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ROBESON: TRUE REVOLUTIONARY

to revoke Robeson's passport and who himself was later tried, convicted and imprisoned for fraud. Like the stage, radio, movie and TV magnates who effectively blacked out the vibrant image and the glorious music of Robeson in their senseless rush to censor into oblivion all that was good and decent in the culture of our country.

Paul Robeson's Americanism will long outlive the lies and slanders of those evil men who feared the people. Because Paul Robeson was of the people. He worked with them, performed for them and fought for them. All of them, all over the world. "Especially the people, especially the people," he sang. "that's America to me."

In Africa, long before the inevitable drive toward self-determination and national independence, Paul Robeson was there to awaken the long suppressed desires for freedom, to ignite the sparks of self-realization and active resistance. Long before their names were known, he had talked to and became fast friends with Nkrumah, Azikiwe and Kenyatta, names which would soon become synonyms of African liberation.

Spain in 1938 was a major turning point in his life. "There," said Robeson, "I saw that it was the working men and women of Spain who were heroically giving 'their last full measure of devotion' to the cause of democracy in that bloody conflict, and that it was the upper class-the landed gentry, the bankers, and the industrIalists-who had unleashed the fascist beast against their own people." In Spain he sang with his whole heart and soul for the gallant fighters of the International Brigade, for the brave anti-fascist heros of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

In China, India, the Soviet Union, even in the pre-Nazi Germany of 1932 Robeson traveled, acted and sang and everywhere he met with the people.

When the protectors and defenders of Americanism revoked his passport, even this did not succeed in stilling the Robeson voice in other lands. By international telephone he performed in concert to the coal miners of Wales, to the textile workers of Manchester, England, and to many people in many other lands. Prohibited from fulfilling an invitation to attend the Canadian convention of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, he sang to 30,000 Canadians who came to the border between the State of Washington and the Province of British Columbia.

To tell of the achievements, the successes and the experiences of Paul Robeson would be to relate the history of most of the first half of this century, and for all of this there is too little time.

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