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HOW BRITAIN MADE PAUL ROBESON A SOCIALIST  
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Taylor Dorrell
April 9, 2024
Tribune
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_ Pioneering black singer Paul Robeson was born on this day (April 9)
in 1898. One of America’s great radical figures, it was his
encounters with Britain’s labour movement which inspired his
socialist and anti-imperialist politics. _

American actor and singer Paul Robeson (1898 - 1976) leaves Waterloo
Station in London, to catch the 'Majestic' boat train, 25th September
1935., Photo by Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

 

On a cool London day in 1928, the towering African-American actor and
singer Paul Robeson sat down for a much-anticipated lunch. Seated with
him were his new acquaintances: a Miss Douglas, the Irish playwright
Bernard Shaw, and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, the wife of American President
Calvin Coolidge. Robeson witnessed a heated debate ensue between Shaw
and Coolidge. The topic was socialism. ‘When Shaw asked me what I
thought of Socialism,’ Robeson recalled later, ‘I hadn’t
anything to say. I’d never really thought about Socialism.’ 

Born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, Paul Robeson
[[link removed]] was at
that moment in the opening stages of an acting and singing career that
would win him almost unparalleled international fame. This fame came
in part due to the variety of his talents. ‘I never failed to be
amazed at the combination in one person of great strength, great
tenderness and great intellectuality,’ the communist folk singer
Pete Seeger wrote of Robeson. He exhibited the great strength of a
professional football player, the tenderness of a stage actor, and the
intellectuality of a lawyer who, despite racial prejudice, had
finished at the top of his class. As a Black man from a segregated
country, the son of a freed slave with ancestors who were forced from
their homeland, Robeson fought against the novel ideas of success that
America had instilled in him, opting instead for what he described as
building ‘the richest and highest development of one’s own
potential.’ 

The part of this monumental life conducted in London, from the late
1920s through the 1930s, would stir Robeson personally,
professionally, and above all politically. As the twentieth century
progressed, he would become one of the most outspoken advocates for
socialism — a politics that would result in the US revoking his
passport, blacklisting him, and purging his name from the history
books.

The Most Respected American in London

Robeson was in London in 1928 for the opening of _Show Boat_ at the
Drury Lane Theatre. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical
based on Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name included a character,
Joe, written for a specific lofty Black actor. Due to scheduling
conflicts, Robeson was noticeably absent from the first showing on
Broadway, but on Drury Lane, his deep, thundering voice sang out his
now-famous rendition of ‘Ol’ Man River
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Although brief, this moment in the show left an enduring impression on
the audience. Marie Seton, a British actress, critic, and friend of
Robeson, recalled in the book _Paul Robeson: The Great
Forerunner_ that ‘everything else in _Show Boat_ was forgotten by
both audience and critic.’ He was booked as a singer in the same
theatre, performing in _Show Boat_ nightly while singing a solo
concert on Sundays. It was at this moment that everyone, from
Chelsea’s intelligentsia to Clapham’s youth, was talking about
Paul Robeson. He became, as Seton put it, ‘the most admired and
respected American in London.’

Paul Robeson attends a rally against nuclear armament organised by the
British Peace Committee, Trafalgar Square, London.
(Express/Express/Getty Images)

Paul and his wife, Essie, decided to stay in London, purchasing a home
in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The London press covered
extensively the Robesons’ attendance at social gatherings where they
would, with a degree of hesitation, mix with some of the most
prominent individuals and families of the city. ‘Within six months,
Londoners read of Robeson moving in circles where they had seldom if
ever heard of an actor moving before,’ Seton observed; ‘among
those who were authorities on the British Empire, its economics and
politics, and among the leading members of the Labour Party, who were
the traditional opponents of British imperialism.’ 

As London, that city once described by an American journalist as a
‘bottomless receptacle of empire,’ embraced Robeson, so too did
those on all sides of the imperial struggle. Robeson recalled one
large party hosted by the publisher and imperialist Lord Beaverbrook
ending with ‘our sitting with a group all night after H.G. Wells had
just walked up to me and begun to ask me a lot of questions.’ The
American, who was treated as a second-class citizen by many of his
countrymen back home, came to be summoned for a Royal Command
Performance at Buckingham Palace and was befriended by Members of
Parliament. It was also in London that Robeson befriended
anti-colonial leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta
of Kenya and Jawaharlal Nehru of India.

In November of 1928, Robeson was invited by a group of Labour MPs for
lunch at the House of Commons. Seated next to him was former prime
minister Ramsay MacDonald, who discussed with Robeson the future of
the British colonies. Later, Robeson was escorted by James Maxton and
Ellen Wilkinson to the tea room where they informed him that the
Borough of Battersea, just over the Thames, had re-elected the
Indian-born communist and the Labour Party’s first MP of
colour, Shapurji Saklatvala
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an individual whose politics would’ve landed him in a British prison
had he still lived in India. 

The lasting effects of these conversations were evident years later.
In 1951, Robeson would deliver with William Patterson a petition from
the Civil Rights Congress to the United Nations charging the United
States with genocide against Black Americans, which argued that the
prevalent police violence, economic racism, and denial of voting
rights in that nation amounted to ‘the intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’ As
he’d reflected after leaving London: ‘My whole social and
political development was in England and I became as much a part of
English life as I now am of America.’

Political Formation

In 1929, Robeson toured Europe, further expanding his worldview and
politics. He witnessed the distinct yet universal struggles and
cultures of the continent, from the poverty of the Viennese people to
the similarities between Hungarian folk songs and ‘Negro
spirituals’. He sang some of those spirituals in Albert Hall on
returning to London, and then on a provincial tour that included
Blackpool, Birmingham, Brighton, Torquay, Eastbourne, Folkestone,
Margate, Hastings, Southsea, and Douglas. ‘Very early,’ Robeson
recalled, ‘I had the idea of singing in the summer at the spas and
seaside resorts. It seemed to me a way to reach the British
public.’ 

Paul Robeson in ‘The Proud Valley’, 1940

In that period, Robeson also met striking Welsh miners
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He’d been enraptured by the harmonies of group mineworkers who had
travelled to London by foot from the Rhondda valley to demonstrate
against poverty pay and dangerous conditions, and he joined their
protest, sparking a long-lasting and formative relationship. The
parallels he perceived between the racist oppression of Black
Americans and the exploitation of Britain’s miners and industrial
workers would shape his socialist and internationalist politics, with
Robeson later reflecting, ‘It’s from the miners in Wales [that] I
first understood the struggle of Negro and white together.’

This bond with Welsh miners culminated in the anti-racist, pro-labour
1940 film _The Proud Valley. _Set in South Wales, Robeson played an
unemployed African-American seaman embraced by miners after choir
leaders heard him sing. Of his numerous provoking film roles —
in _Show Boat, The Emperor Jones, _and _King Solomon’s
Mines_ — his role in _The Proud Valley_ remains one of the few
characters that Robeson was proud of politically. In the prime of his
acting career, the radicalised Robeson had begun turning down
degrading, shallow, and stereotypical roles, instead seeking out
chances to ‘depict the Negro as he really is — not the caricature
he is always represented to be on the screen.’ 

Robeson Against the Colour Bar

Of course, Robeson’s time in London was not all positive
inspiration. In 1929, Lady Colefax, a steady host of parties for the
city’s artists and actors, invited him and Essie to a party at the
Savoy Grill, into which the couple then found themselves refused entry
on arrival. It turned out there was an unspoken policy among
management, kindled by the American tourists who frequented the venue,
to bar access to people of colour. Such a policy would’ve been
commonplace in the segregated US or even a British colony, but it was
unexpected in London — and after African and West Indian community
groups called a press conference, it triggered a massive outcry.

Within the week, Labour MP James Marley announced that he’d raise
the issue in the House of Commons, and Ramsay MacDonald, then in his
second prime ministerial term, said it was against hotel practices,
although he declined to intervene at a government level. The Quakers
set up a joint ‘Negro-white council’ to muster public opinion
against racism; Lord Beaverbrook’s _Evening Standard_ published an
article by Richard Hughes calling for an investigation of all hotels
in London; hotel managers from a variety of establishments, including
the Mayfair, the Berkeley, and the Ritz, came out opposing the Savoy
Grill’s actions. Although no legal action followed, public opinion
was overwhelmingly on the side of the Robesons and against
discrimination.

As the Black American writer James Baldwin would later write about
moving to France, ‘one had to come into contact with these
institutions in order to understand that they were also outmoded,
exasperating, completely impersonal, and very often cruel.’ It was
in Paris, that city where he ‘didn’t feel socially attacked, but
relaxed,’ and that allowed him ‘to be loved,’ that Baldwin was
also arrested for using bed sheets his friend had taken from a
hotel. 

Robeson, too, cherished a degree of social relaxation in London
relative to America, a country where violent attacks on his concerts
were not uncommon. But he also experienced first-hand and bore witness
to the ongoing injustices of European hierarchies and institutions,
with the Savoy Grill controversy being just one example. On another
day, Robeson heard an aristocrat angrily talking to a chauffeur as one
might a dog. It was a far smaller event, one probably reflected in
similar scenes happening across the city at that moment, but it shook
Robeson. ‘I realised that the fight of my Negro people in America
and the fight of the oppressed workers everywhere was the same
struggle,’ he reflected. ‘That incident made me very sad for a
year.’ 

Few likely understood these contradictions better than Claudia Jones,
a former leader in the Communist Party of America, who, after
deportation from the US, had founded the _West Indian Gazette _—
and would later play a central role in the founding of the Notting
Hill Carnival — in London. Her paper hosted the Robesons at what was
described as a ‘festive event’ in 1959; ‘because of Jones’
efforts, the couple was greeted by famed percussionists from Ghana,’
Robeson biographer Gerald Horne writes. In London, both Robeson and
Jones could actually enjoy press coverage that reflected their work
and their achievements, Horne also observes, whereas American
journalists only cared to sensationalise their connections to the
Communist Party. 

An Enduring Change

The racism and class exploitation Robeson experienced in England
didn’t slow him down. In 1930, he played Othello onstage in London,
the first Black man to do so in a hundred years — he was supposed to
perform the role in America afterwards, but the production was
cancelled under racist pressure. In 1931, he was one of the first
singers to record in a new studio called EMI Recording Studios, which
would later become Abbey Road Studios; in 1934 he enrolled in the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he studied the
culture of his African ancestors.

Robeson attends an afterparty following the opening performance of
‘Othello’. (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty)

That same year, at the invitation of Soviet director Sergei
Eisenstein, and along with Essie and Seton, Robeson ventured on his
first trip to the Soviet Union, where he felt like ‘a human being
for the first time in [his] life.’ It was not solely Eisenstein, a
great friend and creative mentor to Robeson, who convinced him to make
the journey. Multiple experiences in London inspired curiosity in him,
one being a conversation with the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral who
told Robeson enthusiastically about what he’d heard of the great
socialist state. 

A second, more confrontational situation arose at the League of
Colored Peoples in London, where Robeson was speaking about the
importance of African culture. A man stood up in the back and yelled
at the intellectuals to recognise the class dynamics of the exploited
masses in Africa. ‘Why don’t you go [to] Africa, especially why
don’t you follow what’s going on in the Soviet Union,’ the man
shouted. Robeson later reflected on the transaction, admitting he
‘accepted the challenge’: ‘A couple of weeks later I found
myself in Moscow.’

Robeson starred in a number of interwar British films and plays before
permanently moving back to the US in the lead-up to the Second World
War, where his fame and radical politics saw him blacklisted and
stripped of his right to travel abroad. As it happened, he had also
been watched by MI5
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in England, with one 1943 report complaining he was ‘rather strongly
anti-white.’ 

It would be years before McCarthyism died down enough to allow Robeson
the ability to have a career and travel again. But the repression
didn’t stop him from trying. In May of 1957, he sang to a sold-out
audience in London. Since he couldn’t perform in person, he sang via
the newly completed transatlantic telephone cable. In October, he used
the same technology to sing to an audience of 5,000 in Wales. Holding
on as tight as ever to the importance of international connection in
collective liberation, he told the London audience down the line:
‘Undoubtedly, one result [of this solidarity] will be concrete
activity here around the implementation of our basic freedoms.’

_TAYLOR DORRELL is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio._

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