Paul Robeson

Rutgers, and a young man who could do everything

Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on 9 April 1898, the son of a man who had escaped slavery. He went to Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on an academic scholarship as the university's third Black student and its first Black football player, and proceeded to win fifteen varsity letters — the awards American universities give for playing a sport at the highest college level — across football, basketball, baseball and track. He was twice named an All-American, one of the small number of players chosen each year for an honorary national team, and he is in the College Football Hall of Fame; he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the national academic honour society, and to Cap and Skull, Rutgers' own society for a handful of outstanding seniors; and he graduated in 1919 as valedictorian — the student chosen to speak for the class.

The valedictory address, delivered at the Second Reformed Church in New Brunswick, was called "The New Idealism", and its argument was the one he never dropped: that unity is impossible without freedom, and that freedom presupposes a reverence for the individual. His senior thesis had been on the Fourteenth Amendment — the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, which he called the sleeping giant of the American Constitution. He then took a law degree at Columbia Law School in New York and, having qualified, declined to practise. He had a voice, and the theatre wanted it.

Ol' Man River, Othello, and the British films

The stage came first. In 1921 he appeared briefly in Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical written, produced and performed by African Americans — the show that also had Josephine Baker in its chorus line and that the Library of Congress puts at the centre of its account of the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of Black American writing, music and art between the world wars. Broadway leads followed in two plays by the dramatist Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings. From his professional singing debut in 1925 he did something no one had done before: he built a formal concert career out of the spirituals — the sacred songs made by enslaved African Americans — and sang them in recital halls as art music.

He spent much of the 1930s in Britain, where there was more work for him and the colour bar — the unwritten rules that kept Black performers out of parts, hotels and halls — sat lower, and he made a run of films there, among them Song of Freedom (1936), directed by J. Elder Wills. Show Boat, the 1927 musical by the composer Jerome Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, gave him "Ol' Man River", the song audiences would demand of him for the rest of his life. The peak was Othello — Shakespeare's tragedy of a Black general in the service of Venice who is destroyed by a subordinate's lies. His Broadway run of 1943–44 was the longest any Shakespeare play had had on Broadway, and he came back to the part in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the English town where Shakespeare was born and where a company performs his plays year-round. In 1937 he helped found the Council on African Affairs, a New York organisation that campaigned against colonial rule — the government of African territories from European capitals — the political commitment that would later be used against him.

Salle Pleyel, 20 April 1949

The Salle Pleyel is a concert hall at 252 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the 8th arrondissement, one of the twenty administrative districts of Paris; it was built for the piano manufacturer Pleyel by its director Gustave Lyon and inaugurated on 18 October 1927, and it has been a listed monument historique — a protected historic building — since 2002. From 20 to 23 April 1949 it held not a concert but a political meeting: the Congrès mondial des partisans de la paix, the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, an assembly of writers, scientists and performers, organised largely by people sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and called against the Cold War — the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies that had hardened since the end of the Second World War. Picasso drew the dove that went on its poster, and the bird became the peace symbol of the next half century.

Robeson was in the hall, and an Associated Press photographer took the picture the Library of Congress — the national library of the United States — still holds: Robeson at the microphone, half-length, facing slightly left, addressing the congress. He spoke briefly. His subject was whether Black Americans would fight a war against the Soviet Union, the communist state he had visited more than once and whose treatment of him as a Black man he contrasted loudly with his own country's — and which had by then become the fixed point of American political fear.

What the wire reported, and what the transcripts say

The Associated Press dispatch that reached American newsrooms had Robeson saying that it was unthinkable that American Negroes — the wire's wording, and the ordinary usage of 1949 — would go to war on behalf of those who had oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union, which in one generation had lifted their people to full human dignity. Printed under his name, in that form, it read as a declaration that fifteen million Black Americans, roughly the Black population of the United States at the time, would refuse to defend their own country. The New York Public Library's catalogue of its Robeson papers — kept at its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the library's Harlem research collection on Black history — states plainly that his words were distorted at home; the account published by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education goes further, and says the wire falsely reported that he had compared the United States government to Hitler's.

The historian Martin Duberman, writing the standard biography of Robeson in 1988, went back to the French-language transcripts of the session — the written record of what was actually said in the hall, taken down as it was spoken. What they record is longer, and different in emphasis: that the wealth of America was acquired on the backs of the poor whites of Europe and of millions of Black people; that it should be shared equitably among all America's children; that Robeson wanted no hysterical stupidity about participating in a war against anybody, whoever it might be; that he was determined to fight for peace and did not wish to fight the Soviet Union. The distance between the two versions is the distance between a man refusing a war and a man refusing his country.

The correction never caught up. Within months two of the most prominent Black leaders in the country had publicly disowned him: Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading American civil rights organisation, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem clergyman who represented the district in Congress. In August 1949 a crowd attacked concertgoers at an open-air performance he gave near Peekskill, in upstate New York, injuring hundreds. Smithsonian Magazine, the magazine of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, added up the cost in 2011: eighty-five booked concerts cancelled, and an annual income that fell from more than $150,000 to under $3,000.

Eight years inside his own country

In August 1950 the State Department cancelled his passport, so that he could no longer leave the country. He was offered it back if he would sign an affidavit — a written statement sworn to be true — declaring that he was not a communist, and he refused to sign; the demand itself, he held, was the illegitimate thing. The National Archives, the keeper of the United States government's own records, sets the revocation down flatly: his passport was taken in 1950 on the ground that he was a threat to national security, and the travel ban ran until 1958. He could still move inside the United States, and did — the "Birthday Tours" of 1952 to 1956 took him through more than twenty-five cities on networks of union halls, churches and Black community organisations that would still book him.

He was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the congressional body then investigating Americans suspected of disloyalty, and gave it nothing: he declined to answer its questions about his politics and turned them back on the members. In 1958 he published Here I Stand, part memoir and part manifesto, and in the same year — after eight years of petitions, legal challenges and protest campaigns mounted abroad — the passport came back. The concert career resumed in Europe and the Othello returned to Stratford in 1959, but his health did not hold. He withdrew from public life in the 1960s and died in 1976, aged seventy-seven, his reputation still darkened by the paragraph the wires had carried out of Paris.

The papers went to two great collections, and the split says something about the man: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, part of the New York Public Library, holds a Robeson collection covering 1925 to 1956, and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington — the research library of one of the country's historically Black universities — holds six linear feet of papers, about two metres of shelved documents, gathered with those of his wife, the chemist, anthropologist and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson. His Harlem apartment is a National Historic Landmark, the federal designation for buildings of national historical importance.