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..
