PAUL ROBESON
Martin Bauml Duberman
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
468 pp. $24.95
Readers of Othello are sometimes tempted to believe that Iago's evil machinations fully explain Othello's destructive passion. This facile interpretation degrades the moral stature of Shakespeare's Moorish hero and steals away the tragedy's instructive core of meaning. The heart and soul of a tragic drama lie ultimately in the conviction that "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." This is why tragedy at one and the same time chastens and uplifts the human spirit, confirming both our frailty and our freedom.
Paul Robeson was the first black American to bring Shakespeare's Othello to life in the American theater. Like the tragic hero he portrayed, Robeson was a man whose enormous capacities won him fame, fortune, and prestige in a world that otherwise abused and rejected black people. He might have been among those who made decisive contributions to the black struggle for justice and equal rights. Instead, when the climactic scenes of the civil rights struggle came, Robeson had to watch from the shadows, consciously shunned by the black leaders who occupied center stage. As with Othello, it would be easy to conclude that Robeson was the victim of the evil around him--a blazing sacrifice upon the altar of racism. Yet nothing in the man suggests the victim's sheepish passivity. His star shone so brightly that the fire which consumed him must have be his own.
Courage and contradiction
In Paul Robeson, Martin Duberman offers a richly detailed rendering of Robeson's story, presented with sympathy but also without excessive apology. Most of the time, he lets matters speak for themselves. Because of this relatively transparent presentation, Duberman's book allows the reader to feel the power, as well as the glaring contradictions, in Roberson's life, without helping us to explain or understand them. Here is a man with such courage and self-control that he successfully challenged determined racial prejudice on the Rutgers football squad. Despite a violent scrimmage that left him "with a broken nose (which troubled him ever after as a singer), a sprained right shoulder, and assorted cuts and bruises," he refused to quit and went on to become the team's most renowned asset.
After a college career in which his academic performance matched his athletic abilities, Robeson earned a law degree. He took a position as the only black at Stotesbury and Miner, a New York law firm. Yet he was ultimately discouraged from the serious practice of law after he encountered the same determined racism he had met with on the playing fields of Rutgers.
After a few weeks, the covert mistreatment blossomed into
open ugliness: when Robeson buzzed for a stenographer
to take down a memorandum of law, she refused--"I never
take dictation from a nigger," she purportedly said, and
walked out. Robeson took the matter to Stotesbury, who
genuinely commiserated. The two men
...
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