Reflection #005
The Tallest Tree in Our Forest (1977)
This was an interesting documentary. It has a kind of investigative reporting feel to it, establishing Robeson’s legacy, his erasure, then ending with the filmmaker holding a microphone and asking pointed questions into the camera like it’s an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
The first part of the film, after introducing us to Paul Robeson, Jr. and the Robeson Museum he curates, establishes that Robeson was skilled in language. He spoke several, and those he could not speak he could reproduce phonetically. He graduated valedictorian from Rutgers in 1919, and would go on to move to Harlem and attend Columbia Law School. According to the film, he was one of the greatest football players of all time, and was Rutgers’ first All-American football player.
Robeson only practiced law a short time before quitting due to racism. He would go into acting and singing, traveling around the world learning local musical forms and stories and finding ways they connected to music and stories from Africa. His first breakout role was for Showboat where he sang “Old Man River,” a song he became famous for. He traveled to Spain to sing for the Loyalists, and sang the song, “Ballad for Americans” to unite Amerikans in opposition to Germany. He was applauded and celebrated around the country for his patriotism.
After World War II, Robeson and Albert Einstein co-chaired the American Crusade Against Lynching, eventually meeting with President Truman in the white house to deliver a petition demanding a commission to investigate lynching. Truman refused, and Robeson responded, “If the government does not do something about lynching, the negroes will.” Truman accused him of making a physical threat.
Robeson began getting bad press centering around his association with communists and his support of the Soviet Union, though he refused to bend. Eventually, the US fully committed itself to the vilification of the USSR. Robeson was barred from media appearances. Eleanor Roosevelt cancelled a scheduled meeting with him. He went to the Paris Peace Conference and was reported to have said, “I don’t believe that colored men will ever join a war against Russia,” and that was it. He was hauled in front of congress, his passport was withheld, concert halls would no longer allow him to sing. Even many of his friends were afraid to be seen with him—though Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker continued to associate publicly with him.
Robeson’s crime was not wanting his personal success to be used against working people or people of color. According to Douglass Turner Ward:
You see Paul was fine as long he was a singer and an entertainer, but when he began to more actively speak out against the oppression of black people and his international point of view, then that wasn’t acceptable. And that’s when the attacks began to happen. When an artist began to say, “Well I am a citizen, and I understand the importance that politics has in my own life and economics and all of these things… and began to intelligently began to speak upon these issues, that’s when the turning point of the fusillade—the massive attacks to destroy him.
He was obliterated from public life like pencil marks erased from a page. The black community came to his support, and he sang in negro churches. He gave a phone concert for Welsh miners. He received the Stalin Peace Prize in New York, since he was not allowed to travel, and he addressed the 1957 World Youth Conference in Moscow via recording. Eventually, in 1958, the State Department was forced to return his passport, whereupon he set out on a world tour, where he received accolades and standing-room-only crowds everywhere he went. In Kazakstan they named a mountain peak after him.
Eventually he developed arteriosclerosis and was forced to retire, and saw himself proven right on many issues on the television. The African nations gained independence, and the US normalized relations with both the Soviet Union and China.
At the end of the documentary we are asked, why isn’t Robeson a more prominent figure in Amerikan history? The director points out that mass media has suppressed large amounts of information about him—there is very little footage available that was shot of him in Amerika, in fact, nearly all of the footage used in the documentary came from other countries. There is even little info about him in the Library of Congress. He has been left out of books about history, civil rights, Amerikan arts, and even denied a place in the football hall of fame*.
Every time Robeson demanded dignity for Black Amerikans, especially on the international stage, he was rebuked by Amerika. His patriotism was useful when it could be used against Amerika’s enemies overseas, but when that patriotism became critical, he became dangerous. Eventually, despite his fame and renown, he was all but erased.
If that could happen to Paul Robeson—an internationally famous singer, actor, athlete, and activist—then how many others disappeared completely? How many people were punished, silenced, blacklisted, or made invisible without ever having enough fame to leave behind footage, recordings, or a museum to preserve them?
*The documentary was filmed in 1977, and from a cursory glance, it looks like Robeson was named to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.