Paul Robeson
1898 — 1976 · Bass-baritone, actor, athlete, lawyer, and political activist; the most internationally recognized African American figure of the mid-twentieth century
Paul Leroy Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on the ninth of April 1898, the son of an escaped enslaved man who had become a Presbyterian minister and a free Black mother of mixed Lenape, English, and African ancestry. He took his undergraduate degree at Rutgers University in 1919 — third in his class, valedictorian, twice-named college football All-American, and Phi Beta Kappa.
He took his law degree at Columbia in 1923. He was admitted to the New York bar but resigned within a year after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. He turned to the theater and the concert stage.
His career across the next twenty-five years made him the most internationally recognized African American figure of the mid-twentieth century. He sang the title role in The Emperor Jones (London, 1925) and reprised it in the 1933 film. He sang Joe in Show Boat in London and New York, introducing "Ol' Man River" — a song subsequent generations would associate with him in particular. He performed Othello at the Savoy Theatre in London in 1930 and on Broadway in 1943, where his run of two hundred and ninety-six performances remains the longest of any Shakespeare production in Broadway history. He recorded over three hundred songs in twenty-five languages.
His political work — his explicit alignment with Soviet socialism, his anti-colonial advocacy, and his criticism of U.S. policy toward Black Americans — produced, after 1948, the most sustained American government persecution of any internationally famous artist of the twentieth century. The State Department revoked his passport in 1950. He was unable to perform outside the United States from 1950 to 1958. The blacklisting reduced his concert income from a peak of one hundred and four thousand dollars in 1947 (over a million dollars in current terms) to two thousand dollars in 1952.
He died in Philadelphia on the twenty-third of January 1976, age seventy-seven.
He is honored here as the artist whose voice carried Black America to the world and was punished for what it said.
Curated with honor.
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