Half a Century Before Colin Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson Said, 'I Cannot Stand and Sing the Anthem.'
A segregationist senator tried to use Robinson to destroy Paul Robeson. Instead, Robinson called out racism.
By Peter Dreier
Seventy years ago today—on July 18, 1949—right-wing and segregationist members of Congress orchestrated a confrontation between the two most well-known and admired African Americans in the country: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. The media salivated at the opportunity to portray the clash of these larger-than-life titans as a surrogate for the Cold War between capitalism and communism.
A few weeks earlier, Robinson—who had integrated Major League Baseball when he signed with the Dodgers in 1947—received a telegram from Congressman John Wood (D- GA), an arch segregationist and former Ku Klux Klan member, who chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He invited Robinson to address a hearing on “Communist infiltration of minority groups.”
Specifically, he wanted Robinson to attack Robeson for being a disloyal American and Communist agitator who didn’t speak for black people.
The pretext for the hearing was a statement that Robeson had made that April at a left-wing conference in Paris. The media ignored Robeson’s main point—that most Americans, including blacks, did not want to go to war with the Soviet Union. Instead, most news outlets used the Associated Press report, which quoted Robeson saying that if a war broke out between the United States and Russia, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/huac-jackie-robinson-paul-robeson/
