“Congress opened debate on passage of a new Internal Security Act, the infamous McCarren Act, which equated dissent with treason and established concentration camps to detain subversives in time of national emergency. When it passed in September, Truman vetoed it, at some political risk, but the House overrode him. The days when Robeson could count on at least minimal sufferance had passed.

Yet he refused to trim his sails to any degree. Speaking out at a Civil Rights Congress rally at Madison Square Garden at the end of June 1950 to protest Truman’s action in sending troops to Korea, Robeson excoriated the President for tying the welfare of the American people ‘to the fate of a corrupt clique of politicians south of the 38th parallel in Korea.’ The meaning of Truman’s order, Robeson predicted, would not be lost on Black Americans: ‘They will know that if we don’t stop our armed adventure in Korea today- tomorrow it will be Africa…I have said it before and say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home…’ When Robeson had ‘said it before,’ in Paris in 1949, he had brought on a national debate; those same words, repeated in 1950, marked its foreclosure. The climate had changed. The government decided to muzzle him.

He had planned to return to Europe at the end of the summer, but the State Department planned otherwise. It issued a ‘stop notice’ at all ports to prevent Robeson from departing, and J. Edgar Hoover sent out an ‘urgent’ teletype ordering FBI agents to locate Robeson’s whereabouts.” -“Paul Robeson: A Biography” By: Martin Duberman

“Robeson spoke out against New Zealand’s discrimination against the Maoris and Australia’s more overt brutality to its own native population, the aborigines. There were about seventy-five thousand aborigines in a total Australian population of ten million, driven off their land into a desert interior scarce in food and water and nearly devoid of the game they had traditionally hunted and lived on. Without the vote or representation, the aborigines roamed the Outback, a desperately abused people…

The more Robeson learned about the condition of the aborigines as his tour progressed through the country, the more his indignation grew. Through Faith Bandler, an aboriginal activist, the Robesons saw a private showing of a fifteen-minute film made in the late 1950s on the plight of the aborigines in the Warburton Ranges. As she remembers it, ‘The tears started to stream down his face’; but when the film showed thirsty children waiting for water, his sorrow turned to anger. Flinging to the floor the black cap he had taken to wearing on his head for warmth, he swore aloud that he would return to Australia and help bring attention to the appalling conditions in which the aborigines lived. He repeated that promise a few days later to the press, and again at a large peace reception for him at Paddington Hall in Sydney. ‘There’s no such thing as a ‘backward’ human being,’ he told the crowd. ‘There is only a society which says they are backward.’ He cited the case of his own family: his cousins in North Carolina who worked the cotton and tobacco fields were also called ‘backward.’ He cited the case of his own family: his cousins in North Carolina who worked the cotton and tobacco fields were also called ‘backward’; that meant they hadn’t been allowed to attend school. ‘The indigenous people of Australia,’ he roared, ‘are my brothers and sisters.'” -“Paul Robeson: A Biography” By: Martin Duberman