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Paul Robeson is a legendary American, one of the few true Renaissance men of the 20th Century. An actor, singer, scholar, athlete, and political activist, Robeson could dominate a stage or concert hail like the sun radiating its rays across the land on a hot summer day. His rich baritone voice was resonant and melodic. He enraptured his audiences with his talent – despite the color of his skin.

Had Robeson been born white, or had he been born in a more tolerant era, every school child in America would speak his name along with Muhammad Ali’s and Martin Luther King’s. But he was a Black man who reached his maturity at a time when Negroes were consigned to the back of the bus, third-class citizens in a white dominated society. He was once asked if those of his race should ignore the brutality that was inherent to racial prejudice. “If someone hit me on the cheek,” he defiantly responded, “I’d try to tear his head off before he could hit me on the other one.” Many considered Paul Robeson too “uppity”; he was doomed to be stifled by the climate of his times.

In his American films, Robeson had to overcome this stereotype. In his British films, although his characters were generally more dignified, he was pitted against an industry which glorified the colonial vision of Africa. Yet in the best and worst of his 11 features, he imbued each role with a natural stateliness and quiet power. His successes, though, were ultimately overshadowed by heartache and rejection, the result of a society which would not tolerate a Black man who spoke his mind.

Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson was born on April 9th, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey. His father, William, was a slave who had escaped from a North Carolina plantation in 1860, worked his way through Lincoln University and became a Protestant minister. His mother, Maria, was a schoolteacher who died as the result of burns sustained in a household accident when Paul was six. The youngest of eight children, Paul was the only one still remaining at home; he and his father moved to Westfield and then to Somerville, New Jersey, where the Reverend Robeson became pastor of the St. Thomas Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

In ’15, Robeson won a four-year scholarship to Rutgers College, and became the third black ever to attend that school. Two years later, he was named the first black Walter Camp All-American football player – Camp called him “the greatest defensive end who ever trod the gridiron.” Robeson earned that accolade again the following season and also won varsity letters in basketball, baseball, and track, but his accomplishments were not just athletic. He garnered various prizes for oratory, served on the student council, gave the commencement address and was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key and membership in the Cap and Skull honor society. He was later to master over 20 languages, from Chinese to Gaelic, Russian to several African dialects.

Robeson graduated Rutgers in ’19 with a B.A. degree and enrolled in the Columbia University Law School. He performed in an amateur production of the play Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA during his first year at Columbia, and made his professional debut in ’21 in a presentation of the same play at the Lafayette Theater. While at Columbia, Robeson met Eslanda Cardoza Goode, a young chemistry student whom he married on August 17, ’21 (their only child, Paul, Jr., was born on November 2, ’27). Eslanda, who became the first Black analytical chemist at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, encouraged her husband’s burgeoning interest in the theater. Robeson performed on Broadway as the leading character in Taboo, which had a brief run during the ’22 season. Later that year he appeared in the same play in Blackpool, England opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell. His trip abroad, in which he and his wife were free to live without the onus of Jim Crow, piqued his curiosity about Great Britain and life outside the United States.

In ’23, Robeson graduated from Columbia with a LL.B. degree, and was admitted to the New York State bar. He worked for a law firm headed by a prominent Rutgers graduate, but realizing that the opportunities in law would be limited because of his color, he commenced an apprenticeship with the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village. There, he met Eugene O’Neill, who cast him in the lead roles in All God’s Chillun Got Wings, a drama about an interracial marriage, and The Emperor Jones, the tale of a black dictator on a West Indian island. George Jean Nathan dubbed him “one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive, and convincing actors” he had ever seen. Robeson, however, did not originate the role of Brutus Jones: the character was first played by the legendary dramatic actor Charles Gilpin.

Robeson’s film debut came in ’24 in BODY AND SOUL, a melodrama directed by Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific of all Black independent filmmakers. BODY AND SOUL was, at best, crude, and the actor certainly did not envision himself a film star. He appeared in the film solely to pick up some extra bucks. On April 19, ’25, he and his accompanist, Lawrence Brown, gave their first concert recital at the Greenwich Village Theater. And during ’25 and ’26, he toured the United States and Europe performing Negro folksongs and spirituals.

In ’28, Robeson played the role of Captain Joe in Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat at the Drury Lane in London; he repeated the part in New York two years later. The composers wrote for him the song that was to become his personal anthem, “ol’ Man River.” Although most of his films were made during the next ten years, he still remained active in the theater. At the Savoy in London, he was lauded for his Othello opposite Sybil Thorndike, Peggy Ashcroft, and Ralph Richardson; in England, where he lived for most of the decade, he starred in The Hairy Ape (’31), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (’33), Basalik (’35), Stevedore (’35), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (’36).

Originally, King Vidor had wanted Robeson for the leading role in HALLELUJAH (’29), and the picture was written for him. But he was unavailable, and Daniel Haynes was cast in the part. So Robeson’s second film became BORDERLINE (’30), a Swiss-made experimental feature produced by the publishers of “Close-Up”, an international film journal. Borderline attracted little public notice; based on his work in the film, though, Sergei Eisenstein wanted Robeson to star in BLACK MAJESTY, a proposed feature about a slave who organizes an army and defeats Napoleon. Because of his hectic schedule, Robeson declined.

Robeson’s next film was to be his most memorable: THE EMPEROR JONES (’33). Independently produced by John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran from profits earned by the American distribution of Maedchen in Uniform, the film is an expanded version of the O’Neill stage play. Robeson’s Brutus Jones is a pullman porter who is sentenced to a chain gang for murdering a friend during a crap game. He kills a sadistic guard and escapes to an island, where he goes into partnership with a Cockney trader and proclaims himself ruler of the land. Eventually, to the accompaniment of a pounding drum beat, Jones disintegrates emotionally as he is hunted in the jungle and, finally, killed. Robeson’s portrayal of the Emperor, particularly in this final sequence, is masterful.

THE EMPEROR JONES is unique in cinema history. It is the initial film in which a black star was supported by a white actor – Dudley Digges as the trader. Critical reaction was generally favorable: “(The film) is a distinguished offering, resolute and firm, with a most compelling portrayal by Paul Robeson,” wrote Mordaunt Hall in the New York “Times.” Yet the film was roundly criticized by the Black press, because the phrase “nigger” was in the script and Brutus, though the focus of the scenario, is essentially a con man and tyrannical hustler. THE EMPEROR JONES was distributed on a limited basis, and was not a financial success.

Robeson first went to England to make films because he felt he would be allowed to enact non-stereotyped characters. “Hollywood can only visualize the plantation type of Negro, the Negro of ‘Poor Old Joe’ and ‘Swannee Ribber’,” he declared in ’33. “It is absurd to use that type to express the modern Negro as it would be to express modern England in the terms of an Elizabethan ballad. The box office insistence that the Negro shall figure always as a clown has spoiled the two Negro films which have been made in Hollywood, HALLELUJAH and HEARTS OF DIXIE. In HALLELUJAH, they took the Negro and his church services and made them funny. America may have found it amusing, but to English audiences the burlesquing of religious matters appeared sheer blasphemy.”

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