The career of Paul Robeson, an extraordinary scholar, entertainer, and activist, was destroyed by the U.S. government. Robeson was persecuted because he was an idealist, a man of principle. He envisioned an American society in which people of all classes and colors had equal status, and believed that socialism was a promising step toward achieving this ideal. Unfortunately, U.S. government officials believed that any criticism of the American system was subversive. The government subsequently mounted a vicious campaign aimed at rendering Robeson's career virtually nonexistent.
During the 1890s, when Paul Robeson was born, the majority of African Americans lived in the South, an environment charged with racial bitterness and contention. Lynch mobs murdered scores of blacks each year. Although blacks had the right to vote, election fraud was notorious. Late-19th century statues passed by the legislatures of the Southern states created a racial caste system. Despite the abolition of slavery, many whites felt that blacks were inherently inferior. To support this belief they sought rationalizations through religion, sociology, and science: "This deadly confusion between biology and social learning could, by easy re-emphasis, yield a value judgment about innate black "childishness" that served as a perpetually self-justifying rationale for proscription and separation" (Duberman 65). Even Northern liberals were inclined to agree with white-supremacist attitudes. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Count legitimized the principle of "separate but equal" in its ruling Plessy v. Ferguson.
Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey, a community which, although quiet and well-educated, exhibited many of the features of Southern segregationism. Princeton public schools were segregated, and for many years no blacks could go to the university. Robeson likened the racial environment of Princeton to that of a Southern plantation (Duberman 6)...