Speaker For almost all of my life, Paul Robeson has been a presence. Long before I met him, he was a huge force in the life and the lives of. The American people. In particular, the. The citizens of the African-American community were hugely sensitive and aware of his presence. He brought such. Luminaires. He brought such power, he brought such intelligence, he brought such courage to our existence when at a time so few were doing that.

Speaker And to.

Speaker To know if Paul Robeson was perhaps the easier part of of life. We knew of Joe Lewis when you, Marian Anderson. And you have Paul Robeson and. That was just about it as far as the true giants of the period that AWB DeBois. All others who had brought some. Importance into our lives and had been out front. Athletes like Jesse Owens and all the goodness that they brought to us, the only really large, large figures of our time.

Speaker So when did you actually meet a man of faith personally about.

Speaker I did not come to meet Paul Robeson until shortly after my service in the United States Navy during the Second World War. I had. Been honorably discharged and like a host of. Young men, African-Americans, we had had huge expectations that America would be more friendly and more compassionate and more rewarding place to be, especially since we had demonstrated our courage and our willingness to fight for this country and for the ideals that it had set for itself. And when I came out of the Navy, I discovered that that generosity was not quite as available as we’d hoped. As a matter of fact, it was quite distant.

Speaker And in looking for where to put my life. And what to do with it? A set of coincidences led me to the theater. When I was very young, I walked into a community theater in Harlem called the American Negro Theater. Made up of a host of wonderful.

Speaker Who were writers and directors and actors? Scenic designers. And as a member of that group, we had undertaken to put out a play written by a great Irish playwright by the name of Sean O’Casey. And we had translated his work into the black environment, it was a play written about Ireland and the Irish rebellion against the British.

Speaker And. When we put on that play.

Speaker Want to get that phone with me because.

Speaker OK.

Speaker Anyway, the first week of play, I played a role in it, and during the first week of the play, one evening word came backstage in this tiny little theater that Paul Robeson was in attendance. And just the thought itself overwhelmed us. And. I’m not quite sure how he got through the play. You tried not to be conscious of moving, please. One would try not to be conscious of the presence of something bigger than I can and do to stay committed to the play, but it was not easy and at the end of the evening to stay behind. He was introduced to the cast. He spoke to us in powerful, warm, embracing terms.

Speaker He applauded the work we were doing. He felt that the kind of theatre we were trying to put out was. Just what the black community in America needed and that art in the service of that kind of theater was art at its best and that he himself had tried to use his life in exactly the same way as we were attempting to do, although we were all much younger.

Speaker At the end of that evening, he spent a bit of time with us. And then when he left, I remember that for.

Speaker Many weeks thereafter, his words and his presence and his gentility, you know, had a profound impact on me.

Speaker I was still in the search for life here. I was 20 years old, 19, 20, wondering where to go, looking for whom I could identify as the person to most light the way, so to speak.

Speaker And all of a sudden, this person landed in the middle of my life and brought an awful lot of solution to a lot of annoying and nagging questions, where do black people go? How do we use ourselves? What do we do? Can you can you beat the overwhelming odds of what’s out here? Everything you could possibly think of that were questions for those of us who would like to get on with life came answered in the embodiment of this one man was when he came back today.

Speaker Did you get a sense of him as a flesh and blood person or was he like that? We, you know.

Speaker Celebrity, political celebrity, when we when he came backstage, we had a sense of him as being the tallest, biggest essence in the world. He was just huge in life. I mean, not only was he tall in his own physical presence and huge and this rather incredible bass voice, but all of that came together, plus who he was. It was not easy to put him into into a context of normality. There’s nothing normal about it was just huge. Huge. I didn’t get to know him in some normal, easy way until much later when our lives had continued to crisscross and we kept coming together around the same issues and causes and then had reason to have personal moments together.

Speaker Uh, before I want to ask about that, but but.

Speaker What was the first performance you saw in the very first performance I ever saw him in was Othello and.

Speaker I didn’t see him in any of the earlier plays. I didn’t see him at all, God’s children and I didn’t see him and Amber Jones, it was a fellow in terms of a play I’d seen him before and newsreels, because when I go to the theater up there in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, the Opera House alone, there’s always the newsreels for the black news. And he was always in it and saying something and giving some instruction or being identified in some way with causes that were important to all of us. So I knew of him and heard his music, his records being played on the air every now and then when they would put him on to celebrate some some occasion or event.

Speaker But it wasn’t until Othello that I saw him and the physical the tangible physical sense.

Speaker I want to ask you this. You know, your career, your use of music and politics. He’s been pretty singularly known for the way he blended the two for what I would call basically noble purposes, and that’s what he did, right? What I what I’m trying to figure out and put into the movie is can you explain how he took the particular folk form that he took and how he put it on the stage and made it sort of formally presentable. But yet, I mean, to do it at Carnegie Hall, he kept the essence of black music, but he gave a different presentation on how how I mean, how can you sort of historically talk about that? Because I think that you’ve done that in your career, too. I may be wrong, but I hadn’t. So how does that work as an artist? How do you do that?

Speaker I think that anybody who is African-American is born into a set of circumstances that are hugely suffocating and extremely difficult to live in, and I think all of us are put upon to find out ways of methodology to survive and to get through and to overcome those conditions.

Speaker When I was a boy growing up, and for that matter, almost all of America was consistently and persistently being fed a diet of image that was wholly unacceptable to us in the movies. We were servants, we were second class citizens, we were buffoons. We were the brunt of and the object of everyone’s disdain and benevolence. We seem to have always been portrayed as a people without intellect, without purpose, without history, without dignity. And I think anyone who was born into those circumstances, who saw the slightest glimmer of opportunity to change that canvas, would have to make the commitment, at least morally and ethically, make the commitment to try to use that opportunity to, in fact, change the canvas. Because usually when that opportunity is afforded you to make that change, it’s a double edged sword. It’s either an opportunity they can use to be self-serving, to just do what is minimally necessary to get on with life. But sustaining some kind of relationship to the dominant community or to those whom you are serving that would never wrinkle them, would never cause them any discomfort. So what you did was you became the good house and that famous word, you know, you became somebody who was always going to behave in a way that would make you acceptable.

Speaker Well, sometimes that was not enough, being acceptable more often than not meant that you robbed yourself of your birthright, you trample on your dignity, and you turn your back on your own struggle in your own people. This was more or less the broad images that were out there constantly being referred to as the Negro. That is what they do. That is how they are. And very few people walk to walk. That was different to that cadence. Along comes Paul Robeson. Along comes John Lewis. Along comes Duke Ellington. Handful of people in that time who rose above that image, who had purpose, who had intellect with dignity, who had talent and decided to put it on the line. Some were able to move much further ahead, given where they chose to do battle.

Speaker Rosa was one of them. His came in many forms. First of all, he was a man of astounding intellect, graduating at the head of his class from Princeton, from Rutgers University. He did a little bit of study at Princeton, but Rutgers was his main college. Then he went on to Columbia University as a law student. And having come out of those institutions with all kinds of letters and accommodations, he then went on to become an artist and not only just an artist in the sense of. How one perceives artists to be creative forces and a little different than most folk, but he went on to become hugely important and influential in the world of the arts in America and globally. He spoke 14 languages. He spoke them all fluently. He integrated his universal sense and being into his art, you know, he showed black people and black history in another in another way, in a way of greater dignity. He totally put us in touch with our music in ways that were very profound, that also had universal outreach. He also gave us insights into the world of others who we should know about. The first positive sounds I ever heard about Africa came from Paul Robeson, along with Dr. Dubois were the only two robustness. An artist was the one who sang songs in Swahili that came from Africa, who spoke of the noble nobility in African history of kings and emperors and conquerors and and men who designed the charts that could could put the world in mobility, the stars and and talked about Timbuktu and or all of which I never heard of, knew very little about. I mean, outside of slavery and slave history, it was always measured as Robeson, who helped put on the table for me that there was a linkage somewhere in the past that had never been available to me, that I had to do with the nobility of Africans, that in and in Europe or orchestrating and arranging, let’s say that the calypso form of music and try to put yourself back in the head of.

Speaker And he chose this. He did as he started with the spiritual I mean, which is essentially a folk. But he gave it a platform. I mean, you did that, too. So what kind of thinking was behind it? I mean, that’s that’s an obvious choice. And you didn’t have to go there. You could have been you know, you could have done a pop song. Why did you do that? Why do you think he did that? Did you follow him? Yeah, OK, that’s my thought. But what was the process behind it?

Speaker There were two choices that one could make. Maybe they were more than two, but they’re certainly two very clear ones. One was to do the art of Eurocentric choice, Eurocentric value, Eurocentric roots, which many chose to do, and try to do that art and has perfected a way as you possibly can.

Speaker There’s one thing that’s going to always be true about that fact or that choice, and that is that you will never touch the soul of who you are because that’s not what you’re in a soul is experiencing or where your inner soul lives. Every attempt to do something that spoke to the greater truth and the greater glory of what our inner souls were about were always being denied us because it was what the other society did not want to hear. When Robeson came upon the scene, he clearly was able to do the former easily read music. He could sing, had a voice. He could do Othello, which was written by William Shakespeare, and he could certainly do other things. But when it came to his own art of his people, when it came to that which he understood more profoundly than anything else, he had to find a way to put that before. Not only the people from whom the music came themselves who had never had a chance to hear it in many of the ways it should have been heard, because they were hearing and also the way white folks wanted them to hear it or the other society wanted them to hear, so had to be interpreted for them as well. Of what Paul did very consciously was to go into that world of black life, black art extract from those songs that he felt most comfortable with and he felt were the ones that most demonstrated our history, our struggle and our dignity as a people. Certainly embodied in the world of spiritual music, of religious music was an awful lot of that for the simple reason that since it was in fact the only music that we were permitted to develop, the white world and our slave masters would permit us to perform, we had to use it to house all of our aspirations and all of our thoughts.

Speaker But it was the only vehicle so that when you look at spirituals, you look at religious music from the black community. It is not just about the praise of God and the presence of Jesus. It is also about how we were paying, how we were crucified, how. Painful life had been to us, how we struggled, how we were, what our hopes and aspirations were all contained within the spiritual. We sang with metaphore, we sang with double meaning.

Speaker Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m upset. You and Paul talk about this. I mean, did he take you?

Speaker You can rest assured that everything we’re discussing right now, Paul and I talked about you would not ask any questions. I can give you any answer that wasn’t always debated. The only thing we never debated was what was going to happen to life after Paul. And I’m sure that his image of where the world would be after he was dead is significantly different than where the world, in fact, is.

Speaker But from the earliest days, Paul Robeson, who had demonstrated that he could sing the spiritual and he could have put the spiritual into a context that told more about us as a people in our struggle and the dignity of us as a people was very, very significant as a strategy. When he and I talked, when I first entered into the world of music and began to sing folk songs out of my earliest experiences in Greenwich Village with Leadbelly and Josh White and the folk artists of the period, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger at all, Paul came and saw me then as well, and he liked very much where I was selecting the material for what I wanted to do. Although my repertoire was somewhat eclectic and I could sing songs from a lot of places, I had known that I had the right and the privilege to do that. Because of how Paul Robeson performed, I could go into other cultures and extract things from those cultures that were to be identified in my own struggle, my own sense of being, and make and make and put them in some place of compatibility and say, look, you may sing in different tongues, but we speak the same soul. We speak to the same cause. So whether you’re a Jew or you’re an Italian or a German or a Russian, we are really all a people. And that artists have the power to articulate for us who we are to each other and even in tongue we can do that. So that’s opera singer Czechoslovakia, dancing in Russian and singing Spanish and singing songs of protest that came from everywhere, singing the folk song of the Welsh miners and singing the folk songs of the Irish rebels. The world, to me was a huge canvas.

Speaker And having made my choice to select from that palette what I would do borrow someone said to me, said, Harry, get them to sing your song. Meaning of the world, people get them to sing a song and they will want to know who you are and if they want to know who you are, you have now been given the first opportunity to give them instruction that might illuminate and give them some choices that they’ve never had before. So when I began to integrate our experiences that were very close to my own life, I was born in New York and Harlem. But I excuse me, but the first on and off the first 12 years of my life was deeply rooted in the island of Jamaica. And those early years left a huge impression on me with the culture of the region. And when I started to sing about it, I had to take a lot of things into consideration. Excuse me.

Speaker First of all, the popular definition of the music of the Caribbean was that, oh, they’re a happy go lucky people. The man who loved to drink and sit on the coconut trees, lazing their time away, completely preoccupied with their genitalia. And they would like to sing about their sexual powers. And mostly they also dislike their history. They dislike their blackness, and they speak about women and really rather demeaning and derogatory terms which are central to the humor of the calypsonian art.

Speaker In fact, there was a whole other side to the culture of the West Indies that nobody paid very much attention to except those who lived in the community. So that whenever I talked about singing the songs of the West Indian of West Indian life and people, people always thought, Oh, the Calypso is coming and there’s going to be some song filled with double entendre about the sexual delights and drinking the lights of experiences in the Caribbean now. But I know what Paul had done with the songs of the workers, with the songs of those who were in Beltrán against oppression, gave me an opportunity to find the songs in that repertoire from the cable that would help me do the same thing as beautiful and as powerful as the banana boat song has become. It is a conscious choice, day or day or daylight come and me wanna go home, work all night on a drink of rum. It is a classic work song. It spoke about the struggles of a people who are underpaid, who are the victims of colonialism. And in the song I talked about our aspirations for a better way of life. This is central to the story of the banana boat song. It’s the Light is the fact that it was done so skillfully and the poet and the part where he was to default and the music is so little to this then led me to other songs that Jamaica farewell. Certainly the first one of the first song they ever attempted to write and co-authored with two other men, one by the name of Bilad Away, another by having Burgess was a song called Island in the Sun, which became hugely popular. But it was a song spoke to the hopes and aspirations of the people of the Caribbean region who are of African descent. All of this existed and was then held for me, great clarity because Paul Robeson had set a glorious pace from which we could all draw sustenance and draw, for example. And each time we met each other and talked, even sang together on the same platforms at political rallies and social events, you know, I got to perform together just for the sake of art and in the commercials, a public sense. But we had shared platforms together with some regularity because we were involved and committed to the same political and social objectives and causes. But we were in London and it was quite by coincidence the first time I played Europe, the first place I played was in London. I think it was 1958, if I’m not mistaken, seven, 57, 58 somewhere there. And Paul had at this time. Won his battle in the Supreme Court on the issue of his passport and his rights to the freedom of travel and freedom of expression as an American citizen for his rights to do that even in America. But when I opened for the first time in London, it was at the moment of my ascendancy and the global popularity. And on the very night that I opened the Kilbane state fair in London was the very same night because not only the Paul Robeson opened in London at the Prince Albert Hall, and the following day the British newspapers came out with their critique of both evenings. And much of the British press had by this time come to adopt the rather cruel American point of view on robes. They had begun to read him. They had begun to it had their own witch hunt. They began to define and describe Robeson in terms of how white America and the ruling white America saw him as opposed to how he really was. And when they wrote this critique of him having come back to London after many years of absence and excuse me, and he was now somewhat older.

Speaker OK, OK. And he was.

Speaker Are you OK? And he was by this time, someone older, more mature, and they talked about everything but the essence of his art in the critique that was held the next day, they talked about his age. They talked about him having lost his luster. They talked about how he is not quite what he was and how fortunate that along came this young artist, also an American, by the name of Harry Belafonte, who is now going to pick up where he left off. And we were the new hope and the new voice. And they hoped that that I would not make the same mistakes he made. Well, I called Paul because were there and I call him somewhat distressed by the way, in which the reviews were written and that I asked him, would he be willing to share the platform with me at a press conference to respond to the to the critique.

Speaker He said no, that he would certainly understand my wanted to do so and would support my doing so. But he felt that it would not be to everyone’s best interest for him to do that.

Speaker That what the press was doing did not deserve the dignity of responsibility, actually. Yeah, so. Well, it wasn’t it wasn’t a rejection. It was a it was a thoughtful analysis that was given to the idea of us holding a joint press conference. And he just felt that. My first time out, my first time before the British public, my reviews were so laudatory that come on into then then know do that was somehow not quite the right cadence. We had ample opportunity to be together on other platforms and strange points of view. But this one, he felt somehow was not quite.

Speaker As appropriate as he would have liked it to be, the word lighthearted was what, uh, research found that that was the phrase. I think the word they use in Europe here is lighthearted. Yeah, it is heavy.

Speaker Right. Right, right. Lighthearted. Well, that was only one review. I mean, there were several. Let me know when you got. But I thought it was definitely in there. But I did hold a press conference, both television, which was in its infancy then, and radio as well as print.

Speaker And it was well attended.

Speaker And I, uh.

Speaker Use the opportunity for the purpose it was called, and that was to point out that. I was. Excited at the idea of coming to England and the rest of Europe, I was somewhat pained at the idea that the occasion should have been used to politically discredit and to socially. Smear. The man who was responsible for me and almost any other human being on the face of the Earth borrows. That his luminary and that his that is his example was precisely the reason that I stood in London at that very moment and that had there been no ropes and there could have been no me and had there been no Paul Robeson, many other black artists who were going through a huge renaissance of of of of a new day and a new order, painters, writers, singers, musicians, dancers, entire arts community in the black world was having a new day because of what Paul Robeson had achieved and was achieving. And that I would hope that future analysis of his work and those who would write about him in the future would begin to look not with a closed, prejudiced views of him that came from those who had a vested interest in this destruction, but would come from some more objective evaluation of history and what his presence really meant for all of us.

Speaker What I for me. But how do you replace Larry Brown’s contribution at all? This is the company’s arranger. And how would you.

Speaker Larry Brown was a writer who Paul chose to be a confidante and to be the person who his life would be translated. He had given a lot of rights and a lot of power.

Speaker To Lloyd Lloyd Lawrence, the accompanist.

Speaker Oh, you’re talking about his pianist. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m thinking of Lloyd. Lloyd Brown. Yeah, yeah. No, I’m talking about larvicide. Right. I was so busy thinking about you. No.

Speaker Oh, yeah. Not too many people know that much about him.

Speaker No, I don’t either. Tell your truth. But I do know this much that. Paul, it often talked about the ability to have an edge on his evening’s presentation by not having to be encumbered with instruments or anything else in his hands. He didn’t have to play guitar, which was not which was not usual for his choice of art. And he said he could have picked out a tune or two on the piano, but he was not a pianist. What was perhaps even more important wasn’t that he didn’t play an instrument, was to find someone who so graced his nuances and understood his whole rhythm in relationship to his art and his music that they became one. And what he dearly loved and felt a huge zone of comfort with was the way Lance played. And that support, I have had exactly the same experience with several of the accompanists that I’ve had, I need someone says I do not play an instrument and don’t want to because it gives me greater freedom to do things as a performer. I certainly found that central to the success of any such endeavor is someone who has your cadence and can play. And the last was a lifetime accompanist who never had anyone else that I know of. But Lawrence was as luminary as Paul was as visible and as large and as was as lost and as hidden, as remote as it was Lawrence. It was almost so self-effacing. It was just as I was he was almost a non-person, except he was this person who gave Paul a very strong sense of security and his performance right now I get the idea might be through, um.

Speaker How did you hook up with him politically? What were the issues that have come?

Speaker I first hooked up.

Speaker With who Paul Robeson was politically when Haley Selassie went before the League of Nations to plead for universal intervention. Into the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia.

Speaker And at the very time that that was going on.

Speaker There are many who are talking to this new. Picture on the horizon of world order, world life. It was Paul Robeson who, by electing to go into Spain at the height of the fight against Franco and the Italian forces that were present there, that gave me linkage to the fact that what was going on in Ethiopia at the behest of the fascists of Italy and what was going on in Spain at the behest of the fascists of Spain and Italy, had reason for linkage, had reason for commonality. And when Paul Robeson went to Madrid to sing for the Lincoln Brigade and for the freedom forces fighting in Spain against that horror was the first time I had seen in any really tangible, meaningful way art being used as a power to disseminate information about a place that we all heard of but knew very little about, certainly of Paul Robeson elected to stand in Spain in the middle of a bomb, of a bombing, the bombardment and in the middle of the height of a war, and put his life on the line to sing for the morale of those troops and to bring them a sense of global support was a remarkable, remarkable. Vision, it was it transcended anything one could ever think of. I mean, wow, what a remarkable thing to do. Well, I was very little in 1938, was at 36, right. I was what? 10 or 11 somewhere in there. Eight. Those are the men I saw this on the screen. This was in a service of something that was really quite astounding. Hmm.

Speaker Dissolve comes the Second World War, I’m now sitting in the barracks with a bunch of black sailors and we’re all black because that’s the way the law was. Our our service in that war was not an integrated service, was a segregated service.

Speaker And there were many indecencies in that experience, both from the point of view of what white folks did and how servicemen were treated with with great indignity and and disdain in many parts of the country.

Speaker And how many of us suffered acts of violence. And we wanted that changed. And a constant voice in our behalf was Paul Robeson, Dr. Dubois, and a man by the name of Walter White, who was the head of the NAACP at the time. And there were very few voices. A. Philip Randolph was another one of our time, was the leader of the Sleeping Car Porters, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porter Pullman Porters. Well, those four men were just about oh, and another very important one about America, Claude Bethune.

Speaker She was extremely important because her her relationship to Eleanor Roosevelt and to the antisocial issue. But during that period in the service in the war, Robeson was always there speaking, raising money for for liberty bonds and for war bonds, speaking to the cause of honor and our mission, pointing out to black people that we had a responsibility to be part of that struggle, even if we had to make alliances with those who were traditionally our enemy. There was a greater there was a greater compelling force and a greater compelling reason we had to defeat fascism in order to secure democracy. And we had to come back to America and fight those who were trying to kill off democracy as we were fighting against those who had created fascism and very much the same spirit. So that he became not only a link to the present, certainly to the past where I grew up, linked to the present during the war itself, but also became the voice of what the future was to be about.

Speaker And when I came out of that war, then I had occasion to meet him in the theater, which was the first time we met personally.

Speaker Excuse me, I, I went to a rally.

Speaker It was for a group called District Sixty Five, I think the local 65, I know the man made it clear, Robinson, who was one of the officials of that union. There was another union, 199, which was being created with the hospital workers. Both of those unions were predominantly black and with some Hispanic Latino there. Now, many more Latinos in both of those years. But it was mostly predominantly black and had to do with workers and service and human service.

Speaker They used to give these functions for political education, for organizers of organizing for various reasons to overcome discrimination, fair employment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one of these gatherings, Robe’s, was being honored. Just a very simple way. Thank you for working, helping the workers in America. Thank you for helping the labor movement. And at this event, a number of artists were brought together who were very young, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, myself, others to be part of the entertainment of the evening. And I remember that when we performed how much Robeson delighted in what we had to offer and that he got up and say a couple of songs with us. And it was a wonderful evening filled with with camaraderie and and a great sense of hope, and subsequently then met him and a number of other such events. And the most important being by 1948, when we decided that America needed another alternative to the ones they were already given, Republicans and Democrats, Republicans and Democrats were wholly unsatisfactory to the needs of the of the future of this country. No one spoke for the suffering underclass. No one spoke for black hopes and aspirations. No one spoke up against the racist laws that existed with any effectiveness who was aspiring to office. So we had to create a new forum. And in creating the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace and Harold Taylor running for vice president, the vice president of the country gave a lot of us a place around which to rally, a place around which to articulate our grievances, a place around which to do analysis and to do outreach.

Speaker And central to this mobilization was Paul Robeson. He was at any number of these rallies nationally helping to build the Progressive Party to help build a new voice of reason and of hope in our community and on that platform was where he and I shared individual moments, singing for a cause.

Speaker I want to what you of you know, our neighbors, by the way, I’m one of those at that rally that you just mentioned, you said you came up here, right? Yeah, I remember that.

Speaker I hasten to point out that to many of my friends, the fact that Paul had smiled on me so, so favorably and had had had had regarded me so, so, so, so, so pleasantly gave me a huge credential when I talked to my friends who I wanted to touch his garment and who I wanted to meet and to know him. And because they’re all really decent men and women and wonderful people and my peers and we were all aspiring and he says, I got to get them into a play or get them into a place and get them an opportunity to meet Paul. I thought it was important that they do so.

Speaker Yeah, I didn’t to cause any problems for you.

Speaker In other words, you know, as times changed and it was pretty clear that you were you know, he was a teacher in a certain way.

Speaker So when they came down on him, they jumped ahead.

Speaker But did they affect you? I mean, you know, there in the U.S. military that they come after you?

Speaker They can in my opinion, I think that Paul and I reached a level of intensity in our relationship and it took it all to another level when I, too, became a victim of the House un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism. I had been severely attacked by vigilante groups who existed unofficially.

Speaker Most of them most of them were secret societies that compile and put lists together and and recklessly gave them out to places that were intimidated by these lists. And they caused huge mischief and great pain to many of the citizens of this country.

Speaker Here I was, a young African-American excuse me, here I was a young African-American at the at the very threshold of his career on an ascendancy, having begun the earliest ripples of public approval, developing an audience that came to embrace my platform with some passion and some sense of purpose and reason, everything I was doing seemed to have been graced with some form of success. My record had just come out and was doing very well. My first time in a Broadway play, John Mohandas Almanack, I received the Tony Award, the highest honor in the theater places were asking me to come and perform that traditionally had never had black artists or black people on their roster or or in their program. Certainly the Waldorf Astoria, as one of the leading and the most famous hotels in the world, which had been had a hugely strong racist policy.

Speaker The first time a black person walked in and sang and broke down the barriers that I was in the same period when they invited me to sing there excuse me, while all of this was going on and while the walls of segregation were being severely challenged, opportunities were opening up, speaking out politically and socially to galvanize and encourage those voices of dissent and and voices of exchange on a host of subjects.

Speaker I was going to make activities committee came out to me, I was blacklisted and in an instant was finding it very difficult to find work. And here I was now beginning to encroach upon the same experiences that my mentor had been suffering for these many years and that I was. Very much aware of in touch with. I offer saw bars advice, certainly when I was called by the investigators of the House on American Activities Committee who came to New York to interrogate me.

Speaker They were looking for an answer as to whether or not I would testify. And, of course, they they saw that that was not at all possible, even thinkable.

Speaker And they continued to hound and they continued to pursue. But they were dealing with us. Many of us also, in ways that I said were very cautionary. They were not going after us with as much reckless abandon as they were going after white folk. They came after us and another with another cadence. There was a subtle difference and some is not quite so subtle. And a lot of it had to do with Pirogues and others who are of color, who had taken a very, very strong and very clear position and how they looked upon the villainy of the witch hunt and the House un-American activities in this country, some people in this country, and certainly many in our government was or willing to do. I think part of the cautionary thing was not only because of the strength of roads and how he articulated the platform, but because you were also at the very earliest days of the Cold War, there was now an international arena, people with huge expectations who work under the heels of colonial oppression, who also participated in the Second World War, black troops from Africa, who fought with the British and the French and the Belgians, even South Africans who became expeditionary forces with the British forces who fought, went back to Africa the same way I came back to America, knowing that after the display of our willingness to commit ourselves to the sovereign states that we represented in battle, that we would be looked upon with compassion, a new grace.

Speaker And you and I with some honor about how we were to be treated in the post-World War environment, this caused a huge upheaval because when the British wanted to go back to business as usual and to maintain colonialism was exactly the same spirit as white America who had to go back to business as usual by black troops coming back. I mean, they were very vigorous in describing to us how well how much they wanted us back in our place. And one of the great moments for us in America and Paul and I worked on the campaign campaigns and protests when one was about a black American soldier named Isaac Woodard, who had served in the United States Army, was one of the most bedeviled soldiers in the war, had done a long time in the European theater, had even been wounded and survived and went back into battle, came out of that war untouched. But honorably discharged on his way back home to the south, got on a bus, and when he got past the Mason-Dixon line, I was told that he could no longer said he had to sit in the back of the bus. And he said, if you don’t understand, I just fought a war to end all this nonsense and I will not sit on the back of the bus. I’m an American and an American and I’m an American hero. And they just hold him off the bus with a blunt end of a billy club. The police gouged out both of his eyes and blinded him for the rest of his life. He still lives today.

Speaker That told us everything we needed to know about how extreme America was prepared to go to put us back in our place and to make us become once again subservient citizens as they had had wanted us to be dismantled.

Speaker His name was Isaac Woodard. And this was going on in Africa. The British were shooting down Africans who were talking about freedom in India, the shooting down of the Gandhian followers. There was a whole universal upheaval around this. And when these forces in the world sought to take up resistance, one of the few supporters in the world to their cause. Were Russians, the Soviet Union good, bad or indifferent, who likes to hear, don’t like to hear, it was, in fact the single major resource that these nations found available to them to draw upon their ability to resist future tyranny. Ironic as it may seem. And because America was in the midst of this struggle, ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of people globally, they had to be very careful how they walked on the lives of black people in America because they were sending out dual images. On the one hand, we are the protectors of democracy, and yet we are ashamed of or should be ashamed of how we are spelling that out in the way we treat black citizens. So I sensed that a certain way, and especially because of the way in which Paul Robeson handled his own case and the fact that the world was behind Paul Robeson, the struggle made the move with a great with greater caution. They were reckless nevertheless, but it was not quite as punitive.

Speaker Having said that, it was Paul who.

Speaker Helped guide me through that period because there was an instance, for instance, when I was confronted by the House un-American Activities Committee with great detail about a conversation that I had with a person on a subject that I thought was privileged between myself and this person, at least somewhat privileged, and went. And the contents of that conversation was then used in the litany of charges placed against me. I thought I had for the first time identified somebody who was obviously friendly to the committee and who was on a Judas mission. I told Paul about this one evening when we were having dinner together, and he said, Harry, let me tell you something you may think.

Speaker You have someone who would appear to be guilty in this indiscretion and this pain you’re being caused, but you’ll never really know unless they personally admit it, because he spelled out the following scenario, what would happen to this young man, went to dinner and with a couple of very close friends and describing the anguish that you both felt at the moment that you were talking about that, he said, you know, Harry and I share exactly the same view and that he and part of the information to the third party who was, in fact the Judas, and it was not he.

Speaker How do you know you’re not accusing the wrong person of having betrayed you?

Speaker You will go through life looking at every face with a huge question mark, when they get through running their number on you, you’ll never know whether it was your mother or your worst enemy who betrayed you. You’re just gonna have to live with that and you have to look into each face and take each day as it comes. You’ll never really know.

Speaker Maybe you can’t, but he seemed to be every time I talked to somebody that that example that you just just stated, that there is a certain kind of concern for others.