Robeson's working class, Communist legacy

By Jarvis Tyner

This article was reprinted from the April 18, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paul Robeson. To commemorate the anniversary, hundreds of events are taking place, not only in the United States, but all over the world.

The ruling-class effort to exorcise Robeson from the collective memory of humanity is failing - Paul is back by popular demand.

No study of the history of the African American people or of the American left would be complete without a serious examination of the role of Paul Robeson. He was a true national treasure - a genius who made an enormous contribution to the struggle of the working class and all oppressed people worldwide.

The son of an ex-slave, Robeson grew up, to borrow a phrase from Du Bois, almost in the very shadow of slavery. As a result of this experience he was always an uncompromising advocate of full equality for African Americans.

Like Du Bois, Robeson's understanding of the fight for equality evolved as he matured and took on an increasingly radical and working-class trajectory. Indeed, a sign of the genius of both men was that the older they grew, the more revolutionary they became.

In the case of both, maturity meant an embracing of the concepts of Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism. Maturity led both to the working class and the Communist Party.

At the height of the Cold War, Du Bois, in a moment of great courage and open defiance of the ruling-class witchhunt, called a press conference and, with Communist Party leader Gus Hall standing by his side, announced before the public his affiliation with the Communist Party USA.

Because of the extreme repression of the McCarthy period, Robeson was not able to publicly announce the nature of his association with the Communist Party.

During the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearing, Robeson joined thousands of others and refused to answer the infamous "are you now or have you ever been" question.

He refused to cooperate with the fascist-like McCarthy investigation and courageously told an interrogator who suggested he go to Russia, that his father had been a slave, that he had fought for his freedom and that no fascist-minded person would drive Robeson from his country.

Robeson's act of courage stood in sharp contrast to those who collaborated with the Committee.

Paul Robeson became a great comrade to the world Communist movement as he placed himself on the front line of the struggle of the African American people and the working class. He was a pioneer in the anti-imperialist movement of solidarity with African liberation.

Furthermore, his great talents and enormous energy were totally dedicated to nothing short of the end of racism, colonialism and class exploitation.

Along with his wife, the scientist Eslanda Goode Robeson, he was also a revolutionary and was not afraid to own up to it, even at the height of the McCarthyite witchhunts.

Robeson associated himself with all forces and movements who were on his side of the great historic class divide, and was a revolutionary in both word and deed. He was perhaps the most outstanding Communist personality of the period.

While refusing to cooperate with McCarthyism, Robeson, however, let the world know he was a staunch defender of socialism and the Soviet Union and he stood with workers in their class-struggle battles all over the world.

He had a close working relationship with Benjamin J. Davis, William L. Patterson, Gus Hall, William Z. Foster, and Henry Winston, who were not only his very close personal friends but his comrades as well. Robeson stood with them during the worst days of the McCarthy repression and they stood with him as well.

During the Smith Act trials, Robeson campaigned tirelessly for the release of the leadership of his Party. And when the racist mobs tried to lynch Robeson at Peekskill, it was the Communists and workers who joined together to defend him and successfully prevented the lynching.

Because of this, he was persecuted for his views and his work for peace and justice, and was consequently banned from travel. He was denied the right to earn a living and practice his great talents as an artist of stage and screen.

His good name was slandered, mainly by the United States government that was determined to diminish his impact and ultimately discredit and destroy him. However, he had the undying love of the common working people throughout the world and he fought on until his dying day.

Paul was a phenomenon, a true Renaissance man, who possessed the natural ability to perform many tasks well. He had so many outstanding skills in such a variety of seemingly different areas of life, that he defied all conventional thinking about how the human mind and body operates.

Everyone "knows" that if you're good in math, you are not good in English - that is conventional wisdom. If you are a star athlete, you're going to be an average scholar. If you are one of the world's greatest folksingers, you're not going to be a great Shakespearean actor.

If you can run fast and jump high, you are not going to be able to master 17 other languages and numerous dialects including Chinese, Russian and Swahili. All of these stereotypes were completely obliterated by the multi- talented Robeson, for he accomplished all of the above and more. He certainly defied all the racial stereotypes of his day - stereotypes that are still widespread.

Blacks make great athletes the stereotype goes, but they don't make good lawyers. They are great dancers but are usually not good analytical, abstract thinkers.

Paul Robeson was a living refutation of all the racist and class-biased stereotypes that are used every day to hold back millions of Black and Brown youth, women and working- class folks who are told that they are not capable of higher thinking. Robeson did it all and did it all well.

Robeson was a star athlete. He was all-American in football and basketball at Princeton, was the valedictorian of his class, and went on to become a professional football player, while working his way through Columbia Law School.

He was a singer, a Shakespearean actor, an outstanding linguist and a movie star. He was one of the world's great humanitarians, besides being a revolutionary and social activist.

Usually an individual who had achieved Robeson's level of talent and performance in life would be celebrated by society. But in his case there were no presidential citations for achievement, no Congressional medals, no ticker-tape parades, no monuments, no TV specials and no lavish wealth and celebrity.

None of those accolades came from the U.S. ruling class, because Paul Robeson with all his brilliance, remarkable talents and energy, dedicated himself to the goal of bringing about the full liberation of his people from racial oppression and genocide, and to the ultimate goal of liberation of the working class, and for peace and socialism worldwide.

Because of his courageous work on behalf of the people, the U.S. capitalist ruling class chose not to honor but instead to isolate and destroy him. They did not succeed.

As a child growing up in my mother's West Philadelphia beauty shop, I heard the name Paul Robeson frequently. Robeson was held in high esteem. In our tight little African American working-class community where everybody was struggling to survive, Robeson was a national hero.

Throughout the '40s, '50s and early '60s, the name Robeson was like magic to us. He was what Black leadership was supposed to be like. And the more they tried to persecute him, the stronger our support for him grew. Indeed, the fact that they persecuted him proved his greatness to us.

My siblings and I were just one generation removed from being sharecroppers in the South. It gave us hope and the energy to struggle, as we heard that a Black man of his stature was a fighter for his people.

Furthermore, when he was red-baited, our instinct was to reject redbaiting and the redbaiters. I remember wanting to be like Paul because he stood up to racism and was for the common person. He didn't give in or give up.

I wanted to contribute to the struggle and, after my radicalization in the civil rights movement of the late '50s and '60s while in my early twenties, I began to work with the Communist Party.

In 1964 I was a speaker on a program to honor Alexander Trachtenberg who was then the director of International Publishers. After a nervous train ride to New York, working feverishly on my speech, I arrived to make my first New York speech before a full house. To add that I was nervous was an understatement.

After completing my little speech, I sat down and a thunderous applause filled the room. "Wow," I said to myself, "was I that good?" Actually it turned out it wasn't that. The thunderous applause was for a giant of a figure who had entered the room unexpectedly. That figure was Paul Robeson.

My mouth dropped and that good feeling you get in the presence of a great leader overwhelmed me. He shook the hands of every one on the dais including mine. I was honored. I was also stunned. He took the mike and expressed his pleasure at being there. He greeted Trachty (as he was called) and spoke of how happy he was to be back home from Europe and that he was as dedicated to the struggle then as he ever was. To prove that he was the same Paul, he sang a verse or two of Deep River.

That basso profondo voice filled the room and the audience was enthralled. As a 23-year old idealistic man, I was in Communist heaven.

Many of his contemporaries angrily resent those who would try to characterize Robeson's life as a tragedy; a genius who was not appreciated, who died unhappy and unfulfilled.

For sure, Robeson's life's goal for a socialist America was not achieved in his lifetime and he surely would have been sad to see the first socialist state, that powerful bulwark for peace and anti-colonialism, that force for equality and justice, dissolved into a society in crisis, torn apart by capitalist chaos.

But those who know the real Paul Robeson would know that he would still be fighting, and his life is in no way a tragedy.

No, that is not the vibrant, brilliant, thinking, optimistic, fighting Robeson - the Robeson who was loved all over the world for his music, his activism, his revolutionary commitment and his defiance of U.S. imperialism.

For example, the people of the socialist German Democratic Republic named a mountain peak after Robeson. He had to have thrived on that love.

He must have known how much he was loved and cherished here at home by so many common working folk of all races and nationalities, the trade unionists whose cause he embraced, the sharecroppers who listened to his music and heard him speak on the radio, and the idealistic youth who found in Paul a role model supreme.

Robeson must have known. And if he knew, how could he be unhappy? How could his great life be in any way a tragedy?

In my opinion, the Robeson centennial calls for big celebrations. Especially young people must know that there was this phenomenal human being; a Black man, an honest man named Robeson, who possessed enormous talents, a giant intellect and an insatiable desire to see a world free from poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice and war. They must go out into this world like some of us strived to do during the 1960s and try their best to live like he did.

As the centennial celebrations are taking place today, many are shamelessly going out of their way to distance Robeson from his party.

Howard Fast, the ex-Communist writer, recently in a Greenwich Connecticut newspaper article, showed which side of the divide he is on when he tried to disassociate Paul from the Communist Party and link him to his own anti- Communist dishonesty.

In another example in a brochure announcing a day-long conference recently held at Long Island University, it was alleged, incredibly, that Paul never embraced the principles of Communism despite his support for the Soviet Union.

Clearly, Paul the man of principle were he alive would never associate himself with such slander. Unfortunately, if these lies go unanswered, Robeson's legacy will be at war with the life he actually lived. We cannot allow the ruling class to praise him, in order to tear him down.

We cannot allow them to turn Robeson into an ordinary liberal. The real Robeson was no liberal - he was a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, a Communist, a 20th century giant.

Today Paul Robeson is back by popular demand. The hundreds of events taking place around the world are a testament to the greatness of the man. In our country Paul's rise in popularity is yet another indication of the radicalization of the U.S. working class and people, and the decline in anti-Communism. Paul is back because the U.S. people are rejecting anti-Communism. Paul is back because workers, Black, Brown and white are rejecting racism.

Paul is back in the same way that the Communist Party is back. The same class-struggle conditions that are giving rise to a mass Communist Party are creating conditions of a mass appreciation of Robeson. We have to guarantee that this appreciation deals with the real legacy of this great man.