The incredible story the legendary bass-baritone Paul Robeson begins with worldwide success, and a bold gambit to end racism in America and abroad. It ends with government persecution and, depending who you believe, depression triggered by drugs secretly administered under the CIA's MKUltra program. Nicole Steinke explores the life of an extraordinary entertainer, larger than life in size, voice and deeds.

He was the man the US government tried to erase from history. From the 1920s through the early 1960s legendary bass-baritone Paul Robeson was a musical giant on the world stage but from the late 1940s he was almost unknown within his own country. Part folk hero, part star of stage and screen, Big Paul became famous at a time when segregation was legal in the United States and black people couldn't get a meal in a New York cafe, let alone walk safely in the south, where lynching was not a crime.

Born in 1898, Robeson was a 6'3" black man in a world where most people were 5'4" and most white Americans were afraid of blacks. Despite the everyday racism of the society he lived in, he was renowned for his charismatic warmth, as well as the rare beauty of his voice. It was a voice that people could feel resonating inside them and the intensely personal connection that deep sound made with an audience allowed Robeson to cross racial boundaries and be both loved and respected as a performer.

He used his music to bring Negro spirituals to public attention and through them the traditional folk culture of his people. Big Paul’s father was an escaped slave who put himself through university and became a minister. By taking the spirituals to the concert stages of the world Big Paul was signalling that they were of equal value to any other musical form.

There's no such thing as a backward human being, there is only a society which says they are backward. Paul Robeson

As well as advancing the cause of black Americans, he used his music to share the cultures of other countries and to benefit the labour and social movements of his time. A linguist, he sang songs promoting world peace and human rights in 25 languages, including Russian, Chinese and several African languages. They were often traditional spirituals or folk songs telling of struggle, resilience and survival.

More than just a singer, Robeson was also a champion athlete, an actor, and graduated in law from Columbia University. He was also a public champion of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union, a country that created hope among black people around the world when its constitution outlawed racism. During the 1920s and '30s Big Paul performed in the Soviet Union a number of times and he and his wife and then manager, Essie, sent their son Paul Jr. to boarding school in the Soviet Union so that he could experience a place where people did not respond to him first on the basis of his colour. Paul Jr. attended the same school as Stalin’s son and he says the experiment worked. Attending that school taught him for the first time that all white people were not racist.

In 1939 Big Paul and Essie returned to America after a dozen years living in London, associating with socialist intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, while Robeson performed across Europe, including a record-breaking two year run in London of the musical Show Boat. But he had a tense marriage, and had continual relationships with other women.

Big Paul Thursday 16 January 2014 Listen to the full program on Paul Robeson, the man the US government tried to erase from history. More This [series episode segment] has and transcript

From their return to the United States in 1939 until the late 1940s, Americans loved Robeson. The Soviet Union was their ally and friend during WW2 and due to his spectacularly successful live performances of patriotic hit Ballad for Americans, Big Paul was regarded by all but the FBI as one of the country's leading patriots.

Major concert halls around the country were packed for his concerts and he was earning immense amounts of money from performances and recording contracts. But it didn’t last. The political wind was shifting with the beginnings of the Cold War, and Robeson was unwilling to moderate his public statements to suit the new climate. He refused to shut up or be careful.

Along with the huge concerts, he continued to make speeches demanding justice for people of colour, including American and Caribbean blacks, as well as the right to independence of all colonised people around the world. He and Essie were friends with Nehru and with the emerging black African leaders of the independence struggles against Britain. It was his unflagging support for the Soviet Union throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s though, when America plunged into ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria, that made him an enemy of the state.

From 1941 Robeson was under surveillance by the FBI and as the years passed, interference in his life intensified. The re-enactment we hear in the Into the Music documentary of his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 is stirring stuff. Big Paul plays himself. The official recordings of those who testified against Robeson still exist but like almost all US news and radio recordings of him, the recording of his appearance before HUAC was destroyed. Only the transcript remains.

After a speech Robeson made in 1949 at a Paris peace conference was misreported in the US press, more than 80 concerts were cancelled on him and it became almost impossible to buy his records. He had reportedly said the black people of America, a country built on slavery where blacks were discriminated against, would not fight in any war against the Soviet Union; a place he believed was without racism. Robeson never said those words in Paris but there was a kernel of truth in the report and when challenged before repeated inquiries, he refused to deny his friendship with the Soviet Union.

Big Paul was branded a traitor. There was a concerted attempt by Americans as a whole to erase this enormous figure from the public record. He was no longer included in the roll of honour of ‘All-American’ footballers and his Othello was removed from the record books as the longest running Shakespearean play on Broadway. The government and those who supported it—or who feared during the McCarthy years to cross it—attempted to make Big Paul voiceless.

They largely succeeded. Recording studios and concert halls were closed to him. One of the largest riots in the country's history occurred at one of his concerts, held in a relatively small outdoor venue in New York State. Concertgoers were attacked while police stood by and watched. There are photos of police beating black men with batons, including one decorated African-American returned serviceman, as well as taking down the number-plates of concertgoers’ cars to add to the government’s ‘Communist’ file. Around 200 people were injured trying to leave the concert. After that, many towns and cities tried to stop Big Paul performing in any venue. One large city council tried to ban his performing on the grounds that with the possibility of rioting, insurance for the city would be too costly.

Outside of America though, Robeson remained a star. His recordings still sold and he continued to receive invitations to perform around the world. To prevent this, for eight years the US government took away his passport. He was trapped inside a country where he had almost no opportunities to work. The State Department gave as its reasons: that he promoted the independence struggles of colonised people in Africa and Asia and that he criticised the treatment of African-Americans by their government. Both were true. But even to escape the punitive restrictions that now bound him, Big Paul wouldn't let up.

He charged the US government with genocide before the United Nations, over its failure to outlaw the lynching of black men in the South. And while he couldn't perform in large concert halls any more, he continued to sing in church halls and at union gatherings, and down the new transatlantic phone line to public gatherings in Britain, sometimes of thousands of people. He sang and spoke wherever people would listen, determined to still get his message out.

In 1958, after eight years, the government was finally compelled by the courts to return his passport. No longer young, Big Paul and his indomitable wife Essie headed to London and began to tour again. In 1960 they came to Australia and in this Into the Music program we hear some rare archival interviews with Robeson and with people who experienced the magic of his concerts, whether in a town hall or on the building site of the new Sydney Opera House.

They speak in these recordings about the feeling of warmth and compassion he projected—of that amazing voice and of his huge size, but especially his gentleness. He and Essie asked to meet indigenous people throughout Australia and New Zealand and Robeson told the press, ‘There's no such thing as a backward human being, there is only a society which says they are backward.’

Indigenous activist Faith Bandler talks in those archival recordings about the tears that burst from Robeson when he was shown a documentary film of the conditions that Aboriginal people were living under in the Warburton Ranges. This was an area where the Maralinga atomic tests had taken place. She says he became furious and promised he would return to help them. They would go to the centre of the country together, he said, and force the Australian government to take notice of the conditions of its people.

He never returned to Australia. Back in Europe, Robeson travelled with a film crew to Moscow for a concert. Essie was not with him. It was now 1961. Stalin was dead and five years earlier, in a secret speech that rapidly became known to the outside world, the new leader, Khrushchev, had denounced Stalin’s ‘personality cult’ and brutal purges. Nobody knows what Robeson thought of those revelations. He didn’t talk about them publicly and left no writing about them.

Like other Communist sympathisers, up until then he probably believed that the whispers about the persecution of Jews, intellectuals and anyone who threatened Stalin were simply US propaganda. On a visit to Moscow in 1949, when Big Paul asked to meet with Jewish friends from previous visits, he learned firsthand that this was not the case. In protest, he ended his Moscow concert by singing in Yiddish the Song of Resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto. An edited recording of that extraordinary performance still exists, and is available on YouTube. Some people booed the song but many more cheered and cheered.

Nevertheless, despite what he had learned, Robeson continued to support the work towards equality and a just society he still believed was taking place in the Soviet Union, and never said anything publicly to undermine it. With his international profile, he was still a significant weapon for the Soviet Union in the propaganda war.

One night in 1961, while he was on that trip to Moscow to perform, a (reportedly) uncharacteristically wild party was held in Big Paul’s hotel suite. According to his son, Paul Jr, it’s not clear who organised the party but he says it wasn’t his father, or the Soviet government. It just seems to have happened. The Soviet Union was going through a period of relaxed rules under the new leader and all sorts of people were coming out of the woodwork, including dissidents. Some were at the party.

At some stage during the evening Big Paul didn’t feel well and locked himself in his room. He began to feel worthless and depressed, he hallucinated and towards morning he attempted to kill himself by slitting his wrists. He told this to Paul Jr. when his son, who had been contacted by the Soviet authorities, arrived in Moscow a couple of days later. Paul Jr. believes the CIA arranged for his father to be drugged.

He says there was no evidence on the footage taken by the documentary film crew who were following Robeson around during this Moscow visit of any depression before that night. At the time the CIA was running a project called MKUltra, designed to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain function. The program included the surreptitious administration of drugs including LSD; also hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

Essie joined them and Big Paul was taken to a Soviet sanatorium to recover. When he was stable, the family headed back to London. Once there Robeson relapsed and was placed in a psychiatric hospital called the Priory. The treatment was extreme. Big Paul received 54 doses of electroshock therapy during the two years he was at the Priory. Paul Jr. is on record saying he believes the treatment his father received there was part of the MKUltra project. He believes the CIA wanted to neutralise his father.

After years of requests for access to his father’s Priory medical records, almost forty years later in 1999 Paul Jr. finally received them. He says that according to the records, his father was being treated for a non-specific depression. Aside from the 54 doses of electroshock therapy, the doctors also prescribed a cocktail of powerful depressive and anti-depressive drugs. Essie approved the treatment, over her son’s protests. The physicians at the Priory had never requested access to his father’s previous medical records and Big Paul received no psychotherapy during those two years. He was never the same man again.

Not everyone agrees with Paul Jr. that his father was drugged or subjected to CIA controlled mind de-patterning. Some believe that the years of US government pressure and his public rejection by much of the country during the late 1940s and the 1950s were enough to break anyone and it was only a surprise Big Paul hadn’t collapsed from the strain earlier. Some suggested he must have had a tendency towards bipolar behaviour all along, although that illness was never diagnosed.

In August 1963, disturbed by his treatment at the Priory, friends finally managed to have Robeson transferred to the Buch Clinic in East Berlin. The doctors there used psychotherapy and less medication but while Robeson improved they still found him to be without initiative. They questioned the high level of barbiturates and ECT that had been administered in London. His doctor advised that, ‘what little is left of Paul's health must be quietly conserved.’

After returning to the United States later in 1963, Robeson briefly participated in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement but not for long. He continued to refuse to repudiate the Soviet Union or Communism and as a result was not accepted within the mainstream Civil Rights power structure. Regardless, from 1965 his health was too poor to allow him to be politically active. The result was that for most Americans his name and deeds remained forgotten for decades to come. He did not appear in the history of the fight for civil rights. Today that is changing and Big Paul is finally being recognised for the ground-breaking work he did in fighting for black Americans' and workers’ rights and the rights of colonised peoples around the world.

Robeson died in 1976. Two years later his films were shown on American television for the first time. Show Boat, with 'Ol’ Man River', the song for which he’s best known, finally appeared on US screens in 1983. More than twenty years after his death, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Around the world festivals and awards are now named after him, and his work towards ending apartheid in South Africa has been posthumously rewarded by the United Nations General Assembly.

Robeson’s epitaph quotes his words from the Spanish Civil War, when he travelled to the front line to sing for the International Brigade volunteers who’d come from around the world to fight fascism: ‘The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.’

This article was first published on 7/6/13. Find out more at Into The Music.