Last year, I wrote a master's thesis for Stony Brook University-SUNY on two recitals which Robeson gave in Duluth in 1931 and 1946. In 2011, I had written a program note for Duluth's Matinee Musicale about the 1931 recital. I'm pasting it in below in case you'd like to have a look:

This year, Matinee Musicale marked the 80th anniversary of a recital given at the Duluth Armory by the African-American baritone, Paul Robeson. Robeson's March 13, 1931 program was performed with the pianist and arranger, Lawrence Brown, who would become Robeson's longtime collaborator. Based on reviews from the Duluth Herald and the Duluth News Tribune, the recital was clearly a success. Rizpah Mitchell, writing for the Herald, reported never having witnessed "a Duluth audience so completely spellbound, so insatiable in its demand for encores and unwilling to leave even at the close of a program so generous in encores that it would have taxed the voice of a less resourceful singer."

Robeson's recital included the spirituals "Go Down Moses," "Deep River," "Water Boy," "Exhortation," and "Every Time I Feel the Spirit." He also performed art songs and arias by Edward Purcell, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Borodin, and Gretchaninoff. He concluded his set of encores with "Old Man River" for which he was already famous from his London performances in Jerome Kern's Show Boat during the late 1920s. (Robeson appeared in the film version of Show Boat in 1936.)

On the day of his performance in Duluth, the News Tribune interviewed Robeson in his suite at the Hotel Duluth, located at Superior Street and Third Avenue East. The focus of the interview was Robeson's new found interest in Russian music. Robeson remarked, "The music of the Russian and the Negro is fundamentally the same. The peasantry, the same oppression ... All this has made me believe that the Russians, artistically at least, are my race." 

Robeson's appearance in Duluth came just three years before his first of many trips to the Soviet Union. Over the years, he would become an outspoken advocate for international socialism and pacifism. Although he never became a member of the communist party, Robeson's sympathy for the Soviet Union would lead, in the 1950s, to his blacklisting in Hollywood and on Broadway, and the revocation of his passport by the U.S. State Department from 1950 to 1958.

The Duluth press was not especially sensitive in its coverage of Robeson's 1931 visit. As an example, in an adjacent column to the News Tribune's front page interview with Robeson, there is a story on a local minstrel show with "black face presentation" that was to be given by students at the Central High School auditorium on the same evening as Robeson's recital. 

Although the reviews of Robeson's recital from both local papers are very favorable, their tone  will seem condescending, if not utterly racist, to a contemporary reader. For instance, in the Herald review, Mitchell refers to how Robeson delivered the set of spirituals "with all the naïve, childlike faith of his race and with the combination of humor and tragedy that made him, more than any other Negro singer, the voice of his people."

The most notable detail on Robeson's return to Duluth in 1946 is that, on the morning after his recital, he sang for women strikers at the Garon Knitting Mill. This episode is mentioned in Richard Hudelson's By the Ore Docks: A Working People's History of Duluth.

Thank you, hbh1. Last year, I had some contact with Sherman Garon, who was at the Garon Knitting Mill on the morning that Robeson sang to the workers there. I would be very interested in following up on this if anyone here might know of others who could have been present that day.