Paul Robeson was a prize-winning scholar and the greatest footballer of his era, even before he ascended to global superstardom as a singer, Hollywood actor, and activist.
The son of an escaped slave, Robeson stunned audiences with 'Ol' Man River' and Othello, as his passion for social justice led him from Jazz Age Harlem to the mining towns of Wales, from the frontiers of the Spanish Civil War to Stalin's Russia.
Charismatic, eloquent, and handsome, he had everything and then lost it all for the sake of his principles.
Jeff Sparrow traces Robeson's troubled life and stellar career, in a story that traverses the arc of the twentieth century and illuminates the fissures of today's fractured world.
From Black Lives Matter to Putin's United Russia, Sparrow visits the places Robeson lived and worked, exploring race in America, freedom in Moscow, and the legacies of communism and fascism in Europe.
Part travelogue, part biography, this is a tale of political ardour, heritage, and trauma—a luminous portrait of a remarkable man, and an urgent reflection on the crises that define us now.
The son of a former slave, Robeson – a supremely gifted vocal stylist and actor (his Othello was a landmark performance) with movie-star looks and physique – hauled himself out of the Jim Crow south to further distinguish himself as an athlete, intellectual, political activist and underdog advocate.
These days his legacy is often neglected, but, in his time, he was almost always the best thing about the various film and theatrical productions in which he appeared (few would remember Show Boat if not for Robeson’s Ol’ Man River cameo).
His was an epic journey from North Carolina to Princeton to Harlem when it sizzled (and where he found his voice as an interpreter of African-American spirituals), to the snooty salons of London’s West End, the devastated mining pits of Wales, the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar Soviet Bloc. Robeson was a cultural force to be reckoned with, chafing against discrimination and racial typecasting, aligning himself with black revolutionaries and busted-union miners alike.
Blacklisted
And the political establishment certainly reckoned with him. The FBI effectively killed his career for refusing to denounce the Communist Party, and Robeson was blacklisted even as Time magazine declared him “probably the most famous living Negro”.
He could not record, radio would not play his songs, venues would no longer book him, cinemas would not screen his movies.
Worse, he was denied a passport, effectively kept marooned and unemployed in the country of his birth.
The immense strain of it all culminated in a mental breakdown, several suicide attempts, extensive drug treatments and a staggering 50-plus
courses of electro-convulsive therapy.
Despite the number of previously published Robeson biographies, one might expect such a life to demand a substantial and in-depth reassessment. But Sparrow’s book is a hybrid, non-definitive beast, dispatching vast tracts of its subject’s career in relatively bite-sized chapters.
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