In an occasion titled “Black Activism, Then and Now,” hosted by the Princeton Public Library on Tuesday, Feb. 15, panelists mentioned the native, nationwide, and worldwide activism of Paul Robeson, a musician, athlete, and distinguished activist for racial equality. Robeson was born within the city of Princeton and his legacy of sustained pupil activism on the College remains to be salient at the moment.
The panel was moderated by Nyle Fort GS ’21, who acquired his Ph.D. in Faith and Interdisciplinary Humanities with a focus in African American Research, and featured Dr. Shana L. Redmond, President-Elect of the American Research Affiliation and a scholar of English Literature and Race at Columbia College; Meena Jagannath, Director of World Packages at Motion Regulation Lab, a social justice authorized group; and Reverend Lukata Mjumbe, Pastor of the Witherspoon Road Presbyterian Church within the city of Princeton as panelists for the occasion.
Robeson’s multifaceted legacy was a key level within the dialog.
“Many individuals wish to simply speak about Paul Robeson and the deep baritone Previous Man River and that is so vital as part of what he was,” Mjumbe said. “However would you’ve gotten actually liked Paul Robeson when he was alive, when he was being burned in effigy up in upstate New York, when he was having his passport seized, when he was pondering that he had been poisoned, when he was given electroshock remedy, when when he was being attacked and vilified earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee?”
Redmond defined the opposition Robeson confronted from the U.S. State Division in the course of the second Pink Scare of the Nineteen Forties and 50s. He was “an enemy of the state, they’d not permit him to journey overseas from 1950 to 1958,” she stated, after his passport was revoked after he was accused of being a Communist, which eradicated most of his earnings from his profession as a musician.
“He was somebody who was one of many petitioners and organizers for the 1951 We Cost Genocide petition that went to the United Nations,” she stated. “He delivered the formable copy to the U.N. in New York Metropolis.”
Jagannath linked Robeson’s experiences to what she has seen as a lawyer, particularly working with younger individuals in Chicago within the mid-2010s amid the early years of the Black Lives Matter motion.
“The U.S. touts its status on the world stage as some bastion of human rights,” she stated. “And in the meantime it’s killing its personal individuals, working tanks by means of the streets, and holding individuals arbitrarily off offshore, amongst many different abuses of its personal individuals.”
Mjumbe talked about how Robeson’s life had moved him to take motion in his neighborhood.
“Even earlier than I grew to become a pastor and was impressed by his father,” Mjumbe stated of William Robeson, who served because the minister of the Witherspoon Road Presbyterian Church from 1880 to 1901. “Paul Robeson impressed me. Paul Robeson impressed me as an activist, as an organizer, as somebody who thought domestically, who labored domestically however had visions that had been world.”
Robeson was an lively opponent of numerous insurance policies enacted by Woodrow Wilson ’1879 throughout his time as College president, significantly these excluding college students of coloration from the College.
“He demanded that certainly one of Paul’s older brothers be capable of enroll at Princeton College,” Mjumbe defined. “However the response was that we do not have colours right here at Princeton College.”
This legacy of activism continues at Princeton, the panelists remarked. Fort recalled the campus ambiance when he arrived on the College in 2014 to start his Ph.D., within the wake of nationwide protests after the homicide of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Miss. On campus, the Black Justice League, a then newly-formed Black pupil activist group, had led a sequence of protests.
“I feel it is necessary what you stated about Paul Robeson, and that relationship between President Woodrow Wilson as a result of the scholars had been combating in opposition to the naming of the [public policy] faculty being beneath Woodrow Wilson, however not all the time seeing ourselves within the custom of a Paul Robeson who had already been combating and resisting these broader constructions that return to the to the very starting of Princeton historical past,” he stated.
Redmond additionally mentioned the dearth of recognition for Robeson’s title and work in at the moment’s world, telling Fort, “If I had a buddy who knew his title, I might depend myself fortunate. Sadly, there are too many individuals who do not know his title.”
“It was a coerced forgetting, proper?” she added. “It was by the hands of the State Division each within the U.S. and varied different colonial nations around the globe.”
Mjumbe additionally commented on the significance of studying about Robeson and his story. “I feel in some methods, you can not perceive Princeton — you definitely cannot perceive Black Princeton — if you happen to do not perceive the legacy of the Robeson household,” he stated.
Redmond additionally spoke on the legacy of activism at Princeton shifting ahead, particularly with regard to policing on campus.
“How can we truly abolish policing on campuses?” she requested. “These are locations of schooling, these are locations that ought to be welcoming and accommodating to everybody. And the police, we all know, don’t make us safer, they make us extra susceptible.”
Jagannath highlighted the significance of those actions.
“The manifestations of injustice that we see on the native degree, they’re all interconnected, proper, just like the techniques which are producing injustice,” she stated. “You realize, in Princeton, in Miami, and different locations there are the identical techniques which are oppressing individuals elsewhere.”
The occasion was co-hosted by the Tempo Middle for Civic Engagement and the Paul Robeson Home of Princeton, and made attainable with assist from the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities. It was hosted on Zoom from 7 p.m. to eight p.m.
Katherine Dailey is a Co-Head Information Editor who usually covers breaking information, politics, and College affairs. She might be reached at kdailey@princeton.edu or on Twitter at @kmdailey7.