PAUL ROBESON–AMERICAN
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Unprofessional theater is an offense in any case; but when the subject is someone like Robeson, the offense is particularly intolerable. A performing artist of international stature, an accomplished intellectual and superstar athlete, Paul Robeson embodied a rare combination of passion and principle. The son of a slave minister, he promoted the unique values of African American heritage while also advocating a pan-cultural humanist sensibility; his concerts (at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere), for instance, drew their repertoire from African, Jewish, Celtic, black American, and Slavic folk and religious music at a time when such broad-mindedness would have been suspect in a white performer, let alone a black one. And at the peak of his success, Robeson risked his reputation to speak out forcefully for black American liberation and for the worthiness, as he saw it, of socialism. When in 1956 an interrogator from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee asked Robeson why he didn’t move to Russia if he thought so much of it, Robeson defiantly shot back: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I’m going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
For his troubles, Robeson was systematically persecuted: he was blacklisted by the entertainment industry; his passport was revoked–and even his right to travel to countries like Mexico and Canada removed–so that his career abroad was effectively curtailed; when he published his autobiography-cum-manifesto Here I Stand in 1958, it was received positively by the overseas press and the black American media but completely ignored by the mainstream American literary press, including the New York Times. But Robeson remained unbowed, confident that the passage of time would vindicate him.
