🇺🇸 U.S. Badass: Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was, by the 1930s, one of the most famous performers on the planet — a world-renowned bass-baritone, a Broadway and film star, an All-American football player and Columbia Law School graduate, and a man fluent in over a dozen languages who performed for audiences across Europe, Africa, and the Soviet Union. The United States government looked at all of that and decided the most important thing to do with him was destroy his passport, blacklist his career, and erase him from American cultural memory for the crime of refusing to renounce his political beliefs on command.

Born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of a man who had escaped slavery, Robeson built one of the most extraordinary resumes in American history before politics ever entered the picture — Phi Beta Kappa at Rutgers, a law degree from Columbia, a legendary stage and film career including his landmark performance in Othello, and a singing career that made him a global icon, particularly for his rendition of "Ol' Man River," which he rewrote the lyrics to over the years to make them more explicitly about Black resistance rather than resignation.

He was also, increasingly and openly, a communist sympathizer and civil rights radical who refused to separate his art from his politics. He toured the Soviet Union in the 1930s and praised it publicly, based substantially on the fact that he experienced less racism there than in his own country — a statement about America's failures more than an endorsement of Stalin's, though he was also genuinely slow and reluctant to publicly reckon with Soviet atrocities as they became known, a real blind spot in his politics. He supported anti-colonial movements across Africa and Asia. He was, by any honest accounting, one of the most globally significant Black American public figures of the 20th century, and the U.S. government treated that global significance as a threat rather than an asset.

In 1950, at the height of McCarthyism, the State Department revoked his passport, citing his communist sympathies and specifically his refusal to sign a sworn affidavit disavowing the Communist Party. He was not permitted to travel internationally for the next eight years. His domestic career, already targeted by a coordinated concert-cancellation and blacklist campaign, collapsed. Concert venues that had once sold out canceled his bookings under political pressure. His annual income fell from roughly $150,000 to under $6,000. He was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, where he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs, invoked the Fifth Amendment, and told the committee directly that the question of his loyalty was itself un-American in a country built by enslaved ancestors of his who never had the option to leave.

The Supreme Court finally restored his passport rights in 1958, ruling that denying passports based on political beliefs was unconstitutional. By then the damage to his career and health was largely permanent. He spent his final two decades in declining health, partially withdrawn from public life, having watched the American establishment spend a decade systematically dismantling everything he'd built because he refused to perform loyalty on their terms.

They took his passport to keep the world from hearing him and took his stages to keep his own country from hearing him too. He still refused to say the words they wanted.

"The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear."

This week's U.S. Badass had the biggest voice in the world and a government that spent a decade trying to make sure nobody could hear it — because he refused to lie about what he believed to get it back.