The career of Paul Robeson, in both life and death, is an inspiring story of antiracist struggle and revolutionary communist class-consciousness and fightback, an arc that remains a model for the entire international working class. It’s also a story that makes crystal clear the racist hypocrisy of the U.S. ruling class, and the treachery of the bourgeois Black misleaders who attempted to appropriate his memory after his death—while during his life, did everything they could to repress and tarnish him.
Scholar, athlete, singer, actor, antiracist, communist
Robeson won an academic scholarship to Rutgers University in 1915. He was only the third Black person ever to have attended Rutgers, and one of only two Black youth at Rutgers during his entire four years on campus. At college he was both an academic and athletic leader, making Phi Beta Kappa (an academic honorary society), as well as being a All-American football player, and starring in several other sports. And even though Robeson had a beautiful and powerful singing voice, he was barred from the Rutgers Glee Club because of racism at the school's social functions.
Robeson developed a career as a concert singing artist. He had appeared in a singing role in the Broadway musical, “Show Boat” in 1928, and would repeat the role in a film version seven years later. But he was cast in a racist stereotype, and Robeson hoped that through concerts he could side-step the racist pressures involved in dramatic productions and films.
Throughout this period his political consciousness was being developed in the Communist Party. Their influence began to give him the insight that racism was not an isolated phenomenon, but was an intrinsic and necessary part of capitalism, and would never be defeated until the capitalist system itself was destroyed
‘In Soviet Union, I am not a Negro, but a human being’
Robeson’s trips to the then-communist-led Soviet Union in 1934 and 1936 had an enormous effect on him, where he stated for the first time in his life, he felt like a human being, walking in full human dignity. During the Spanish Civil War, moved by the energy, selflessness, and antiracist struggle, he appeared at rallies and concerts to raise money. He also visited Spain to give concerts for the communist-led International Brigades fighting the Spanish, German, and Italian fascists, including a performance on the front lines.
Robeson also supported the anti-lynching efforts of the militant National Negro Congress. Being outside the control of the bourgeois leadership of the NAACP and the Urban League, Robeson became a loathed target of bourgeois Black misleaders, especially the NAACP.
During World War II, Robeson crisscrossed the U.S. appearing at rallies, concerts and other causes in support of the anti-fascist war effort. He drew enormous crowds, raising enthusiasm and hundreds of thousands of dollars from Black and white working class audiences.
Unapologetic amidst capitalist attacks, liberal betrayal
In 1943, he appeared in another very successful production of Othello on Broadway. He was at the peak of his popularity as an antiracist, an actor, a singer, and a fighter against fascism. By 1943, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I., already had him tagged for “preventive detention” in the event of some “crisis.”
The end of World War II saw a great increase in racist lynchings throughout the U.S. South, and a rise in racist oppression in the rest of the country. Robeson connected sharpening racist attacks with U.S. imperialism in the post-World War II Cold War era. In April 1949, he attended a Paris meeting of the World Partisans of Peace, where he attacked imperialist plans for a new war against the Soviet Union and the emerging communist-led China. As anticommunism ran rampant, he was denounced by the entire Black bourgeois misleadership—Walter  White, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, et al., the AFL, and bosses in the entertainment industry.
Peekskill: kkkops and racists riot
The bosses’ hatred of Robeson culminated in a fascist attack which succeeded in breaking up a scheduled concert where Robeson was to sing near Peekskill, NY on Saturday, August 27, 1949. The concert was rescheduled for Sunday, September 4. Several thousand guards of Black and white workers and veterans, communists, and supporters protected Robeson and the 20,000 concert-goers, while Robeson sang in the face of rifles aimed at him (Duberman, Paul Robeson 1988, p. 369).
After the concert, state troopers forced departing vehicles with families with small children to pass through a gauntlet of rock-throwing fascists. One hundred and fifty concertgoers were injured but overall, the day remained a victory for Robeson and the antiracists, showing that determination, organization, and courage could defeat racism even in the face of brutal attacks.
Blacklisted, interrogated for being a communist
In the aftermath, Robeson was blacklisted. Bookings in the U.S. disappeared, and the government revoked his passport in 1950, thus depriving him of the ability to tour abroad. Nevertheless, during this period, he remained politically active, singing and marching to support the Rosenbergs as they were sentenced to death by the U.S. government for fighting against capitalism, speaking at May Day rallies, appearing at benefit concerts for the Labor Youth League and the World Youth Festivals, speaking out against racism and imperialism.
In 1956, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), where he was an unrelentingly hostile witness. Throughout this entire period the bourgeois Black misleaders didn't lift a finger to support him. This exposes how Black nationalism is a pro-ruling class idea and a deadend for Black workers.
With the restoration of his passport and the upsurge in the Black civil-rights movement in the late 1950s, Robeson's career saw a mild resurgence. He was able to tour both in the U.S. and abroad until illness overtook him in the mid-1960s. He died on January 23 in 1976.
After his death, the bourgeoisie, both Black and white, engaged in a hypocritical orgy of adulation, naming schools, college centers, and libraries after a man they hated, despised, and feared. All the while hiding and distorting what he really stood for: multiracial unity and a world run by and for working people—a communist world.
A person's life is a process and there was only one Paul Robeson. He was a communist, he belonged to the international working class and the international communist movement. He was a militant supporter of both.

Kevin Whitfield, a cherished member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), died on August 12, 2021 from Alzheimer’s disease. Kevin was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and spent part of his youth in the Panama Canal Zone. There he saw firsthand the horrible impact of U.S. imperialism on the lives of the local working class. This experience helped set Kevin on the path to a life committed to destroying capitalism. Following World War II, his family returned to Queens, NYC where Kevin attended high school and later Columbia University studying Classics and languages.
Kevin’s ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) financed college education required him to serve for more than four years in the Navy. As a U.S. naval intelligence officer fluent in both Russian and German, Kevin was assigned to listen to Russian-language radio reports in the Far East. This gave him a unique perspective on the workings of both the U.S. and Russian militaries. He was forced to listen as fellow U.S. officers bragged about the genocide of three million Koreans killed during that war. Similarly, he witnessed the growing hypocrisy and imperialism of the once socialist Soviet Union.
Fighting imperialism and racism
After his Navy tour of duty, Kevin completed his PhD at Columbia and taught Classics at Columbia, Wesleyan, Brooklyn College, and later UMass/Boston. With his background as a former Naval officer and Irish working-class boy who made good, Kevin could easily have become an academic star. Instead, when anti-Vietnam war students approached him, he gave them his full support. His active opposition to the Vietnam War was a key factor in his denial of tenure at Wesleyan and Brooklyn College.
In the early 1970’s Kevin met members of  the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and joined the fight to build a multiracial, antiracist mass movement. A few years later, Kevin and his family moved to Boston, where he taught for nearly 10 years at UMass/Boston. He helped build a large and influential InCAR chapter that led to many young people joining PLP. The UMass group became the key component in the many antiracist (often violent) battles against the Klan and other racist groups in Boston and Connecticut. This also included battles against racist police terror in Boston, Worcester and Lowell. Kevin’s efforts helped stop Klan organizing in Boston and New England.
Fighting for communism
As a professor of classics (as well as philosophy and law), Kevin had a great knowledge not only of Greek and Latin, but also of ancient history. Unlike the idealists who one-sidedly glorified Athenian ‘democracy,’ Kevin would point out that Athens was a society based on slavery which conquered and oppressed other parts of the Mediterranean basin. He introduced thousands of students to communist ideas and participated in many campus struggles against budget cuts, racism, and military recruiters. Students would crowd into his office and enthusiastically discuss politics with him there or in the cafeteria.  
Kevin was a well studied and modest man who was always there when political work needed to be done, whether writing, editing and distributing leaflets, attending antiracist rallies, or supporting and advising comrades. He worked in community organizations fighting gentrification and evictions and built a communist base among his neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Serving the working class
Kevin and his wife Pat always welcomed people from all walks of life into their home for good food and provocative conversation. You never heard Kevin complain. He was always comradely, gracious, and supportive, with an ability to make constructive criticisms without judgment. He lent a global and historical perspective to our meetings, struggled with us to follow the plans we had made, and learn from our mistakes.
He modeled for other academics in the Party how to shed the arrogance that’s inherent in professional training and to use one’s position as a “highly educated” person to serve the working class in word and deed. He was a beloved member of the PLP community in the Boston area. We will long remember Kevin’s many contributions. He will live on in our hearts, minds, and in our continued fight back.

The year-long civil war in Ethiopia is a fight over power and money between two vicious groups of local capitalist rulers. It also reflects the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry between China and the United States for control over the strategically vital Horn of Africa. Most of all, it reminds us that there are no good bosses, no side that represents the interests of the international working class. Workers in Ethiopia have no future under the criminal, Nobel Prize-winning prime minister or the fake-left, identity-based “liberation” forces that stole everything they could while in power.
Only communist revolution, led by a mass Progressive Labor Party, can stop the bosses’ endless blood-soaked clashes for maximum profit. Only communism, a society run by and for the working class, can put an end to sexism, racism, and exploitation.
Workers ravaged by bosses’ conflict
The latest conflict in Ethiopia began in November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered an offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF, a group long backed by the U.S. and widely rumored to be tied to the Central Intelligence Agency, had ruled the country with secret prisons and brazen corruption from 1991 to 2018. That’s when Abiy “was appointed by the ruling class to quell tensions and bring change, without upending the old political order” (CNN.com, 11/5). The move backfired when the TPLF—whose leaders were ousted from power and arrested for graft—rejected the new government and reportedly assaulted a federal army base outside Tigray’s regional capital.
The war has dragged on ever since—with workers, as always, bearing the brunt of it. According to a joint investigation by the United Nations and Ethiopia’s human rights commission, “both sides have engaged in violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law…war crimes and crimes against humanity” (Guardian, 11/3). Numerous first-hand accounts have told of civilian massacres, torture, and gang rapes. While most of the terror appears to have been perpetrated by Ethiopian government forces and their Eritrean allies, a “youth group called Samri killed ‘more than 200 civilians’—ethnic Amhara—in Mai Kadra, western Tigray, with the help of local police, militias and others affiliated with the rebel TPLF” (Guardian, 11/3).
Despite loud protests by the UN and calls for a ceasefire by the Joe Biden administration, it’s clear that workers have no “human rights” under capitalism, where they are treated either as commodities for profit or as cannon fodder in the bosses’ cutthroat competitions. To date, despite a media blackout, it’s estimated that tens of thousands have been killed in the fighting in Ethiopia—on top of the 1.4 million that were killed in the earlier, 17-year civil war that originally brought the TPLF to power. More than two million workers have been displaced, and a “man-made famine”—created by government blockades against emergency food deliveries—have left hundreds of thousands on the brink of starvation (Aljazeera, /11/4).
China rising
The carnage in Ethiopia has been fueled by arms exports from an array of capitalist bosses striving to gain a foothold in the Horn of Africa, from China and Russia to Germany, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (ipsnews.net, 11/25). Before a belated arms embargo declared by Biden on November 1, the U.S. had heavily invested in the “modernization” of the country’s military, dating back to the 1950s.
Besides the fact that it’s the second most populous country in Africa, why does Ethiopia get so much attention from the imperialist bosses? To begin with, it’s a matter of geography. Ethiopia is the dominant nation in the Horn of Africa, which controls the oil route from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea—from the Middle East to Europe. After being dominated by Britain and the U.S. and then invaded by Italy under Mussolini’s fascists in the runup to Word War II, Ethiopia became a semi-colony of the Soviet Union, pushing a state capitalist ideology that contributed nothing for the benefit of workers. After the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the U.S. rushed to fill the void. In recent years, however, there’s a new contender for regional influence, the rising capitalist power of China.
For China, Ethiopia is “the gateway to Africa” and the continental lynchpin for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China has flooded the country with inexpensive mobile phones, solar energy (in a country where only 30 percent of the population has access to electricity), and ambitious infrastructure projects. “By giving loans that are unable to be paid back in full, China holds Ethiopia firmly within its grasp, creating a never-ending cycle of debt…Chinese lenders require collateral: in this case land and resources. This places the country more into Chinese control, and supplies cheap land for China to build overseas manufacturing” (medium.com, 3/26/20).
The once-sleepy international airport in Addis Ababa is now the third busiest in East Africa, a major cargo hub for Chinese exports (medium.com, 3/26/20). China has also leveraged its growing power in the region by establishing its first overseas People’s Liberation Army naval base in neighboring Djibouti.
Fight for communism!
Never in Ethiopia’s history has there been a government that defends the interests of the working class. Workers have been oppressed by a succession of dictatorial, racist, and nationalist regimes and immersed in endless war. They have no role under capitalism except to suffer and die. The experience of Ethiopia shows the urgent necessity to end capitalism for all time with a mass international revolution that arises from the minds and hands of workers in the factories and fields. The revolutionary ideas of PLP will guide us to replace the dictatorship of the bosses with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Workers' internationalism will smash sexism, racism, imperialism, nationalism, and the exploitation of the working masses. Fight for communism! Build PLP in every corner of the planet!

CHICAGO, November 20—Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined hundreds of multiracial protestors downtown today to blast the racist “not guilty” verdict of the murderer Kyle Rittenhouse. The unsurprising results of the trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin are another clear reminder that a capitalist judicial system is designed to protect its racist and violent foundation. Only communism is capable of guaranteeing workers’ safety and rights. Once our class smashes racism, private property, and profit with revolution we will run a society that no longer fosters the likes of Rittenhouse and the institutions that have protected him.
For anyone familiar with the thoroughly racist and sexist nature of the legal system under capitalism, the result should come as no surprise. The capitalist bosses would love for antiracists to feel dejected and cynical. The presence of thousands of angry workers and youth marching across the country, however, proves that the fighting spirit of the working class is alive and well!
As communists in PLP we know we have to immerse ourselves in the mass movement in order to help guide spontaneous rage against the profit system’s abuses into a militant and disciplined Party fighting for mass international revolution. Attempting to reform capitalism is like trying to control a runaway train. PL’ers are on deck today and every day, with new and old friends, to win our class to the lifelong fight for communism!
Racist capitalism let Rittenhouse off the hook
The PLP arrived at the rally, armed with a bullhorn and hundreds of CHALLENGEs and leaflets, ready to call for revolution. We split up into small groups to cover different spots around the plaza, where we could hand out literature and chat with workers.
Many workers seemed especially eager to take copies of CHALLENGE and our flyer, with some asking how they could get more involved with the Party on the spot. In contrast to the dead-end strategies offered by the opportunist politicians and reform groups at the rally, our calls for workers’ power through communism clearly struck a chord.
In contrast to the bogus liberal claim that it was “white-skin privilege”that got Rittenhouse (and many others like him) off the hook, he in fact got off because of his service in upholding the racist capitalist status quo that views property as more valuable than workers’, especially Black workers’ lives. It was this racist, sexist system that filled Rittenhouse’s head with a rotten ideology and armed him with an assault rifle to travel across state lines to shoot and kill two antiracist white workers fighting for justice for Jacob Blake. While Black and Latin workers are super-exploited by racism, all workers suffer at the hands of capitalism and it is with mutliracial, international fightback that we will truly win.
It is practically certain that if any Black or Latin worker tried what Rittenhouse got away with they would never have made it out of Kenosha alive, much less faced a trial. But to push the “white privilege” line is to distort the truth of the source and beneficiary of racism and all other divisive anti-worker attacks: capitalism.
Racist ideas and violence attack Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant workers first and hardest, but they are used to lower the living standards of the entire working class, including white workers. When white workers unite with other workers in militant antiracist struggle, the bosses and their thugs don’t hesitate to unleash state terror on them too. Our multiracial working-class unity is truly our most powerful weapon against capitalism, and thus the bosses’ biggest fear.
PL’ers crank up the militancy
By the time the rally turned into a march, our collective was ready to turn up the militancy a notch. Using our bullhorn, we took turns in leading the crowds in chants like, “The kkkops, the kkkourts, the Ku Klux Klan! All are a part of the bosses’ plan!” and “What does Rittenhouse mean? We’ve got to fight back!” Other PL’ers and friends gave speeches in between chants, including a Black worker who blasted the bosses’ criminal injustice system to wide applause.
A little boldness can often go a long way. Many marchers who were at first hesitant to take a flyer or CHALLENGE were more inclined the second time around after seeing the Party’s communist politics in action. To this end, we ran out of the 500 flyers we printed up as well as close to 400 copies of CHALLENGE.
Most inspiringly, we were able to get contact information for nearly 10 young antiracists, including one who was familiar with the Party from CHALLENGE sales in a south side neighborhood! What we do really counts!
Join PLP to turn the guns around
As uplifting as the march turned out for us, we have to keep a sober assessment about the dangers surrounding the international working class. From fascists like Rittenhouse and the kkkops shooting us down in the streets, to the imperialist bosses whipping up nationalism to try to get us to fight and die in their wars of profit, we must prepare to confront capitalist state violence with revolutionary violence. Pacifism and trusting in the bosses’ courts are two deadly miscalculations for our class.
The international communist PLP represents the force that will one day turn the guns around and smash the bosses and their murderous, racist profit system for good. Join us in the struggle to ensure that the day of our collective liberation comes sooner.