A mockery of Black Heritage.(The Last Word)(Biography)

On January 20, the Postal Service issued the latest stamp in its Black Heritage series. The new stamp honors identified Communist Party member Paul Robeson. Americans of African ancestry, like all Americans, should be outraged by this insulting elevation of an admitted enemy of the American system to hero status.

Robeson was known to the American public principally as an actor, singer and recording artist. But unlike Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and other black performers who have been honored by being depicted on postage stamps, Robeson's greatest performance was to hide his Communist affiliations from an unknowing public.

Robeson had an exceptional education for an entertainer in a period when most of his contemporary performers, black or white, were graduates of the "school of hard knocks." He received his B.A. from Rutgers College in 1919 and an LL.B from Columbia University in 1922.

This entertainer with a law degree made his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, at the height of Stalin's tyranny. So enthralled was he with the Soviet system that he enrolled his nine-year-old son, Paul Jr., in a Moscow school for four years. In 1936, Robeson wrote in the Communist monthly Soviet Russia Today: "Now, the Soviet Union is the only country I have ever been in where I have felt completely at ease. I have lived in England and America, and I have almost circled the globe, but for myself, wife, son, the Soviet Union is our future home. For a while, however, I would not feel right going there to live. By singing its praises wherever I go I think that I can be of the most value to it."

In 1949, former Communist Manning Johnson (who had been in the party from 1930 to 1940, but then became an ardent anti-Communist) was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was conducting a series of hearings entitled "Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups." When asked if he had met Robeson within party circles, Johnson replied: "I have met Paul Robeson a number of times in the headquarters of the national committee of the Communist Party.... During the time I was a member of the Communist Party, Paul Robeson was a member of the Communist Party...."

Johnson continued: "Paul's assignment was to work among the intellectuals, the professionals, and artists that the party was seeking to penetrate and influence along Communist lines. As long as Paul Robeson's identity with the party was kept secret, so long would his work among these groups be effective and serve the best interests of the party. It was for this ...