Roland Ayers, Paul Robeson

This lithograph was printed at Brandywine Workshop and Archives. It was used as a poster for Moonstone Arts Center in Philadelphia, which hosted a Paul Robeson Festival for eight years. Robeson was a professional athlete, Shakespearean actor, Hollywood star, operatic singer, cultural scholar, and political activist. Ayers’s depiction of him is based on well-known photographs from throughout Robeson’s life: a man of letters and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers College and Columbia University, a football star, a leader of people, and as Othello in the costume he wore for a production at New York’s Shubert Theatre, which was the longest-running Shakespeare play in Broadway history. African sculpture around the edge of the tondo may be a reference to Robeson’s father, an enslaved man of Igbo descent who escaped to freedom and became a minister in Princeton, New Jersey.

During the 1940s, Robeson’s anti-racist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who persecuted him as a threat to American democracy. Although he fought back, Robeson eventually retired to Philadelphia and lived in self-imposed seclusion in his sister’s home at Walnut and 49th Streets until his death in 1976.