On the evening of Feb. 4, 1932, an eager crowd gathered at the Hoyt Sherman Place auditorium for a recital of spirituals by a man whose bass-baritone voice was already legendary. Paul Robeson was an all-American football player, Columbia-educated lawyer, and star of both a hit musical and a West End Shakespeare production.
A Des Moines Tribune writer described Robeson as a “magnificent figure in meticulous dress” with a “boyish grin and his sly, informal and humorous singing style.” Accompanist Lawrence Brown, who is credited with encouraging Robeson to pursue singing on the concert stage, joined him for at least two songs.
Among those in attendance was Harlan Miller, “one of Iowa’s best-known newspapermen” who started the “Over the Coffee” column in 1925 before becoming city editor for the Des Moines Register the following year.
“His singing of ‘Were You There?’ was as deep a religious experience as any two of Billy Sunday’s sermons,” Miller writes, referring to the Ames-born baseball player turned revival tent preacher. “‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel!’ evoked a moment of awesome silence followed by fervent applause which testifies more eloquently than Sunday school statistics that we are still a Biblical folk.”
The Tribune was especially taken by an encore in which Robeson, who is said to have learned as many as a dozen languages in his lifetime, “reached across an ocean and a continent into the somber soul of Russia.”
“This song, a touching and simple prayer in its melody, was a flash revealing the linked fates of the Negro and the Russian serf even in the unintelligibility of the Russian words.”
Robeson told the Tribune, “Some day there will be a great Negro composer, or a great composition out of Negro music, but not while Brahms and Wagner are followed as models by American composers.”
The Tribune’s headline read, “City Pleased By Robeson: Spiritual Verses of Negro Dramatic,” while the Register reported, “Robeson’s Voice Catches Heart: Each Spiritual is an Emotional Rite.” Sadly, there are no film or audio records of the performance, nor a set list.
“Each song reached a climax of dramatic effect, always finely and delicately drawn, never gross and exaggerated,” the Tribune reported. “With his dramatic craftsmanship, Robeson possesses a remarkably precise enunciation which prevents any listener’s failure to grasp a point of humor and humility.”
Fellow sonorous-voiced actor James Earl Jones saw Robeson when he was young, standing in the back of a sold-out auditorium.
“I could feel his magnetic energy coming through his voice and rock my body,” Jones recalled in a 2007 documentary on Robeson’s lost legacy. “I could feel a rocking of my body.”
Paul Robeson was born the youngest of five children in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, son of a formerly enslaved clergyman. It was in Reverend William Drew Robeson’s church where the young Robeson learned many of the songs that would become part of his concert repertoire, and gave him his earliest lessons on how to speak and engage an audience.
“What my father taught me way back: Compete with your own brains, your own talents,” Robeson later said in an interview.
Robeson had suffered the brutal indignities of racism since childhood, which followed him to Rutgers University as one of only two Black students. At 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds, he was considered a born athlete. But when he tried out for the football team in 1915, the white players ganged up on him, breaking his nose and dislocating his shoulder.
Undeterred, Robeson returned to the field. He knocked down three of his attackers, ensuring they never laid another hand on him. He went on to be one of the top-ranked players in the country two years in a row, becoming an All-American and bona fide football star.
Valedictorian of his undergraduate class, Robeson attended Columbia University, where he obtained a law degree. During his time at Columbia, he was drawn into the world of amateur theater.
The New York City legal firm of Rutgers alum Louis Stotesbury, who specialized in real estate law, hired Robeson in 1923. What was supposed to be a promising legal career was stalled once again by Robeson’s skin color. Fearing that white clients and judges would be “uncomfortable” with a Black lawyer, the firm had Robeson working behind the scenes, preparing briefs and other assignments where he wouldn’t have to appear in a courtroom. When a white secretary refused to take dictation from him and hurled a racial epithet, enough was enough.
From that day on, the promising young attorney made sure he would always be out front and center.
Robeson turned to singing and acting, appearing in playwright Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings and earning critical acclaim for his performance as Brutus Jones in a 1924 revival of O’Neill’s political satire The Emperor Jones. O’Neill personally invited Robeson to play the lead, a train porter who manipulates his way to power over a Caribbean country. Robeson reprised the role for the 1933 film version.
Robeson would act in various stage and eventually film productions, including work by groundbreaking independent Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Robeson’s earliest roles on celluloid were silent, so his extraordinary voice couldn’t be heard, but he retained a strong screen presence that made him impossible to ignore.
Robeson was hand-picked by composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein for the role of Joe in their new musical Show Boat, based on Edna Ferber’s bestselling 1926 novel of the same name. The show debuted on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1927 and opened in London’s West End in 1928. Its most popular number, “Ol’ Man River,” became a major hit, and is the song most associated with Robeson’s legacy.
Ferber — whose childhood in Ottumwa, Iowa, partially inspired Show Boat — saw Robeson perform in a 1932 revival in New York.
“I have never seen an ovation like that given any figure of the stage, the concert hall, or the opera,” Ferber wrote of the show. “It was completely spontaneous, whole-hearted, and thrilling …. That audience stood up and howled. They applauded and shouted and stamped …. The show stopped. He sang it again. The show stopped. They called him back again and again. Other actors came out and made motions and their lips moved, but the bravos of the audience drowned all other sounds.”
Some of the song’s lyrics, however, troubled Robeson and other Black audiences, plagued with the racial stereotypes he spent his whole life trying to dismantle.
In 1930, Robeson starred in the title role of William Shakespeare’s Othello at the Savoy Theatre in London, becoming one of the first Black actors to play the part on a major English or American stage. The Davenport Democrat and Leader on July 31, 1932, perceptively noted Robeson’s casting was “a stunt not so likely in these bigoted United States,” where white actors in blackface were standard.
“I’m conscious of the fact that I’m a Negro actor playing in London,” Robeson said in an interview. “If I fail, not only is it my failure, it’s the failure of 18 million American Negroes. It’s the failure of 200 million people on the continent of Africa, and wherever I go, therefore, you sort of reach beyond yourself.”
The proceeds from the 1933 revival of All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings went to Jewish refugees at the urging of British actress and writer Marie Seton. Robeson later credited this as an early part of his political awakening. At Seton’s insistence, Robeson and his wife Eslanda traveled to the Soviet Union in 1934, where many artists saw a new world being born. At a stopover in Berlin to change trains, Robeson had to stand his ground against a gang of uniformed Nazi goons to allow his group to catch their train.
Robeson was impressed by the lack of racism he encountered in the Soviet Union, and remarked, “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life. I walk in full human dignity.” Similar remarks would be misquoted by the press throughout his career, and would later have dire consequences.
When Hollywood adapted Show Boat into a feature film released in 1936, Robeson insisted the n-slurs in the lyrics be changed. He prevailed, and the worst line was softened to, “Darkies all work on the Mississippi, darkies all work while the white folk play.”
In later performances, he altered the lyrics again, stripping the song of its more derogatory elements to reflect his determination in the face of oppression. “You gets a little drunk, and you lands in jail” was changed to, “You shows a little grit and you lands in jail,” and, “Tired of living and afraid of dying,” became, “I must keep fighting until I’m dying.”
In 1937, the elected government of the Republic of Spain was fighting for its life against the insurrection led by General Francisco Franco (supported financially and militarily by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). Robeson went to Spain in support of the Republic’s soldiers and the international volunteers who had joined the fight against fascism. He performed songs to boost morale among the Republican forces in the bloody civil war, which Franco and the fascists eventually won, leading to a 36-year-long dictatorship in Spain.
On Nov. 5, 1939, Robeson sang “Ballad for Americans,” written by lyricist John La Touche and music by Earl Robinson, on the CBS radio show The Pursuit of Happiness. Originally titled “The Ballad for Uncle Sam,” the song was written for the Federal Theatre Project production “Sing for Your Supper” that opened in April earlier that year. Robeson’s rendition, recorded by RCA Victor in 1940, was a hit with the public and became an anthem of equality and unity during the U.S. entry into World War II.
Robeson rallied Americans for the Allied cause, singing to packed crowds and selling war bonds. After the war against fascism and imperialism ended in a victory for the Allies, the U.S. government turned to what was perceived as the threat of the Soviet Union, the so-called “Red Menace.”
Robeson returned to Iowa to campaign for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace in the Democrat’s home state for the 1948 campaign. This time, Iowans were singing a different tune.
The crowds that once warmly embraced Robeson turned a cold shoulder to both him and his candidate. Both men were red-baited as “commies” or “commie sympathizers” for their progressive views, especially their call for peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union. The men were denied entry into several venues.
On April 13, 1948, Robeson spoke to a crowd at the Waterloo CIO labor hall on behalf of Wallace, touching on many subjects ranging from the failure of the two-party system to the need to oppose the Taft-Hartley Bill, which weakened the rights of workers.
“I have known what it feels like to fight ever since I played football in New Jersey,” Robeson said, according to the Waterloo Daily Courier. “I have become part of the new party because I think it stands with the rank and file of labor.”
In other parts of the country, particularly in the Deep South, Wallace and supporters were greeted more violently, with constant threats to their safety and well-being. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations into the alleged “Communist Conspiracy” soon festered into McCarthyism. In 1950, the U.S. State Department revoked Robeson’s passport, claiming he was a danger to national security, leading to nearly a decade-long battle by Robeson to get it back. Years later, he was subpoenaed by the committee to testify before Congress in a public hearing.
When Robeson appeared on July 12, 1956, he challenged the constitutionality of the HUAC investigation, politely reminding them he was an attorney. Refusing to name names, he invoked the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Goaded by a committee member who asked Robeson why he didn’t stay in Russia, Robeson, never one to suffer fools gladly, calmly but firmly answered:
“Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I’m going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear? I am for peace with the Soviet Union and I am for peace with China, and I am not for peace or friendship with the fascist Franco, and I am not for peace with fascist Nazi Germans, and I am for peace with decent people in the world.”
Robeson got his passport back, but the damage had been done. He was blacklisted from the entertainment industry and from public life. Even his alma mater Rutgers scrubbed his name from the football records, although it has since been restored.
The controversy took its toll on him professionally, as well as his health. The glory days of his career far behind him, Robeson died on Jan. 23, 1976.
Robeson chose his calling carefully, as he reminds us in his “The Artist Must Take Sides” speech from 1937.
“The challenge must be taken up. Time does not wait. The course of history can be changed, but not halted. Fascism fights to destroy the culture which society has created; created through pain and suffering through desperate toil, but with unconquerable will and lofty vision. Progressive and democratic mankind fight not alone to save the cultural heritage accumulated through the ages, but also fight today to prevent a war of unimaginable atrocity from engulfing the world.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2026 issue.
