There will be a secret meeting in Belfast next Thursday (April 23rd) to mark the centenary of the birth of Paul Robeson, the prototype for Muhammad Ali.
Suitably enough, a secret recording of one of Robeson s most famous concerts has just been released.
For three decades, from the mid- 20s to the mid- 50s, Robeson was the most famous black person in the world. He was variously a lawyer, an athlete, a professional footballer, a great bass-baritone singer and an acclaimed film and stage actor. He was at ease in seven languages and devoted most of his time to political campaigning.
Robeson was born in New Jersey in 1898, to a school teacher and a Methodist preacher who had spent his childhood as a slave. An academic prodigy, he won scholarships to university and then to Columbia Law School, where he had a brilliant career in sports and became the third black American ever to graduate.
Finding it difficult to work as a black lawyer in a racist society, he took eagerly to acting when Eugene O Neill, whom he d met by chance, cast him as the lead in The Emperor Jones. Launched in the theatre, it was discovered that he had a wonderfully powerful singing voice. He starred in the premier of Showboat in London s West End, where he transformed Old Man River from a song of oppression to a declaration of defiance. Nobody today would think of singing it any other way.
In 1930 he played Othello at the Old Vic, to shouts of acclaim from the critics, and went on to star in ten movies. He formed a close bond with miners in South Wales and was a frequent visitor to the valleys, where he sang with miners choirs in village halls and at union rallies. In 1938, he went to Madrid to give a concert behind the barricades for the fighters defending the city against Franco and fascism.
He went back to the US at the outbreak of World War II and became re-involved immediately in the struggle for black civil rights. His status as an international star gave him space to work in for a time, but both government and established black leaders were wary, on account of his admiration for the Soviet Union and the association he had formed with the US Communist Party.
In 1950 he made a speech in New York about the Korean War which presaged Ali s pronouncement on Vietnam. Urging to blacks to refuse to fight half a world away, he declared: The place for the Negro people to fight for freedom is here at home . His passport was withdrawn, his records were removed from the shelves, and he didn t appear on a concert platform for years. He was the first person ever banned from American TV.
In 1954 he played a memorable concert for Canadians, from a stage outside Buffalo surrounded by FBI agents to an audience gathered on the other side of the border, so that while he hadn t left the States, the gig hadn t been staged there either.
His last trip abroad before being banned from world travel had been to Moscow, in 1949. He had visited Warsaw en route, and seen the rubble of the ghetto in which Polish Jews had fought the Nazis, literally to the last man and woman.
This was at the height of Stalin s anti-Semitic campaign against Soviet Jews and Yiddish culture. Robeson s old friend, the writer, Itzik Feffer, was locked up in the notorious Lubyanka prison. At Robeson s request, he was released briefly, and the two met at the singer s hotel.
At his final Moscow concert , broadcast live across the USSR, Robeson sang, in Yiddish, the Warsaw ghetto anthem of defiance, Zog Nit Keymo (never say you ve reached the end), dedicating it to all Jewish fighters against fascism. The recording of the concert was suppressed. The tapes were rescued from the silence only last year.
It s released now on CD as The Legendary Moscow Concert.
Much of this and far more will be touched upon at the memorial meeting in the Communist Party premises in Belfast next Thursday. Publicity for the gig says only that it will take place in the premises : as to whose premises, and where, you wouldn t know if you weren t told.
Why so coy, I wonder? Is it just that even in death, Paul Robeson is still a dangerous man, and not just to one form of tyranny?
Dander into the Duke of York off Donegall Street and ask about the Communist meeting. n