On 12 June 1956, Paul Robeson faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as part of an investigation into the use of passports “in the furtherance of the objectives of the Communist conspiracy”. Things did not go quite as the committee intended.
In round after round of “verbal fencing”, Robeson not only refused to answer questions, but also countered the attacks of chairman Francis E. Walter, an “overt white supremacist”.
At the peak of the confrontation, Walter asked Robeson why he didn’t leave the US and go live in Russia. As Jeff Sparrow recounts in No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson, the world-famous performer responded with “one of the most ringing answers given to interrogators” throughout HUAC’s campaign:
“‘Because my father was a slave’, Paul said, ‘and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?’”
It was. So clear that Walter moved to adjourn, muttering, “I’ve endured all of this that I can”. Robeson won that verbal battle, but years of confinement, denial of a passport and being “locked inside a nation that considered him a traitor and a threat” took their toll. It would be two more years before the Supreme Court ruled that “the secretary of state could not deny a passport on the basis of a citizen’s political beliefs”.
No Way But This traces the milestones of Robeson’s extraordinary life, beginning with his rise from obscurity as the son of a former slave to become a prize-winning scholar and football star, then to global fame as a renowned singer and actor. Sparrow also charts the development of Robeson’s political consciousness and activism – from his early awareness and anger at the racism that permeated every aspect of his life in the US, to his embrace of radical left politics and working class solidarity.
Retracing Robeson’s footsteps through North Carolina and Harlem, the theatres of London where Robeson performed Othello to standing ovations, the mining villages of Wales, the battlegrounds of Spain, the relics of Stalin’s Russia and even the scaffolding of the Sydney Opera House, Sparrow meets a cast of real-life characters who keep the memory of Robeson alive and calls forth the ghost of the man himself.
The effect of this hybrid storytelling is remarkably intimate and revealing. “Paul”, as Sparrow refers to Robeson, becomes much more than just a hidden, half-forgotten figure of history. Instead, his defining characteristics of determination, commitment, compassion and defiance start to make this character appear as flesh and blood – someone we urgently need to know, a man whose principles and actions resonate today as we face the immediate challenges of standing up to racism and reaction everywhere.
Sparrow writes of Robeson’s support for the Welsh labour movement after a chance encounter with protesting miners from the Rhondda Valley (solidarity that would later be reciprocated by thousands of miners when Robeson’s US passport was cancelled), as well as his support for the civil rights movement and the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
Sparrow also refutes some of the criticism of Robeson’s wife Essie, who is sometimes painted as “ruthless, grasping and ambitious”. He points out that “Essie’s steel would be a key factor in Paul’s success”; that she refused, when hauled before McCarthy’s committee, to disavow either Robeson or the left wing causes they both supported; and that Essie, while “not militant by temperament”, was so deeply affected by what she saw when travelling with Robeson through war-torn Spain that “she identified wholly with the Spanish cause”.
In the final chapters, Sparrow deals with Robeson’s decline into physical and mental illness, and his dogged refusal to recognise the Soviet Union as anything but a “land free of prejudice and exploitation”. Partly, Sparrow explains, Robeson’s own experience of visiting the USSR shaped his attitude: “In Moscow he’d first walked in human dignity; in Moscow, he’d been persuaded racism could be abolished”. (He remained oblivious to Stalin’s brutal repression of ethnic minorities.)
But Robeson’s intransigence was also fuelled by his determination not to “besmirch the vision that had inspired him and all the people like him – the conviction that a better society was an immediate possibility”. The tragedy of Robeson’s personal decline and his disastrous refusal to acknowledge the crimes of the USSR do not, as Sparrow argues, negate his achievements or his political courage at other turning points in his life.
Perhaps the moment in No Way But This that best illuminates Robeson’s spirit and character is Sparrow’s description of the archival video footage of Robeson’s impromptu performance of “Ol’ Man River” (with his own, defiant revisions to the lyrics) to Sydney Opera House construction workers in 1960.
“In 1960, construction workers were not respectable. Concert halls did not cater to labourers, whom few considered deserving of fine music or sophisticated entertainments … [B]y transforming – if only for a lunch hour – their worksite into the musical venue it would eventually become, Robeson makes a statement characteristic of his life and career. You aren’t, he says to them, simply tools for others; you’re not beasts, suitable only for hoisting and carrying, even if that’s the role you’ve been allotted. You’re entitled to culture, to music and art and all of life’s good things – and one day you shall have them.
“By the time the last resonant notes have died away, some of those on the scaffolding are weeping.”
Robeson’s character, art, principled politics and legacy of extraordinary courage all come vividly to life in No Way But This. There are many worthy books about the life of Paul Robeson, but this is one not to be missed.

Allyson Hose

Paul Robeson’s extraordinary life

“Both my parents were factory workers, migrants to this country. That history and that understanding is crucial to me and it’s crucial to the way I understand what I do as a writer.” Christos Tsiolkas, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and award- winning novelist, speaks quietly but emphatically. The audience, who’ve braved a chilly winter afternoon to hear Christos speak about class and culture at Trades Hall listen, rapt.
“I think the fact that I was fortunate, through the work of my parents, to have an education, to be able to read and write, is just something that I can never take for granted – and my parents never had that opportunity. So it feels to me that I would be shitting on that heritage if I didn’t keep class and the understanding of working class culture at the forefront of my thinking.
“At the same time, I feel it would be a lie to call myself working class. I work as a writer, I went to university, and I inhabit a bourgeois world. I think that’s the tension that I keep wanting to explore in my writing as well.”
It’s a tension always evident in Tsiolkas’s work – from the raw energy of Loaded, his first novel, which chronicles a sex and drug-fuelled day in the life of Ari, a 19-year-old gay man from a Greek migrant family, to the pressure cooker atmosphere of his latest novel The Slap – a panoramic view of a schism between a middle class group of family and friends after an incident at a suburban barbecue.
And it’s a tension that Tsiolkas has acknowledged and explored in his essay “The toxicity of smugness”, published in Left turn: political essays for the new left, where he decries the use of terms like “bogan”, “aspirational” and “redneck”, and argues that “The toxicity of progressive bourgeois smugness can be ascertained by how contemptuous is the language used to define the behaviour and expressions for working-class and welfare-class lives.”
The genesis of that essay came from Christos’s own experience. “I was just increasingly distressed by how people around me – and as I said, now I inhabit a really bourgeois world – were using the term ‘bogan’ as a shorthand to dismiss a whole class of people.”
But can class conscious writers and literature be an antidote to this toxicity? And what chance do we have of seeing a genuine revival of radical, working class culture?
These are the questions that preoccupy the audience of socialists, activists, students, teachers, unionists and young writers who’ve come to hear Christos speak.
Hearing more working class voices in literature is important, but Christos believes that “writing these characters is not enough – I think it’s also about involving yourself in debates, in culture, in an active political way.”
Christos talks about the issues that are important to him, “the questions of refuge and asylum, the question of the conditions for working people, the demonisation of Aboriginal people, of working mothers”, but he says that, thinking back to when he was a teenager, it was always clear that writing, not activism, was his path.
“I was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament through Resistance, a socialist group, and I do remember this wonderful older woman turning to me at one point – because I’d come reeking of alcohol and high on speed – and she said ‘you’re too hedonistic to be a good activist!’”
Despite this, he later became a shop steward at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), and experienced firsthand the difficulties of trying to organise arts workers who didn’t see themselves as workers at all.
His experiences as a worker and a unionist, as well as his earliest memories of childhood – “my Mum’s family were communists in Greece and that whole history of the left was part of my heritage as well” – fuel Christos’s commitment to promoting working class culture.
“There has been great working class literature produced in this country but I think there’s been a critical consensus that the literature we talk about in universities, the literature we talk about in The Age or The Australian is not that literature.”
He talks about the influence of modernism on his development as a writer, and about his Australian literary influences – particularly Rosa Cappiello’s Oh lucky country, Katherine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo, and Frank Hardy’s work.
Reading and talking about working class literature is, Christos believes, an antidote to the toxic smugness of middle class culture. And when a young teacher in the audience asks the final question about how overworked teachers and parents can instil a love of reading in school kids, Christos offers another strategy:
“Fight really hard to have an education system that is committed to educating working class youth… My Dad had two years of primary school education… every Thursday he’d get paid and he would go to a bookshop down the road in Richmond and get me two books.
“Because he didn’t know how to read English, sometimes it would be Mills &amp; Boon, sometimes it would be Jaws, sometimes it would be Henry Miller, and it didn’t matter – he just wanted me to read. So one thing I would also say is, I don’t give a fuck about censorship, if someone wants to read, read whatever they want, because that’s how you learn to read…
“What is happening in education in this country is just abhorrent and that’s one of our political fights. That’s one of the things that, whatever arguments we have about what the left means, we can all agree on. That’s one of the battles.”

Paul Robeson’s extraordinary life

Christos Tsiolkas on “the toxicity of smugness”

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