Home / Full timeline / Paul Robeson, athlete, actor, singer, and civil rights activist, dies.
Paul Robeson, athlete, actor, singer, and civil rights activist, dies.
1976 (Jan 23)
Paul Robeson, athlete, actor, singer, and civil rights activist, died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at age seventy-seven. Robeson was born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, to William, a minister, and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson. William Robeson was formerly enslaved from North Carolina who worked his way through Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1915, young Paul entered Rutgers University after earning an academic scholarship in a statewide competition. When he joined the football team, where he became an all-American, Robeson was once nearly mangled on the playing field by white bigots. The scholar-athlete graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1919. Robeson scorned his father's wishes that he follow him into the ministry, but after a brief career in law, he grudgingly accepted his wife Eslanda's urging to use his rich baritone voice in singing and acting. She helped persuade her husband to accept a role in Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA in 1920. “Even then," Robeson later recalled, “I never meant to [become an actor]. I just said yes to get her to quit pestering me." The Harlem performance, however, launched the remarkable stage career of Robeson. In 1922, he made his first Broadway appearance as Jim in Taboo. He also made his debut in London in the same year in Taboo, which was retitled The Voodoo. Upon his return to New York in late 1922, Robeson joined the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village group that included dramatist Eugene O'Neill, and took the role of Jim Harris in O'Neill's "All God's Chillun Got Wings." This led to another successful appearance as Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones, another play by O'Neill that had been especially revived for Robeson. The Provincetown Players also sponsored Robeson's first major concert in 1925, which consisted of a collection of spirituals. Between 1925 and 1928, he had a triumphant performance in The Emperor Jones and a heralded portrayal of Joe in Show Boat, in which he sang "Ol' Man River," both in London, England, as well as in an appearance as Crown in George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess on Broadway. Between 1928 and 1939, Robeson lived mostly abroad, particularly in London, where he found fewer color barriers than in the United States. One of his most spectacular successes in London occurred in 1930 when he played the lead in Shakespeare's Othello. To many, the New York Times stated, Robeson's performance was "an unforgettable experience.” Following these latest triumphs, Robeson toured the major cities of Europe both as a recitalist and an actor. Robeson's political consciousness was first jolted in 1928 when writer George Bernard Shaw asked him what he thought of socialism. Roberston later recalled, "I hadn't anthing to say. I'd never really thought about Socialism." In 1934, Robeson visited the Soviet Union where he was warmly received. He was also impressed by the absence of racial prejudice among Soviet citizens" (in Germany, Robeson was subjected to racial slurs by a Nazi soldier). Later, Robeson began to publicly express a belief "in the principles of scientific Socialism" and his “deep conviction that for all mankind a Socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life.” In the late 1930s, Robeson sang for the Republican troops and for members of the International Brigades who were fighting the fascist dictator Francisco Franco in Spain. That experience led him to see "the connection between the problems of all oppressed people and the necessity of the artist to participate fully" in the struggle for human rights. It also convinced him to return to the United States to continue his work. On October 19, 1943, Robeson became the first Black actor to play the title role of Othello (with a white supporting cast, including Jose Ferrer and Uta Hagen) before a Broadway audience. The next year, the NAACP bestowed upon him its highest award, the Spingarn Medal. Meanwhile, Robeson increased his political activity. He led a delegation to national baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that urged him to remove the racial bias in baseball. Robeson called on President Harry S. Truman to extend civil rights to Blacks in the South. He was also a co-founder and chairman of the Progressive party, which nominated former Vice President Henry A. Wallace for President in 1948. Then, at a World Peace Conference in Paris in 1949, Robeson declared, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes will go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country (the Soviet Union) which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind." Although Robeson later asserted that this statement had been taken “slightly out of context," adding that he had really spoken for two thousand students "from the colonial world” who had requested him to express their desire for peace, his words stirred widespread opposition in the United States. In August 1949, veterans' groups and right wing extremists attacked crowds who were arriving for one of his concerts in Peekskill, New York. Subsequently, professional concert halls were closed to him and commercial bookings grew scarce. Robeson's income reportedly dropped from $100,000 in 1947 to $6,000 in 1952. Beginning in 1948, Robeson was called before Congressional committees on several occasions in which he was usually asked if he was a member of the Communist party. He always refused to answer, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights. The New York Times, however, reported that Robeson maintained "privately ... that he was not a member." Nevertheless, in 1950 the United States State Department canceled his passport on the ground that he had refused to sign the then required non-Communist oath" for traveling abroad. Robeson had contended that “the government had no right to base his freedom of travel on his political beliefs or a lack of them." He sued the State Department over the issue, and in 1958, the United States Supreme Court, in a related case, ruled that Congress "had not authorized the department to withhold passports because of applicants' 'beliefs and association[s]." Once Robeson received his passport, he departed immediately for Great Britain, declaring, "I don't want any overtones of suggestion that I am deserting the country of my birth. If I have a concert in New York, I will go there and return to London." He did return permanently to the United States in 1963, where he lived quietly, first in a Harlem apartment and then with his sister, Marian Forsythe, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Despite his difficulties with Congress, the State Department, and many American organizations and individuals, Robeson became a hero to much of Black America and to countless numbers of other peoples throughout the world. On his sixtieth birthday in 1958, he was given a thunderous ovation by a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It was his first New York recital in eleven years, and on the same day, birthday celebrations were held in many nations abroad, including India. There, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called Robeson "one of the greatest artists of our generation (who) reminds us that art and human dignity are above differences of race, nationality, and color." In 1973, on his seventy-fifth birthday, another tribute in his honor was held at Carnegie Hall. Although the ailing actor-singer could not attend, he sent a recorded message to the crowd, which included many theatrical personalities. Upon the occasion of Robeson's death, the official Soviet news agency Tass commented: "The persistent struggle for Black civil rights and for stronger world peace won him recognition not only in the United States but also outside of it."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.