Paul Robeson
(1898-1976)
There are people whose lives like underwater mountain ranges take on a depth which contains social history and multiple stories. In Paul Robeson is the American tragedy of an artist of conscience. An American Socrates who also gets banished from Athens for his politics in Joe McCarthy's America. When they threw stones at him at a workers' rally in Peekskill, New York in 1959, the state troopers never raised a pinkie. Like Dubois, they will try to break him of his spirit. They almost do. Denying him his civil rights and right to travel. It will be a slow death. His versions of "Old Man River" and "Ballad for Americans" are the truest national anthems of America that have ever been recorded. In his multiple lives as scholar, All-American athlete, concert artist, stage actor, recording and film star, few figures of this century have spoken out in defense of people of color and global consciousness with such eloquence as Paul Robeson. His voice was the texture of redwoods, those immense and ancient trees that John Muir discovered overlooking the cliffs of the blue-green Pacific ocean.