What is Paul Robeson like in this timeline? I know he would exist because his mother's side of the family were always free, and his father escaped slavery to Philadelphia in 1860, before the POD.
The analogue to Paul Robeson in TTL was Leroy Robeson, born on a different date compared to our world. Robeson, like his counterpart from our world, was gifted academically and artistically, and also attended Rutgers. After graduating from Rutgers, and after the the end of the First Great War, Robeson moved to New York City, where he found work in the city’s growing theatrical world.
Robeson celebrated the victory of the Socialist Party in the 1920 presidential elections, and through himself into support for the party. During the 1920s, Robeson began to shift from a career as a stage actor to that of a playwright. Robeson’s plays in the 1920s, which were celebratory of Socialism, denounced racism, and promoted a future society of social and economic equality, were financially successful in an artistic medium and City that was receptive to the more idealistic forms of Socialist thought.
By the time of the Business Collapse in the early 1930s, Robeson was financially secure as a respected playwright and producer in the contrasting worlds of the left-wing network known as the Workers Theater and also on Broadway itself. Robeson is thought by US cultural historians to be the anonymous author of
City of the New, a utopian novel that was published in 1931, and imagined a futuristic version of New York City where socialism has banished both economic poverty and societal prejudice. This idealistic period of Robeson’s career ended with the twin shocks of the Business Collapse and the rise of the Freedom Party in the CSA.
Leroy Robeson spent the 1930s trying to organize a political alliance in New York City across political lines against the Freedom Party and the CSA. These efforts faltered in the late 1930s, as the Socialist Party under President Al Smith adopted a policy of appeasement towards the Featherston regime and the CSA. Robeson, who did not waver in calling for a harder line by the United States, found himself alienated from a Socialist Party that seemed to have embraced the idea that Al Smith’s policies toward Featherston would avoid another Great War.
Robeson also tried to organize a political alliance to help African American refugees escape from the former CSA, only to discover that this was not a popular cause, even among the Socialist Party.
After the beginning of the Second Great War in 1941, Robeson supported efforts to mobilize New York City, particularly the artistic and theatrical worlds, behind the war effort. Robeson did not stop his attempt to bring attention to the plight of African Americans in the CSA and for the USA to accept refugees from the Freedom Party, but still found that the political establishment in New York City and Philadelphia was uninterested in his proposals to prioritize to rescue of refugees.
The revelations at the end of the Second Great War of the horrors and scale of the Destruction enraged Robeson. In 1946, Robeson, in what what would later be called the Long Letter that was carried by most newspapers in New York City, denounced the Socialist Party and the very concept of Socialism, and mocked the idea of the Socialists actually believing in equality. Robeson then retreated from public life, and would never produce another play again.
The last play that Robeson wrote, which was finished in 1959, was not performed in his lifetime, was called
Alone. The play, which was taken from the accounts of different survivors of the Destruction, chronicled the gradual demise of one African American family in the former CSA under the Freedom Party, until the last member of the family delivers a furious denunciation of the Confederacy for its long list of injustices and crimes against his family and his people, while speaking directly to the audience.
Alone would not be performed onstage until 1984, four years after Robeson’s death. By 2023, it’s still considered by critics and historians to be the most depressing play in US history.
