Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Duberman
book review
Paul Robeson was
simply the very best at whatever he did. He excelled in athletics and dramatic
acting, and he had a world class singing voice.
I am totally amazed
at this man’s abilities and his humanitarianism coupled with his
crusade for world peace with freedom and justice for all.
By the end of WWII
Paul Robeson was earnestly doing everything in his power to stomp out
lynchings and segregation that was going from bad to worse. General
Eisenhower eloquently proclaimed in a 1945 speech that blacks had
been friends in need to the U.S. government along with the USSR in
waging war against the Nazi Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
After WWII the U. S.
implemented the Cold War to perpetuate its hold on world power and
immediately things got worse for Robeson and the USSR. McCarthyism
began under Truman and went wild with Eisenhower in the 1950s.
You will need to
read this true and revealing book ...I will not spill the beans here
and spoil your read. This book has a monumental message, and I
strongly recommend it.
Excerpts:
Paul
Robeson’s voice is all honey and persuasion;
His voice has all
the power of Chaliapin’s and practically the same range, but there
the likeness ends. Paul Robeson’s voice is all honey and
persuasion, yearning and searching, and probing the heart of the
listener in every tiniest phrase. A rich, generous, mellow, tender,
booming voice that you think couldn’t say a bitter word or a biting
sentence with a whole lifetime of practice. A voice like his is worth
waiting ten years to hear, and an art like his comes once in a
generation…
Robeson
went on the radio to introduce songs of the International Brigade
during the Spanish Civil War, appeared at a rally in behalf of the
China Defense League, helped to dedicate the Children’s Aid Society
in Harlem, and, along with a host of other celebrities, appeared at a
mass meeting sponsored by the Committee to Defend America by Keeping
Out of War, to protest conscription and other preparedness measures.
There he argued, yet again, that under their present leadership
Britain and France were essentially engaged in a struggle to protect
the profits of plutocrats, not the rights of the people.
As
late as March 1941, Robeson told a reporter that he was against aid
for Britain because he believed the mobilization was primarily aimed
at saving the British Empire. According to the reporter, Robeson
spoke “angrily” and “stormed” over the refusal of the British
ruling class to do anything “about giving India and Ireland and
Africa a taste of democracy.”
June
1941, the war would become, in Robeson’s eyes, an unimpeachable and
united struggle against fascism…
On
March 12, 1956, 101 Southern members of Congress issued a
“Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which called on their
states to refuse implementation of the desegregation order. Defiance
became the watchword in the white South, massive resistance the proof
of regional loyalty. Every item in the white-supremacist bag of
tricks—from “pupil-placement” laws to outright violence—was
utilized to forestall integration of the schools.
The
Ku Klux Klan donned its masks and hoods; the respectable middle class
enrolled in White Citizens’ Councils; the press and pulpit
resounded with calls to protect the safety of the white race. A tide
of hatred and vigilantism swept over the South. Some blacks knuckled
under in fear; many more dug in, prepared once again to endure—and
this time overcome. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa
Parks, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress, stubbornly refused to
give up her bus seat to a white man—thereby launching the
Montgomery bus boycott, energizing black resistance, catapulting
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his strategy of nonviolent direct action
to the forefront of the movement. An epoch of black insurgency had
been ushered in.
1 comment:
I sure do admire your choice of reading materials. Although I have 6 songs by Robison in my collection, I had no idea that he was such an icon of the civil rights movement. In fact, I since discovered that he was a cohort of Marian Anderson, another legendary figure.
Thanks for the info,
Alinde
Post a Comment