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Portrait of Paul Robeson smiling for the camera, 1926.
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Portrait of Paul Robeson Smiling for Camera, 1926

Credit: Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann

Blessed with many talents, Paul Robeson helped pay his way through college and law school by working as an athlete and a singer. A first-team All-American football player at Rutgers University, he graduated from Columbia Law School in 1923 and then began a career as a lawyer in New York City. The next year, Robeson won acclaim in the 1924 revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. Blessed with an extraordinary bass voice, Robeson was twenty-eight when he posed for this publicity photo in 1926.

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