Victory. There is no other way to describe the US Postal Service’s decision to honor the life of Paul Robeson with a commemorative stamp. After eight years of struggle and with the support of a quarter of a million signatures from Robeson supporters, the USPS relented and decided to honor the life of this working-class giant.
In 1998, this magazine, along with organizations such as the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Paul Robeson 100th Birthday Committee, and many other individual and organizations, urged the issuance of a stamp to honor Robeson. Paul Robeson sacrificed a successful movie, theater and singing career for the causes he held dear. In the 30 years of his active political life, he fought the fascist menace in Germany and Spain. In 1938 he traveled to Spain where he met with and entertained the soldiers of the International Brigades. The necessity of his personal commitment to this cause stemmed from his belief that “the artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
From the 1930s through the rest of his public life, Robeson vigorously supported organized labor, speaking and performing at labor rallies, conferences and festivals. In 1943, in the depths of the international struggle against fascism, Robeson saw the connection between “the disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism” and the Nazis. “They are the people,” he said, “who believe Hitler’s lie that Nazism and Fascism were and are necessary in order to save the world from Communism.” They are the people, he argued, who support discrimination. They turn a blind eye to lynching and racial violence. They perpetuate the economic insecurity of Blacks and are satisfied with employment discrimination and other forms of social marginalization. They do not regard African Americans as worthy of full inclusion in our universities and other institutions of learning and culture.
Robeson struggled mightily for the unity of the working class but believed deeply that the full struggle for racial equality was the minimum necessary to achieve that unity.
At the height of his theater career, Robeson delivered a Broadway performance of Othello that ran for 296 shows in 1943-1944. By the late 1940s, he came under attack by the ultra-right for his anti-segregation, pro-labor, pro-peace beliefs. The McCarthyites accused him of supporting the overthrow of the government and other offenses. His right to travel abroad was curtailed and many of his performances and concerts were cancelled. After World War II, he helped found the National Negro Labor Council, the Civil Rights Congress and the Council on African Affairs. He published the Freedom newspaper in Harlem. Though he was strongly supported by sections of the labor movement (especially the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers) violence and government pressure put on him and the organizations he built forced him into ill health and early retirement.
After finally having his right to travel restored in 1958, Robeson went to the Soviet Union to recuperate. He died on January 23, 1976, at the age of 77.
Though many in the Communist and progressive movements continued to remember him as a hero of our class and our struggle, his fame – in the 1940s he was believed to be the most famous person on earth – languished to obscurity in the US. His celebrity continued in much of the rest of the world.
Robeson’s autobiography, Here I Stand is currently out of print, but is available through small book dealers. In 1965, dozens of essays by Robeson and tributes and poems by his supporters were collected together in the book Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner (International Publishers). One particularly memorable tribute comes from DuSable Museum founder Margaret Burroughs: For years, Paul Robeson has been my barometer, a system of checks and balances to measure how much my life, our lives, have been involved with concern for people and the liberation of our own black people, of oppressed peoples all over the world. This commemorative stamp is but a small token of the honor Paul Robeson deserves.
