Othello Performance featuring Paul Robeson, 1943

On the night of October 19, 1943, Paul Robeson walked onto the stage of New York's Shubert Theatre as Othello, and Broadway changed. A Black actor in the title role of Shakespeare's tragedy of a Black general, opposite a white Desdemona, was something American audiences had almost never seen on a major stage.

A role Robeson carried across an ocean

Robeson had already played the Moor in London in 1930, at the Savoy Theatre opposite Peggy Ashcroft. That production made him a sensation in Britain, but no American producer would risk it at home. It took thirteen years, and the Theatre Guild, before Robeson could bring Othello to the country of his birth.

Thirteen years later, on Broadway

Directed by Margaret Webster, with José Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, the production ran for 296 performances — the longest run of any Shakespeare play in Broadway history, a record it still holds. Critics praised Robeson's commanding voice and presence. He won the Donaldson Award in 1944, and the company followed the New York run with a national tour in which Robeson refused to play before segregated audiences.

Why one performance mattered

Robeson understood Othello as a play about a Black man destroyed by a society that never truly accepted him, and he said so publicly. In 1943, in the middle of a war fought in the name of democracy, a segregated nation filled a Broadway house night after night to watch that story told by a Black man at the height of his art. Within a decade, the same government that celebrated him would revoke his passport for his politics. The triumph of 1943 is part of the record of what America applauded, and what it later tried to silence.