The Young Paul Robeson

Lloyd L. Brown. The Young Paul Robeson. Boulder: Westview P, 1997. 187 pp. $24.00. Lloyd Brown's The Young Paul Robeson is a model of scholarship for the biographer of formative influences, and a remarkable distillation of Robeson's life as a whole. There is no doubt that his painstaking research into early influences on Robeson has provided the foundation on which future Robeson scholars must build. Novelist, short story writer, and once secretary to Robeson, Brown has researched Robeson's background on his father's side from the slave era deep into the twentieth century--an aspect of Robeson history, considering the many dimensions of this extraordinary figure, that might otherwise have gone unexamined for decades. And though Brown treats the background of Robeson's mother, covering Quaker influences and an ancestor's involvement in the Revolutionary War, his findings regarding the father are pivotal, owing to Paul's enormous respect for him--his mother died when he was but six--and his attachment, through his father's people, to the most oppressed elements of black America. Brown's research took him to rural North Carolina, where he interviewed Robeson relatives three-quarters of a century following the movement of his father, together with other ex-slave relatives, to Princeton, New Jersey, where the university, with its preference for Southern, white values, ruled the town. Having escaped from slavery as an illiterate fifteen-year-old, William Drew Robeson worked his way through Lincoln University, graduating with honors in studies that included four years of Latin and Greek. A man of broad shoulders and powerful build, a loving human being who possessed the greatest speaking voice Paul ever heard, he supervised Paul's studies in high school, urging him to test himself against his own potential, never to be satisfied with a grade that was less than the maximum attainable. He also taught Paul that his responsibility to his own people was paramount, a lesson that the young boy absorbed with little difficulty because the small black community in Princeton, peopled mainly with Southern blacks, practically adopted him as its own following the death of his mother. Paul had the invaluable experience of hearing the singing of men and women who had been slaves, and who felt especially close to him. And he sang with them. Such communion between him and that early Princeton community of b lacks nurtured that naturalness of sound that later so gloriously marked his style. Strength of character was his father's most outstanding quality, one from which Paul drew inspiration late in life, as he had in high school and college. Opposed by the white rulers of Princeton and forced to leave his church, the Reverend Robeson took a job hauling ashes, never wavering in his insistence that blacks be treated justly, which helped steel Paul's resolve to be like him. Hence, the source from which young Paul began to fashion lasting priorities in racist Princeton where, he later wrote, the theology was Calvin, the religion cash. Paul's intelligence enabled him to complete his studies more quickly than the best of his classmates, freeing him in college to enter upon a football career, despite the brutal acts of his teammates to block him, as storied as the artistic one he pursued after graduating from Columbia Law School. An experience in high school, however, best demonstrates how he could meet challenges. Of a statewide competition for a scholarship to Rutgers, he observed: was faced with an examination embracing the entire four year [high school] course, in the same three-hour period during which the other competitors would cover only their senior years work.... Well, I won. As Robeson developed into one of the greatest football players of the century, a more lasting strength than anything physical was maturing in him, leading him at a family reunion in 1918 to emphasize, in a speech to family members, that one's principles, at whatever cost, should not be compromised

Art · Education Systems and Policy · History

• Two Souls, Two Thoughts, Two Unreconciled Strivings”

  Jennifer Hildebrand, Jennifer Hildebrand Jennifer Hildebrand•Black Music Research Journal•2010

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