Robeson, Paul

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Paul Robeson

Personal

Born April 9, 1898, in Princeton, NJ; died following 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 (died, December, 1965); children: Paul, Jr. Education: Rutgers College (now University), A.B., 1919; Columbia University, LL.B., 1923. Politics: Communist.

Career

Admitted to the Bar of New York State; employed in a law firm, 1923; actor in plays, including Simon the Cyrenian, 1921, All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1924, Othello, 1930 and 1943, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1936; actor in films, including Body and Soul, 1924, The Emperor Jones, 1933, Sanders of the River, 1935, and Show Boat, 1936; singer in concert performances, for recordings, and in musical productions, including Show Boat, 1928. Member, Council on African Affairs (co-founder), Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and Committee to Aid China.

Member

National Maritime Union (honorary member), Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Phi Alpha, Sigma Tau Delta.

Awards, Honors

Badge of Veterans of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939; Donaldson Award for outstanding lead performance, 1944, for Othello; medal from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1944, for good diction on the stage; Spingarn Medal, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1944; Champion of African Freedom Award, National Church of Nigeria, 1950; Afro-American Newspapers Award, 1950; Stalin Peace Prize (U.S.S.R.), 1952; German Peace Medal (East Germany), 1960; Ira Aldridge Award, Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, 1970; Civil Liberties Award, American Civil Liberties Union, 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, 1932 and 1973, Hamilton College, 1940, Morehouse College, 1943, Howard University, 1945, Moscow State Conservatory, 1959, and Humboldt University, 1960.

Writings

Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs, Harlem Trade Union Council, 1950.

Here I Stand (autobiography), Othello Associates (New York, NY), 1958.

Columnist for People's Voice, c. 1940s; editor and columnist for Freedom, c. 1951-55. Contributor to periodicals, including African Observer, Afro-American,

American Dialog, American Scholar, Daily Worker, Freedomways, Jewish Life, Masses and Mainstream, Messenger, National Guardian, New Statesman and Nation, New World Review, New York Age, Opportunity, Spectator, and Worker. Created many sound recordings.

collections

(With others) Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, Freedomways, 1971, enlarged edition, Dodd (New York, NY), 1985.

Paul Robeson: Tributes, Selected Writings, compiled and edited by Roberta Yancy Dent with the assistance of Marilyn Robeson and Paul Robeson, Jr., The Archives (New York, NY), 1976.

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

Sidelights

Paul Robeson—civil rights activist, singer, actor, law school graduate, athlete, scholar, author—was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the first half of the twentieth century. Balancing his many accomplishments in the eyes of many, Robeson was also a Soviet apologist, and later in his life he was widely vilified and censured for his outspoken and unyielding views on issues to which American public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful; in his final decades he was defeated and unsure mentally, a mere remnant of his younger self. While Robeson learned to speak more than twenty languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last twenty-five years of his life his name was "a great whisper and a greater silence in black America." Martin Baulm Duberman, in his 1989 biography, Paul Robeson, asserted that Robeson ultimately is a hero wrongly accused, that his story is an "American tragedy." Barry Gewen, writing in the New Leader, felt instead that Robeson was a great man tragically flawed, "an artist of unassailable gifts and achievement who was brought low through his own political obtuseness." Such divergent views of Robeson can only be reconciled by understanding the complexity of his life from the beginning.

Paul Leroy Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, the fifth and last child of Maria Louisa Bustill and William Drew Robeson. During these early years the Robesons experienced both family and financial losses. At the age of six Paul and his siblings, William, Reeve, Ben and Marian, suffered the death of their mother in a household fire. This was followed a few years later with their father's loss of his Princeton pastorate. After moving first to the town of Westfield, the family finally settled in Somerville, New Jersey, in 1909, where William Robeson was appointed pastor of St. Thomas AME Zion Church.

Driven to Success

Enrolling in Somerville High School as one of only two blacks, Robeson excelled academically while successfully competing in debate and oratorical contests and showing great promise as a football player. He got his first taste of acting in the title role of William Shakespeare's Othello. In his senior year he not only graduated with honors, but placed first in a competitive examination for scholarships to enter Rutgers University. Although his other male siblings chose all-black colleges, Robeson took the challenge of attending Rutgers, a predominantly white institution, in 1915.

In college from 1915 to 1919, Robeson experienced both fame and racism. In trying out for the varsity football team, where blacks were not wanted, he encountered physical brutality. In spite of this resistance, Robeson not only earned a place on the team but was named first on the roster for the All-American college team and went on to graduate with fifteen letters in sports. Academically he was equally successful, elected a member of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Cap and Skull Honor Society of Rutgers. Graduating in 1919 with the highest grade point average in his class, Robeson gave the class oration at the 153rd Rutgers commencement.

With college life behind him, Robeson moved to the Harlem section of New York City to attend law school, first at New York University, then transferring to Columbia University. He sang in the chorus of the 1921 musical Shuffle Along by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and made his acting debut in 1920 playing the lead role in Simon the Cyrenian by poet Ridgely Torrence. Robeson's performance was so well received that he was congratulated not only by the Harlem Young Men's Christian Association audience but also by members of the Provincetown Players who were in the audience.

While working odd jobs and taking part in professional football to earn his college fees, Robeson met Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode. The granddaughter of Francis L. Cardozo, South Carolina's secretary of state during the Reconstruction era following the U.S. Civil War, Goode was a graduate of Columbia University and was employed as a histological chemist, the first black staff person at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The couple married on August 17, 1921, and their son, Paul, Jr., was born on November 2, 1927.

To help support his family and fund his education while studying at Columbia Law School, Robeson played professional football for the Akron Pros from 1920-21 and the Milwaukee Badgers during the 1921-22 season. During the summer of 1922 he traveled to England to appear in a production of the play Taboo, which was renamed Voodoo. Graduating from Columbia in 1923 with a law degree, Robeson sought work in his new profession, all the while singing at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. He obtained a position with a New York law firm, only to have his career halted when a stenographer, as Duberman related the incident, refused to take down a memorandum and stated, "I never take dictation from a nigger." Offered an acting role in 1923 in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, Robeson quickly took this opportunity. "The stage," Harvey Klehr wrote in Commentary, "was an arena where his race, far from impeding his career, actually enabled him to capitalize on his talents much

more quickly than would ordinarily have been the case." A Nation critic, reflecting on the traditional, stereotyped role for blacks then, posed this question and answer: "What if Paul Robeson had wanted to use his proven mental abilities to become a great lawyer instead of employing his magnificent voice and physical presence to become a brilliant performer? A comparable career would have been unlikely."

Although All God's Chillun brought threats by the Ku Klux Klan because of the play's interracial subject matter and the fact that a white woman was to kiss Robeson's hand, it proved to be an immediate theatrical success. Robeson soon found himself cast in a 1924 revival of The Emperor Jones, the play Rosanne, and the silent movie Body and Soul, the last under the direction of independent African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. In 1925 Robeson debuted in a formal concert at Cape Cod's well-known Provincetown Playhouse. His performance, which consisted of Negro spirituals and folk songs, was so brilliant that he and his accompanist, Lawrence Brown, were offered a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company. Encouraged by this success, Robeson and Brown embarked on a tour of their own, but were sorely disappointed. Even though they received good reviews, crowds were small and they made very little money. What Robeson came to know was that his talents in acting and singing would serve as the combined focus of his career.

Acting and Singing Career

Robeson's acting career started to take off in 1928 when he accepted the role of Joe in a London production of Show Boat, a musical composed by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. It was his singing of "Ol' Man River" that received most of the acclaim surrounding the show and earned him a great degree of attention from British socialites. Robeson gave concerts in London at Albert Hall and Sunday-afternoon performances at Drury Lane. In spite of all this attention, he still had to deal with racism, however. In 1929 Robeson was refused admission to a London hotel; because of the protest the actor then raised, major hotels in London soon announced that they would no longer refuse service to blacks.

Years later, Robeson recalled 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 men, 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: "He 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."

Robeson was embraced by the media during the 1920s. In the New Yorker Mildred Gilman wrote during that decade that Robeson was "the promise of his race," "King of Harlem," and "Idol of his people." Respected by white audiences as well, Robeson returned briefly to the United States in 1929 to perform before a packed Carnegie Hall. In May of 1930, after establishing a permanent residence in England, he accepted the lead role in Shakespeare's Othello. This London production at the Savoy Theatre was the first time since the performance of well-known black actor Ira Aldridge in 1860 that a major production company cast a black in the part of the Moor. Robeson, a tall, strikingly handsome man with a deep, rich, baritone voice and a shy, almost boyish manner, so captivated the audience that the first performance included twenty curtain calls.

Robeson received many accolades for his outstanding acting and singing performances during the 1930s, but his personal and home life were surrounded by difficulties. His wife, Essie, who had published a book on her husband in 1930 titled Paul Robeson, Negro, sued for divorce in 1932. Her actions were encouraged by the fact that Robeson had fallen in love and planned to marry Yolande Jackson, a white Englishwoman. Jackson, whom Robeson called the love of his life, originally accepted the still-married actor's proposal, but later called the marriage off. It was thought by some who knew the Jackson family well that she was strongly influenced

by her father, Tiger Jackson, who was less than tolerant of Robeson and people of color in general. With his marriage plans canceled, Robeson and Essie came to a new understanding regarding their relationship, and the divorce proceedings were canceled.

A Life of Activism

Robeson returned to New York briefly in 1933 to star in the film version of Emperor Jones before turning his attention to the study of singing and languages. His stay in the United States was a short one due to his racist treatment at the hands of the U.S. film industry and because of criticism he received from blacks upset over his role as a corrupt emperor. Upon returning to England, Robeson eagerly immersed himself in his language studies; along with Essie, he became an honorary member of the West African Students' Union and met students Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, the future presidents of Ghana and Kenya, respectively. It was also during this time that Robeson performed at a benefit for Jewish refugees, an action that marked the beginning of his political activism.

Robeson's inclination to aid the less fortunate and the oppressed in their fight for freedom and equality was firmly rooted in his own family history. His father, William Drew Robeson, was an escaped slave who eventually graduated from Lincoln College in 1878, and his relative, Cyrus Bustill, was a slave who was freed by his second owner in 1769 and went on to become an active member of the African Free Society. Recognizing the heritage that brought him so many opportunities, Robeson chose roles in several films that present blacks in other than stereotypical ways: 1935's Sanders of the River and the 1937 film releases King Solomon's Mines and Song of Freedom.

In 1939 Robeson stated his intentions to retire from commercial entertainment and return to the United States. He gave his first American recital at Mother AME Zion Church Harlem, where his brother Benjamin was pastor. Later that same year he premiered the patriotic song "Ballad for Americans" on CBS radio as a preview of a play of the same title. The song was so well received that studio audiences cheered for twenty minutes after the performance, while the listening audience outnumbered that tuning in for actor Orson Welles's famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast. Robeson's popularity in the United States soared and he remained the most celebrated person in the country well into the 1940s. He was awarded the esteemed NAACP Spingarn

Medal in 1945 and received numerous other awards and recognitions from civic and professional groups. In the 1943 U.S. film production of Othello his performance placed him among the ranks of great Shakespearean actors. The production ran for 296 performances—over ten months—and toured both the United States and Canada.

Continued travels throughout Europe in the 1930s had brought Robeson in contact with members of politically leftist-leaning organizations, including socialists and African nationalists. Singing to and moving among the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, and 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," as Huggins noted. On a trip to the U.S.S.R. in 1934 to discuss the making of the film Black Majesty, he befriended Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein and also became so impressed with the education Soviet school children received against racism that he began to study both Marxism and Socialism. He also decided to send his son, nine-year-old Paul Jr., to school in the U.S.S.R. so that Paul would not have to contend with the racism and discrimination his father had confronted in both Europe and the United States. Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, as New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins explained, "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,'" Robeson was quoted as saying. Noting Robeson's intellectual bent, Diggins went on to point out 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 desire to believe in a cultural genealogy, Robeson soon become a vocal advocate of communism and other politically left-wing causes. He returned to the United States in the late 1930s, Saal observed, as "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." After World War II, when relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. dissolved into cold war hostility, many former advocates of communism backed away. When the many crimes of Soviet leader Josef Stalin became public—his forced famines, genocide, political purges, and death camps—still more advocates of communism left the ranks. Robeson, however, was not among them. 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."

McCarthy-Era Backlash

Robeson's popularity soon plummeted in response to his increasing rhetoric. A violent riot prevented his appearing at a concert in Peekskill, New York, after he had urged black youths not to fight if the United States went to war against the Soviet Union. The State Department revoked Robeson's passport in 1950, 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 [as little as] $2,000—and he was removed from the list of All-Americans," Saal observed. With no passport to travel abroad, Robeson continued to speak out in public forums in the United States and through his own monthly newspaper, Freedom. Barred from all other forms of media, his own newspaper became his primary platform from 1950 to 1955.

Robeson's passport was restored in 1958 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar case, but it was of little consequence. By then he had become a nonentity. When his autobiography was published in that same year, leading newspapers, 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 the Smithsonian. Slowly deteriorating and virtually unheard from in the 1960s and 1970s, Robeson died after suffering a stroke in 1976.

If you enjoy the works of Paul Robeson

If you enjoy the works of Paul Robeson, you may also want to check out the following films:

To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Gregory Peck, 1962.

Glory, starring Denzel Washington, 1989.

Othello, starring Laurence Fishburne, 1995.

During his life, Robeson had thrilled thousands with his athletic achievements on the football field, had entertained thousands with his artistic presence on the stage and screen, and had inspired thousands with his voice raised in speech and song. But because of his singular support for communism and his inability to renounce 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 went out in sadness and loneliness, "forced in the end to retreat into the wilderness with his ghosts," as Huggins asserted. Robeson's 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," Diggins explained, "is at once an American triumph and an American tragedy." On February 24, 1998, Robeson received a posthumous Grammy lifetime achievement award. On January 20, 2004, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp honoring the former actor in his hometown of Princeton, New Jersey. Writing in Dynamic, the official magazine of the Young Communist League, Brandon Slattery stated: "Robeson is perhaps the first U.S. communist to be so honored."

Biographical and Critical Sources

books

Boyle, Sheila Tully, and Andrew Bunie, Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement, University of Massachusetts Press (Boston, MA), 2001.

Brown, Lloyd L., The Young Paul Robeson, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1997.

Davis, Lenwood G., A Paul Robeson Research Guide: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1982.

Dorinson, Joseph, and William Pencak, editors, Paul Robeson: Essays on His Life and Legacy, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2002.

Duberman, Martin Baulm, Paul Robeson, Knopf (New York, NY), 1988.

Editors of Freedomways, Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, enlarged edition, Dodd (New York, NY), 1985.

Gilliam, Dorothy Butler, Paul Robeson: All-American, New Republic Books, 1976.

Hoyt, Edwin P., Paul Robeson: The American Othello, World Publishing, 1967.

Robeson, Paul, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey, 1898-1939, Wiley (New York, NY), 2001.

Robeson, Susan, The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson, Citadel (New York, NY), 1981.

periodicals

American Heritage, April, 1976; April, 1989.

Commentary, May, 1989, Harvey Klehr, review of Paul Robeson.

Dynamic, November, 2003, Brandon Slattery, "Paul Robeson Honored on U.S. Postage Stamp."

Journal of African American History, summer, 2002, Barbara J. Beeching, "Paul Robeson and the Black Press: The 1950 Passport Controversy," p. 339.

Nation, February 7, 1976; March 20, 1989, Nathan Irvin Huggins, "Paul Robeson," p. 383.

National Review, May 19, 1989, Joseph Sobran, review of Paul Robeson, p. 55.

New American, February 23, 2004, Warren Mass, "A Mockery of Black Heritage," p. 44.

New Leader, February 20, 1989, Barry Gewen, "The Robeson Record," p. 17.

Newsweek, February 13, 1989, review of Paul Robeson.

New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989, review of Paul Robeson. New York Times, August 6, 1972; April 16, 1973; February 25, 1998, "Robeson Receives Posthumous Grammy."

New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1973; February 12, 1989, review of Paul Robeson.

Smithsonian, October, 1989, Dennis Drabble, review of Paul Robeson, p. 221.