Book Review - Five Stars
Paul
Robeson: A Biography by Martin Duberman
Since
early childhood Paul Robeson stood up for equal rights and
constitutional law with liberty and justice for all.
Xenophobia
was politically ingrained all the way to the top. J. Edgar Hoover,
Joseph McCarthy, and President Woodrow Wilson, too busy fighting to
make the world “safe for democracy,” refused to speak out
publicly against lynching. President Woodrow Wilson did, however,
speak out against what he called “a social blunder of the worst
kind”.
Recommended
reading and mind boggling in the extreme.
“The
only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great a faith in human
beings.”
EXCERPTS:
During
the years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Robeson remained reasonably
hopeful that white America would itself recognize the worst aspects
of institutionalized racism and work to expunge them. But as the
democratic impulses of the New Deal drained off into the intolerance
of postwar McCarthyism, his real hope fastened on the ultimate
transforming power of international socialism. He never ceased being
an American patriot—continuing to believe in the inspirational
promise of the country’s principles, if not her practice—but the
more white America failed, in the post-World War II years, to stand
up for the rights of people of color, the more Robeson grew into a
militant spokesman for the world’s oppressed. The country’s
failure to set its house in order, to ransom its own promise, brought
out in him not—as in so many others—weary acquiescence but,
rather, uncompromising anger, a dogged refusal to bow. Robeson’s
stand endeared him still further to those who shared his politics and
his principles, but cost him dearly with the multitude of mainstream
Americans who had once been among his admirers. By 1960 his career
and health had been broken, his name vilified, his honor—even his
good sense—assailed, his image converted by a now hostile
establishment from public hero to public enemy. Branded a Soviet
apologist, kept under close surveillance by the FBI, his right to
travel abroad denied by the State Department and his opportunities to
perform at home severely curtailed, deserted by most of the beholden
black leadership, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson.
This extraordinary turnabout in what had been one of the great
twentieth-century careers is a singularly American story, emblematic
of its times yet transcending them, encompassing not merely Cold War
hysteria during one moment in our history but racial symbolism and
racial consciousness throughout our history. That a man so deeply
loved all over the world could evoke in his own country such an
outpouring of fear and anger may be the central tragedy—America’s
tragedy—of Paul Robeson’s story.
Ask
fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, ‘What is the
greatest menace in your life?’ and they will answer in a thunderous
voice, ‘Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job
Discrimination!’—in short White Supremacy and all its vile works.
Our enemies,” Robeson concluded, “are the lynchers, the
profiteers, the men who give FEPC the run-around in the Senate, the
atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers,” those who sustain injustice
at home while shipping arms—here Robeson was surely prescient—to
“French imperialists to use against brave Vietnamese patriots.”
His black audience gave him a prolonged ovation. Two weeks later the
daily press blazoned in screaming headlines that “COMMUNIST
IMPERIALISTS FROM NORTH KOREA” had invaded their “PEACE-LOVING
BROTHERS” to the south. The victors of World War II had put an end
to Japan’s colonial rule in Korea and split that country into two,
the North, under Kim II Sung, claiming to build socialism, the South,
under Washington’s puppet Syngman Rhee, proceeding to bolster
capitalism. From the first there had been constant sniping across the
border, each side threatening to “liberate” the other, but when
Sung’s well-equipped army finally crossed into the South, Rhee’s
troops were unprepared and ill-equipped. Though Truman had in the
past shown contempt for Rhee, he felt he couldn’t risk—not so
soon after the Communist victory in China and the sensational
publicity surrounding the fall of Hiss and the rise of
McCarthy—having the Republicans charge that he was soft on
Communism.
The
court’s own implementing decision rejected the notion of rapid
desegregation in favor of a “go-slow” approach, which itself
proved too radical a notion for President Eisenhower; initially he
refused to endorse the Brown ruling, remarking,
“I
don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or
decisions,” and calling his own appointment of Earl Warren to the
Supreme Court “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”
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..
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