Experimental Blog # 232

Quotations from and/or comments on  "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - An Artist's Journey, 1898-1939" by Paul Robeson, Jr.{2001} and "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976"{2010} also by Paul Robeson, Jr. and "Here I Stand" by Paul Robeson{1957}

Quotations from "An Artist's Journey":

    Paul Robeson's father... In 1858, as a fifteen-year-old field slave on the Roberson Plantation in Robersonville in eastern North Carolina, he had escaped with his older brother, Ezekiel, on the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania."
    The Reverend William Drew Robeson, the escaped slave, gave all of his five children a very religious up-bringing. However, in 1929 Paul, the youngest child, wrote in his diary, "God doesn't watch over everyone, because everyone isn't important". He did not seem to remember, "As you do to the least of these, so you do to me."

   "Paul read extensively < > He read the works of Marx and Engels in German, and those of Lenin and Stalin in Russian."
   "The Southern-born Woodrow Wilson had been elected president in 1912 and expanded segregation in federal office buildings. He also made it a policy of his administration to reject black applicants for federal jobs, and in 1914 he had refused to condemn lynching."

Quotations from "Quest for Freedom":

   Paul Jr. quotes his father as saying to him, "I'm a human being first, a Negro second, and a Marxist third. But all three of those levels are inseparably connected."
   "Stalin's "Great Purge" of 1937 had reached a peak by that time. < > In 1989, Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that the number of official executions in 1937 reached 353,680."

   A fairly recent video from Russia stated that from 1934 through 1938 about 700, 000 people were shot in the Soviet Union for "political crimes". Another video entitled "Famine - 1933. Unlearned Lessons", which came out in 2008, stated that about 7,000,000 people died in the Soviet Union from starvation during what they call "dekulakization" and collectivization. Many women and children were included in this number.
   Yet another video from Russia{since deleted} was about a peasant village in southern Russia that was refusing collectivization in 1921. The entire village had taken refuge in a nearby forest, so the Red Guards used poison gas and exterminated the entire village, women and children included.
   During all of these awful events there were spectacular parades, ceremonies, and celebrations in Moscow, Leningrad, and probably other cities, as well. Many thousands of enthusiastic "builders of Socialism" took part in these events.

   It is difficult to say from these 3 books precisely, but Paul Robeson visited the Soviet Union during the years 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1937; during which time he put eight-year-old Paul Jr. in an elite school in Moscow. Paul Jr. says that Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was about 20 months older than Paul Jr., was also in this school, but he never says that they met.  Paul senior again went to the Soviet Union in 1949, and, again during the years 1958, 1959, 1960, and 1961, and he was hospitalized there. Paul Robeson also went to a hospital in East Germany in 1963.
   They never say that either one of them met Joseph Stalin in person. However, in 1958 Paul and Essie Robeson met with Nikita Khrushchev in the Crimea.
   In 1952 Paul Robeson received a Stalin Prize, which has since been renamed a Lenin Prize. However, because his passport had been revoked he had to receive it in New York. To date there have been only about 6 Americans who have received this prize.
   These quotes and comments have concentrated entirely on Paul Robeson's involvement with the Soviet Union. He was also very close with American and other communists and many other people around the world.
   Needless to say, however, his accomplishments in music, on stage and in film, and in foreign languages and linguistics, and many other efforts were highly exceptional.




































p