Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

As much as anyone in the decades following World War I, Paul Robeson helped to redefine black male identity in America and throughout the world. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, the son of an ex-slave minister father and school teacher mother, Robeson's career achievements seem the raw material of legend. As an actor, he starred on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones , shakespeare's Othello , and Jerome Kern's showboat. On screen, he pioneered the way for black actors in films like song of Freedom (1937) and The Proud Valley (1940), and fought against the dehumanizing black stereotypes commonly portrayed in American films. As an athlete, he won 15 sport letters and All American recognition at Rutgers University and excelled in the early days of professional football. As a singer and recording artist, he was equally at home performing classical arias, African American spirituals, and folk songs, and his renditions of “Old Man River” and “The Ballad for Americans” remain icons of American popular culture. As a linguist and scholar, Robeson spoke multiple languages, earned Phi Beta Kappa status and Rutgers valedictorian honors, and graduated from the Columbia University school of Law. Yet Robeson's most enduring legacy was not as an artist but as a political activist and social thinker. He realized early in his career ... log in or subscribe to read full text