Martin duberman paul robeson biography
Paul Robeson
There is no sheltered rear. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Americans are perhaps notorious for their selective amnesia when it comes to history. When notable Black Americans from its history are spoken of (still an increasingly rare occurrence) it is typically when they have either already passed on or are too infirm to be considered threatening to anyone’s power.
When they are spoken of, Muhammed Ali and Martin Luther King as the most glaring examples, it is rarely mentioned that they were reviled in their lifetimes. The racism, the ever present threat of lethal violence, is simply erased.
Martin Luther King, a tireless worker for social justice for all Americans and an outspoken critic of American imperialism, years after his death was reduced to a man who was colorblind.
Muhammed Ali, also an outspoken critic of America’s wars abroad and racism at home, even prosecuted for his beliefs, in his later years was crafted into a colorful character, a showman, a kind of large, smiling teddy bear. Down the rabbit hole went the more “uncomfortable” ideas of these men, to be replaced by a caricature of what they really stood for.
They were not erased from history, but their lives were thoroughly scrubbed and repackaged for White consumption. Not all were so “lucky”.
Then there was Paul Robeson.
In many respects, Robeson (along with W.E.B. DuBois) were the preeminent Black voices of their generations, decades before King, Malcolm, Ali and others. While DuBois was well known in the Black community, he was less known in White America. Not Robeson.
From his days at Rutgers University as an All-American football player soon after WW1, to his acting career, to his concert engagements, all the way up to the ’s, there were few men in America, White or Black, more well known or loved than Paul Robeson.
Domestically and internationally he was mobbed at his concerts and filled the largest concert halls America had. And he was a supporter of the Soviet Union.
Seeing lynchings and the unrelenting and dehumanizing effects of life under Jim Crow, Robeson saw a system during his visits to the USSR where Black men and women were not second class citizens.
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They could perform, work, and go about their daily lives while trying to fulfill their natural potential.
Robeson’s support for the Soviets in the ’s and 40’s where Russia was seen as the bulwark against Fascism, was hardly a controversial position to stake out. While some scattered criticism far the far right existed, it did not effect Robeson’s life.
As the Cold War began however, new rules applied. Not only did Robeson continue to insist that friendship between the USSR and America was a desirable thing, he began to more forcefully assert that under communism, Black people had far more rights and were treated with more dignity than in America. While never saying he was personally a communist, (the author when looking at the historical record and speaking to acquaintances is emphatic that he never joined the party) he bristled at the assumption that it was immaterial whether he was or wasn’t and that he was under no obligation to share that information with anyone anymore than he needed to say whether he was a democrat or republican.
In America, freedom meant freedom. Even the freedom to be a communist if one chooses. As Robeson famously remarked at a Council on African Affairs rally in New York. :
“This could happen to any American who believes in democracy and says so fearlessly. This is the heart of the issue. Whether I am or am not a Communist or Communist sympathizer, is irrelevant.
The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights. If the government is sincerely concerned about saving America from subversive forces, let our officials stop worrying about the Communists whom they suspect of subversive activities and start doing something about the fascists who are openly parading their disdain of civil rights and democratic procedures here in America today.
I, however, am going to function exactly as I have tonight, at other times.
I come from the people, and from the side of the people. I want nothing back but the kind of affection that comes to me tonight, the kind of feeling that you’re there. That’s what allows me to do what I do, because you are there! I want no political office of any kind, nor will I ever seek one.”
Speaking in Paris in , he would elaborate on his feelings about the USSR and how it compared to America for Black people.
“The wealth of America, he said, had been built on the backs of the white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of blacks.
And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union.”
While certainly forceful, there was little that in was particularly incendiary that would have created the firestorm that it spawned.
Black leaders like A. Phillip Randolph had previously said that he could see why Black soldiers would be hesitant to go abroad and die for freedoms they lacked at home. Soon after hearing the speech, the Associated Press reprinted Robeson’s remarks as:
“We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth.
We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels. It is unthinkable that American Negroes would 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.”
Robeson had said nothing about Hitler or Goebbels and in fact had said none of what he was quoted as saying.
What followed however were instant denunciations of him from all over the country.
Black voices as varied as newspaper editors and the NAACP all rushed to stress their loyalty to America and say Robeson didn’t speak for them. Similarly, he was abandoned, with a few exceptions, by most of his White liberal friends as well, who viewed him as toxic in the aftermath of the speech. The FBI also targeted Robeson more aggressively, and intensified their surveillance and harassment of him, labeling him as a “known communist”.
From America’s treasure with the beautiful voice to pariah overnight, Robeson became for lack of a better word, a non person in America.
His concerts were protested, often violently. When protests were ineffective, pressure was applied to any venue that would host him.
By the summer of , Robeson, who once sold out the largest concert halls in America was persona non grata. Unable to work domestically, he decided to go abroad where he was still loved. The U.S. responded by confiscating his passport. Robeson would get his passport back years later but in many ways the damage was done. He was erased from the public conscious and would for all intents and purposes remain so up until the present day.
It is shocking in retrospect to consider how easily and quickly someone can go from universally acclaimed to near total obscurity.
That is in many ways the story Duberman tells here. However it is not the only story. While in the aftermath of Paris, Robeson’s professional life evaporated and most likely led to serious mental illness which would plague him in his later years, this is also the story of a supremely courageous man. A man who in the face of the worst kind of harassment, denunciation, and persecution, never shied away from speaking truth to power, never allowing others to speak for him or dictate what he stood for:
“I want everybody in the range of my voice to hear, official or otherwise, that there is no force on earth that will make me go backward one-thousandth part of one little inch.”
Rarely appreciated during the height of his powers and given little credit for laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement that would follow, this wonderful biography brings the man to light again for future generations to ensure that the injustices of the past do not become our future.