[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 1]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 114-115]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     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

[[Page 115]]

     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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