Paul Robeson: No One Can Silence Me: The Life of the Legendary Artist and Activist (Adapted for Young Adults) by Martin Duberman

Author:Martin Duberman [Duberman, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Social Activists, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Performing Arts, history, United States, 20th Century, People & Places, African American & Black
ISBN: 9781620976616
Google: jSXxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2021-03-09T23:38:58.219520+00:00

“I’m Looking for Freedom”

When Robeson returned to the United States from Moscow in June 1949, the Council on African Affairs, which he chaired, staged a “Welcome Home” rally at the Rockland Palace in Harlem. Some five thousand fans, roughly half of them white, showed up to cheer his return. And he gave them their money’s worth in one of the most powerful speeches of his career. “I defy any part of an insolent, dominating America, however powerful,” he said. “I defy any errand boys, Uncle Toms of the Negro people, to challenge my Americanism because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death. I’m looking for freedom—full freedom, not an inferior brand.”

Most Black Americans, he insisted, unlike some of their leaders, were “not afraid of their radicals who point out the awful, indefensible truth of our degradation and exploitation. … How Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass must be turning in their graves at this spectacle of a craven, fawning, despicable leadership.”

In thunderous tones Robeson went on to denounce the continued enslavement of colonial peoples and the betrayal of the Black American worker by some white labor leaders. He insisted that Black Americans “must have the courage to shout at the top of our voices about our injustices and we must lay the blame where it belongs and where it has belonged for over three hundred years of slavery and misery—right here on our own doorstep, not in any faraway place. … We do not want to die in vain any more on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia. Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings.”

Despite his challenging words, by the late 1940s Robeson felt increasingly penned in, no longer able to count on an admiring audience. Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) soon made that clear. Within weeks of his speech they subpoenaed him to give testimony.

When the day arrived, HUAC first called to the stand half a dozen Black witnesses hostile to Robeson. Alvin Stokes, a Black investigator for HUAC, claimed that the communists were planning to set up a Soviet republic in the Deep South and that “Robeson’s voice was the voice of the Kremlin” (the seat of the Soviet government). Next up was Manning Johnson, a Black anticommunist and professional informer who’d done his masters’ bidding in a number of earlier “loyalty” cases. He declared flatly and falsely that Robeson was a signed-up member of the Communist Party USA, had “delusions of grandeur,” and wanted to become “the Black Stalin.”

Johnson was followed by several more prominent Black citizens. Thomas W. Young, president of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, declared that Robeson had broken the bond he once had with Black people and had “done a great disservice to his race—far greater than that done to his country.” Lester Granger, head of the Urban League, who’d already

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