Please study the above photo, dear Pilgrim. I scanned it from the most excellent Paul Robeson, a biography by Martin Bauml Duberman. It shows Robeson, the legendary athlete, singer, actor and activist performing at a concert just outside of a little town called Peekskill, New York, back in 1949.
Please be so kind as to study that photograph for a moment. Go ahead and click it and expand it if you like. I’ll wait.
OK, good. Let’s discuss this photo now.
People are surrounding Robeson up on that stage for a reason. They were protecting him from getting injured, or even possibly killed. A sniper nest (two men with high-powered rifles) was discovered by security forces and flushed out at a hill overlooking the concert. So obviously, this was not your typical outdoor music festival.
Paul Robeson was an influential African-American who spoke out against racism, poverty, and the exploitation of labor, along with other kinds of injustice. I consider him to be one of the bravest American citizens in history, who lived a life dedicated to the defense of human equality and dignity, regardless of any threat to his own life, career or well being.
He had performed at Peekskill previously, but things were going to be different this time for certain significant reasons. He had not only testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee against making Communists register as foreign agents, he had also been quoted as saying at the World Peace Conference in Paris, in an Associated Press dispatch, “it is unthinkable that American Negroes will go to war in 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.”
Robeson never said those words at the Paris conference. No one fact checked them either. When the remarks were carried in the media, they were perceived by many to be anti-American, and local newspaper The Peekskill Evening Star fanned the flames of sentiment against Robeson, encouraging protests at the concert site.
Apparently, many of the Evening Star’s readers were either actual or wannabe Klansmen, as the protests featured a burning cross and lynched effigies of Robeson. VFW and American Legion members, in tandem with a loose group of boneheads, threw rocks at concertgoers and beat them with baseball bats, effectively shutting down the first attempt at a concert, planned for August 27. Looks like somebody forgot all about the First Amendment and the right to freely assemble.
The concert was postponed to September 4, and this time the concert itself went off without any incidents of violence. However, it was the transit for performers and audience in and out of the concert that was a different story altogether.
Robeson was literally tucked into the rear floor of a car to be shuttled out, which must have been quite a feat since the man was the size of your average modern day NFL offensive tackle. People were dragged out of vehicles and attacked, and those who weren’t had windows taken out from rocks and other objects courtesy of what must have seemed like a miles-long gauntlet of racist rioters. If you were black, you were serenaded with screams of the n-word; if you were a white concertgoer, you were labeled as a “white n-word”. Pete Seeger, who also performed that day, had so many rocks tossed into the car which he, Woody Guthrie and others were riding in, that he built a chimney at his cabin to remind people of the riots.
The police did nothing as far as even trying to stop the riots. Some of the cops even joined the anti-Robeson crowd and assisted them in beating those exiting the concert site. The Westchester County District Attorney, George M. Fanelli, later congratulated the police for doing “a magnificent job”.
Learn all you can about the Peekskill Riots, and take all that you will learn into serious consideration when witnessing certain events that are occurring today. Next time you see a town hall meeting on health care reform, or one of those lame ass right wing teabagger rallies, with all of these Angry White Men and Angry White Women out of the Dittohead Textbook a-yellin’ and a-screamin’, remember that those guys and gals engaging in such behavior are the cultural descendants of the white, male, xenophobic rock throwers and bat wielders at Peekskill in 1949, who not only beat people like Eugene Bullard, an African American WWI aviator for France who was awarded the Croix de Guerre, but were the same people who had also attacked people who were white, simply because they supported racial equality for those who were not.
Times may have changed since the Peekskill Riots, but nothing has been entirely eliminated. That environment of ignorant, stupid hate has simply been tamed, and driven down to a social sublevel of relative impotence. Unfortunately, in recent times with the election of our nation’s first African-American President, the symptoms of the disease called racism are starting to re-appear. We need to never let up our guard when it comes to keeping that sort of mentality from ever re-entering our national psyche. That’s why, sooner or later, Americans of tolerance are going to need to step up and counter attack the re-emerging actions of the intolerant. In the same way that we should feel about the Holocaust, we must be determined that the Peekskill Riots never happen again.
"[W]e can make clear what peaceful coexistence means. It means living in peace and friendship with another kind of society--a fully integrated society where the people control their destinies, where poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated, and where new kinds of human beings develop in the framework of a new level of social living."
-Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks, p. 338
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