I wouldn't take the liberty of inserting a large cut and paste item into this thread but it seems so appropos. It is by Irwin Silber and was delivered at the Paul Robeson Seminar of Smithsonian Associates, in Washington, DC 1/30/98.

The fact that it was given by Irwin Silber gives the speech additional significance:

PAUL ROBESON - A Twentieth Century Joshua by Irwin Silber

There was a time not too long ago when it would have been considered brave to hold a gathering such as this one -- and foolhardy just to attend it.

Consider this:

In the late 1940s, when Richard Nixon was still only a freshman Congressman, he got himself appointed to a seat on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee -- an institution which our political folklore, with unerring instinct, came to call the UnAmerican Committee. It will tell you something about the intellectual level of that enterprise and our future president that in pursuit of secret Communists and Pinkos, Nixon had called, as an expert witness, a movie actor -- no, not that movie actor, but one whose name only my contemporaries and some addicts of American Movie Classics will recognize -- Adolph Menjou.

"These Commies are pretty tricky," Dick said to Menjou. "Do you have any advice on how to spot them??"

"Well," Menjou replied, "one of the best ways to spot a Communist is if that person is seen applauding at a Paul Robeson concert or owns a Paul Robeson recording."

Silly? Of course. But the FBI regularly assigned agents to take photos of people attending Paul Robeson concerts and to write down the license plate numbers of every car parked near any event where Paul Robeson was to sing while Loyalty Boards -- yes, there were such things -- routinely asked civil service employees whether they owned any Paul Robeson records.

And that wasn't so silly. Quite the contrary. These actions were designed to intimidate those who might otherwise attend a Paul Robeson concert at a moment when all the agencies of government colluded to still his powerful voice.

Now I know that today many of those who might ordinarily be on the case of Smithsonian Associates for holding this seminar are otherwise occupied up on Capitol Hill. Still, the more cautious among you may want to sit stony-faced if, in the course of this talk, I happen to say something favorable about Paul Robeson. And I warn you. I will!

After all, I knew Paul Robeson and it was my privilege to work with him on several occasions in connection with various activities of People's Songs, People's Artists and Sing Out! magazine -- institutions whose work and outlook were strongly influenced by Paul. I also had the great honor of having Paul Robeson write the foreword to my first book -- "Lift Every Voice!"

So. Paul Robeson.

Once he was hailed as the most gifted Black man in America. But less than a decade later, President Truman took away his passport and the State Department designated him "one of the most dangerous men in the world."

In fact, he was both. Arguably the most gifted Black man in America and one of the most dangerous men in the world. That seeming anomaly is an important chapter in our common history, shedding light on the ever-precarious relationship between artists and their government when the worlds of art and politics intersect. To which, it must be added, especially in America and especially wherethe artist is Black.

In essence, it is the story of a man who went beyond the confines of a brilliant career to become a Twentieth Century Joshua, one who devoted his life to tearing down the walls of oppression imposed by the inequities of race and class anywhere in the world -- but especially as he encountered them in his own country.

In pursuing this vision, Paul Robeson went everywhere and was fearless in doing so. He broke new ground in every concert hall and on every stage where he appeared -- not only for African-Americans but for all peoples of color. He played roles previously denied Black artists. He forced segregated concert halls to bring down their racial barriers. He made every song, every play every performance a statement of affirmation of his people's remarkable cultural heritage and a ringing challenge to all who would maintain and justify their oppression.

Beyond the African-American community, hundreds of thousands of working men and women who heard Robeson sing -- not in concert halls but on their picket-lines and in their union halls -- still remember the power of that presence which was so accessible to them. There were times when he seemed to be singing on every picketline in America: for striking Black workers at the R.J. Reynolds tobacco plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; for striking sugar workers in Hawaii; for autoworkers at the Ford River Rouge plant in Michigan; forseamen, steel-workers, coal miners, teachers, hospital workers.

He sang in Spain for the international volunteers fighting Franco. He sang in the Panama Canal Zone for striking public workers and denounced the institutionalized racism imposed by U.S. policy there. He sang for and with coal miners in Wales. He sang in the Soviet Union where he spoke with favor of what he believed was a grand experiment in a new system of social justice.

Many more millions in Africa and Asia remember Robeson as an unremitting opponent of colonialism, an outspoken advocate of self-determination for every people deemed "not ready for self-government" by those who profited from their labor and held them down by force.

Above all and everywhere he went, Robeson was outspoken about the conditions facing Black people in America.

Small wonder then that there eventually came a time when his name sent shivers of apprehension through the corridors of power in America and much of the western world. The object of perhaps the most intense official and unofficial persecution of any individual in U.S. history, Paul Robeson was, for more than a decade from the late forties to the early sixties, a pariah without peer in America.

It was the particular privilege of those of us associated with People's Songs, People's Artists and Sing Out! in its early years to know and work with Paul Robeson as a compatriot on that singular battlefield where art and politics are sometimes joined. For us, he was the consummate political artist -- an individual who had so integrated his enormous musical gifts with political principles that one could not be thought of without the other.

While his accomplishments are varied and legion, it was undoubtedly most of all as a singer that Robeson made his mark. Blessed with a remarkable voice, he approached music with the same sense of conviction he brought to everything else he did. For Robeson, every song -- whether a Negro spiritual, a Russian folk song, a Yiddish lullaby or an operatic aria; whether "Old Man River," "Ballad for Americans," "Water Boy," or the Chorale from Beethoven's Ninth -- was a statement of who he was and how he looked at the world.

Robeson's impact, not just on his audiences but on American culture more broadly can hardly be overstated. Before a packed house in New York's Greenwich Village Theater in 1925, at the age of 27, Robeson presented a concert that made musical history. His program, a first for any Black soloist, was devoted exclusively to African-American songs -- both spiritual and secular. The impact was electric. Even for those who had heard that Robeson was a great singer with a powerful voice, the evening was a revelation. But at least equally stirring were the beauty and range of African-American music from "Go Down Moses" and "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" to "Water Boy" and "Scandalize My Name." The concert consisted of sixteen songs but the audience refused to leave until Robeson had sung an additional sixteen encores.

"All those who listened last night to the first concert in this country made entirely of Negro music," wrote the reviewer for the New York World, "may have been present at a turning point, one of those thin points of time in which a star is born and not yet visible -- the first appearance of this folk wealth to be made without deference or apology."

Called by another critic "the embodiment of the aspirations of the new Negro," Robeson's subsequent concert tours thoroughly changed the way audiences perceived African-American music. But they did more. By refusing to perform for segregated audiences, Paul Robeson led the way in bringing down racial barriers which had defined U.S. social relations ever since the nation's founding.

One of his most spectacular and significant firsts was in his role as Othello. Although Othello was clearly identified by Shakespeare as Black -- "Othello, the Moor of Venice" was Shakespeare's exact title -- no Black actor had ever played the role on Broadway before. Instead, white actors had put on blackface to play the part. Why? The stated excuse was the fear of "riots" when audiences saw a Black man first kiss and later kill a white woman. Well, of course, there were no riots. There was only applause and ovations as Robeson's Othello became the longest-running Shakespeare play ever to be shown on Broadway while Paul himself won the award for best actor of the year on the Broadway stage.

At times, it seemed, Robeson could do anything -- which wasn't quite the case. In 1940, backed by the Count Basie band, he recorded a blues called "King Joe," a tribute to Joe Louis with words by Richard Wright. "It certainly is an honor to be working with Mr. Robeson," Basie would say afterwards. "But the man certainly can't sing the blues."

Robeson was, indeed, an unsurpassed artist -- even if he couldn't sing the blues. But what made him unique even among the finest of his peers, was a quality which would eventually enrage those who hoped to use his success to divert attention from the realities of American racism.

Paul Robeson was not the first or only artist who vowed to use success as a platform for purposes larger than an individual career. Certainly others have tried; and a few have managed to sustain such a commitment over a lifetime. But in this regard, I believe Paul Robeson stands alone as one for whom art and politics were inseparable and for whom the cost was immeasurable.

What made Robeson especially offensive to the political establishment was that he did not confine his politics to the stage or to merely lending his name to various causes. He was a political personality who used his access to power and to the media as a public platform to advance ideas considered "extremist" and "radical" in their time.

In 1943, with pressure mounting to end the color bar in Major League baseball, Paul Robeson headed a delegation who met with the owners of all 16 teams andthe Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Landis. Addressing them as a former athlete and one who had shown how groundless fears of riots breaking out during the run of "Othello," Paul made an impassioned plea to end the ban, citing the hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers who were at the very moment fighting and dying for their country all over the world. The owners were clearly impressed and the event was another nail driven into the Jim Crow coffin. Less than three years later, Jackie Robinson was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers organization.

In 1946 he headed a delegation that met with President Truman to demand government action against lynching. Robeson urged Truman to issue "a formal public statement" condemning lynching and to come up with "a definite legislative and educational program to end the disgrace of mob violence." Heavily dependent on the support of Southern senators and congressmen, Truman balked, saying the time wasn't right for such actions. To which Robeson responded that if the Government did not do something to curb lynching, "Negroes would!" Enraged, Truman said that this sounded like a "threat." It was no threat, Robeson replied, merely a statement of fact.

He was a bitter opponent of those who counseled "gradualism" in the effort to obtain equal rights and minced no words in saying so. "The idea itself," he said, "is but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are law-breakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of law." And then he added in what was undoubtedly considered another "threat": "Chattel slavery was finally abolished -- not gradually but all at once. The slave-masters were crushed by the overwhelming force that was brought to bear against their rotten system."

Similarly, Robeson's antagonism to colonialism went beyond expressions of support for liberation struggles. "We have a part to play," he told American Blacks, "in helping to pry loose the robber's hold on Africa. For if we take a close look at the hands that are at Africa's throat, we will understand it all: we know those hands."

It was statements like these that aroused such anger in the sanctuaries of power. Thus, when Robeson sued to regain his passport (it had been revoked in 1950), the State Department opposed the suit, "In view of the appellant's frank admission that he has been for years extremely active politically on behalf of the colonial people of Africa." To which the Justice Department added that "During his (Robeson's) concert tours abroad he has repeatedly criticized the conditions of Negroes in the United States."

This dual transgression -- condemning and linking colonialism abroad and Black oppression at home -- was the real source of Paul Robeson's persecution. But it wasn't just Robeson's words. Many others, after all, were equally outspoken. It was who Robeson was: extraordinary artist, gifted actor, all-American athlete, and, most of all, the Black man who, more than any other, was both a role model and the symbol of everything that African-Americans were capable of achieving. This is why, in those secret places where such matters are discussed, Paul Robeson was indeed considered "one of the most dangerous men in the world."

When Robeson sang that soaring finish to his version of "Old Man River" -- "I must keep fighting until I'm dying!" -- transforming Jerome Kern's original song not only into a personal but a universal hymn of resistance, he showed us the possibility of unleashing the political potential that rests within those who have so long been kept out of history. And when all the energies of the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Congressional committees and self-appointed petty inquisitors were launched against him, we saw that assault as a badge of honor awarded to one who had lived his convictions no matter the price; Robeson's commitment to principle reinforced our own efforts to fashion a song culture that we hoped would also help change the world.

Paul Robeson was with us not only in spirit -- but in the trenches. When, early in 1949, we launched People's Artists and Sing Out! magazine, there was Paul delivering the keynote speech at our founding meeting. Little did we know that in a few months we would again be joined on a battle field whose very name invokes indelible images of heroism and pain.

That battlefield, of course, was Peekskill where People's Artists produced the Paul Robeson concerts heard around the world. Racist vigilantes broke up the first concert. But despite a climate of state-promoted fascist hysteria and threats of death to Paul, we went back to Peekskill and put on our concert. With the audience as well as Robeson protected by thousands of Black and white trade unionists, Paul sang that day even as police helicopters flew menacingly overhead while a score of bodyguards served as a human shield for the Black man whose very existence had become anathema to a U.S. political establishment with a newly awakened appetite for world domination.

More than anything, it was the living example of Paul Robeson which kept Sing Out! going in those dark years that followed. Our circulation was small; our finances were minimal. But with Paul risking everything for our shared beliefs, how could we abandon that little bastion of people's music we had worked so hard to establish?

What a standard Robeson set for us! There is much that a new generation of artists and singers can learn from his life and especially the way in which this courageous man conducted himself in those years when support for his persecution was a litmus test of loyalty.

Here was a man, son of an escaped slave, who had achieved greatness in the face of racial barriers and political persecution in every field of activity he had undertaken.

That persecution reached a high point in 1949 when he purportedly declared at an international Peace Congress in Paris: "It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war against the Soviet Union on behalf of those who have oppressed them for generations." The statement triggered a firestorm of denunciations from political figures, the press and many prominent Blacks.

The years that followed were a nightmare.

The FBI pursued him with a rare vindictiveness which presaged its later hounding of Martin Luther King. But it will tell you a lot about this most "American" of all government institutions that in 1942 its official description of the Council on African Affairs -- of which Paul Robeson was President -- concluded that it was not only a Communist front but the leading group "presently active in creating considerable unrest among the negroes by stressing racial discrimination."

Local police agencies and various legislative committees investigating "subversive activity" followed the FBI's lead. Concert halls which a few years earlier had been honored to have Paul Robeson on their stages barred their doors to him. In 1950, syndicated columnist Robert Ruark urged Robeson's internment "as any Jap who got penned away" during World War II, calling him "an enemy of his own country and a passionate espouser of those people who are our declared enemies." The 37 newspapers which made up the Hearst press chain ran an editorial declaring, "It was an accident unfortunate for America that Paul Robeson was born here."

The cruelest cut of all, perhaps, came when Robeson was denounced by many prominent African-Americans -- including Jackie Robinson and Walter White, then the head of the NAACP.

Nevertheless, Robeson would not knuckle under. Kept off the concert stages, he sang in Black churches all across America where he remained welcome. Denied his passport, he gave concerts by telephone to audiences in other countries. Enjoined from even going to Canada -- where no passport was required -- he gave an unprecedented concert at the Peace Arch on the U.S.-Canadian border just south of Vancouver which was attended by tens of thousands from both countries.

And he continued to speak his mind. In 1953, with the Korean War still raging, he said in a public speech:

"Will shooting down Chinese help us get our freedom? Will dropping some bombs on Vietnamese patriots who want to be free of French domination help American Negroes reach a plane of equality with their white fellow citizens? Mr. Eisenhower or Senator McCarthy would have us believe that this is necessary to "save" the so-called "free world." But the man who keeps that Negro sharecropper from earning more than a few hundred dollars a year is not a Communist -- it's the landlord. And the man who prevents his son from attending school with white children is not a Communist -- it's Governor Talmadge or Governor Byrnes of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations."

In 1954, as defeated French troops were preparing to leave Vietnam and John Foster Dulles was suggesting that American troops should take over their role in Indochina, Paul Robeson echoed his charged Paris speech, asking: "Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi be sent to shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad? The American Negro cannot become the ally of imperialism without enslaving his own race."

In 1956, called before HUAC, Robeson was accused of being a secret Communist with the Party name of John Thomas. After bursting out in laughter -- as his wife said at the time, "the idea of the world-known giant with the fabulous voice trying to hide himself under an assumed name was absurd" -- he responded: "My name is Paul Robeson, and anything I have to say or stand for I have said in public all over the world -- and that is why I am here today.... You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people."

Asked why he didn't move to Russia, Robeson shot back: "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?"

"White folks are scared of this type of leadership," declared the African-American newspaper, Chicago Crusader. "They were enraged at Jack Johnson who could look a white man in the eye in such a way as to make him cringe. In Paul Robeson they have met their match again."

In many ways, the two great movements of the sixties -- the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement -- were Robeson's vindication. John Lewis, then head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and now a Congressman from Georgia, would speak for a new generation of African-Americans in saluting Paul as a role model. Like Robeson, he would declare, "We, too, have rejected gradualism and moderation.... We are Paul Robeson's spiritual children."

There were likewise echoes of Robeson when Muhammad Ali, in refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, declared: "No Vietcong ever called me nigger!" even as hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets chanting, "Hell, No! We Won't Go!" Few of them would even know who Paul Robeson was. But they were marching on the trail he had blazed.

Even Jackie Robinson would later have second thoughts about his role in aiding the witch-hunt. "I have grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America's destructiveness," Robinson wrote in his autobiography published in 1972. "And I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson who, over a span of twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people."

Thirty years ago, Paul RBut today, more than twenty years after his death, Paul Robeson remains, like Banquo's ghost, a figure whose very memory continues to haunt the official history of our times. Fortunately, we have more than memories. We have Paul's music -- and it is still a rallying cry for all the unfinished battles against every form of oppression and injustice still on our common agenda.