Presenters' Profiles
Amiri Baraka 
Noel Beasley
Ed Bullins
Samuel A. Hay
Floyd W. Hayes III
James E. Lennertz
Miller Lucky Jr.
John T. McCartney
Charles Musser
Kofi Asare Opoku
Nelson Peery
Staff Sergeant Alvy Powell
Paul Robeson Jr.
Randall Robinson
Harry R. Targ
Paul Von Blum
Saul Williams
Lamont Yeakey
Amiri Baraka is a prize-winning poet, playwright, and essayist. His poetry includes Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), Selected Poetry (1978), Hard Facts, Poetry for the Advanced, What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger and the Means of Production (1978) and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995) (1995). His play Dutchman won the 1964 Obie. He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem in 1965, which launched the Black Theatre Movement in the '60s and '70s. Among his other influential works are Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), Home: Social Essays (1966), Black Music (1968), Black Magic: Poetry 1961-1967 (1969), It’s Nation Time (1970), reggae or not! (1981), Wise, Why’s Y’s: The Griot's Tale (1995), and The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1999). Baraka will discuss the significance of the plays performed by Paul Robeson.
Noel Beasley is an international vice president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. He manages its Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board, which represents 30,000 workers in ten Midwestern states. He is a director of the Amalgamated Bank of New York and is the chairman of its trust committee. He has been the executive vice president of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, Terre Haute, Ind., for 20 years. He has been very active in initiating Employee Stock Ownership Plan companies. Among his several essays is “On the Front Lines: The Labor Movement around the Country,” which is in Not Your Father’s Labor Movement (1998). Beasley will analyze "Robeson as Labor’s Champion."
Ed Bullins is Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Northeastern University. Among the awards his 50+ plays have won are the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award, the Obie, and the AUDELCO Award. His paper will discuss his role in the Dramatist Guild's support of the boycotted Paul Robeson (1978) by Phillip Hayes Dean, starring James Earl Jones. Bullins, for the first time, will share his views about the significance of his opposition to the boycott, although he respected the boycotters, who included Paul Robeson Jr., James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Vinnette Carroll, Coretta Scott King, Lonne Elder III, and U.S. Representative Charles Rangel.
Samuel A. Hay, visiting professor of government and law at Lafayette, has published seven books, among which are African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (1994) and Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography (1997), winner of the 1998 CHOICE Award. His paper will closely analyze Phillip Hayes Dean’s Paul Robeson to determine Dean’s artistic choices used to balance the song-and-fun spectacle, which many African Americans of that day resented, with Robeson’s serious and substantive views about the racism he experienced in places as varied as a college football field and New York City law office.
Floyd W. Hayes III is senior lecturer in political science and coordinator of undergraduate studies in Africana studies at The Johns Hopkins University. His book Turbulent Voyage (1992), now in its fourth edition, has become a standard text in African American studies. His paper focuses on how Robeson and Richard Wright—as major Black creative intellectuals driven by the quest to defend Black humanity against the cultural domination of white supremacist ideas and practices—handled the political challenge of making relevant to the larger society one’s intellectual engagements by forming alliances with, and utilizing, those non-state organizations whose sole purpose was to agitate and advocate on behalf of the dispossessed masses.
James E. Lennertz is associate professor of government and law at Lafayette. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and has published more than seven legal essays, along with the well-received Analyzing American Government, 4th edition, with Lowi, Ginsburg, and Jackson. Lennertz’s paper will analyze how Robeson’s study of law influenced his work and character: First, he was inspired and guided by the substance of the American legal and constitutional tradition; Robeson’s habits of mind and heart, secondly, were transformed by his legal studies; and, finally, he never shied away from a fight and was continually drawn into legal proceedings as a party or active supporter.
Miller Lucky Jr. is associate professor of theater at North Carolina A&T State University. He is a producer, director, and actor. Among his numerous awards are the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival Award as the Best Director in 1999 and as Best Actor in 1983. He has chaired the Southeastern Theatre Conference Directing Award Committee. His paper will analyze Robeson’s study of the Stanislavasky Method in preparing for several roles, including the highly acclaimed Othello. The focusing device for the analysis will be Robeson’s homework for the role of Pee Wee in Plant in the Sun (1938). Robeson’s studies for his roles, concludes Lucky, greatly assisted in developing his intellect.
John T. McCartney, professor and head of government and law at Lafayette, is the director of the conference. His Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Thought (1992) is viewed as a major contribution to American intellectual history. His paper will argue that Robeson was influenced not by “mechanical Marxism,” a determinist philosophy that robbed humankind of free will and its distinct nature. Robeson was swayed, instead, by the democratic, humanist, and anti-racist Marxism that he felt could enrich American democracy and end racism. Robeson’s creative use of Marxism was distorted, unfortunately, by prejudice and fear during his life.
Charles Musser is professor of film studies and American studies at Yale. Among his 10 books and two films are Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Period (2001), Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (1997), and The Emergence of Cinema (1990). His lecture will study Robeson’s films, with three principal questions in mind: (a) Based on Robeson’s particular role, what critical questions did he have to answer in order to prepare well for the role? (b) Of the directors’ rehearsal processes, which required Robeson to read extensively for his preparation? What did he read? and (c) based on Robeson’s artistic choices made in playing the characters, to what extent did his studies influence his intellectual development?
Kofi Asare Opoku is professor of religious studies at Lafayette. His publications include Hearing and Keeping: Akan Proverbs (1997), Healing for God’s World with Kim Yong Bock and Antoinette Wire (1991), West African Traditional Religion (1978), and Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa (1975). His lecture will analyze Robeson’s discovery of Africa in the 1930s as a pivotal and deep-reaching experience that informed his outlook on life and gave him a clear understanding of the spiritual dimensions of African culture as a grounding element in community life.
Nelson Peery, a veteran revolutionary organizer, is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (formerly the Communist Labor Party). He is the award-winning author of Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (1994), a memoir of his years in the army during World War II. He is also author of a volume of political essays The Future is Up to Us (2002), in which he shares his experiences and answers questions about communism, capitalism and fascism; about poverty and plenty; race and class; globalization and robotics; about what makes our era different from all others and why it is possible today to achieve a new cooperative world.
Staff Sergeant Alvy Powell is a bass baritone in the U.S. Army Band. His performance of Porgy in the New York City Opera production of Porgy and Bess, broadcast live from Lincoln Center on PBS, was nominated for an Emmy Award for “Best Classical Music Production.” Powell has performed the role of Porgy over 1,100 times with companies such as La Scala, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, Cape Town Opera in South Africa, and Sydney, Australia. Other roles include Balthazar in Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors for BBC Films, Bartolo in The Marriage of Figaro, Timur in Turandot and Sharpless in Madame Butterfly. Powell has been bass soloist in the Verdi Requiem for the Rome Opera, which was sponsored by the Vatican; Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Rossini’s Stabat Mater at the Kennedy Center. He is a soloist with the U.S. Army Chorus and has sung at The White House on several occasions. He first came to national prominence singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the inauguration of President George H.W. Bush in 1989.
Paul Robeson Jr. is a freelance journalist, translator, and highly regarded lecturer on American and Russian history. He served as a personal aide to his father for more than 20 years. He is the owner and archivist of The Robeson Collection, which consists of more than 50,000 items. His books include The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, 1898-1939 (2002) and Paul Robeson Jr. Speaks to America (1993).
Randall Robinson is founder and former president of TransAfrica, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the general public—particularly African Americans—about the economic, political, and moral ramifications of U.S. foreign policy as it affects Africa and the Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America. His books are Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (2004), The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe To Each Other (2002), The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000), and Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998).
Harry R. Targ is professor of political science and American studies at Purdue University. Among his nine books are Marxism Today (1996), Cuba and the USA: A New World Order (1992), Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II (1986), and Planning Alternative World Futures (1975). His paper will analyze the significance of Robeson’s attraction to Fredrich Engels’ empirical studies on the lives of the English working class. Of particular importance to Robeson were Engels’ vivid descriptions of the origins, status, and future of this class as tools for improving working-class rights in the United States.
Paul Von Blum is senior lecturer in African American studies at University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a J.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Among his six books are Other Visions, Other Voices: Women Political Artists (1995), Foundations of Freedom (1991), and Stillborn Education (1986). His paper will analyze Robeson as a major public intellectual who expressed deeply-felt political positions on civil rights, colonialism in Africa, war and peace, the rights and dignity of labor, interracial respect and cooperation, and the ethical superiority of socialism. The lecture argues that even when Robeson’s positions were questionable, like his continuing support for the Soviet Union, his efforts contrasted dramatically with those of many contemporary academic intellectuals, whose political commitments remained abstract.
Saul Williams, spoken-word artist and hip-hop musician, co-wrote and starred in the urban drama Slam (1998), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival and Camera d'Or at Cannes Film Festival. He received the Perry Ellis Award for Breakout Performance by New York's Independent Film Project. After graduating from Morehouse College with a B.A. in philosophy, he moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree in acting at New York University and found himself at the epicenter of the New York cafe poetry scene. In 1995 he began mesmerizing audiences with landmark performances at the Brooklyn Moon Cafe's fabled "Open Mic" sessions and in 1996 became the Nuyorican Poet Cafe's Grand Slam Champion. Author of three print collections, , said the shotgun to the head (2003), She (1999), and The Seventh Octave (1998), he is also featured in a number of poetry anthologies, including Listen Up!, Catch The Fire, Slam, and In Defense of Mumia.
Lamont Yeakey is associate professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. He is a leading authority on Paul Robeson, about whom Yeakey has published and lectured widely. His lecture will analyze the numerous ways that Robeson helped to lay the foundations for the Civil Rights movement, among which were postulating a theory of how to use the law to abolish racial discrimination; using his artistry to advance a new cultural pluralism and to dismantle the social and psychic underpinnings of prejudice and inequality; and championing the causes of racial, ethnic, and gender equality.
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