Paul Robeson Was So Much More Than A Great Black Singer And Actor

He was a champion student athlete (and occasional football pro), an NYU- and Columbia-trained lawyer, London socialite, and linguist. (He was also, for a time, a nude artists’ model.) Many know that he was a civil rights firebrand, but he became a committed Communist and Sovietophile (he had fluent Russian) – until, far too late, he came to understand what life was like in the USSR, and it wrecked him.