Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman

Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman. New York : Knopf, 1988. 1st ed. xiii, 804 p., [48] p. of plates .

Good thing I double-checked as I wrote a new FB that I'd blogged about this book when, in fact, this entry has been in draft form since September 2009.

This may be first book where I spent as much time reading the "Notes" as the text. 198 pages of notes printed in a small typeface and arranged in a double column make for a considerable amount of reading. Many of these notes provide highly detailed clarifications or contradictory evidence; readers ignore the notes at their own peril.

As Professor Duberman explains in the "Note on Sources", this level of information was necessary because so much of his research was based on the Robeson Family Archives (RA), a 50,000-item collection made by Paul Robeson's wife, Eslanda (Essie), and later organized by their son, Paul Robeson, Jr. Writing in 1988 Duberman hopes that the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University will open the RA to general use shortly. He has attempted to assist future scholars by citing gaps or contradictions in the record and also pointing to valuable seconday sources. In addition to the documentary material in the RA, Duberman consulted the holdings of an additional 29 repositories and 30 privately-held collections of manuscript materials. He interviewed over 100 acquaintances and colleagues of Robeson, going back to high school and college classmates.

Paul Robeson was not a diarist nor was he a prolific correspondent; the years before he met and married Essie Goode are sparsely documented. For the later chapters of Paul Robeson's life, much of the documentation is provided by files from the FBI which Paul Robeson, Jr. was able to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act. Feeling there was additional FBI material that Mr. Robeson had not received and recognizing that access under FOIA had become more restricted, Duberman eventually filed a lawsuit against the FBI for materials relating to Robeson's physical and mental collapse. Sadly, the files received were inconclusive, leaving another avenue for future scholars to probe. Since this work was researched and published prior to the end of the Soviet Union, one can only hope that the opening of Soviet-era archives in Russia and Eastern Europe will provide access to additional unpublished material from these counties.

112 black-and-white photographs from family, friends and a wide range of other sources

Martin Bauml Duberman is Distinguished Preofessor of History at Leman College, The City University of New York and the author of ten previous books and a play.