Paul Robeson

It was in the late 1930s: 20,000 crowded Madison Square Garden to protest the growing world menace of fascism. I was one more teenager in the upper tiers. There had been many speeches that evening, mostly by white people, some lecturing, some shouting and declaiming at ever higher pitch. Then this tall, broad-shouldered black man stepped up to the microphone. "Good evening, friends." The voice was so low, so deep and resonant, it seemed to represent the whole vast mass of rank-and-file humanity. The entire auditorium responded with one big, warm and loving exhalation. This man represented us, all of us.

In subsequent years, hearing Robeson speak and sing at rallies, in concerts, I never failed to be amazed at the combination in one person of great strength, great tenderness and great intellectuality. In an individual any one of these qualities might be highly developed, but here were all three, kept in beautiful balance in one man.

He was the hero of my youth. Several million other young whites must have also felt so. When I was in the U.S. Army in World War II my wife wrote me a long description of the huge birthday party given him in New York City. After the encomiums, the ceremony, he sang, and some would have wanted him to sing all night, but others knew he had a hard schedule, playing six nights a week in Othello, and their admonition was picked up by thousands, "Save your voice, Paul!"

After the war I met him in person. I waited in line after a concert, knocked on his dressing-room door, and asked if he would be one of the sponsors of our fledgling organization, People’s Songs. "Why, of course," he said with that broad smile. With all the other things on his mind he took time to help us, to advise us.

During the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948 I heard him speak many times, and saw how that combination of physical strength with delicate tenderness was driven by extraordinary courage and honesty.

In Peekskill, September, 1949, ultra-rightists tried to kill him. I was a relatively unknown performer at the time, but was honored to be asked to sing a few songs on the first half of the program. After the great concert was over, the audience of thousands got into cars to drive home. The police (secretly in league with the KKK) stood at the gate, ordering all cars to turn right. Along that road were stationed men with waist-high piles of stones which they heaved at every car. Ten thousand car windows must have been smashed that day. When my wife and I got home we rinsed the broken glass out of the heads of our babies. Inside the car we found two rocks which had actually come through the glass. I later cemented them into our fireplace.

The rulers of America never dared put Robeson in jail-I'm sure because they feared international repercussions. But in the early fifties, every single concert hall was closed to him. Every "respectable" person and organization were running for cover. As Martin Luther King later said, "The ultimate tragedy is not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people." In 1954 the Oberlin College chapter of the NAACP told me, "We wanted Robeson to come and sing for us last year, but we were told by the National Office that they would revoke our charter if we did so."

If, if, if! If we had only fought harder for him. If Americans had seen through the Cold War lies quicker. If his health had only held out for another twenty years. No use. We only know that one of this country's greatest Cold War Crimes was the stopping of his voice, so it could not be heard by hundreds of millions.

Well, for me, Paul Robeson will live forever. His strength made us stronger; his artistry inspired us to be better artists. The day will come when the hard-working people of the world will put an end to class exploitation, an end to racism, and militarism, and poverty, and I am glad that this book will remind our sons and daughters how another step on Jacob's Ladder was brought closer and sooner by this tender giant of the twentieth century, Paul Robeson.