Stage actor, singer, and political activist, born in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. At Rutgers University, he was a two-year All-American in football, valedictorian, and a Phi Beta Kappa at a time when few African-Americans even attended college. He took a law degree at Columbia University, but turned to singing and acting, appearing internationally in plays, films, on concert stages, and on recordings. He was especially known for his renditions of black spirituals, while his most famous stage role was in Othello. By the late 1930s he had become increasingly more active and outspoken on behalf of racial justice, social progress, and international peace, and when he defied charges that he was a Communist, the government cancelled his passport. He spent most of the next 13 years living in Russia and London, returning to the USA (1963) to live out his last years in poor health.
Early life and family
Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey. His father William Drew Robeson I ran away from a North Carolina plantation where he had been enslaved; Paul's four siblings include: William Drew Robeson, a physician who practiced in Washington, D.C.; Benjamin Robeson, a minister; Reeve Robeson (called Reed); and Marian Robeson, who lived in Philadelphia.
Education
Rutgers
Robeson won an academic scholarship to Rutgers University. Robeson was the third African-American student accepted at Rutgers, and was the only Black student during his time on campus.
Robeson was one of three classmates at Rutgers accepted into Phi Beta Kappa. A noted athlete, Robeson earned fifteen varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field.
During the later period when the United States government stopped him from traveling outside the country, his name was retroactively struck from the roster of the 1917 and 1918 college All-America football teams. [September 26, 1982, The New York Times]
Columbia Law School
After graduation, Robeson moved to Harlem and earned a law degree at Columbia, graduating in the same law school class as United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Between 1920 and 1923, Robeson helped pay his way through law school by working as an athlete and a performer. At Columbia, Robeson joined Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity for African Americans. Robeson later studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Family
He married Eslanda (Essie) Cardozo Goode (1896-1965) in August of 1921. Robeson and his wife had one child: Paul Robeson II, born in 1927.
Actor and singer
Robeson found fame as an actor and singer with his fine bass-baritone voice.
His first roles were in 1922 playing Simon in Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA and Jim in Taboo at the Sam Harris Theater in Harlem. Robeson's repertoire of African-American folk songs helped bring these to much wider attention both inside the US and abroad — in particular his rendition of "Go Down Moses." Robeson also became interested in the folk music of the world;
Between 1925 and 1942 Robeson appeared in eleven films — all but four of them British productions — after he and his wife moved to England in the late 1920s. At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Robeson became a major box office attraction in British films such as Song of Freedom and The Proud Valley. He was also cast as Joe in the 1936 film version of Show Boat, another box office hit for Robeson, and the most frequently shown and highly acclaimed of all his films.
Activism and advocacy
Robeson was among the first performers to sing in concert on behalf of the U.S. World War II war effort. [September 26, 1982, The New York Times]
He sang and spoke out against racist conditions experienced by Asian and Black Americans; In particular, Robeson spoke out against lynching and, in 1946, he founded the American Crusade Against Lynching.
In 1948, Robeson was active in the presidential campaign to elect Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, who had served as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President, and Secretary of Commerce in the administrations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the campaign trail in June of that year, Robeson went to Georgia, where he sang before "overflow audiences...
In March of 1950, NBC cancelled Robeson’s scheduled appearance on former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s television program, Today with Mrs. Roosevelt. A spokeman for NBC declared that Robeson would never appear on NBC, thus making him the first American to be officially banned from television. Press releases of the Civil Rights Congress objected that "censorship of Mr. Robeson's appearance on TV is a crude attempt to silence the outstanding spokesman for the Negro people in their fight for civil and human rights" and that our "basic democratic rights are under attack under the smoke-screen of anti-Communism."
According to Progressive Party organizer Rev. Domas, Robeson rode a flatbed truck through the streets of the Black neighborhoods singing.
Robeson and the Soviet Union
Like many intellectuals and artists of the time, Robeson supported the Soviet Union. On July 8, 1943, at the largest pro-Soviet rally ever held in the United States, an event organized by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and chaired by Albert Einstein, Robeson met Solomon Mikhoels, the popular actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and the Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer. After the rally, Robeson and his wife Essie entertained Feffer and Mikhoels.
Six years later, in June 1949 during the 150th anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union to sing in concert and was given a warm public welcome.
Robeson defies Stalin
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Robeson was troubled because the Jewish pianist who had accompanied Robeson's concerts was denied a visa by the Russians, and their closest Russian Jewish friends were conspicuous by their absence. Concerned about their welfare, Robeson demanded of his Soviet hosts that he see Feffer, and they did meet. Robeson paid tribute to both Feffer and Mikhoels during his concert in Tchaikovsky Hall, June 14, 1949.
In a 2006 interview with the Toronto Star Paul Robeson, Jr., said
"My father learned the words to the song from a Warsaw ghetto survivor on his way to Russia...
In 1952, Robeson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Because of the segregation African Americans faced in the United States, Robeson said he admired Stalin for the decisive role the Soviet leader played in encouraging national minorities:
"I was later to travel", he wrote, "to see with my own eyes what could happen to so-called backward peoples.
Robeson however is often criticized for continuing to support the Soviet Union despite being aware of Soviet anti-Semitism. At the time of Robeson's 1949 visit to Moscow, when Robeson met with Feffer, Feffer had been in prison for a year. Although their meeting-room was bugged, Feffer, through gestures and a few written notes, let Robeson know that he faced imminent execution, that other prominent Jewish cultural figures were under arrest and that a massive purging was underway. On his return to the United States, Robeson denied rumors of rampant anti-Semitism, and announced to a reporter from Soviet Russia Today that he had "met Jewish people all over the place... According to Joshua Rubenstein's book, "Stalin's Secret Pogrom," Robeson justified his silence on the grounds that any public criticism of the USSR would reinforce the authority of America's right wing which, he believed, wanted a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.
International travel ban
In 1950, after he refused to sign an affidavit that he was not a Communist the U.S. government took away Robeson's passport and, with it, his freedom to travel outside the United States. When Robeson and his lawyers met with officials at the U.S. State Department August 23, 1950 and asked why it was "detrimental to the interests of the United States Government" for him to travel abroad, they were told that "his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries"—it was a "family affair." 389)
In the travel ban, Robeson joined other radicals whose right to travel was prohibited, including the writers Howard Fast and Albert E. In his biography of Robeson, Duberman sought and received answers to his requests under the Freedom of Information law. One such answer came in the State Department's 'memorandum for file' summarizing the August 23, 1950 meeting between U.S. officials and Robeson and his attorneys. The internal State Department memorandum reveals that U.S. government officials asked Robeson to sign a statement guaranteeing not to give any speeches while outside the U.S. When Robeson refused, the State Department declined to reconsider his passport application. 389)
While no U.S. citizen needed a passport to travel to and from Canada, the State Department also took steps to prevent Robeson from leaving the U.S. to sing at a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia in January 1952. Falling back on legislation passed during World War I "during the existence of a national emergency"—to prevent the entry or departure of its citizens, U.S. officials stopped Robeson from singing in Canada.
In an act of defiance against the travel ban, labor unions in the U.S. and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia on May 18, 1952. 400) Paul Robeson stood on the back of a flat bed truck on the American side of the U.S.-Canada border and performed a concert for a crowd on the Canadian side, variously estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 people. Robeson returned to perform a second concert at the Peace Arch in 1953.
In 1956, Robeson left the United States for the first time since the travel ban was imposed, performing concerts in two Canadian cities, Sudbury and Toronto, in March of that year.
The travel ban ended in 1958 when Robeson’s passport was returned to him after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of State had no right to deny a passport or require any citizen to sign an affidavit because of his political beliefs.(Duberman, p. 463)
However, because of the controversy surrounding him, all of Paul Robeson's recordings and films were withdrawn from circulation. From then until the late 1970's, it became increasingly difficult in the United States, if not impossible, to hear Robeson sing on records or on the radio, or to see any of his films, including the highly acclaimed and successful 1936 film version of Show Boat.
Wales
Robeson's association with Wales began in 1928 while he was performing in London in the musical Show Boat. During the 1930s, Robeson made several visits to Welsh mining areas, including performances in Cardiff, Neath and Aberdare.
Between 1952 and 1957, Robeson was invited to sing at the Miners' Eisteddfod, an arts festival, held at the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl.
Welsh miners' organisations were among the most prominent international supporters of the campaign calling for the restoration of his passport and to Let Paul Robeson Sing!. When his passport was returned in 1958 as a result of a United States Supreme Court decision in a related case, Robeson traveled to Wales as a guest of the MP Aneurin Bevan to appear at the National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale. In 1960, Robeson's final performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London included choral accompaniment from the Cwmbach Welsh male voice choir.
Robeson remains a celebrated figure in Wales. The exhibit Let Paul Robeson Sing! was unveiled in Cardiff in 2001, going on to tour several Welsh towns and cities. A number of Welsh artists have celebrated Robeson's life: The Manic Street Preachers' song "Let Robeson Sing" appears on the album Know Your Enemy. The band also covered "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?"— the spiritual sung by Robeson as part of his 1957 telephone performance. The play Paul Robeson Knew My Father by Greg Cullen, set in the Rhondda during the 1950s, features a character with a childhood obsession for Robeson's music and films. Robeson's health began to break down and he spent some time in Russian and East German hospitals.
In 1958, Robeson's 60th birthday was celebrated in Europe, the Soviet Union, Latin America, Asia and Africa, for a total of twenty-seven countries, as well as in several US cities.. In 1963 the German Democratic Republic (DDR) established the Paul Robeson Choir and in 1965 the Paul Robeson Archive was established at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
In 1961, Robeson attempted suicide in a Moscow hotel room. Paul Robeson returned to live in the United States in 1963.
Over 3,000 people gathered in Carnegie Hall to salute his 75th birthday, including Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Pete Seeger, Angela Davis, Dolores Huerta, Dizzy Gillespie, Odetta, Leon Bibb, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte (who also produced the show), James Earl Jones, Zero Mostel, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Coretta Scott King; Robeson was unable to attend due to illness, but a taped message from him was played which said in part, "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."
In 1976, at the age of 77, Paul Robeson died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he had been living with his sister. One of the post-graduate accommodation buildings at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is named for him, Paul Robeson House He co-founded the Progressive Party and the Council on African Affairs. equivalent to the Tony today) He was the first African-American to demand and receive the right to final approval of films (though only effectively in three films), and portrayed strong black male American roles 15 years before Sidney Poitier (albeit mostly in British films) He is considered to be one of the greatest college football players of all time (two-time All-American), and won 15 varsity letters at Rutgers. it contains the Paul Robeson Cultural Center. The Paul Robeson House in West Philadelphia, where he lived with his sister at the end of his life, is a museum. In 1978, the United Nations honored Robeson for speaking out against apartheid in South Africa. In 1994, the New York City-based Cetic rock band Black 47 remembered Robeson in their song "Paul Robeson". In 2001, the Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers remembered Robeson in their song tribute "Let Robeson Sing". In 2003, the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth featured Robeson's life story in a special exhibit focusing on his love for the working people of Wales. In 2004, the United States Postal Service honored Robeson with a stamp in the Black Heritage Series. In 2005, The World/Inferno Friendship Society released the Speak of Brave Men EP, featuring a photograph of Robeson on the cover and a song named for him. Lead singer Jack Terricloth, a New Jersey native himself, often cites Robeson as a personal hero. In 2007, the Criterion Collection issues a DVD Box Set Paul Robeson: Portraits of an artist .
Quotes
If the United States and the United Nations truly want peace and security let them fulfill the hopes of the common people everywhere -- let them work together to accomplish on a worldwide scale, precisely the kind of democratic association of free people which characterizes the Soviet Union today. - Daily Worker; Foner, ed., _Paul Robeson Speaks_ [1978/2002], p. Foner, ed., _Paul Robeson Speaks_ [1978/2002], p. "’I Love Above All, Russia,’ Robeson Says," Afro-American, June 25, 1949, p.7. They see how under the great Stalin millions like themselves have found a new life. .from Shakespeare's Othello, the final monologue which Paul Robeson frequently performed
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