Six days later, he will give another performance in Room 226 of the former Capitol Hill office building in Washington, DC. Sen. John Wood, a descendant of the Ku Klux Klan and a Klan shepherd at the time. HUACinvited him to testify about “communist infiltration of minority groups,” as evidenced by the interest shown by black Americans in the Soviet Union, which had championed racial equality. “The appeal of the Soviet Union to black Americans may best be seen not through the complex rubric of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations, but rather through the political disenfranchisement, daily hardship, and violence of black life in the United States,” Bryant writes. In the 1930s, a cadre of black artists was welcomed to the Soviet Union, including poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. But it was no longer the ’30s, and everyone was frightened by the exigencies of black loyalty.

According to Bryant, Robinson was an “unenthusiastic” witness who had appeared before the commission, which had by then honed its persecution tactics against “subversives” within and outside of Hollywood. Bryant said his testimony is in segmented texts and provided to several different masters. Robinson consults with his wife, Rachel, and tries to defuse the committee’s temper by citing the plight of black people. “Just because communists make such a fuss about racism when it suits their purposes, many people try to act as if the whole issue is a figment of the communist imagination.” But this is not the essence of the speech. It’s his comments about Robson that grab the headlines. Robson, a global star, attended a left-wing convention in Paris in April on his way to a concert in Russia. He was singing “Joe Hill,” a protest song about a laborer, songwriter, and communist of the same name who was accused of murder in 1914 and executed in Utah the following year. Robson also gave a speech in Paris denouncing the arms race. “It is inconceivable that black Americans would go to war on behalf of a people who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union, which in one generation raised the people to full dignity,” Robeson was quoted as saying, according to the Associated Press, a comment that was misinterpreted in the media as a call for revolt against blacks in their homeland. time HUAC When I ask Robinson about these remarks, he hedges, “Even if Robinson actually made comments like that, it seems very stupid to me.”

“Stupid” – those are definitely Robinson’s words. If he is an orator, he is an orator of the unaffected. He went on to say that Robson “is entitled to his personal views and if he wants to look ridiculous when expressing them in public, that’s his job, not mine. He’s still a famous former athlete and a great singer and actor.” But the testimony doesn’t end there. Robinson then asserts that black people have invested so much in the welfare of the country that they could “throw it away to the siren song sung in the bass,” a shock of hostile poetry within the testimony. Bryant believes Robinson did not coin the phrase himself. The author claims Robinson’s manager Branch Rickey’s fingerprints are all over it. In Robinson’s standard myth of interracial bonding, Ricky is a progressive innovator, a manager who took players under his wing and broke the game’s color line. Bryant counters that that oversimplifies things. Ricky was both an opportunist and a manipulator. In other words, he was like a father figure to me. A staunch nationalist and zealous evangelist, he was instrumental in ousting anti-imperialist figures, including Robeson. Bryant claims that the “bass siren song” was written by no one but Ricky. That torque shows the strength of his obsession. These are also words that solidify Robson’s fate.

Why would Robinson follow it? In “Kings and Pawns,” Bryant explores the “dormant black history” of post-war intrigue, overshadowed in our collective consciousness by the momentum of the civil rights movement. Robinson would have seen himself as a combatant in what was known in the black press as the “Double V” campaign, signifying the defeat of fascism abroad and the defeat of racism at home (he was a war veteran and had first-hand experience of the particular mistreatment of black soldiers). This bias toward the future, even at the expense of would-be allies like Robson, is the reason for the 2019 article. nation terrifyingly Robinson’s testimony misrepresents the moment his political speech was violated as a prelude to Colin Kaepernick’s rebellion against the NFL