Paul Robeson was a superstar of the stage and screen, a talented football player and a music hitmaker. Then, amid the “anti-communist fervour” of the US in the Cold War, came a dramatic fall from grace.
Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans was an unlikely pop smash. A 10-minute-long patriotic folk cantata, it offered an inclusive version of the US story, from fiery formation (“In ’76 the sky was red”) to a pan-ethnic present, as articulated by a narrator who reveals himself to be America itself.
Warning: This article contains use of an antiquated racial term that some readers may find offensive
Yet when the celebrated baritone first performed the song on a national CBS radio broadcast in 1939, it became an instant sensation. The studio audience cheered for 20 minutes. Letters and phone calls flooded into the station, and the show was repeated throughout the following year. Already a star of stage, screen and the football field, the broadcast and subsequent single release of Ballad for Americans cemented Robeson’s status as the most famous black person in America.
He died on 23 January 1976, 200 years after the bloody birth of the US and 50 years ago this month. His final decades were marked by illness and seclusion, the lingering effects of a campaign of suppression that was unprecedented, even amid the widespread entertainment industry blacklisting that characterised the “Red Scare”.
Paul Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest of five children. His father, a pastor, raised the family after his mother died in a house fire a few years after his birth. To say that Robeson was a remarkable young man would be a significant understatement. He excelled academically, in sports and the arts while attending his Jersey high school.
He won a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University, eventually leaving with the highest academic honours and delivering the graduating class oration. He was awarded 15 varsity letters, including for baseball, basketball, javelin, discus and shot put. But it was at American football that he became a true star, twice making the All-American first team before playing professionally to help finance his studies at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s. Walter Camp, the US’s leading football expert, called Robeson “the greatest defensive back ever to trod the gridiron”.
Living in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Robeson also used his time at Columbia to take up acting, as well as singing in the famous Cotton Club. His legal career ended abruptly not long after graduation, when he quit his position at a law firm in protest after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. Instead, he became a full-time performer, supported financially at first by his wife Eslanda, the head of New York-Presbyterian hospital’s pathology laboratory. He starred in two Eugene O’Neill plays (All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Emperor Jones), recorded albums of so-called Negro spirituals and opened a new Oscar Hammerstein/Jerome Kern musical, Show Boat, in 1927, singing Ol’ Man River to critical acclaim.
A mere decade later, however, he had been branded not just “un-American” but an effective non-person, barred from television, expunged from textbooks, his passport revoked. As the Cold War took hold and the US political and cultural establishment was gripped by anti-communist fervour, Robeson’s civil rights activism and socialist solidarity made him a prime target.
He also began travelling to the UK and Europe. In 1930, he played Othello at London’s Savoy Theatre, the first black actor to do so in the British capital since Ira Aldridge a century before. And when, after spending much of the early decade performing overseas, he returned to the US to star in the 1936 Hollywood film version of Show Boat, his ascension to A-list status was complete. In 1928, New Yorker magazine had labelled him “the promise of his race”, “King of Harlem”, and the “idol of his people”.
By 1940, shortly after he performed Ballad for Americans for 30,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl, Colliers magazine crowned him “America’s No. 1 Negro Entertainer”. According to his biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson seemed to “the white world in general […] a magnetic, civilised, and gifted man who had relied on talent rather than belligerence to rise above his circumstances”.
A swift and damning response
In reality, Robeson spent much of his rise to fame educating himself and becoming increasingly outspoken on the broader context of the black struggle. In Europe, he performed benefits for Welsh miners, Jewish refugees and Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War. He studied African languages and Marxist writings, and visited the Soviet Union. Back home in the US, he refused to perform for segregated audiences, joined union picket lines, and, in the 1948 presidential race, campaigned for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Yet all these causes proved relatively undamaging to Robeson, prior to a speech he gave in Paris on 20 April 1949. The World Congress of Partisans for Peace was a gathering of some 2,000 scientists, teachers, activists and artists from 75 countries, convened to condemn the Cold War arms race and what it saw as US aggression against the Soviet Union.
“It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations,” Robeson announced to the assembled leftists, “against a country [the USSR] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” Some six years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Robeson suggested a form of black rebellion that far outstripped the assimilationist goals of the then-dominant NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The response, from mainstream liberals and conservative anti-communists alike, was swift and damning.
A few months after Paris, Paul Robeson twice attempted to perform a concert for holidaymakers at Jewish socialist summer camps near Peekskill, New York, just as he had done in previous summers. Twice, thousands of local war veterans counter-protested, and rioters attacked concertgoers with rocks, sticks and fists, overturning cars and injuring 150 people while the police watched on. While this violent attempted cancellation of Robeson was broadly condemned and never repeated, a more subtle version began almost immediately afterwards.
In March 1950, NBC barred him from appearing on Eleanor Roosevelt’s TV show, Today With Mrs Roosevelt, after protests by the American Legion (a veterans’ organisation) and others. Then in July, the State Department revoked his passport, preventing him from performing overseas, where he remained hugely popular. In the US, his career was effectively already over. Record companies refused to issue his old records or record new ones. From being one of the top 10 highest paid performers in the US in 1941, and earning $100,000 from concerts as late as 1947, by 1952 he was barely making $6,000 a year.
“Of all those blacklisted, from Hollywood screenwriters to civil servants and academics, none were as high profile or once-beloved”
The lyrics of Ballad for Americans were removed from school textbooks, and the poet Langston Hughes was forced to cut any mention of Robeson from his book Famous Negro Music Makers, lest it be banned from school library shelves. His name was retrospectively erased from lists of NAACP award winners and football champions alike. Even owning a Paul Robeson record, as hundreds of thousands of Americans had done, was enough to earn government employees a black mark at the various loyalty board interviews that took place in the 1950s.
Baseball star Jackie Robinson was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to disassociate himself, and by extension, the black public, from Robeson’s Paris remarks. Eventually, in 1956, Robeson himself appeared before HUAC. Unapologetic as ever, he told the committee members: “you are the un-Americans”.
‘A unique threat’
In her book Many Are the Crimes, Cold War historian Ellen Schrecker argues that “probably no other individual was as heavily censored” as Paul Robeson. And in some ways he did present a unique threat. Not as a spy, but as an outspoken black socialist. Someone who linked the African American fight for civil rights to the cause of the working classes worldwide, from the Welsh valleys to West Africa, from Mississippi to Moscow. And of all those blacklisted, from Hollywood screenwriters to civil servants and academics, none were as high profile or once-beloved. As Schrecker says, “The most charismatic black actor and singer of his generation had become a non-person”.
Robeson’s passport was finally returned to him in 1959 and he tried to once again tour internationally. But, worn down from his years of struggle, his efforts were derailed by bouts of sickness and depression. By the mid-60s he ceased giving concerts entirely, and, following the death of Eslanda, spent his remaining years under the care of his sister.
In 1973 he addressed a Salute to Paul Robeson event at New York’s Carnegie Hall. He declared himself “dedicated as ever for the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood”, affirmed his commitment to the struggle of African Americans to “achieve complete liberation from racist domination”, and paid tribute to anti-colonial movements around the world. He concluded his message with the following. “Though ill health has compelled my retirement, you can be sure that in my heart I go on singing:
