The First Black Movie Star

    

        Perhaps the title here is a bit controversial. Hattie McDaniel was the first black person to win an Oscar, for her turn as the caricatured “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1939), and Stepin Fetchit rode the “Laziest Man in the World” character to stardom in the early days of Hollywood. Still, the case for this sobriquet I believe is strongest made for the actor and singer Paul Robeson.

        Robeson was always more of a personality than an actor. Whether he was playing Othello, an Africa warlord, or a day labourer, he was always recognizably himself - he never lost himself in characters in the way that we consider “acting”. With his 6’3 height and athletic build, he was always instantly recognisable - to say nothing of his distinctive voice, a rich bass baritone that has often been imitated, but never equaled by subsequent performers. Despite not being a classically trained actor, it was through his persistence in making sure that Black characters were portrayed with their human dignity intact that he left his stamp on the early cinema.

        There was never any intention of becoming a movie star. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest son of a former slave turned Presbyterian minister, Robeson first made a name for himself as an athlete - when Princeton University turned him away because of his skin colour, he instead became the second Black student to attend Rutgers, where he captained the football, baseball, track and debate teams, graduating valedictorian of his class in 1919. From there, he accepted a spot at Columbia Law School, while also playing football in a few now defunct NFL teams in the Midwest, before the league segregated their athletes. While in New York, he also took up acting, and found it more fulfilling than law or football, and so made it his focus shortly after earning his legal degree.

        To be a black actor in the 1920s was to either take minor parts, to be confined to obscure productions, or to travel to Europe. Robeson, never one to be sidelined, mostly spent this part of his career living in London, taking opportunities that were often denied to him in the United States. He starred in just one film in this decade - Body and Soul (1925), directed by Oscar Micheaux, the only black filmmaker whose films were widely viewed at the time. Robeson played two parts - twin brothers at cross purposes. While the film certainly has its merits, Robeson was an actor best known for his great voice - in the age of silent film, he was never going to rise to the top - so his acting was primarily confined to the stage, memorably starring in Shakespeare’s Othello (a part he would return to several times over the course of his career) and the title character in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a part he would later reprise on film. His acting, along with his singing, soon led Robeson to become one of the most widely respected performers of his time, popular in America, Britain, and, increasingly, the Soviet Union.

        Throughout the 1930s, Robeson’s star continued to rise, as more concerts, stage plays, and film roles came his way. Early Hollywood being what it was, the characters Robeson had to choose from often relied on lazy stereotypes of black people - he’s often a dock worker (Song of Freedom [1936], Big Fella [1937]), or a tribal warlord (Sanders of the River [1935], Jericho [1937]); while he tried to negotiate to rewrite his characters to develop them into real people, he was often frustrated in these efforts, and ultimately embarrassed by a lot of his films. Still, he was able to turn in a number of memorable performances - most notably Show Boat (1936), where he became an international icon with his performance of “Ol’ Man River”. If you have never listened to the song in its entirety, I invite you to do so - I find myself getting emotional every time I hear him belt out the fourth stanza:

I gets weary, and sick of trying

I’m tired of living, and scared of dying

But ol’ man river, he just keeps rolling along

A few years later, Robeson was performing for Republican soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, and began to change these words to make the song more of an empowered protest anthem. The changed lyrics ultimately became:

But I keeps laughing, instead of crying

I must keep fighting until I’m dying

And ol’ man river, he’ll just keep rolling along

        

        There was only one film that Robeson felt truly proud of, The Proud Valley (1940). Set in contemporary Wales, Robeson joins a group of coal miners, going deep underground to gather coal each day. The film explores issues of workers and management, labour and capital, issues central to Robeson’s budding political beliefs. Afterwards, Robeson made one more film, Tales of Manhattan (1942), co-starring with Henry Fonda, Eugene Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Laughton. Disappointed with his racist portrayal, Robeson walked away from a lucrative film career, and returned to Othello, starring in the longest run of any Shakespearean production in Broadway history. Following the successful run of sold out shows, Robeson decided to devote his time and energy to his singing, and, in the midst of a global conflict, human rights.

        At this point, Paul Robeson was at the top of the world. A household name on several continents, a close personal friend of artists and politicians the world over (including, but not limited to, Howard Fast, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sergei Eisenstein, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Emma Goldman), Robeson could have chosen to live a life of luxury and ease. Instead, deeply troubled by the American caste system, he returned home and devoted himself to the questions of class and race. In America, his powerful voice was first used in service of president Roosevelt's plans for a postwar world - when Roosevelt died, he threw his support behind Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party candidacy. Where workers would strike and organise Paul Robeson could be found, ready to use his voice to support oppressed peoples.

        As the end of the Second World War began to transition to the early stages of the Cold War, Robeson’s rhetoric (he had once said that the Soviet Union was the only place he had been treated like a human being, and had called on African Americans to boycott any wars against colonised peoples) began to attract the attention of the FBI. He was viewed as a growing threat, so his phone calls were bugged and his movements tracked. Starting in 1950 efforts to neutralise Robeson were ramped up - the State Department took away his passport; local governments were pressured to deny facilities for concerts across the country; riots broke out at the few concerts he could host. Never one to back down from a fight, Robeson doubled down on all of his anti imperialist, pro communist rhetoric, and when subpoenaed by the United States Senate, refused to answer whether or not he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. The United States had turned Robeson into a pariah - even the NAACP, which had given him their highest honour in 1945, blacklisted him, and his name and image were erased from the records of Rutgers University. While he still enjoyed popularity abroad, he was a non person in his home country.

Paul Robeson on a picket line - Photo Credit: St. Louis Dispatcher, 1947

        In 1958, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union began to ease, and as Black Americans led by Martin Luther King began to organise for civil rights, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote that it was unconstitutional for the State Department to deny Robeson his passport. At this point, Robeson attempted to launch a comeback, first with sold out concerts at Carnegie Hall, and then a return to Europe, ready to pick up where he left off. Now over sixty years old, Robeson took up a busy schedule of performing and acting (including another run of Othello), but the next couple of years began to show serious wear on Robeson. After a tour of Australia and New Zealand, where in addition to performing he advocated for the rights of the aborigines and Maori, Robeson made another trip to the Soviet Union.

        Robeson was physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted when he made it to Moscow. He was disillusioned with the politics in the United States where he and his people were always treated as second class citizens, Europe where he saw the end of imperialism being coupled with sabotage in newly independent states, and the Soviet Union, where former friends had been arrested or killed. In the early hours of 27 March 1962, after a night of wild partying, Paul Robeson attempted suicide by slashing his wrists in his Soviet hotel room. His life was saved through the intervention of a hotel maid.     

        Although he survived the attempt, Robeson was never the same. He would spend the rest of his life between living with various family members and in and out of hospitals, receiving over fifty rounds of electroshock treatments. At the height of the civil rights movement, Robeson was incapacitated. While he occasionally met privately with leaders and entertainers such as John Lewis, Harry Belafonte, and Ella Fitzgerald (a planned meeting with Malcolm X was ruined by the latter’s assassination the same month), he was forcibly retired from public life, most days unable to get out of his pajamas. He died, a broken man, in 1976.

        

        The latter decades of Paul Robeson’s life are a story of human tragedy. Robeson had been a man of infinite energy - both physically and intellectually. An accomplished linguist, he is reported to have been fluent in more than twelve languages, including Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and several African languages, and he sang songs in many of these as a regular part of his concerts. He had hoped by learning these languages to show a common humanity between the peoples of the Earth, and to elevate all people by destroying imperial notions of “backwards people”. The forces of fascism, which he had spent the Second World War proudly helping America destroy, ultimately came after him in his own country. The reason Robeson is not the household name today that he once was is because his ideas were at odds with the police state in which he operated, and the US government used everything in their arsenal to minimise his influence. And, to a large extent, they were successful. Although his former homes of Princeton and New Brunswick have named streets after him, he remains somewhat of an obscure figure - one with a cult following, but one who has been erased from the greater narrative of the civil rights struggle in the United States.

        So I invite you to join the movement to put him back into the narrative. Part of that means watching his movies, and listening to his music. But Robeson’s fight for the international recognition of human rights is resonant to this day, and we honour his memory most by continuing with that fight. Further viewing:

Many of the facts herein come from Martin Duberman's wonderful biography, Paul Robeson (1988).