Journey's End

As one of the world's highest-paid musicians, Paul Robeson had traveled far from the house in Princeton, NJ. where he was born the son of a runaway slave. But he wasn't satisfied with his progress in the U.S.; 16 years ago, he went all the way for Moscow, and decided that Negroes had a better chance of advancing under the Commies. For the last three years, in London, Moscow, Paris, Manhattan, he had faithfully slandered the Atlantic pact, the Marshall Plan, the U.S. defense of Korea--shouting, all the while, for Soviet-style "peace."

Last week the State Department, to block his appearance at Red "peace" riots abroad, voided his passport. Robeson would have to stay put a while in the land that has seemed to him, at various times, fascist, imperialistic, bourgeois and warmongering. To the State Department, Robeson's statements did not seem in the best interests of the U.S., or representative of the U.S. people. A sample: "It is unthinkable that [American Negroes] would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations," against a country (U.S.S.R.) "which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind."

Said a State Department spokesman: "We won't give a passport to anybody else ... up to the same thing."

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