Replies

Paul Robeson seems to be a signficant missing piece.

He taught at the school Stanley Ann attended in Washington.

I had suggested at an early ACORN thread that Paul Robeson connected the Dunham’s to Frank Davis from an editorial I read by American Thinker’s blog.

Paul Robeson is mentioned in the columns Davis use to write in Hawaii:

http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Frank_Marshall_Davis_4.pdf
Page 62

Bio of Paul Robeson:
http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/comtex/rob3.htm
Born Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson, April 9, 1898, in Princeton, NJ; died of a stroke, January 23, 1976, in Philadelphia, PA; son of William Drew (a clergyman) and Maria Louisa (a schoolteacher; maiden name, Bustill) Robeson; married Eslanda Cardozo Goode, August 17, 1921; children: Paul Jr. Education: Rutgers College (now University), A.B., 1919; Columbia University, LL.B., 1923.

Career
Admitted to the Bar of New York; employed in a law firm, 1923; actor; stage appearances include Simon the Cyrenian, 1921, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, 1924, Show Boat (musical), 1928, Othello, 1930 and 1943, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1936; films appearances include Body and Soul, 1924, The Emperor Jones, 1933, Sanders of the River, 1935, and Show Boat, 1936; singer; recording and performing artist.

Awards: Badge of Veterans of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1939; Donaldson Award for outstanding lead performance, 1944, for Othello; American Academy of Arts and Letters medal, 1944; NAACP Spingarn Medal, 1945; Champion of African Freedom Award, National Church of Nigeria, 1950; Afro-American Newspapers Award, 1950; Stalin Peace Prize (U.S.S.R.), 1952; Peace Medal (East Germany), 1960; Ira Aldridge Award, Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, 1970; Civil Liberties Award, 1970; Duke Ellington Medal, Yale University, 1972; Whitney M. Young, Jr., National Memorial Award, Urban League of Greater New York, 1972. Honorary degrees from Rutgers University, Hamilton College, Morehouse College, Howard University, Moscow State Conservatory, and Humboldt University.

Paul Robeson—singer, actor, civil rights activist, law school graduate, athlete, scholar, author—was perhaps the best known and most widely respected black American of the 1930s and 1940s. Robeson was also a staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, and a man, later in his life, widely vilified and censored for his frankness and unyielding views on issues to which public opinion ran contrary. As a young man, Robeson was virile, charismatic, eloquent, and powerful. He learned to speak more than 20 languages in order to break down the barriers of race and ignorance throughout the world, and yet, as Sterling Stuckey pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, for the last 25 years of his life his was “a great whisper and a greater silence in black America.”

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898, Robeson was spared most of the daily brutalities suffered by African Americans around the turn of the century. But his family was not totally free from hardship. Robeson’s mother died from a stove-fire accident when he was six. His father, a runaway slave who became a pastor, was removed from an early ministerial position. Nonetheless, from his father Robeson learned diligence and an “unshakable dignity and courage in spite of the press of racism and poverty.” These characteristics, Stuckey noted, defined Robeson’s approach in his beliefs and actions throughout his life.

Having excelled in both scholastics and athletics as a youth, Robeson received a scholarship to Rutgers College (now University), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and chosen valedictorian in his senior. He earned varsity letters in four sports and was named Rutgers’ first All-American in football. Fueled by his class prophecy to be “the leader of the colored race in America,” Robeson went on to earn a law degree from Columbia University, supporting himself by playing professional football on the weekends. After graduation he obtained a position with a New York law firm only to have his career halted, as was recalled in Martin Baulm Duberman’s Paul Robeson, when a stenographer refused to take down a memo, saying, “I never take dictation from a nigger.” Sensing this episode as indicative of the climate of the law, Robeson left the bar.

While in law school, Robeson had married fellow Columbia student Eslanda Cardozo Goode, who encouraged him to act in amateur theatrical productions. Convinced by his wife and friends to return to the theater after his departure from law, Robeson joined the Provincetown Players, a group associated with playwright Eugene O’Neill.

(snipping theatric claims to fame)

Continued travels throughout Europe in the 1930s brought Robeson in contact with members of politically left-leaning organizations, including socialists and African nationalists. Singing to, and moving among, the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, the working classes, Robeson began viewing “himself and his art as serving the struggle for racial justice for nonwhites and economic justice for workers of the world,” Huggins noted.

A critical journey at that time, one that changed the course of his life, was to the Soviet Union. Paul Robeson author Duberman depicted Robeson’s time there: “Nights at the theater and opera, long walks with [film director Sergei] Eisenstein, gala banquets, private screenings, trips to hospitals, children’s centers, factories ... all in the context of a warm embrace.” Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins, “that the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. ‘Here, for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity.’” Diggins went on to assert that Robeson’s “attraction to Communism seemed at first more anthropological than ideological, more of a desire to discover old, lost cultures than to impose new political systems. ... Robeson convinced himself that American blacks as descendants of slaves had a common culture with Russian workers as descendants of serfs.”

Regardless of his ostensibly simple desire to believe in a cultural genealogy, Robeson soon become a vocal advocate of communism and other left-wing causes. He returned to the United States in the late 1930s, Newsweek’ s Saal observed, becoming “a vigorous opponent of racism, picketing the White House, refusing to sing before segregated audiences, starting a crusade against lynching, and urging Congress to outlaw racial bars in baseball.”

After World War II, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union froze into the Cold War, many former advocates of communism backed away from it. When the crimes of Soviet leader Josef Stalin became public—forced famine, genocide, political purges—still more advocates left the ranks of communism. Robeson, however, was not among them. National Review contributor Joseph Sobran explained why: “It didn’t matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might be abused. In 1946 the former All-American explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: ‘The coach tells you what to do and you do it.’ It was incidental that the coach was Stalin.” Robeson could not publicly decry the Soviet Union even after he, most probably, learned of Stalin’s atrocities because “the cause, to his mind,” Nation contributor Huggins theorized, “was much larger than the Soviet Union, and he would do nothing to sustain the feeding frenzy of the American right.”

Robeson’s popularity soon plummeted in response to his increasing rhetoric. After he urged black youths not to fight if the United States went to war against the Soviet Union, a riot prevented his appearing at a concert in Peekskill, New York. But his desire was never to leave the United States, just to change, as he believed, the racist attitude of its people. In his autobiography Robeson recounted how during the infamous McCarthy hearings, when questioned by a Congressional committee about why he didn’t stay in the Soviet Union, he replied, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

In 1950 the U.S. Department of State revoked Robeson’s passport, ensuring that he would remain in the United States. “He was black-listed by concert managers—his income, which had been

Robeson’s passport was restored in 1958 after a Supreme Court ruling on a similar case, but it was of little consequence. By then he had become a nonentity. When Robeson’s autobiography was published that year, leading literary journals, including the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune refused to review it. Robeson traveled again to the Soviet Union, but his health began to fail. He tried twice to commit suicide. “Pariah status was utterly alien to the gregarious Robeson. He became depressed at the loss of contact with audiences and friends, and suffered a series of breakdowns that left him withdrawn and dependent on psychotropic drugs,” Dennis Drabble explained in Smithsonian. Slowly deteriorating and virtually unheard from in the 1960s and 1970s, Robeson died after suffering a stroke in 1976.

(snipping books authored, viewable at link)