Catalogue Number
NMLH.2024.27
Object Name
booklet
Title
'Paul Robeson'
Place
USA, Belle Vue, Manchester
People
Paul Robeson
Events
Paul Robeson Tour 1949
Description
A programme for a concert tour with the singer, Paul Robeson's name and portrait on the front, and tour dates and locations on the reverse. Robeson is a Black man portrayed in profile, looking off to the side of the photo. He has short black hair, a grey shirt and suit jacket.
Paul Robeson (9 April 1898 â 23 January 1976) was a Black American communist actor, singer, and political thinker. His 1949 tour of the UK was a prelude to a trip to the Soviet Union to perform at a concert to celebrate the 150th anniversary of socialist revolutionary Alexander Pushkin's birth. During the trip Robeson learned that Jewish socialists, including his friends from the anti-fascist socialist movement, Solomon Mikhoels and Itzak Feffer, were being incarcerated and executed by the Stalin regime for antisemetic reasons. He attempted to intervene on their behalf, and defiantly sang 'Zog Nit Keynmol' (Partisan Song), a Yiddish anthem in both Russian and Yiddish during the Pushkin memorial concert. The Stalin government censored the song and statements in support of Jewish USSR citizens in their recorded broadcasts of the concert. Robeson's efforts to intervene were unsuccessful and both men, along with an unknown number of other Jewish artists and intellectuals were executed by
the Stalin regime.
Born and raised in the US, Robeson first worked as a lawyer in Harlem, New York, before rejecting the legal profession and justice system as institutionally racist. He became an actor, and a prominent member of the Black art movement the Harlem Renaissance before he eventually moved to London, where he was the first Black man in the modern era to play Othello. He participated in many mutual aid concerts around the world during his career, and used the proceeds from his work to support workers strike funds including ones in the UK for striking mine workers, political prisoners and communist and socialist causes around the world. Robeson was persecuted for his socialist and communist political beliefs in the United States after he and William Patterson delivered a petition titled "We Charge Genocide" to the United Nations in 1951 charging the United States with anti-Black genocide. British socialists that Robeson had previously supported in turn provided mutual aid to him. He eventually
suffered from significant mental health problems that were caused by the stress of being harassed by the FBI.
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