![Transcription Center logo](/themes/custom/tc_theme/assets/image/logo.png)
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1969 jim-crow treatment of Paul Robeson. In the interim, apparently, James Carr attempted to determine what official responsibility was involved for the fact that Paul Robeson did not play in the Washington and Lee game. When he learned, he spoke out. Another event in 1919 spurred him on to protest. In that year, as James Carr's letter reveals, the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, was presented by a demand to play a lily-white game by the Naval Academy at Annapolis, administered by the United States government! (Woodrow Wilson was President of the U.S.) Like Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania refused to cancel the game, even though the Penn players were ready to refuse to play without their Negro team-mate. The fact that still another university, in addition to his Alma Mater, had surrendered to jim-crow, led James Carr to protest the "prostitution of principle." Paul Robeson's picture has been a focal point of growing student upsurge making for a Robeson Renaissance. The demand for first-class citizenship, a demand having antecedents over many years, was spurred by questions as to why his picture was missing from the gallery of football players in the gym. In the student paper Targum April 4, 1967, an athletic official had attempted to explain to the student questioner the reason for the missing picture by putting the responsibility on Paul Robeson, claiming he had never sent his picture in. The chauvinism involved in blaming the discriminated for the discrimination is apparent. In the same issue of Targum, Athletic Information Sports Director Lee Unger, in reference to Paul Robeson, said, "We do not brag about him." He was duly answered by the Campus upsurge. Campus papers (The Caellian, Targum, Press Club Weekly) and organizations, black and white, have participated in this upsurge. A telling example of the upsurge is the editorial "Time to Honor," calling for ending of racist practices implied in the silent treatment accorded the most famous son of Rutgers. This editorial was published by The Caellian, paper of the women students of Douglass, a division of Rutgers' the State University, April 7, 1967. This editorial was particularly significant in that, on the heels of official claims not to have a picture of Robeson in football uniform, one such picture, available in university files, was published by a student newspaper. Press Club Weekly in a front-page display April 14, urged that Paul Robeson be named to the Hall of Fame. On April 16, 1967, 226
Transcription Notes:
----------
Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 09:35:17