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PAUL ROBESON
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ROBESON is a native of Princeton; he grew up there and then attended Rutgers. His scholastic record there is one of those examples toward which other fathers exhort their sons; and his athletic record is best illustrated by the fact that he was an All-American end for two years. Then came Columbia Law School, and with it a quirk of fate that steered him from law to the theatre. When he was in the middle of Blackstone, he was wheedled and cajoled into taking a part in a production of a play by Ridgeley Torrence called "Simon the Cyrene." The play as about the Negro who carried the cross for Christ and for Robeson was more or less of a declamation. He had never acted very much, but his father had taught him how to be at home speaking before an audience. As Robeson tells it: "...How I happened to do that thing, is one of those accidents that make me believe it is all luck the way things come about for me. They were giving this play at a YWCA in Harlem. A woman named Dora Cole was directing it. She had studied dramatics at the Sargent School and she knew Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth MacGowan from there, and they happened to see me in the play. But how I happened to be on the stage is that I was living next door to the YWCA, so close that it was actually possible for Dora Cole to drag me in there and make me do the part. If it just hadn't happened that I was so close that I couldn't get out of it, I never would have done that thing. I was going to Law School, coaching a football team, I didn't want to go into the theatre, I didn't know what I was doing a play at the YWCA for, only I couldn't get out of it." 

     "So, I did it, and everybody was excited about it. Then later Jasper Deeter came to see me. I was studying Law, I was very anxious about my life and what I would do, because I was very much concerned with contributing something to my race. And, of course, I was very sensitive to every epithet applied to it. Added to that, I had been brought up to believe that the theatre was an evil place. And this man――Jasper I mean――came up and read me the play, 'Emperor Jones.' You can understand that my reaction was one of such anger that I couldn't breathe. The more he read me that terrible character, the angrier I got. I think I almost threw Deeter out of the house!

     "It took a lot of convincing years later to make me believe that this all came under the heading of art and you didn't worry about those things. And so finally I did 'Emperor Jones' for Jones and MacGowan, and then 'Taboo' with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and I just gradually got to thinking of myself as an actor, and then, later, a singer. But, it was nothing that I planned. Law was what I had planned. It was just luck."

     Paul Robeson made the sensation that we all know about in "Emperor Jones," followed it with "Black Boy" and "Showboat." Then he went to England, for he was rapidly gaining as much fame as a singer as he received as an actor, and the interest in him was enormous in England. However, he still managed to continue to act as well as sing, and he did "All God's Chillun Got Wings" with Flora Robson, "The Hairy Ape" and "Othello." Robeson was singing at Albert Hall one night when he got a telephone call from Maurice Browne asking him to do "Othello." The production followed and in one of its audiences sat Margaret Webster. She and Robeson had not met at that time, but several years later they did, and with that meeting this production of "Othello" began to form.