Posted on 01/19/2004 8:23:49 AM PST by Sir_Humphrey
Monday, January 19, 2004
By ROBERT STERN
Staff Writer
PRINCETON BOROUGH - When the U.S. Postal Service launched its "Black Heritage Series" of stamps in 1978 to recognize prominent black people, Paul Robeson Jr. was certain his famous father was bound to make the list.
Now, 27 years after the elder Robeson died, the Postal Service will launch a stamp tomorrow in his honor during a ceremony at Princeton University.
It's a tribute Robeson admirers say is both well-deserved and long overdue for the trailblazing and sometimes controversial man, whose birthplace and boyhood home at 110 Witherspoon St. is just a few blocks from the university.
"He was really a forerunner of Martin Luther King's activities," said Anthony Secondo, president of the historical society in Enfield, Conn., where Robeson lived in the 1940s and early 1950s.
"He was extremely talented," said Secondo, adding that he used to deliver the newspaper to the Robesons when they lived in Enfield. "As far as people of his ethnic background, he was tops, really."
Robeson, an All-American football player who graduated from Rutgers College and Columbia Law School, subsequently gained international renown as a singer and actor during the 1920s.
The youngest of five children born to a minister who escaped slavery at age 15, Robeson parlayed his stage and screen fame into social activism, championing racial equality and workers' rights.
But his outspoken political beliefs, association with the Communist Party and admiration for the Soviet Union drew scorn from the U.S. government.
As a result, Robeson was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, was blacklisted on Broadway and had his passport revoked for eight years at the height of the anti-Communist McCarthy Era.
Robeson Jr. said his father was never a member of the Communist Party.
"You were either an anti-Communist and denounced them or you were branded as a Communist. There was no other choice, period," Robeson Jr. said. "He rejected that in principle. Therefore, he paid the price."
He speculates that his father's Communist sympathies even figured in the Postal Service's decision to scuttle a proposal to issue a Paul Robeson stamp in 1998, which would have coincided with the centennial anniversary of the elder Robeson's birth.
"The centennial was sort of his official beginning of his return to the mainstream," Robeson Jr. said in a telephone interview from his New York City home last week. "I think the stamp represents a recognition of that.
"The idea (for a Paul Robeson stamp) has been out there since the Black Heritage Series began," he said.
"If you named 10 black historical figures from the beginning of the Republic, my father would have had to be one of them," he said. "I've always felt that it was an inevitable occurrence since they began the series."
Still, Robeson Jr. was hard-pressed to criticize the Postal Service for waiting until this year to issue the stamp, which will be the 27th in the Black Heritage Series.
Postal Service spokeswoman Frances Frazier said she doesn't know why the Robeson stamp wasn't issued sooner than this year but noted the Postal Service receives thousands of stamp proposals annually.
"Most stamps take three or four years before they materialize because we have so many proposals," Frazier said.
"It would have been nice for it to happen (in 1998 or sooner) but I think it just has taken this amount of time for the process to play itself out," Robeson Jr. said.
"The timing has been excellent because the U.S. Postal Service has done, to my mind, a magnificent job with this stamp - its design, the process surrounding its release," Robeson Jr. said.
The stamp, designed by Richard Sheaff of Scottsdale, Ariz., is a detail of a photograph of Robeson taken around 1943 by an unknown photographer.
An inscription by Robeson in the lower left corner of the print suggests Montreal-based photographers Annette and Basil Zarov took the original shot, according to the Postal Service.
"I am very gratified," Robeson Jr. said. "To say the least, the family and I are very pleased."
Donald Moore, who has a framed photo of Paul Robeson hanging from a wall in his West Windsor home, said he, too, is gratified the stamp will be a reality tomorrow.
Moore said he and the Robeson family have been close since Robeson was a boy, when Moore's late aunt, Christine Moore Howell, and Robeson struck up a childhood friendship in Princeton.
The families grew so close that Moore remembers regular dinners and weekend visits by Robeson to his aunt's New Brunswick house where Donald Moore grew up under her care, he said.
Moore even refers to Robeson as "uncle."
"He was so down to earth," Moore said. "When we were together, I don't remember him ever talking about politics. He talked about the theater, his singing."
"I'm pleased that they're doing this. It's about time," Moore said.
"Everything seems to come a little late for Paul," he said. "But people are beginning to recognize that this is a great human being."
The Postal Service will issue 130 million Paul Robeson stamps initially.
Tomorrow, the stamps will be available for purchase only at the main Princeton Post Office at 213 Carnegie Center in West Windsor and at the Palmer Square Post Office in downtown Princeton. They will go on sale nationwide Wednesday.
The official ceremony for the stamp's release is planned for 10 a.m. tomorrow in Princeton University's Alexander Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
If that's what Rutgers did, it's fine by me.
At least there's a logical connection.
My gripe as a Penn State alumnus is that Penn State named THEIR's after him.
Where's the connection to the school's heritage???
There is NONE!
As far as I'm concerned, the honor belongs to somebody else.
I don't know who, their accomplishments and fame are probably much more obscure than Robeson's.
But there's no doubt in my mind that the University oughta be able to dig deep into it's dusty archives and find SOMEBODY worth honoring who is more directly related to the school's history.
I really like your whole comment. While I detest Robeson's communist sympathies, I agree he was very talented in many ways.
To me it seems inappropriate for the U. S. to issue a stamp to honor a communist. But on the other hand we've had stamps (and coins, and paper currency) that honor plenty of men who have lots of good AND lots of bad in their background.
With the passage of time maybe we can forgive communist membership in the same way that we can more or less forgive slave ownership among many of the founding fathers who made this conuntry free.
Personally I'd prefer that we wait another hundred years before we start looking at communist membership they way we look at slave ownership now -- as something that's a regretable but more or less understandable product of the time in which he lived.
The information coming out about the real situation in the Soviet Union was filtered through a variety of sources with varying agendas. It was impossible for an American to know what exactly was going on.
Had he known how communism was implemented, he might have seen through it's lofty rhetoric about equality and recognized it as the murderous ideology it is.
But his outspoken political beliefs, association with the Communist Party and admiration for the Soviet Union drew scorn from the U.S. government.As a result, Robeson was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, was blacklisted on Broadway and had his passport revoked for eight years at the height of the anti-Communist McCarthy Era.
Robeson Jr. said his father was never a member of the Communist Party.
"You were either an anti-Communist and denounced them or you were branded as a Communist. There was no other choice, period," Robeson Jr. said. "He rejected that in principle. Therefore, he paid the price."
I've read that several Russians were put to death, because Paul Robeson betrayed them, and disclosed (directly to Stalin himself) comments made by them in private conversations.
Friday, April 21, 2000 Paul Robeson on the Soviet Union At the moment these quotes are largely random. Soon I will be categorizing them and providing hyperlinked commentary. -Brian.
"Whether I am or am not a Communist or a Communist sympathizer is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights."
-Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1976, Calendar Section, pp. 1, 58.
"Many friends have asked me how it feels to have received one of the International Stalin Prizes "For strengthening peace among peoples." Usually I say -- as most prize winners do -- "It’s a great honor." But, of course, this award deserves more than just passing acknowledgment. Through the years I have received my share of recognition for efforts in the fields of sports, the arts, the struggle for full citizenship for the Negro people, labor’s rights, and the fight for peace. No single award, however, involved so many people or such grave issues as this one. the prize is truly an international award. And the prize winners including outstanding figures from many lands. Most important, it must be clear that I cannot accept this award in a personal way. In the words of an editorial written by A.A. Fadyeev in Pravda: "The names of the laureates of the International Stalin Prizes are against witnesses to the fact that the movement for peace is continuously growing, broadening and strengthening. In the ranks of the active fighters against the threat of war, new millions of people of every race and nationality are taking their place, people of the most widely differing political and religious convictions.... The awards to Eliza Branco and Paul Robeson reflect the important historical fact that broader and broader sections of the masses of the Western Hemisphere are rising to struggle for freedom and independence, for peace and progress; peoples that endure the full weight of the attempts of imperialist reaction to strangle the movement of the masses against a new pillaging war, being prepared by American billionaires and millionaires.""
-"Thoughts on Winning the Stalin Peace Prize," Freedom, January, 1953, pp. 1, 12.
"....So here one witnesses in the field of the arts -- a culture national in form, socialist in content. Here was a people quite comparable to some of the tribal folk in Asia -- quite comparable to the proud Yoruba or Basut of East and West Africa, but now their lives flowering anew within the socialist way of life twenty years matured under the guidance of Lenin and Stalin. And in this whole area of the development of national minorities -- of their elation to the Great Russians -- Stalin had played and was playing a most decisive role... But in the Soviet Union, Yakuts, Nenetses, Kirgiz, Tadzhiks -- had respect and were helped to advance with unbelievable rapidity in this socialist land. No empty promises, such as colored folk continuously hear in these United States, but deeds. For example, the transforming of the desert in Uzbekistan into blooming acres of cotton. And an old friend of mine, Mr. Golden, trained under Carver at Tuskegee, played a prominent role in cotton production. In 1949, I saw his daughter, not grown and in the university - a proud Soviet citizen.... They have sung -- sing now and will sing his praise -- in song and story. Slava -- slava -- Stalin, Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands. In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, lack through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remains invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin -- the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future...."
-"To You Beloved Comrade," New World Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, April, 1953, pp. 11-13.
"If the United States and the United Nations truly want peace and security let them fulfill the hopes of the common people everywhere -- let them work together to accomplish on a worldwide scale, precisely the kind of democratic association of free people which characterizes the Soviet Union today."
-"No Real Minorities in U.S.S.R.," Daily Worker, November 22, 1945, p. 7.
"I have been, I am, and I shall always remain, a strong, unbending friend of the Soviet people, their wise leaders and the Land of Socialism, Equality and Peace!"
-"Land of Love and Happiness," New World Review, Vol. 20, No. 12, December, 1952, pp. 3-4.
"There is an ominous parallel between what happened in Germany under Hitler and what is happening today in America’s Secretary of Labor Schellenback, joining campaign of Big Business to hamstring American progressives and labor, has called for outlawing a Communist Party. The Nazis did that, too. And President Truman justification of a policy of American intervention in Greece and Turkey on the grounds of saving these countries from the ‘totalitarian’ menace and guarding the security of the United States, is remarkably similar to the anti-Communist smokescreen of the fascists aggressors...."
-"Ban on Communism Step Towards Fascism," People’s Voice, March 22, 1947, p. 14.
"Friends of peace in every land have much to celebrate this year, and on the occasion of the 38th anniversary of the October Revolution it is especially fitting to salute the peoples of the Soviet Union and their government which reflects their passionate devotion to the cause of world peace. The many Americans who have recently visited the Soviet Union -- Congressmen, farmers, clergymen, journalists, athletes, and others -- are unanimous in their findings that the Soviet people, far from being hostile and warlike, are openhearted and friendly. And the evil myth of ‘Soviet aggression’ has been largely shattered by the consistent efforts of the Soviet government to remove all sources of tensions. Those voices of discord in the world which cried out, hypocritically, for ‘deeds’ to match the peaceful processions of the Soviet government, are being drowned out by the popular acclaim which has greeted the numerous steps taken by that government to build a lasting peace. The Austria treaty, the rapprochement with Yugoslavia, the establishment of relations with West German, the concessions to Finland -- yes, the world has applauded each new breakthrough for peaceful coexistence achieved by the Soviet Union, and the birth in Geneva of a hopeful new spirit in international relations..."
-"Their Victories For Peace Are Also Ours," New World Review, Vol. 23, No. 10, November, 1955, pp. 16-17.
"The workers are alive. You sense it in the streets, everywhere. You see it in their bearing. They feel that they are doing something, that they are laying the foundations of something, that they are laying the foundations of something great. In the factories, handling the most up-to-date machines, I saw men who obviously had been ignorant peasants a few years ago. In the universities and schools were students born in savage tribes that up to a decade ago were still in the Stone Age. The theatres and opera houses packed every night by workers. On the trains you see men and women studying works on science and mathematics. In the Soviet Union today there is not only no racial questions; in the minds of the masses there is not even the concept of a racial questions. Black, white, yellow -- all were part of a whole, and no none thought of the question...."
-"Paul Robeson Tells of Soviet Progress," Irish Workers’ Voice (Dublin), February 23, 1935.
"I have never and nowhere seen so many various types of nationalities of such splendid sanitariums and rest homes. Every possible modern convenience is available. Indeed no such mass projects for the working class exist or can exist in the outside bourgeois world.... Her I have found, in addition to the great houses of rest, a first class opera and an excellent orchestra which perform for the cultural enlightenment of tens of thousands of Soviet workers who come and go, who are guaranteed the right to rest by the Soviet constitution. And what is more remarkable and commendable, is that these Soviet workers are of all nationalities and shades of color. In one generation, the Soviets have completely liquidated the race problem...."
-"Robeson Finds Soviet A Haven for Artists of All Nationalities," California Eagle, October 7, 1937, p. 1.
"I am truly happy that I am able to travel from time to time to the USSR -- the country I love above all. I always have been, I am now and will always be a loyal friend of the Soviet Union. I am taking away with me strength newly acquired here. And all this will serve me as a new weapon in the struggle for the cause of peace. I will name aloud the real criminals against peace when I testify as a defense witness at the New York trial of Communist leaders...."
-"’I Love Above All, Russia,’ Robeson Says," Afro-American, June 25, 1949, p.7.
"In 1934, on my first visit to the Soviet Union, I felt for the first time in my life a full human being. Here was a nation whose history and future made clear that it would be the friend of colonial peoples struggling for liberation. Recent events have supported fully this deep faith and belief. So I am proud, deeply proud of my friendship with the Soviet people, and proud to belong to that America (the real America) that wants peace and human brotherhood...."
-"Millions of Us Who Want Peace and Friendship," Moscow News, September 17, 1958.
"Of course, it [Hungarian uprising] was not a true uprising of the people. It was inspired by America and other agents. The ‘Voice of America’ really started it."
-"America to Blame for Hungary: Paul Robesons’ Line Undeviating - Closely Questioned by Anzac Reporters," Variety, October 16, 1960, p. 2.
In a 1950 debate on Paul Robeson’s statement that Negros would not fight against the Soviet Union, Mr. Walter White wrote,
"....Paul Robeson is wrong in giving consent by silence to a political way of life whose strategy is amoral and subject to reversal whenever it suits the whims or fears of a tiny group of men in the Kremlin.... Paul Robeson may believe it is justifiable to practice consistency and integrity only on alternate Thursdays. I don’t agree. Russia’s eloquent and perfervid denunciations of colonialism and race prejudice has been singularly meaningless to me ever since she sold oil to Italy to crush Ethiopia and her shameless switch of policy on the Negro question when the Stalin-Hitler honeymoon ended abruptly."
-"Paul Robeson: Right Or Wrong, Right, Says W.E.B. DuBois, Wrong, Says Walter White," Negro Digest, March 1950, pp. 8-18.
© Copyright 1996-2002 by Brian Carnell. All rights reserved.
Here's a link to some of Paul Robeson's own quotes about communism:
http://www.cpsr.cs.uchicago.edu/robeson/links/quotes.html
One example:
Mankind has never witnessed the equal of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. . . . Firstly, because of the significance it has for my people generally. Everywhere else, outside of the Soviet world, black men are an oppressed and inhumanely exploited people. Here, they come within the provisions of Article 123 of Chapter X of the Constitution, which reads: "The equality of the right of the citizens of the U.S.S.R. irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law. Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as the propagation of racial or national exceptionalism, or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law."
Omitted from both articles: Although Paul Robeson grew up in Princeton and was outstandingly talented, Princeton University wouldn't admit him because he was the wrong color.
Exactly.
Nah they just killed 20 million Ukrainians instead.
For a brief glimpse of Robeson... check out this article from David Horowitz.
There is an immediate reminder of these connections in the Paul Robeson centennial that progressives are observing this year. In a variety of cultural and political events on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the left is celebrating the life and achievement of one of its greatest modern heroes. Robeson, however, is a man who also betrayed his friend, Yiddish poet Itzhak Pfeffer, not to mention thousands of other Soviet Jews, who were under a death sentence imposed by Robeson's own hero, Josef Stalin.
In refusing to help them, despite Pfeffer's personal plea to him to do so, Robeson was acting under a code of silence that prevented Communists like him from "snitching" on the crimes their comrades committed. They justified their silence in the name of the progressive cause, allowing the murderers among them to destroy not only millions of innocent lives, but their socialist dream as well.
... "Snitching" is how the progressive mob regards the act of speaking truth to power, when the power is its own.
From David Horowitz's book "Radical Son":
"About the time my father was being called before the superintendent of schools, my childhood hero Paul Robeson made a trip to the Soviet Union. While in Moscow, he arranged to meet with an old friend, the Yiddish poet Itzhak Feffer. Like Robeson, Feffer was a Party stalwart who had deployed his art as a weapon in the political struggle. During the war, Feffer had come to the United States as a member of the Jewish Joint Anti-Fascist Committee, which Stalin had created to help his relations with the Allies in the West. While visiting the United States, Feffer met many American artists and became friends with Robeson.
Now the poet was fighting for his life. The cause of his danger was Stalin's latest purge. Since the 1930's, when Stalin first instituted the Terror, wave upon wave of internal "enemies" had been disposed of in the chambers of the secret police. War had interrupted the slaughter, but when it was over the killing resumed. Lifting a page out if Hitler's book, Stalin decided to launch his last liquidation campaign against the Jews. It began without warning in the winter of 1948 with the killing of a friend and colleague of Feffer, the actor Solomon Mikhoels. An alleged plot to murder the Soviet leader was used as the pretext for a full-scale pogrom. As the new persecutions got under way, Jews began to vanish into the vast concentration-camp system that Stalin had built along with the other construction feats of the socialist state. Among those arrested was Feffer.
In America, the quistion "What happened to Itzhak Feffer?" entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumors that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalins' police brought Feffer out of prison, put him in the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked him how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. They're going to kill us," he said. When you return to America, you must speak out and save us."
After his meeting with the poet, Robeson returned home. When he was asked about Feffer and the other Jews, he assured his questioners that the reports of their imprisonment were malicious slanders spread by individuals who only wanted to exacerbate Cold War tensions. Shortly afterward, Feffer, along with so many others, vanished into Stalin's Gulag.
It was not that Robeson had not understood Feffer's message. He had understood it all too well. Because it was Robeson, near the end of this own life and guilty with remorse, who told the story long after Itzhak Feffer was dead."
Robeson was one of the privileged few who, because of his fame and its usefulness, were invited into the belly of the beast. All he had to do was open his eyes. This he obviously refused to do. He probably felt, like so many other true believers, or useful idiots as Mona Charon calls them, that he was serving the cause of peace and brotherhood by helping Stalin feed his friend and the other Jews to the Gulag. That he recognized his error at the time of his death is to his credit, kind of, but too little and way too late to help the dead Jews.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.