HERE I STAND
An appreciation of Paul Robeson
Book by Charles Deemer
I am an American. I am a Negro. The house
I live in is in Harlem, this city within a city, the Negro metropolis of America.
Here is a bond that joins me with the long, hard march that is my people's
history in America. This very church, Mother Zion, the mother church of
the great African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, goes all the way
back to 1796 when it was founded by free Negroes who could not abide
the church of the Christian slave-masters.
Sojourner Truth, heroine of our liberation struggle, was an early
member of Mother Zion; and Frederick Douglass, our greatest hero and
teacher, and Harriet Tubman, our Moses of the Underground Railroad, also
worshipped here. This is my country, my city, my church. This is where I
raise my voice in song.
SONG: “I Got A Robe”
I heard my people singing. In the glow of
parlor coal stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from
choir loft and Sunday morning pews, my soul was filled with their
harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my
father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and
rhythms of folk-song. The great, soaring gospels we love are merely
sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted gospel singers as
Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so
many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech.
My own people, many of them, have
felt that the old Spirituals were not in keeping with the aspirations of
the modern Negro. They feel that white audiences approach the Spirituals
in a patronizing spirit. Perhaps this is true, but it is what they
take with them from a concert that means most. The distinctive gift
the Negro has made to America has not been from the brilliantly successful
colored men and women who, after all, have done only
what white people are doing. It is from the most humble of our people
that the music, now recognized as of abiding beauty, has emanated.
I thought I could do something
for the Negro race by acting on the New York stage and later by making
films. I wanted to show the truth about my people and about other people
too. I felt I was doing my part and I could go away feeling satisfied.
I thought everything was O.K.
because I found that on the stage, whether singing or acting, race and
color prejudices are forgotten. Art is the one form against which
such barriers do not stand.
I could lose myself in my art. Then I went
to Spain in 1938, and that was a major turning point in my life. There I
saw that it was the working men and women of Spain who were heroically
giving "their last full measure of devotion" to the cause of
democracy in the bloody conflict of the Spanish Civil War, and that it was
the upper class, the landed gentry, the bankers and industrialists, who
had unleashed the fascist beast against their own people. I became
political. I took sides with humanity and freedom against oppression and
privilege, wherever I might find it.
SONG: “Solidarity Forever” or
another labor song
In Russia I felt for the first time like a
full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, and no color
prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human
being, where I did not feel the pressure of color. I found at once that
the Russian language and the music suit my voice, and I think there is a
psychological explanation. There is a kinship between the Russians and the
Negroes. They were both serfs, and in the music there is the same note of
melancholy touched with mysticism.
SONG: a Russian folk song
Like most of Africa’s children in America,
I had known little about the land of our fathers, but in England I
came to know many Africans. I finally traveled to Africa and learned
Swahili, Tivi and other African dialects. I sang African songs.
SONG: an African song
When I sing back to the people the songs
they themselves have created, I can feel a great unity, not only as a
person, but as an artist who is one with his audience. This has a lot
to do with shaping my attitude toward the struggle of the people of the
world. It has made me an anti-fascist, whether the struggle is in Spain,
Germany or here. Peace is the all-important thing. With peace all nations
and races will flower. Soon, when Man travels the paths blazed by these
little moons like Sputnik that we send into the sky, he will look down
upon our Mother Earth and say, with great love and pride for all mankind,
what Shakespeare said of his homeland: "This happy breed of men, this
little world.” When I sing my spirituals, in which is the whole history of my race,
it is then, more than at any other time, that I am liable to be caught away and
feel and know that God exists – and that God is love.
Written by an anonymous penitentiary
inmate in Marion, Illinois:
“Paul Robeson:
They knocked the leaves from his limbs,
the bark from his tree,
but his roots were so deep
that they are a part of me.”
SONG: “Lift Every Voice”