image copyrightGetty Images
Warning: This article contains the use of an outdated racial term that some readers may find offensive.
Ballad for Americans, performed by Paul Robeson, was an unexpected musical hit.
A 10-minute patriotic folk cantata that offered an inclusive version of American history, from a complicated beginning ("In '76 the sky was red") to a pan-ethnic present, articulated by a narrator who at the end reveals himself to be the country itself.
Although it was not your typical commercial song, when the famous baritone first performed it on a national radio broadcast on CBS in 1939, it became an instant phenomenon.
The studio audience applauded her for 20 minutes. Letters and phone calls flooded the station and the program was repeated for the following year.
By then, Robeson was already a star of theater, film and American football; The broadcast and subsequent release of the single "Ballad for Americans" cemented his status as the most famous black person in America.
However, just a decade later, he would be branded not only "un-American," but would be banned from television, erased from textbooks, and had his passport revoked.
With the Cold War at its peak and anti-communist fervor dominating the American political and cultural establishment, Robeson's civil rights activism and socialist solidarity made him a prime target.
End of Most read
He died 50 years ago, on January 23, 1976, 200 years after that bloody birth of America he sang about.
His last decades were marked by illness and isolation resulting from an unprecedented campaign of repression.
All this in the midst of the widespread blacklisting of members of the entertainment industry with sympathies with leftist ideas, known as the "red terror."
The number 1
Paul Robeson was born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest of five children.
His father, a pastor, raised the family after his mother died in a house fire a few years after his birth.
To say that Robeson was an extraordinary young man would be an understatement.
All the news you need is on BBC World Service
Download it here
End of Ad app
He excelled academically, in sports and the arts, while attending Jersey High School.
He earned a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University, from which he eventually graduated with highest academic honors and gave the commencement address.
He received 15 varsity medals, including in baseball, basketball, javelin, discus and shot put. But it was in football where he became a true star, twice making first-team All-American before playing professionally to finance his studies at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s.
Walter Camp, America's leading American football expert, called him "the greatest defender in history."
Robeson also took advantage of his time at Columbia to pursue acting, in addition to singing at the famous Cotton Club.
His legal career ended abruptly shortly after graduation, when he resigned from his position at a law firm in protest because a white secretary refused to take dictation from him.
Instead, he devoted himself to acting full-time, supported financially at first by his wife Eslanda, head of the pathology laboratory at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
He starred in two works by Eugene O'Neill ("All God's Children Have Wings" and "Emperor Jones"), recorded albums of so-called black spirituals and began performing in the United Kingdom and Europe.
In 1928, he premiered a new musical by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, "Show Boat", in London, singing "Ol' Man River" (translated in Spanish as "The Old River") to great critical acclaim.
That year, the New Yorker magazine had described him as "the promise of his race", "King of Harlem" and "the idol of his people."
In 1930, he played Othello at the Savoy Theater in London, the first black actor to do so in the British capital since Ira Aldridge a century earlier.
And when, after spending much of the first decade acting abroad, he returned to the United States to star in the Hollywood film version of "Show Boat" in 1936, his rise to fame was complete.
By 1940, shortly after performing "Ballad for Americans" before 30,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl, Colliers magazine crowned him "America's No. 1 Negro Artist."
According to his biographer, Martin Duberman, to the "white world at large", Robeson was "a magnetic, civilized and talented man who had relied on talent, rather than belligerence, to overcome his circumstances."
Strong reaction
In fact, Robeson spent much of his rise to fame educating himself, and becoming increasingly outspoken, about the broader context of the black struggle.
In Europe, he held charity events for Welsh miners, Jewish refugees, and Republican combatants in the Spanish Civil War. He studied African languages and Marxist writings, and visited the Soviet Union.
Back in the United States, he refused to perform for segregated audiences, joined union pickets, and, in the 1948 presidential race, campaigned for Henry Wallace's Progressive Party.
However, he did not have much trouble until he gave a speech in Paris on April 20, 1949.
The World Congress of Partisans for Peace was a meeting of some 2,000 scientists, professors, activists and artists from 75 countries, convened to condemn the arms race of the Cold War and what they considered American aggression against the Soviet Union.
"It is unthinkable for black Americans to go to war in the name of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the USSR] that in a single generation has elevated our people to full human dignity," Robeson told the assembled leftists.
Some six years before the Montgomery bus boycott and the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Robeson suggested a form of black rebellion that far exceeded the assimilationist goals of the then-dominant NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
The response, both from traditional liberals and conservative anti-communists, was swift and forceful.
A few months after Paris, Paul Robeson twice attempted to give a concert at socialist Jewish summer camps near Peekskill, New York, as he had done in previous summers, but thousands of local war veterans protested and rioters attacked attendees with rocks, sticks, and fists, overturning vehicles and injuring 150 people as police watched.
While this violent attempted cancellation by Robeson was widely condemned and never repeated, a more subtle version began almost immediately afterwards.
In March 1950, NBC banned him from appearing on Eleanor Roosevelt's television show, "Today With Mrs. Roosevelt," following protests by the American Legion (a veterans organization) and others.
Then, in July, the State Department revoked his passport, preventing him from performing abroad, where he remained enormously popular.
In the United States, his career was practically over. Record companies refused to issue their old albums or record new ones.
From being one of the 10 highest-paid artists in the United States in 1941, and earning US$100,000 in concerts until 1947, by 1952 he was barely earning US$6,000 a year.
The lyrics to "Ballad for Americans" were removed from school textbooks, and poet Langston Hughes was forced to remove any mention of Robeson from his book "Famous Negro Music Makers" to avoid being banned from school libraries.
His name was retrospectively removed from the lists of NAACP award winners and American football champions.
Even owning a Paul Robeson record, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, was enough to get government employees a bad grade in the various loyalty board interviews that took place in the 1950s.
Baseball star Jackie Robinson appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to disassociate himself from Robeson's comments in Paris.
Finally, in 1956, Robeson himself appeared before the HUAC.
As unapologetic as ever, he told committee members, "You are the un-Americans."
'A unique threat'
In her book "Many Are the Crimes," Cold War historian Ellen Schrecker argues that "probably no other individual was as severely censured" as Paul Robeson.
And in some ways, he represented a unique threat. Not as a spy, but as an avowed black socialist, and as someone who linked the African-American struggle for civil rights with the cause of the working classes around the world, from the Welsh valleys to West Africa, from Mississippi to Moscow.
Of all those blacklisted, from Hollywood screenwriters to civil servants and academics, none were as well-known or as beloved at the time.
As Schrecker says: "The most charismatic black actor and singer of his generation had become a character without personality."
In 1959, Robeson finally received his passport and attempted an international tour again. But, exhausted by years of fighting, his efforts were thwarted by bouts of illness and depression.
In the mid-1960s, he stopped giving concerts completely and, after Eslanda's death, spent the rest of his life caring for his sister.
In 1973, he gave a speech at a tribute to him at Carnegie Hall in New York.
He declared himself "more committed than ever to humanity's global cause of freedom, peace and fraternity", affirmed his commitment to the struggle of African Americans to "achieve complete liberation from racist domination", and paid tribute to anti-colonial movements around the world.
He concluded his message by saying: "Although poor health has forced me to retire, you can be sure that in my heart I continue to sing:
"But I keep laughing
"Instead of crying,
"I must keep fighting
"Until I die,
"And the Old River
“He just keeps rolling!”
---
*If you want to read the original article in English, click here
Click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.
You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook and our new WhatsApp channel, where you will find breaking news and our best content.
And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.
Discover more
Video
End of Video
