As Black History Month comes to a close and schoolchildren around the country are being treated to their complimentary yearly discussion on slavery, , the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X, (without adequate treatment of other topics and players in the history of Black America) I’d like to reflect a bit on another man who I’ve always looked up to and, like some of the best and most amazing activists for social change in history, is incredibly controversial.
Paul Robeson, civil rights activist, singer, scholar, communist, and author, blazed a path for social change and social equality that left many many people on various sides of the civil rights and freedoms debate during his career in the 1930s to the 1950s stung in a way that still exists today-few teachers know who he is, and many who do still won’t talk about him because of his controversial nature. He was communist, which landed him blacklisted by several record companies in the 1950s (to which he responded by funding his own label and producing more music on his own), and to this day his detractors harp on his communism and his life-changing trip to the then Soviet Union as a method to smear his beliefs and distract attention from his formidable achievements.