The Loudest Yeller:
A Collection of Book Reviews

"I ain’t the world’s best writer, ain’t the world’s best speller         
                   But when I believe in somethin,'’ I’m the loudest yeller"
                                                                           ( W O O D Y   G U T H R I E )

Review for January 13, 2001

Paul Robeson:
A Biography

by Martin Bauml Duberman

Martin Duberman is that rarity among authors: an academic who can write coherently and interestingly. This exhaustively researched biography takes the reader on an epic ride through perhaps the most remarkable life ever lived by an American: Paul Robeson’s. There was apparently nothing Robeson couldn’t do. At Rutgers University he was an All-American football player. After graduating as valedictorian of his college class, Robeson attended Columbia Law School and became an attorney, taking a brief time out to become one of the first African-Americans to play professional football. But Robeson soon found that he loved the theater, and became a leading stage actor both on Broadway and in London. In 1943 his performance in the title role of Othello drew critical raves, and to date is still the longest-running Shakespeare production in Broadway history. Robeson’s greatest fame, however, came as a singer. With a deep baritone voice, he was the most popular and highest-paid concert singer in the world, and used his fluency in more than a dozen languages to perform folk songs from a wide array of countries. 

Then it all came crashing down. In the late 1940s the American government began its Communist witch hunts, and Robeson was one of the main targets. (A tireless worker for civil rights around the world, he sympathized with the racially tolerant Communist Party, but was never a member of it.) Under pressure Robeson refused to renounce his political beliefs, instead refining them and stating them even more strongly. This started a period of relentless harassment and persecution by the United States government. For the next 15 years, FBI agents closely followed Robeson’s every move. The State Department canceled his passport, threatening his livelihood as a concert singer by preventing him from performing abroad. Many of his U.S. concerts were censored by public officials, and others were disrupted when law enforcement officers started riots by beating concert-goers. He became the first American banned from appearing on television. The mere mention of his name in the media was taboo. Paul Robeson became, for all practical purposes, a non-person.

In 1956, Robeson was subpoenaed to testify for the second time before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his alleged Communism. Congressman Gordon Scherer (R-Ohio) asked Robeson why he didn’t just go live in Russia if he loved Communism so much. Robeson responded: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” Although he never stopped fighting, he never regained his lost stature, and he died in relative obscurity in 1976. Duberman’s work, taken as a whole, stands as a moving and ultimately tragic story of a great man destroyed by the thing he loved most: his own country.

Find Paul Robeson: A Biography on Amazon.Com

About the Book Reviews

I don’t fancy myself a literary critic, but I do enjoy reading books and discussing them. In the hopes that these pages will reach others who love books as much as I do, I will periodically post new book reviews to this site. (Ideally there will be a new book review posted every week, but we’ll see.) The reviews will be fairly brief, and I don’t plan on reviewing every book I read. Rather, I’ll only be posting reviews of books I find to be especially moving or significant. (Why waste your time?) So if you enjoy discovering new books and ideas, stop by every once in a while and see what’s here.

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