Singer, actor, baseball, basketball, football player, legal mind and intellectual, activist and fierce dissident, Robeson was one the most celebrated, revered and therefore hated Black men of his time.
Attempts to silence him were taken at every opportunity, and even pbs.org references Paul Robeson as having been "persecuted," which they say "reached a climax when his passport was revoked."
Writer Lloyd Brown, called Robeson "the most condemned Black man in America."
Many of his accomplishments are still eclipsed by the "propaganda of those who tirelessly dogged him throughout his life."
Paul Robeson was investigated by the FBI and denounced by the NAACP and blacklisted as "un-American" in the 1950's for his "radical views" that by the way amounted to mere justice seeking that is still considered just as "radical" today.
Here are some resources for more learning about Paul Robeson, and some opportunities to hear him speak and perform.
Paul Robeson the Dissident
"Most importantly, however, the questions raised by the State Department as to my political opinion, here's a question of whether one who wants to sing and act can have, as a citizen, political opinions.
And in attacking me, they suggested that when I was abroad, I spoke out against injustices t . . . I certainly did."
"To this day, Paul Robeson's FBI file is one of the largest of any entertainer ever investigated by the United States Intelligence Community, requiring its own internal index and unique status of health file."
"I defy any part of this insolent, dominating America, however powerful; to challenge my Americanism; because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death."
Eslanda Good Robeson, Pan African Scholar and Anti Colonial Champion
"She enrolled in graduate school at London University from 1933 to 1935, specializing in anthropology with a focus on the colonized black people of the world."
"Paul Robeson Jr. claims that his father had been poisoned by the CIA to prevent what would have been a very high profile visit to Havana at the time of the American-backed invasion of Cuba.
He believes, that his father was part of a wider plot to ensure that the charismatic activist never assumed his place in the vanguard of the US civil rights movement."
"First, Paul Robeson's life was one full of choices. For all the barriers which confronted him, his colossal talent and intellect could easily have let him live a most luxurious existence.
He chose not to remain silent in the face of racist insults to make his way in the world."
"How I should have loved to be at Bandung! In this Indonesian city for the week beginning April 18 the hopes of mankind were centered.
Of course, the State Department still arrogantly and arbitrarily restricts my movements to the continental United States, so that I could not join the representatives of more than half the world who convened in the Asian-African Conference."
"What really influenced him was the way his people were treated - it was what gave him his motivation, and his enormous talent gave him an opportunity to get that into the public arena."
In the Spirit of Robeson and Malcolm X, Indict he US a the UN
"In this, he picked up the banner waved by Paul Robeson and other African Americans of the Left, in the late 1940s, with their petition charging the United States with genocide against Black Americans. Malcolm's voice infused the Black Freedom Movement with an internationalist perspective; he called for African Americans to stand up as citizens of the world, rather than act like an isolated minority begging favors from a hostile domestic majority."
As always, your comments, compliments and criticism are always providing more scope to the perspective presenting at terryhowcott.com.
Since posting this, I heard from a scholar with considerable knowledge about the life and times of Paul Robeson (whose comment you can find at the comment page).
He points to Senator McCarthy's "Un-American Activities Committee" hearings at which "Jose Ferrer and Jackie Robinson both accused Paul Robeson of being a communist. Neither, he says - and I'm paraphrasing - did to badly in life once they did their deeds.
He also mentions the DVD, "Scandalize My Name" which was familiar to me from the song by the same title you will find at the Black Queens in Opera panel - with Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman.
Paul Robeson Resolution, Pittsburgh City Council
"Whereas, during the height of the McCarthy hysteria, Paul Robeson had his password revoked for eight years until it was restored by the U.S. Supreme Court, because of his outspoken opposition to racism and colonialism and for fighting for the rights of working people . . . "
Paul Robeson, The Artist as Activist and Social Thinker
by John Henrik Clarke
"Paul Robeson would not let his public acceptance as an actor and singer, make him relax in comfort and forget the struggle for basic dignity still being waged by the rest of his people."
"His words, often exaggerated out of context, turned every right wing extremist organization in America against him.
Their anger reached a sad and destructive climax during two of his concerts in Peekskill, New York in the summer of 1949."
"The NAACP openly attacked Robeson while other black organization shunned him in fear of reprisals."
Robeson found Black people to be, "as courageous, and possessors of a profound and instinctive dignity, a race that has come through in trials unbroken, a race of such magnificence of spirit that there exists no power on earth that could crush them."
The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright
Theorizing the African Diaspora
"As his pride in and knowledge of Africa grew, and as he met African nationalists and intellectuals in London, Robeson saw it as his responsibility to speak out publicly against the oppression and exploitation of Africans.
Moreover, he and others linked imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, pointing out that the dehumanization and humiliation of Black Americans, Asians, and even ethnic Russians were generated by the same global system of domination."
"Furthermore, his great talents and enormous energy were totally dedicated to nothing short of the end of racism, colonialism and class exploitation.
Along with his wife, the scientist Eslanda Goode Robeson, he was also a revolutionary and was not afraid to own up to it, even at the height of the McCarthyite witchhunts."
A Young Black Woman Speaks of Protest in Stage and Theatre
"Examining the role that such pioneers such as Paul Robeson and Oscar Micheaux played in the movement and progression of the Theater during the era of the Harlem Renaissance"
"Tap Tap, Tap Tap, Tap Tap"
'Examining the role that such pioneers such as Paul Robeson and Oscar Micheaux played in the movement and progression of the Theater during the era of the Harlem Renaissance'
"Einstein gave a speech in which he called racism "a disease of white people," and added, "I do not intend to be quiet about it."
"The 20-year friendship between Einstein and Robeson is another story that has not been told, Jerome said, but that omission may soon be rectified. A movie is in the works about the relationship, with Danny Glover slated to play Robeson and Ben Kingsley as Einstein."
"I follow in my father's cultural tradition, and like him, I am a black radical," said Mr. Robeson, whose first book, "Paul Robeson Jr. Speaks to America," published this year by Rutgers University Press, is a critique of American culture.
"Their guide took them to the Pharoah's Chamber at the geometric center of the pyramid, where they all noticed an unusual echo. Wilcoxon suggested that Paul sing a chord, and when Paul complied, the echo sounded like it had come from a huge organ.
As the reverberations finally died out, Paul, without hesitation, stepped to the center of the chamber and sang {O' Isis and Osiris}.
The entire chamber vibrated like an enormous high-fidelity speaker, producing an unforgettable sound of unbearably majestic beauty."
(Mozart obviously had no concept of the depth and breadth of what Paul Robeson felt and was conscious of as he stood in those Egyptian chambers.)
Walking the Lonely Road: A Review of Paul Robeson's Words of Freedom
"In a word, Paul Robeson had made such a great contribution in popularizing this song of the heroic struggle of the Chinese people against fascism to the world, a struggle which was a common struggle of the whole world and mankind.
This song has become our national anthem since the founding of the People's Republic of China."
"Paul immortalized the song "Joe Hill," about a martyred radical labor organizer, and brought it to world attention. The verses could as well describe Robeson"
"While scholars today recognize Robeson's significant role in the U.S. civil rights movement, Robeson's contemporaries were horrified at his radical views," Peery says.
"The governmental leadership at the time put all of their money on the heads of the NAACP and the gradualist movements, so when Robeson spoke out, they attacked him, and when they attacked him, he moved further to the left so he could speak more clearly, and so it went . . . "
"When Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were distant clouds on the horizon, Robeson thundered defiance at racial inequity. In return, a jittery America, shivering in the Cold War winds and fueled by the posturings of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, deprived him of his right to travel abroad. His recordings vanished from the shelves. Concert halls closed their doors to him."
"He had lived in Russia for a year and, as the Russians lionized him, he disastrously came to regard the Soviet Union as a progressive human experiment rather than as a destroyer of freedom."
And as the Russians "lionized" him, it appears that he dropped the ball in being able to see and make demands with respect to blatant White supremacy, while unable to see less conspicuous forms of racist structures perpetrated against Black Russians.
Paul Robeson, Artist and Radical Internationalist, Part 1
Click the third square button below screen to enlarge.
Robeson’s Vision of Cultural and Economic Democracy
"Many prominent African-Americans, under pressure from government security agencies, felt compelled to denounce his ideas.
The NAACP and the Urban League, which had once treated him as the most honored of black Americans, excluded him from their meetings and from the pages of their publications."
"His mother, a schoolteacher whose family ''traced its roots to the African Bantu people, died from a stove-fire accident when Paul was 6 years old. "
"Deep down, I had imagined Negroes to the South beaten, subservient, cowed. But, I see them now, courageous and possessors of a profound and instinctive dignity, a race of such magnificence of spirit that there exists no power on earth that could crush them. They will bend, but they will never break." - Paul Robeson, 1942
"... the verdict of history, which we are reading in the stormy events of our day, is unmistakably clear. Those forces which stand against the freedom of nations are not only wrong - they are doomed to utter defeat and disaster." - Robeson, 1955
When many others were overawed by the power of the colonialists and racists, he never wavered in his faith that the oppressed peoples would triumph. He rejected so-called gradualism, which was still being advocated after repeated betrayals of the black people, and called for "freedom now," saying:
"... too long, too long have my people wept and mourned. We are tired of this denial of decent existence." - Leslie Harriman (Nigeria) at a "Special Meeting of the Committee Against Apartheid to pay Tribute to Paul Robeson on His 80th Birthday"
" . . . even the national secretary of the NAACP questioned his loyalty as an American."
" . . . the NAACP and baseball great Jackie Robinson turned against him . . . "
Thumbnail image from the cover of: A Young Paul Robeson, Lloyd L. Brown, Westview Press, 1997
Closeup of a young scholar Paul Robeson on the football field. Robeson's football record was literally wiped clean from the Rutgers historical record.
It took 77 years for Rutgers to finally induct Paul Robeson to its Hall of Fame. His coach had described him as "the greatest to ever trot the gridiron."
Paul Robeson is but one example of millions of Black people who were brilliant and talented, but who sacrificed upward mobility to battle widespread oppression, White supremacy and a searing injustice.
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