Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was born April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey. He is known for his extraordinary accomplishments as an actor, in both theater and film, as a singer and activist on the international stage--including the US, nation states of Africa, Soviet Union, China, Australia, and Spain. Robeson credited the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War as a turning point in his activism. He became an advocate for self-determinism and independence in the nations of colonial Africa, and made a declaration to the UN that the US committed genocide by allowing lynching. Under McCarthyism and during the Cold War, Robeson was persecuted because of his pro-communist beliefs, including having his passport revoked to having propaganda distributed against him by J. Edgar Hoover and the US State Department and surveilled by the British agency MI5. Asked to renounce Communism in order to join the mainstream Civil Rights movements in the 1960s by Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, Robeson declined.