“London was the center of the British Empire and it was there that I discovered Africa. Like most of Africa’s children in America I had known little about the land of our fathers, but in England I came to know many Africans.”
— Paul Robeson
The collapse of the New York stock exchange in 1929 sent shockwaves around America and the world, which led to The Great Depression, the period of mass unemployment, grinding poverty and, above all, a sense of hopelessness encapsulated in the photographs of mothers with a bunch of grime-faced children clinging to their skirts, or men in flat caps and dungarees staring blankly into the middle distance or marching with placards demanding jobs and dignity. Stock values in America fell by as much as 40% while the country’s industrial production, along with that of its debtor nations, Germany and Great Britain, also plummeted.
Austerity was not the destiny of all, though. Some still had money and needed ways to show it. If there were folk songs about the Depression there were also jazz-related dance crazes such as the Charleston that captured the imagination of decadent, cocktail-sipping flapper-wearing “Bright young things.”1
America in the 1930s, particularly New York, was still in a state of artistic ferment despite the hand-to-mouth existence to which many working -class folk had been condemned. The “Harlem Renaissance”, the creative explosion of which Paul Robeson (the main subject of this chapter) was a part, alongside others such as Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Zora Neale Hurston, brought together a cornucopia of Black talent in literature, theatre, music and dance. For the liberal white elite, there was further evidence of the inventive eclecticism of African-American artists. For those who took a closer interest, it was evident that the movement included a strong West Indian presence amongst its intelligentsia, political firebrands, theorists, writers and musicians. Chief among them was the brilliant Jamaican writer, Claude McKay, who wrote a number of landmark works, the most impressive of which was the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Home To Harlem (1928).2
The figure who eclipsed all of these in world impact – in notoriety to some, immense popularity to others – was the radical Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey, a champion of the notion of blackness as a positive rather than negative attribute, an articulate advocate of the rights of the descendants of slaves and, above all, the originator and populariser of the Back to Africa movement. Garvey’s time in New York was controversial, and the support that he drew from many American Blacks (his United Negro Improvement Association was reputed to have four million followers at its peak) was offset by a long running campaign of ridicule from African-American intellectuals, many of whom were notably lighter in skin shade, who saw him as a “Jamaican jackass”.3 Politics was not the only engagement of Garvey or his wife Amy. Readers of the New York Amsterdam News, the Black community’s paper, would, in August 1927, have seen the advert for the musical revue Brown Sugar, noted in the previous chapter at the Lafayette Theatre in 7th Avenue at 132nd Street.
But New York and Harlem were not the only places where musical innovation and political ferment went hand-in-hand. Because it was at the centre of a world empire, London (and later Manchester) was a magnet that attracted both musicians and migrants with political objectives in mind. Unquestionably the greatest of these figures was the singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, and his story is one that brings together both the African American struggle for civil rights and respect and the anti-colonial struggle which Africans, West Indians and Indians, amongst others, took to the heart of empire.
In those days (indeed right up until 1962), colonial subjects within the empire did not require a passport to board a ship. New World Africans had been crossing the Atlantic since the days of the War of Independence, and England became a meeting place for the many different peoples from around the colonial empire. Among them were preachers, thinkers, philosophers, rabble-rousers – individuals who were aware of the challenges facing “the Negro” and attempting to devise strategies to meet them. There were some who just wanted to make a living, but others who were prepared to fight for their constitutional rights and racial dignity. This credo, later to be termed Pan-Africanism, advocated universal solidarity for people of colour. Pan-Africanist sentiments had first been expressed in the late 18th century when the first Black writers to be published in Britain – Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano – had anticipated the dominant themes of the years to come: pride in ethnic origins and the refusal to accept white supremacy in any form.
From the mid 19th century onwards, a number of Black intellectuals settled in Britain, such as the African-American physician Martin Robinson Delany and the Dominican labourer Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards. In 1900, a Trinidadian teacher and lecturer, Henry Sylvester Williams4 staged the inaugural Pan-African conference between July 23rd and 25th at Westminster Town Hall in London. Thereafter came organizations such as the African Progress Union founded by John Archer (1863-1932), born in Liverpool to Barbadian parents, who became mayor of Battersea in south London, and subsequently a key figure in local affairs, as well as a great international champion of the rights of people of colour.
Britain became the centre for the Pan-Africanist movement because it was here that Africans, West Indians, African-Americans and mixed race Anglo-Africans could assemble, exchange ideas and create networks. Because London was the hub of the British Empire, people from all over the world met and interacted in places ranging from the raucous public houses of the East End to the refectories and common rooms of the city’s institutes of higher education.
There were times when it was possible to hear Marcus Garvey preach his message of black self-empowerment at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. There were the activities of pioneering civil rights organizations such as the League of Coloured Peoples, which was founded by the Jamaican doctor and social campaigner, Harold Moody in 1931. The League of Coloured Peoples drew together intellectuals from the West Indies and Africa and set out clear objectives in its charter. While its overarching mission was “To interest members in the Welfare of Coloured Peoples in all parts of the world”, the League also proposed: “To render such financial assistance to Coloured People in distress as lies within our capacity.”
The organisation was criticized by more militant activists. The Marxist publication The Negro Worker branded Moody a typical “Uncle Tom”, possibly the worst insult that could be thrown at a politicised person of colour. But the League’s efforts to help the colonial seamen of Cardiff who had seen their lives become increasingly difficult in the wake of the Special Restriction Order were admirable.5
Another significant Black organisation was the West African Students Union. Founded in 1925 by 21 African law students, and subsequently provided with premises by none other than Marcus Garvey, the organisation was vocal in its denunciation of western imperialism and had an inevitably difficult relationship with the Colonial Office. Its London headquarters in Camden Square was “not only a social centre but a hive of intellectual and political activity and a market place for ideas.”
London was the center of the British Empire and it was there that I discovered Africa. Like most of Africa’s children in America I had known little about the land of our fathers, but in England I came to know many Africans. Many of the Africans were students and I spent long hours talking with them and taking part in their activities at the West African Students Union building.6
So wrote Paul Robeson (1898-1976) in the opening chapter of his autobiography, Here I Stand. For a highly intelligent man like Robeson, this meeting fostered the growth of his thinking on the themes of ancestry, fraternity, solidarity, unity, history and cultural heritage. Some of the African students he met, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, subsequently went on to lead their countries, Ghana and Kenya respectively, to independence. Robeson became one of the key patrons of the West African Students Union, a characteristic gesture of an indefatigable champions of civil rights, a man who was intent on seeing the Negro obtain full enfranchisement as well as recognition for the great richness of his culture. This bond epitomised Robeson’s embrace of his African roots in the period when London was his home. He liked nothing better than to spend time in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies where he researched the languages of Africa. He was convinced that the continent had much more to offer than the “barbarous dialects” commonly evoked by scholars during his youth.
Actor, singer, political activist, and polyglot, Robeson was an African-American who had a sizeable impact not just on British but on global culture during his lifetime. He grew into an emblem for those who refused the constraints and restrictions placed upon them because of their race. In his approach, Robeson was an internationalist, never provincial or ghettoised. He was erudite and curious, and never afraid to be thought subversive. He fully exercised his right to think, move, sojourn, speak and create in as many different fields as he saw fit. Freedom was the passion of his mind.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson was the son of a runaway slave who became a minister, who graduated from Lincoln University. Paul himself went to Columbia Law School and proved himself a brilliant sportsman, but it became clear at this stage that Robeson had assets that predestined him for a life in the performing arts. His physique was striking. Tall, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, he had an imposing presence that came through equally on stage and screen. If Robeson looked extraordinary, he sounded more so. He had a deeply sonorous bass voice that could seduce and entice just as easily as it could intimidate and threaten. Besides stage and screen, his talents were seized on by the developing recording industry. But whatever rewards came to him, he remained a committed civil rights activist.
He won plaudits in the lead role of The Emperor Jones at the Provincetown playhouse in Greenwich Village, New York in 1924, but also received death threats for his part in the interracial drama All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Just a year later, accompanied by pianist and arranger Lawrence Brown, he performed a repertoire of Negro spirituals at the Greenwich Village theatre. He went on to act and sing for over three decades, and Brown remained Robeson’s trusted collaborator for most of that time, providing a strong thread of continuity as the singer’s fame steadily grew.
Arriving in London in 1927, Robeson wasted little time in making inroads into the world of theatre and by the end of the decade he performed a series of iconic Shakespearean title roles as Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. The latter was a part for which he prepared with the help of Amanda Aldridge, the daughter of the African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, who had toured Europe in the early 19th century, to great acclaim. Robeson’s work in West End theatres such as Drury Lane was met with consistently good press and he became a courted figure among London’s cultural elite.
One of the defining entries in his extensive list of theatre and film credits was the character of Joe in the musical Showboat, a production that premièred in New York in 1927 and transferred to London to open at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 3rd May, a year later. Although he had been unavailable for the original American shows, Robeson was a star attraction in the very strong British presentation that included two other renowned figures in African-American music: singers Alberta Hunter and Mabel Mercer.
Showboat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, remains powerful on the subject of colour prejudice, and the prohibition of sexual relations between the races in late 19th century America. The title refers to the steamers that sailed up and down the Mississippi with their rooms for music and gambling, a phenomenon crucial to the history of Black music because it was the setting for early gigs by Louis Armstrong. Robeson’s character, Joe, is a black dockworker who is the eyes and ears of the action, advising other characters, such as the naïve young actress Magnolia, on the ways of debonair cardsharps. Whilst Joe submits to the permanence of the great Mississippi, recognizing that the mighty river “jes keeps rolling along”, his songs do not sidestep the black man’s oppression at this point in American history.
It is the song, “Ol’ Man River”, featured in the opening act of the play and reprised in the second, which became the anthem with which Robeson is indelibly associated. He recorded the song as a 78 rpm single for Victor records in 1928, and performed it many times during his career. Over the years the lyrics of the song were altered several times, and a precise chronicle of the changes would be an essay in its own right, but the essential amendment to note is that the original Hammerstein lyric, which used the word “niggers” who sweat and strain, later became “darkies”. Robeson himself objected to “nigger”, but the concrete image of black labour/white leisure – “darkies all work while the white folks play” – was a potent contrast to the abstract idea of the river as a person of advancing years who is a silent witness to the inequality that exists on land:
There’s an old man called the Mississippi
That’s the old man that I’d like to be
What does he care if the world’s got troubles
What does he care if the land ain’t free?
Old man river that old man river
He must know something but don’t say nothing
He just keeps rolling, he keeps on rolling along.
This grand metaphor of the river as an irresistible force that is also a backdrop to oppression and exploitation is vividly served by Robeson’s commanding voice, and in the 1928 version, the depth of his tone and the authoritative but measured nature of his delivery packs a considerable emotional punch. In the song’s chorus there is a more explicit reference to the condition of blacks consigned to plantation life, to which Robeson responds by hardening his timbre just a little, underlining the political undercurrent in the haunting second line of the couplet:
He don’t plant taters, he don’t plant cotton
Them that plants ’em is soon forgotten.
The river is a hard taskmaster. For Blacks at least, it is exertion and exhaustion, rather than the pleasure taken by the showboat’s idle white gamblers. In the midst of registering the suffering, Robeson’s voice, on all the recorded versions, is intensely moving in making a cry for help. The text becomes overtly biblical, and as the singer’s emotional pitch rises, he builds a bridge between the material and spiritual world, making a direct plea for freedom from racial oppression. He does this by invoking one of the most potent images in the vocabulary of Negro spirituals: the river Jordan.
Let me go away from the Mississippi
Let me go away from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the River Jordan
that’s the old stream that I long to cross.
The Jordan is salvation, redemption and deliverance for people of colour, both a secular and spiritual image. Wade across its water, scramble to the other bank, and one might reach a land free of iniquity. Its place in the sermons and songs of the African-American church gives the allusion in this song a deep rooting in black culture, acknowledging and drawing on the wellspring of Black church music, making a connection with Robeson’s forerunners, The Fisk Jubilee Singers. Whether it is set to creamy, lush orchestration or just as a voice-piano duet, the steady, insistent pulse of the verse and the grand, sweeping nature of the choruses, marked by their sustained notes and repeated phrases, are redolent of Negro spirituals.
Whilst the word “darkies” evokes the era of minstrelsy, “Ol’ Man River” still stands as a bedrock of Black musical culture, making the point that American song has evolved with the input of African-American elements. What the moneyed patrons of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane thought about the relevance of Showboat to black Britain is a moot point.
Although the hardships evoked in “Ol’ Man River” are very much rooted in the African-American experience, it had obvious parallels in Britain for colonial seamen in Liverpool and Cardiff, who no doubt had similar experiences to those of the character of Joe the stevedore. There is no evidence of how much Robeson knew about these communities and their marginalization, but since the 1919 race riots in Wales made the British national press, he might well have been aware of them. In any case, as he pointed out in his autobiography, the plight of the common man was always his priority. Songs espousing the rights of Black people and songs expressing support for the struggles of oppressed workers anywhere in the world were always central to his repertoire.
An incident that occurred one day in1929 became a defining moment in his life. On his way to a gala dinner in central London, he heard the sound of miners singing to sustain themselves after a long, weary march from South Wales. They had walked all the way to the capital to petition the government for help in the face of spiralling unemployment in the coal industry that had devastated whole villages. Spontaneously, Robeson joined them and when they reached government offices in Whitehall, he gave a rousing rendition of spirituals and popular ballads, one of which was inevitably “Ol’ Man River”.7
This was the beginning of a love affair with the people of Wales that lasted for the rest of his life. Robeson went out of his way to help this group of miners, raising money so that they could catch the freight train home, and thereafter he gave fees from some of his concerts to the Welsh Miners Relief fund and visited Cardiff, Neath and Swansea to sing for those who spent long hours underground. Accounts of Paul Robeson as an individual inevitably – and correctly – draw attention to his common touch, his affinity with workers of the world, regardless of whether their toil was in the cotton fields of Georgia or the mines of the Rhonda Valley. The great coherence of his life was that as a man of the people he sang the songs of the people – “the eternal music of common humanity.” This was an expression of his socialist ideals and his vision of the possibility of empathy and solidarity across racial and cultural divides, which is why he went on to make the following statement after living in Britain for many years:
When I myself have appeared on a concert platform in Wales, the Welsh people have appeared to be the most responsive, there appeared to be a real link between us.8
If the struggles of common humanity were always uppermost in his mind, Robeson was nonetheless always focused on the inescapable reality of his blackness. In his autobiography, Here I Stand, the definition “I am a Negro” preceded the classification “I am an American”. Yet this pro-black stance of Robeson must be seen in the wider context of a commitment to the rights of working people regardless of race. The farthest reaches of Eastern Europe were also of interest to him.
Indeed his greatness lies precisely in his espousal of the ideal of empowerment for all of those who were on the lowest rung of the social ladder. His frames of reference were wide. As he said, when accepting an honorary degree from Morehouse College of Atlanta: “The tremendous strides of the various peoples in the Soviet Union have given greatest proof of the latent abilities, not only of so-called agricultural peoples presumably unfitted for intricate industrial techniques, but also of so-called backward peoples who have clearly demonstrated that they function like all others.”9
Empathy was something that Robeson had in great supply. His support for humanitarian causes in Wales was a given. On 25 March 1934, Robeson performed a gala concert organized by the Wrexham FC Supporters club in aid of the local St. John’s ambulance association, which attracted some 2,000 people. Such local initiatives were supplemented by events that had far-reaching international ramifications, such as the commemoration held at the Pavilion, Mount Ash, in 1938 in order to pay tribute to the 33 men from Wales who died supporting anti-fascist forces in Spain in 1936 when the civil war unleashed by General Franco’s reign of terror reached a bloody climax. Robeson was named the guest of honour at the event that was attended by a crowd of a staggering 7,000 people. Arthur Horner, of the South Wales Miners Federation, introduced Robeson as “a great champion of the rights of the oppressed people to whom he belongs.”10
Notes
1. The name given to the set of rich socialites, as satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.
2. See Arnold Rampersad, The New Negro Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
3. See Tony Martin, Marcus Garvey Hero: A First Biography (Majority Press, 1984). For an excellent insight into Garvey’s life see also Colin Grant’s The Negro With A Hat (Vintage, 2009).
4. See Owen Mathurin, Henry Sylvester Williams and the Origin of the Pan African Movement 1869-1911 (Greenwood Publishing, 1976).
5. See Blackpast.org: The Pan African Congresses 1900-1945.
6. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Dennis Dobson, 1958).
7. See Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898-1939 (John Wiley and Sons, 2001).
8. Here I Stand.
9. Ibid.