Episode 21E - Paul Robeson: 10-Minute Profile

By the time he attended New Jersey's Rutgers University, it was clear that Paul Robeson was an academic, athletic, and artistic prodigy. He also had the misfortune of having been born of African ancestry in the USA during 1898, at the low point of American race relations. After his aspiring legal career was scuttled by racism, Robeson participated in the Harlem Renaissance of Black culture, and he went into show business. He made his fame singing "Old Man River" in the musical "Show Boat," and went on to become a star of stage and screen. He also became a left-wing political activist, promoting labor militancy and wealth redistribution in pursuit of global human equality. This got him into trouble by the time of the Red Scare. Although he was not a card-carrying Communist, unlike many other leftists of the era, Paul Robeson never stopped defending the Soviet Union. He did not accept reports that the USSR had fallen far short of its stated egalitarian ideals and had engaged in bloody repression of political dissidents. His views on this topic were criticized by both liberals and conservatives, and his once-thriving career suffered greatly as a result. By the end of a life spent dealing with both racial and political persecution, Robeson suffered poor mental & physical health, but his iconic acting and singing performances have left an indelible mark on American culture.

Transcript

“From Boomers to Millennials” provides a fresh look at modern United States history. Welcome to Episode 21E, entitled “Paul Robeson: 10-Minute Profile.” Although this one will technically be closer to a 15-minute profile. This podcast episode will examine the story of a 20th Century Renaissance man whose career was sometimes stifled due to racial and political prejudice. But before we get into that story, I need to let my listeners know that yes, I am aware that this is the first time we’ve gotten all the way to an “Episode E,” meaning there have been five supplemental episodes released since the last chapter in our main chronological narrative. We really need to get back to our central story, and never fear, I already have the script mostly written and next month, we will release Episode 22 about the civil rights struggles of 1963.

The life story of Paul Robeson provides excellent context for those struggles, because it demonstrates the difficulties experienced by Black Americans in the decades before civil rights. Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey in the year 1898. His father was a preacher and a former slave. The young Paul quickly demonstrated substantial athletic, artistic, and academic talents. An article on the website of the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) by Matt Glazebrook notes that Robeson (quote) “won a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University, eventually leaving with the highest academic honors and delivering the graduating class oration. He was awarded 15 varsity letters, including for baseball, basketball, javelin, discus, and shot put” (close quote). But the sport he excelled in the most was football; he was named a first team All-American for his accomplishments on the gridiron. He achieved this in spite of being targeted by opposing teams who engaged in dirty play against Robeson because he was the only Black player on the field; he was also once benched for a game, despite being the team’s star, because a Southern college team that Rutgers was playing refused to play the game if Robeson were allowed to participate. After completing his undergraduate education, Robeson enrolled in prestigious Columbia Law School in New York City. He earned his law degree there in 1923, but he found that even in the North, opportunities for even a highly-qualified Black man to practice law were quite limited. He finally found a job at a firm, but he quit in protest after being socially shunned by several coworkers, some of whom refused to even interact with Robeson in the office because of his race.

It’s important to bear in mind that Robeson had the misfortune of being born during what historians have called the nadir (or low point) of American race relations. During the final two decades of the 19th Century, whites consolidated their political control over the postbellum American South. They disenfranchised the Black population and imposed segregation upon it. The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such “Jim Crow” laws in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. During this age of global imperialism, academics in the Western world justified white domination of the Global South by promoting pseudo-scientific theories that darker-skinned races were inherently inferior to (quote-unquote) “Caucasians.” Even Northern historians at Ivy League universities argued that abolitionists had made a big mistake in attempting multiracial democracy in the South – they characterized the Blacks who had obtained political power during the Reconstruction era as corrupt and unqualified, and viewed the reimposition of white supremacy as a benign return to the natural order of things. De facto segregation became common even in the North, and lynchings of Black people accused of crimes, while more common in the South, spread up into the Midwest. In July 1920, 3 black men were lynched in Duluth, Minnesota, which is only 150 miles from the Canadian border. So, Paul Robeson was growing up as a young Black prodigy during a time when racism was at its apex of nationwide influence.

However, a man as talented & resourceful as Robeson would not be deterred from finding success. He had already been working on backup plans before his legal career went bust. During his time at Columbia, he started moonlighting as an actor and singer within the vibrant NYC arts scene. In 1921, Paul married Eslanda Goode, nicknamed “Essie,” who was also was a gifted young African-American pioneer. Essie had a graduate degree in biology and she worked at a prestigious position in a New York hospital. 

During the Twenties, even some white folks began to take note of the cultural achievements of the American Black population in New York during what was called the “Harlem Renaissance,” which was named after the heavily African-American neighborhood of Harlem in Upper Manhattan. Robeson sometimes performed at Harlem’s Cotton Club, a Prohibition-era speakeasy which gained notoriety as a place where a mixed-race audience, including many white sophisticates (today we might call them “hipsters”), went to hear predominantly black musicians play jazz music. The entertainment industry was one of the few places within American society where African-American talent was starting to be accepted and appreciated. 

Robeson got his big break in 1928, when he was cast as the character of Joe in the musical “Show Boat,” written by Broadway legend Oscar Hammerstein. That production included the song “Old Man River,” which is probably still Robeson’s most iconic song, as his deep and rich voice added extra gravitas to the tune’s melancholy lyrics. Paul’s fame increased during the 1930s, a period in which American racial attitudes, at least among educated Northerners, were slowly starting to become more tolerant. He was cast in serious dramatic roles in stage plays written by acclaimed American author Eugene O’Neill. He also did a star turn as Shakespeare’s Othello in London. In 1936, Robeson reprised his role as Joe in a film version of “Show Boat.” A recording of a performance by Robeson that gained particular prominence was a song called “Ballad for Americans,” released in 1939. Journalist Matt Glazebrook writes that this work was a (quote) “10-minute long patriotic folk cantata . . . [which] offered an inclusive version of the US story,” including the contributions of immigrants, African-Americans, and other minority groups. The song became such a success that Glazebrook argues it (quote) “cemented Robeson’s status as the most famous black person in America.” As is often the case with famous men, his celebrity did not have a positive impact on his marriage; Paul & Essie grew apart due to his long absences & affairs with costars, although the couple would later reconcile.

                  Yet Robeson otherwise refused to play the role of a stereotypically shallow celebrity. After all, he had an intellect as deep as his baritone voice, and he became well-informed about fights for economic & social justice around the world. He became politically active, playing benefits for striking miners in the British Isles, and supporting the anti-fascist Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War (for more information on that conflict, see Episode 20D). Paul Robeson’s increasingly anti-capitalist political sympathies were not seen as overly controversial, particularly in show business, during the Great Depression, or during World War II, when the USA was allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against the Axis powers. But after the war, the political climate was shifting away from the left & toward the center, and Robeson stood out of step with the era’s emerging bipartisan Cold War consensus. For instance, he supported Henry Wallace’s left-wing third-party presidential campaign in 1948 (see Episode 3). 

            If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you can probably tell where this is going. A backlash against Paul Robeson’s political activities really took off after he gave a speech in Paris to a group called the World Congress of Partisans for Peace during April 1949, in which he implied that the US had engaged in aggression toward the USSR. He also suggested American Blacks should not fight for their country, because it oppressed them. By that time, the Cold War and the Red Scare were reaching peak intensity (see Episode 4), and Robeson’s words were roundly condemned by both conservatives and anti-Communist liberals in the United States. Glazebrook reports that a few months later, Robeson (quote) “attempted to perform a concert . . . at summer camps near Peekskill, New York, just as he had done in previous summers,” but this time, thousands of anti-Communist protesters opposed to Robeson showed up and “attacked concertgoers with rocks, sticks, and fists, overturning cars and injuring 150 people while the police [just] watched” (close quote). Historian Michael Kazin notes that these notorious “Peekskill riots” were organized by the American Legion, the veteran’s organization that, during the mid-20th Century, promoted strongly right-wing views.

            The next phase of the public condemnation of Paul Robeson was less violent, but even more damaging to his livelihood. In March 1950, NBC barred him from appearing on the television network. In July of that year, the US State Department revoked his passport, which prevented Robeson from touring overseas. The man who had once been the most famous Black performer in America by the early Fifties had effectively been blacklisted; according to Glazebrook, (quote) “In the US, his career was effectively over. Record companies refused to issue his old albums or record new ones. From being one of the top 10 highest paid performers in the [United States] in 1941 . . . by 1952 he was barely making $6,000 a year” (close quote). Robeson was hardly alone in this treatment; the white songwriter of his hit “Ballad for Americans” had, unlike Paul, been an outright Communist Party member, and he was also blacklisted. However, the disproportionate number of Black, Jewish, and immigrant members within American far-left groups caused the Red Scare to be a particular obstacle in those groups’ path to achieving social equality. Civil rights organizations like the NAACP now shunned Robeson, as they were eager to maintain their patriotic anti-Communist credibility. During the mid-1950s, Black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (or HUAC) to denounce Paul Robeson’s pro-Soviet remarks. In 1956, Robeson himself was called before HUAC, and he refused to distance himself from his sympathetic view toward the Communist bloc. He combatively told the Committee members, (quote) “you are the un-Americans.”

            In his book The Cold War and the Color Line, historian Thomas Borstelmann pointed out that most mid-century African-Americans were not interested in socialism, much less communism, but some Black intellectuals had embraced it. These included Robeson and the famed sociologist WEB DuBois. However, Borstelmann observes that the Red Scare pretty much killed off the “Black Left” for a generation. Neither Robeson nor DuBois ever recanted their Marxist leanings, and both tended to deny or justify the crimes of Joseph Stalin and other authoritarian Communist leaders, viewing reports of repression & brutality as Western propaganda, or, in today’s parlance, as “fake news.” Both of them defended the bloody Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, which we described in Episode 11. By the end of his life, DuBois gave up on the USA entirely, and he moved to Ghana in West Africa, where he lived until his 1963 death. Robeson did not go so far as to renounce his citizenship or to permanently leave the United States, but he remained a political contrarian during the Cold War who always held onto his anti-capitalist convictions.

            Nevertheless, Robeson did eventually benefit from the thaw in the Cold War that was occurring by the late Fifties (see Episode 13). In 1958, he was reissued his US passport and was able to tour abroad again, where he was now much more widely accepted than he was in the States. After touring the UK, he then, I kid you not, went to the Soviet Union and hung out with Nikita Khruschev in the resort town of Yalta during 1959. So clearly, he was not backing down from his Red sympathies. Robeson then toured Australia in the early Sixties, where he spoke out for the rights of Aboriginal communities. However, the stress of years spent as a national pariah had taken a toll on his mental and physical health. He knew he was under US government surveillance, which added to his paranoia & depression. Robeson unsuccessfully attempted suicide by slicing his wrists in a Moscow hotel room during 1961. Afterwards, he returned to London where he checked himself into a hospital. There, he was given electroshock therapy, a common treatment for severe depression at the time, but it only seemed to worsen his health difficulties. Back in the US during 1965, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and kidney problems. His wife Essie died of breast cancer later that year, & Paul then retreated into seclusion. He moved into his sister’s home in Philadelphia, and he rarely left it for the rest of his life. During 1973, Robeson was unable to attend a public celebration of his 75th birthday due to health reasons, but he recorded a message stating that despite recent inactivity (quote) “I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood.” Paul Robeson passed away in 1976 at the age of 77 in Philadelphia.

Paul Robeson left a legacy of high-quality cultural contributions and humanistic political activism. While his beliefs that the Soviet Union was a worker’s paradise were inaccurate, and his defenses of Stalin’s regime were embarrassing and morally obtuse, they probably need to be understood in the context of the time he grew up in. He had seen how hard it was for someone of his race to be accepted in his own country, no matter how talented any given Black person was, and perhaps that helps explain why he placed his faith in another country with a very different political & economic system. Today, Robeson is recognized as one of the 20th Century American masters of the performing arts, but some of his political views remain controversial, to say the least. You can provide feedback about this episode via email at: boomertomillennial@outlook.com. Please follow our Instagram by typing “boomerstomillennials” into the app’s search bar. We can also be found on the social media network BlueSky: @boomertomillennial.bsky.social. Thank you for your support, and as always, thank you for listening.