An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 7/18/2020
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"We ask for nothing that is not ours by right, and herein lies the great moral power of our demand."
Born in 1898 to a storied lineage (a maternal great-great-grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, founded the Free African Society in 1787; and his own father William had been born a slave in 1844 but escaped through the Underground Railroad), Paul Robeson originally set his sights on athletics --he was only the third black student to ever be accepted at Rutgers and the first to play on their football team, for which he endured a great many threats and indignities. In 1919 he made the All-America list AND was named valedictorian of his graduating class. However acting and music later took his attention, and after a brief flirtation with a law career he eventually landed a role in 1924's All God's Chillun Got Wings. His astonishingly good looks and his deep bass voice brought him and his wife Eslanda ("Essie") to New York, London, and Spain, China, and on several occasions to the USSR. Naturally this last destination came up years later when McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists entered the public lexicon.
Robeson's recording and stage/film career came to an abrupt halt in the 1950's, from which it never truly recovered. However it can be asserted that was merely the beginning of his life as a civil rights activist. As he would later recount in his autobiography, Here I Stand: "I care nothing --less than nothing-- about what the lords of the land, the Big White Folks, think of me and my ideas. For more than 10 years they have persecuted me in every way they could --by slander and mob violence, by denying me the right to practice my profession as an artist, by withholding my right to travel abroad. To these, the real Un-Americans, I merely say: 'All right, I don't like you either!' "
A one-man play based on Robeson's life, later adapted for television, was performed by James Earl Jones in 1978. Rutgers inducted Robeson into their football Hall Of Fame in 1995, nineteen years after his death.
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