curated news excerpts & citations
Paul Robeson was a superstar of the stage and screen, a talented football player and a music hitmaker. Then, amid the “anti-communist fervour” of the US in the Cold War, came a dramatic fall from grace.
Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans was an unlikely pop smash. A 10-minute-long patriotic folk cantata, it offered an inclusive version of the US story, from fiery formation (“In ’76 the sky was red”) to a pan-ethnic present, as articulated by a narrator who reveals himself to be America itself.
Warning: This article contains use of an antiquated racial term that some readers may find offensive
Yet when the celebrated baritone first performed the song on a national CBS radio broadcast in 1939, it became an instant sensation. The studio audience cheered for 20 minutes. Letters and phone calls flooded into the station and the show was repeated throughout the following year. Already a star of stage, screen and the football field, the broadcast and subsequent single release of Ballad for Americans cemented Robeson’s status as the most famous black person in America.
A mere decade later however, he had been branded not just “un-American” but an effective non-person, barred from television, expunged from textbooks, his passport revoked. As the Cold War took hold and the US political and cultural establishment was gripped by anti-communist fervour, Robeson’s civil rights activism and socialist solidarity made him a prime target.
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