ABSTRACT
Paul Robeson grants an interview in July of that same year to the New York Herald Tribune, explaining why he left his practice of law to become a singer and actor. Robeson’s father had moved the family to the North on the Underground Railroad from North Carolina following the Civil War, and he became an ordained minister in 1909 and was appointed to be pastor of the St. Thomas A.M.E. Church in Somerville, New Jersey, close to Princeton. Robeson entered Rutgers in the fall of 1917, and he excelled in both athletics and academics. Robeson’s performance in the London Othello has been routinely dismissed as a mere apprenticeship to the extremely successful Broadway version of Othello produced in 1943, but the earlier version did anticipate and articulate racial issues back in the United States. Robeson was also becoming increasingly strident in his calls for freedom from tyranny around the globe.
