Word: robeson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...roots of this catastrophe can be traced to the moment that Robeson fell in love. The affection was not for his forbearing wife Essie, or for Peggy Ashcroft or Uta Hagen, or for any of the other strong-willed women with whom he had affairs. Robeson was smitten with the Soviet Union. During a 1934 visit, the singer proclaimed that in the U.S.S.R. he felt "like a human being for the first time since I grew...
...then Robeson had collected enough grievances to fuel a revolution. In high school one of his teachers thought Paul "the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can't forget that he is a Negro." Neither could the college football players who reviled him, or the secretary who warned the young law student, "I never take dictation from a nigger...
...Robeson doubled his fists, abandoned his studies and entered the concert hall by the stage door. His rich interpretations of spirituals rapidly brought him to London in 1930 as Othello and to Hollywood five years later in Show Boat. But the rewards could never assuage the early injuries...
Duberman, a professor of history at Lehman College in New York City, is a scrupulous biographer. But he seems an ingenuous historian. In his view, Robeson became the target of "Cold War hysteria," and the sad outcome of a brilliant career was, in essence, "America's tragedy." But in fact, the wound was self-inflicted. The champion of minorities and laborers turned out to be oddly forgiving about crimes against humanity -- provided that they were committed in the Workers' Paradise. To him, Stalin's infamous purges were a $ proper way to deal with "counter-revolutionary assassins." The pact between...
...Robeson's rhetoric intensified after World War II ("It's up to the rest of America when I shall love it . . . in the way that I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union"), and in 1950 the State Department revoked his passport. He made new enemies when he accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. White enthusiasts dropped away, joining a series of black spokesmen who had given him their backs. The head of the N.A.A.C.P. pronounced him "more to be pitied than damned...