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Letters, Arts & Sciences · Music

Paul Robeson

1898 – 1976

Bass-baritone, actor, athlete, and activist; Rutgers All-American whose global stardom was curtailed by Cold War blacklisting.

Paul Robeson in a head-and-shoulders photograph by Gordon Parks, June 1942
Gordon Parks, Office of War Information, June 1942. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Paul Robeson was a two-time All-American football player, a Columbia-trained lawyer, one of the most admired concert singers of his generation, and an acclaimed Othello on the London and Broadway stages. He used that fame to attack segregation, lynching, and colonialism, and his refusal to renounce his left-wing politics made him a principal target of the Cold War: the State Department cancelled his passport in 1950, and his career in the United States never recovered.

At a Glance

Born
9 April 1898, Princeton, New Jersey
Died
23 January 1976, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Birth name
Paul Leroy Robeson
Known for
“Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat (London, 1928); Othello on Broadway (1943–44); testimony before HUAC (1956); Here I Stand (1958)
Fields
Music · Civil Rights · Sport
Era
Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Robeson was born on 9 April 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest child of the Reverend William Drew Robeson, who had escaped slavery in Martin County, North Carolina, as a teenager and became a Presbyterian pastor in Princeton, and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, a teacher from the prominent Bustill family of Philadelphia. His mother died in 1904, and his father raised the children in a household that prized scholarship, public speaking, and religious conviction.

In 1915 Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers College, where he was the first Black student to play on the football team. He earned fifteen varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track, and was twice named an All-American end (1917 and 1918). He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the Cap and Skull honor society, and in 1919 he graduated as valedictorian of his class.

He entered law school, finishing at Columbia Law School in 1923, and paid his way in part by playing professional football in the young National Football League for the Akron Pros (1921) and the Milwaukee Badgers (1922). In 1921 he married Eslanda Goode, then a laboratory technician at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital and later an anthropologist and writer, who became his business manager and a political partner. He joined a New York law firm but quit after a stenographer refused to take dictation from him because he was Black, and turned to the stage.

Life and Work

Robeson’s acting career began with the Provincetown Players in New York, where in 1924 he appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings and, from 5 May 1924, in a revival of The Emperor Jones. By 1925, with the pianist and arranger Lawrence Brown, he was giving recitals devoted entirely to spirituals and songs by Black composers, an unusual program for a concert singer at the time and the foundation of his recording and recital career. In the 1928 London production of Show Boat at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he sang “Ol’ Man River,” the song with which he remained identified for the rest of his life, later rewriting its words to turn resignation into defiance.

Robeson lived largely in London from the late 1920s to 1939. In 1930 he played Othello at the Savoy Theatre opposite Peggy Ashcroft, the first Black actor to take the role on the London stage since Ira Aldridge in the nineteenth century. He made thirteen films between the 1920s and early 1940s, among them The Emperor Jones (1933), Show Boat (1936), and the Welsh mining drama The Proud Valley (1940). His years abroad radicalized him: he met students and activists from the colonies, visited the Soviet Union, and in January 1938 traveled to Spain to sing for the International Brigades fighting Franco. In 1937 he co-founded the organization that became the Council on African Affairs, which he chaired as it lobbied for African independence.

Back in the United States, he opened as Othello on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre on 19 October 1943, with José Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, under the direction of Margaret Webster. The production ran for 296 performances, still the longest run of any Shakespeare play on Broadway, and then toured the country. In 1945 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal. He used the stage and his concerts to campaign against lynching and segregation.

As the Cold War deepened, Robeson’s praise for the Soviet Union and his refusal to say whether he was a Communist made him a target. The FBI kept him under surveillance for decades. On 27 August 1949 a mob attacked concertgoers arriving for his outdoor concert near Peekskill, New York, and when the concert was held on 4 September, departing audience members were stoned and beaten while police looked on; more than 140 people were injured. In 1950 the State Department cancelled his passport, confining him to the United States, where concert halls, record companies, and broadcasters shut him out. His income collapsed. He accepted the Stalin Peace Prize, awarded in 1952.

Summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee on 12 June 1956, Robeson refused to answer questions about his politics, lectured the committee on the treatment of Black Americans, and told its members that they were the un-Americans. In 1958 he published Here I Stand, written with Lloyd L. Brown, his only book. That June the Supreme Court ruled in Kent v. Dulles that the State Department could not deny passports on the basis of political belief, and Robeson recovered his passport and left for Europe and Australia.

Legacy

Illness ended Robeson’s performing career in the early 1960s. He returned to the United States in 1963 and spent his final years largely out of public view in West Philadelphia. He died in Philadelphia on 23 January 1976 at the age of 77.

For decades after the blacklist, Robeson was largely written out of popular histories of American sport and entertainment; Rutgers restored his standing with an honorary doctorate in 1973, and the College Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1995. Scholars now treat him as a central figure linking the Harlem Renaissance, the Popular Front, and the African independence movements, and as a case study of how the Cold War punished Black dissent. Rutgers’ Paul Robeson Cultural Center and the many schools and institutions bearing his name reflect that reassessment, as does the continuing debate over his loyalty to the Soviet Union long after the crimes of the Stalin era were known.

For Educators

Paul Robeson’s career shows how fame could amplify a Black artist’s protest against segregation and colonialism, and how the Cold War state could use passports, blacklists, and surveillance to silence dissent. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 9 April 1898 Born in Princeton, New Jersey.
  2. 1919 Graduates from Rutgers as valedictorian after two All-American football seasons.
  3. 1923 Earns his law degree from Columbia Law School.
  4. 5 May 1924 Opens in The Emperor Jones with the Provincetown Players.
  5. 3 May 1928 London Show Boat opens at Drury Lane, with Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River.”
  6. 1930 Plays Othello at the Savoy Theatre, London, opposite Peggy Ashcroft.
  7. January 1938 Sings for the International Brigades in Spain.
  8. 19 October 1943 Othello opens on Broadway; runs a record 296 performances.
  9. 1950 State Department cancels his passport.
  10. 12 June 1956 Testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
  11. 1958 Publishes Here I Stand; recovers his passport.
  12. 23 January 1976 Dies in Philadelphia.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Paul Robeson with Lloyd L. Brown, Here I Stand (New York: Othello Associates, 1958).
  2. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
  3. Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Rutgers University, “Paul Robeson.” Link
  4. West Philadelphia Collaborative History, University of Pennsylvania, “Paul Robeson, Part II: The Arena of Human Rights and Dignity.” Link
  5. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry, “Othello — Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, José Ferrer, and Others (1943).” Link

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Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Paul Robeson. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/paul-robeson/
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Black-History.com Editors. “Paul Robeson.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/paul-robeson/.
Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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