Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello by Swindall Lindsey R.;

Author:Swindall, Lindsey R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Political Performances During the Mid-1940s

During the mid-1940s, Paul Robeson’s prominence reached its apex: glowing reviews indicated that his place in the history of Broadway and Shakespearean theater was secured, his popularity was reinforced through numerous awards and honorary degrees, and his left-wing political affiliations were not called into question as long as the United States and Russia were allied. Significantly, the Broadway Othello occurred during the war mobilization as well as a time of mounting civil rights protest. As political circumstances increasingly influenced the major theatrical production with which Robeson was employed, the relationship between Robeson the artist and Robeson the activist became ever more conflated.

The war effort engaged progressives and Communist Party members who pushed for a second European front after Germany invaded Russia in June of 1941. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, most of the United States, except for small pockets of Socialists and conscientious objectors, rallied around the cause of antifascism. The World War II years also represented an important period of campaigning for civil rights by African Americans. Perhaps most famously, A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leader in the National Negro Congress, planned a March on Washington Movement against employment discrimination. The notion of a mass protest during wartime roused President Roosevelt to pen Executive Order 8802. This law outlawed discrimination in the defense industries and formed the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Although it did open jobs for African Americans in some wartime industries, the FEPC was largely impotent because it did not possess the power to enforce any of its recommendations. These jobs were often menial and many African Americans remained segregated in wartime boom towns. Moreover, the armed forces remained segregated through the war for the thousands of African Americans who served and were treated with segregated blood from the Red Cross when they were wounded. On the issue of separated blood supplies, Walter White of the NAACP wrote in the People’s Voice, “How ironic must be the laughter today in Berlin and Tokyo as they listen to American assertions that the war is being fought … to wipe out totalitarianism based on racial bigotry!”20 Meanwhile, the NAACP was continuing its long-term strategy in the courts that would climax with the 1954 Brown decision on school segregation.

In 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American newspaper, introduced the term “double v,” which referred to the need for a double victory against fascism abroad as well as race discrimination in the United States. African Americans fought valiantly against fascism and, thus, also came home fighting for full citizenship rights. This idea was adopted widely in the black community during the war years. The spirit of the Double V campaign was evident at a rally of seventy-five hundred when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. backed Benjamin Davis, of the Communist Party, for city council and proclaimed, “The will of the anti-Fascists … and the anti-Ku Klux Klan will send Benjamin Davis, Jr. to the City Council on November 2nd.

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