Paul Robeson

Singer, actor, activist

Racist Incident Soured Law Career

Found a Moral Cause in Song

Went to the Soviet Union

Would Not Denounce Communism

Pariah Status

Selected writings

Selected discography

Sources

Paul Robeson—singer, actor, civil rights activist, law school graduate, athlete, scholar, author— was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s and 1940s. Robeson was also a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man, later in his life, widely vilified and censored for his frankness and unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful. He learned to speak more than 20 languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last 25 years of his life his was “a great whisper and a greater silence in black America.”

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson was spared most of the daily brutalities suffered by African Americans around the turn of the century. But his family was not totally free from hardship. Robeson’s mother died from a stove-fire accident when he was six. His father, a runaway slave who became a pastor, was removed from an early ministerial position. Nonetheless, from his father Robeson learned diligence and an “unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press of racism and poverty.” These characteristics, Stuckey noted, defined Robeson’s approach in his beliefs and actions throughout his life.

Racist Incident Soured Law Career

Having excelled in both scholastics and athletics as a youth, Robeson received a scholarship to Rutgers College (now University), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and chosen valedictorian in his senior. He earned varsity letters in four sports and was named Rutgers’ first All-American in football. Fueled by his class prophecy to be “the leader of the colored race in America,” Robeson went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University, supporting himself by playing professional football on the weekends. After graduation he obtained a position with a New York law firm only to have his career halted, as was recalled in Martin Baulm Duberman’s Paul Robeson, when a stenographer refused to take down a memo, saying, “I never take dictation from a nigger.” Sensing this episode as indicative of the climate of the law, Robeson left the bar.

While in law school, Robeson had married fellow Columbia student Eslanda Cardozo Goode, who encouraged him to act in amateur theatrical productions. Convinced by his wife and friends to return to the theater after his departure from law, Robeson joined the Provincetown Players, a group associated with playwright

For the Record…

Born Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson, April 9, 1898, in Princeton, NJ; died of a stroke, January 23, 1976, in Philadelphia, PA; son of William Drew (a clergyman) and Maria Louisa (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Bustill) Robeson; married Eslanda Cardozo Goode, August 17, 1921; children: Paul Jr. Education: Rutgers College (now University), A.B., 1919; Columbia University, LL.B., 1923.

Admitted to the Bar of New York; employed in a law firm, 1923; actor; stage appearances include Simon the Cyrenian, 1921, All God’s Chilluan Got Wings, 1924, Show Boat (musical), 1928, Othello, 1930 and 1943, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1936; films appearances include Body and Soul, 1924, The Emperor Jones, 1933, Sanders of the River, 1935, and Show Boat, 1936; singer; recording and performing artist.

Awards: Badge of Veterans of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939; Donaldson Award for outstanding lead performance, 1944, for Othello; American Academy of Arts and Letters medal, 1944; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1945; Champion of African Freedom Award, National Church of Nigeria, 1950; Afro-American Newspapers Award, 1950; Stalin Peace Prize (U.S.S.R.), 1952; Peace Medal (East Germany), 1960; Ira Aldridge Award, Association for the Study of Afro-American life and History, 1970; Civil Liberties Award, 1970; Duke Ellington Medal, Yale University, 1972; Whitney M. Young, Jr., National Memorial Award, Urban League of Greater New York, 1972. Honorary degrees from Rutgers University, Hamilton College, Morehouse College, Howard University, Moscow State Conservatory, and Humboldt University.

Wright Eugene O’Neill. Two productions in which he starred, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, brought Robeson critical acclaim. Contemporary drama critic George Jean Nathan, quoted by NewsweeKs Hubert Saal, called Robeson “thoroughly eloquent, impressive, and convincing.”

Thus Robeson continued on the stage, winning applause from critics and audiences, gaining an international reputation for his performances on the London stage, and eventually extending his acting repertoire to include films. His stage presence was undeniable, and with the musical Show Boat and Shakespeare’s Othello, Robeson’s reputation grew even larger. In Show Boat he sang the immensely popular “OI’ Man River,” displaying a powerful, warm, soothing voice. Robeson, realizing his acting range was limited both by the choice of roles available to him as a black performer and by his own acting abilities, turned to singing full time as an outlet for his creative energies and growing social convictions.

Found a Moral Cause in Song

Robeson had been giving solo vocal performances since 1925, but it wasn’t until he traveled to Britain that his singing became for him a moral cause. Robeson related years later in his autobiography, Here I Stand, that in England he “learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.” Consequently, he began singing spirituals and work songs to audiences of common citizens and learning the languages and folk songs of other cultures, for “they, too, were close to my heart and expressed the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music.” Nathan Irvin Huggins, writing in the Nation, defined this pivotal moment: “[Robeson] found the finest expression of his talent. His genuine awe of and love for the common people and their music flourished throughout his life and became his emotional and spiritual center.”

Continued travels throughout Europe in the 1930s brought Robeson in contact with members of politically left-leaning organizations, including socialists and African nationalists. Singing to, and moving among, the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, the working classes, Robeson began viewing “himself and his art as serving the struggle for racial justice for nonwhites and economic justice for workers of the world,” Huggins noted.

Went to the Soviet Union

A critical journey at that time, one that changed the course of his life, was to the Soviet Union. Paul Robeson author Duberman depicted Robeson’s time there: “Nights at the theater and opera, long walks with [film director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories… All in the context of a warm embrace.” Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins, “that the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. ‘Here, for the first time in my life… I walk in full human dignity.’” Diggins went on to assert that Robeson’s “attraction to Communism seemed at first more anthropological than ideological, more of a desire to discover old, lost cultures than to impose new political systems…. Robeson convinced himself that American blacks as descendants of slaves had a common culture with Russian workers as descendants of serfs.”

Regardless of his ostensibly simple desire to believe in a cultural genealogy, Robeson soon become a vocal advocate of communism and other left-wing causes. He returned to the United States in the late 1930s, Newsweek’s Saal observed, becoming “a vigorous opponent of racism, picketing the White House, refusing to sing before segregated audiences, starting a crusade against lynching, and urging Congress to outlaw racial bars in baseball.”

Would Not Denounce Communism

After World War II, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union froze into the Cold War, many former advocates of communism backed away from it. When the crimes of Soviet leader Josef Stalin became public—forced famine, genocide, political purges—still more advocates left the ranks of communism. Robeson, however, was not among them. National Review contributor Joseph Sobran explained why: “It didn’t matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might be abused. In 1946 the former All-American explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: ‘The coach tells you what to do and you do it.’ It was incidental that the coach was Stalin.” Robeson could not publicly decry the Soviet Union even after he, most probably, learned of Stalin’s atrocities because “the cause, to his mind,” Nation contributor Huggins theorized, “was much larger than the Soviet Union, and he would do nothing to sustain the feeding frenzy of the American right.”

Robeson’s popularity soon plummeted in response to his increasing rhetoric. After he urged black youths not to fight if the United States went to war against the Soviet Union, a riot prevented his appearing at a concert in Peekskill, New York. But his desire was never to leave the United States, just to change, as he believed, the racist attitude of its people. In his autobiography Robeson recounted how during the infamous McCarthy hearings, when questioned by a Congressional committee about why he didn’t stay in the Soviet Union, he replied, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

In 1950 the U.S. Department of State revoked Robeson’s passport, ensuring that he would remain in the United States. “He was black-listed by concert managers— his income, which had been $104,000 in 1947, fell to $2,000—and he was removed from the list of All-Americans,” Saal noted in Newsweek. America’s highest prize, its honor, was removed from him. His career died.

Pariah Status

Robeson’s passport was restored in 1958 after a Supreme Court ruling on a similar case, but it was of little consequence. By then he had become a nonentity. When Robeson’s autobiography was published that year, leading literary journals, including the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune refused to review it. Robeson traveled again to the Soviet Union, but his health began to fail. He tried twice to commit suicide. “Pariah status was utterly alien to the gregarious Robeson. He became depressed at the loss of contact with audiences and friends, and suffered a series of breakdowns that left him withdrawn and dependent on psychotropic drugs,” Dennis Drabble explained in Smithsonian. Slowly deteriorating and virtually unheard from in the 1960s and 1970s, Robeson died after suffering a stroke in 1976.

During his life Paul Robeson inspired thousands with his voice—raised in speech and song. But because of his singular support for communism and Stalin, because his life in retrospect became “a pathetic tale of talent sacrificed, loyalty misplaced, and idealism betrayed,” according to Jim Miller in Newsweek, Robeson disappeared in sadness and loneliness. His life, full of desire and achievement, passion and conviction, “the story of a man who did so much to break down the barriers of a racist society, only to be brought down by the controversies sparked by his own radical politics,” New York Times Book Review contributor Diggins pronounced, “is at once an American triumph and an American tragedy.”

Selected writings

Here I Stand, Othello Associates, 1958, Beacon, 1971.

(Contributor) Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, Freedomways, 1971, Dodd, 1985.

Paul Robeson: Tributes, Selected Writings, edited by Roberta Yancy Dent, The Archives, 1976.

Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974, edited by Philip S. Foner, Brunner, 1978.

Columnist for People’s Voice, 1940s; editor and columnist for Freedom, c. 1951-55. Contributor to periodicals.

Selected discography

American Balladeer—Golden Classics, Volume 1, Collectables.

Man & His Beliefs —Golden Classics, Volume 2, Collectables.

Historic Paul Robeson—Golden Classics, Volume 3, Collectables.

Collector’s Paul Robeson, Monitor.

Essential Paul Robeson, Vanguard.

Favorite Songs, Volume 1, Monitor.

Favorite Songs, Volume 2, Monitor.

Live at Carnegie Hall, Vanguard.

Paul Robeson, Pearl.

Paul Robeson Sings “Ol’ Man River” & Other Favorites, Angel.

The Odyssey of Paul Robeson, reissue, Omega/Vanguard Classics, 1992.

Sources

Books

Duberman, Martin Baulm, Paul Robeson, Knopf, 1988. Robeson, Paul, Here I Stand, Beacon, 1971.

Periodicals

American Heritage, April 1989.

Commentary, May 1989.

Nation, February 7, 1976; March 20, 1989.

National Review, May 19, 1989.

New Leader, February 20, 1989.

Newsweek, February 2, 1976; February 13, 1989.

New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989.

New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1973; February 12, 1989.

Smithsonian, October 1989.

Time, February 2, 1976; March 13, 1989.

Times Literary Supplement, September 5, 1958.

—Rob Nagel

ROBESON, Paul

Nationality: American. Born: Paul Leroy Robeson in Princeton, New Jersey, 9 April 1898. Education: Attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (All-American football player), B.A., 1919 (Phi Beta Kappa); Columbia University Law School, New York, graduated 1923; admitted to the New York Bar, and joined New York law firm, 1923. Family: Married Eslanda Cardozo Goode, 1921 (died 1965), son: Paul. Career: Professional football player while attending law school; 1921—professional debut on Broadway in Taboo; 1922—English debut in the same play, retitled Voodoo, in Blackpool opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell; 1924—on stage in New York in The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings; 1925—film debut in Body and Soul; first professional singing tour; 1930—in stage play Othello: later appeared in the play on Broadway and on tour, 1940; 1950–58—after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, passport revoked; 1958—farewell concert, Carnegie Hall, New York; in poor health from 1959 until his death. Awards: Stalin Peace Prize, 1952 (received 1958); admitted to Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, 1974; inducted into College Football Hall of Fame, 1995. Died: In Philadelphia, 23 January 1976.

Films as Actor:

1925

Body and Soul (Micheaux); Borderline (MacPherson)

1933

The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy) (as Brutus Jones)

1935

Sanders of the River (Bosambo) (Z. Korda) (as Bosambo)

1936

Song of Freedom (Wills) (as John Zinga); Show Boat (Whale) (as Joe)

1937

King Solomon's Mines (Stevenson) (as Umbopa); Jericho (Dark Sands) (Freeland) (as Jericho Jackson); Big Fella (Wills) (as Joe)

1940

The Proud Valley (Tennyson) (as David Goliath)

1942

Native Land (Hurwitz and Strand—doc) (as narrator); Tales of Manhattan (Duvivier) (as Luke)

1954

Das Lied der Ströme (Song of the Rivers) (Ivens—doc) (singing voice only)

Publications

By ROBESON: books—

Here I Stand, New York, 1958.

Paul Robeson, Tributes, Selected Writings, edited by Roberta Yancy Dent, New York, 1976.

Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974, edited by Philip Fowler, Larchmont, New York, 1978.

By ROBESON: article—

"The Culture of the Negro," in Spectator, 15 June 1934.

On ROBESON: books—

Robeson, Eslanda Goode, Paul Robeson, Negro, New York, 1930.

Graham, Shirley, Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World, New York, 1946.

Robeson, Eslanda Goode, Paul Robeson Goes to Washington, Salford, Lancashire, 1956.

Seton, Marie, Paul Robeson, London, 1958.

Salk, Erwin, Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, New York, 1965.

Hoyt, Edwin, Paul Robeson: The American Othello, Cleveland, 1967.

Brown, Lloyd, Lift Every Voice for Paul Robeson, New York, 1971.

Hamilton, Virginia, Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man, New York, 1974.

Wright, Charles, Labor's Forgotten Champion, Detroit, 1975.

Brown, Lloyd, Paul Robeson Rediscovered, New York, 1976.

Gilliam, Dorothy, Paul Robeson, All-American, Washington, D.C., 1976.

Nazel, Joseph, Paul Robeson: Biography of a Proud Man, Los Angeles, 1980.

Robeson, Susan, The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Portrait of Paul Robeson, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1981.

Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London, 1987.

Duberman, Martin Bauml, Paul Robeson, New York, 1989.

Larsen, Rebecca, Paul Robeson, Hero before His Time, New York, 1989.

McKissack, Pat, Paul Robeson: A Voice to Remember, Hillside, New Jersey, 1992.

Holmes, Burnham, Paul Robeson: A Voice of Struggle, Austin, Texas, 1995.

Anthony, others, Paul Robeson: Bearer of a Culture, New York, 1998.

Davis, Lenwood, A Paul Robeson Handbook: Every, Kearney, 1998.

Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, New York, 1998.

Stewart, Jeffrey C., Paul Robeson: Artist & Citizen, Piscataway, 1998.

Reiner, Carl, "How Paul Robeson Saved My Life": And Other Mostly Happy Stories, New York, 1999.

On ROBESON: articles—

Hutchens, John K., "Paul Robeson," in Theatre Arts (New York), October 1944.

DuBois, W. E. B., "Paul Robeson, Right," in Negro Digest, March 1950.

Mieirs, Earl Schenk, "Paul Robeson: Made by America," in Negro Digest, October 1950.

Rowan, Carl T., "Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?," in Ebony (Chicago), October 1957.

Pittman, John, "Mount Paul," in New World Review, February 1962.

Fishman, George, "Paul Robeson's Student Days and the Fight against Racism at Rutgers," in Freedomways, Summer 1969.

Cripps, Thomas, "Paul Robeson and Black Identity in American Movies," in Massachusetts Review, Summer 1970.

Weaver, Harold D., "Paul Robeson: Beleaguered Leader," in Black Scholar, December 1973-January 1974.

Current Biography 1976, New York, 1976.

Obituary in New York Times, 24 January 1976.

Stuckey, Sterling, "'I Want to Be African': Paul Robeson and the End of Nationalist Theory and Practice," in Massachusetts Review, Spring 1976.

Ward, Geoffrey C., "Robeson's Choice," in American Heritage, April 1989.

Sorel, Nancy Caldwell, "Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft," in Atlantic (New York), May 1992.

Cunningham, John, "A Second Look," in Cineaste (New York), June 1996.

Thompson, Cliff, "We Hardly Knew Ye: Four Early Films of Paul Robeson," in Cineaste (New York), July 1998.

Paul Robeson's life story, of which his film career was a small and sadly underdeveloped component, is one of the great inspirations and tragedies of modern American history. An actor and singer of great presence and power, Robeson tried, often in vain, to find dignified roles for a black man in both American and British studios. With the exceptions of the African-American pioneer director Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul, the avant-garde Borderline, and the British Big Fella he was cast as either a subhuman or a super-leader with whom no one could identify. Nevertheless, Robeson was America's Twentieth-Century Renaissance man: All-American athlete at Rutgers, Columbia law school graduate, political activist, bass-baritone, public intellectual, linguist, and actor. Born in 1898, he became famous in the mid-1920s for his roles in two Eugene O'Neill plays, All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones. He repeated the latter role in the 1933 independently produced film version, and the play itself anticipates Robeson's film career in several ways.

Like Robeson himself, Brutus Jones embarks on a journey of self-discovery. This southern black laborer becomes first a criminal and then the despot of a Caribbean Island. The transformation repeats itself through Robeson's film career: severing ties with one world, he must adopt a new persona in another. Two years after making The Emperor Jones, in the Korda-produced Sanders of the River, Robeson played a petty thief who has left Liberia and, by kowtowing to the British imperialists, becomes an African chief. In Song of Freedom he portrays an English dockworker who, after becoming a famous singer, retraces his ancestry in an African village. Another transformation occurs in King Solomon's Mines, in which Robeson's Umbopa, after traveling with white fortune-hunters to his native land, reveals himself as the rightful chief. He plays the mythical David Goliath in Pen Tennyson's The Proud Valley. After arriving in a Welsh coal-mining town as a vagabond who has jumped his American ship, David becomes the pride of the men's chorus and a miner who martyrs himself to save the less noble white miners. (Although Robeson's characters obviously represent moral choices, more recent critics have also openly acknowledged their frequent eroticism.)

The Emperor Jones contains gratuitous songs for Robeson which were not in the stage productions, again setting a precedent. In Show Boat, recreating his stage role as Joe, he sings "Ol' Man River" (which he would later reinvent in concert as a protest song) in a stunning expressionistic sequence, and later performs a comic duet with Hattie McDaniel written especially for the film once Robeson was cast. His songs in Sanders of the River ("On to Battle") and King Solomon's Mines ("Song of the Mountains") contain embarrassingly childish lyrics, and in both Song of Freedom and The Proud Valley Robeson's obtrusive lyrics can be best described as anglicized Socialist Realism. Robeson's singing is perhaps best experienced through his many recordings of spirituals and international folk songs, which often suggest the legendary power of his live concerts.

Robeson's life was as superhuman as David Goliath's in The Proud Valley: the Spanish Civil War stopped for a day for his concert; his Othello was the longest-running Shakespearean play in American theatrical history; he was as outspokenly pro-African liberation as he was anti-imperialist. He championed communism even when government pressure destroyed his health and career. That he accomplished so much in so many public arenas is still awe-inspiring, while his life continues to inspire debate and discussion; that the American and British film industries, not to mention the U.S. government, so consistently devalued and hampered his talents remains a major shame.

—Howard Feinstein, updated by Corey K. Creekmur