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FREEDOMWAYS    FIRST QUARTER 1973

revered by millions around the world. Honors have come to him from the Mineworkers Union of Scotland, the Freedom Fighters of South Africa, the people of India who in 1954 held a nationwide observance of his birthday and from the Soviet Union which years ago named one of is highest mountain peaks in the Caucasus, Mt. Robeson.

In those difficult years in the decade before the Montgomery bus boycott when McCarthyism represented official government repression of democratic rights Paul Robeson was the pre-eminent leader of our freedom movement. He utilized his exceptional talents as an orator and performing artist to mobilize resistance to the repression of that time.

In his art, Robeson personified the principle that the creative artist draws upon the life experience of the working people for his subject matter. The voice of Paul Robeson eloquently articulated the work songs and Negro spirituals, the traditional folk-music of the Afro-American community, and his artistic mastery of music extended to the songs of the Chinese people, the Soviets, the African chants, and many others sung in their original languages.

The "magic" of that great baritone voice which so easily moved audiences with songs like Ole Man River and Joe Hill was that it carried with it a quality of love and respect for those broad sections of the common people whose socially useful work and militant struggles for human dignity make them the real movers of history.

Every society in crisis, as the United States is today, has its social parasites, its lumpen and other declassed elements and there is evidence all around us of efforts to saturate the artistic and educational media with their lifestyles and values. Nevertheless, any lasting art or culture with universal appeal must draw upon deeper social roots. In this regard many of our film media writers and performing artists, who honestly seek to reproduce an art representative of the Black experience, can learn much of benefit to them from Paul Robeson's experience with the owners of the Hollywood film industry thirty years ago. We suggest that the "leopard hasn't really changed its spots."

Given the personal magnetism and achievements of Paul Robeson; the talented individual, it is possible to overlook or underrate the significance of Paul Robeson the historical figure, the activist Robeson with a vision of human society and its development. The special with a vision of human society and its development. The special significance of Paul Robeson, the historical figure, is that he clearly understood the epoch in which we live. It is the epoch in which

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