Paris
The World Congress of Partisans for Peace—and the disputed Associated Press account of Robeson’s remarks.
Documentary feature · In development
The Rise and Fall of America’s Number 1 Negro
Paris · Moscow · Peekskill
One year in which a singer’s words, a news dispatch and organized violence collided with the politics of race and the Cold War.
1944
The height
A record-breaking Broadway Othello, the NAACP Spingarn Medal and global celebrity: before the “fall,” Robeson was among the most celebrated Black artists in the world.
The central question
What was said—and what was reported?
A documentary investigation of the distance between Robeson’s voice, the dispatches that defined him, and the violence that followed him home.
Moscow
A hotel-room encounter with imprisoned poet Itzik Feffer, followed by a public concert and a Yiddish song the Soviet state did not expect.
Peekskill I
A benefit concert stopped before it began as organized violence overran the grounds.
Peekskill II
Robeson returned to sing. The concert proceeded; the assault intensified on the roads afterward.
Paris and the machinery of quotation
Speech, translation, wire copy and political reaction—presented side by side so viewers can examine the record.
Moscow behind the official story
Robeson’s private meeting with Itzik Feffer and his Tchaikovsky Hall performance of “Zog Nit Keynmol.”
Peekskill—twice
The two events reconstructed separately: who organized, who protected, who attacked and how the story was remembered.
The evidence
Let the record remain visible
Reviews, dispatches, programs, photographs and contemporary press material become an inspectable layer of the site, with source notes and rights status attached to every item.
The film
History reconstructed from voices, documents and place
The project combines archival footage, dispatches, concert programs, photographs, maps and interviews with historians, witnesses, musicians and Robeson scholars.