May 1944 was a tense month in the struggle against fascism. The Allied bombing of Germany continued unabated while clandestine operations for an invasion of France coalesced on the coast of England. As soldiers dutifully followed orders in the European theater of war, artists back in the United States waged a battle of their own. That month, the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee sponsored a radio program in New York City which was broadcast over the Blue Network. For this half hour, African American tenants of apartments in Harlem and brownstones in Brooklyn could visualize the impact their brothers, sons, and nephews were having in the war effort. Listeners could also conceptualize the importance of conveying that antifascist spirit from the war front back to the home front as they heard artists like Teddy Wilson, Helen Hayes, and Canada Lee assert that “the problem of racial discrimination,” like the issue of Hitler’s menacing empire building and Hirohito’s blatant attack on Hawaii, “is one which we must face and solve.” Perhaps the best-known voice on that program was the unmistakable baritone of Paul Robeson. In a dramatic reading the narrator queried Robeson, “And if the Negro pilots of the [Ninety-ninth] Squadron could send a greeting to Abe [Lincoln] what do you think they’d say … ?” To which Robeson responded, “You set us marching toward freedom and we’re marching with the world.” His reply highlighted the vital contribution of African American troops in the war effort. Robeson also pointed out that Hitler did not care much for this squadron because “it upsets his race theories and it upsets a lot of Nazi planes, too.”1
Robeson’s presence at a politically motivated entertainment event was in itself wholly unremarkable. The aims of the committee to counteract “the evil of race antagonism” and ensure “that this war has not been fought in vain” cohered well with his antifascist principles. What was notable about this occasion was that Robeson had rushed so quickly from the Shubert Theatre, where he was performing nightly in Shakespeare’s Othello, to the radio studio that he had no time to change out of the flowing robes worn by the Moorish general. Fredi Washington noted in her enthusiastic article in the People’s Voice newspaper that Robeson’s fashion faux pas occurred “much to his embarrassment.” What transpired as a minor inconvenience and was probably soon forgotten represented, in retrospect, a potent symbol of the unique fusion between Robeson’s artistic career and his political activism. He was, at this time, one of the most recognizable celebrities on the U.S. as well as the world stage. The production of Othello in which he was starring got rave reviews and was in the process of playing a record number of shows on Broadway. Robeson’s solo vocal concerts were also well known and highly acclaimed.
Significantly, audiences were equally familiar with his stature as a politically engaged artist. Over the course of the war, Robeson helped raise money for war bonds, encouraged support for refugee relief, trumpeted the cause of friendship with the Soviets, and emphasized the need for victory over manifestations of domestic fascism as well as fascism overseas in speeches and appearances across the country. His interpretation of Shakespeare’s Moor broke the barrier against African Americans performing that role on Broadway. His noble personification of the character embodied the dignity of the African American community and implicitly argued against the history of discrimination against this minority group. Yet, the visceral merging of Robeson the actor and Robeson the political advocate was never more apparent than at this broadcast when he promoted the cause of racial justice quite literally as Othello. At this moment, more than perhaps any other, the artist and the activist were indistinguishable.
Born in New Jersey in 1898, just two years after the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision gave legal sanction to segregation, Paul Robeson came of age at a time when the fury of racial discrimination was largely unfettered by federal oversight. As he later reminded audiences at his speeches and readers of his columns, Robeson’s father had escaped enslavement in North Carolina, making Paul Robeson just one generation removed from the insidious history of unpaid, forced labor which laid the economic foundation of the United States. Sensing the legal underpinnings of race discrimination at a young age, Robeson astutely observed in his senior thesis at Rutgers University that citizenship protection for African Americans should have been enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, enforcement of this law had by and large been ignored since the collapse of Reconstruction. He completed a law degree at Columbia University but was thwarted by bigotry in his pursuit of a career in that field.
It was in the 1920s, when the art scene in New York’s Harlem was blossoming, that Robeson began taking small stage roles and performed his first recital of African American spirituals. Robeson possessed a distinctive, sonorous baritone, along with a strong background in oratory that was buttressed during his formative years by his father’s preaching in the A.M.E. Zion church. Fortified with these natural talents, Robeson, the promising new artist, became a familiar face in the New York cultural scene. By 1930, his career as an actor and vocalist was solidified by roles in plays such as All God’s Chillun Got Wings, The Emperor Jones, and Show Boat and by numerous accolades for his concerts. It was via this, somewhat indirect, path that Robeson the Phi Beta Kappa scholar and aspiring attorney came to pursue a successful livelihood in the arts. The acute mind and political insights developed during his education were not abandoned even though he ultimately did not practice law. Rather, as Robeson became increasingly politically active in the 1930s, his activism influenced his art and enriched his stage performances. Similarly, as his stagecraft was honed, the diction and comportment of the artist imparted a singularly performative element to his political appearances.
Intrinsic to Robeson’s political principles was the constant struggle to obtain justice and human dignity for African Americans and oppressed people worldwide. The marriage of these principles to Robeson’s art was represented, for example, by his conscious decision to concentrate on African American spirituals and folk music from many countries in his vocal programs. Conveying the dignity of people of African descent became central to his theatrical interpretations. Reviews of Robeson, especially from the middle 1940s to the late 1950s, were replete with references to his dignified portrayals. Robeson explained his identification with this cause in an interview in 1958 when his outspoken politics were unwelcomed by cold war reactionaries: “They can shut me up, I’ll gladly shut up tomorrow if the poor colored worker is freed of discrimination and can stand up with dignity and be a man.”2 Benjamin Davis, a councilman in New York and friend of Robeson’s, connected the cause of dignity directly to Robeson’s art that same year: “Mr. Robeson is one of the great artists of our generation … because he has represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us—the cause of human dignity.”3 More recently, fellow actor and friend of Robeson’s, Ossie Davis, summarized poetically the conflation of Robeson’s art and political advocacy: “Paul was an artist and an activist because he saw very clearly that the one equals the other. … With Paul there was no difference. To be an artist was an element of the struggle. To be an artist was to strike a blow with a song, which in his voice and in his hands became a battle axe.”4 Thus, for Robeson, being an artist did not negate or detract from the role one could play in the fight against injustice. He saw no dichotomy which separated the art world from the political realm. Throughout his career he endeavored to conjoin these two binaries and in doing so left a legacy of artistic work that represented a unique fusion of art that reflected issues in contemporary politics.
To be sure, Robeson’s politics were not always readily apparent in every play, or especially film, in which he starred. Looking at his early work in particular, one sees, for instance, a mixed heritage of imperialistic jingoism (as in Sanders of the River), a misguided and paranoid black leader (The Emperor Jones), and a stereotypical hallelujah-singing sharecropper (Tales of Manhattan). However, one must take into account the full scope of Robeson’s work, including his politically induced decisions offstage, when assessing individual pieces such as these. For example, he denounced Sanders of the River and took a hiatus from acting in movies in the late 1930s because of his frustration with the demeaning portrayals of people of African descent in that medium. His interpretation of Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1936 in a politically inspired play written by a black author, C. L. R. James, offered a heroic black lead which countered the psychological descent into madness emphasized in Eugene O’Neill’s Brutus Jones. Tales of Manhattan precipitated Robeson’s final departure from the film industry because he saw little progress away from the traditional denigrating images of people of color. Thus, the growth of his political consciousness swayed the direction of Robeson’s artistic career. Perhaps nowhere was this evolution toward becoming a politically motivated artist more evident than in the history of Robeson’s three portrayals of Shakespeare’s Othello.
Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James once penned in one of his letters to literary critics that “Shakespeare’s characters are an embodiment of the assault upon the ordered conception of the medieval world. …”5 Writing during the European Renaissance, England’s great playwright relentlessly questioned the political and social assumptions of the previous era by crafting nuanced and multifaceted roles that personified the new intellectualism of his time. Othello, for example, represented a rumination on the idea of blackness, which often symbolized evil in Elizabethan England. However, Shakespeare’s Moorish character, though he was dark-skinned, was not the villain of the play but was a casualty in the tragedy. James’s idea can also be applied to Robeson’s rendering of the Moor of Venice. His Othello represented an assault on the previous conceptions of Othello as well as on the ordered notion of the racially segregated theater house. In 1930, Robeson was the first actor of African descent to portray Othello in London since Ira Aldridge in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of a dark-skinned Othello was not universally accepted, so Robeson wrote articles and sat for interviews where he persuasively argued in favor of an African depiction of Shakespeare’s character. In the middle 1940s, Robeson was the first African American to play Othello on Broadway, which was a historic accomplishment. However, Robeson took the issue of theater desegregation an unprecedented step further by insisting that the troupe would not perform to segregated audiences on the seven-month U.S. tour. Robeson, as a reporter for The Worker shrewdly pointed out, had pioneered the cause of dignity for the theater audience by refusing to subject them to racial segregation.6 Finally, Robeson returned to the role of Othello for the 1959 Stratford festival. The nearly overwhelming reception for this performance, while probably not his best due to ill health, flew in the face of cold war repression by demonstrating the adulation which audiences abroad maintained for Robeson’s triumph over his unconstitutional eight-year confinement in the United States. Thus, Robeson’s Othello portrayals underscored the dignity of an African individual onstage and illustrated the amalgamation of his politics with his artistic career.
The development of Robeson’s maturity as a politically minded artist, as depicted through the three Othello productions, can also explicate the broader issue of the role of the artist in times of crisis. He intuitively recognized, as Susan Curtis has pointed out, that “cultural victories ring hollow when they are not accompanied by social and economic improvement.”7 Robeson not only fervently believed but tangibly exhibited through his life’s work that political engagement was an inherent component of the role of the artist in society. He articulated this commitment in one of his most well-known speeches in 1937 during the critical moment of the Spanish civil war when he publicly avowed his antifascism and called on others to join the struggle. In this speech he explained that the artist had a distinctive role in fighting fascism because it “fights to destroy the culture which society has created. …” Fascism “makes no distinction between combatants and noncombatants.” As a result, “the true artist cannot hold himself aloof.” Robeson stressed the urgency of the situation, “The legacy of culture from our predecessors is in danger. … It belongs not only to us … it belongs to posterity—and must be defended to the death.” Thus, it was vital to rally “every artist” and “every writer … who loves democracy” to join the battle.8
Robeson’s defiant posture against fascism was prompted not only by the political threat of this authoritarian movement but also because the cultural legacy, the art of Western society was in jeopardy. Fascism sought to destroy political opposition as well as the organic, indigenous culture of the people. The art forms that blossomed out of the daily lives of the folk and sustained generations through their lively words, song, and life force could be destroyed. The only place for the artist, then, was to stand on the side of freedom, to be on the front lines to prevent such a disaster. Freedom, for Robeson, meant not solely political freedom and protection of civil rights but also artistic freedom and the freedom to pursue his livelihood.
Robeson’s public pronouncement of his political principles came in the late 1930s as fascist clouds were gathering across Spain, Italy, and Germany. Because he spent much of that decade living in England, he had witnessed firsthand the coalitions built to counter this political force as they were taking shape. It was against this backdrop that Robeson’s political awareness ripened and began to more overtly meld with his stage career. By the 1940s, when the United States was jolted out of its isolationism and began mobilizing, Robeson’s antifascism was already firmly rooted and remained entrenched throughout the war. As the Second World War wound down and anticommunist reactionism began to prevail, Robeson’s stance against fascism persisted. In the climate of the cold war, he spoke against the neo-fascist constituents in the United States that disregarded constitutional civil rights as well as sovereignty rights for colonized people arund the world. Thus, Robeson’s antifascist perspective endured from the 1930s through the late 1950s whether the specter of fascism loomed over Europe or reared its head from the right wing of the U.S. government. As an artist, Robeson responded to political crises that were specific to the historical circumstances: the spread of fascism across Europe, the Second World War, full citizenship for African Americans, independence for European colonies, especially in Africa, and peace with the Soviet Union after the war.
Robeson’s three productions of Othello occurred at pivotal moments in his career that reflected both the particular historical setting and his response to the political climate. Because of this unique positioning, the Othello productions act as guideposts which signal the transformation in Robeson’s art as he became a consciously devoted, politically minded performer. Each of the Othello productions illuminated key ingredients in Robeson’s artistic development. In addition, the time frame in which these revivals were produced shed light on fundamental aspects of his political life and the historical events which informed his politics. Analyzing these theater productions, or any of Robeson’s work, in the absence of the political context would neglect the basis of Robeson’s approach to art as a socially conscious endeavor. Using the Othello productions as a framework, this study will examine each of these revivals and the corresponding historical milieu as a means to elucidate the way in which an artist can perform in a politically charged environment should s/he choose to engage and respond to contemporary issues. Concurrently, this narrative inherently speaks to the pressure that society was capable of exerting on an artist who challenged mainstream political assumptions in an outspoken manner. Should an artist relent when government and social pressures endanger the artist’s ability to practice his or her livelihood? For Robeson, the answer was a resounding and inspiring “no.” The shifting political climate impacted and, at times, devastated Robeson’s artistic career, but once he had committed to wedding his creative life, his means of making a living, with his political principles, that would be the enduring position from which he stood, as the resolute title of his memoir, Here I Stand, affirmed.
This exploration begins by introducing Shakespeare’s play in the first chapter and offering an overview of important precedents, from Britain, the U.S. and the African American community, to Robeson’s portrayal of the Moor of Venice. To provide context for Robeson’s artistry, this chapter also looks at Shakespeare in the African American community and the importance of the black oratorical tradition to Robeson’s acting methodology. Chapter two then closely examines Robeson’s first portrayal of Othello in London in 1930, including the critical reception of the play and the obstacles that inhibited this from being a successful production overall. This experience was crucial to Robeson’s growth as an artist and the development of his cultural theory. The next chapter, three, delves into Robeson’s writing on culture as it blossomed in the 1930s. This decade was decisive in the maturation of his political thinking and was the key moment when his politics began to conjoin with his art. This progress is explored through fundamental events, including Robeson’s portrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture, his published writing on African culture, and his visit to the front of the Spanish civil war.
Chapter four analyzes the significance of Robeson’s historic portrayal of Othello on the Broadway stage during World War II. The importance of this revival was embedded not only in the conscious decision to cast a black actor in the lead role but, moreover, that it responded to both the wartime context and the issue of segregation in the theater setting. The following chapter, five, discusses the blurring line between Robeson the artist and Robeson the activist in the 1940s. During this time, his political activities added depth to his Othello interpretation, while his political involvement can be conceptualized as performance outside of the formal theater. In all arenas, he advocated against fascism and for the dignity of the African American community. The ways in which Robeson utilized creative performative strategies to circumvent his confinement in the United States during the early cold war is dealt with in chapter six. Despite persistent government repression, Robeson maintained his internationalist anti-fascist analysis which emphasized civil rights for African Americans and self-determination for Africans. The final monologue of Othello remained prominent in his cold war repertoire, reflecting the importance of that role in his artistic legacy and the capricious passport ban which prevented him from again donning Othello’s robes onstage.
Finally, chapter seven explores Robeson’s third portrayal of Shakespeare’s Moor in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959. This triumphant moment recalled the pinnacle of Robeson’s career, the Broadway Othello, while symbolizing his victory over the State Department’s unconstitutional withholding of his right to travel overseas. This revival afforded audiences abroad the opportunity to affirm their support for him as both an artist and a citizen of great courage who had stood steadfastly against government suppression and emerged with his dignity intact. Significantly, this production occurred at a moment when cold war repression was ceding slightly, and independence for Africans, for which Robeson had so zealously advocated, seemed momentarily hopeful.
Robeson’s path toward becoming a politically motivated artist encompassed some of the most weighty and controversial historical events of the mid-twentieth century. Yet, the true starting point on this journey must be much earlier, near the dawn of the seventeenth century, when England’s most revered playwright sat down to pen a drama about a Moor in Venice.