Experimental Blog # 233

More quotations from and comments about "The Undiscovered Paul Robeson - Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976" by Paul Robeson Jr.

"In June 1947, Truman veered to the left in his domestic policy < > The administration's Civil Rights Committee publication To Secure These Rights recommended an antilynching law, abolition of the pole tax, statutes protecting the right to vote, integration of the military, denial of federal funds to institutions that discriminate, and federal laws against discrimination and segregation in employment, interstate commerce, and public accommodations.
     By preempting the NAACP's civil rights agenda, Truman ensured that most black leaders would remain loyal to him. < > Paul's uncompromising left-wing political stance and his open attacks on Truman isolated him from the black elite ...."

    Paul Robeson consistently supported the efforts of W.E.B. DuBois; and, later on, he supported the work  and efforts of Martin Luther King. He also got along well with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. However, he generally scoffed at the work of the other civil rights leaders: Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Roy Wilkins. He is never quoted as saying anything about Ralph Abernathy.

    "Richard Helms, the CIA's chief of operations, had given the green light to widespread overseas operations involving the use of the new hallucinatory drug LSD, lethal toxins, and electroconvulsive therapy{ECT} against foreign and American targets. One of Helm's teams was MKULTRA Subproject 111, headed by Professor Hans Jurgen Fysenck < > of London's Maudsley Hospital."

    Unknown to him, Paul Robeson was certainly given LSD in Moscow by someone working for the CIA early in 1961. He very soon was put in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow and in a few weeks, or so, he recovered. Paul Robeson Jr. came to see his father; and he too, unknown to him, was given LSD. And, he too, was put in a psychiatric hospital, where he soon recovered.
    Paul senior's wife, Eslanda, was told by the soviet doctors that under no circumstances should her husband be given electroshock treatments. Nevertheless, she took her husband to a psychiatric facility in London sometime around September of 1961. He was at this facility most of the time until September of 1963; and during this time the official record shows that he was given 54 electroshock treatments. The official record also shows that he received 17 antipsychotic and other drugs which were intended to affect his brain.
    In around September of 1963 Eslanda Robeson took her husband to a psychiatric facility in communist East Berlin, East Germany. Paul Robeson recovered there and returned to America in December of 1963, and he never left America again.