In my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea – to be African.
Paul Robeson, one of America’s greatest concert singers and actors, was willing to risk all in resisting the melting-pot ideology and challenging the cultural foundations of American racism. In this regard, he represented the antithesis of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in black life. Unlike Thomas, who is a model of subservience to white authority, Robeson continued the tradition, exemplified by his predecessors, of the independent black leader who champions the interests of his own people.
Robeson’s personification of the African-American cultural tradition derived from the same source that provided Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with his moral and philosophical base – the religious culture of the black South with its core values of American slaves. This culture, forged in the crucible of the slave-ship hell and the chains of slavery, constructed an intricate and sophisticated communications web that united the myriad of African ethnic groups scattered over a vast territory. It was centered around the traditions common to all African ethnic groups – traditions which nourished the preservation of each group’s culture and were enhanced in return by those cultures – and was never understood by most whites.
In this sense, the slave culture had a universality which transcended the ethnic and religious differences among the large, diverse, and constantly changing black population of the U.S. during the 19th century. That universalist tendency was reinforced both by the inclusion of the black freedmen’s culture and the necessary absorption of modified aspects of American culture. And since the Bible as the only book slaves were legally permitted to read, the religious expression of the slaves’ culture became interwoven with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The African-American Church emerged as the cultural focus of black life in America by combining both the Afrocentric and universalist sides of the slaves’ culture, thus supporting those blacks who integrated into American society, as well as the black majority left behind, outside the melting pot. However, American culture has always refused to acknowledge the Afrocentric side of black culture and has insisted on restricting it to its universalist side. Those blacks who are admitted to American society are required to abandon their Afrocentrism by pretending that they are children of the melting pot.
Although they were separated by a generation, both Martin Luther King and Paul Robeson steadfastly refused to abandon either their Afrocentrism or their universalism despite the conflicting pressures and blandishments of American culture on the one hand, and black separatism on the other.
Three years before Reverend King was born, Paul Robeson made his spectacular arrival on the American cultural scene during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Together with his pioneering accompanist-arranger, Lawrence Brown, he went on to become one of the world’s greatest concert artists of the 20th century. Through his identification with the universality of the black cultural tradition, he was able to embrace the universal essence of the ancient European cultures.
Those roots in the African-American slave culture came from my grandfather, Rev. William Drew Robeson, a runaway plantation slave from North Carolina. He was pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1890s, built the St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Westfield, New Jersey in the decade prior to World War I, and then was pastor of the St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion Church in Somerville, New Jersey from 1910 until his death in 1918. It was he who taught Paul the nonviolent assertion of full human dignity in the face of anti-black discrimination and hatred. My father referred lovingly to this legacy in his 1958 autobiography Here I Stand:
The glory of my boyhood years was my father... I marvel that there was no hint of servility in his make-up... From him we learned, and never doubted it, that the Negro was in every way the equal of the white man...
...I heard my people singing...from choir loft and Sunday morning pews – and my soul was filled with their harmonies...I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father...The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung...
The cultural significance of Paul Robeson’s artistry was not lost on the critics. The reviews of his first concert season in 1925-1926 referred explicitly and even reverently to this aspect of his singing. The music critic of The New York Times wrote: “His Negro Spirituals... hold in them a world of religious experience; it is their cry from the depths, this universal humanism, that touches the heart ... Sung by one man, they voiced the sorrow and hopes of a people.”
And in an article in The New Republic magazine, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote that Robeson was “a symbol...of the increasingly important place of the American Negro on the American stage” and added that she hoped that “Paul Robeson with his evangelical tradition and Lawrence Brown with his Florida verve are establishing a ‘classic’ Spiritual tradition that will long live in American music...Let us give thanks that we were not born too late to hear this Negro Chaliapin render the Spirituals reverently, with wildness and awe, like a trusting child of God.”
However, not all of the songs included in the programs of his earliest concerts were spirituals. Throughout his concert career, one of his favorite songs was “Water Boy,” a secular song written by the well-known white composer, Avery Robinson. Some years ago, I found an interesting reference to that song in my father’s 1929 diary: “Of course, technique might help me grow... – but that might not make me a greater artist. ‘Water Boy’ is my best record – [made it] when I was untrained.”
Seventeen years later, in 1946, his intuitive affinity for the song was confirmed when he received a letter, accompanied by an African battle axe, from a member of an anthropological expedition to a remote village in southern Angola. Several records had been played on a portable gramophone for the assembled villagers, and one of the songs was my father’s rendition of “Water Boy.” As the song ended, the village chief rose, went to his hut, and brought back a ceremonial battle axe which he laid before the gramophone as a gift to “the great chief across the water.”
One might wonder how Paul Robeson could speak to the heart of an African chief through a song written by a white composer, but my father was not surprised. By then his search for his African cultural heritage had led him to research the origins of “Water Boy.” He discovered that Robinson had heard the song sung by a black Alabama chain gang in a particular county of Alabama where the culture of rural blacks had its origins in southern Angola.
In the years between the Harlem Renaissance and 1946, my father traveled far and wide in a determined quest for artistic and personal growth. Like many gifted African-American artists and intellectuals of the 1920s, he chose to escape the stifling cultural atmosphere created by the melting-pot ideology. Because he sensed the essential shallowness of American culture, he decided to establish his artistic career in the richer cultural soil of England and the European continent. He also understood that the white cultural “establishment” in America would never willingly allow him to transcend its crude black stereotypes.
In 1927 my father brought me and my mother to London, where he became a dominant figure in the popular culture for the next decade. It was in London, he said, that he “discovered Africa”:
There is the future of the Black man. From there will come his real contribution to the culture of the world... I am now working at Swahili, one of the Bantu tongues, and have consulted many sources on comparative Bantu sounds. I found them most subtle... In these African languages is the content of the Negro spirit – the same spirit that one finds in music and sculpture... As one of African descent, I feel this strange necessity to (spiritually at least) find my roots.
During this same period, his travels across Europe on concert tours brought him into contact with many cultures in which he found reflections of his own. In 1936 he wrote the following comment, which I found in a page of notes he had inserted into a Russian edition of poetry written by the great poet Alexander Pushkin, whose great-grandfather, on his mother’s side was Abyssinian:
It is interesting that Pushkin, the shaper of the Russian language, llike Chaucer and Shakespeare rolled into one, was of African descent. So the Russian language as spoken today passed through the temperament of a man of African blood ... Pushkin means more to me than any other poet.
By this time, Paul Robeson had enriched his repertoire with songs created from the folk idiom by many famous European composers, including Bach, Mussorgsky, and Mozart. A year later he had an extraordinary experience which linked Mozart to the culture of African antiquity. He found himself on location in Egypt, during the making of the film Jericho. Henry Wilcoxon, his costar in the film, took him on a visit to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh.
As their guide led them to the Pharaoh’s chamber at the geometric center of the pyramid, they all noticed an unusual echo. Wilcoxon urged Paul to sing a chord, and when he complied, the echo sounded like it had come from a huge organ. When the reverberations finally died out, Paul, without hesitation, stepped to the exact center of the chamber and sang the aria “O’ Isis and Osiris” from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The entire chamber vibrated sympathetically like an enormous natural high-fidelity speaker, producing an unforgettable sound of unbearably majestic beauty. The richness of the multicultural symbolism was also very moving – here an African-American singer had made a connection with ancient Africa through one of Europe’s greatest composers, whose music had been inspired by the legend of the African prince and princess who had colonized ancient Egypt. A perfect circle.
The famed British historian, Arnold Toynbee, made note of Paul Robeson’s linkage of African culture to ancient Western culture in his book A Study of History:
A distinguished Negro American singer.. .came to realize that the primitive culture of his African ancestors... was spiritually akin to all the non-Western higher cultures, and to the pristine higher culture of the Western world itself, in virtue of its having preserved a spiritual integrity which a late Modern Western secularized culture had deliberately abandoned... Paul Robeson was putting his finger on the difference between an integrated and a disintegrated culture.
Toynbee is referring to the “pristine higher” culture of Shakespeare and his predecessors, which was far superior to modern Western culture; moreover, unlike most white Americans, he recognizes that Paul Robeson symbolizes the Negro who happens to be an American, rather than the American who happens to be a Negro. He goes on to quote Robeson, who had written:
I discovered that... African languages – thought to be primitive because monosyllabic – had exactly the same basic structure as Chinese. I found that Chinese poems which cannot be rendered in English would translate perfectly into African. I found that the African way of thinking in symbols was also the way of the great Chinese thinkers...I found that I, who lacked feeling for the English language later than Shakespeare, met Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Lao-tze, and Confucius on common ground.
My father’s comment that he “lacked feeling for the English language later than Shakespeare” registers his affinity for Shakespeare’s multiculturalism – a view that he shared with me a decade later when I asked him about Shakespeare’s intent in the characterization of Othello. This universality derives from the ancient Anglo-Saxon culture of Chaucer, and it is my father’s understanding of this culture that informed his definitive interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello.
Paul studied Othello in four foreign languages: French for its soft, almost caressing quality when Othello speaks about his love for Desdemona; German for a special kind of harshness when reference is made to military matters; Russian because of its extraordinary range of imagery and its capacity for the expression of subtle shadings of emotion; Yiddish for its light and sardonic humor and its bittersweet sadness. He also studied Elizabethan English and the pre-Elizabethan English in which Chaucer wrote, as well as the ancient Venetian and Moorish cultures in preparation for the role.
A leading British Shakespearean critic, John Dover Wilson, called the Robeson performance in the 1943-1944 Broadway production, with Jose Ferrer as lago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, the most notable one in the present century. It was also described, by Margaret Webster, the director of the production, in a 1971 radio interview. “Paul brought qualities with him which I never have seen equaled before or since,” she said. “The moment he stepped on that stage, he was not only a black man but a great black man – a man of stature. Somehow or other, he put the play in focus.”
Although she recognized the importance of bringing greatness to the role of Othello, the tell-tale words “somehow or other” reveal that she could not ‘- understand how Paul “put the play in focus.” The reason for this becomes clear from an interview she gave to New York Times critic Elliot Norton prior to the Broadway opening of the play. According to Norton, Webster’s idea of Othello:
“...centers in the belief that both the text and the sense of the play require a Negro in the title part.”...Everything points to his believing himself a member of a race which is not fully equal; it is this which makes him easy prey for Iago. Miss Webster points out that he is not sure of himself.
Paul Robeson’s approach to the role was markedly different.
Othello has killed Desdemona. From savage passion? No. Othello came from a culture as great as that of ancient Venice. He came from an Africa of equal stature, and he felt he was betrayed – his honor was betrayed, and his human dignity was betrayed.
My father believed that Othello’s vulnerability to Iago stemmed from his feeling of superiority over the Venetians, a superiority which led him to pay little attention to what were, to him, their petty intrigues. This concept is based on a deep belief in multiculturalism, while Margaret Webster’s view comes from the familiar assumption in dominant Western civilization that anyone from a non-Western culture must feel inferior.
The critics at the Broadway opening recognized the fidelity of Paul Robeson’s Othello to Shakespeare’s intent. Louis Kronenberger of PM wrote: “Robeson’s Othello has so great a natural assurance as never to feel doubt; in a sense, he is lost once so utterly unfamiliar a thing as doubt enters his mind... Where shall we find an Othello to equal him?” And, Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune observed: “The magnificent Margaret Webster production is the first I have seen in which a Negro played a role obviously designed for him, and...it takes on more meaning and grandeur than I could have believed possible. There are those who have found Robeson’s performance less than satisfactory, objecting to his deliberate delivery of lines in the early scenes, and his gestures of hapless anger as he is caught up in a web of jealousy. For my money, it is exactly these accents...which illuminate the tragedy for the first time on a stage.”
Margaret Marshall of The Nation was among the small minority who openly objected to the multiculturalism represented by a black Othello:
Paul Robeson...performs passably well, but he creates no illusion... He is not the Moor as Shakespeare conceived him. Both Mr. Robeson and Miss Webster have tried to prove that Othello is a Negro; they have attempted also to prove that Othello is a play about race. Both theories arc false and foolish... In Shakespeare’s conception the essential quality of the Moor is his foreignness. He is the exotic character – so exotic as to bewitch, for all his denials, the innocent English – or Venetian – Desdemona.
During the play’s pre-Broadway run, Leo Gaffney of the Boston Daily Herald had demonstrated his racial bias more crudely: “His Moor is too black, too burly, too obvious.”
Rudolph Elie, Jr., the Variety critic, was prophetic in his review of Robeson’s performance during the 1942 summer tryout of Othello when he concluded, “The play silences for all time the folderol centering around the furious controversy that Othello was not intended as a Negro and should consequently not be played by one. Fact of the matter is that Robeson’s performance is of such a stature that no white man should ever dare to presume to play it again.”
However, Elie, like Margaret Webster, missed the main point – it was Paul Robeson’s ability to tap the multiculturalism of pre-Renaissance Western culture, rather than just his color, that made his extraordinary performance possible. Salvini, a leading actor of Italian ancestry who was in touch with the ancient European culture, had also been an Othello far superior to the Othellos of many leading white and black actors who were imprisoned within the narrow confines of modern Western culture.
Paul Robeson’s Othello made a powerful impression on an America in which the minstrel show was still a pervasive ritual, and some of the most persistent stereotypes of the black male were permanently undermined by his powerful interpretation at a time when he himself was only one generation removed from slavery. I can recall an evening in 1944 when a white man with a Southern drawl who was about my father’s age respectfully asked my father for an autograph. His name was Robeson, he said, adding that we got our name from his father. Dad’s face clouded over for a moment, but then he smiled, signed his autograph, and handed it to the man, saying: “Let’s just say my father worked for your grandfather.” After all, it was the grandson of the slave owner who had asked the son of the slave for an autograph!
The response of American popular culture to this challenge to its black stereotypes was to tout Paul Robeson as an American national hero, a living monument to that cornerstone of American civilization—the opportunity of an individual of humble origins, even a black individual, to reach the pinnacle of success. The clearest example of this can be found in the association of Paul Robeson with a staple of the popular culture: the musical Show Boat and its theme song, “Ol’ Man River.”
Jerome Kern, one of the greatest composers of the American musical theater, composed the music for Show Boat in 1926, and the famous lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote the lyrics. “Ol’ Man River” was dedicated to Paul Robeson; his rendition of it captivated audiences around the world, and it became his artistic signature. Edna Ferber, author of the book Show Boat, described a 1932 performance at New York’s Casino Theater in a letter to the renowned writer and critic Alexander Woollcott:
I...looked at the audience and the stage at the very moment when Paul Robeson came on to sing “Ol’ Man River.” In all my years of going to the theater... I never have seen an ovation like that given to any figure of the stage, the concert hall, or the opera...That audience stood up and howled. They applauded and shouted and stamped. Since then I have seen it exceeded but once, and that was when Robeson, a few minutes later, finished singing “Ol’ Man River.” The show stopped. He sang it again. The show stopped. They called him back again and again. Other actors came out and made motions and their lips moved, but the bravos of the audience drowned all other sounds.
Listening to Robeson sing “Ol’ Man River” became a landmark experience in American culture, so the lyrics, which changed over time, acquired a significant symbolism. My father had already modified the first two lines by 1932. Hammerstein had written:
Niggers all work on the Mississippi,
Niggers all work while the white folks play...
Robeson changed these lines to:
Colored folks work on the Mississippi,
Colored folks work while the white folks play...
The rest of the lyrics expressed a nondefiant lament, all that was allowed by the popular culture of the 1920s:
Pullin’ dem boats from the dawn till sunset,
Gettin’ no rest till the judgment day...
...Tote that barge and lift that bale,
Ya gits a little drunk and ya lands in jail.
I gits weary and sick of tryin’
I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’,
And O1’ Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.
After his triumph in the Broadway Othello, Robeson rewrote the lyrics of “O1’ Man River” as a way of challenging the black stereotypes of the popular culture overtly. And his altered rendition of the song became the symbolic equivalent of the raised black fist, so it is not surprising that this version was not published, existing only as a sung version:
There’s an old man called the Mississippi,
That’s the old man I don’t like to be.
What does he care if the world’s got troubles;
What does he care if the land ain’t free...
Tote that barge and lift that hale;
You show a little grit and you lands in jail.
But I keeps laffin’ instead of cryin’,
I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’,
And O1’ Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.
Paul Robeson’s refusal to accept the terms under which non-whites are integrated into American society was the reason behind his decision to challenge American racism head-on. Although he had been accepted as the equal of whites because of his extraordinary achievements, he rejected the basic framework of the society and demanded fundamental social, political, economic, and cultural change. He insisted that not just outstanding black individuals but the entire African-American people must be accepted as full citizens into all aspects of national life.
My father’s rejection of the stereotypical images mandated for blacks by American culture coincided with his active participation in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s. In March of 1947, at a concert in Salt Lake City, he startled the audience after singing his final song by holding up his hand to still their ovation; then he announced that they had heard his last formal concert for two years, and that he would be singing songs of struggle to civi1 rights and labor audiences, rather than “pretty songs” on the commercial concert circuit. “From now on,” he said, “I shall sing... only at gatherings where I can sing what I please.”
He explained to the press that he had always refused to sing before segregated audiences in the South; instead, he sang at black universities where white people could attend and sit among their black neighbors. He added that he would continue to sing on college campuses and for trade union organizations after he left the concert stage.
Paul Robeson was true to his word, and his artistic appearances on behalf of civil rights and labor causes led him to become a spokesman for the growing national civil rights movement. On September 11, 1947, at a Madison Square Garden rally sponsored by the Progressive Citizens of America, Paul made reference to his universalist African-American cultural base in evoking a tradition which countered the ideology of the melting pot:
Let us – a unified power of labor, liberals, Negroes, the Jewish people, descendants of foreign born, all oppressed groups...protect our true American tradition. Let us turn this country toward the course of history – a world of all the people, ...a world where men of every race and creed may walk the earth in true dignity.
A year later, he spoke in a similar vein about his tour through the Deep South on behalf of the Progressive Party presidential campaign of former Vice President Henry Wallace. On that trip he and many others had risked their lives while leading the first voter registration drive among southern blacks since Reconstruction, and his words bear a striking similarity to those spoken by the civil rights campaigners of the 1960s:
I’ve just come from a very long tour up and down the breadth of America... I was most moved by what happened in the Deep South. They told us...we couldn’t come into Memphis, Tennessee...We went into Memphis. People said, “You’re not going to have a meeting.” We said, “We are going to have a meeting.” And we got one of the biggest Negro auditoriums; a Negro minister gave us one of the finest places in Memphis.
We went on to New Orleans; to Mobile, Alabama; to Charleston, South Carolina; to Savannah, Georgia... Here again, one felt that...here for the first time it was not a question of...a few civil rights – it was a question of striking at the liberation, the complete liberation of the Negro people in our time.
Fifty years ago, Paul Robeson was speaking of the “complete liberation” of African-Americans, not merely “a few civil rights.” Over forty years ago, he rejected the limited absorption of all black individuals into the melting pot which is still being offered today; what Robeson was insisting on was the inclusion of African-Americans into American society as a distinct people. I believe it was this, and not primarily his left-wing radicalism, for which he was persecuted so ferociously by the U.S. government for so many years. A decade later, having survived the secret war waged against him by the FBI and the CIA, he illuminated the path of the nascent civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In his autobiography he wrote: “As I see it, ...freedom can be ours, here and now: the long-sought goal of full citizenship under the Constitution is now within our reach. We have the power to achieve that goal – what we ourselves do will be decisive...”
At the same time, he believed that African-Americans had the potential to become a decisive force in American politics if they forged alliances based on mutual interest with organized labor, liberals and other minorities. In this context he saw no contradiction between complete dedication to the interest of African-Americans as a people and close collaboration with white allies: “Even as I grew to feel more Negro in spirit...I also came to feel a sense of oneness with the white working people I came to know and love.” He wrote:
This belief in the oneness of humankind... has existed within me side by side with my deep attachment to the cause of my own race. Some people have seen a contradiction in this duality... I do not think, however, that my sentiments are contradictory... I learned that there truly is a kinship among us all, a basis for mutual respect and brotherly love.
Paul Robeson was one of the main cultural links between the last generation of black slaves and the generation of independent black leaders who spearheaded the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. The creative manner in which he developed his cultural philosophy and used his artistic talents to further the cause of civil rights led a panel of black historians to include Robeson among the ten most important black men in American history. In an article published in the August 1972 issue of Ebony, they wrote that when his scholarship became better known, Paul Robeson would “win recognition as the finest ideologist of black nationalism since Sidney of the early 1840s... [and] as one of the century’s most perceptive commentators on the cultures of the East, the West and Africa.” In 1977, on behalf of a group of black notables who were protesting a Broadway play titled Paul Robeson which they felt trivialized Robeson’s life and misrepresented his character, the late James Baldwin alluded to Robeson’s historic cultural stature and his symbolic meaning to Baldwin’s generation:
Robeson is not yet a historical figure, has not yet entered the limbo of the public domain. He lives, overwhelmingly, in the hearts and minds of the people whom he touched, the people for whom he was an example, the people who gained from him the power to perceive and the courage to resist. It is not a sentimental question. He lived in our times, we lived in his.
Thus, it is not a matter of setting a historical record straight, or a matter of historical interpretation. It is a matter of hearing witness to that force which moved among us.
... The man the play presents is not Paul Robeson. That is all we are saying... We must say this so that our children’s children’s children will know better than we did how to honor and protect him when they meet him in their own lives.
FURTHER READING
Eulogy