That was quite the day for Mr Robinson....
Jackie Robinson was asked to denounce Paul Robeson. Instead, he went after Jim Crow.
His testimony before House Un-American Activities Committee was a turning point for the baseball hero
On the morning of July 18, 1949, Jackie Robinson, dressed sharply in a tan gabardine suit, arrived at a packed room in Washington, D.C., to testify before a congressional committee about the loyalty of black Americans. Flashbulbs popped as Robinson raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth. The subject was stage star Paul Robeson, a prominent Communist sympathizer and one of the most outspoken black men in the country.
Georgia congressman John S. Wood, chairman of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), had invited the Brooklyn Dodgers hero to testify. HUAC was founded in the late 1930s to investigate subversive activity and political organizations suspected of communism. Segregationists on the committee suspected that civil rights activists were members of the Communist Party. In 1948, however, HUAC’s own investigators had concluded that Communists had made little progress in recruiting African Americans.
But a speech given by Robeson in April 1949 before the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Congress in Paris had renewed the committee’s interest in the subject. Before Robeson even began his extemporaneous talk in Paris, an Associated Press reporter had filed a story quoting the actor as saying, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”
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https://theundefeated.com/features/j...fter-jim-crow/