Paul Robeson

Singer

• Born: April 9, 1898
• Birthplace: Princeton, New Jersey
• Died: January 23, 1976
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

American athlete and activist

A Renaissance man, Robeson made unprecedented contributions to American and world history as an athlete, intellectual, performer, and internationally renowned peace advocate. In politics, he championed the cause of human rights for African Americans and other oppressed people throughout the world.

Areas of achievement Sports, theater and entertainment, peace advocacy, civil rights, diplomacy

Early Life

Paul Robeson (ROHB-suhn) was born at a time when African Americans were politically disenfranchised, economically exploited, excluded from the mainstream of American life, and suffering the worst racial hostility since the abolition of slavery. Paul was the youngest of six children born to the Reverend William Drew Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson. His mother was a member of the prominent Bustill family of Philadelphia, some of whom were patriots in the American Revolutionary War. The Bustills helped to establish the Free African Society and produced a long line of teachers, artisans, and ministers to the Northern free black community. Paul’s father, William Drew Robeson, was born a slave in Martin County, North Carolina. He fled to the North and, with the outbreak of the Civil War joined the Union army. After the war, William Robeson attended Lincoln University and received a divinity degree.

Robseon was six years old when his mother died; the family moved to Sommerville, New Jersey, where Robeson received most of his early education. The greatest influences on Robeson for the remainder of his life were his family tradition, the environment of Jim Crow America, and the experience of being reared by his father. At an early age, Robeson, who often worked with his father after school, sang in his father’s church, listened to stories about slavery, and became imbued with several basic principles: to labor diligently in all endeavors, pursue worthwhile goals, maintain high standards, be of service to his people, and maintain his integrity.

At age seventeen, Robeson won a state scholarship to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Those who knew him described him as a good-natured person who loved life. Striving for perfection in his work, this handsome six-foot three-inch man maintained a sense of quiet, modest self-confidence. While attending Rutgers, he established an unprecedented academic record, achieving the highest grades in his class. He was also considered to be without equal in athletics.

Although football was his favorite sport, he participated in basketball, track and field, and baseball, winning an astonishing twelve major letters in four years. He was honored as the greatest athlete in Rutgers’s history, elected to the All-American team twice (in 1917 and 1918), and has been called the greatest defensive back ever to tread the gridiron. Robeson brought the school national recognition by being the first player ever named All-American in any sport at Rutgers.

Robeson also loved public speaking and debate. A master in elocution contests, for four consecutive years he won first place honors in many speaking competitions, excelling in oratory, in extemporaneous speaking, and in forensics.

Robeson won admission to Rutgers’s exclusive Cap and Skull honor association and the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa society. His senior thesis, “The Fourteenth Amendment: The Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution,” by identifying several ways in which the law could be used to secure civil rights for black Americans, presaged by nearly forty years ideas adopted by the United States Supreme Court in the landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). At commencement, he delivered the class oration, and afterward Rutgers honored him as the “perfect type of college man.”

Life’s Work

In 1920, Robeson began law school at Columbia University and played a few games of professional football to finance his education. While at Columbia, he met and married Eslanda Goode Cardozo. They had a son, Paul, Jr., in 1927. After his graduation, Robeson worked briefly for a New York law firm; after encountering considerable hostility in the legal profession, however, he took up acting as a career.

During his law school days, Robeson played Simon in a benefit play, Simon the Cyrenian (1921), staged at the Harlem Young Men’s Christian Association by the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village theater group. His successful performance led to other parts, and he was offered the lead in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) and, in 1924, The Emperor Jones (1920). Robeson’s acting was immediately acclaimed. He also made theater history, for that production of All God’s Chillun Got Wings was the first in which a black man played the leading role opposite a white woman on the American stage. The young actor starred in numerous plays, including Black Boy (1925) by Jim Tully and Frank Dazey, Porgy (1927) by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Show Boat (1927) by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. He successfully toured Europe in the late 1920’s and throughout the 1930’s, drawing massive, enthusiastic crowds. Robeson played Othello in William Shakespeare’s play at London’s Savoy Theatre in 1930, where the opening performance received twenty curtain calls. He reached the pinnacle of his stage career in 1943-1944, with his New York performance in Othello, which holds the record for the longest run of any Shakespearean play produced on Broadway. His ovations were among “the most prolonged and wildest . . . in the history of the New York theatre.”

In one scene from the 1924 production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Robeson was asked to whistle; instead, he sang a black spiritual. To his listeners’ delighted surprise, he had a marvelous voice. This event launched an illustrious musical career that brought additional celebrity. Robeson began augmenting his acting by singing spirituals. He was the first person to give entire programs of exclusively African American songs in concert to white audiences. This innovation made Robeson one of the most popular concert singers for more than a quarter of a century. Later, he broadened his repertoire to include the music of other nationalities. Accompanied on piano by Lawrence Brown, Robeson’s magnificent baritone voice thrilled audiences around the world. Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” became his personal signature, concluding every concert.

Robeson made several films, the more significant being The Emperor Jones (1933), Sanders of the River (1935), Show Boat (1936), The Song of Freedom (1937), King Solomon’s Mines (1937), Jericho (1937), and Big Fella (1938). He was particularly pleased with Proud Valley (1939), which depicted the harsh life of Welsh coal miners and gave a fair and accurate portrayal of black people, and his narration for Native Land (1942), a moving documentary on contemporary American life. Although British filmmakers, unlike their American counterparts, were willing to feature Robeson in major roles, with few exceptions these films depicted blacks in a demeaning manner. Disgusted at the results, Robeson picketed his own films, abandoned the cinema, and focused attention on the stage, where he could control and determine the images in every performance.

As Robeson became more successful in the theater and on the concert stage, he committed himself to improving the plight of blacks. He believed that with his singing and acting he could increase the white world’s respect, knowledge, and understanding of his people. “They will,” he said in 1932, “sense that we are moved by the same emotions, have the same beliefs, the same longings that we are all humans together.” Moreover, his prominence motivated him to reaffirm his black identity, and he started a campaign to educate black people about the virtues of their own cultural heritage, arguing that African history was as old and significant as that of the Chinese or Persians. Uncompromisingly, he maintained that “it should be the mission of Negro artists to earn respect as Negroes as a step toward making the white race eventually respect the black.” He believed that blacks had a unique and valuable contribution to make in humanizing the world through their philosophy and art.

Robeson developed a sophisticated concept of cultural pluralism that had at its roots a deep respect for his own ethnicity. Living in Europe during the 1930’s, he determined to use art to advance the cause of his own people and to use it on a grander scale to build a more humane world. Art would be the vehicle to unite all people against the common foes of poverty, exploitation, bigotry, political violence, and war. He began studying world cultures, history, politics, and economic and social systems, and he became fluent in more than two dozen languages, including Ashanti, Mande, Swahili, Yoruba, Hindustani, Arabic, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Spanish, and Finnish.

Robeson’s cultural philosophy led him to more direct political activity. In 1934, at the invitation of film director Sergei Eisenstein, he made the first of several trips to the Soviet Union. He spoke out against the fascist politics of the Nazis and was the only American entertainer to go to Spain and sing to Loyalist troops. At a rally sponsored to aid Spanish refugee children held in 1937 at London’s Royal Albert Hall, he remarked, “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice.” He raised money to fight the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and opposed all forms of colonialism. Robeson supported the Committee to Aid China, denounced Japanese imperialism, and made a special album of Chinese songs, Chee Lai (1940), which he recorded in the language to raise money for Chinese relief. The foremost spokesperson against European colonialism, he led the campaign for African independence and became chair of the Council on African Affairs, which he helped establish in 1937. With the outbreak of World War II, he supported the American effort by entertaining soldiers in camps and laborers in war industries. Many of his concerts were greeted by some of the largest audiences of military personnel and civilian workers ever assembled during wartime.

By 1946, Robeson became more determined than ever to work for an end to colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. For the second time in his life, black soldiers were returning from a war to preserve democracy only to be greeted with racism and bigotry. Robeson could no longer tolerate the status of second-class citizenship imposed on blacks. Jeopardizing his career and spending more than $100,000 a year, he devoted his time to campaigning for black civil rights. He spoke on behalf of trade unions who found their wartime, New Deal economic gains eroded, defended Native Americans, denounced sexism, backed Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, and confronted President Harry S. Truman, demanding that he put an end to lynchings in the South and segregation in the armed forces and that he enforce fair employment practices for minority laborers.

Disturbed by Robeson’s militance, opponents labeled him a communist to undermine his legitimate dissent and weaken his mass appeal. When Cold War tensions and McCarthyistic hysteria mounted, Robeson’s detractors tried to discredit him, and on several occasions he was called to testify before government committees regarding his loyalty to the United States. Repeatedly he challenged the officials, reminding them of the unconstitutionality of these proceedings, and refused to be baited into identifying anyone of his associates or activities as being un-American.

As the fear of war between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated, Robeson, at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference, called for a cessation of hostilities and an end to the arms race. A cogent and powerful speaker, he articulated the similarities in attitude between many domestic and international policies, suggesting that the black people of the world, whether in the South or in colonies abroad, had no quarrel with Russia. Their grievance was more immediate; it was with those who oppressed them: “the senators who have just filibustered them out of their civil rights. . . . Milan in South Africa who, just like Hitler, is threatening to destroy eight million Africans and hundreds of thousands of Indians through hunger and terror.”

In the 1950’s, Robeson was viciously attacked for his statements. Riots occurred, disrupting his concerts in Peekskill, New York. His opposition to the United States’ participation in the Korean War brought a barrage of criticism. Books and information about his achievements were removed from library circulation and stricken from histories, anthologies, and bibliographic references. Blacklisting and intimidation cost him his theatrical and concert bookings and a domestic audience. His passport was revoked, and he was barred from travel outside the United States. According to the State Department’s brief, action was taken “solely because of his recognized status as a spokesman for large sections of Negro Americans . . . in view of his frank admission that he has been for years active politically in behalf of independence of the colonial people of Africa.”

The government offered to return his passport if he signed a statement that he would not make any speeches while abroad; Robeson refused. He lost the lucrative income from concerts and an international forum. In the meantime, he continued to accept invitations to speak and sing before labor organizations, civic groups, and black churches. One amazing concert was mounted in 1953, when Canadians arranged to meet Robeson near the border at Blain, Washington, where he spoke and sang to nearly thirty thousand people who jammed the Peace Arch Park.

With the Supreme Court ruling in 1958, Robeson’s passport was reinstated. He published his autobiography, Here I Stand (1958), and resumed a vigorous speaking and concert tour, traveling to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. Dispelling any misconceptions about his actions, he stated, “The truth is, I am not and never have been involved in any international conspiracy or any other kind, and do not know anyone who is.”

Whenever he spoke crowds gathered. Yet the physical strain of the previous decades had taken its toll. In 1961, illness caused him to retire from singing and acting, and in 1963 he returned to the United States, where he remained in seclusion until his death in 1976.

Significance

During his life, Paul Robeson received hundreds of awards and tributes for his superlative artistic achievements, phenomenal intellectual contributions, and unparalleled political sacrifices on behalf of world freedom and international peace. The British parliament set aside a day to honor him. He won the Donaldson Award for Best Acting Performance, received the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Gold Medal for Best Diction, and was awarded numerous honorary degrees from colleges. He was honored with the Badge of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, for those who fought for Republican Spain against Francisco Franco, the Thirtieth Annual Spingarn Medal, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties’ award. Further, he received the Lenin Peace Prize and the African Freedom Award, as well as other international honors. His prodigious career included eleven films, five documentaries, nearly two dozen plays, and hundreds of records. His meticulous and constant scholarship resulted in three dozen articles, one book, and hundreds of addresses and speeches.

Robeson believed that he could show the world through the media of entertainment that racism and exploitation of all people had to end. For him, art had a definite purpose. Aside from offering pleasure and joy, art was enhanced when it enlightened people; this was the true essence of art’s potential to uplift the human spirit.

During the 1930’s, Robeson integrated his artistic career with that of a political activist, a socialist cultural philosopher, and a peace advocate. Seeing German fascism at first hand compelled him to fight against it. He called for “immediate action” to save the Jews of Europe even though it might mean “heavy sacrifice and death.” His interest in labor organization grew out of his pioneering effort as a founder of the Unity Theatre in England.

Robeson supported popular liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He wrote on behalf of Philippine independence from the United States and was the most prominent voice against colonial rule in Africa. Robeson pioneered in the antiapartheid movement, counseling in the 1940’s that “we cannot afford to tolerate the advocates of White Supremacy in South Africa, any more than we can agree to the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia or Mississippi.”

Robeson was without peer in championing the cause of worldwide democracy; yet he became one of the greatest casualties of the Cold War. Actions that won approval and praise in the 1920’s and 1930’s brought derision and enmity in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. (Earl Schenck Miers, at the height of Robeson’s vilification, wrote in The Nation that, “as a product of his times, Robeson today is perhaps more All-American than he was as a member of his college.”) His constitutional rights were violated, and a torrent of hostility was directed against him.

A new generation of Americans, rediscovering Robeson in the 1970’s, brought increasing recognition of his achievements. No doubt they would be reassured by his last public statement just before his death: “Though I have not been able to be active for several years, I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated, as ever, to the worldwide cause of humanity, for freedom, peace and brotherhood.” As William Shakespeare’s Othello said in his last speech before they took him away: “Soft you; a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know’t.” With his genius and his humanism, Paul Robeson did indeed serve the state extraordinarily well.

Bibliography

Boyle, Sheila Tully, and Andrew Bunie. Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Tracing Robeson’s life from his birth through 1939, this biography describes how his radical politics were a response to racism and how these political views affected his life and career.

Davis, Lenwood G. A Paul Robeson Research Guide: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. All Robeson scholars must consult this very fine bibliography. Given the difficulty in identifying foreign and obscure domestic material on Robeson, this rather large compendium is a timely and essential reference.

Foner, Philip S., ed. Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978. This is an extremely valuable reader containing most of Robeson’s major published material. Those interested in twentieth century history and politics must include this volume on their reading lists.

Freedomways Associates. Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner. New York: International, 1985. This anthology contains a number of short articles on various aspects of Robeson’s life. Also included are a few documents and numerous tributes to the man from friends, associates, and admirers, who appreciated his contributions to humanity.

Gilliam, Dorothy Butler. Paul Robeson: All-American. Washington, D.C.: New Republic, 1976. This thoughtful biography of Paul Robeson is the best of the recent surveys of his life. The author, however, fails to explain adequately political events in the 1930’s or Cold War issues that shaped his thinking.

Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. New York: Othello, 1958. Although short and succinct, this autobiography covers Robeson’s life, beginning with his family and concluding with his sixtieth birthday. This fascinating personal account should be read by everyone.

Robeson, Paul, Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898-1939. New York: Wiley, 2001. In the first book of a projected two-volume biography, Robeson’s son explores his father’s life, career, and intellectual development. Robeson is the owner and archivist of his parents’ archives, and he uses materials from that collection to provide new information about his father and mother.

Seton, Marie. Paul Robeson. London: D. Dobson Books, 1958. Seton, a longtime friend of Robeson since the early 1930’s, has written the best biography of the man to date. Filled with many colorful insights, Seton endeavors to explain the origin of Robeson’s radicalism in the 1930’s. The work should be updated to cover the period from 1958 until his death in 1976.

Stuckey, Sterling. “’I Want to Be African’: Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice, 1914-1945.” Massachusetts Review 17 (Spring, 1976): 81-138. This stimulating article treats the development and expression of Robeson’s cultural nationalism in the 1930’s. The author is correct in asserting that the actor had a profound understanding of African culture and its possibilities as a humanistic approach to life that, if accepted by the West, might benefit the entire world.

Walwik, Joseph. The Peekskill, New York, Anti-Communist Riots of 1949. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Recounts the violent demonstrations staged by veterans’ groups and others to protest Robeson’s comments about American racism.

Wright, Charles H. The Peace Advocacy of Paul Robeson. Detroit, Mich.: Harlo Press, 1984. This short pamphlet provides valuable insight into a hitherto misunderstood aspect of Robeson’s political activities: his role as one of the world’s leading antiwar pioneers at the start of the nuclear age.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Robeson: Labor’s Forgotten Champion. Detroit, Mich.: Balamp, 1975. Although much has been written about Robeson, this book stands alone as the only treatment of his trade-union activities, a vital commitment to which the artist devoted much of his life. Another virtue of the book is its insight into labor’s views and support for this champion of the working class.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1930’s: Hindemith Advances Music as a Social Activity; October 10, 1935: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess Opens in New York.

1941-1970: 1947-1951: Blacklisting Depletes Hollywood’s Talent Pool.