January 23rd was the 50th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s death. As historian Gerald Horne noted in his 2016 biography of Robeson, Time magazine declared him “probably the most famous living negro” in 1943, while in 1964, an “admiring reporter…upping the ante,” referred to Robeson as the “best known American in the world.” Sports journalist Howard Bryant, was interviewed on 1/23 by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about his new book on baseball player Jackie Robinson’s pressured 1949 testimony before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) intended to discredit Robeson. Goodman told Howard that when she asked a group of students, invited to the studio to watch the show who Jackie Robinson was, almost all of them raised their hands. But when she asked them if they knew who Robeson was, almost none did. How is it that someone who was at one time so famous has been made into a virtual non-person and why?
Horne tells us:
“Born in 1898, Paul Leroy Robeson, a descendent of enslaved Africans in the U.S., was globally renowned – not just as a singer but as an actor, athlete and political activist. As a singer and actor, he was as celebrated as Michael Jackson and Denzel Washington would be; as an athlete, he was as illustrious as [black Italian soccer player] Mario Balotelli; as an activist, he carried the moral weight of Nelson Mandela…
[I]t was left to Robeson’s comrade – the Father of Pan Africanism, W.E.B. Du Bois – who in the 1950s called Robeson “without doubt” the “best known American on Earth” in that “his voice is know in Europe, Asia and Africa, in the West Indies and South America and in the islands of the seas. Children on the street of Peking and Moscow, Calcutta and Jakarta greet him and send their love.” Yet with all this, there was a reigning anomaly: “only in his native land is he without honor or rights.”
As Horne explains, the reason was simple. After U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated after World War II, Robeson refused to join the anti-Soviet consensus. Like former Roosevelt administration agriculture secretary and vice-president Henry A. Wallace, Robeson favored “peaceful coexistence” and cooperation with the U.S.S.R., rather than Cold War confrontation. Robeson was a major supporter of Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, serving as a co-chairman of the National Wallace-for-President Committee. Robeson actively campaigned for Wallace, advocating for his platform of peace and desegregation, even traveling to the South despite death threats from the KKK.