The Radical Paul Robeson

[parisian]

The Radical Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was born on this day in 1898. A pioneering black singer and actor, he was also a lifelong radical – and committed his life to the struggle against oppression and exploitation across the globe.

tribunemag.co.uk

09.04.2021

The Radical Paul Robeson
ByManus O'Riordan
Paul Robeson was born on this day in 1898. A pioneering black singer and actor, he was also a lifelong radical – and committed his life to the struggle against oppression and exploitation across the globe.


Paul Robeson was born on 9 April, 1898. 13 years ago, while visiting the city of San Francisco, I learned that throughout the month of April 2008, there was a Paul Robeson exhibition running in the nearby city of Oakland to mark the 110th anniversary of his birth. The persistent campaigning by the Bay Area Paul Robeson Centennial Committee had finally borne fruit.

That 1 April I entered through the doors of Oakland City Hall not quite knowing what to expect. At the top of the splendid rotunda staircase, and alongside the Stars and Stripes, a large portrait of Robeson gazed down on all who entered. Almost six decades after being deprived of his US passport in 1950, there was at least one US city finally prepared to honour this world-renowned singer and pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement.

The reason I had the good fortune to see that exhibition was that two days previously, as Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, I was present for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Monument unveiling ceremony, where I witnessed surviving Brigade veterans of the Spanish anti-fascist war being honoured by the city of San Francisco. As far as I was concerned, the Oakland and San Francisco experiences were two of a kind, since Robeson was an internationalist, whose most outstanding campaign of solidarity had been on behalf of the besieged Spanish Republic.

Paul Robeson in Republican Madrid, 1938

At a London rally in June 1937 Robeson would proclaim: ‘The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice… I stand with you in unalterable support of the government of Spain, duly and regularly chosen by its lawful sons and daughters.’ In the course of that campaign he would add a new song to his repertoire, the bitterly anti-Franco ‘The Four Insurgent Generals’, where the expressed his wish was that the tears of sorrow of a Madrid bombed by the fascists should be avenged. This solidarity campaign would also see Robeson radically alter the lyrics of that song so closely associated with him, ‘Ol’ Man River’.

Paul Robeson also believed in an internationalism of song itself. He familiarised himself with over twenty languages, and in the recording of his famous 1949 Moscow concert, one can hear him sing in seven of them – English, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Yiddish. Welsh, the language of that Western European country closest to his heart, was not one he ever learned, but he did sing the English language translations of its national anthem, ‘Land Of My Fathers’, as well as ‘All Through The Night’. A similar place in his English language repertoire was held by a number of songs in the Gaelic musical idiom, such as ‘The Castle of Dromore’ from Ireland, and ‘The Erriskay Love Song’ from Scotland.

In his 1958 autobiography, Here I Stand, Robeson wrote of how it had been when residing in Britain from 1927 to 1939 that he began to broaden his repertoire. He had come to be of the similar mind as the escaped slave and pioneering abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had visited Ireland in 1847 during the Great Famine under British rule:

Our music—Negro music of African and American derivation—was in the tradition of the world’s great folk music. And so for my first five years as a singer my repertoire consisted entirely of my people’s songs. Then I went on to learn the songs of other peoples, and in Britain there was at hand the riches of English, Welsh, and Gaelic folk-songs. And as I sang these lovely melodies I felt that they, too, were close to my heart and expressed the same soulful quality that I knew in Negro music. Others had noted this kinship before me, and in his autobiography Frederick Douglass, recalling the songs ‘both merry and sad’ that he had heard as a plantation slave, wrote: “Child as I was, these wild songs depressed my spirit. Nowhere outside of dear old Ireland, in the days of want and famine, have I heard songs so mournful.”

This resonated with Robeson in more ways than one. His own father, the Reverend William Drew Robeson, had been born a slave in North Carolina in 1845, escaping North in 1860. No wonder he gave such a powerful rendition of Thomas Moore’s ‘Minstrel Boy’:

And said,
No chains shall sully thee
Thou soul of love and brav’ry
Thy songs were made for the pure and free
They shall never sound in slavery

The Power of Solidarity
Before he became famous as a singer and actor, Robeson had already broken racial barriers in
his personal life. He won a scholarship to Rutgers University, only the third black American to graduate from the university in 1919, although he was initially denied permission to live on campus.

He excelled academically, but also in sports—baseball, basketball, and track—and most notably, he was the first black American to be named all-American in college football, and was hailed by many as the best American footballer of his generation. Winning yet another scholarship, he went on to become the third black American to graduate from Columbia Law School.

Paul Robeson in the 1933 film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Emperor Jones’.

Due to prevailing racism in the practice of law, Robeson opted instead for a career as a singer and actor. In 1928 he accepted an invitation to play the role of Joe in the London production of Showboat. There was criticism, however, from the black community in both the UK and USA of Robeson being willing to sing the original opening line of ‘Ol’ Man River,’ which included the n-word. For the the 1932 Broadway revival, Robeson insisted that the word ‘Darkies’ be substituted, and by the time the movie version was in production in 1935, he further insisted that those lines should be dropped altogether and substituted by ‘Dere’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi, / Dat’s de ol’ man that I’d like to be’.

It was at a London rally for Republican Spain in December 1937 that Robeson first sang his most radically altered version of the song. Robeson’s changes to the lyrics were as follows:

Instead of ‘Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi, / Dat’s de ol’ man that I’d like to be’, Robeson sang ‘There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi, / That’s the ol’ man I DON’T like to be’.

Instead of ‘Tote that barge! / Lift that bale! / Git a little drunk, / An’ you land in jail’, Robeson sang ‘Tote that barge and lift dat bale!/ YOU SHOW A LITTLE GRIT / And you lands in jail’.

And instead of ‘Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’; / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An skeered of dyin’, / But Ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rolling along!’, Robeson sang ‘But I keeps laffin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I MUST KEEP FIGHTIN’; / Until I’m dyin’, / And Ol’ Man River, / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!’

The Albert Hall rally erupted in wild enthusiasm. Robeson’s altered lyrics resonated not only with the struggle for racial equality but also with class struggle. As he would write in Here I Stand:

I went to Spain in 1938, and that was a major turning point in my life. There I saw that it was the working men and women of Spain who were heroically giving ‘their last full measure of devotion’ to the cause of democracy in that bloody conflict, and that it was the upper class—the landed gentry, the bankers and industrialists—who had unleashed the fascist beast against their own people. From the ranks of the workers of other lands volunteers had come to help in the epic defence of Madrid, and in Spain I sang with my whole heart and soul for these gallant fighters of the International Brigade.

It was in London in 1929 that Robeson’s radical education on class struggle had begun. Emerging from one of his performances in Showboat, Robeson came across a Welsh male voice choir busking on the street. These were Rhondda Valley coal miners who had been blacklisted ever since the collapse of the 1926 General Strike, and they had marched in their working clothes all the way to London, hoping to feed their families by busking en route.

He joined them on part of their protest march, sang for them, and not only paid their train fares back to Wales, but also paid for food and clothing to bring back home. He donated the proceeds of a subsequent concert to the Miners’ Relief Fund. Likewise, when on concert tour of Wales itself in 1934, he donated the proceeds of his Caernarfon concert to a fund for the families of the more than 200 miners who had perished and remained buried underground in the Gresford colliery inferno.

In December 1938, Robeson would be back in Wales to speak and sing at a commemoration of 33 Welshmen who had given their lives in Spain, with International Brigade veterans marching behind the flags of Wales and the Spanish Republic onto a platform alongside a group of Basque refugee children as well as one hundred black citizens of Cardiff. And in August and September 1939, he was filming in Wales as the star of The Proud Valley, which told the story of a black American sailor who jumps ship to work in a South Wales colliery.

This was a film of which Robeson himself was so proud, saying that it allowed him to ‘depict the Negro as he really is, not the caricature he is always represented to be on the screen’. The Proud Valley was released in 1940, but film critic Matthew Sweet was of the opinion in 2005 that if the film had been completed before the outbreak of war ‘it would have been the most uncompromisingly Marxist picture ever produced in Anglophone cinema’.

Paul Robeson sings during the choir scene of ‘The Proud Valley’.

Robeson returned to the USA in October 1942. The Second World War saw the largest voluntary westward migration of black Americans from the South to California in US history, with nearly 500,000 moving west between 1942 and 1945. There is a powerful photo of Robeson singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in September 1942 with a racially integrated shipyards workforce in Oakland.

He was now adding songs of the US labour movement to his repertoire, most notably ‘Joe Hill’, with its lines ‘In San Diego up to Maine / In every mine and mill / Where working men defend their rights / It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill’. It was in 1943 that Robeson released his recording in ‘Songs of Free Men’, but in 1939 he had already informed the composer of its melody, Earl Robinson, ‘I know one of your songs.’ He had learned ‘Joe Hill’ in the Workers’ Theatre in England fewer than three years after it had been completed in 1936.

The post-war years saw Robeson and US reaction in direct confrontation with each other. In September 1946, as leader of the Anti-Lynching Crusade, he had a very stormy meeting with President Truman. He told the President that if the government did not do something to curb lynching, ‘Negroes would’. He asked the government to make a formal declaration of disapproval of lynching within 100 days.

The President, Robeson reported, said that this was not the time for him to act. Robeson responded that if this was the case, the Nuremberg war crimes trials were an exercise in hypocrisy. The USA could not take the lead in punishing the Nazis while the government permitted Negroes to be lynched and shot. A reporter asked, ‘Are you a communist?’, to which Robeson replied, ‘I am violently antifascist.’ Another asked if he believed in ‘turning the other cheek’. ‘If someone hit me on one cheek, I’d tear his head off before he could hit me on the other one,’ came the reply.

Robeson was touring Europe again in 1949. That May, the Scottish area of the National Union of Mineworkers booked Robeson to give a concert to hundreds of miners in Edinburgh. A newsreel report recorded how that afternoon Robeson had also visited Woolmet colliery and sang ‘Joe Hill’ for the miners in their canteen. But it was what Associated Press had misreported Robeson as saying that April at the World Peace Conference in Paris that finally cast the die.

The false report was that he had condemned the US government as Hitlerite. But what he had actually said was in itself sufficient to get him blacklisted: ‘Negroes would fight for peace, would become Partisans of peace rather than be dragged into a war against the Soviet Union and the East, where there is no prejudice. Take a questionnaire and give a Negro sharecropper an honest appraisal – peace with nations who are raising their former minorities, or war in the interest of those who just refused him his civil rights.’

On returning to the USA, Robeson proceeded to schedule outdoor concerts in Peekskill, New York, for August and September 1949. Spurred on by press incitement, rock-throwing racist mobs attacked concert goers. With reasonable fears of a possible assassination attempt, volunteers from the Fur and Leather Workers’ Union and the United Electrical Workers, as well as Longshoremen, formed a human shield around Robeson as he sang.

A year later, Robeson’s passport was withdrawn by the US State Department. Canada, however, permitted entry to US citizens without requiring presentation of a passport. But when the United Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union invited Robeson to give a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, in January 1952, the State Department invoked World War emergency legislation to prevent Robeson crossing the border. The Union’s response was to organise a concert for May 1952, at the Peace Bridge Arch, on the border between Washington State and British Columbia. Robeson sang from the US side to an audience of 30,000 across on the Canadian side, and 5,000 on the US side.

Union internationalism was no less dramatically in evidence in October 1957. The President of the South Wales Miners, Will Painter, who had been an International Brigade commissar in Spain, invited Robeson to sing at the Union’s Eisteddfod in Porthcawl. Knowing full well that Robeson was forbidden to travel, Painter set up a trans-Atlantic telephone link to the Eisteddfod.

Robeson’s voice resounded through its speakers with a set from his repertoire, while the Treorchy Male Choir replied in kind. And after Robeson had joined with the choir in singing the Welsh anthem ‘Land of My Fathers’, the whole audience of 5,000 responded by singing back ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside / We’ll keep a welcome in the Vales / This land you knew will still be singing / When you come home again to Wales’.

Meanwhile, in June 1956, Robeson had been summoned to Washington to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He remained steadfast and defiant, declaring: ‘I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country and they are not. They are not in Mississippi and they are not… in Washington… You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people… That is why I am here today.’

Congressman Scherer interrupted: ‘Why do you not stay in Russia?’ Robeson replied: ‘Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?’

Paul Robeson speaks before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1956.

Forbidden to travel, Robeson set to work on his autobiography Here I Stand. There he pointed out that ‘Karl Marx said, a hundred years ago, that “Labour in a white skin can never be free while labour in a black skin is branded”.’ One particular chapter, ‘The Power of Negro Action’, read like a blueprint for the Civil Rights Movement’s advances of the 1960s. Robeson further emphasised:

Here let me point to a large group among the Negro rank-and-file which is potentially the most powerful and effective force in our community the Negro men and women who are members of organised labour. We are a working people and the pay-envelope of the Negro worker is the measure of our general welfare and progress… Here, on the basic bread-and-butter level, is a crucial front in our fight for equality and here the Negro trade unionists are the main force to lead the way… You must rally your white fellow workers to support full equality for Negro workers; for their right to work at any job; to receive equal pay for equal work; for an end to Jim Crow unions; for the election of qualified Negroes to positions of union leadership; for fair employment practices in every industry; for trade union educational programs to eliminate the notions of ‘white superiority’ which the employers use to poison the minds of the white workers in order to pit them against you.

Marking Robeson’s Legacy
In June 1958 a US Supreme Court decision resulted in Robeson’s passport being restored. With that document firmly in hand, he flew to London in July. He would undertake a concert tour of the UK, with a series of 26 performances between September and December 1958.

More than 30 years ago, three of my International Brigade veteran friends told of their vivid memory, half a century later, of the morale-boosting concert that Robeson had given to Brigadistas in Spain in January 1938, before they were sent to the front. These were Dubliners Bob Doyle and Maurice Levitas, and Dave Goodman from Middlesbrough, who wrote to me of their short period at training camp:

My company commander was an Irishman, Paddy O’Sullivan. We didn’t even have rifles to train with, and we weren’t there long anyway. Teruel had been re-taken by the fascists and we were needed at the front to try and stop the rot. Before leaving we had a concert with Paul Robeson. Although many details of my experiences in Spain have faded from my memory, the fact that my memory of Paul Robeson singing to us on the eve of our departure for the front is ever green, and is a measure of the impact of his singing. The effect was electric and inspirational.

My International Brigade father, Michael O’Riordan, arrived in Spain in April 1938. 20 years later, he at long last had the opportunity to travel from Dublin to Belfast to see and hear Robeson for the first time at one of the two concerts he was to give in that city in November 1958.

He also met and spoke with Robeson and returned with a concert programme signed for myself and my sister: “Hello Manus & Brenda. Hope to see you soon. Much love from Paul (Robeson)”. As if he needed to clarify that he was not to be confused with any other Paul! I was already familiar, as a nine year old, with Robeson’s renditions of ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Kevin Barry’, ‘The Castle of Dromore’, and ‘The Erriskay Love Song’, as played on Radio Éireann, as well as hearing him guest on the BBC programme ‘Desert Island Discs’.

As the South Wales Miners audience had sung to Robeson across the Atlantic in October 1957, he would indeed be welcomed back to Wales, and November 1958 would also see him give concerts in Cardiff and Swansea. But the highlight of his return had already occurred in August 1958, when he was the special guest of the MP for Ebbw Vale and the founder of the National Health Service, Nye Bevan, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, held that year in Ebbw Vale.

Paul Robeson and Aneurin Bevan at the Eisteddfod festival of Welsh culture in 1958.

Robeson was the first person ever given permission to address the National Eisteddfod in English, when he said of those Welsh people he had come to know and love: ‘You have shaped my life – I have learned from you. I am part of the working class. Of all the films I have made, the one I will preserve is Proud Valley.’

In 1960 Robeson was to lead the May Day Parade in Glasgow, and later that year he embarked on a concert tour of Australia and New Zealand. The most outstanding feature of that tour was his outdoor concert for construction workers building the Sydney Opera House, when ‘Joe Hill’ rang out yet again.

But ill-health would thereafter take its toll. In 1965 Robeson would sing his fighting version of ‘Ol’ Man River’ in public for the last time. His final years were lived in seclusion, until his passing on January 23, 1976. In 1975 Robeson had, however, issued the following statement:

People should understand that when I could be active I went here, there, and everywhere. What I wanted to do I did; what I wanted to say I said; and now that ill-health has compelled my retirement I have decided to let the record speak for itself. As far as my basic outlook is concerned, everybody should know that I’m the same Paul Robeson and the viewpoint I expressed in my book Here I Stand has never changed.

In 2004, bowing to the pressure of a six-year grassroots campaign, the US Postal Service finally issued a stamp commemorating Paul Robeson, as part of its Black Heritage series. This was midway through the two-term Republican presidency of George W. Bush. But when a man like Robeson had been been so grievously hounded and persecuted by the state, something more presidential than a postage stamp was required.

In 1933, charged with being a Communist, James Gralton became the only Irish person ever to be deported from his native land. In 2016 the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, travelled to Gralton’s birthplace to unveil a monument in his honour and apologised on behalf of the Irish state for the wrong done to him.

That was truly presidential. Sadly, nothing similar happened in the USA in respect of Paul Robeson during the course of the two-term Democratic presidency of Barack Obama. In October 2013, midway through that period of office, President Barack Obama visited Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With P-TECH lauded as ‘a ticket into the middle class… available to everybody who’s willing to work for it,’ a report in the New York Amsterdam News elaborated:

Controversy reigned at the beginning of the two-year-old school though, which took up space in Paul Robeson High School and partnered with IBM to give space to 300-plus citywide students. It was part of Mayor Bloomberg’s small school movement, wherein he went on an educational rampage, closing established schools and paradoxically opening small ones in the same building. Some of the remaining 50 Paul Robeson students said that they felt like ‘second-class citizens’ in the building they are now sharing with this highly touted, much praised new school… According to Obama, big business married to education is the key to success… The problem is, the students of Paul Robeson and so many other schools under Bloomberg will not have that opportunity because they are being phased out gradually either by colocation or charter school placement.

President Obama could not bring himself to say one word about the man whose name had been given to the building in which he was now standing, nor could he acknowledge that without the pathbreaking struggles of Paul Robeson, an Obama presidency would never have come to pass.

Paul Robeson speaks at a rally against nuclear weapons in Trafalgar Square, London, in 1959.

He ought to have reflected on the statement given by Robeson to the Milwaukee Journal in October 1941: ‘It means so little when a man like me wins some success. Where is benefit when a small class of Negroes makes money and can live well? It may all be very encouraging, but it has no deeper significance. I feel this way because I have cousins who can neither read nor write. I have had a chance. They have not. That is the difference.’

A rising tide does not lift all boats. For Paul Robeson, identity politics would remain neutered unless they also embraced the reality of class discrimination and struggle. At the time of writing, such issues are being acted out in Bessemer, Alabama, as ballots are being counted in the campaign by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionise 5,800 Amazon employees, 85 percent of whom are black Americans.

The RWDSU says that this is not just a union struggle, it’s also a civil rights struggle, one seeking to assure dignity for every worker. Richard Bensinger, who is working on organising drives at several other other Amazon warehouses in the USA and Canada, said:

Win or lose (the ballot) they [the RWDSU] already won. The good thing is they jumped in feet first. They took on the most powerful, richest guy in the world. Everyone in labour is inspired by this. When there are these big campaigns, some people in the labour movement are afraid and ask, What if they lose? If you don’t try, you’ll never win. I’ve said to the Amazon workers I’m working with, “Whether they win or lose, the folks in Alabama are showing the way.”

This the blueprint that Paul Robeson mapped out in 1958 with Here I Stand. His struggle continues.



About the Author
Manus O'Riordan is Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. From 1971 to 2010, he was the founding Head of Research with the ITGWU and its successor union SIPTU.

 

[parisian]

more people need to know and learn about Paul Robeson
truly an amazing human being

 

[Black 454]

The Radical Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson was born on this day in 1898. A pioneering black singer and actor, he was also a lifelong radical – and committed his life to the struggle against oppression and exploitation across the globe.

tribunemag.co.uk

09.04.2021

The Radical Paul Robeson
ByManus O'Riordan
Paul Robeson was born on this day in 1898. A pioneering black singer and actor, he was also a lifelong radical – and committed his life to the struggle against oppression and exploitation across the globe.


Paul Robeson was born on 9 April, 1898. 13 years ago, while visiting the city of San Francisco, I learned that throughout the month of April 2008, there was a Paul Robeson exhibition running in the nearby city of Oakland to mark the 110th anniversary of his birth. The persistent campaigning by the Bay Area Paul Robeson Centennial Committee had finally borne fruit.

That 1 April I entered through the doors of Oakland City Hall not quite knowing what to expect. At the top of the splendid rotunda staircase, and alongside the Stars and Stripes, a large portrait of Robeson gazed down on all who entered. Almost six decades after being deprived of his US passport in 1950, there was at least one US city finally prepared to honour this world-renowned singer and pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement.

The reason I had the good fortune to see that exhibition was that two days previously, as Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, I was present for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Monument unveiling ceremony, where I witnessed surviving Brigade veterans of the Spanish anti-fascist war being honoured by the city of San Francisco. As far as I was concerned, the Oakland and San Francisco experiences were two of a kind, since Robeson was an internationalist, whose most outstanding campaign of solidarity had been on behalf of the besieged Spanish Republic.

Paul Robeson in Republican Madrid, 1938

At a London rally in June 1937 Robeson would proclaim: ‘The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice… I stand with you in unalterable support of the government of Spain, duly and regularly chosen by its lawful sons and daughters.’ In the course of that campaign he would add a new song to his repertoire, the bitterly anti-Franco ‘The Four Insurgent Generals’, where the expressed his wish was that the tears of sorrow of a Madrid bombed by the fascists should be avenged. This solidarity campaign would also see Robeson radically alter the lyrics of that song so closely associated with him, ‘Ol’ Man River’.

Paul Robeson also believed in an internationalism of song itself. He familiarised himself with over twenty languages, and in the recording of his famous 1949 Moscow concert, one can hear him sing in seven of them – English, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Yiddish. Welsh, the language of that Western European country closest to his heart, was not one he ever learned, but he did sing the English language translations of its national anthem, ‘Land Of My Fathers’, as well as ‘All Through The Night’. A similar place in his English language repertoire was held by a number of songs in the Gaelic musical idiom, such as ‘The Castle of Dromore’ from Ireland, and ‘The Erriskay Love Song’ from Scotland.

In his 1958 autobiography, Here I Stand, Robeson wrote of how it had been when residing in Britain from 1927 to 1939 that he began to broaden his repertoire. He had come to be of the similar mind as the escaped slave and pioneering abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had visited Ireland in 1847 during the Great Famine under British rule:


This resonated with Robeson in more ways than one. His own father, the Reverend William Drew Robeson, had been born a slave in North Carolina in 1845, escaping North in 1860. No wonder he gave such a powerful rendition of Thomas Moore’s ‘Minstrel Boy’:


The Power of Solidarity
Before he became famous as a singer and actor, Robeson had already broken racial barriers in
his personal life. He won a scholarship to Rutgers University, only the third black American to graduate from the university in 1919, although he was initially denied permission to live on campus.

He excelled academically, but also in sports—baseball, basketball, and track—and most notably, he was the first black American to be named all-American in college football, and was hailed by many as the best American footballer of his generation. Winning yet another scholarship, he went on to become the third black American to graduate from Columbia Law School.

Paul Robeson in the 1933 film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Emperor Jones’.

Due to prevailing racism in the practice of law, Robeson opted instead for a career as a singer and actor. In 1928 he accepted an invitation to play the role of Joe in the London production of Showboat. There was criticism, however, from the black community in both the UK and USA of Robeson being willing to sing the original opening line of ‘Ol’ Man River,’ which included the n-word. For the the 1932 Broadway revival, Robeson insisted that the word ‘Darkies’ be substituted, and by the time the movie version was in production in 1935, he further insisted that those lines should be dropped altogether and substituted by ‘Dere’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi, / Dat’s de ol’ man that I’d like to be’.

It was at a London rally for Republican Spain in December 1937 that Robeson first sang his most radically altered version of the song. Robeson’s changes to the lyrics were as follows:

Instead of ‘Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi, / Dat’s de ol’ man that I’d like to be’, Robeson sang ‘There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi, / That’s the ol’ man I DON’T like to be’.

Instead of ‘Tote that barge! / Lift that bale! / Git a little drunk, / An’ you land in jail’, Robeson sang ‘Tote that barge and lift dat bale!/ YOU SHOW A LITTLE GRIT / And you lands in jail’.

And instead of ‘Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’; / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An skeered of dyin’, / But Ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rolling along!’, Robeson sang ‘But I keeps laffin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I MUST KEEP FIGHTIN’; / Until I’m dyin’, / And Ol’ Man River, / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!’

The Albert Hall rally erupted in wild enthusiasm. Robeson’s altered lyrics resonated not only with the struggle for racial equality but also with class struggle. As he would write in Here I Stand:


It was in London in 1929 that Robeson’s radical education on class struggle had begun. Emerging from one of his performances in Showboat, Robeson came across a Welsh male voice choir busking on the street. These were Rhondda Valley coal miners who had been blacklisted ever since the collapse of the 1926 General Strike, and they had marched in their working clothes all the way to London, hoping to feed their families by busking en route.

He joined them on part of their protest march, sang for them, and not only paid their train fares back to Wales, but also paid for food and clothing to bring back home. He donated the proceeds of a subsequent concert to the Miners’ Relief Fund. Likewise, when on concert tour of Wales itself in 1934, he donated the proceeds of his Caernarfon concert to a fund for the families of the more than 200 miners who had perished and remained buried underground in the Gresford colliery inferno.

In December 1938, Robeson would be back in Wales to speak and sing at a commemoration of 33 Welshmen who had given their lives in Spain, with International Brigade veterans marching behind the flags of Wales and the Spanish Republic onto a platform alongside a group of Basque refugee children as well as one hundred black citizens of Cardiff. And in August and September 1939, he was filming in Wales as the star of The Proud Valley, which told the story of a black American sailor who jumps ship to work in a South Wales colliery.

This was a film of which Robeson himself was so proud, saying that it allowed him to ‘depict the Negro as he really is, not the caricature he is always represented to be on the screen’. The Proud Valley was released in 1940, but film critic Matthew Sweet was of the opinion in 2005 that if the film had been completed before the outbreak of war ‘it would have been the most uncompromisingly Marxist picture ever produced in Anglophone cinema’.

Paul Robeson sings during the choir scene of ‘The Proud Valley’.

Robeson returned to the USA in October 1942. The Second World War saw the largest voluntary westward migration of black Americans from the South to California in US history, with nearly 500,000 moving west between 1942 and 1945. There is a powerful photo of Robeson singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in September 1942 with a racially integrated shipyards workforce in Oakland.

He was now adding songs of the US labour movement to his repertoire, most notably ‘Joe Hill’, with its lines ‘In San Diego up to Maine / In every mine and mill / Where working men defend their rights / It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill’. It was in 1943 that Robeson released his recording in ‘Songs of Free Men’, but in 1939 he had already informed the composer of its melody, Earl Robinson, ‘I know one of your songs.’ He had learned ‘Joe Hill’ in the Workers’ Theatre in England fewer than three years after it had been completed in 1936.

The post-war years saw Robeson and US reaction in direct confrontation with each other. In September 1946, as leader of the Anti-Lynching Crusade, he had a very stormy meeting with President Truman. He told the President that if the government did not do something to curb lynching, ‘Negroes would’. He asked the government to make a formal declaration of disapproval of lynching within 100 days.

The President, Robeson reported, said that this was not the time for him to act. Robeson responded that if this was the case, the Nuremberg war crimes trials were an exercise in hypocrisy. The USA could not take the lead in punishing the Nazis while the government permitted Negroes to be lynched and shot. A reporter asked, ‘Are you a communist?’, to which Robeson replied, ‘I am violently antifascist.’ Another asked if he believed in ‘turning the other cheek’. ‘If someone hit me on one cheek, I’d tear his head off before he could hit me on the other one,’ came the reply.

Robeson was touring Europe again in 1949. That May, the Scottish area of the National Union of Mineworkers booked Robeson to give a concert to hundreds of miners in Edinburgh. A newsreel report recorded how that afternoon Robeson had also visited Woolmet colliery and sang ‘Joe Hill’ for the miners in their canteen. But it was what Associated Press had misreported Robeson as saying that April at the World Peace Conference in Paris that finally cast the die.

The false report was that he had condemned the US government as Hitlerite. But what he had actually said was in itself sufficient to get him blacklisted: ‘Negroes would fight for peace, would become Partisans of peace rather than be dragged into a war against the Soviet Union and the East, where there is no prejudice. Take a questionnaire and give a Negro sharecropper an honest appraisal – peace with nations who are raising their former minorities, or war in the interest of those who just refused him his civil rights.’

On returning to the USA, Robeson proceeded to schedule outdoor concerts in Peekskill, New York, for August and September 1949. Spurred on by press incitement, rock-throwing racist mobs attacked concert goers. With reasonable fears of a possible assassination attempt, volunteers from the Fur and Leather Workers’ Union and the United Electrical Workers, as well as Longshoremen, formed a human shield around Robeson as he sang.

A year later, Robeson’s passport was withdrawn by the US State Department. Canada, however, permitted entry to US citizens without requiring presentation of a passport. But when the United Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union invited Robeson to give a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, in January 1952, the State Department invoked World War emergency legislation to prevent Robeson crossing the border. The Union’s response was to organise a concert for May 1952, at the Peace Bridge Arch, on the border between Washington State and British Columbia. Robeson sang from the US side to an audience of 30,000 across on the Canadian side, and 5,000 on the US side.

Union internationalism was no less dramatically in evidence in October 1957. The President of the South Wales Miners, Will Painter, who had been an International Brigade commissar in Spain, invited Robeson to sing at the Union’s Eisteddfod in Porthcawl. Knowing full well that Robeson was forbidden to travel, Painter set up a trans-Atlantic telephone link to the Eisteddfod.

Robeson’s voice resounded through its speakers with a set from his repertoire, while the Treorchy Male Choir replied in kind. And after Robeson had joined with the choir in singing the Welsh anthem ‘Land of My Fathers’, the whole audience of 5,000 responded by singing back ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside / We’ll keep a welcome in the Vales / This land you knew will still be singing / When you come home again to Wales’.

Meanwhile, in June 1956, Robeson had been summoned to Washington to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He remained steadfast and defiant, declaring: ‘I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country and they are not. They are not in Mississippi and they are not… in Washington… You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people… That is why I am here today.’

Congressman Scherer interrupted: ‘Why do you not stay in Russia?’ Robeson replied: ‘Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?’

Paul Robeson speaks before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1956.

Forbidden to travel, Robeson set to work on his autobiography Here I Stand. There he pointed out that ‘Karl Marx said, a hundred years ago, that “Labour in a white skin can never be free while labour in a black skin is branded”.’ One particular chapter, ‘The Power of Negro Action’, read like a blueprint for the Civil Rights Movement’s advances of the 1960s. Robeson further emphasised:




Marking Robeson’s Legacy
In June 1958 a US Supreme Court decision resulted in Robeson’s passport being restored. With that document firmly in hand, he flew to London in July. He would undertake a concert tour of the UK, with a series of 26 performances between September and December 1958.

More than 30 years ago, three of my International Brigade veteran friends told of their vivid memory, half a century later, of the morale-boosting concert that Robeson had given to Brigadistas in Spain in January 1938, before they were sent to the front. These were Dubliners Bob Doyle and Maurice Levitas, and Dave Goodman from Middlesbrough, who wrote to me of their short period at training camp:


My International Brigade father, Michael O’Riordan, arrived in Spain in April 1938. 20 years later, he at long last had the opportunity to travel from Dublin to Belfast to see and hear Robeson for the first time at one of the two concerts he was to give in that city in November 1958.

He also met and spoke with Robeson and returned with a concert programme signed for myself and my sister: “Hello Manus & Brenda. Hope to see you soon. Much love from Paul (Robeson)”. As if he needed to clarify that he was not to be confused with any other Paul! I was already familiar, as a nine year old, with Robeson’s renditions of ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Kevin Barry’, ‘The Castle of Dromore’, and ‘The Erriskay Love Song’, as played on Radio Éireann, as well as hearing him guest on the BBC programme ‘Desert Island Discs’.

As the South Wales Miners audience had sung to Robeson across the Atlantic in October 1957, he would indeed be welcomed back to Wales, and November 1958 would also see him give concerts in Cardiff and Swansea. But the highlight of his return had already occurred in August 1958, when he was the special guest of the MP for Ebbw Vale and the founder of the National Health Service, Nye Bevan, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, held that year in Ebbw Vale.

Paul Robeson and Aneurin Bevan at the Eisteddfod festival of Welsh culture in 1958.

Robeson was the first person ever given permission to address the National Eisteddfod in English, when he said of those Welsh people he had come to know and love: ‘You have shaped my life – I have learned from you. I am part of the working class. Of all the films I have made, the one I will preserve is Proud Valley.’

In 1960 Robeson was to lead the May Day Parade in Glasgow, and later that year he embarked on a concert tour of Australia and New Zealand. The most outstanding feature of that tour was his outdoor concert for construction workers building the Sydney Opera House, when ‘Joe Hill’ rang out yet again.

But ill-health would thereafter take its toll. In 1965 Robeson would sing his fighting version of ‘Ol’ Man River’ in public for the last time. His final years were lived in seclusion, until his passing on January 23, 1976. In 1975 Robeson had, however, issued the following statement:


In 2004, bowing to the pressure of a six-year grassroots campaign, the US Postal Service finally issued a stamp commemorating Paul Robeson, as part of its Black Heritage series. This was midway through the two-term Republican presidency of George W. Bush. But when a man like Robeson had been been so grievously hounded and persecuted by the state, something more presidential than a postage stamp was required.

In 1933, charged with being a Communist, James Gralton became the only Irish person ever to be deported from his native land. In 2016 the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, travelled to Gralton’s birthplace to unveil a monument in his honour and apologised on behalf of the Irish state for the wrong done to him.

That was truly presidential. Sadly, nothing similar happened in the USA in respect of Paul Robeson during the course of the two-term Democratic presidency of Barack Obama. In October 2013, midway through that period of office, President Barack Obama visited Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With P-TECH lauded as ‘a ticket into the middle class… available to everybody who’s willing to work for it,’ a report in the New York Amsterdam News elaborated:


President Obama could not bring himself to say one word about the man whose name had been given to the building in which he was now standing, nor could he acknowledge that without the pathbreaking struggles of Paul Robeson, an Obama presidency would never have come to pass.

Paul Robeson speaks at a rally against nuclear weapons in Trafalgar Square, London, in 1959.

He ought to have reflected on the statement given by Robeson to the Milwaukee Journal in October 1941: ‘It means so little when a man like me wins some success. Where is benefit when a small class of Negroes makes money and can live well? It may all be very encouraging, but it has no deeper significance. I feel this way because I have cousins who can neither read nor write. I have had a chance. They have not. That is the difference.’

A rising tide does not lift all boats. For Paul Robeson, identity politics would remain neutered unless they also embraced the reality of class discrimination and struggle. At the time of writing, such issues are being acted out in Bessemer, Alabama, as ballots are being counted in the campaign by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionise 5,800 Amazon employees, 85 percent of whom are black Americans.

The RWDSU says that this is not just a union struggle, it’s also a civil rights struggle, one seeking to assure dignity for every worker. Richard Bensinger, who is working on organising drives at several other other Amazon warehouses in the USA and Canada, said:


This the blueprint that Paul Robeson mapped out in 1958 with Here I Stand. His struggle continues.



About the Author
Manus O'Riordan is Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. From 1971 to 2010, he was the founding Head of Research with the ITGWU and its successor union SIPTU.

Thank you

 

[HeathCliff]

more people need to know and learn about Paul Robeson
truly an amazing human being

Yes Paul Roberson was THAT DUDE.

 

[Mr.H]

Helluva athlete too!

 

[Gazoo]

Often overlooked.

 

[Tdot_firestarta]

Often overlooked.

definitely

 

[CPT Callamity]

Respect! Rutgers Legend.

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

The Chris Hedges Report: Gerald Horne on the unrelentingly radical life of Paul Robeson

Historian Gerald Horne discusses how the legacy of Paul Robeson illustrates the lengths to which the American empire will go to destroy and silence its most powerful critics.

therealnews.com

THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: GERALD HORNE ON THE UNRELENTINGLY RADICAL LIFE OF PAUL ROBESON
Historian Gerald Horne discusses how the legacy of Paul Robeson illustrates the lengths to which the American empire will go to destroy and silence its most powerful critics.
BY CHRIS HEDGESMAY 6, 2022


Heroic dissidents are demonized, marginalized, physically and psychologically destroyed, or assassinated by the American ruling class. Before the persecution of Julian Assange, before the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, before the murder of Martin Luther King, there was the relentless campaign to silence the activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson, the most internationally known and revered Black American of his day, was a socialist and a militant who stood with the crucified of the earth.

Historian Gerald Horne is author of the biography “Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary,” and is the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, he joins Chris Hedges to discuss the life of “the most blacklisted performer in America,” linking the persecution of Paul Robeson directly to the persecution of Julian Assange, held today in a high security prison in London where his mental and physical health—like Robeson’s at the end of his life—is in serious decline.

Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.

Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

TRANSCRIPT
Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. When you defy the imperial capitalist American state; When you denounce the crimes done to its own people, especially the poor, immigrants, and African Americans, as well as the crimes it commits abroad; When you have a global audience in the tens of millions that admires you and respects you for your courage and integrity; When you cannot be intimidated or bought off; Then, you are targeted for destruction.

Heroic dissidents are demonized, marginalized, physically and psychologically destroyed, or assassinated by the American ruling class. Before the persecution of Julian Assange, before the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, before the murder of Martin Luther king, there was the relentless campaign to silence the activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson was a socialist and a militant who stood with the crucified of the earth. He was fearless, confronting then president Harry S. Truman in a face to face meeting in the White House and berating him for failing to halt the reign of terror and lynching that afflicted Blacks.

He famously filed a petition with the United Nations charging the US government with genocide against African Americans. Robeson, who had a law degree from Columbia University, was multilingual. He had a global appeal that has perhaps never been matched by another Black American, even by figures such as Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X. W.E.B. Du Bois called him, without doubt, the best known American on earth. He was a stalwart member of the radical left, an active defender of trade union movements. But he was to become, in the words of Pete Seeger, the folk singer who was also persecuted in the United States, the most blacklisted performer in America. By the end, stripped of his passport, subject to relentless character assassination, denied the ability to make a living, he would end his days in 1976 a virtual recluse in his sister’s home in Philadelphia.

His life illustrates the lengths to which the American empire will go to destroy and silence its most powerful critics. Linking the persecution of Paul Robeson directly to the persecution of Julian Assange, held today in a high security prison in London where his mental and physical health, like Robeson’s at the end of his life, is in serious decline.

Joining me to discuss the life of Paul Robeson is his biographer Gerald Horne, the Moores professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston. So in your book, you write that Robeson pioneered the struggle against Jim Crow throughout the ’30s and ’40s. It was only with Robeson’s fall that King and Malcolm could emerge as they did. The undermining of Robeson created a vacuum that these two leaders filled. I wondered if you could talk about his battle against racial segregation, racial terror, and this legacy that you highlight.

Gerald Horne: Well, the great Paul L Robeson was born in central New Jersey in 1898, passed away in Philadelphia in 1976. In between, he is an All-American football player at his alma mater, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He’s also a stalwart on the basketball court and on the baseball diamond. As you suggested from there, he moves on to Columbia University, and seemingly is en route to a comfortable life, or as comfortable as a “negro” could be under the savage ravages of Jim Crow.

But his life is diverted. His life is diverted in part because of the fact that he was friendly with another Black lawyer, speaking of William Patterson, who eventually becomes a leading Black member of the US Communist Party. And also his life is diverted by his spouse, Eslanda Robeson, who encourages him to express his artistic and cultural talent as a singer, as an actor. And he’s finding it difficult – This is in the early 1920s, or in the post World War I era, post 1918 – To pursue that kind of career in New York City where all three, Patterson and Robeson and his spouse, were living.

And so he decides to go into exile, like so many Black Americans before or since. For example, the great James Baldwin, for example, spent a good deal of his most fertile years as an artist in France and in Turkey, for example. Robeson decided to choose exile in London, where he found things a bit more comfortable than he did in New York City. And he quickly becomes a star of stage and screen, on stage as a singer and as an actor. His Othello is still considered to be the definitive performance of that Shakespearean tragedy. And as well, because of the influence of Patterson, he is encouraged and decides to move even further to the left than he had been to that point.

What I mean is that as you suggested, Robeson was multilingual and that allowed him, for example, to perform in Germany, since he was fluent in German. But he was performing in Germany at a time when fascism was rising. And this was perhaps the definitive episode in Robeson’s life. That is to say, coming face to face with the ugliness and horrors of fascism in the 1930s. He of course was fluent in Russian, and winds up educating his only son, Paul Jr., his only child, in Russia, in the Soviet Union because he wanted him to escape the pernicious nature of Jim Crow in the United States and his homeland. And another turning point comes as well in the 1930s, indeed, when he performs on the battlefield of Spain. Recall that a democratically elected government in Spain was then under siege by fascism. That is to say, the eventual victor, Francisco Franco, and his fascist supporters in Rome and Berlin, Robeson performed there.

And that too was a turning point in his life. And it’s fair to say that he would have likely resided in London indefinitely but for the coming of World War II in Europe. By the late summer of 1939. Feeling that he and his family might be trapped in a war zone, they all decamped back to the United States across the Atlantic. And this was a kind of propitious moment, because the United States was egging itself on towards entering the antifascist war. Robeson, as a result, was on the same page as his homeland and initially was lionized. He was able to perform Othello on Broadway, for example, where he was applauded heartily. Although I should mention that when performing Othello in New York, he was nervous about embracing, as a Black person, his leading lady, Desdemona in the Shakespearean play, for fear that some racist in the audience might storm the stage and slap him, for example, or worse.

But in any case, that sort of New York spring or US spring lasted until the conclusion of World War II 1945, when the political climate shifted towards anti-communism, the new Cold War, the Red Scare. Robeson was becoming a non-person as a result. He had an infamous face-to-face confrontation with the then US president Harry S. Truman, with Robeson reading the Riot Act to the US president because of Washington’s seeming inability to do anything or lift a finger with regard to the lynching of Black people, with certain Black soldiers in particular, coming home from the war and being attacked in their uniform.

One notorious case of Isaac Woodward in South Carolina has his eyes gouged out by racists, which obviously inflames the ire of Robeson. But what’s inflaming the ire of the White House is the fact that the Red Scare is underway and Robeson refuses to turn his back on his comrades in the US Communist Party, among which, as noted, is William Patterson, Ben Davis Jr., the eventual spouse of W.E.B. Du Bois, speaking of Shirley Graham Du Bois, and many others.

And so Robeson finds himself on the so-called blacklist. That is to say, he finds it difficult to perform. He finds it difficult to find a venue where his records could be sold. His income plummets from the six figures to the low four figures. He becomes a kind of non-person. The All-American Football Squad of which he was a member decades earlier at Rutgers University, his name is stripped afterwards during the Red Scare so that there were only 10 players on that All-American Football team instead of the requisite 11. And there is an attempt to drive Robeson into the ditch. In fact, there are attempts on his life, most notoriously when he gives a concert in 1949 where Pete Seeger performs, amongst others. A fundraiser for the Civil Rights Congress led by his friend William Patterson, which is raising money so that they could file that petition at the United Nations that you mentioned, charge The United States with genocide against Black people.

A mob amasses, they are baying for blood. They are apparently in league not only with neo-Nazis, but with the police authorities as well. Robeson barely escapes with his body in one piece. And that is the case for a good deal of the 1950s. That is to say, attempted marginalization, attempted isolation, being hauled before congressional committees, being interrogated and brow beaten as to whether or not he is a member of the US Communist Party. Until finally in the late 1950s, as a result of a global campaign – Where, by the way, the leaders of independent India, speaking of Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, play a leading role – Robeson’s passport is returned. He speedily departs the United States of America. But he tends to overdo it in terms of his travel. He travels down under to Australia, for example, and engages in solidarity with other victims of racist persecution, speaking of the Indigenous population, which are referred to as the Aboriginal population on these shores.

What happens as well is that his spouse who is also his manager, Eslanda, also kind of over does it. She passes away by 1965. Robeson by then is in a kind of decline. He returns to live in West Philadelphia with his sister, where he spends his declining years, although he is in touch with many of the strugglers and fighters in the anti-Jim Crow movement, particularly the younger strugglers and fighters and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the shock troops of the anti-Jim Crow movement in Dixie, before passing away in 1976. Where, interestingly enough, he is celebrated in the pages of the Black Panther Party newspaper.

Chris Hedges: One of the things in your book that you highlight is that while living in London, he has a very close relationship with anti-colonial movements and many future leaders of independent countries in Africa. And that is a very important part of his education, that he was accused, I think, at one point of espousing communist or Soviet ideas. And he said, well, all of my political education came in London.

Gerald Horne: Yes, that’s true. Because London, although it may be difficult to imagine today, had a very strong left-wing movement. Not only comprised of those who had escaped colonialism, such as C.L.R. James of Trinidad and Tobago, who wrote the still worthy book The Black Jacobins about the Haitian revolution, still consulted. Or Jomo Kenyatta, the founder of independent Kenya, who was once as close to the organized left as Robeson was before deciding to make his peace with London for various reasons. But in the 1930s, as noted, he was part of the left as well.

And that’s not to mention the now forgotten stalwarts of the left in London itself. Speaking of R. Palme Dutt, D-U-T-T, for example, whose works on fascism are still worthy of consultation, or other leaders of that stripe. And so Robeson correctly suggested that it was in London that he received this fundamental education. And so perhaps instead of pinning Moscow on his lapel, as Congress sought to do, they should have pinned London on his lapel.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about his role in Othello. So he said that playing Othello gave him a more profound understanding of white supremacy and that it was his art that helped drive him to revolutionary understanding. “Performing Othello,” he said, “has taken away from me all kinds of fears, all sense of limitation. Quite simply, it has made me free.” I thought it was fascinating. I wonder if you could speak about that.

Gerald Horne: Well, of course, as you recall, Othello deals with the very striking period in the late 1500s early 1600s, that is the time when it is written by William Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, London at that time is on the verge of surpassing Catholic Spain as the leading European power, and also surpassing Protestant Holland as well, in part because opportunistic London cuts the deal with the other major European power, speaking of Ottoman Turkey, which is a leading, if not the leading Muslim power.

And so in telling this story of Othello, the Moor hailing from North Africa, a predominantly Muslim territory, in some ways, Shakespeare like Othello himself, is performing a service for the state. That is to say, he’s helping English and London audiences become more comfortable with Queen Elizabeth’s defacto alliance with Muslim powers, which is seemingly at odds with a Christian ethos, which suggested that Islam was as antagonistic to Christianity, as many people centuries later thought communism was antagonistic to capitalism.

And so Othello happens to be a character who also is done in by gossip, by the fact that Iago is whispering in his ear and driving him to the depths of despair. And I think that Robeson thought that in order to perform that character of Othello, he had to understand that character psychologically. In fact, when he was playing the role on Broadway in New York, he suggested that in order to work himself up psychologically to generate the kind of rage that audiences would find perhaps comprehensible and help them to understand what he was trying to convey as Othello, he would imagine that he was being betrayed. Of course, betrayal is a central concept of Othello, as you know. He would imagine that he was being betrayed by one of his communist colleagues, speaking of William Patterson or Ben Davis Jr., another Black leader of the Communist Party.

And so I think that that quote that you mentioned also helps to expose and reveal the fundamentals of acting, which many spectators tend to take for granted when they see someone on stage or the silver screen: trying to convey a character. But if you’re going to convey that character adequately and move the audience emotionally, it’s very important for you as the actor to understand the character emotionally and psychologically. And I think that that’s what he was driving at in that quote that you referenced.

Chris Hedges: I want to read another quote. He writes, “Every artist, every scientist must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights…. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” What was the role of the artist for him?

Gerald Horne: Well, the role of the artist was to inspire. The role of the artist was to convey eternal truths. And, given his imminence, the role of the artist was to be a fundraiser, which he did quite successfully for anti-colonial movements, for union movements. For example, he was quite close to another Black communist leader, speaking of Ferdinand Smith, a founder of the National Maritime Union, a once powerful union that had control, to a degree, over imports and exports on vessels, before he was subjected to the Red Scare and chased back to his homeland, speaking of Jamaica.

And so I think that Robeson was one of the early victims of the so-called blacklist which swept through Hollywood, which has been the subject, as you know, of many different films and plays and novels and memoirs and all the rest. And I think the fact that Hollywood was so deeply impacted by this anti-communism, by this Red Scare, betokens and bespeaks the fact of how the rulers of the United States fundamentally were afraid of artists. They were afraid of artists like Paul Robeson because the ruling elite were aware of the kind of popularity that he held, the kind of esteem in which he was held, and they were aware that he could move millions. And so it’s no accident that A, Robeson is subjected to a vicious persecution, and B, artists more broadly and more widely were treated similarly.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about that persecution. So the FBI follows Robeson’s every move. They mount an extensive and a covert campaign to destroy him, including of course, as you mentioned, his ability to make a living. I think in 1947, he’s making about $104,000 a year. In 1950, it’s fallen to $2,000. I want to speak about what they did to Robeson. And then, talk about how they used Black celebrities, figures like the great baseball player, Jackie Robinson, to attack Robeson and his supporters.

Gerald Horne: Well, as you suggested, Jackie Robinson at one time, particularly in the 1940s, was quite popular, broadly being depicted as the man who helped to break the color line. Actually breaking the color line for the second time circa 1946, of course, Major League Baseball, such as it was, was desegregated in the late 19th century before the onset of the 1890s and the rise of a very vicious Jim Crow and racism.

And so Jackie Robinson was importuned to come before the house Un-American Activities Committee and denounce Paul Robeson. This is in the wake of Paul Robeson quite famously speaking in France, casting doubt on whether Black Americans would be up for a nuclear war against the former Soviet Union. Of course, he doubted it. And that created a firestorm of protest which led to Jackie Robinson coming before the QAC to castigate him.

Of course, subsequently Jackie Robinson apologizes. But by then it’s a bit too late for that kind of apology. And interestingly enough, baseball fans might recall Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers teammate, the fastballer Don Newcombe, who went further than Jackie Robinson in denouncing Paul Robeson. And that’s the way as a Black celebrity, or as a celebrity in general, or as a US national in general, you kept your head above water. By denouncing Paul Robeson, who was thought to be, believe it or not, the “Black Stalin.” That is to say there was a devious plot to somehow have Paul Robeson be in league with domestic and global communists to somehow take over the United States of America.

I know that some of your viewers and listeners might be tittering at this point. But if so, that suggests that they do not necessarily comprehend the kind of hysteria that was sweeping from the Atlantic to the Pacific at that particular historical moment.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about… His physical, as you mentioned, and psychological health deteriorates under this constant campaign against him. And in 1961, his son finds him in the bathroom of a Moscow hotel attempting to slit his wrists. And until the death of his son, he argued that his father was a victim of the CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s MK Ultra program, which secretly administered synthetic hallucinogenics to dissidents, leaving many to have mental breakdowns or even commit suicide. And of course, one of the tactics was that after that hallucinogenic trauma – Which is not explained to them, they don’t know why they have it – They funnel them into electroshock therapy, which happened to Robeson. And they never really recover. And his son always argued that this was orchestrated by the CIA. And I wondered if you could address that.

Gerald Horne: Well, interestingly enough, his son, Paul Robeson Jr., writes a two volume biography of his father which is actually quite interesting, and he deals with that point. Likewise, at New York University at the Temement Library at NYU, under Paul Robeson Jr.’s name, you can find details and files that help to substantiate the point that Paul Robeson Jr. makes. Likewise, as history proceeds, new documents arise, which is one of the reasons why many historians speak to history as argument without end, because as time passes, new documents arise. As you know, there’s a 30-year rule with regard to the United States government releasing documents.

And so now we can expect documents as recent as, what, 1992 to be coming forth. And so you see in this new book, White Malice, which just came out recently, a very thick tome, the author takes advantage of some of these records to talk about Sidney Gottlieb, and actually to talk about the CIA malfeasance on the African continent, with the same kind of dirty tricks that were directed against Paul Robeson also directed against African leaders as well. Which helps to give sustenance and credibility to the charges that Paul Robeson Jr. makes.

And interestingly enough, the author of the book White Malice, who brings out this new evidence that I was just alluding to, also suggests that recent regulations and legislation with regard to files on the Kennedy assassination, which as you know takes place in 1963 – Well before the 30-year rule, now we’re talking about a 60-year rule – That documents are still emerging that are shedding light on Africa, shedding light on the US Red Scare. Interestingly enough, the current US president, for various reasons, has put a hold on coming releases of documents. I take it that hold will be lifted soon. And so we can expect to receive more documentation that no doubt will help to substantiate the charge that not only was Paul Robeson likely subjected to dirty tricks of the most malevolent variety, but many of his comrades, there are a lot of unexplained deaths in this country. As the book White Malice points out, there’s this really striking coincidence of so many people committing suicide by jumping out of skyscrapers, for example. That’s a very curious trend.

And so once again, the lesson is that historians need to keep researching. Journalists need to keep researching. Journalists and historians need to keep writing.

Chris Hedges: Well, there was a whole unit set up to terrorize Black artists like Billie Holiday and destroy their lives. And Billie Holiday is another example, perhaps, of that.

Gerald Horne: Well, certainly, and in fact, there was a recent movie that did not do very well at the box office, perhaps fortunately, that tries to depict the kind of dirty tricks that Billie Holiday was subjected to. But alas, I think that the salacious aspects tend to overcome the creativity of the screenplay writer and the director.

Chris Hedges: Great, we’re going to stop there. That was professor Gerald Horne on the great Paul Robeson. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

 

[jack walsh13]

more people need to know and learn about Paul Robeson
truly an amazing human being

Absolutely I agree

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

Paul Robeson Spent His Life Fighting Against America’s Extreme Right

Paul Robeson, the socialist actor, musician, and civil rights campaigner, dedicated his life to battling against right-wing red-baiting that has echoes in reactionary crusades against progressive education and “critical race theory” today.

jacobin.com

Paul Robeson Spent His Life Fighting Against America’s Extreme Right
BYJOEL WHITNEY
Paul Robeson, the socialist actor, musician, and civil rights campaigner, dedicated his life to battling against right-wing red-baiting that has echoes in reactionary crusades against progressive education and “critical race theory” today.

Paul Robeson at a press conference in New York, September 20, 1949. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

An hour north of New York City just past the Hudson Line’s Peekskill station, a golf course sprawls along ponds, sand dunes, and weeping willows. Before this idyllic green was carved from the wooded valley, my friends and I knew it as the defunct Hollowbrook Drive-In. With a giant L-shaped mid-century sign fading above an entrance on the far edge of a traffic circle, I recall during my middle and high school years the skunk weeds and dandelions breaking through asphalt that sprawled beneath a long-neglected screen. I pictured old films playing in black and white. But four decades before, the world-beloved actor, singer, activist, and lawyer Paul Robeson produced a concert here. What that concert spurred made our town infamous, associated forever with the phrase “Peekskill riots.”

It was late August when Robeson arrived. The concert was a fundraiser for the Civil Rights Congress, one of the many progressive organizations that fell victim to a right-liberal backlash against the social and economic policies of the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) era. The start of the Cold War gave succor to conservatives eager to put brakes on a civil rights movement, whose most forceful advocates were radicals and socialists.

The day of the riots, Robeson and his entourage saw a burning cross on the hill above; racists pelted and flipped over some of the singer and his crew’s cars; rioters effectively blocked the concert to supporters; and mobs slinging racial epithets against blacks, leftists, and Jews injured a dozen. A week and a day later, the concert proceeded. But damage was done: the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) gloated and plastered Peekskill with posters adorned with phrases lifted from fascist rioters during Kristallnacht.

Thinking back on my childhood, I found it strange how little I knew about these events. We never heard about Robeson in our history or social studies courses. A cultural amnesia had overcome our town, broken only by a small group of people who were able to draw a connection between the horrors of the past and the right-wing revanchism of the present. I wondered, too, whether something like this cultural amnesia was at play on a national scale. Did it explain how a country which had driven itself into a frenzy during McCarthyism could rally around a new red scare under the guise of anxieties over anti-leftist conspiracies, like “Critical Race Theory”?

Larger Than Life

Paul Robeson was the son of William Drew Robeson, a runaway slave turned Presbyterian minister, who had fled from his captors to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1860 at the age of fifteen. From there he met Robeson’s mother, Maria Louisa Bustil, a schoolteacher and member of a family of prominent anti-slavery and Jim Crow campaigners.

On Sundays, he would watch his father’s weekly sermons boil over into operatic morality tales on the importance of race pride. The younger Robeson’s own membership in this educated African American milieu allowed him to gain access to the more liberal parts of society. Although he would in his later years describe Princeton as still “spiritually located in Dixie,” it would provide Paul a starting point from which he would be admitted to Rutgers University on a full scholarship. At the respected institution, Robeson would go on to be the star of the university’s glee club and an all-American for football.

From New Jersey, Robeson would move to Harlem and apply to study at Columbia Law School before landing a job at Stotesbury and Associates, a prestigious Manhattan law firm. But here he hit a wall in the halfway world in which he was attempting to make a life for himself. A racist secretary informed Robeson’s colleagues that she would not take dictation from a black man and the partner who hired him as a favor to a mutual friend warned that clients would not let Robeson represent them in court. Robeson took the hint and tried his luck on the stage.

In 1923, Robeson earned the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, one of his first major roles. The play depicted an interracial relationship between a white woman and her black husband, whose success she resents so deeply that it leads her to sabotage his budding law career. The resonances with themes in Robeson’s own life must have been clear to him.

Controversially, the script called for the lead to kiss his costar, Mary Blair, the wife of the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Delays in the production caused by an illness which afflicted Blair during rehearsals led to an unusually long buildup which provided the media with an opportunity to work the public into a frenzy. Weeks before the play was due to air, the New York American published an article with the headline “Riots Feared From Drama,” and the Long Island chapter of the KKK threatened to blow up the theater.

Although Robeson’s director, Eugene O’Neill, and all of his costars came to his defense, dismissing the supposed controversy as not worthy of remark, reactionaries rallied around it. On opening night, steelworkers close to the cast guarded the dressing rooms from possible attacks as police fenced the theater in response to the numerous threats. Fortunately, these attacks did not materialize and although critics were generally not very enthused by the play, they praised Robeson’s contribution. One went so far as to write that “Caucasian superiority does suffer a little, because Paul Robeson is a far finer actor than any white member of the cast.”

International Solidarity

The Robesons would move to London in 1928 where Paul would star in a production of Show Boat, a West End musical adapted from a best-selling book about race relations in the American South. The appearance of Robeson was the talk of the town. On one occasion he was denied entry to the Savoy Grill, a fancy London eatery, and this incident became national news and was discussed in the Houses of Parliament.

Even within the cosmopolitan world of the arts, Robeson felt that he struggled to reconcile his ideals with films in which he was cast. In 1934, the Hungarian-British filmmaker Zoltán Korda asked him to star in Sanders of the River, alongside Kenya’s future president, the conservative leader Jomo Kenyatta. The film, which depicted British colonialism, was initially thought by Robeson to offer a harsh criticism of the institution. Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey would later ridicule Robeson for acting in what turned out to be another white man’s burden narrative. Reflecting on these events, Robeson would describe the film as something that could have been “shown in Italy and Germany, for it shows the Negro as Fascist States desire him — savage and childish.”

Robeson eventually landed a handful of films on the working-class struggle, stories more in line with his politics. In Song of Freedom (1936), he played a dockworker whose singing voice makes him famous, and whose fame allows him to investigate his regal bloodline in Africa. In Jericho (1937), he plays a heroic World War II officer who refuses an order to abandon ship to save the lives of his men. Robeson would truly hit his stride with a film on the plight of Welsh coal workers.

The relationship with these miners began a decade earlier, when Robeson emerged from a matinee performance of Show Boat back in London. He was confronted by a chanting crowd of Welsh miners, who had marched all the way from the neighboring country. They were on strike, blackballed, and going hungry. After taking them to eat, hearing of their union activity and their difficult position, with no other jobs in their region, Robeson took up their cause.

He visited Wales and brought their story to the screen in the musical The Proud Valley (1940), in which he plays a sympathetic American named Goliath. Without prospects in America, Goliath works in the Welsh mines, and ultimately, saves his comrades from a tunnel collapse. Historian Tony Benn recalls of the musical, “It was through his contact with the Welsh miners that he realized he was working class, as well as black.”

War and Fascism

In 1934, during the Great Depression, Robeson first visited the Soviet Union on the invitation of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein. The auteur had hoped to direct Black Majesty, a film on the Haitian Revolution starring Robeson as the island’s liberator, Toussaint Louverture. Though the partnership never panned out, his journey to the Soviet Union made clear to him the contrast between fascism and socialism. Going through Nazi Germany, state officials harassed Robeson for traveling with a white woman. “I could read hatred in their eyes,” Robeson thought while reflecting on this episode. “This is how lynch mobs start.”

Robeson viewed international socialism as a great equalizer and the only real solution to fascism, and Robeson was impressed by a film shoot on a collective farm, which Eisenstein showed him. The constitution of the Soviet Union guaranteed in Article 123 full equality for all. Within the workers’ state, Robeson could remark, “Here, I walk in full human dignity.”

In 1936, with a fascist coup overturning the elected left-wing government of Spain, Robeson made the consequential decision to deepen his commitment; he would relegate his career to second place, behind the anti-fascist struggle. “I stand before you in unalterable support of the government of Spain, freely chosen by its sons and daughters,” he told European audiences. “The battlefield is everywhere. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice.” Crisscrossing Spain, he sang to wounded soldiers and demoralized partisans in hospitals or depots on their way to the front. Singing in English, Spanish, and Russian, he aimed to bring hope to the leftist Republican forces.

As a greater European war loomed, Robeson and family prepared to return to the United States. But after spending so much time abroad, his reputation had dimmed in his homeland. At the height of the jingoistic fervor generated by the war, Robeson took on a patriotic musical produced by CBS, titled Ballad for Americans. The show was hackneyed and uninteresting: war propaganda set to soaring music mashed up with a 1940s History for Dummies libretto. It ended up being a wildly popular radio special that made the singer more famous in the United States than ever, and quite likely the most famous black man in the world. Riding on this high, he would go on to take the lead role in the longest running Broadway production of Othello.

Truman

Preempting the rise of Joseph McCarthy and the House and Senate Un-American Activities Committees, President Harry Truman presided over a purging from government posts of progressives whose views he thought might make them sympathetic to Russia. It was in this tense atmosphere that Robeson would help found the American Crusade Against Lynching (ACAL) in 1946 and bring its concerns to a rally in Washington on September 23, followed by a meeting with Truman. The president would respond to the ACAL by dismissing its concerns; now was not the time for bringing up such divisive issues.

Truman insisted that the United States and Great Britain represented “the last refuge of freedom in the world.” The historian Martin Duberman recounts in his biography of Robeson that the civil rights icon scoffed at this, referring to rampant imperialism from both, and went on to add that “if the federal government refused to defend its black citizens against murder, blacks would have to defend themselves.” At which point, “Truman declared the interview at an end.”

Truman had only added support to a broader backlash against the progressive politics of the FDR era, and now Robeson was in its sights, called for the first of many times before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), likely as a result of the Truman meeting. In 1951, the State Department planted an article in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, chiding him as a dupe of communists, who was dangerously “naïve.” The following year it suspended his passport. The aim of these smear campaigns was to drive a wedge between the Left and the Civil Rights Movement.

As the smear campaign intensified, and concerts were canceled under the blacklisting regime — which targeted university professors, Hollywood progressives, musicians, athletes, writers — Robeson and his pianist and musical partner Larry Brown had to leave America to earn a living. In Paris, Robeson shared a stage with Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda at the Partisans for Peace Congress in 1949. There he issued an anti-war statement and warned of the horrific consequences of a conflict with the Soviet Union. He contrasted the valor that African Americans displayed on the front to the poor treatment they had received at home. The media misreported Robeson’s statement, playing up the suggestion of black revolt and disloyalty to the nation.

At first oblivious to the reaction back home, Robeson continued his tour, proceeding to Eastern Europe, and arriving in Moscow in June 1949. Hoping to find out if the rumors of antisemitic repression in the Soviet Union were correct, Robeson asked to see his friend, the poet Itzik Feffer, who was then locked incommunicado in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Six years prior, Robeson had met with Feffer in New York at a meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee along with Albert Einstein.

The actor waited for several days to see his friend who was finally brought by state officials to see Robeson in a hotel. There, Feffer signaled that the room was bugged and the duo spoke cautiously while passing notes.

Where have you been? Robeson jotted.

Prison.

What can I do?

Say nothing or we prisoners are dead.

But Robeson followed the visit with a concert in Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. It was broadcast live, with Soviet leadership in attendance. Though no recordings survive, Robeson announced — “to gasps,” according to his son — that he saw his friend Itzik Feffer earlier.

With little fanfare, after reminding the audience of the long-standing cultural ties between Jews in the United States and those in the Soviet Union, then asking for silence, Robeson sang an encore of the Warsaw ghetto resistance song, “Zog Nit Keynmol,” offering an extraordinary moment of defiance to Stalin. When Robeson came home, rather than offer a header to the American right, however, he said nothing.

In America, Robeson found himself in a bind. He opposed Stalinist terror, but he did not wish to give support to a cold war that many feared would grow to a direct war between two rising nuclear superpowers. Unable to find a solution to this dilemma, he opted simply to lie. When asked directly by a small newspaper about Stalin’s atrocities toward Jews, he denied knowledge of purges that Feffer and other friends in Russia underwent. In 1952, Feffer along with twelve other Soviet Jews would be executed in Lubyanka prison in Moscow.

But more than his silence on these purges, it was his antiwar message in Paris that haunted Robeson’s return to the United States. Aware that the Truman moment was defined by a reactionary media, which performed like an adjunct to the security state, he watched as his plea for peace and freedom from fear was twisted into an expression of disloyalty. The HUAC reactionaries and centrist splitters even pulled baseball great Jackie Robinson into the debate. Robinson was allegedly strong-armed into testifying against Robeson, convinced that he wouldn’t have a career if he objected.

When Robeson arrived in Peekskill in 1949, this climate of anti-communism and red-baiting served as the backdrop for his performance.

Peekskill

As he drove toward the field with his sixty-five-year-old mother, folk singer Pete Seeger rolled down his window, and told the cop he had to get through; he was here to sing. There wasn’t going to be a concert, the cop said, and gruffly turned away. Helen Rosen picked up her friend, Robeson, the star attraction, at the Peekskill train station. He had called ahead and told her he’d been warned of disruptions.

As they approached the field known then as Lakeland Acres picnic area, Rosen recalled seeing unusual traffic, hearing noises and disturbance, even screaming. A gang of veterans broke through the barricades and its members proceeded to vandalize the stage. Seeger recalled seeing piles of stones beside the road on the way in, with rocks as large as tennis balls piled several feet high.

The piles must have been covered when performers came in, Seeger told an interviewer. Otherwise, he would have seen them. Rioters turned cars on their sides, smashed windshields, and injured dozens. Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and Catholic organizations had rallied the opposition in the Peekskill Evening Star. Knowing Robeson’s three prior concerts here had been successes, these groups pitted Peekskill’s traditional working-class inhabitants against a relatively new enclave of wealthy, educated, left-wing weekenders, many of them Jewish, like Rosen.

In the aftermath, with the announced do-over concert to come a week later, signs appeared across the town that read, “Wake up, America. Peekskill did.” Supporters of the violence had plastered these posters on store windows and car bumpers, recalled Seeger.

“In Europe, they were horrified,” Seeger told the interviewer. “They said those were the same signs that went up in Germany after Kristallnacht. Only in Germany they read: ‘Wake up Germany: Munich did.’ . . . As pogroms grew, they whispered, ‘Throw stones at all the Jewish storekeepers,’” he recalled.

At the second concert, twenty thousand supporters arrived to hear Robeson, Seeger, and others, who were met by eight thousand protesters. Like two decades earlier in Provincetown, Robeson’s people organized trade unionists to link themselves, arm in arm, around the stage, forming themselves into a human wall. Though the one-day concert was finally able to go forward, again the protesters shouted violent antisemitic and racist threats, chanting, “We’ll kill you,” and “You may get in but you won’t get out.”

The volunteer security, made up of union members, flushed snipers from the trees above the field who were alleged to have high-powered rifles and their sights ready to aim at the stage. But after performers left under close protection, with only a verbal barrage of violence able to reach them, a mass beating followed. A barrage of stones and blows rained down on the union members and other left-wing supporters of Robeson, who were corralled in the field that became the drive-in I knew growing up, and later the golf course it remains today. Until 1:30 AM, the police oversaw this beating, resulting in one hundred fifty injured, and did nothing to stop it.

In the days that followed, reactionaries launched a witch hunt against the Left and a nasty combination of racism and anti-communism came to dominate the town. Fascists plastered posters which read “Communism is Treason, Behind Communism stands — the Jew!” on cars. In the neighboring village of Harmon, one of the few Jewish homes had its windows smashed and the American Legion requested that books written by known communists be removed from Peekskill’s library.
Faced with a backlash which had at this point become national in scale, Robeson did not back down. In a press conference held after the grand jury hearing into the riots, he said before an audience of reporters that “the Communist Party has played a magnificent role in fighting for the freedom of the American Negro.” Despite the vitriol thrown at him by the Right, he would continue to defend freedom of speech and association as central to any progressive politics, and to reject the idea that reactionary political violence could ever be justified.
The divisions which the Right attempted to create in Peekskill are illustrative of a broader strategy implemented by reactionaries in their struggles against the Left. Opponents of Robeson sought not only to attack him as an individual, but they also sought to attack the institutions as well as the political and intellectual culture out of which his ideas emerged.
In thinking about the recent wave of right-wing hostility to leftist books, wokeness, and critical race theory, we should not forget to place this hostility within the context of a broader right-wing tradition. This is a tradition which runs through American history; but running parallel to it has always been a radical, progressive alternative to these antidemocratic tendencies.
When I imagine Paul Robeson in Peekskill, I think of this. And though he would die — thanks to a backlash — in relative obscurity, his accomplishments are legion and his politics were prescient. Sometimes called the Great Forerunner, who powerfully quipped, “The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic, but to end the injustice,” his influence on the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first is immeasurable.

 

[parisian]

 

[Jumbodicc]

Paul Robeson is a legend. Big Jersey icon

 

[parisian]

Paul Robeson: activist, communist and spokesperson for the oppressed of the earth

On the 120th anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth, Jenny Farrell tells the story of his life. "The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative." - Paul Robeson at a rally in London’s Albert Hall on 24 June 1937,...

www.culturematters.org.uk

Paul Robeson: activist, communist and spokesperson for the oppressed of the earth

On the 120th anniversary of Paul Robeson's birth, Jenny Farrell tells the story of his life.

"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."

- Paul Robeson at a rally in London’s Albert Hall on 24 June 1937, in support of the democratically elected Spanish Republic.

Paul Robeson, son of an escaped slave, was born into apartheid America on 9 April 1898, 120 years ago. Best known as a bass-baritone singer, he was also an outstanding actor and consummate athlete, fighting against racial discrimination in sports. He was a fearless political activist in the struggles for emancipation at home, a supporter of all liberation movements, a friend of the Soviet Union and the socialist world. He sang in over 20 languages, including Chinese, Russian, and African dialects. He was the first singer to perform an entire programme of spirituals and songs of the African-American experience, giving them the recognition of a concert stage and making them known worldwide. Robeson was also the first to refuse to perform before segregated audiences. He was the first African-American actor to perform as Othello in the US, based on his ground-breaking interpretation of this character and the first in Britain since Ira Aldridge in the 19th century. He was the most significant African-American actor in the US on stage and screen and first African-American actor to gain international prominence, bringing dignity and respect to African-American characters. He was a worldwide symbol of the artist as activist and spokesperson of the oppressed of the earth.

When he died in 1976, he lived in seclusion with his sister in Philadelphia, standing firm on all his political convictions, yet never having fully recovered from the enormous pressure of the witch-hunt against him. The responsibility for this tragic trajectory lies with the racism and anti – communism of the McCarthy era.

Robeson met and married Eslanda (Essie) Goode, first African-American analytical chemist working at Columbia Medical Center in New York, activist, writer and orator, in 1921. When it became clear he could not work as a lawyer because of racism, he began his singing career in the mid-1920s with radically new interpretations of spirituals. The spirituals express the hardship of slavery in biblical language, and often contain veiled messages and resistance. Thus, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”, not merely expresses Robeson’s own experience of losing his mother at an early age, but also describes the severance of families through slavery. Further, Robeson’s interpretation adds his father’s experience of those African-Americans who fled the South to escape from slavery. Another spiritual, “Go Down Moses”, celebrates the release of the Israelites from captivity, something Robeson’s audience understood referring to their own freedom.



A turning point in Robeson’s life were his years in London, 1927-39. Here, he formed his outlook on world affairs, became an internationalist, fully embraced socialism, identified with the oppressed working class, regardless of colour. In London he discovered Africa and forged life-long friendships with Jomo Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Azikiwe (also, the future Indian leader Nehru) – and African seamen in the ports. Robeson began to study African culture, learn African languages, and embrace languages as gateways to the nations of the world: “It is fascinating … to find flexibility and subtlety in a language like Swahili, sufficient to convey the teachings of Confucius”. He also came to realise that alongside “the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa’s material wealth … and I came to learn of the remarkable kinship between African and Chinese culture.” Robeson indeed went on to develop a theory whereby a universal pentatonic tonality links musical folk cultures across the continents.

Robeson worked as a celebrated actor and singer in London, playing Othello and other important roles. During these years, he came to realise one could not rely on middle-class African-Americans in the emancipation struggle, recognising their dependence on their White masters. Robeson grasped that the lives of the oppressed were connected, evident in their music, and that alliances must be forged across geographical and racial differences, along the lines of class. He joined the working-class Unity Theatre in London, in an effort to help build workers’ theatres and develop a working-class culture in its full meaning.

Concomitantly, Robeson became active in the political issues of the time: the Spanish Civil War, anti-fascism, and the liberation struggles in Africa and Asia. Indeed, he became the supreme emblem of this global battle for emancipation. Through his interest in Africa, Robeson looked to the Soviet Union, which had overcome the backwardness of Czarist Russia. He first went there in 1934, struck by “a place where coloured people walked secure and free as equals” - he arranged for his son to attend school in Moscow for two years, a fact cited later as a reason to withdraw Robeson’s passport. Robeson learnt Russian to perfection and felt great empathy with the USSR.



Robeson’s journey to Spain in 1938 was a milestone in his life: “I sang with my whole heart and soul for these gallant fighters of the International Brigade. A new, warm feeling for my homeland grew within me as I met the men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion … My heart was filled with admiration and love for these white Americans, and there was a great sense of pride in my own people when I saw that there were Negroes, too, in the ranks of the Lincoln men in Spain.”

His partisan involvement in the Spanish Civil War shows Robeson’s courage in the international struggle against fascism. In beleaguered Madrid, the Republican forces used Robeson’s music as a weapon, broadcasting it through loudspeakers to the fascist trenches.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Robesons returned to the struggle in America, only delaying for Paul to finish filming The Proud Valley, a film about an African-American becoming one of a mining community in Wales, filmed on location in the coalfields. This film, he “was most proud to make”, forged a deep bond between Robeson and the Welsh.

Back in the US, acting was an important source of income, e.g. playing Othello in the incredibly successful Broadway production in 1942/43, whilst continuing his political commitments.

In the US, Robeson used his celebrity effectively, in a prolonged campaign against segregation, heralding the boycotts of the civil rights era. He headed the anti-lynching movement, leading a delegation to the White House. When Truman refused to act, Robeson, in December 1951, presented a petition “We charge Genocide” to the United Nations, on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress, charging that the U.S. violated Article II of the U.N. Genocide Convention by failing to prevent the lynching of African-Americans.

At the Paris Peace Convention in April 1949, he stated: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.” This speech resulted in a witch-hunt against him. In August 1949, the notorious racist and anti-communist assault took place at Peekskill, thwarting a concert which had been organised with Howard Fast and Pete Seeger. It left many seriously injured.



Angry locals from Westchester County, New York shout hate-filled insults at the carloads of concert-goers arriving to hear the singer Paul Robeson, the most famous African-American of the day, perform at an open-air concert in Lakeland Acres, north of Peekskill, on September 4th, 1949. A state trooper smirks and does nothing. Photo: History Today.

This his unyielding stand on the rights of African-Americans, and Robeson’s continued support of the USSR and world peace, led to his silencing. The state department withdrew his passport, and that of his wife and son, denying him the right to travel.

By 1952, Robeson was, according to Pete Seeger, “the most blacklisted performer in America”. No commercial hall was available to him, no producer promoted him, and his acting career finished. The FBI threatened concert organisers, shops and radio stations banned his records. From the height of fame, Robeson was turned into a non-person. From a career of intense activity he was blacklisted, deprived of public life and the source of his income. The African-American bourgeoisie failed to support Robeson, and colluded in this campaign.

He fought back by giving famous concerts, which circumvented the travel ban. He sang on the Canadian border to audiences on the other side. He gave transatlantic telephone concerts in England and Wales. The national ‘Let Paul Robeson Sing’ solidarity committee, the British Actors’ Equity Association and 27 MPs organised for Robeson to sing by telephone. This epic concert in St Pancras Town Hall on 26 May 1957, unforgettable for anybody who witnessed it, increased the pressure on the US government to return the passport.

In June 1958, years after taking his passport, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to deny a US passport on political grounds. Robeson immediately embarked on a worldwide tour, flying first to London. He sang to millions on television and radio and became the first lay person - and the first non-White - to take the pulpit in St Paul's Cathedral, with 4000 spectators inside and 5000 outside.

In the late 1950s, the world was changing, with African nations beginning to achieve independence. Robeson’s last concert tour in 1960, took him to Australia, where he gave the first recital at the Sydney Opera House - to the trade unionists who were constructing the building. He was the first to speak publically here about the oppression of the indigenous people by Europeans.

In Australia and elsewhere, Robeson sang “Ol’ Man River”, one of his best-known songs. Robeson changed the words of this song, originally written for The Show Boat, transforming it from acceptance of oppression to a song of resistance: the desire for freedom would prevail:

There’s an old man called the Mississippi,
That’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be.
What does he care if the world’s got troubles?
What does he care if the world ain’t free?

Tote that barge, lift that bale,
You show a little grit an’ you lands in jail.
But I keeps laffin’ instead of cryin’;
I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’,
And Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.

 

[parisian]

You're Dead to Me - Paul Robeson - BBC Sounds

Greg Jenner and his guests discuss the astonishing life and legacy of Paul Robeson.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

 

[parisian]

 

[respiration]

Paul Robeson is one of my greatest heroes. Thank you for this thread honoring this KING among men. I proudly wear his image in my profile.

 

[34real]

They don't mention him enough and the movies he did are decent black films.

 

[parisian]

Paul Robeson is one of my greatest heroes. Thank you for this thread honoring this KING among men. I proudly wear his image in my profile.

respect

 

[parisian]

 

[bbuzzard]

He was the real deal!!

It's a shame a lot of coons don't get it...you gotta face your enemy and leave the plantation.

 

[parisian]

Peekskill 1949 – “the first great open manifestation of American fascism”.

This weekend marks the anniversary of one of the great stands against American fascism, at Peekskill, NY, in 1947. And at the heart of it was the great black American singer, Paul Robeson.

andybell2000.com

August 28, 2023

Peekskill 1949 – “the first great open manifestation of American fascism”.​

Today marks the 75th anniversary of one of the great stands against American fascism, at Peekskill, NY, in 1949. And at the heart of it was the great black American singer, Paul Robeson.

In August 1949, the Civil Rights Congress and a Communist Party-friendly cultural organisation called Peoples’ Artists planned an open air concert near Peekskill, in Westchester County, NY, where the main attraction would be a performance by Paul Robeson. The concert was a fundraiser for the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress and Howard Fast, the great historical novelist (Spartacus, Freedom Road etc) was to be the compere.

Fast, not as well known in the UK as he should be, was later to distinguish himself by refusing to co-operate with Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities and was jailed and blacklisted as a consequence. In 1949 he was a member of the Communist Party of the USA. He later recorded what happened at Peekskill in his book ‘Peekskill USA’, describing it as as “the first great open manifestation of American fascism”.

At that time, Paul Robeson had been speaking out increasingly against the KKK and American racism, particularly focussing on the role of black troops fighting during the second world war. The far right became incensed, and the local chapter of the American Legion started to mobilise opposition. Although the Legion began life as a veterans organisation after the first world war, it had quickly morphed into a far right, anti-working class outfit which attacked trade union organisations, striking workers and anyone else it deemed communist.

Paul Robeson fell squarely in their sights.

On the day of the concert, several hundred local merican Legion members, Westchester Klansmen and various other racists and right wingers launched a vicious wave of assaults on those arriving early at the open air concert ground. Many were savagely beaten with rocks and clubs. An effigy of Robeson and a huge cross were burnt on a hillside opposite the concert ground. The few police who turned up stood by and did nothing. The concert had to be called off and the American Legion crowed that it had stopped the “commie” Robeson from singing.

But their victory was only temporary. A week later, on 4 September, the concert took place and this time over two thousand trade union stewards from the Longshoremen’s Union, the United Electrical Workers and others formed a human cordon around the entire concert site to keep the fascists at bay. And, in response to fears that someone would try to shoot Robeson while he performed, fifteen ex-military vets, black and white, formed a shield around him ready to take any bullet intended for him. More than 20,000 people then heard Robeson sing.

But they hadn’t accounted for the aftermath. The Legion had mobilised again and hundreds of fascists and racists lined the only exit allowed by police, ambushing concert-goers as they left the site. Many were attacked with rocks and weapons as they tried to drive away. There were more casualties later when hundreds of police entered the concert site and attacked the trade union stewards who had provided security for the event.

But despite the casualties – over 150 ended up in hospital – the violence represented little more than the spiteful, enraged grunt of defeat from the fascists. For, in the end, Robeson did sing, and Robeson was heard.

Howard Fast, Pete Seeger and Robeson himself recorded their account of the Peekskill events on a wonderful 78 rpm record “Our Song Will Go On” which you can listen to here:

 

[parisian]