The Paul Robeson Foundation

EARLY LIFE (1898-1914)

Paul Leroy Robeson, the youngest of five children, was born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898. His father, Reverend William Drew Robeson, escaped from slavery on a plantation in Martins County, North Carolina when he was 15 years old. He joined the Union army, and then worked his way through Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1873 with a Divinity Degree. Reverend Robeson began his ministry in a Princeton Presbyterian Church, and later pastured A. M. E. Zion churches in Westfield and Somerville, New Jersey until his death in 1918. Paul's mother, Maria Bustill Robeson, a Philadelphia school teacher, was a member of the noted Bustill family - free Blacks whose mixed African-American, Delaware Indian and English Quaker ancestry included a great-grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, who baked bread for George Washington's troops. Her death, in 1904, from burns received in a tragic household accident when Paul was six years old, left him with a deep and permanent wound.

After his mother died, he became even closer with his father who possessed a rich bass speaking voice and an air of surpassing dignity. He was a stern task master and taught his son personal discipline, a love for learning, and a continuing quest for perfection. Paul's childhood was influenced by his four older siblings, the rich African-American culture of his New Jersey relatives who had recently emigrated from the South, and the community life associated with his father’s church. He wrote in his autobiography Here I Stand, “The glory of my boyhood years was my father. I loved him like no one in all the world.... How proudly, as a boy, I walked at his side, my hand in his, as he moved among the people.”

Robeson attended New Jersey public schools and was one of only two Blacks in high school where he was an outstanding student and a star football and baseball athlete. In addition to singing in the Glee Club and participating in debating events, Paul worked during the summers as kitchen boy at Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island and at other jobs to earn money for his school expenses. Achieving an outstanding high school record, he won a four-year state scholarship to attend Rutgers despite his bigoted high school principal’s attempt to prevent him from taking the qualifying examination. He later said that this experience convinced him that even if he was denied equality he was not inferior.

SCHOLAR-ATHLETE AT RUTGERS (1915-1919)

Paul Robeson entered Rutgers in 1915. A small private college marked by an atmosphere of racial hostility, he was the third Black student ever to attend, and one of only two Blacks on campus during his entire four years. Excluded from the dormitory, he lived with a Black family in New Brunswick. His athletic prowess was apparent, but during his tryout for the football team he sustained injuries because of the continuous and calculated aggressive attacks on him. Although he required hospitalization, his brother Ben urged him not to quit explaining he had a responsibility to his race. Returning to team practice, his hand was purposefully stomped on by the star halfback between plays. As the next play unfolded, Paul tackled his assailant and swung him up over his head. Fearing for the halfback’s life, Coach Sandford screamed: “Robeson! You’re on the team.” Although he became a star of the team, his locker stood separate from the others, and he roomed with as assistant coach when the team traveled.

Walter Camp selected Paul to the All-America football team in 1917 and 1918, saying: “there never was a more serviceable end, both in attack and defense than Robeson.... He is a veritable superman.” Robeson also earned a total of 14 varsity letters in baseball, football, basketball, baseball, discuss, shotput and javelin. However, during the hysteria of McCarthyism some 30 years later, Rutgers removed Robeson’s picture from the locker room wall. Subsequently this was rectified. In 1972 Rutgers awarded him an Honorary Doctorate and he is now recognized as one of their outstanding graduates. There are Paul Robeson Students Centers on the New Brunswick and Newark campuses. He also sang with the Glee Club and was a prize-winning member of the Debating Team. He was elected to the national Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society in his junior year and was selected as valedictorian of his graduating class. The class prophecy was that he would be Governor of New Jersey by 1940 and a leader of the colored race in America.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE (1920-1929)

Robeson entered Columbia Law School in 1920, supporting himself by working in the Post Office, singing, coaching basketball teams, playing professional football, and acting. While he was attending Law School, he made his initial stage appearance in Simon the Cyrenian. He also played in Voodoo in New York and, making his first Atlantic crossing, he toured with the play in England under the title of Taboo. It was at this time that he met Lawrence Brown, a fine musician, who was to become Paul’s accompanist for 30 years.

In August 1921, he married Eslanda Cardozo Goode, a vivacious and ambitious woman. After graduating from Columbia University in 1921 with a degree in Chemistry, Eslanda worked at Presbyterian Hospital as the first Black analytical chemist in pathology. She had initially considered going to medical school, but after a few years she left her job to become Paul’s manager-agent. Robeson obtained his Law degree in 1923. Employed by a white law firm, he was confined to researching briefs as it was impossible for a black person to represent clients in court. When a secretary refused to take dictation from him, he said, “I put on my hat and walked out.”

Harlem in the 1920s was gaining a reputation as the center of Black cultural creativity, attracting attention to African-American artists and intellectuals on a scale unprecedented in United States history. Paul was admired and welcomed at the gatherings of the elite of this Harlem Renaissance, and by 1924 he and Eslanda moved in both the uptown and downtown intellectual and artistic circles. Her diaries recount their visits with Heywood Broun, James Weldon Johnson, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Van Vechten, George Gershwin, Walter White, Theodore Dreiser, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, among others. Upon meeting Paul, Alexander Woollcott commented: “I felt that I had just crossed the path of someone touched by destiny. He was a young man on his way. He did not know where he was going, but I never in my life saw anyone so quietly sure, by some inner knowledge, that he was going somewhere.”

Having eschewed a career in law, the pace of Robeson’s performing career accelerated rapidly. He opened in Eugene O’Neill’s plays The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings in 1924 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, in New York City. The latter play, which depicted an interracial marriage, called forth a racist outcry from the Hearst Press and the Klu Klux Klan and a barrage of hate mail, including death threats to Eugene O’Neill’s son prior to its opening. However, a New York newspaper reported that when the opening night performance was over, “He was dragged before the curtain by men and women who rose to their feet and applauded. When the ache in their arms stopped their hands, they used their voices, shouted meaningless words, gave hoarse, throaty cries.... The ovation was for Robeson, for his emotional strength and superb acting.” During this year, Paul made the silent film, Body and Soul with the independent Black filmmaker Oscar Michaux, played in The Emperor Jones in London in 1925 and in Black Boy in New York in 1926.

On April 19, 1925, Robeson, in a historic concert, sang a program of Negro Spirituals at the Greenwich Village Theater, accompanied by Lawrence Brown. This was the first time that this music had been presented by a soloist on the formal concert stage. The response was overwhelming, and in 1926-1927 he launched his first national concert tour, playing to sold-out audiences.

Robeson opened in Sir Alfred Butts’ spectacular production of Show Boat at London’s Drury Lane Theater in April 1928. In anticipation of the play’s opening, people began to line up at the box office 24 hours in advance. It was the first performance of “Ol’ Man River,” the song which Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II had written expressly for him, and he was received with overwhelming acclaim. Following this success, he made his home in London and was joined by Eslanda, their son Paul, Jr., who was born in 1927, and Eslanda’s mother. The Robesons were immediately lionized by London society, as Paul continued performing in England and in Central Europe. Frequently, audiences refused to leave after the final encore, and on occasion he was compared to Chaliapin. During this time, he continued to write and talk about the African roots of his culture, the development and responsibility of his artistry, and of religious issues. He also began to explore the meaning of socialism with such people as George Bernard Shaw. His interest in politics and his empathy for the English working class was stimulated by the Welsh miners, whose cause he championed, and by conversations with members of the British Labor Party.

AMBASSADOR OF CULTURE (1930-1939)

During the 1930s, Robeson pursued his artistic and intellectual activities, singing concerts, starring in theater and film productions, traveling, studying, writing and speaking, and demonstrating his scholar’s passion for knowledge – characteristics that remained throughout his lifetime. Based in London, he toured throughout Europe and the United States.

He opened in Othello on May 19, 1930 at London’s Savoy Theatre, the first Black man to interpret this role for 65 years. He saw the play as a tragedy of racial conflict, one of honor rather than jealousy, and felt the play related to the problems of his own people. He received 20 curtain calls on opening night. While there was discussion in the press about a Black man playing opposite a white woman, the controversy soon died down. His stage career during this decade included appearances in Basalik, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Stevedore, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Plant in the Sun.

His film career was equally ambitious. He made nine feature films in the United States and London. It was during this time that he came to personify human dignity in his acting roles. While his film roles did represent a departure form the usual black stereotypes of the era, he was increasingly dissatisfied with the opportunities available to him. He felt that the film industry would not permit him to portray the living interests, hopes and aspirations of the people from whom he came. By 1938, Robeson was publicly voicing his objections to many of the stereotypical roles he was offered. He finally found a script to his liking – The Proud Valley – a story about Welsh coal miners and their strike during the depression years.

His concerts received overwhelming acclaim as he toured with his accompanist and arranger, Lawrence Brown. He established Negro spirituals and multilingual folksongs as accepted art forms and began to include songs by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven and Mussorgsky. He believed that the music he sang shared a universal kinship. It was at this time he decided not to become an opera singer, feeling that operatic training would reduce the musical overtones which provided the rich timbre to his voice.

Robeson’s exploration of world cultures led him to enroll in the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London. His linguistic studies eventually embraced more than 20 languages including Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Efik, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindustani, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Yiddish. He further developed his theories about the interconnectedness of world cultures and traced the centrality of African culture in Black America’s cultural expressions. A panel of Black historians writing in Ebony magazine in 1972 noted that Robeson’s writings of the 1930s “... show him as one of the century’s most perceptive commentators on the cultures of the East, the West and Africa,” and included him among the ten greatest Black Americans of all time.

Passing through Berlin in 1934 on his first trip to Moscow, Robeson experienced the unavoidable racism of fascist Germany. In sharp contrast, he was overwhelmed by the Russians’ warm welcome and their expressions of deep respect for him. Viewing the rapid advancement of their ethnic minorities, and despite his perception of Stalinist cruelty, he consistently supported the Soviet Union against what he saw as the worldwide menace of fascism and colonial exploitation.

In 1937 at London’s Albert Hall before an audience of 9,000 people gathered to support the Spanish Civil War, Robeson made his famous statement “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice, I had no alternative.” When he sang at the front lines in Spain, the war stopped as both sides listened to his songs.

LAUREATE AND SPOKESPERSON (1940-1947)

As World War II began in Europe, Robeson returned to his native land to take up residence in New York City. He felt his responsibility was to be with his people and to aid the effort to defeat world fascism. He was acclaimed as a national hero by both Black and white Americans. He soon emerged as a symbol of the fight against fascism abroad and against racism at home. In the atmosphere of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the burgeoning labor movement, and the patriotic efforts to mobilize the American people in the war effort, he became a dramatic voice for democracy. At a time when our armed forces were still segregated, he spoke and sang as part of the first racially mixed overseas USO-sponsored camp shows, at war bond rallies in the United States and to the troops in Europe. In appreciation of his efforts, he received official recognition from numerous high governmental officials, including the War and Treasury Secretaries and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Despite his increasingly outspoken political statements, his popularity increased. A 1940 Collier’s magazine poll cited him as the favorite Negro male singer, and in 1941 he was the highest paid concert artist. Attendance at his concerts was staggering – 30,000 at the Hollywood Bowl, 14,000 at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium, 5,000 in Harlem. Twelve thousand people turned out for his 46th birthday tribute at a New York City armory while 4,000 were turned away. Sponsoring luminaries included Duke Ellington, Joe Louis and playwright Lillian Hellman. Mary McLeod Bethune described him as “the tallest tree in our forest.”

He opened on Broadway in the Theater Guild’s production of Othello on October 19, 1943 to ten curtain calls and twenty minutes of applause. The production, directed by Margaret Webster starred two young and then little-known actors, Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. After breaking all records for the longest run on Broadway of a Shakespearean play, the cast toured in 45 cities. The director, Margaret Webster, noted that “Paul brought qualities with him which I never have seen equaled before or since. The moment he stepped on that stage, he was not only a black man, but a great black man – a man of stature.” At a time when the minstrel show was still a pervasive presence in America’s national culture, a critic writing in Variety suggested that “Robeson’s performance is of such a stature that no white man should ever dare to presume to play it again.”

During these years, Robeson sang and spoke in churches, synagogues, schools, and for a variety of civil rights organization and labor unions. He provided leadership to the Council of African Affairs, expressing his belief that the successful end of the war was part of the struggle to end colonialism in Africa. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) awarded him the prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1946 for his “active concern for the rights of the common man of every race, color, religion and nationality.”

By 1946, Harry Truman’s Presidency was reversing the progressive domestic and foreign policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal. This period also saw an increase in the lynching of African-Americans. Fifty-six Black people had been brutally killed since the end of World War II without a single arrest or indictment. Having organized the National Crusade to End Lynching in 1946 with Dr. W. E. B. DuBois and Albert Einstein, Robeson led an integrated delegation to Truman’s Oval Office to petition him to support National anti-lynching legislation. In response to President Truman’s statement that this was not a propitious time for legislative action, Robeson replied that if the Federal Government refused to defend its Black citizens against murder, Negroes would have to resort to collective armed self-defense. President Truman angrily terminated the meeting. When a reporter asked Robeson if he was a Communist, he replied: “I label myself as very violently anti-fascist.” Shortly thereafter, he was subpoenaed by the California legislature to appear before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities which was ostensibly called to investigate the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1947 Robeson announced to a startled audience in Salt Lake City that he was temporarily retiring as a concert performer and would sing only for his trade union and college friends to take a more active role in the fight against the growing forces of racism and reaction.

LET MY PEOPLE GO (1948-1958)

The Progressive Party was organized in 1948 as a third party opposition to the Cold War policies of Harry Truman, and Paul Robeson became a co-chairman of its Wallace for President Committee. (Henry Wallace had been Truman’s Secretary of Agriculture.) Robeson refused to consider the position of Vice-President on the ticket, but he campaigned with Wallace in support of peace, for the rights of labor, and against racial discrimination. Throughout their travels in the south, he was constantly at the risk of organized attacks by the Ku Klux Klan.

Shortly after the election, Robeson returned to his scheduled concert tour but, due primarily to the intervention of the FBI, all of his concerts were canceled. Anybody contemplating the rental of a facility to Robeson was immediately visited by the FBI, and their livelihood was threatened. Despite this boycott, he continued to speak and sing under the auspices of sympathetic organizations. By 1952 his annual income had dropped from over $150,000 to $6,000.

In April 1949, Robeson attended the World Peace Congress in Paris. Convinced that war with the Soviet Union would impede the progress of American Blacks, he said: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.” Generally misquoted in the American press as “American Negroes would not defend their country,” his words were immediately labeled as treason by the national establishment. The leaders of major African-American organization immediately stepped forward to declare their loyalty to the U.S.A., denouncing Robeson or distancing themselves from him. During these years of McCarthy hysteria, the African-American communities and press continued to support and protect him, and he was particularly welcomed at his brother Ben’s Harlem church – Mother A. M. E. Zion Church and various African-American churches throughout the country. Strong national support also came from the labor movement and white progressive organizations.

FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that United States surveillance agencies had begun investigating Robeson as early as 1941. In 1943, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed him on the custodial detention list as a threat to national security in the event of a national emergency. This intense scrutiny continued throughout the rest of his life. The government portrayed him as a gifted but naïve hero, embittered by racial discrimination and misled by communism. In various disguises this characterization has continued over the years.

The State Department canceled his passport in 1950 saying that it was not in the best interest of the United States to have Robeson travel abroad because “... he has been for years extremely active politically in behalf of the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.” Prevented from pursuing his career domestically and abroad, he organized Othello Recording Corporation to record and produce his albums. The House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed him in 1956, accusing him of being a Communist. Invoking the Fifth Amendment, he accused the Committee of being Un-American and maintained his right to express his opinions.

During these difficult years he continued his musical and scholarly studies, pursuing the relation of folk music to classical music, and analyzing the relationship between the five-tone pentatonic scale, Johann Sebastian Bach and jazz. After a seven-year boycott, he was able to return to the concert stage and broadcast to London and Wales via the new transatlantic cable. His autobiography Here I Stand, written in collaboration with Lloyd L. Brown was published in 1958. While it was totally ignored by the commercial white media, the African-American press reviewed and promoted its sale.

The denial of his passport caused powerful protests throughout the world, but it was eight years, in 1958, before Paul and Eslanda recovered their right to travel. A tumultuous welcome met them in England, throughout Europe and in the Soviet Union where he spoke and sang to enormous audiences. An American visiting Europe at that time said, “You had to be there to experience the full symbolic weight of the reception to understand how Europe feels about Robeson.” He was the first lay person to read scripture from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, took tea at the House of Lords, lunched at the House of Commons, sang on British television and accepted the invitation to star in Othello for the 100th anniversary of the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. He received 15 curtain calls at the opening, and the play immediately sold out for its seven-month engagement. When a reporter commented to Harry Belafonte, who was appearing in London, that his singing was more light-hearted than Robeson’s, Belafonte responded: “It’s because Robeson made his protest that we can be more lighthearted now.” Following the closing of the play, Robeson traveled to Australia and New Zealand for what was to be his last concert tour. While there, he expressed his concern about the brutality and discrimination towards the Aborigines of Australia and the New Zealand Maoris.

By 1961, eager to join the fight for civil rights in his own country, Robeson decided he would return to America after completing a farewell world tour that was to include visits to Africa, India, China and Cuba. However, these plans were aborted when, during a stay in the Soviet Union, Robeson experienced a psychological breakdown. Based on Freedom of Information Act documents and the recollections of witnesses, some have raised the possibility that the incident was the result of the hallucinatory drug LSD being administered to Robeson by agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s “MKULTRA” Project. He recovered rapidly under the care of his Soviet doctors, but returning to London he had a relapse. Despite his Soviet doctors’ advice to the contrary, he was admitted to a British hospital where he was subjected to 54 electroshock treatments. Convalescing in East Berlin, doctors expressed surprise at the excessive amount of shock therapy and medication that he had received. A subsequent brain scan performed in the United States revealed significant brain damage caused by the electroshocks. Robeson was now gaunt and worn. The United States Government agencies maintained their interest in Robeson during this period of ill health. In 1962, under the heading of “Internal Security” the FBI noted: “We will continue to follow Robeson’s activities closely....”

Robeson returned to the United States in 1963. While The New York Times described him falsely as a “Disillusioned native son,” Robeson wrote a statement to members of the African-American press saying: “Like all of you, my heart has been filled with admiration for the many thousands of Negro Freedom Fighters and their white associates who are waging the battle for civil rights throughout the country, and especially in the South.” Although his health did not allow his active participation in the struggle for racial equality during this period, his fight against racial segregation in earlier years had helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Despite his ill health, Robeson spoke at a 67th Birthday salute to him in 1965 sponsored by the periodical Freedomways.

In December 1965, after a lengthy battle with cancer, Eslanda died. Struggling with recurring symptoms of anxiety and confusion, Robeson withdrew from the world stage and spent the rest of his years living quietly in Philadelphia with his devoted sister, Marian. During this time, some significant openings were made in the curtain of silence that had been drawn around him. Several social, cultural, professional and sports organizations recognized his outstanding contributions. He was inducted into the National Theater Hall of Fame in 1972 as a charter member.

The most dramatic revival of Robeson’s legacy took place in Carnegie Hall at a 75th birthday celebration. Produced by Harry Belafonte in collaboration with Paul Robeson, Jr., it was attended by many notables including Coretta Scott King, Sidney Poitier and James Earl Jones. Birthday greetings came from around the world, including several from third-world leaders – President Julius Nyere of Tanzania, Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana eloquently referred to Robeson as “our own black prince and prophet.” The audience heard Paul’s recorded message: “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. Though ill health has compelled my retirement, you can be sure that in my heart I go on singing.

But I keeps laughing instead of crying;
I must keep fighting until I’m dying;
And Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rolling along!

Paul Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77. The funeral was held at Mother A. M E. Zion Church in Harlem where his brother, Reverend Benjamin D. Robeson, had been pastor. Five thousand people attended, some standing in the rain outside the overly crowded church. The assembled group inside the church and on the street listened in silence to a recording of Robeson, as his unmistakable rich bass-baritone voice sang “Deep River.”

LEGACY

During the years of his presence on the world stage, Paul Robeson was both one of the greatest performing artists of the 20th century and a powerful symbol of uncompromising, dignified Black manhood. He challenged and undermined the foundations of this country’s racism, refusing to allow his own success to interfere with his efforts on behalf of his people.

Today, generations of Americans have little awareness of him. Paul Robeson is better known in Europe, Africa and Asia than in his own land. A charter member of the National Theater Hall of Fame, Robeson does not appear in the index of Notable Names in the American Theater. A twice-selected Walter Camp All-American, he was not inducted into the National College Football Hall of Fame until 1995. Nor is he listed in numerous sources that provide information on outstanding figures of the 20th century. There is a complex contradiction between Paul Robeson’s relative obscurity today and the power and range of his five decades of achievement and stature.

Paul Robeson’s legacy can offer a unifying message in an age of cultural, ethnic and racial conflict. He transcended divisions of race, ethnicity, gender and class. His humanity embraced his dual identity as an African-American and a world citizen, and his life was distinguished by his passionate struggle against oppression and his quest for the “oneness of humankind.”