Send a Stamp for Mankind;
Paul Robeson's New Passport
by Frederick B. Hudson
It's too bad we don't have to lick stamps anymore. If our tongues had to be applied to the glue of the back of a U.S. postage stamp which was issued this January 20th, we might be reminded of the attempts of an ungrateful country to silence one of the most profound and dignified voices America has ever produced-Paul Robeson.
The stamp, with Robeson's face, issued as part of the U.S. Post Office's Black Heritage's series, was unveiled at Princeton, New Jersey, birthplace of the singer, actor, scholar and citizen of whom the words Shakespeare wrote of the character Othello(which Robeson played so brilliantly on Broadway) could so aptly describe: "I have done the state some service and they know't."
Paul Robeson stamp from the
U.S. Post Office's Black Heritage's series
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Even his detractors constantly acknowledged his gifts and contributions. Barbara J. Beeching, a writer for Ebony Magazine, noted that in late July of 1950, acting on orders from J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents in New York City set out to find Paul Robeson When they arrived at his home. The agents then told Robeson what he already knew--that the State Department had canceled his passport and they had come to pick it up. Why such personal treatment? Because this man had won the hearts of oppressed people all over the world with his song and spirit.
The Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet Pablo Neruda, who had witnessed firsthand the iron fist and boot of fascism's terror hailed Robeson's mission in an ode:
You,
Paul Robeson,
defend man's bread,
honor,
fight,
hope.
Light of man,
child of the sun,
our sun,
sun of the American suburb
and of the red snows
of the Andes:
you guard our light.
And what a light it was. It led the All American football player to get up from the playing fields of Rutgers when his own teammates maimed him to prevent him from making the team. It shone on his stages across the globe as the rolling thunder of his voice electrified "Ol Man River," Negro spirituals, Russian folk songs and medleys that celebrated all the wretched of the earth.
A pioneer Black star of films, plays and the concert stage, and one of the first great international cultural icons, Robeson was hailed almost everywhere as a great actor and singer, in great demand in Hollywood and on Broadway and leading European centers, he turned his back on ease, fame and fortune and demanded freedom and justice not only for African-Americans but also for all the wretched of the earth.
He was accused of being a Communist, but the charge was never proven. What was proven, over and over again, was his genius and his unflagging commitment to his cause.
Fitting his nature as a fighter, the U.S. Post Office did not capitulate easily to honoring him with a stamp. It took the concerted letter writing campaign of the Paul Robeson Foundation who organized communication to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee of the Post Office.
As we send his picture around the world, we have given Robeson back his passport-not for vacations but to see what humanity needs. Share with the world, his words, recorded in his autobiographical work Here I Stand, "I learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes, but by the common people, and that the common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind."
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