[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 20, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E13]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E13]]
     UNVEILING UNITED STATES POSTAGE STAMP IN HONOR OF PAUL ROBESON

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. RUSH D. HOLT

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 20, 2004

  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I submit to the Record remarks I gave this 
morning at the unveiling of a United States Postage Stamp in honor of 
Paul Robeson. He was an impressive American, and these remarks capture 
my thoughts and feelings on his remarkable, yet tragic, life and 
accomplishments.

       I am honored to be here to recognize Paul Robeson and also 
     to recognize his son Paul Robeson, who himself has done so 
     much for America.
       This is just a stamp. But I can hardly express how 
     important this is to me personally.
       You see, I grew up in the 1950's. My town was probably no 
     more racially segregated than most of America, and anti-
     communism was no more at a fever pitch than anywhere else. 
     But I never had heard of Paul Robeson.
       When, as a young man, I learned about Paul Robeson I got 
     all his recordings and watched all his movies and read all 
     about him. I marveled at his voice, his intellect, his 
     optimism. Several times as a student I even considered trips 
     to meet him, just to show up at his door and ask to speak 
     with him. But I was told he was in seclusion.
       I did not know what I would do if I met him. Say I admired 
     him? Apologize for his mistreatment? As a kid I did not think 
     I could really do anything. Maybe I wanted to know how he got 
     the courage to sacrifice his career by fighting for, what he 
     called, his people.
       Mostly I just wanted to meet the person who more than 
     anyone else in America represented for me what had to be 
     fixed.
       How could this be? Not how could so much talent be in one 
     person. Rather, how could a talent of this magnitude, a 
     person of such dignity and such accomplishment be rubbed out 
     of the history books? A great actor, singer, writer, linguist 
     and scholar. And how could America, sports crazy America, 
     fail to mention a note-worthy all-American football player. 
     One of the great talents of our age. How much more he offered 
     than so many of the shallow, faintly-talented people whom we 
     celebrate in the papers, on television, and, yes, even on 
     postage stamps. His autobiography and manifesto was not 
     reviewed in a single main-stream publication. I felt cheated. 
     Even as a boy, I considered myself very well informed about 
     the world and about America. How did I not know about his 
     role in the American labor movement? How could the knowledge 
     of Paul Robeson be kept from me. Yes, I felt cheated and 
     angry. Even more, I felt America had been cheated. Why was 
     he denied to my generation? And worst of all, America had 
     cheated itself. It was painful. In the person of Paul 
     Robeson I saw the cost of racism and the cost of patriotic 
     fear. It wasn't just a few vicious bigots. It wasn't just 
     some anti-communist know-nothings. It was the official 
     policy of my country to commit this injustice. Our 
     country, Paul Robeson's and mine.
       And it was happening to the person who had popularized the 
     song ``The House I Live In'' with the words ``. . . the right 
     to speak my mind out; that's America to me.'' Someone who had 
     overcome racial exclusion to become one of the best-known and 
     outwardly successful figures in the world, only to be 
     benched. As Lloyd Brown had said, ``The spotlight was 
     switched off . . . and a thick smokescreen was spread around 
     him.''
       I could not fix it, and I regretted deeply that I couldn't. 
     Even if I visited him, I couldn't. What could a white kid 
     say, standing on his doorstep? I never met him.
       When I heard about the decision of the commemorative stamp 
     committee, I realized that I should bring this ceremony to 
     Princeton, Robeson's birthplace. The irony, you say? That a 
     white elected official would ask to bring this ceremony to 
     Princeton, the town that Robeson himself said ``was 
     spiritually located in Dixie'' and a home to Jim Crow? To the 
     Princeton University Paul Robeson never could have attended? 
     (Need I say that it hurt Princeton University more than it 
     hurt Paul Robeson. They lost the benefit of a two-time all-
     American, a national-level debater, a Phi Beta Kappa and 
     valedictorian level student, an actor and chorister unmatched 
     in the collegiate world of the day, and they lost the 
     bragging rights to Paul Robeson.) Yes, Princeton was where 
     this ceremony should be.
       Paul Robeson said Princeton not only gave him his start; it 
     gave him his grounding. Princeton days were, he said, his 
     ``happier'' days. After his mother died and his father was 
     removed from his pulpit, the people of Princeton--not so much 
     the white people, although he had white playmates, but the 
     close-knit African-American community--gave him ``an abiding 
     sense of comfort and security.'' He had a Home in that 
     Rock, don't you see? He was adopted, he said, by all of 
     Negro Princeton. In his words: ``Hard working people, and 
     poor, most of them, in worldly goods--but how rich in 
     compassion! How filled with the goodness of humanity and 
     the spiritual steel forged by centuries of oppression! 
     There was the honest joy of laughter in these homes, folk-
     wit and story, hearty appetites for life as for the 
     nourishing greens and black-eyed peas and cornmeal bread 
     they shared with me. Here in this hemmed-in world where 
     home must be theater and concert hall and social center, 
     there was a warmth of song. Songs of love and longing, 
     songs of trials and triumph, deep-flowing rivers and 
     rollicking brooks, hymnsong and ragtime ballad, gospels 
     and blues, and the healing comfort to be found in the 
     illimitable sorrow of the spirituals. Yes, I heard my 
     people singing. . . . And there was something else, too, 
     that I remember from Princeton. Something strange, 
     perhaps, and not easy to describe . . . People claimed to 
     see something special about me . . . that I was fated for 
     great things.'' Princeton, he says, gave him what he 
     needed to succeed, what every child needs. Yes, what every 
     child needs, a sense of comfort and security, and a sense 
     of possibility and expectation. We could still give that 
     to every child, couldn't we?
       He needed all the strength that was bred into him and more. 
     Years later he was summoned before the House UnAmerican 
     Activities Committee and he was asked, by someone like me, I 
     regret to say, why, if he liked Russia so much on his 
     repeated visits, why didn't he just stay there, he replied in 
     a most imposing voice, ``Because my father was a slave, and 
     my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay 
     right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no 
     fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that 
     clear?'' I suppose the Princeton and Somerville schools did 
     not teach the Dale Carnegie method back then.
       Paul Robeson began his autobiography with the sentences, 
     ``I am a Negro,'' and too, ``I am an American.'' When he said 
     that blacks should not fight the USSR, I'm sure he meant that 
     the fight for freedom begins at home. Then, declaring him a 
     security risk the government, our government, revoked his 
     passport--even at a time that we were castigating China and 
     Russia for not allowing their citizens freedom of travel. And 
     as we castigated them for police-state tactics at the same 
     time that we tailed Robeson, tapped his phone, opened his 
     mail, and denied him his livelihood. Why? Out of 
     irrational fear. Out of ill-considered patriotic fervor. 
     Out of, yes, unexamined fear of terrorism. Paul Robeson 
     must have scared the daylights out of America. It wasn't 
     just white America; it was Jackie Robinson who spurned 
     him, and the NAACP, and the leaders of the civil rights 
     movement, and the labor leaders he had championed. Robeson 
     said maybe his watch was fast. Explaining that he was 
     ahead of his time is small consolation. How that must have 
     hurt! The painful isolation, after he had broken the 
     ground, from which a successful civil rights movement 
     grew.
       Yes, we can take satisfaction in knowing that the people 
     here in New Jersey made Paul Robeson what he was. Then, too, 
     we must remember we represent what brought him down, what 
     blacklisted him, what crushed his optimism--ordinary 
     Americans. We let it happen. We did it to ourselves.
       A stamp does not make it all right. A stamp does not 
     absolve us of our collective responsibility and regret. Too 
     many lives were ruined by the hatred of racism and the 
     fearful excesses of the Cold War. Still, this stamp helps a 
     lot. This is First Class postage! This is official U.S. 
     postage. Every time we affix one of these stamps to a 
     letter--a stamp depicting Paul Robeson with cheerful 
     dignity--let's draw a lesson or two. First, just as the 
     people of Princeton once did for a boy, let's show young boys 
     and girls that there is something special about them; that 
     they can do great things. And second, let us remember that we 
     as a government, we as the media, and we who comprise 
     conventional wisdom can be wrong, painfully wrong. Let us 
     guard against that possibility of self-deception in a skewed 
     view of the world. The Cold War and fear of communism are 
     past, you say? Let us remember that simplistic tests of 
     patriotism appear from time to time in our history and in an 
     unthinking love for our country we can crush the very 
     greatness of America.




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