The Paul Robeson Foundation was incorporated in 1996 as a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with the mission to preserve and extend Paul Robeson’s rich legacy of humanism, civil rights activism and excellence in scholarship, athleticism and artistic expression.
In 1998, as the catalyst for yearlong celebrations marking the centennial of Paul Robeson's birth, the Foundation created the major museum exhibition, Paul Robeson: Bearer Of A Culture, which opened at the New-York Historical Society on his 100th birthday. Containing rare photos and memorabilia never before seen by the public, the exhibition toured nationally and internationally, including long-term venues at the Welsh National Museum in Cardiff, the Theatre Museum of London. and numerous cultural centers in the United States. It was viewed by more than 500,000 people.
The overarching goal of The Paul Robeson Foundation is the creation of a Paul Robeson Digital Archive. This multimedia time capsule, consisting of over 50,000 items spanning more than half a century of Paul Robeson's public and private life, will be integrated into a custom-designed, easy to search database accessible by secure web server. Since its designation in 2006 as the digitizing institution for the Paul Robeson Collections, the Foundation has embarked on converting, to digital format, this epic Collection which includes:
Over 8,000 photographs of Robeson 300 hours of Robeson film; 600 hours of audio, including speeches Robeson's prodigious unpublished writings Rare correspondence with Charles Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Babe Ruth, George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Sinclair Lewis, Oscar Hammerstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Jawaharal Nehru and others Museum-quality pieces FBI and CIA files tracking Robeson’s activities from the 1920's onward Diaries and writings of Robeson's wife, Eslanda Robeson
Upon completion, the Paul Robeson Digital Archive will be among the richest, most comprehensive African-American historical collections by virtue of the range, time span, amount of material and global content, which - like Robeson's impact - spans virtually every continent of our planet.