1963 was an iconic year in the southern nonviolent civil rights movement. The previous year, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s strategy of direct action nonviolence had received little press attention and achieved few tangible goals in the fight against segregation in Albany, Georgia. However, moving on to Alabama in the spring of 1963, SCLC’s campaign to challenge segregation confronted Birmingham’s notorious police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor. His tactics secured national and international headlines. Connor infamously ordered the assault of the nonviolent activists, including young people and children, with police dogs and fire hoses which filled nightly news broadcasts and prompted an outcry from around the United States. In a display of cold war politics, newspapers in the Soviet Union jumped at the opportunity to lambast the failures of U.S. domestic policy, especially in the wake of the recent botched invasion and missile crisis in Cuba. Following the violence in Birmingham and the subsequent international criticism, President Kennedy was finally moved to take his strongest stand yet on racial discrimination by promising to bring a comprehensive civil rights bill before Congress.
Organizers built on the momentum generated that spring to bring to fruition A. Philip Randolph’s decades-long vision of a mass march on Washington, D.C., in August. Some of the most enduring images from the civil rights years occurred when an interracial assembly of about 250,000 crowded around the reflecting pool on the mall. Generational paradigms were also apparent that day. For example, the college-aged were represented by folk music revivalists Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing anthems of the era and the movement such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.” John Lewis, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was requested to tone down the rhetoric of his speech because it was deemed by veteran organizers such as Bayard Rustin as overly critical of the Kennedy administration. In the eyes of SNCC activists, JFK and attorney general RFK had done little to protect their constituents who were being brutalized in the South. However, Lewis altered the speech out of respect for the elder generation of activists, especially Randolph. Still, many SNCC members remained disapproving of the president as well as the march itself, which some later characterized as a “castrated giant,” for failing to address any critiques of Kennedy or engaging in civil disobedience.1 King, only in his early thirties at the time, delivered the most celebrated speech of the day which cemented his prominence as a national symbol of the contemporary civil rights movement. Rather than criticizing the Kennedy brothers, King focused on a hopeful message of future reconciliation and racial equality. Thus, a changing of the guard was evident that historic afternoon as representatives of a younger generation took center stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Paul Robeson had delivered an antilynching address at that very monument in 1946, but he and another distinguished cold warrior were conspicuously absent that warm summer day in 1963.
Thousands of miles across the Atlantic and far from the spotlight, two deans of the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights followed news of the mass march. The venerable, ninety-five-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois, who had expatriated to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, had heard about the planned protest through the Ghanaian media but died quietly in his sleep as the march commenced.2 On another continent, Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda, monitored the coverage of that memorable August day from Europe. In a piece she penned in October, Mrs. Robeson recorded the connection that both Robesons felt with the protest in Washington. She noted, “We could almost feel ourselves there, in person, in Washington. We certainly felt ourselves an intimate part of this history.”3 Significantly, she linked the campaign in Washington to Robeson’s legacy of activism.
In 1958 when his passport was returned, Robeson had headed to perform for friendlier audiences overseas. Yet his exit occurred just as direct action nonviolence, as implemented by groups like SCLC and later SNCC, was burgeoning. In December 1963, the sixty-five-year-old returned with weakened health to retire in the country which had kept him confined within its borders for speaking out in favor of African independence. As if to underscore his absence during pivotal years of civil rights action, a reporter at the airport unthinkingly queried whether Robeson would be joining the civil rights movement. Though he smiled silently at most questions directed toward him upon his arrival, to this inquiry Robeson cogently retorted, “Yes, I’ve been part of it all my life.”4 The disconnect between this reporter’s question and Robeson’s life as an activist stemmed in part from what the New York Times labeled his five-year “self exile.”5 Additionally, a new generation of civil rights activists who came of age in the postwar years was now at the forefront of the struggle. While the mainstream press tended to characterize Robeson’s return as something like that of a prodigal son who had been swayed by Communism and was detached from the contemporary struggle, the progressive journal Freedomways, in an editorial which welcomed him home, made explicit the relationship between Robeson and the current fight. The editors thoughtfully noticed that “the winds of Freedom are once again blowing across the south; sparked by a new generation of Negro youth who proudly inherit the traditions of courage and dedication of which Paul Robeson is such a towering symbol and legend in his own time.”6
In September 1964, after the signing of the Civil Rights Act that summer, Robeson published an article in the Afro-American that commented on his return as well as present issues. He correlated observations from his 1958 memoir with the current movement for civil rights by recollecting that he had called for mass involvement in the final chapter, “The Power of Negro Action.” By 1964, he was pleased that the idea was now “manifesting itself throughout the land,” as “[t]he ‘long hot summer’ of struggle for equal rights has replaced the ‘cold war’ abroad as the concern of our people.” Finally, Robeson affirmed the role of artists in the current movement. “It is especially heartening,” he declared, “for me to see the active and often heroic part that leading colored artists … are playing today in the Freedom struggle.” As opposed to the forties and fifties, Robeson ruminated, “Today it is the colored artist who does not speak out who is considered to be out-of-line. …” In recognition of contemporary civil rights leadership, his closing acknowledged King’s famed speech at the March on Washington. Robeson, the seasoned activist, was a bit more reserved than the younger King, yet still optimistic. He suggested, “But if we cannot as yet sing: ‘Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last,’ we surely can all sing together: ‘Thank God Almighty, we’re moving!’”7
A generational shift was also evident at an event for Robeson in April 1965 hosted by the journal Freedomways. Over two thousand acolytes, celebrities, and activists, including Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Billy Taylor, Pete Seeger, John O. Killens, and Lloyd Brown, gathered at the Americana Hotel in New York for a cocktail party followed by a four-hour tribute to the performer.8 The Liberator, a journal of the younger generation of black artists and advocates, dedicated a page to discussing the Robeson event. In its notice, the Liberator observed that the “fearless and uncompromising leadership which Robeson exerted before his departure” was “a type of leadership which we sorely lack today.”9 This article also pointed out that the only speech of the evening which highlighted the contemporary struggle was delivered by SNCC’s John Lewis, who had recently participated in the Selma to Montgomery march. Robeson biographer Martin Duberman noted that when asked to prepare a keynote address, Lewis sought help from another SNCC member because Robeson’s history was unfamiliar to him.10 Nevertheless, the speech made critical linkages between Robeson’s activism and the SNCC generation.11
He opened by acknowledging that for two generations “Paul Robeson represented the entire Negro people of this country.” It was significant that Lewis, as well as the Liberator article, accepted Robeson as a leader in the African American community. This role had been denied by those who denounced Robeson after his remarks in Paris in 1949 but was now being documented by the subsequent generation. Lewis continued, “Tonight, as we salute Paul Robeson, we salute more than a man, we salute a cause.” In addition, “We salute the dreams … of an oppressed people whether they be in Selma, Alabama … or in Vietnam.” In this way, Lewis recognized the internationalism of Robeson’s civil rights activism. Robeson had critiqued U.S. involvement in Korea in the early 1950s while the imperialist war of Lewis’s generation was in another country in Southeast Asia: Vietnam.
Noting that SNCC, like Robeson, had been accused of being radicals of “Communist influence,” Lewis wondered what was so dangerous about Robeson and later SNCC. In reply, he perceived that both maintained “faith in the numberless poor and uneducated” while believing that “they must be free” to “decide their own political destiny.” He then thoughtfully suggested that the audience pay homage to Robeson’s activism by supporting SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s challenge to unseat the legislators who were elected in absence of the African American vote. Most memorable was Lewis’s assertion that “we of S.N.C.C. are Paul Robeson’s spiritual children.” Indeed, Lewis had been a child at the time of Robeson’s triumph on Broadway in the middle 1940s when his artistry and political advocacy were successfully conjoined. Robeson came forward to make a few comments following Lewis’s speech. There must have been a moment when the legendary, now senior, artist and the youthful practitioner of nonviolent direct action met, and perhaps shook hands, marking a discernable transition between generations of civil rights proponents.
What was instructive about Robeson’s career as a performer was not solely the substance of his politics, though that was vital and should be intrinsic to any examination of his artistry. Rather, it was the unique melding of his politics with his artistic talent that illuminated the role of the artist during times of crisis. When stymied by discrimination from pursuing a career in law, this budding scholar did not subvert his political acuity in favor of a livelihood in the arts but, over the years, he employed creative methods to unite his singing and stagecraft with his antifascism. Through the Othello production on Broadway, his stand against segregation was boldly manifested onstage as well as outside of the theater. As the political climate intensified, in the postwar years, Robeson did not divest himself from his commitment to being a politically minded artist. Instead, he sacrificed the financial remuneration of a purely artistic career in order to remain true to his political principles. His stalwart posture in the face of cold war repression was unmistakable in his persistent struggle to play Othello in England again.
As Shakespeare’s character ruminated in act I, “Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it / Without a prompter. …” Robeson, like Othello, knew when it was his cue to fight. The performer took his cue in the battles against fascism, discrimination, and colonialism in favor of freedom, dignity, and self-determination. Robeson brought to these fronts an arsenal of talent: an unforgettable resonant baritone shaped by the artist, a noble physique with the dignified comportment of the actor, and a sharp mind along with the courage to speak truth to power in trying political circumstances. As James Baldwin poetically observed at the Freedomways event, “[I]n the days when it seemed that there was no possibility of applying the rigors of conscience, Paul Robeson spoke in a great voice. …”12 Whether he was discussing African independence, peace with former allies, or the Bard of Stratford, and whether he was performing on a theater stage, at a press conference, or during a demonstration, when Paul Robeson voiced “a word or two before you go,” many heads turned to listen.