Word: robeson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...race barrier in the legal profession, and he took up acting in all-black shows in Harlem. There he caught the eye of a Broadway producer who hired him to star in a British production of "Showboat." From the early 1930s until the outbreak of World War II, Robeson lived with his wife in England, mixing with the British aristocracy and winning the hearts of audiences in cities all over Europe to whom he introduced for the first time the strange, soulful, moving experience of black folk music and spirituals...
...England, at the hub of the British Empire, that Robeson discovered Africa, and learned about the black Africans' struggle against European colonialism. He stayed up nights talking with Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, who were then students in London. He also witnessed the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany at close range; in 1938 Robeson went to Spain and sang for anti-Franco International Brigade, and was named one of only three honorary members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His political consciousness aroused and troubled by Franco, Hitler and African colonialism, Robeson began to look back across the Atlantic...
...Robeson became acutely aware that he was a man of the world at a time when most of the good things the world had to offer were denied to all but a handful of other black Americans. So he gave up his comfortable niche in the European artistic community to crusade for a future in which all blacks could participate in the community of man. More and more convinced that this community would be the work of the common people, the poor, working people he had met all over the globe, and impressed with the Soviet Union's championing...
Ironically, the price that Robeson paid for that vision was his own freedom to perform and travel as a man of all nations. In the heat of McCarthyism, the State Department began denying him visas to travel abroad to accept the performing offers that continued to pour in from around the globe. On June 12, 1956, he was called up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and badgered about his ties to the Communist Party. America gave Robeson little peace in his last decade, and he had every right to turn bitter and resentful...
...portray Robeson's odyssey on the stage, to try to convey his aspirations and his frustrations, to dramatize what Robeson meant when at the end of his life he quoted a statement by Frederick Douglass--"A man is worked on by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances carve him out as well"--is a difficult touchy task. To say that playwright Philip Hayes Dean's one-man play, Paul Robeson, starring James Earl Jones and directed by Charles Nelson Reilly, does as sensitive a job as could have been done, given the format...