Why Paul Robeson?
Paul Robeson was one of the foremost African-Americans of the twentieth century. He was a world renowned singer and actor and a leading civil rights activist. Robeson’s connections with Wales are said to have begun in 1928, when he impulsively joined a group of marching Welsh miners singing in London’s West End. The next ten years saw him donating money to, and visiting, Talygarn Miners’ Rest Home, appearing in many concerts across Wales including an appearance at the Caernarvon Pavilion the night after an explosion had claimed 266 lives at the Gresford Pit near Wrecsam, and, most famously, a visit to Mountain Ash in 1938 for the ‘Welsh National Memorial Meeting to the Men of the International Brigade from Wales who gave their lives in defence of Democracy in Spain’. The 1930s also saw Robeson establishing connections with the multi-ethnic community in Cardiff’s Butetown, which was also home to the political activist and Pan-Africanist native of Philadelphia, and uncle by marriage to R
