- The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976
When Paul Robeson sang and spoke, thousands of working people in the United States and Canada listened. His popularity was worldwide and his name remains revered amongst an older generation of political/cultural activists. His recordings still sold 34 years after his death.
While rock stars today are often admired for their work on issues of social justice, the esteem that Robeson earned at a time when he was so openly political and identified as a communist was offset by his vilification by the official media and government, and by his experiences as a black man when the colour bar reigned supreme. What is it that drew so many working people to his performances when his repertoire included African-American spirituals, freedom songs, Russian folk songs, operatic themes, songs of the Spanish Civil War, and union songs, hardly the stuff of popular culture?
Paul Robeson Jr. provides us with not only a biography of his father from 1939 to his death. He places Robeson's personal life, struggles, work, and study within an historical context. This was the era of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, and an era when labour struggled to make gains despite rabid counter-attacks by the bourgeoisie and the state in the name of anti-communism.
The biography goes beyond the too common understanding of the Cold War as a struggle between two emerging [End Page 268] superpowers. Growing anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa provided an essential dynamic. Important too were the political struggles within the US. Anti-communism was not just a singular attack upon the Communist Party and worldwide communism. It was a continued attempt from the era of the First World War to rid the labour movement of all radicalism and to reimpose industrial discipline upon the US working class after the industrial union insurgency of the 1930s. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was a milestone in that anti-union battle. The working class meanwhile was changing with the rise of an African-American industrial working class and consequent rising demands from that community after World War II. Robeson became a symbol of communities defined by class and race that were under attack.
While Robeson was regarded by many on both the left and right as singularly owned by the Communist Party of the US, Robeson Jr., who himself became a party member, records the complexity of his father's political thought. Robeson characterized himself as an anti-fascist and anti-colonialist. Fascism existed not only as Nazism, but also in Jim Crow laws, racism in the US, and colonial attitudes of white European powers to developing countries. In conversation with his son he spoke of himself as "a human being first, a Negro second, and a Marxist third. But all three of those levels are inseparably connected." (56) As an artist, educator, and activist, he was not only a precursor to the forthcoming civil rights movement but also prefigured the division between the more conservative elements of that movement, and the rise of independent and militant Black self-organization. He advocated the need for such independent political action of "his folk."
J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI judged that Robeson was an internal threat to the US. Working from files released from government sources, Robeson Jr. shows the intricate attempts to silence, marginalize, restrict, and even jail his father through a network of spies and informants, as well as the deliberate smear campaigns in which the FBI passed on fabrications of his speeches to a press that then condemned Robeson as a traitor and a tool of Kremlin policy. His freedom to work and travel were restricted in a constant battle to secure a passport.
Robeson Jr. also reports on his father's years of sickness and depression that undermined his ability to carry on activity. While the strain of constant work and political battle took a heavy emotional and physical toll, Robeson Jr. suggests that US officials, in an effort to render him incapable of...