When Paul Robeson, aged and ailing, was asked on 12 June 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was a member of the Communist party, he replied: “Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?” His mockery and contempt for the interrogation belied the perilous state he was in: his passport had been withdrawn; he was banned from performing in Hollywood or in concert halls; radio stations refused to play his music. That moment, when the singer and actor had both everything and nothing to lose, is one of the emotional highpoints of this nuanced and haunting biography. Robeson, who had always been told to hold his tongue, not to rise to provocation, finally allowed himself to kick back at his tormentors.
He was born in a small wooden shack in Princeton, New Jersey, to a father who had been enslaved in the south. This father, Reverend William Robeson, was a man of no small achievement; after emancipation he studied ancient Greek, Hebrew, mineralogy, trigonometry, political economy and all the elements of a classical education needed to train as a theologian. The weight of his father’s expectation never lifted from Paul’s broad shoulders. But from youthful academic excellence to his college success in debating, basketball and American football, to the praise lavished on his voice and dramatic skills, there seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do.
Jeff Sparrow, an Australian leftist, was drawn to add to the already sizeable documentation of Robeson’s extraordinary life because of the American’s centrality to socialist movements around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Clearing out the small libraries of elderly leftwing activists in Melbourne, he first pulled together the elements of Robeson’s life from dusty biographies. Robeson and the Welsh Miners, Robeson on stage in Moscow with Eisenstein, Robeson serenading the men building the Sydney Opera House; he was both “the world’s most famous Negro” and a man without borders. To bring disparate parts of his story together, Sparrow travelled the world and followed in Robeson’s footsteps from church to grand London mansion.
In one powerful episode, Sparrow visits the small town in North Carolina where William Robeson and his mother, Sabra, were enslaved. “Oh, Sabra! I’ve got her here,” says one of the three female descendants of their tormentors, as she thumbs through an old will that lists “Sabry” as goods along with a cow and a featherbed. The sisters’ desire to investigate the past while also sanitising it is not limited to them: it is an attitude that Sparrow brushes up against in Spain in relation to the civil war and in post-Soviet Russia.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
