Carolfrances Likins

• Paul Robeson courageously integrated a sports team, but so did Jackie Robinson.
• Robeson brought Negro spirituals into the lives of whites and others, but so did Bessie Smith.
• Robeson worked to have positive roles for Blacks in films, but so did Sidney Poitier.
• Robeson used his beautiful singing voice to connect us with global struggles for justice, but so did Harry Belafonte.
• Robeson used his celebrity to support union organizing, but so did Pete Seeger.
• Robeson inspired workers and students wherever he could find their audiences, but so did Fannie Lou Hamer.
• Robeson refused to sing before segregated audiences, but so did the Beatles.
• Robeson worked relentlessly against racial injustice, but so did Martin Luther King Jr.
• Robeson visited and raised solidarity for the people of Africa and for all oppressed people, but so did Malcolm X.

So what’s the big deal about Paul Robeson?

He did them first and he did them all.

I did not know of Paul Robeson, this “Great Forerunner,” when I was growing up in the fifties, and I didn’t even hear or read about him when I started teaching in Compton and hanging out in the Carson Library filling in all the empty spaces in my knowledge with as many Black people as I could read about in books for children. I only learned about him later when I started hearing of the activities of Oneil Cannon’s Paul Robeson Center and their successful campaign to get the U.S. postal service to honor his centennial with a commemorative postage stamp.

Time Magazine in 1943 called him, “probably the most famous living Negro;” a couple decades later in 1964, another writer called him “the best known American in the world.” So why is he so unknown today, at least in the U.S.? The whole answer is that throughout the McCarthy Era, even when he was before HUAC, he refused back down from the campaign against fascism and racism and for international socialism.

Happy 123rd birthday, Paul Robeson!

I ask that we recognize three different groups of people who were — and are still today — victimized by the evils of the Cold War. The first were those who were not Communists but were falsely accused of being so, and these are the people whom we usually think of and hear stories about, those who are called it’s “innocent” victims.

The second group were those who were accused of being Communists and really were members or supporters of the Communist Party, as they had every right to be, for as Robeson bravely pointed out before the HUAC Committee, “The first to die in the struggle against Fascism were the Communists” and “It is a legal party.” These avowed Communists were just as innocent, just as undeserving of what they suffered.

But the third group victimized by McCarthyism is the rest of us, for we ended up with our unions and anti-war groups broken and still not fully recovered, with the era’s Taft-Hartley Act still stifling labor organizing, and with our movies, poetry, novels, and other arts (even the work that came from some of the same artists and writers as before) being less powerful than they had been previously. And those few artists who refused to be broken – like Robeson – were taken away from us, not allowed to perform, and erased from our history.

I believe we cannot consider the McCarthy Era to be truly over until we as a people can say and hear the word “communism” without cringing, till we repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, and till we reconnect our people with Paul Robeson. There are attempts to do just that: I have seen four different one-man shows about him by four different artists, he’s all over the internet now, and the National Archive has an extremely positive page about him for educators on their website.

I urge you to all listen to some of Robeson’s songs as well as his testimony to HUAC, today and on his birthday. (See links below.) In his testimony, you will hear a man who, instead of saying as little as he needed to get by, used every moment to tell the committee off, even accusing them, “You are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

Robeson paid the price for his stance, as it usually happens when one speaks courageously in dangerous situations. After a concert at Peekskill, New York, his people were violently attacked with stones and bats while the police watched. Venues where he was scheduled to do concerts canceled them, recording companies would not record him, and stores withdrew his records from their stock, all under threats from the government. Plus, for eight years he was denied a passport and unable travel to any of the places where people still loved him and wanted to hear him. He was like a prisoner who could neither pass through the prison walls nor fully participate in activities within them.

During those eight years, he was limited to doing concerts at places wherever people who loved him bravely invited him to sing, including at the First Unitarian Church right here in L.A. A friend of mine once told me that when he was five, he got lost at a such an event at MacArthur Park. Robeson found him crying, looking for his parents, and so he walked through the crowd with the boy on his immense shoulders till he was able to reunite him with his parents.

But Robeson also did some remarkable things during this time. Eight months after the opening of the Trans-Atlantic telephone cable, he performed a concert through it for people in a London theatre. And at the Peace Arch on the Canadian border, tens of thousands, mostly on the Canadian side, attended a Robeson concert as he performed from the U.S. side.

When the Supreme Court finally restored his passport rights in 1958, it establishined that the State Department can not deny us our right to travel on the basis of our political beliefs or affiliations Passport back in hand, he immediately launched a successful singing tour and was soon performing Othello at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Robeson didn’t write his songs, but he sometimes rewrote them. In the movie, Showboat, he sang the lyrics to “Old Man River” just as Hammerstein had written them, “There’s an old man called the Mississippi. That’s the old man that I’d like to be. What does he care if the world’s got troubles? What does he care if the land ain’t free?” But later, by adding the single word “don’t, he changed it from Hammerstein’s world view to his own, singing, “That’s the old man I don’t like to be.”

By time he was singing this song at Peekskill and at Carnegie Hall, people no longer heard:

Tote that barge! And lift that bale!

Get a little drunk and you lands in jail.

I gets weary and sick of trying.

I’m tired of living but scared of dyin’.

And old man river, he just keeps rollin’ along,

but rather:

Tote that barge! And lift that bale!

Show a little grit and you lands in jail.

But I keeps laughin’ instead of cryin’.

I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.

And old man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.

Let us come together on his birthday, celebrate what he gave us, and promise that we’ll keep

fighting against injustice and violence until we’re dyin’.

Robeson Resources

HUAC testimony (video) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=akj4lrS1bFY

HUAC Testimony (text) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6440

National Archives page for educators https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/robeson

Songs

Old Man River (Carnegie Hall version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7oAn4Pydpo

Shenandoah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gtJkeXAMt0

Joe Hill https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Kxq9uFDes

Deep River https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qXBG5BRT3c

Jerusalem (words by William Blake) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gt-2Ijppbiw

(Carolfrances Likins is a board member of the ICUJP, a retired elementary teacher, and screenwriter. Courtesy: LA Progressive.)

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‘I Shall Not Retreat’: Recalling Paul Robeson’s Support for India’s Freedom Struggle

Archishman Raju

In April 1958, Paul Robeson’s 60th birthday was celebrated in several cities in India. These celebrations were organised by an all-India committee under the chairmanship of MC Chagla, the former chief justice of the Bombay High Court. This committee had been initiated by Indira Gandhi, who had consulted with Jawaharlal Nehru about the possibility of celebrating Robeson in India. The prime minister had readily agreed.

By this time, Paul Robeson was a famous singer and actor known around the world. The American government had confiscated Robeson’s passport in 1950, claiming that “Paul Robeson’s travel abroad at this time would be contrary to the best interests of the United States”. It was only after the celebrations of 1958, where people around the world rose up in solidarity for Robeson that the battle for his passport was finally won and he was able to travel again.

The American government immediately reacted to the possibility of these celebrations being held in India. The Consul-General of the US visited Chagla trying to pressure him to stop the event. Nehru had written earlier to Chagla, “I gather there is a good deal of excitement and some distress in the upper circles in the United States about this celebration of Paul Robeson’s sixtieth birthday in India.”

In the opinion of the American ruling elite and its Cold War world view, a celebration of Robeson would confirm that India was drifting into the “communist camp”. It was incomprehensible to them that India might admire Robeson on its own terms, that there were revolutionaries in India who were not necessarily communist but not anti-communist either. They were staunchly anti-imperialist and instinctively associated with Robeson’s struggle.

Indeed, in his address at the celebration, Chagla said, “Robeson was fighting against the insolence and arrogance of a ‘superior’ race, and the sense of dominance which comes from a lack of pigmentation in the skin.” He added, “If there is a God, and God is only another name for compassion and kindness, the Negroes must be dearer to Him than any other people.”

Chagla was referring to the consciousness that shaped the time: the idea that the darker nations and peoples of the world who had faced or were still facing colonialism and neo-colonialism had common cause. The fight against racial discrimination was linked to the fight against colonialism and western supremacy. This is why celebrations for Paul Robeson were held around the worldm including in Africa and China.

There are some parallels to the situation today as we observe Paul Robeson’s 125th birth anniversary. In the neo Cold War view of the US ruling elite, it is incomprehensible that India does not toe the western line on foreign policy. Meanwhile, many nations of what is termed the global South are recognising the era of western domination is over. is worth remembering Paul Robeson’s close relationship with the darker nations of the world and the reason they celebrated him.

Communicating through song

Robeson is usually remembered as a singer but he was in fact a great thinker and philosopher. Songs, for him, were a medium to communicate his ideas and a way to understand the commonality of working people around the world. “I have found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton or dig in the mines, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering and protest,” he once said. Robeson was devoted to singing folk songs, by which he meant “songs of people, of farmers, workers, miners, road diggers…that come from direct contact with their work”.

One of the members of the 1958 Indian committee to celebrate him, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, had written, “When Paul Robeson sings he becomes something more than a singer. He transcends all human limitations and becomes the disembodied melody, which knows neither colour nor race. He interprets the ageless, deathless spirit of his lost land of Africa, his priceless heritage, before which even the hooded order of bigotry and hate spontaneously retreat.”

In 1937, Robeson founded the Council on African Affairs, with the objective of fighting for African freedom and educating the American people about Africa. The Council led several struggles particularly against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In 1944, the Council held a conference in which Kwame Nkrumah, who was to become president of Ghana, participated. The Conference came up with a six-point programme to provide concrete help to the African masses and strengthen the alliance of progressive Americans with Africans.

In June, 1946, the Council on African Affairs organised a “For African Freedom” rally at Madison Square garden. At the rally, Robeson said “The race is on–in Africa as in every other part of the world– the race between the forces of progress and democracy on the one side and the forces of imperialism and reaction on the other.”

Earlier, in September 1942, when the Congress leadership was in jail following the Quit India movement, the Council on African Affairs had organised a Free India rally. Speaking at the rally, Robeson told the audience how he had toured Spain with Krishna Menon and become friends with Nehru, Vijay Laxmi Pandit and others while he was in London in the 1930s. Another speaker at the rally was Kumar Ghoshal, a little-known Indian revolutionary who was a member of the Council on African Affairs. Kumar Ghoshal would bring ES Reddy into the Council on African Affairs. Reddy was later to play a huge role in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

The membership of the Council on African Affairs was largely composed of African-Americans. Paul Robeson’s support for India’s freedom reflected the support of the African American people. In October 1942, right after the council rally, the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper in which Kumar Goshal had a column, took a survey of black Americans on whether “India should contend for her rights and liberty now.” Close to 90% responded with “yes”.

If Paul Robeson supported the Indian people’s struggle, he was equally close to the Chinese struggle. At a Sun-Yat Sen tribute meeting in New York in 1944, he spoke of the parallels between China and Africa. He became close friends with Liu Liangmo, a Chinese musician who collaborated with him in the production of an album of songs titled Chee Lai, Songs of New China. Robeson spoke Mandarin and his rendition of Chee Lai continues to be popular online. Robeson was appointed as honorary director of the China Defense League formed by Soong Ching Ling, of which Nehru was also a member.

He could never visit China or India because his passport had been confiscated. “If only my heart could become a bird, I could fly freely, fly to China,” he said. Similarly, he could not attend the famous Bandung conference but sent his greetings. Whether in Korea, or Vietnam, Robeson would always voice his support for any struggle in Asia or Africa. He was a committed socialist and a great admirer of the Soviet Union. Till the end of his life, he refused to bend to anti-communism and Cold War McCarthyism in the U.S., never condemning the Soviet Union. As he said, “I shall not retreat one thousandth part of an inch.”

Robeson’s legacy is not more well known today because, as Coretta Scott King said, he was “buried alive”. In a letter to Marie Seton two years before her death, Indira Gandhi called Paul Robeson “a remarkable man.” She noted, “It is tragic that his country tried to denigrate and belittle him.”

On his 125th birth anniversary, it would be fitting for people around the world, whose struggles he steadfastly supported, to recall his legacy and learn from it for our own time.

(Archishman Raju is a scientist based in Bangalore associated with the Gandhi Global Family and Saturday Free School, Philadelphia. Courtesy: Scroll.in.)