Paul Robeson was born on this day, April 9th, 1898 making him 110 years old today. Robeson was an astonishingly accomplished man. Only the third black student ever admitted to Rutgers University at the tender age of 17 he was in the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity there, graduated a four-letter man in athletics and led his class as the Valedictorian. From there he went to Columbia University where he earned his Law Degree. But his commanding voice and stage presence soon found him fame. Most memorably in Show Boat, singing Ol' Man River, and in Eugene O'Neil's The Emperor Jones.
In 1930 he starred as Othello in a marred London production at the Savoy Theatre with Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona. It's producer, Maurice Browne, cast himself as Iago and to make things even worse, brought in his wife, Ellen van Volkenburg, as the director. By all accounts both he and she were incompetent and brought the whole production down. Ashcroft called Volkenburg "a pretentious dud". Apparently Volkenburg had the set designer cram the stage so full of ornate props and set pieces that the whole thing rustled and made noise that wouldn't die down after set changes. Robeson was the only one with a strong enough voice to be heard over it.
But still, he was noticed. The London Observer's critic Ivor Brown compared Robeson and the idiot producer Browne thus: Robeson was "an oak... a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break." Next to him, Browne was "a gimlet". To make that even funnier here's Merriam-Webster's first definition of a gimlet: "a small tool."
Controversy raged of course with Robeson being cast in the play. To her everlasting credit, Peggy Ashcroft had this to say in an interview in 1930 during the production: "Racial prejudices are foolish at the best of times but I think it positively absurd that they should even come into consideration where acting is concerned. Ever so many people have asked whether I mind being kissed in some of the scenes. It seems to me silly. Of course I do not mind. I see no difference in being kissed by Mr. Robeson than being kissed by any other man." She didn't become a Dame for nothing people.
Robeson would have to wait until 1943 before he would be allowed to play Othello in the United 
States, although by then it was a much better productions and the reviews were raves. It ran on Broadway from 1943 through 1945 with Jose Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. But the controversy only grew. Robeson was passionately outspoken about human rights throughout the world and civil rights for Black Americans here at home. He was harassed for having Communist sympathies and eventually did almost all of his performing in Europe. His last performance of Othello came in 1959, at the Stratford-on-Avon in England.
Although he did not have much of a film career and his acting was better suited to the stage it must be said that there are few other figures in film history who did more to elevate the perception of the African American actor than Paul Robeson. Some other early figures come to mind, most notably Rex Ingram, but none of them, not even Ingram, had the erudite lineage of Robeson. While future actors like Sidney Poitier receive due credit for breaking down the color line in American film, Paul Robeson has not received nearly enough. And he did it at a time when it was a hundred times more difficult to have an African American character portrayed with dignity on the screen.
Robeson spent most of his career abroad due to prejudice and red-baiting at home but he always loved his country of birth and returned in the late fifties. Because of his intelligence, erudition, athleticism and artistic talents he could be said to represent all the good that America has to offer. He died in the year of this country's Bicentennial, 1976 in Philadelphia, PA. Somehow, that just seems right.
