The most dangerous man in America’: how Paul Robeson went from Hollywood to blacklist

Howard Bryant, The Guardian

This week marks 50 years since Robeson’s death and the silence remains. His erasure from the lineage over the decades shows that what Robeson’s political opponents did not take from him, the years have most certainly. Robeson’s decoupling from the story of African American culture has been so complete that in the half-century since his death, even generations of Black Americans have never heard of him.

The Robeson legacy spawned a staggering list of Black stage performers, from Lena Horne to Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, Andre Braugher, Keith David and Denzel Washington. At his peak, Paul Robeson was the most famous Black American in the world. And yet for his refusal to denounce the Soviet Union as cold war tensions increased, Robeson was isolated by both the white mainstream and by the respectable pillars of the Black establishment – the NAACP, the Urban League and many leading Black political and cultural voices who feared being branded communist by the rising conservative tide.

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