Paul Robeson
From time to time I used to ask my new, incoming students if they had heard of Paul Robeson. Each time there was silence – no one had heard of him. I found this strange if not disconcerting. Paul Robeson was, of course, the acclaimed American college football player, a star actor and opera singer. He was a towering international figure who had dedicated a lot of his life to the causes of the working class, civil rights across the world, and of the African American.
I became aware of him in my teens listening to his powerful bass/ baritone voice on the radio. He was a popular performer on record request programmes. This awareness grew while at art college and when, in 1960, he was billed to sing at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh I managed to get a couple of the last tickets in a sold-out event. I know these were some of the last tickets because they were for the choir stalls at the back of the stage which meant that I was looking at his back for the duration of the concert. However, I was in the front row which made it easy for me at the end of the concert to go up to him and get him to sign the back of my ticket. I still have it. One song he sang was about ‘the Sharpeville Shootings’, a recent massacre of black South Africans by the Apartheid regime. This was typical of the man and a feature of his whole life’s work.
I only learned, much, much later that this performance was part of a world tour by Robeson, the first for five years during which time he had been held in the USA in internal exile. His passport had been confiscated by the US Government. During these years Robeson still managed to give concerts to the world.
While staying in Britain in the Thirties he had befriended many trade unionists and built a special relationship with Welsh miners. He had grown to love Welsh singing and especially the male voice choirs which abounded. He sang their songs often in the Welsh language as he did with songs in many other languages. Not to be outdone by the US authorities he organised a concert for the Welsh miners using radio telephone equipment. It was reported that around 5000 miners turned up in Porthcawl to hear him sing through a loudspeaker set in the middle of the stage. He repeated this way of performing to his fans on several other occasions. However, for me the most dramatic performance took place on the US border with Canada. The unions in British Columbia invited him to come to a place called ‘The Peace Arch’ and with Robeson on the US side and the audience in Canada he delivered his concert.
In January 1976 I was in Chicago when it was announced that Robeson had died. I was on a lecture tour while also documenting public art works in the USA. I was being hosted by the Public Art Workshop that had produced a number of political murals involving local communities and based in the West side of the city. It’s founder was Mark Rogovin who later founded The Peace Museum in the city. Mark’s father was a well-known socialist photographer. ( He had, remarkably, made a suite of photographs of Fife miners.) In this milieu of social activism I found myself taken by a group of people, communists, if not by name, to a hastily arranged event in a theatre to mark Robeson’s passing. It was a memorable night of songs and speeches.