PAUL ROBESON: 1898-1976

By RICHARD CORLISS

he story goes that when Kim Philby, British Intelligence officer and Soviet mole, was assigned to Washington D.C. after World War II, his superior at MI6 warned him not to get mixed up with communists, homosexuals or Negroes. "In other words," Philby replied, "I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson."

Fifty years ago Robeson was already a legend, a cue for awe and resentment. How could one man--and a black man, at a time when African Americans were denied basic rights--have achieved and symbolized so much? He was a college football phenomenon, the holder of a Columbia University law degree, the lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, the singer of Ol' Man River in stage and film versions of Show Boat, a star in Hollywood and British movies, a magnetic concert basso, a sensation as Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft in London and Uta Hagen on Broadway, a prescient advocate for African self-determination. He was also a stubborn apologist for communism, Stalin-style. In one Promethean figure were packed the power, glamour, pathos and tragedy of black dreams and leftist myopia in the 20th century.

Robeson's centenary this month has yanked him from the obscurity into which he slumped long before his 1976 death. The multimedia spate of tributes includes a posthumous Grammy; reissues (on CD) of his concerts and (on video) some of his British films; and a contentious BBC documentary, Speak of Me as I Am. All that's missing is a reverent Hollywood bio-pic. That won't happen, for one reason: no actor today could match the breadth of Robeson's talents, the pull of his charisma, the solitude of his pioneering outsider status. Or the depth of his fiery, finally wayward commitment.

The son of a runaway slave who became a Presbyterian minister in Princeton, N.J., Paul showed grit from early manhood. When he went out for the Rutgers University football team, other players beat him up and pulled out his fingernails; he bore the abuse to prove his worth, and when he graduated he was a two-time All-American and the school valedictorian, exhorting his classmates to "catch a new vision." Robeson did. Four years later he was starring for O'Neill, giving the first concert composed entirely of songs by African Americans and playing the two lead roles (as a philandering preacher and his sweet-souled brother) in Oscar Micheaux's silent film Body and Soul.

In a Hollywood that thought blacks should simply shuffle and mewl, the spectacle of Robeson lording it over not only black savages but a white trader in the 1933 Emperor Jones film was galvanizing. "Take care of the camels, boy," he genially tells his white costar in Jericho. This, like most Robeson films, was made in Britain, where he lived for the rest of the '30s. He'd sing, act a little, show off his burly torso, flash that intoxicating smile-and, uniquely for a black actor, get top billing above whites. He played African kings, or ordinary Joes who somehow take over tribes, in King Solomon's Mines, Sanders of the River, Song of Freedom, Jericho; all tapped into his natural nobility. As Roland Young says in Solomon, "I always thought that fella had a spot of royal blood in him."

Robeson often signed for films expecting script approval, only to feel trapped in stereotype by the time of shooting. So the camera catches him in the corpse of his original enthusiasm--an actor's version of passive resistance. Perhaps his naivety was as huge as his talent. He believed that Hollywood moguls would give a black actor (any actor) final cut, and that Stalinism was not slavery but liberation. Through three decades of Soviet tyranny (including the murder of one of his Russian-Jewish friends), he remained faithful to the U.S.S.R. And here his charm failed him. He could sell sand to Saharans, but he couldn't peddle Stalin to America. Widely popular in the early '40s, he was a pariah by 1950, denied a passport until 1958, spurned by mainstream black groups, forgotten in the civil rights struggle he had championed.

Two related points need to be made. One is that Soviet Communism was a dour, acquisitive tyranny; and leftists in the U.S. and Europe who believed in this failing light despite reams of damning evidence were, at the very least, lying to themselves. The other point is that a man should not be punished for saying what he thinks. If Robeson rejected a homegrown system of oppression to embrace another, more toxic one, that was his right. He should no more have been denied a passport then than he should be praised for stainless political acuity now.

As he aged he altered Ol' Man River's words to reflect this passion: "You show a little grit/ And you lands in jail./ I keeps laughin'/ Instead of crying',/ I must keep fightin'/ Until I'm dyin'..." His legacy is still worth fighting over, and fighting for.