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PAUL ROBESON: 
TRUE REVOLUTIONARY

GEORGE W. CROCKETT

We join to pay tribute tonight to the greatest American of us all: Paul Robeson.

His voice, his talent, his genius, all are part of the magnificent heritage left to us and to the world despite the brutal and desperate efforts to silence that voice, to stifle that talent and to bury that genius.

They would erase the legacy of Paul Robeson. They would forget his works, obliterate his gifts and expunge his thoughts. They would still his sounds and cloak his name and his greatness in a suffocating miasma of empty nothing. They would make of him, as they have tried to make of so many others, an invisible man.

But kings will not be dethroned by fools. Giants will not be toppled by pygmies. And the people's heroes will survive even the mightiest onslaughts of the mightiest imperialists. Along with Fredrick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson is one of the greatest of these people's heroes.

His life is an inspiration-one without parallel today. He has confidence in the people. He is fully committed to the fight against the evils of war, poverty, and racism. His loyalties and his friendships are inviolable. And he believes in America.

There would come to pass in the years following World War II that the forces of reaction would mount an ever increasing and brutally vicious attack upon the loyalty and the Americanism of Paul Robeson. And those forces would, for a cruel moment in history, prevail.

Those like Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York, who tried to prosecute the victims of vicious, storm trooper assaults against the peaceful Robeson concert-goers at Peekskill. Like J. Parnell Thomas of the Un-American Committee who led the fight in 1950


The Honorable George W. Crockett, Judge, Recorder's Court, Detroit, Michigan is widely known and respected for his courageous leadership in civil rights and civil liberties. This speech was delivered at FREEDOMWAYS Annual W.E.B. Du Bois Cultural Evening honoring Paul Robeson on February 16, 1973 at Carnegie Hall, New York City.

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