Disciplining the Black Radical Tradition: The Case of Paul Robeson

• In Event: Pioneering Artists and Art Institutions

Abstract

Using the persecution of Paul Robeson as a case study, this paper will analyze the ways in which the American state used anticommunism to discredit all forms of radical mobilization on behalf of anti-colonialism, antiracism, and anti-fascism in the era following WWII. Between 1946-1958, Paul Robeson, one of America’s greatest Black leaders, radicals, and Renaissance men, became one of the most egregious victims of U.S. statist technologies of antiradicalism and antiblackness. Starting in 1946, Robeson was
continually called before HUAC, and in 1949, after a speech he made at the World Conference of Partisans for Peace, the American state and press systematically targeted
him as a subversive Communist agitator. His career and public image suffered irreparably. Though he was an American citizen, Robeson’s blacklisting resulted in the
denial of his civil rights; the surveillance and restriction of his movements; and the cancellation of his passport in August 1950. Robeson’s radical socialism, antiracism, and
internationalism, coupled with his fame and influence throughout the world, made him the most dangerous man in (and to) the Cold War state because his politics challenged the image—and the liberal economic interests—that the U.S. was trying to export abroad. He was considered a hindrance to national defense and a threat to national security because
he revealed the entanglements of America’s racist domestic policy, imperial foreign policy, and anticommunism. He refused to cease doing so even as other Black leaders
aligned themselves with the Cold War state.

Robeson’s experience elucidates how anticommunism was deployed in myriad ways, to variously undermine racial struggles that challenged dominant modes of accumulation,
labor relations, and social hierarchy; to discredit non-Western ideological formations as undemocratic, totalitarian, and/or authoritarian to rationalize intervention; and to
conscript the decolonizing world into the U.S.-led mode of accumulation. Forms of radical mobilization that challenged the hegemony and authority of the U.S. were misrepresented as “Communist,” irrespective of the ideology, and were confronted through military, political, and economic violence. The disciplining of Paul Robeson through the delegitimizing of Black radicalism remains significant to the forms of Black
mobilization the state sanctions, and the forms that it targets and discredits.

Authors

• ASALH Audience, .

• Charisse Burden-Stelly, University of Illinois