Also being released early in 2004 will be the 27th stamp in the Black Heritage series, which will honor actor, singer, civil rights activist and athlete Paul Robeson.
David Failor, executive director of stamp services for the Postal Service, said there was strong support from the public for a stamp honoring Robeson, who was labeled a subversive for his mid-century activism against racism and anti-Semitism.
Most people have scarcely heard of Robeson today, but he was quite a talent and also a Stalin apologist. It’s odd that the story calls him a subversive for his fights against racism and anti-Semitism when he strongly defended the 1940 pact between Hitler and Stalin. Brent Bozell laid out the case against Robeson in 1998. (courtesy of the corner)
The political Robeson was not merely a crusader for civil rights and against Jim Crow, a precursor to Martin Luther King in politics as well as to James Earl Jones in acting and Marcus Allen in sports. He was also a fervent supporter of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, which oppressed its entire population - not to mention large portions of the globe -- far more systematically and brutally than the United States ever oppressed its blacks and other minorities. Yet in many of the recent stories, that truth about Robeson has been played down, if not ignored altogether.
In our modern enlightenment we’re supposed to look back at communists as idealists, I suppose. An idealist is nothing but a fool praised for good intentions over good sense. We don’t go around calling former Nazi’s idealists. It would be much better to label Robeson a talented guy who lost his mind. Here’s what Robeson's idealism led to.
A February 9 Associated Press dispatch from Moscow sheds light on the regime Robeson proudly endorsed. The AP looked into the files of fifteen Americans who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s to serve the revolution. Two died in labor camps, five went to prison, and eight were executed. Among those in the third group was Arthur Talent, who accompanied his mother to the USSR when he was seven and who, as a young adult, was befriended by Robeson's wife when she and her husband visited Moscow. Talent was shot in 1938 after "confessing" to fabricated charges that he was a spy for Latvia.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan quotes Robeson's love of Stalin.
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