Paul Robeson Quotes

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying, If I am dead, as dead I well may be, You'll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say Ave there for me, And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be, For you will bend and tell me that you love me, And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic, but to end the injustice.

This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler.

Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life.

After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.

The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.

I asked her who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to her.

In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future.” – Paul Robeson

The man who accepts Western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions; and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms, to feel that life is not worth living, and, in chronic cases, to take his own life.

We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility.

There are others, honest men beyond all doubt and sincerely concerned with their people's welfare, who seem to feel that it is the duty of a leader to discourage Negro mass action. They think that best results can be achieved by the quiet negotiations they carry on. And so when something happens that arouses the masses of people, and when the people gather in righteous anger to demand that militant actions be started, such men believe it their duty to cool things off.

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren’t Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?),

We were singing for Dr. Du Bois' spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage. To many of us he was the first American Negro intellectual. We knew about Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. We were proud of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. We memorized the verses of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen, but they were athletes, musicians and poets, and White folks thought all those talents came naturally to Negroes. So, while we survived because of those contributors and their contributions, the powerful White world didn't stand in awe of them. Sadly, we also tended to take those brilliances for granted. But W.E.B. Du Bois and of course Paul Robeson were different, held on a higher or at least on a different plateau than the others.

Oh, Lawd, I done forgot Harlem! Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street--they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There's dancing after supper in a big warm room. It's cold as hell on Lenox Avenue. All you've had all day is a cup of coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat's a ragged banner on your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just crazy about Paul Robeson! Maybe they'll like you, too, black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a lot of darkie color--free for nothing!

6) The National General Assembly of the people of Cuba - confident that it is expressing the general opinion of the peoples of Latin America - affirms that democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy; with discrimination against the Negro; with disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan; nor with the persecution that drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, held prisoner in his own country, and sent the Rosenbergs to their death against the protests of a shocked world including the appeals of many governments and of Pope Pius XII.

Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had lived in her parents’ building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing voice who drowned at a Maine summer camp. “You can’t imagine what happened,” said Sarah, but of course Rebecca could imagine. Being a boy soprano had a shorter shelf life than being a supermodel. She could almost see it as Sarah went on and on, the boy with the pale blue eyes, insensible to the hormones coursing through his body as he stood on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. Apparently his choir director had chosen “Old Man River,” sung not in the bass range made famous by Paul Robeson, or in the dialect in which it had been written, but in a high register with crisp consonants. (To be fair to the choir director, he had never

I named you Fauna because I loved Robinson Jeffers’ poem about Flora and Fauna. I asked that they keep that name. I wanted only two things, I didn’t think they’d let me have what I wanted, but one was that you be named Fauna, and the other was that you at least have on your birth certificate that your father was Negro. Because in my little world I believed that black people were made of far superior stuff than the whites I knew. All the great men that I knew, all the great girls that I knew were black: Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Josh White,

former Confederate leaders had begun to regain political power in the South, staging targeted and effective misinformation campaigns to unseat progressive Blacks like Francis who had managed to secure positions of influence during Reconstruction.

we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.  — GWENDOLYN BROOKS, “PAUL ROBESON” What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.  — BARBARA KINGSOLVER, ANIMAL DREAMS

The president reddened, stood up, and shook his finger at Paul. “That sounds like a threat!” he said. Expressionless, Paul slowly rose from his chair, looking directly at the president. The two Secret Service guards on either side of the president’s desk unbuttoned their jackets and took a step forward. “I meant no offense to the Presidency,” Paul said evenly. “I was merely conveying the mood of the Negro people who constitute ten percent of the U.S. population.” Then he waited for the president to sit down. Truman sat down and abruptly terminated the meeting.

Soon after Robinson’s testimony, HUAC ended the hearings without calling Paul, thus conceding defeat. By now a strong majority of the black masses, especially in the South, supported Paul. The left and progressive constituencies backed him solidly, including the entire Communist Party leadership.

Paul Robeson, Jr. had expressed a very deep truth when he said, “If you scratch the surface of a right-winger you often find a racist.

By mid-September, after postponing the start of his concert tour until October 24, Paul was leading a crusade against lynching. When Walter White and most other leaders of the black establishment, such as A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Mary McCleod Bethune, refused to back such an initiative, Paul asked W. E. B. DuBois and Albert Einstein to join him in a national call for a mass protest meeting in Washington, D.C. They agreed,

On my upcoming sixteenth birthday, I would be eligible to get my driver’s license. “You’ll be a target of the state police, especially after dark,” my father said, and offered me detailed advice on what to do in order to minimize my risk. He also urged me to stay alert whenever I found myself in an unfamiliar white neighborhood: “Always be conscious of where you are, what is going on, and who is around you,” he counseled.

We helped plow the fields, build the dams, write the poems and sing the music of America. Are not all Americans proud, of Doree Miller, of Frederick Douglass, of Paul Robeson, of Joe Louis, of Marian Anderson

She was anxious to monitor the political rumblings back home in the United States.28 A new Black leadership was emerging there and changing the social, cultural, and political landscape.

Thousands of left-wing volunteers from all over Europe, along with many Americans and Canadians, answered the Spanish Republic’s call for help and were supported by arms shipments, military advisers, and air force pilots from the Soviet Union. The governments of England, France, and the United States maintained a hypocritical neutrality, embargoing arms shipments and volunteers to both sides.

On July 7, Essie was subpoenaed to appear before the feared McCarthy Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations. Headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing Republican from Wisconsin, this so-called McCarthy Committee was spearheading the anticommunist witch hunt throughout the nation with its high-profile hearings.

A few days after Paul was banned from Madison Square Garden, over six thousand people showed up at a Harlem rally for him. And though the leadership of the black establishment either failed to support Paul or joined in the attacks against him, a significant portion of black public opinion became even more sympathetic.

The standard FBI questionnaire designed to ferret out communists or “communist sympathizers” included an inquiry as to whether the suspect had black friends. Black politicians and establishment leaders responded by keeping a low public profile

In October, an afternoon visit with Albert Einstein in Princeton at Einstein’s invitation provided Paul with a welcome change of pace. The two recalled their previous meetings—especially backstage in Princeton when Einstein had seen Paul in Othello. They talked at length about the right to travel, Paul’s fight for his artistic life, and scientists’ responsibility to speak out against the trampling of constitutional rights.

nearly 100 years have passed since the struggle to abolish Negro slavery was won—yet today the Negro people here are still fighting to win true freedom and equality. In hundreds of laws we are branded as inferior, set apart, humiliated.

The best football player in America could not serve as captain of his team. But Paul expressed neither surprise nor anger: by now he knew this was the way the white world operated, and he was able to shrug it off.

he had charged that the democratic countries of the world had “retreated at every step” before the onslaught of fascism, and that “the Colored people of the United States must ever keep in mind that the reactionary forces seeking to smash democracy in Spain are the same forces which would destroy our constitutional rights at home.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler’s army marched unopposed into the Rhineland, a demilitarized buffer zone between France and Germany. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull did not protest, and FDR went fishing.

In 1938, U.S. public opinion preferred fascism to communism by 31 percent to 22 percent; 47 percent had “no opinion.

The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.

In 1951, 20-year-old [Jim]Jones [of Jonestown massacre fame] began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. He became flustered with harassment during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event that he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. He also became frustrated with the persecution of open and accused communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jones said he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.

It’s Complicated” with Paul Robeson. To try to explain him—which is a form of excusing him—gets you stuck in a quagmire. Nevertheless, the absence of this giant of the 20th century from [a] list of “African Americans Who Shook Up the World” should leave us asking why. Was it his politics? Was it some of the songs he sang, some the films he appeared in? Or was he simply overlooked? Nobody else shook up the world in quite the way Paul Robeson did.