Word: robeson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...PAUL ROBESON...
...years Robeson was a legend, a giant, an epic figure, a cue for awe and resentment. He would earn a place in any history of race relations by being the first black man in movies to call a white man "boy."("Take care of the camels, boy," he genially tells his costar in the 1937 "Jericho.") But Robeson was much more than an uppity, or for that matter heroic, film star. Then and now, one gazes up at him and asks: How could one man - and a black man, at a time when African Americans were denied basic rights - have...
...college football phenom (just the second black man to be named a football All-American), Robeson went on to play pro ball while studying law at Columbia University (just the third black to be admitted to the program). The notion of Robeson at the bar, pleading cases for the underprivileged, instructing the Supreme Court in the justice due all men, is an enticing fantasy; but in the 20s that was as likely to happen as Robeson was to be named president of U.S. Steel. His brilliance would have to be deployed in an arena where blacks had already achieved...
...With no professional acting experience, Robeson was cast as the lead in Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones." He played Joe and sang "Ol' Man River" in stage and film versions of "Show Boat." He was a star in American 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 personality were packed the power, glamour, pathos and tragedy of black dreams and leftist myopia in the 20th...
...perfect subject for 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...