Freedom is a constant struggle: A King and Robeson timeline

By Frank Chapman

This article was reprinted from the April 4, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

This week in April is significant in the lives of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Paul Robeson, two titans, contemporaries - both descendants of slaves, both men of vision and indomitable courage. April 4 marks the 30th anniversary of King's assassination and April 9 is the 100th anniversary of Robeson's birth.

Both men were giants in the fight for jobs, equality and peace. Both suffered because they wouldn't back down.

Two years before King was born, Paul Robeson, at the urging of William L. Patterson, then an attorney for the International Labor Defense, was on a picket line in Boston protesting the frame-up and imminent execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists framed on robbery and murder charges in 1921 and executed in 1927. Already he had turned away from his peers at Rutgers, and he was not willing to be a part of the Black bourgeoisie's attempt to exploit Black workers and rule the ghetto market.

Robeson refused to let the ruling class use him as a showpiece of American democracy, a system which has no equal in hypocrisy. From the very beginning he recognized through his actions and thoughts that the struggle against racism must be firmly grounded in the working class struggles against injustice and for socialism.

In 1943 Robeson, duly seasoned in the great working class struggles of the Depression era and the united front against fascism, said:

"Two years ago many Americans, like Hitler, expected the Soviet Union to crumble under the treacherous blitz attack. Now Americans are beginning to know something of the great power of the Russian people - a power born of unity, of legally enforced equality, of opportunity for all the many millions within its borders, regardless of race, creed, nationality or sex.

"No other nation on earth has achieved such a thing. And no other nation on earth has stated with such explicitness its war aims: 'abolition of racial exclusiveness; equality of nations and integrity of their territories; the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes."

Robeson's assessment was in direct conflict with the aims and interests of U.S. imperialism and was linked with the progressive struggle of humanity for peace, racial and national equality - and socialism.

Not only was he a formidable and fearless leader of the movement for African American equality, he also recognized and understood the fundamental importance of the working class in all progressive struggles.

Robeson opposed any and all attempts to isolate the struggles of African Americans from the American working class. For Robeson, Black-white unity was not tactical, but strategic - a necessary precondition to end capitalist domination and emancipate the working class.

As a Marxist-Leninist, Robeson knew that fantastic longings for a better world were not enough. He understood that the struggle against state-monopoly capitalism must be scientifically organized and systematically carried out to the finish.

The freedom movement led by Robeson was centered in the working class, the true emancipator of modern society. As a Communist, Robeson knew the working class was the locomotive of history.

In 1950 the U.S. government revoked Robeson's passport which he had held since 1922. Why? Fascism had been defeated in a united front led by the U.S and the Soviet Union, giving rise to new aspirations for freedom and democratic expectations in the colonies and in capitalist- dominated countries. The State Department, therefore, considered Robeson dangerous because, by its own admission, "he had been for years extremely active politically in behalf of independence of the colonial people of Africa."

Robeson responded, "Yes, I have been active for African freedom for many years, and I will never cease that activity no matter what the State Department or anybody else thinks about it. This is my right - as a Negro, as an American, as a man!"

One of the strategic objectives of the Cold War was to destroy the Communist Party and the militant trade union movement in order to prepare for war against socialism and liberation movements in developing countries. This is why Robeson was persecuted; this is why leaders of the Communist Party were jailed and militant trade union leaders, many of them Communists, were barred from unions.

Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in the South, learned early the apartheid character of U.S. racism in those days. He was 11 years old and had ventured into a "white only" shop. A white woman walked up to him and slapped his face.

"You're the little n--," she yelled in anger, "that stepped on my foot."

That first humiliating, racist slap carried in it all the weight of Jim Crow rule, which could degenerate in a heartbeat into a howling lynch mob, even against an 11- year-old child.

The insults continued while King was a student at Morehouse College. Working at a mattress factory during the summer months, King discovered that white students were paid nearly twice as much for the same work.

King, like Robeson, was a brilliant student with extraordinary social insights. His educational pursuits took him North to Boston. When he graduated, he chose to go South again, to Montgomery, Ala., to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. That was June 1955, one year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional.

On June 12, 1956 Paul Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He declared his position with forceful clarity:

"I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. They are not, in Mississippi. They are not, in Montgomery. That is why I am here today ... You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the rights of his people!"

Comments on Robeson's testimony appeared in several African American newspapers, many saluting him. For example, the San Francisco Sun-Reporter of June 23, 1956 editorialized:

"Robeson, as far as most Negroes are concerned, occupies a unique position in the U.S., or the world, for that matter ... he is the conscience of the U.S. in the field of color relations. Those Negroes who earn their living by the sweat of their brows and a few intellectuals idolize the man. He says the things which all of them wish to say about color relations, and the manner in which he says these things attracts the eye of the press of the world."

Robeson's name rang out in African American communities more often than church bells. In those days, you couldn't get a haircut without hearing a discussion on Paul Robeson. Surely King heard Robeson's ringing words, which appeared prominently in the African American press.

An irony of human history is that in 1956, the same year Robeson was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, King led the victorious Montgomery bus boycott - an event that signaled the opening shot in the battle for civil rights. The very thing the U.S. ruling class thought it was getting rid of in harassing Robeson, history found in King: a fearless fighter for African American freedom and equality.

In Montgomery, Rosa Parks, a courageous working class woman, had refused to obey the racist rule to move to the back of the bus. Four days later King and others called for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The 50,000 African Americans who lived there honored the boycott.

A boycott rally at King's church was packed with 4,000 people, with more pouring out into the streets. King, in his first speech of this "Walk for Freedom" said:

"There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired - tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression ... We had no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience ... But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."

During this period, someone firebombed King's home. King was shaken, unable to sleep. As he struggled to break the grip of fear, he thought, "The people are looking to me for leadership and I stand before them without strength and courage ... I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left."

But it was precisely at that moment of facing death that this young, inexperienced man answered the call of his people: "Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth and God will be at your side forever," he told himself.

The paralyzing fear was gone, never to return. The end became the beginning. He knew that his suffering, struggling people were the source of his resolve.

"I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land," he said in Memphis not long before he was killed. "So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man."

Driven by the objective laws of class struggle, the King- led freedom movement ultimately ended up standing for peace by opposing the war in Vietnam, and standing shoulder-to- shoulder with the working class in the struggle for equality and economic justice.

When King was struck down by the assassin's bullet in Memphis, he was in the midst of a struggle to defend the rights of sanitation workers to organize. The journey that began in Montgomery cleared from the path of freedom much of the racial rubbish of segregation, especially the insult of "whites only."

In a way, King's life in the struggle had come full circle. It started with an African American worker, Rosa Parks, standing up against American-style apartheid, and it ended with King being gunned down as he again stood with African American workers standing up for their right - for the right of all workers - to organize.

Shortly after his assassination, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, told a United Auto Workers convention:

"It is not an accident that my husband was assassinated while leading a strike, nor is it coincidental that the time of his assassination came when he was calling for a coalition of all the poor, Black and white, and urging that they create a union organization. He was arousing a sleeping giant when he was cut down."

Like a signal rocket, both Robeson and King soared up into the night of our ignorance, casting much-needed light on the fact that there is "no easy walk to freedom," and that along the way we discover and rediscover that the enemy is the capitalist system.

Both Robeson and King were hounded by the U.S. ruling class and made the objects of the most vicious campaigns of lies and slander. And now, after their death, there is an attempt to convert them into what Lenin called "harmless icons."

We will not accept this. We cannot accept this. What we will accept is the historic responsibility of the African American people: to stand side by side with all progressive humanity in the struggles for freedom, equality and socialism, for all people for all time.