If Paul Robeson were living, he would have been 100 years old on
April 9. The fact that his centennial birthday is being celebrated
around the world, offers us a tremendous opportunity to reflect on the
man’s life, legacy, and significance.
Many of Paul Robeson’s positions on issues maintain a currency in
contemporary political analysis. Whether he was addressing Vietnam,
African independence, the rights of workers. or the development of
democracy, statements that he made in the early to middle twentieth
century often represent current progressive thinking.
When Robeson described himself as one of “Africa’s children in
America,” he shaped the discussion that would later take “Africa’s
children” from Negro to Black to African American. When he gleefully
reveled in his Blackness (“Sometimes I think I am the only Negro living
who would not prefer to be White.”), he portended the Afrocentricity of
Stokely Carmichael, Maulana Karenga, Molefe Asante, and others. When he
spoke of peace, his words foreshadowed those of generations of peace
activists who used arguments similar to those he offered to oppose U.S.
involvement or intervention in Vietnam, El Salvador, Iraq, and other
countries.
Robeson’s influence was diminished when his right to travel was
curtailed. He was effectively muzzled by the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC). His treatment raises questions about the
perversion of the First Amendment in the name of Cold War solidarity.
As historical revisionism focuses on the horrible toll that HUAC took
on the lives of hundreds of American artists and the devastating impact
it had on our democracy, it is important to focus on the artistic and
sociopolitical legacy Paul Robeson left.
Deconstructing Paul Robeson’s enigmatic life seems as unachievable
as grasping hold of an evasive apparition. The most definitive
biography of Robeson’s life is not without controversy. The most
comprehensive compilations of Robeson’s speeches and writings reveal a
man who cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker. Indeed, the opening
words of the Paul Robeson Speaks collection recall Mrs. Ogden Reid,
publisher of the New York Herald-Tribune, Describing Robeson as having
“distinguished himself in four separate fields: scholar, athlete,
singer, and actor.”
For all the goodwill that accompanies her statement, Mrs. Ogden
incompletely describes Robeson. To be sure the achieved distinction as
“scholar, athlete, singer, and actor.” He was also a Rutgers
University-educated lawyer and activist whose voice on issues of racial
and economic justice emerged early in his career. He realized his
acting and singing made him something of a racial ambassador, noting
that through his work, “the talents of the Negro are being brought to
the fore and at last the shackles of intellectual slavery are being
severed.”
Robeson’s work might be more easily categorized if racial barriers
had not defined his opportunities for achievement in so many areas. He
achieved as an athlete despite the negative racial attitudes of his
colleagues. And he excelled as a scholar despite the fact that he had
only limited affiliation to academic institutions after his
under-graduate and legal studies at Rutgers.
