[ Michael Yates reviews Ballad of an American, a newly released
graphic biography of Black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson.
The book gives an uncompromising look at a complicated, passionate
man, wholly dedicated to the cause of liberation.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘BALLAD OF AN AMERICAN’: THE ILLUSTRIOUS LIFE OF PAUL ROBESON,
NEWLY ILLUSTRATED  
[[link removed]]


 

Michael D. Yates
November 1, 2023
Monthly Review
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Michael Yates reviews Ballad of an American, a newly released
graphic biography of Black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson.
The book gives an uncompromising look at a complicated, passionate
man, wholly dedicated to the cause of liberation. _

Paul Robeson seated with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady;
Hon. Walter Nash, New Zealand's Minister to the US and later Prime
Minister; and Mr. George Palmer, the Superintendent in charge of
maintaining the Statue of Liberty, (at left is David Jenkins, a young
New Zealander who was working in the US and who asked the questions on
behalf of listeners for the "Answering New Zealand" radio programs,
aired by The Voice of America c.1942 (Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 2

 

One of my favorite Paul Robeson songs is “Jacob’s Ladder.” It
originated as a slave spiritual, based upon the Biblical story of a
dream that Jacob, the patriarch and leader of the Israelites, once
had. A ladder went from Earth to heaven, with angels traversing up and
down it. For enslaved people, it signified the hope that they could
climb out of slavery and into freedom. When Robeson sings, the
listener can feel this climbing, heading toward freedom, giving the
song not just a spiritual meaning but one hoping for the end of all
oppression, not least that of the working masses to which Robeson
devoted much of his life. The verses and the melody are simple, but
their power is undeniable. It is a song of hope, and it encourages,
even demands, a dedication to realize that hope.

 

Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson
[[link removed]]
By (artist) Sharon Rudahl
by Sharon Rudahl
Edited by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware
Rutgers University Press; 142 pages
Paperback:  $26,96
October 16, 2020
ISBN:  9781978802070

 

Cover of Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson,
edited by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware. (Rutgers University Press)
Download/Print Leaflet
[[link removed]] _(from
Rutgers University Press)_

The book, _Ballad of An American_, is a beautifully rendered graphic
biography that takes readers, especially those not familiar with
Robeson, on an exciting journey through his remarkable life. He rose
like a shooting star, from humble beginnings to the height of
worldwide acclaim—and he fell nearly as rapidly as he shot to
stardom, destroyed by the U.S. government and powerful right-wing
elements after the Second World War. He was deemed a danger to the
white and imperialist ruling class, and with good reason. As we shall
see, what Robeson stood for and acted upon threatened to incite an
uprising by the working class, especially the Black superexploited
part of it.

Robeson was born in 1898, the youngest of five children, in Princeton,
New Jersey. His father, William, born enslaved, was a Presbyterian
minister, and his mother, Maria, was a schoolteacher. Maria, who was
nearly blind, died tragically in a house fire when Robeson was 6 years
old. His father lost his job at an all-Black church in Princeton,
probably for race-related reasons, forcing the family to move. They
took up residence in Somerville, New Jersey, a town much more
working-class than Princeton and with a larger Black population.
William obtained employment, again as a minister, and this time more
secure than in Princeton. Even before he was a teenager, Robeson
showed great promise as a student, and his voice drew attention, so
much so that he sometimes gave sermons in his father’s church. He
excelled in all of his academic subjects.

His elementary school was all Black, but Somerville High was not, and
Robeson felt the slings and arrows of racism. Still, his overall
excellence in everything could not be ignored, and his music teacher
made him soloist of the Glee Club. He starred as Othello in a school
play, a role he would famously reprise many times as an adult, in
venues around the world. He was also a gifted athlete, lettering in
baseball, basketball, track and field, and most notably in football
where his size, skill, grace, and power overshadowed that of everyone
else.

Despite the high school not informing him of the statewide, two-part
(the first taken as a high school junior and the second as a senior)
examination that Rutgers University had initiated, with the winner
receiving a full scholarship, Robeson took both parts on one day in
his senior year. He got the highest score in New Jersey and thus
entered the university, with its campus in New Brunswick, in 1915. It
was then an all-male, private college with about five hundred
students. There he once again excelled in everything he did: in his
studies, in acting, in singing, and in sports, where he earned fifteen
varsity letters, in track and field, baseball, basketball, and
football. Rutgers excelled in football during Robeson’s tenure
there, and he was selected an All-American in 1917 and 1918. He was
one of four Rutgers students to be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and
he was valedictorian of his class.

After graduation, Robeson attended and graduated from, with some
delays to earn a living, Columbia Law School. He played professional
football for three years in the American Professional League,
forerunner to the National Football League. He lived in Harlem just as
the Harlem Renaissance was beginning. With his athletic fame, his
outgoing personality, and his good looks, he was a popular sight on
Harlem’s streets and at parties.

He had a passing acquaintance with a young woman from a prominent
family, Eslanda Goode, a college graduate with a degree in chemistry.
Goode was working as a lab technician when Robeson suffered a football
injury and spent a few days in the hospital where she was employed.
She spent time with him, making sure he was well taken care of, even
making notes for the law school classes he missed. They began to see
each other, and a year later, in August 1921, they were married. He
was 23 years old, and she was 25. They stayed together, through many
ups and downs until Goode’s death in 1965. To say that their
relationship was tumultuous might be an understatement.

Goode continued her work as a chemist for several years after her
marriage to Robeson, but she was keenly interested in promoting his
burgeoning talents, as a singer and then as an actor. She soon began
to devote all her time to his career. The book’s illustrations and
text show what happened. He took roles in theater productions in New
York City and was invited to perform in one of these. Robeson went to
London, where he not only acted but also met the singer, pianist, and
composer Lawrence Benjamin Brown, who became his accompanist and close
friend over the following forty years. Through Brown, Robeson began to
sing the spirituals so important to the Black experience in the United
States from slavery onward.

After London, Robeson returned to the United States, where Goode had
undergone surgery but kept it from him so that he could begin to lay
the foundations for his subsequent career, then to the rest of Europe,
acting and singing. His politics deepened, and he moved steadily to
the left. He took the world by storm, stunning audiences with his fine
acting and heart-stopping singing. He became a global force for the
liberation of Black people in the United States and workers around the
world. He studied African history and languages. He sang in multiple
foreign tongues, everywhere captivating those who met him or watched
him sing and act. He was, in a word, a phenomenon. He visited the
Soviet Union and became a lifelong ally of the world’s first
socialist society. He wanted nothing less than the liberation of all
those exploited, alienated, and robbed of their humanity by
capitalism. To see him among Welsh coal miners, with whom he had a
special affinity, is to witness something very special. The white
miners, blackened by coal dust, showing deep love and affection for a
Black man from the United States, fill us with both wonder and
feelings of the solidarity that should be at the foundations of human
existence.

As the editors of this book, Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware, tell us in
their afterword, Robeson arose to great prominence during the time of
the Popular Front. This was a period stretching roughly from the
election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as U.S. president in 1932 until
the candidacy of the progressive politician and former Vice President
Henry Wallace in 1948. Many radicals, including those in the Communist
Party of the United States, made alliances with liberal Democrats in
support of the New Deal, the mass union organization of industrial
workers, and a united front against fascism in the Second World War,
including support for the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion of that
country in 1941. The proponents of the Front believed that it would
greatly increase the popularity of socialism, and its achievements
would pave the way toward a radical transformation of society. A
person like Robeson, who had great “crossover appeal,” was an icon
of the Popular Front, with fans both white and Black and from every
corner of the Earth. He was a symbol of multiracial and multiethnic
solidarity.

However, under the surface of potential working-class harmony was a
darker reality. While it appeared that right-wing and fascist forces
had been vanquished by the Popular Front and the victory against
fascism in the War, they remained alive and active. Already during the
war, the dominant economic and imperial powers, Great Britain and the
United States (the latter now headed by the reactionary and racist
Harry Truman), were plotting against their ally, the Soviet Union. No
sooner had the war ended than a new, Cold War, began. The Soviet Union
was now public enemy number one, and the nefarious machinations
against it by the dominant capitalist nations hardly need to be
recapitulated. The allies, minus the USSR, quelled Communist political
advances in France, Greece, and Italy.

The newly formed Central Intelligence Agency began to undermine
radical movements all over the world. Domestically, a Republican
Congress enacted, in 1947, the antilabor Taft-Hartley amendments to
the National Labor Relations Act. This law contained a provision
demanding that union officers sign an oath stating that they were not
communists. The two dominant labor federations, the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO), capitulated to this statute, and not long after, the CIO
expelled ten unions, among which were the most militant, with the best
collective bargaining agreements, and with the greatest commitment to
racial and gender equality, as well as the most principled opposition
to growing U.S. imperialism. The CIO also abandoned its Southern union
organizing campaign. Radical labor leaders were also expelled or
marginalized in individual unions, including the United Auto Workers.
They were also hounded by the FBI and federal and state Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC).

After the Second World War, there were massive strikes in the United
States, and a burgeoning civil rights movement was coming to life.
Despite the forces of reaction, there were possibilities for a
labor-civil rights alliance. Robeson would certainly have been an
important catalyst for such an alliance. He had a superlative speaking
ability; his knowledge and connections were enormous; and he was still
popular. What is more, he was a fervent anticolonialist, right when
tens of millions of people living in the colonies of the rich imperial
powers were demanding freedom. No doubt, he could have helped
galvanize support among U.S. workers and the civil rights movement for
the anticolonial movement.

The U.S. government was quick to neutralize Robeson. He met with
Truman in July 1946, urging the president to support anti-lynching
legislation. The racist bomber of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave him
short shrift. Robeson’s friends in the Communist Party were being
prosecuted—persecuted—for their thoughts, as anticommunist
hysteria hit full stride. Robeson supported Wallace’s presidential
run, and after that politician’s landslide defeat, he and those who
supported him were suspect, much like those who fought on the side of
the loyalists in Spain a decade before were now declared to be
“premature antifascists.” When Robeson spoke and sang at
progressive venues in Europe, U.S. newspapers denounced him as
anti-American. His friendship with the Soviet Union was now seen as a
betrayal of his country. Racist mobs began to harass him, most notably
at a concert in Peekskill, New York, where racists and antisemites
attacked his followers in August 1949. Even Jackie Robinson, who
should have known better, denounced Robeson before HUAC. Theaters
refused to book him during a U.S. tour. Then, when he prepared to
travel to Europe to perform, he discovered that his passport had been
revoked. The U.S. government declared that “Robeson’s travel
abroad would be contrary to the interests of the United States.” He
was even denied the right to travel to Canada, which did not then
require a passport. So, in 1952, he gave the first of his famous
open-air concerts in Blaine, Washington, at the Peace Arch on the
border between the two countries.

Goode was compelled to testify before HUAC in 1953, soon after
becoming ill with breast cancer. She had a mastectomy and recovered
rapidly. Robeson also became sick, and for him, this was the beginning
of two decades of mental and physical decline. He underwent various
treatments, including heavy doses of drugs and multiple electric
shocks, as well as psychotherapy (the authors of the book argue that
recent studies of the brains of deceased modern football players
suggest that Robeson may have suffered from Chronic Traumatic
Encephalopathy, the result of concussions suffered while playing
football). Still, he continued to perform, even using
telecommunications to reach audiences abroad. He kept speaking out
against injustices, including at a compelled appearance before HUAC.
His passport was restored by the Supreme Court in 1958, and he was
able to travel overseas. He sang once again in support of the cause of
liberation. However, his health was not good. He could not remember
the lines of Othello, a part he had acted so many times. At home, his
films and recordings disappeared from the marketplace, and though the
McCarthy period ended, anticommunism remained in full force. Robeson
was further castigated for his friendship with the Soviet Union, for
his failure to condemn the persecutions and executions enacted under
Joseph Stalin. Ultimately, he faded from public view, and he was even
marginalized by the more militant wings of the Black freedom struggle.
His film and stage roles were dismissed as stereotypically subservient
Black men.

Goode’s cancer returned, and she died in 1965. Robeson was too
distraught to attend her funeral. He hung on for ten more years, cared
for in Philadelphia by his sister Marian. Already toward the end of
his life, he received honors, including in 1967 the opening of the
Paul Robeson Cultural Center on the Rutgers campus. After his death,
many other honors were bestowed upon him; the U.S. Postal Service even
issued a Robeson stamp.

This review began with a Robeson song, so it is fitting to end with
one. In 1945, a short film, _The House I Live In_, was made to
counter post-Second World War antisemitism in the United States.
Written by Communist Party member Albert Maltz, sent to prison in 1950
as one of the “Hollywood Ten,” persecuted for their refusal to
testify before HUAC in 1947, the movie featured Frank Sinatra singing
the title song. The song was written by Abe Meeropol, who used the
assumed name Lewis Allan. He was the adoptive father of the children
of the executed radicals, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as well as the
writer of “Strange Fruit,” the gut-wrenching song about the
lynching of Black people. To people of a certain age, the lyrics of
“The House I Live In”—especially when sung by Robeson, the man
who made it famous—strike an emotional chord. They reflect more
hopeful times: the period of the Popular Front.

The afterword, perhaps unwittingly, gives the impression that, since
Robeson was a product of the Front, a modern version of the Popular
Front is needed now. Perhaps such a development would provide the
political conditions in which Robeson could regain the prominence he
once had. Because despite all the accolades he has received, he is not
well-known among those who have turned to the left in the past few
decades. However, it is unlikely that a new Popular Front will arise.
What we need now is an openly radical movement, one aimed at
substantive equality in all spheres of life, a planned degrowth in
terms of production, a frontal assault on structural racism and
patriarchy, and a refusal to participate in any way in the imperial
machinations of the United States. Alliances of those dismissed today
as on the far left with liberals and social democrats will be of
limited values, given that these political entities are the very ones
dismissing those of us who have stayed the course and demanded the
complete annihilation of capitalism.

Such a radical movement, of the world’s workers and peasants, is
what Robeson embraced. It is in such a movement that he will once
again stand out as perhaps the greatest radical artist in history. For
it is not just his astonishing, multidimensional talent that made him
great and worthy of our admiration, but his unyielding commitment to a
world in which freedom thrives because necessity has been conquered.
If this book helps readers see this, that despite his all-too-human
flaws, his life is a light toward which we should all travel, then it
will have more than done its job.

2023 [[link removed]], Volume 75, Number 06
(November 2023)
[[link removed]]

* Paul Robeson
[[link removed]]
* African Americans
[[link removed]]
* African American artists
[[link removed]]
* African American athletes
[[link removed]]
* Graphic novel
[[link removed]]
* Comics and graphic novels
[[link removed]]
* progressive politics
[[link removed]]
* Cold War
[[link removed]]
* McCarthyism
[[link removed]]
* U.S. history
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]