Paul Robeson - Honorary Tyke

There are some people who are supermen. Truly great inspirational figures who have what these days they call Star Quality. It's a quality that is now tied up with how you come across on the TV screen and is backed up by marketing and all sorts of commercial conjuring tricks. How else could the likes of Justin Timberlake not be working in McDonalds where he belongs.

True star quality dates from before color telly. Before CDs and DVD. Free of a world where stars are made by corporations. Back when real talent, real leadership and real brilliance shon through to everyone who comes into contact.

I grew up knowing that Paul Robeson was just such a man.

I grew up to full adulthood before I realized that Robeson was not universally recognised as one of the greatest men of the last century. And I always take it very personally. I feel deeply passionate about the greatness of Paul Robeson and he's very close to my heart.

Because I grew up with the knowledge of his greatness. It was something my whole family - coal miners for generations - brought me up knowing. There were great entertainers - Nat King Cole, Sinatra, Ray Charles, Elvis, but one man stood taller and prouder than the rest.

I hope that you know who I'm going on about. And if you don't (and he's a man already getting lost in history) here's the skinny. For thirty years - roughly between the first and second world wars - Paul Robeson was always in the spotlight. And no wonder. His achievements were extraordinary.

First he won national fame in America as a football superstar, an all-time all-American. He graduated as a lawyer from one of America's most prestigious colleges. Then he achieved international fame as a concert singer with a huge emotional baritone, and an actor on stage and screen. He was an immensely popular artist across the world. He was a fiercely proud American citizen and a major internationalist.

The American Lloyd L Brown once wrote of him " Here is a man who is the foremost people's artist of America and a world artist. He sings the songs of the peoples of the world in the languages of those peoples and touches their hearts. They call him brother. Son"

I grew up knowing this - not least because of my Gran, who revered him because of the connections he made with ordinary coal miners in South Wales. He made a heroic movie called 'The Proud Valley'. It's still a movie I cannot watch without a fierce pride welling up. OK - bunch o Welsh mining buggers singing is a bit of a cliché but it was our life being portrayed on that silver screen instead of Jimmy Cagney and Bette Davis.

He was already a great artist by then - and known the world over. He didn't just turn up and do his Old Man river routine (Yup - he was the Showboat dude) and bog off with a fat cheque. He took time to get to know the Welsh communities in the valleys, the Miner's Choirs, the Eisteddfod and made real friends and built real understanding.

Robeson spent a lot of time in England - famously playing Othello in the Shakesperian theatres. Robeson himself would later say that his time in London actually made him a world citizen and opened his eyes to his own African heritage.

He says he crossed the pond like a lot of people - as a jobbing professional. He received a noticeably friendly welcome by the Brits - initially by the hoi-poloi who treat him as gentleman and a scholar. But there was also Britain's role at the center of the Commonwealth and- he says- It was because of this he discovered Africa, This is the sensibility that's now prevalent amongst a lot of Americans who no longer identify as 'black', but as African-American. He was there first...

Robeson spent a lot of time with the African contingent in London - and with the seamen of Cardiff, Liverpool and London who share the same heritage. From here in he was a major artistic diplomat, crossing the iron curtain and making friends of ordinary working people. Regardless of race, creed or boring political shite. England broadened his political and cultural horizons. And from then on he was a leader of men and a huge inspiration.

But of course America, then in the grip of its own witch trials courtesy of Senator Joe McCarthy put the boot in. All they saw was a man making excuses for Stalin, not a man building cultural bridges. The yanks saw a dangerous subversive. The ordinary Russian saw an honourable American and a man who in every sense epitomised the meaning of Freedom. The yanks saw him as a traitor instead of one of their most crucial Ambassadors who laid the seeds for the Glasnost of later years.

When the Berlin Wall came down it was in no small part down to cultural barriers broken down by Paul Robeson. He was the living breathing example to the communist world of the greatest of free society. And that's why they honoured him. Yet back in the country he called home he was a subversive, a traitor and a dangerous man.

So they took his passport off him, and the climate of fear built so high that even Martin Luther King and the NAACP condemned him publically. He couldn't get a concert hall in America to let him on a stage for years.

I've always thought that this was a disgrace. I grew up revering the man - completely unaware that in his own country he was vilified for over twenty years.

But my Gran always puts em straight. He was on the side of the miners at a time when the miner needed a friend. A great athlete. A supreme scholar. A world class singer. A major actor and one of the first genuine world superstars.

He was quite simply one of the giants of the century. He might have been born to an ex-slave from North Carolina in New Jersey USA but to our lot he was a true Yorkshireman. No doubts.

"The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice."
Paul Robeson

Blogga.

Links
Rutgers College -Paul Robeson timeline Robeson's college
Africana Biography

MP3 of his music 3mb