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Three: Anticommunism and the American Lynching Imagination
- University of Michigan Press
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THREE | Anticommunism and the American Lynching Imagination UPON PAUL ROBESON’S RETURN TO NEW YORK from the Paris Peace Conference in July 1949, Harlem residents filled the streets to welcome home their sometimes neighbor. Residents were undeterred by the national press’s vilification of Robeson for his Paris remarks that it was “unthinkable ” to him that Negroes would go to war against the Soviet Union. Rather, thousands packed Harlem’s Rockland Palace for a welcome home rally. There, Robeson declared that the “financial big boys . . . the Wall Street masters . . . and the greedy supporters of American fascism” were in for a rude awakening—a “new reconstruction” propelled by AfroAmerican , Jewish, and white progressive labor was at hand. Unlike the abandoned Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War, this “time [it] will not be betrayed by any coalition of Northern big finance barons and Southern bourbon plantation owners.”1 In opposition to the growing imposition of Cold War militarism, Robeson demanded a new militancy in support of civil rights and in opposition to racist violence at home and internationally. “If we must die,” he insisted, “let it be in Mississippi or Georgia! Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings.” As long as the “socalled western democracies” supported or silently acquiesced to the lynch mob, Robeson concluded, “the fight is still on for peace and freedom . Concerts must wait.” In the place of concerts, he argued, there might be a way for him to “love” America “with the same intensity that I love the Negro people . . . and in the way I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union.” Robeson proposed collectivity and organization across racial lines as a “final answer to the warmongers”: Democracy, indeed! We must have the courage to shout at the top of our voices about the injustices and we must lay the blame where it belongs and where it has belonged for over 300 years of slavery and misery: right here on our own doorstep—not in any far away place.2 91 Robeson’s call to replace concerts with shouting against injustices was not absolute. In fact, Robeson continued to organize concerts and receive invitations to sing as a means to protest racial violence, labor exploitation, and Cold War militarism. A month and a half after this speech, Robeson headed to Peekskill, New York, about an hour outside New York City, where he had been invited to give an outdoor concert. In this, his fourth annual concert in the area, he would be singing in a concert sponsored by the left-wing folk collective People’s Artists, with the proceeds going to the Harlem branch of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a predominantly black and Jewish group that organized and provided legal defense to “legal lynching” victims like Willie McGee and the Trenton Six, as well victims of the Smith Act. However, following weeks of anticommunist invective by the Peekskill Evening Star, local residents attacked concertgoers, preventing the August 27 concert. At a defiant second concert on September 4, locals attacked once again, this time aided and abetted by local and state police. Despite the racial invective, burning crosses, and hanged effigies of Robeson that accompanied the attacks, Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s “full” investigation came to a decision surprising only to those unfamiliar with governmental collaboration with and defense of lynch mobs in the South: the mob had been “provoked.” THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS CONSIDER the Cold War performance complex through the so-called Peekskill riots—sites, not only of theatrical political violence, but also of performances of resistance to Cold War repression . What is critical here is the demand for what Robeson called the restoration of Americans’ “social sanity” as a material practice enacted in opposition to Cold War violence as well as against white liberals’ attempts to enact racial reforms that hinged on the psychopathologization of African Americans. At Peekskill, Robeson enacted meta-performances that referenced their qualities of African American traditions of performance as a means of subverting and organizing resistance to surveillance , violence, and exploitation. These theoretical and performance praxes that constitute the resistive and ruptural elements of the Cold War performance complex understand race and racism as materially linked to capitalist exploitation of labor that must be resisted through political and social means, rather than simply adjusted to by the psychoanalytic rhetoric that came to dominate liberal antiracist discourse. And yet Robeson was condemned by Peekskillite anticommunists and their defenders for having vocally spread a...