The last house where Paul Robeson lived

Arcenia McClendon was telling a story about the time she met Paul Robeson:

She was a young school teacher in her early 20s and she passed the house at 50^th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia on her way to school. She lived with her mother just around the corner, and she saw Robeson, then a sickly man, and his sister on the porch. She waved and spoke to them.

Whenever she’d think of Robeson, she always remembered his deep bass singing of “Ol’ Man River,” she said, mimicking that distinguishable voice and the way he’d hunched his neck in as he sang. She had first heard of him as a high school student in Mississippi when her music teacher took the class to Jackson College (now Jackson State University, an HBCU school) to see his movies.

Once when she passed the house, Robeson was not on the porch. He’s not feeling well today, his sister Marian Forsythe, said. He’s in bed. Why don’t you come in to visit with him?

McClendon was both excited and nervous as she walked up the stairs to Robeson’s room. You have a visitor, Marian told her brother. Robeson didn’t saying anything. Then Arcenia mentioned that she was from Laurel, MS.

“Leontyne Price,” he said. She knew exactly what he meant. He was remembering that Leontyne Price was from Laurel, MS. (Robeson was one of the soprano’s early benefactors.)

McClendon also tells the story in the 2009 book “Stories from the Paul Robeson House: Lives Touched by a Renaissance Man” and in an audio interview. The Paul Robeson House holds a special place in her heart because of that encounter and because she is  one of the earliest members of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance that purchased the house in the 1990s.

She was among a group of volunteers helping to raise funds last weekend at an art sale and potluck for what is known as the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House. The event was coordinated by Morgan Robinson, a Temple University graduate student who is working on a college project with the house’s volunteer staff.

The name Fran Aulston is synonymous with the Paul Robeson House in Philadelphia. Aulston, who died of cancer last year, put her heart, soul and her own money into the house. She, a group of volunteers, including Barbara Akins, and the board have spent the last three decades keeping the house afloat. The alliance, founded in 1984, owns and operates the house, which became a state historical landmark in 1991 and is a historical site on the National Register of Historic Places.

Like most nonprofits and small museums, keeping the dollars coming has not been easy.

The house is a modest homage to Robeson. Two floors bear oversize panels featuring photos and text of Robeson and his life that were created by African American historian Charles L. Blockson and Philadelphia artist Frank Stephens. On the second floor is a room with three paintings of Robeson’s father the Rev. William Drew Robeson, his sister Marian and his mother Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson by Philadelphia artist Cal Massey, and newspaper articles and other documents. Through a door is Robeson’s bedroom with its original furniture, the room where McClendon formally met him.

The house is open for tours – where visitors can hear recordings of Robeson – and other activities, including book signings, chess club tournaments (it has its own youth chess club, two of whom members were there last weekend), activist-group meetings, movie series and community educational sessions, according to Vernoca Michael, a volunteer administrator and co-owner of the now-closed Blue Horizon boxing arena.

The art sale was among several other events, projects and rotating exhibits being considered for the house.

Art at the Robeson house is nothing new. Barbara Johnson, a 30-year board member, noted that years ago, artists appeared there for events. One of those was Sylvia Walker, who was represented by four beautiful signed and numbered prints of African American children at the sale. Many of the works were created by Philadelphia artists, including Stephens, and all were either signed and numbered prints, signed prints or reproduction prints. Some of the artwork is still for sale.

As I sat in what was Robeson’s living room, I listened as one visitor imagined a robust Robeson making his way up the stairs to his bedroom, bending his head and upper body slightly to avoid bumping into the overhang above the staircase. I pictured him, too, his tall 6-3 figure seeming to take up all the air in the living room.

That was our vision of Robeson, but McClendon’s story was about an older man in this house – thin and frail, being cared for by a loving sister who wrapped him against the weather before taking him out on the porch. He arrived at her house in 1966 after his wife Eslanda died. Robeson lived there until 1976 where he died at the age of 77.

In his younger years, Robeson was seen as a hero to some and a villain to the country that was his birthplace. He was considered a renaissance man: a star athlete at Rutgers University, actor in movies and theater, singer, scholar and author. He spoke out often and loudly against racism and discrimination. For his activism, the U.S. State Department revoked his passport, hampering his ability to perform abroad and earn money. Eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the agency.

Like many others during the 1950s, Robeson was dogged by the House Un-American Activities Committee that sought to ferret out anyone – real and imagined – harboring what it considered communistic leanings or subversive tendencies. Robeson testified before the committee in 1956 but refused to say if he was a member of the Communist Party. He noted instead that he was being tried “for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.”

Once his passport was reinstated, Robeson did some performances overseas. By then, though, he had suffered both physical and psychological illnesses and eventually retired to Marian’s house in West Philadelphia. Even Rutgers did not acknowledge his athletic achievements until 1995 when he was admitted into its College Football Hall of Fame.

There is also a Paul Robeson house in Princeton, where he was born in 1898. That house is in the midst of a campaign to raise money for repairs and upkeep.