The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 341also lead to equal rights at home for them, many of whom had served in the
war. While many in the government and the ruling class did in fact agree that
America’s racial policies–essentially apartheid where blacks and whites were
kept separate by law, often violently–had to change, the White power structure
feared extreme change, so wanted to create new racial practices that were
limited and do so slowly. Many Blacks were tired of waiting and wanted more
direct and quick action. W.E. B. Du Bois, for instance, continued to take
strong positions on race, not willing to simply settle for menial jobs or small
reforms. He believed in full equality and spoke positively about communism
so his own organization, the NAACP, removed him, its founder, from their
membership in 1947.
The case of Paul Robeson was even more extreme. Robeson was the vale-
dictorian of his class at Rutgers and an All-American and then professional
football player. He graduated from Columbia Law School but decided to leave
the profession when it became clear that, because he was Black, he would be
limited to doing research and not take on other jobs that White lawyers far
inferior to him would be able to do. So Robeson, who had one of the more
amazing voices one would ever hear, became the best-selling singer in
America, and then a star on Broadway [while in Othello, the play set a record
at the time for longest run] and in Hollywood, where his most famous role
was in Showboat, where he sang the famous song “Old Man River.” Robeson,
in his heyday, was making hundreds of thousands of dollars and was world
famous [he also had an incredible facility for languages and spoke Russian,
Chinese, Hebrew, and Gaelic, among others].
Paul Robeson, however, was also a public critic of U.S. racial and foreign
policies, and was not afraid to speak out. When the hopes of racial advance-
ment after World War II were fading, Robeson essentially urged Blacks to not
fight in the army of a country that treated them as second-class citizens at
home, saying that African Americans would not fight in a war against the
Russians. He was hauled before HUAC where his intelligence and composure
stood out, especially as various congressmen tried to rattle and race-bait him.
In fact, Robeson had made such an impact that HUAC then brought the most
famous Black man in America at that time, Jackie Robinson–the first African-
American professional baseball player–before the committee to denounce
Robeson’s views. Robinson, who would have risked his baseball career if he
had refused, called Robeson’s views “silly” but also angered the HUAC mem-