Song does not intertwine Paul Robeson & Kate Smith

When I began reading the stories about the removal of Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” recording from the games of two sports teams, one name stood out for me.

Paul Robeson.

I’m very familiar with Robeson, his life and his activism as well as the torment that he endured in this country. The controversy surrounds Smith’s singing of the song “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” in 1931 and other instances in her life that are considered racist. Most of the stories equated the two, offering little else about who Robeson was – a laziness I’ve found often in my online research. (One writer even described him as a musician.)

Smith’s “God Bless America” had long been used during games of the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers, which had also erected a statue of her in 1969. The statue was recently removed. The song is dated and divisive, and I’ve always seen it as insular in the way it seems to leave out some Americans who make up this country.

I was curious about Robeson’s version, so I Googled to hear it on video. I heard him sing that horrible word that songwriters, authors and everyday people used in the early part of the 20^th century – along with the n-word – to describe African Americans.

The song was written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown for George White’s Scandals, a series of Broadway musical revues in the 1920s and 1930s. It was sung during the finale of the first act of the 1931 show and “took a compassionate view of Negro fortitude in the face of injustice,” according to a book on Broadway shows.

Several recent articles noted that it was satire, but I don’t see it as such given the awful portrayal of blacks in sheet music and artifacts from that time.

If the song was racist, why would Robeson record it, one article asked. Probably to make a living in a country that sought to rob him and other African Americans of a meaningful livelihood. Robeson recorded the song in 1931, on the cusp of his awakening as an activist artist.

“In the early days of my career as an actor, I shared what was then the prevailing attitude of Negro performers — that the content and form of a play or a film scenario was of little importance to us,” he said in his autobiography “Paul Robeson: Here I Stand” in 1958. “What mattered was the opportunity, which came so seldom to our folks.”

Even before Robeson, African American vaudeville actors George Walker and Bert Williams performed in blackface while hating it.

“The one fatal result of this to the colored performers was that they imitated the white performers in their make-up as ‘darkies,'” Walker wrote in a 1906 article in The Theater magazine. “Nothing seemed more absurd than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself.”

Paul Robeson was a man of many talents: football star, valedictorian of his class at Rutgers in 1919, lawyer, actor, singer, orator, civil rights activist, peace activist, advocate for the oppressed all over the world.

Robeson was a standout football player who was terrorized by his teammates who stepped on his hands with their metal cleats. He was the team’s first black player. Rutgers basically erased him from its record bookss but finally in 1995 inducted him into the college’s Football Hall of Fame.

He graduated from Columbia University with a law degree and got a job at a white law firm, quitting after the secretary refused to take dictation from him.

With the encouragement of his wife Eslanda Goode Robeson – who became his manager – he began acting and singing during the 1920s.

Robeson sang the spirituals, bellowing them out in his deep baritone voice like a man who had experienced the pain and the hope that they embodied. He sold out venues in the United States.

In the 1920s and early 1930s he toured Europe and other parts of the world, again packing arenas. As a black man, Robeson led a rich life, both materially and professionally while tolerating the restraints that society placed on him and other African Americans.

For most of the 1930s, he and Eslanda lived in London. He got a chance to meet revolutionaries and activists from around the world with whom he felt a common kinship. These relationships broadened his outlook, and he began to see oppression as a worldwide sickness that stretched beyond blacks in the United States.

“When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs,” Robeson said. “I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.”

 

As the decade of the 1930s progressed, he began earnestly to use his art – his singing and acting voice – to speak out in favor of universal freedom. A trip to the Spanish front in support of soldiers seeking democracy sealed it for him. He also went to Russia and later told the House Un-American Activities Committee: “In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington.”

“Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands,” Robeson said later of his role as activist and agitator. “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

Robeson became well-known for his trademark song “Ol’ Man River,” which he first sang in the musical “Showboat” in London in 1928. The role of the character Joe was expanded and written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II for the then-famous singer/actor. He sang the lyrics just as they were written, beginning with the n-word.

By 1936, when he played Joe in the movie version of “Showboat,” the n-word was replaced with “There’s an old man,” but the lyrics still contained the word “darkies.” One of Robeson’s most dramatic changes came at the end when “Ol’ Man River” becomes a song of defiance and not deference. Robeson was known to change derogatory lyrics in songs; that was part of his enlightenment.

His advocacy for his own people and others like them around the world riled many in this country. The FBI opened a file on him and Eslanda – which remained in place until Robeson died in Philadelphia in 1976. His concerts were banned, his phonograph records were destroyed, and his recording sessions dried up.

Many accused him of being a communist, and he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 to say yea or nay. He refused, just as Eslanda who was also called to testify.

Both of their passports were revoked by the State Department (and later reinstated), an act that cut off his travels abroad where he could still perform to make a living.

The government was intent on wiping him out of existence and out of the history books. In many ways, it succeeded because today, too few people know about Robeson’s accomplishments and activism, which came years before the full-fledged civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Probably one of the best things that has come out of this Kate Smith controversy is Paul Robeson’s name. I just hope people will take the next step and find out who he truly was.