The Paul Robeson House of Princeton Podcast

Welcome to the Paul Robeson House of Princeton podcast. Our goal is to Make ROBESON a HOUSEhold name. In this Summer edition of the podcast series, we have updates on our Freedom Tomato garden initiative.

As we draw nearer to the end of our campaign, the Program Committee wants to thank every friend and neighbor that took up the challenge to grow Robeson tomatoes this season. We especially want to thank the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative, Princeton Public Schools and Dr. Louise Senior for your contributions to the success of this initiative: going from seed to table. For this episode, we sit down to talk to the Food Systems Literacy Coordinator for the Princeton Public Schools, local farmer, educator, dancer and agri-activist Mrs. Tomia MacQueen.

The brilliance of Lawrence Benjamin Brown, long-time Robeson accompanist and collaborator, is spotlighted for this month’s podcast. Biographical notes from the Lawrence Brown papers currently archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library provide key insights into Robeson’s career through his friend Lawrence Brown.

We share some of the voices and perspectives of participants who joined us  on Monday, January 16th at the Martin Luther King [Day of Service]  Curriculum Exchange and Teach In. We started the day acknowledging the labor and land of the people who  have come before us, then joined our voices in the singing of Lift Every Voice and Sing, in honor of the presence of the ancestors on whose shoulders we stand.   

It is important to us that we make ROBESON a HOUSEhold name. The  ideas of legacy and Martin Luther King, planting seeds in the garden that all of us are, as a community, was a key goal of the day. We spent time thinking richly about what it means to be represented in the media, and how it is that Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King and the very many  people in their lives in the 20th century ran together—in association  and in community.

The Board Program Committee End of the Year episode shares an adapted version of a talk given at The Arts Council of Princeton—one of our partner organizations—on Saturday, November 19th 2022. Titled Roots & Branches of the 20th century Black Arts Movement, this talk explains the unique mentoring relationship and influence of Paul Robeson on younger artists of the 20th century—namely Ossie Davis and Alvin Ailey. An original poem is shared that combines various styles of poetic meter to tell the story of Paul Robeson in four acts: Act I: Roots: Networks & Human Geography; Act II: The Forest: Adjacency & Influence; Act III: Branches: Freedom of Movement; Act IV: Black Joy: Blood Memories—Histories that celebrate our joys and our pains a collection and collective.

This episode will serve as a preview of programming for 2023-2024: the 125th birthday celebration of Mr. Paul Leroy Robeson.

Music heard during this episode includes: