PLEASE READ SPECS!
PLS NOTE Production is working with an African American/Canadian heritage

Paul Robeson was one of the most successful and best-loved singers and actors of the first half of the 20th Century. He was a passionate civil rights activist, hounded by the FBI and CIA who fought difficult, dramatic and consequential battles across the US, Canada and Europe. He is one of the most extraordinary individuals in the cultural history of the 20th Century. The son of an ex-slave, he had a tumultuous childhood. He witnessed the death by fire of his mother, and an attack on his father for his opposition to lynching. Even though he received intense discrimination as the only Black player on the team, he became a football star, first in high school, then at Rutgers University, where he was voted ‘All-American’.
While studying law at Columbia, he also was the star player for two pro teams in the NFL. He attempted to practice law but quickly found that the racist climate of the day would not accept a Black lawyer, so he moved into acting and performed the lead role in several of Eugene O’Neill’s plays. He also became a singer, and with his distinctive, powerful bass-baritone voice, performed in concert halls in New York and across North America. His most famous role was in Showboat, singing the lead song, Ol’ Man River.
In the 1940s he was one of the very biggest recording stars in the world, but the FBI and right-wing press convinced Americans he was an undesirable. Radio refused to play his records, television studios were forbidden to admit him, his concerts were shut down, and books about him were stripped from library shelves. An open-air concert in Peekskill, NY turned into a riot, with Klan crosses and effigies being burned. He had an acrimonious meeting with an unsympathetic President Truman about lynching, which Truman refused to condemn, and then an equally contentious hearing with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Robeson’s problems with the American government climaxed in 1950 when the State Department stripped him of his passport. Unable to perform in America or to leave the country, he basically lost all his income and thus lived in dire financial straits for the next eight years. One of the few concerts he was able to give was at the International Peace Park on the border of Washington and British Columbia where he sang to 30,000 Canadian fans across the border fence. Our film, "Robeson", tells the story of his dramatic life.