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P: Paul Ropeson?

L: That was an interesting meeting with him, I talked with him on a number of
 occasions during his time on Broadway. he was playing the part of Othello,
 Shakespeare's Othello.

P: What year was this about?

L: You know I cannot remember and a fellow was talking about that the other night
 and I cannot remember those years. it had to be in the 1940s.

P: How did you get to meet him then?

L: I do not recall, some friends of mine knew him and we went to see the play and
 after the play they took me back stage and there I had an opportunity to meet Mr.
 Robeson. Big man, very resonant voice. So I talked with him and then made an
 appointment, he said I could come back to see him. So I went back to see him,
 we talked about his experiences at college. how they did not want him on the
 football team and how he became a star on that team. The things they did to him
 and that whet his ideas about civil rights and what he had experienced from the
 theater world. He was not easily accepted. it took a long time, but I think Paul
 might have been, you could use the term bitter, more than frustrated in the latter
 years. The things they did to him. He was more accepted abroad, except in
 Germany than he was here in America. He could have gone to Hollywood and
 been a big star but it would not have been in a movie or play, similar to he
 was the star. I have forgotten the name of who played the part of lago, similar to
 the devil in that play. You would know his name if I could call it, I think he is
 passed-on now. Here is a man who felt that his country had betrayed him and
 other blacks, who felt that America had not been fair and that black people were
 getting the short end of that which they deserved, pushed back and held back,
 segregated and denied their rightful position. He for one would not accept
 second class citizenship. If you were any black you had to be subjected to that
 kind of embarrassment because they were brought here they were not
 They were brought here, they did all of this labor, this back-breaking work, and
 worked for nothing, they were not paid. Along those lines he moved and in the
 later years, he was considered a communist and a betrayer which, of course, he
 was not.

P: He also married a white wife and I know that created a lot of bitterness.

L: Yes, I did not know that for a long time. Many of our people did though. Marion
 Anderson married a white person.


P: Who is this?