[News] Paul Robeson's Birthday!

Fri Apr 9 16:02:52 EDT 2004

Paul Robeson, born April 9th, 1898. Happy Birthday Paul!

The Freedom Archives has a unique collection of Paul Robeson recordings, 
including music, speeches, and interviews. To celebrate his birthday, these 
quotations and comments of interest:

"The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my 
choice, I had no alternative."

  "As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for 
peace, and no one can silence me in this."

In 1950, again called before the HUAC, Paul Robeson proudly confronted his 
interrogators and was cited for contempt for shouting at them, "You are the 
real un-Americans and you should be ashamed of yourselves."

In 1956, Paul Robeson was called to testify before the HUAC testimony 1956: 
(as quoted in The Whole World in His Hands, p. 205.)

MR. ROBESON: I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full 
citizens in this country and they are not. They are not in Mississippi and 
they are not ... in Washington ... You want to shut up every Negro who has 
the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people ... That is 
why I am here today...

MR. SCHERER: Why do you not stay in Russia?

MR. ROBESON: Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build 
this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like 
you. And no fascist- minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?

Below are excerpts from Black Renaissance Volume 2, Number 1

The full article by Amiri Baraka is available at:
http://iupjournals.org/blackren/brn2-1.html

Paul Robeson and the Theater  (four short excerpts of interest)

Contrary to negro nationalists immune to investigation, Robeson was one of 
the deepest theoreticians on the place of Black national consciousness in 
art and politics. He understood that the imitation of the oppressor 
aesthetic had less to do with Art than with ideological and political 
submission and, more generally, that the Afro-American people could only 
find their artistic or political voice by understanding and utilizing their 
own broad social and emotional experience. But the purpose of this was to 
communicate and broaden human solidarity, not to exclude or create some 
metaphysical relationship to the other peoples of the world. However, he 
also constantly explained that the abandoning of the cultural and political 
expression of Afro-American life could only bring a destructive alienation 
and soul-withering submission to the oppressor's will. In this, he is 
similar to Du Bois (the "double consciousness"), and also of course to 
modern African revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau (see 
"Return to the Source"), and Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the 
Racial Mountain."

Song of Freedom (1936) was one of Robeson's best film appearances. He plays 
a Black dock worker whose singing attracts opera producers. Again, he has a 
revelatory connection to Africa. Even his name, Zing, conjures Nzinga, the 
heroic Queen of Ngola who resisted colonialism. Robeson said of this film, 
"I wanted to disillusion the world of the idea that the Negro is either a 
stupid fellow or, as the Hollywood superfilms show him, a superstitious 
witch doctor under the spell of witch doctors." He thought it was "the 
first film to give a true picture of many aspects of the life of the 
colored man in the west. Hitherto, on the screen, he has been caricatured 
or presented as a comedy character. This film shows him as a real man." 
Twenty years later, Kwame Nkrumah, about to become Prime Minister of the 
first postcolonial African state, modern Ghana, celebrated Robeson for this 
film.

Proud Valley (1939) was made in Wales. Having refused major roles in 
Hollywood films for two years, Robeson agreed to appear in an independent 
film made in Wales about Welsh coal miners. This film is my own personal 
favorite. Not only does it completely avoid the loathsome denigration of 
Black people that Hollywood still persists in and still denies, it casts 
Paul as a heroic figure in complete unity with white working men. He plays 
David Goliath, who is at the center of this film, and who magnetizes the 
struggling Welsh miners with his magnificent songs, learns their heritage, 
and even helps them organize a movement for better working conditions. 
Goliath dies in the mines, sacrificing his life in a deeply heroic and 
moving scene, to save his fellow miners. The film is clearly the most 
successfully wrought and emotionally satisfying of all Robeson's films. It 
is a greater film than most American films made. The solidarity of a Black 
worker struggling alongside white miners against the repressive mine owners 
was a genuinely revolutionary aspect of the film.

A 1946 meeting with President Truman at which Robeson urged Truman to 
oppose lynching (some 15 known lynchings took place that year alone and 
were registered in the presentation to the United Nations by Du Bois, 
William Patterson, and others called "We Charge Genocide") turned into 
virulent hostility and confrontation. Reporters at one point besieged 
Robeson with questions like "Are you a communist?" Robeson told them of his 
general pro-socialist views but told them as well they had no business 
asking. To another question, Robeson answered that he "would not turn the 
other cheek" if attacked, but instead would "tear (his assailant's) head 
off, before he could hit me on the other." The most shocking statement of 
Robeson's to Truman was that "if the government did not do something about 
lynching, Negroes would!" Truman, no slouch as an intellectual, said "it 
sounded like a threat" (Paul Robeson Speaks, 175).

A rare photo  (attached) with (l to r) Henry A. Wallace (who ran for 
President on Progressive Party ticket); Albert Einstein; Frank Kingdon 
(radio commentator), and Paul Robeson. Credit: UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN.

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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