Hood Heroes: Paul Robeson - Do the Knowledge!

Paul Robeson--singer, actor, civil rights activist, law school graduate, athlete, scholar, author--was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s and 1940s. Robeson was also a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man, later in his life, widely vilified and censored for his frankness and unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful. He learned to speak more than 20 languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last 25 years of his life his was "a great whisper and a greater silence in black America."

What followed was a brilliant career as an actor and concert singer which spanned nearly four decades. Robeson made his concert debut in 1925 with a highly successful program of Black music. He went on to such stage successes in Show Boat, Porgy and Bess and Othello, which was hailed by some critics as the play's greatest interpretation. He starred in 13 films between the 1920s and the early 1940s, but decided to stop making movies until there were better opportunities for blacks.

He sang for peace and justice in 25 languages throughout the United States, Africa, Asia Europe, and the Soviet Union. Robeson became known as a citizen of the world, as comfortable with the people of Moscow and Nairobi as with the people of Harlem. Wherever he traveled, Robeson championed the cause of the common person. During the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, every attempt was made to silence and discredit Paul Robeson because of his political views and dedication to civil rights.