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ROBESON AT RUTGERS        FISHMAN
so hard to the ground that I'd break him right in two, and I could have done it. But just then the coach yelled ... 'Robey, you're on the varsity!' That brought me around." [[^]] 4
  Paul Robeson confronted, full force, the racist gang-up. He fought back with courage, pride and persistence, winning Coach Sanford's notice. Paul was able to defeat the attacks. In doing so, he demonstrated the possibilities of breaking through and overcoming white supremacy. He became on of the first Afro-Americans in the United States to crack the color-line of a college varsity football team. Paul Robeson won the admiration, support and love of the team, campus and community. 
  He was not simply a valuable football player. The team came to be built around him, as a 1917 account describes: 
  "A tall, tapering Negro in a faded crimson sweater, moleskins and a pair of maroon socks ranged hither and yon on a wind-swept Flatbush field yesterday afternoon. He rode on the wings of frigid breezes. The Negro was Paul Robeson of Rutgers...it was Robeson, a veritable Othello of battle, who led the dashing little Rutgers eleven to a 14-0 victory over the widely heralded Newport Naval Reserve." [[^]] 5 
  No wonder Paul Robeson was selected all-time all-American by Walter Camp! Yet Rutgers University will not sponsor him for the football Hall of Fame! Only in terms of racism, lingering McCarthyism and flunkeyism before the large corporate contributors can such a refusal be understood. Relevant is the $1,500,000 gift to Rutgers from Engelhard Minerals and Chemical Corporation of Newark, with investments in apartheid South Africa. If the Rutgers policy-makers on high think that proposing Paul Robeson to the football Hall of Fame is paternalistic charity and not something thoroughly earned and richly deserved, they should ponder this fact: Paul Robeson entered the Hall of Fame long ago - the people's Hall of Fame!
  The student year-book, The Scarlet Letter, in the year of this graduation, 1919, hailed Paul Robeson, in these words: 
    "All hats off to 'Robie,' men. 
     All honor to his name; 
     On the diamond, court or football field
     He's brought old Rutgers fame."
  His class-mate and friend, Earl Schenck Miers, wrote in later years: "The hero of the campus was Paul Robeson who had graduated from Rutgers...as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an all-American end...in my generation, Rutgers men said proudly, 'I go to Paul

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