Jews Recall Activist Paul Robeson With Fondness

There were murmurs of recognition Sunday as 120 people packed a meeting room at the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center to hear a lecture on Paul Robeson--the extraordinary African American actor, singer, activist and athlete born a century ago this year.

The occasion was a bagel brunch and lecture by academic and activist Paul Von Blum, the only white faculty member at UCLA’s Center for African American Studies--and a Jew.

Mostly Jewish and mostly past retirement age, the Sherman Oaks audience included activists who had struggled along with Robeson for civil rights and the rights of working people.

Robeson always acknowledged his many Jewish friends, and this was a community he would have felt at home with--they knew by heart all the words to his version of the labor anthem “Joe Hill.” It was the sort of progressive Jewish crowd that had continued to support and admire Robeson even after the State Department seized his passport, and after the entertainment industry, emboldened by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, blacklisted him.

A veteran of the civil rights and free speech movements of the 1960s, Von Blum has taught a course on Robeson at UCLA every year for the last decade. He recently described Robeson to another reporter as “the quintessential genius of American life.”

“Do you really want to put it that strongly?” the reporter asked.

“Yes, I do,” Von Blum answered.

“There was never a time in my life when I didn’t know who Paul Robeson was,” Von Blum said. He listened to his parents’ Robeson records growing up in Philadelphia, and, when he was 5, he dimly remembers meeting the towering Robeson at the 1948 Progressive Party National Convention. Robeson was an exemplar of courage to many Jews, including Von Blum’s parents, who helped integrate Levittown, Pa., in the 1950s.

Unlike Robeson’s admirers at the Jewish Center, many of Von Blum’s college students have never heard of Robeson, in large part, Von Blum believes, because conservative forces, including those in the U.S. government, so effectively maligned him and tried to dim his star. Von Blum remembers a time in America when people hid their Robeson records out of a legitimate fear that someone would report them to the House Un-American Activities Committee and they would lose their ability to make a living.

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The story Von Blum had to tell was often painful to hear. Born and raised in Princeton, N.J., Robeson was a brilliant student and athlete whose high school principal hated him for being both superior and black. Robeson was steeled against such affronts by his father, a minister and escaped slave whose enduring lesson was: “You never compromise an issue of principle.”

Instead of becoming a shoeshine boy, as his principal would have liked, Robeson was a Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers University, one of three African Americans on campus. There, the man who had what Von Blum described as a voice that “comes once a century” was rejected by the glee club.

“They said he had a pitch problem,” Von Blum recounted. “He didn’t have a pitch problem. The director had a racism problem.”

Later, Robeson was the only black in his class at Columbia Law School, where he helped support himself by playing professional football. He practiced law for a year, until a white secretary refused to take his dictation. Disgusted by the racism in the profession, he left the law to become an entertainer and activist.

“We’re all the better for it, actually,” Von Blum said of Robeson’s choice.

Like Robeson, Von Blum doesn’t believe that social change just happens.

“People in power, in my experience, never have moral epiphanies,” Von Blum said. “They have to be pushed.”

Robeson never stopped pushing. When, in 1943, he became the first African American to play Othello on Broadway in this century, he shocked American audiences by kissing blond Uta Hagen’s Desdemona on stage.

And he didn’t hesitate to turn the demeaning original lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” into what Von Blum described as a “song of social change and resistance.” In Robeson’s version, “You show a little grit and you lands in jail,” and, instead of being “tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’,” the singer “keeps laughin’ instead of cryin’ / I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”

Clearly an admirer, Von Blum admits Robeson wasn’t perfect. He thinks Robeson should have known and spoken out about the crimes of Josef Stalin--including the murders of millions of Soviet Jews. Instead, Robeson accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952, convincing much of Cold War America that he was a Communist, if not a traitor. Robeson died in 1976.

Von Blum argued that it was as a champion of social justice that Robeson made his greatest contribution and it was that achievement that resonates with the progressive Jewish community. After Von Blum’s talk, he played a CD of Robeson singing “Song of the Warsaw Rebellion,” in perfect Yiddish. Several people quietly sang along. Some wept.

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Interestingly, there was no talk during the discussion period of the rift that sometimes separates today’s Jews and African Americans. Instead, Tobi Dorf Klastorin, of North Hollywood, recalled asking Robeson for his autograph when she was a teenage usher at one of his concerts. As he looked down at her from his great height, she remembered, “His face broke into a smile, and it was like the sun.”

Then, the petitions came out. These were activists, after all, just as Robeson was. His admirers had hoped the U.S. Post Office would issue a stamp in his honor in his centenary year, but it didn’t happen.

As Von Blum noted: “They gave one to Tweety Bird, but they did not give one to Paul Robeson. But Tweety Bird was not black, or red.”