A singer, actor, civil rights activist, lawyer, athlete, scholar, author,—Robeson was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s and 1940s. Robeson was also a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man, later in his life, widely vilified and censored for his frankness and unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful. He learned to speak more than 20 languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last 25 years of his life his was "a great whisper and a greater silence in black America."
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson was spared most of the daily brutalities suffered by African Americans around the turn of the century. However, his family was not totally free from hardship. Robeson's mother died from a stove-fire accident when he was six. His father, a runaway slave who became a pastor, was removed from an early ministerial position. Nonetheless, from his father Robeson learned diligence and an "unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press of racism and poverty." These characteristics, Stuckey noted, defined Robeson's approach in his beliefs and actions throughout his life.
Having excelled in both scholastics and athletics as a youth, Robeson received a scholarship to Rutgers College (now Rutgers University), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and chosen valedictorian in his senior. He earned varsity letters in four sports and was named Rutgers' first All-American in football. Fueled by his class prophecy to be "the leader of the colored race in America," Robeson went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University, supporting himself by playing professional football on the weekends. After graduation he obtained a position with a New York law firm only to have his career halted, as recalled in Martin Baulm Duberman's Paul Robeson, when a stenographer refused to take down a memo, saying, "I never take dictation from a nigger." Sensing this episode as indicative of the climate of the law, Robeson left the bar.
Who was Paul Robeson?
