Paul Robeson arrives at New York’s Idlewild Airport from England after a five-year absence in 1963.
CREDIT: Associated Press/Harry Harris
PERHAPS THE most all-around-talented American of the 20th century, Paul Robeson was an internationally renowned concert singer, actor, college football star and professional athlete, writer, linguist (he sang in twenty-five languages), scholar, orator, lawyer, and activist in the civil rights, union, and peace movements. Despite his fame, his name was virtually erased from memory by government persecution during the McCarthy era. He was blacklisted, his concerts were canceled, and his passport was revoked.
Robeson’s mother, a teacher, died when Paul was six. His father, the Reverend William Drew Robeson, who had escaped from slavery at age fifteen in 1850, raised Paul and his four older siblings. Reverend Robeson served as pastor of a church in Princeton, New Jersey, until the church’s white elders fired him for speaking out against social injustice. For a while he worked as a coachman, but he eventually managed to find other pulpits.
After excelling in academics and sports in high school, Robeson attended Rutgers, back then a private college, on a scholarship in 1915. He was the third black student at Rutgers and its first black football player. His own teammates roughed up the six-foot-three Robeson on the first day of scrimmage, and he constantly endured racial slurs and physical harassment from opposing players. His father had impressed upon him, he later recalled, that he was not there on his own but rather was “the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football and wanted to go to college.”
Robeson was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and was the valedictorian of his 1919 graduating class. He won the Rutgers oratory award four years in a row. Although a member of the college glee club, he was not allowed to travel with the group or participate in its social events. He earned varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track. He was twice named to the College Football All-America Team, but he was benched when Rutgers played southern teams, who would not take the field with a black player playing for the opposing team. A “class prophecy” in the college yearbook predicted that by 1940 he would be the governor of New Jersey as well as “the leader of the colored race in America.”
After graduation, Robeson moved to Harlem and studied law at Columbia University, earning his degree in 1923. He helped pay for law school by playing professional football. However, when he took a job at a private law firm, his supervisors made it clear that he would never be considered a professional equal. The last straw was a white secretary’s refusal to take dictation from him. He quit and never practiced law again.
Fortunately, while Robeson was in law school his wife had persuaded him to perform in small theater roles, and he quickly launched a new career as an actor and concert singer. In 1924, a year out of law school, he got the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings at a Greenwich Village theater. Critics praised Robeson’s performance, but he could not find a restaurant in that liberal neighborhood that would serve him. Next he played the central character in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, about an ex-convict who escapes to a Caribbean island and sets himself up as emperor. The following year, Robeson launched his career as a concert singer with a recital of Negro spirituals. From that point on, his solo concerts and recordings were the core of his work as a performer, and he won increasing fame as an actor on stage and in film.
Robeson had a powerful bass-baritone voice and a commanding presence on stage. He was tall, handsome, and self-confident. He performed with dignity even the demeaning and stereotypical roles available to black actors at the time.
In 1928 Robeson was invited to sing the part of Joe in the London production of Show Boat, which had been a huge hit in New York. The musical chronicles the lives of people working on a Mississippi River showboat, but its black characters reflected the era’s stereotypes. Robeson sang “Ol’ Man River,” which became one of his trademark songs throughout his career. In the London show he sang the original lyrics, which begin “Niggers all work on the Mississippi.” Within a few years, he changed the first word to “darkies,” performing the song in concerts, and when he made the film version in 1936, he transformed the opening line entirely to “There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi; that’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be.” He also eventually changed the line “I’m tired of livin’ and feared of dyin’” to the more militant and political “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dying.”
Although Robeson disliked most of his film roles for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Africans and African Americans, a few of them allowed him to play parts several notches above the typically demeaning parts available to black actors. In The Proud Valley, he played David Goliath, a black American miner who gets a job in a Welsh mine, joins a male choir made up of other coal miners, and eventually dies in a mine accident while saving his fellow workers. This independently produced movie, filmed on location in the Welsh coalfields, documents the harsh realities of coal miners’ lives and showed Robeson’s character in particular in a positive light, merging his artistic and political talents.
In 1930 he became the first black man in almost a century to play Othello in England. It would be another thirteen years, in 1943, before he performed the role in the United States; even then, having a black man play a romantic lead, especially with a white woman as Desdemona, was controversial. However, the production ran for 296 performances, a record for a Shakespeare play on Broadway.
Robeson and his family spent much of the 1930s living in England and traveling and performing throughout Europe. In England he faced less overt racial prejudice and greater social acceptance than in the United States. His travels awakened his political consciousness. In London he met Jomo Kenyatta and other young Africans who would soon lead independence movements, triggering Robeson’s awareness of the emerging struggles by nonwhite peoples against colonialism.
In 1934 he visited Germany, where the Nazis had just taken power, and said the atmosphere felt like a “lynch mob.” That same year he visited the Soviet Union and was impressed by the lack of racial bigotry of the Russian people.
As his fame grew, Robeson filled the world’s largest concert halls and used his celebrity to speak out on political issues. In 1933 he donated the proceeds of All God’s Chillun to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany. At a 1937 rally for antifascist forces fighting in the Spanish Civil War he declared, “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” In New York in 1939 he starred in a network radio premiere of Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans,” a patriotic cantata that celebrated America’s racial and ethnic diversity and its tradition of dissent. Robeson and Bing Crosby recorded the piece, which was so popular that it was performed at both the Republican and Communist Party conventions in 1940.
During World War II, Robeson was at the height of his fame. His concerts of Negro spirituals and international songs drew huge audiences. His recordings sold well. In polls, Americans ranked Robeson as one of their favorite public figures. He entertained troops at the front and sang battle songs on the radio. He was a frequent presence at rallies and benefits for left-wing causes. In Los Angeles in September 1942, he gave a free concert for thousands of workers at an aviation plant.
In 1943 Robeson headed a delegation of blacks who met with the baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and major league baseball owners to demand the desegregation of baseball. (The Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a contract two years later.) In 1945 he headed an organization that challenged President Harry S. Truman to support an antilynching law.
When World War II ended and the Cold War began, Robeson’s outspoken support for the Soviet Union became highly controversial. His biographer Martin Duberman suggests that privately Robeson had begun to have doubts about the Soviet Union, particularly its mistreatment of Jews. When he visited Russia in 1949, he insisted on seeing his friend Itzik Feffer, a Jewish writer, whom the Soviets had arrested. Feffer told him about widespread official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, including the arrests and show trials. At his concert in Moscow, Robeson made a point of talking about Feffer and then singing, in Yiddish, the anthem of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, clearly a statement of solidarity with Russian Jewish dissidents. But when speaking in the United States, Robeson never uttered any criticism of the Soviet Union, leading many to suspect that he was a communist.
Once he was asked why, being so critical of the United States, he did not move to the Soviet Union. “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country,” Robeson said, “and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it.”
In 1948 Robeson campaigned enthusiastically for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign for president.
The attacks on Robeson escalated dramatically after he spoke at the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace in Paris in 1949. Robeson said that American workers, white and black, would not fight against Russia or any other nation. In the United States, however, the media misreported his remarks, interpreting them to mean that black Americans would not defend the United States in a war against the Soviet Union.
After that, it was open season on Robeson. He was denounced by the media, politicians, and conservative and liberal groups alike as being disloyal to the United States and a shill for the Soviet Union. Even civil rights groups—eager to avoid the taint of communism—distanced themselves from Robeson, who had received the Spingarn Medal, the highest award given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, only four years earlier.
In 1950 the US State Department revoked Robeson’s passport, claiming that his travel overseas would be “contrary to the best interests of the United States.” The loss of his passport prevented him from performing in Europe and Australia, where he was still enormously popular. His American concerts were canceled, too. Record companies stopped recording him. NBC barred Robeson from appearing on a television show with Eleanor Roosevelt. He received frequent death threats. Right-wing groups violently disrupted the few concerts he performed, sponsored by left-wing groups, such as a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress in Peekskill, New York, in August 1949. Unable to perform regularly, Robeson’s income declined from $100,000 in 1947 to $6,000 in 1952.
Robeson could not travel abroad until a 1958 US Supreme Court ruling, written by William O. Douglas, overturned travel bans based solely on someone’s beliefs and associations. He made triumphant concert tours in England, Australia, and Russia and performed at a sold-out recital at Carnegie Hall in New York, but the eight years of persecution and enforced idleness had taken a tremendous toll on his physical and mental health as well as his income. He suffered from debilitating depression and spent the last fifteen years of his life in relative seclusion.
Robeson was too isolated to play a role in the civil rights movement; his accomplishments and very existence were practically erased from public memory. It was not until the late 1970s that Robeson’s admirers—boosted by the upsurge of black studies and black cultural projects, plus the waning of the Cold War—began to rehabilitate his reputation, with various tributes, documentary films, books, concerts, exhibits, and a one-man play that Avery Brooks performed on Broadway and around the country. In 1995, after five decades of exclusion for political reasons, his athletic achievements were finally recognized with his posthumous induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Even though Robeson’s life and career were destroyed by the Red Scare, he has inspired many artists, particularly African Americans, to use their talents and celebrity to promote social justice. He opened the path for many others—including activist artists like Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis; more-recent black superstars like Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, and Spike Lee; and thousands of everyday activists in various struggles for social justice, who have carried on Robeson’s legacy of commitment and conscience.