{"id":1181955,"date":"2023-08-16T13:49:14","date_gmt":"2023-08-16T13:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/08\/paul-robeson-peoria-red-scare-farm-equipment-workers-ajay-martin\/"},"modified":"2023-08-16T13:49:14","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T13:49:14","slug":"when-peoria-banned-paul-robeson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/08\/16\/when-peoria-banned-paul-robeson\/","title":{"rendered":"When Peoria Banned Paul Robeson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

In April 1947, Paul Robeson, the outspoken leftist artist and singer, was barred from performing in Peoria, Illinois. The repressive move, though fought by a radical labor union of black and white workers, prefigured the Red Scare that would soon envelop the country.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Paul Robeson in 1942. (Gordon Parks \/ Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

As an actor and singer, Paul Robeson<\/a> was perhaps the world\u2019s most popular black artist in the 1930s and 1940s. He was also an unapologetic leftist, loudly condemning racism and fascism in the United States and internationally.<\/p>\n

But with the beginning of the Cold War, an anti-communist hysteria emerged that would soon engulf the country \u2014 smothering the anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonial politics that Robeson and many other leftists still espoused. The most famous \u201cSecond Red Scare\u201d incident involving Robeson is the 1949 Peekskill riot, where a right-wing protest-turned-lynch-mob<\/a> violently marched on a concert headlined by Robeson in the tiny New York town.<\/p>\n

Far less well known is an incident two years earlier, in Peoria, Illinois. In April 1947, days after the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) first attacked Robeson, he was scheduled to perform in Peoria. Almost immediately, Peoria\u2019s entire white power structure \u2014 corporate, media, university, and government \u2014 condemned Robeson and canceled his concert. Robeson refused to back down. His local allies included African-American activists, particularly those in a radical labor union. Rather than perform publicly, Robeson sang at a tiny house concert hosted by a black union leader.<\/p>\n

As the first US city to ban Robeson from singing, Peoria offered a preview of the political fault lines that would expand during the Second Red Scare. Repression against Robeson spiked thereafter and established the pattern: verbal assaults and threats of physical violence coordinated with political repression and full-throated support from a chorus of right-wing groups and corporations. Others who embraced left-wing politics \u2014 whether communist or not \u2014 also found themselves muzzled. As Robeson observed: \u201cThere\u2019s a lesson that must be learned from this Peoria affair. . . . Americans seem to be on the go here regarding a Red Hysteria, but they don\u2019t understand the nature and danger of fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

As Peoria Goes . . .<\/h2>\n \n

The phrase \u201cwill it play in Peoria?\u201d defines this city of roughly 110,000 straddling both banks of the Illinois River. As the Saturday Evening Post<\/em> noted in 1949, \u201cGenerations of comedians have vulgarized Peoria as the symbol of the rube and the boob. . . . Peoria has become a companion word for \u2018hayseed,\u201d an all-American common denominator, a municipal equivalent of the [white] man on the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Peoria of the 1940s was overwhelmingly white and segregated. While the city\u2019s black population rose during the first Great Migration (1915\u20131940), just 3 percent of residents were black in 1940. Public and private facilities upheld the color line by custom. Many employers, including Caterpillar, the area\u2019s largest, and the Journal Star<\/em>, the local newspaper, refused to hire black workers.<\/p>\n

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Paul Robeson leading Moore Shipyard workers in singing the Star Spangled Banner, Oakland, September 1942. (Photographer unknown. National Archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Paul Robeson entered 1947 ready to fight. That January, he joined a St Louis picket line organized by the Civil Rights Congress<\/a> to protest racially segregated theaters and attended a dinner in his honor hosted by United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 600<\/a> in Detroit. In March, Robeson\u2019s performance in Salt Lake City featured his version of the classic \u201cJoe Hill,\u201d in the very city where the radical troubadour was executed<\/a> in 1915. At the concert\u2019s end, Robeson announced: \u201cYou\u2019ve heard my final concert for at least two years, and perhaps for many more.\u201d Henceforth, \u201cI shall sing . . . for my trade union and college friends; in other words, only at gatherings where I can sing what I please.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following month, Robeson began a short tour in downstate Illinois. First, he performed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where two students from Millikin University<\/a>, in nearby Decatur, invited Robeson to sing. He agreed and, two days later, put on a free concert to a \u201cstanding-room-only audience,\u201d opening with some classic renditions of \u201cNegro spirituals,\u201d followed by a Chinese children\u2019s song and \u201ca Russian lullaby, commenting that he had found the Russians \u2018love their children, too.\u2019\u201d Afterward, Robeson referred to brewing controversy in nearby Peoria where the city council had declared two days earlier, \u201cno artist or speaker who has what they consider to be subversive tendencies may appear.\u201d The city council copied the language of HUAC that condemned Robeson, that same week, for membership in \u201cCommunist Front\u201d organizations. Robeson made clear that he still planned to perform: \u201cIt has been my privilege<\/em> to fight Fascism in various parts of the world during recent years. I don\u2019t mind if it now becomes my duty<\/em> to fight it here in America.\u201d<\/p>\n