Paul Robeson was a canary in the coal mine long before Jeremy Corbyn

Paul Robeson, the African American singer, actor and activist (April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976), married a woman who was part-Jewish, had a Jewish daughter-in-law, and spoke and sang Hebrew and Yiddish. He would have had several Jewish friends who fled Anti-Semitism in Europe and the USA to join the decades-long wave of migration to the burgeoning state of Israel. However, when his political views became too dangerous for the establishment, they came for him.

Paul Robeson: political awakenings

As a descendant of enslaved Africans (his father had escaped from a North Carolina plantation), he empathised with Jews’ search for sanctuary in Palestine, just as waves of his people migrated from the Deep South to the relative safety of the northern United States and Canada.

Old Testament stories that were canonised in the spirituals he learned from his ancestors and sang so beautifully were married in Robeson’s remarkable bass voice and repertoire to the histories and traditions of the two peoples, giving his renditions a poignancy and authenticity unmatched by few (if any) before or since:

Oh don’t you want to go / to dat gospel feast /

Dat promised land where all is peace?

Robeson’s love of Democratic Socialism and Communism was sparked in 1928 when, during a run of Showboat in London, he came across Welsh miners who had walked all the way to the capital to highlight the plight of their exploitation by capitalist bosses.

This encounter disabused him of the notion that only Black people suffered under capitalism, and developed in him the belief that Socialism was the only system under which Africans, other colonised peoples and even white working people could achieve freedom and equality.

Shining

Paul’s star shone brightest between 1939 (when he first sang Ballad for Americans to widespread acclaim) and 1943 (when he performed Othello in what remains the longest-ever run of a Shakespearean role on Broadway), while being a hugely sought-after concert performer and film actor on both sides of the Atlantic. As his Socialism solidified, he used his platform to campaign on issues ranging from trade unionism, racial justice at home, anti-colonialist struggles abroad, and maintaining friendship with the Soviet Union, notwithstanding the post-WWII onset of the Cold War.

It seems that his politics didn’t adversely affect his popularity as an artist for a while, but the authorities in the USA and Britain were very concerned about him espousing his political views repeatedly from the stage, and had him surveilled from about 1941, if not before.

While on tour in Europe in 1949, things took a decisive, ominous turn for Robeson.

The establishment turns

Attending the Paris Peace Conference that April, he made a speech in which he pointed out the absurdity of African Americans being asked prepare to fight against the Soviet Union (where he had experienced no racism) despite remaining second-class citizens in their own country.

This presented the administration with the opportunity to begin the demonisation of this national treasure. His speech was distorted in the American press, convincing the public that he had said African Americans shouldn’t join the armed forces, had expressed greater love for the Soviet Union than for his own country, and compared US policies to those of Hitler and Goebbels. Despite having helped raise money and morale for the war effort, and spent the war years touring US bases singing for troops, Robeson was transformed from national hero to Public Enemy #1 in the space of a few short months.

An outdoor concert he had been booked to give back home to raise funds for the Civil Rights Congress on August 27, 1949 was violently disrupted by vigilantes and had to be abandoned before Robeson got to the ground, outside Peekskill, New York State.

The following week, supported by many trade unions who organised guards for him and the crowd, the concert went ahead, on September 4^th. It was however followed by another riot, where the mob, encouraged by the local police, attacked concert-goers as they left. In addition to numerous vehicles being destroyed, there were many injured, with one Black man losing an eye.

Love Song

Coming across this story in my research for my first play, Call Mr. Robeson, I realised that the Peekskill Riots was an extremely important but greatly underappreciated episode in American history, with Robeson being the crucible in which the combination of anti-Communism, anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism violently coalesced to reveal the USA as being as close to fascism as it had ever been.

Although it forms one of the highlights of the stage play, I had always thought it warranted separate dramatisation. Various ideas and events finally crystalised in an audio play, Paul Robeson’s Love Song.

One of its inspirations was the role the media played in manufacturing a fake ‘Anti-Semitism crisis’ in Britain’s Labour Party as a means of preventing Jeremy Corbyn from becoming UK Prime Minister. The political assassination of this overly-decent man, I argue, paved the way for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ongoing rampage around the Middle East.

Set in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020 during the protests that followed the near-fatal police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, a pair of middle-aged siblings discover a unique Paul Robeson record in their late mother’s house, suggesting a romantic link between their grandmother and Robeson, dating back to the time of the Peekskill Riots. The open display of alt-Right Anti-Semitism in Charlottesville (“Jews will not replace us”) makes them recall their mother recounting what she had observed in the 1940s.

Robeson: gone but not forgotten

Written and recorded during the pandemic on basic microphones and laptops in bedrooms and kitchens on both sides of the Atlantic, Paul Robeson’s Love Song was premiered on his birthday, April 9, 2021. It remains relevant five years later, during the even-more-dangerous Trump era 2.0.

Also relevant are these words from Mr. Robeson himself from 1949: at an Anti-Apartheid rally in London, he noted that in South Africa, nationalists had succeeded in setting Africans against Indians in Natal, warning that “… they have provoked a fratricidal clash which unless checked very quickly may have the same tragic consequences for the non-European people of South Africa as the Arab-Jewish conflicts had for the people of Palestine.”

Tayọ Aluko is a playwright, actor and singer based in Liverpool. His stage play, Coleridge-Taylor of Freetown, will be performed in London in May.

Tickets to listen to Paul Robeson’s Love Song between April 29 and May 1 and then participate in an online Q&A with the author and some of the creatives can be purchased here.

Featured image via the Canary