Click here to access brief article by Yasmin Dahnoun who interviews Nigerian born British actor Tayo Aluko in a podcast and posted on CounterFire (Britain).
This was posted for the 40th anniversary of Robeson's death (January 23, 1976). Aluko's brief history of Paul Robeson is correct as I remember from my readings many years ago. The birth date of Robeson's slave-father was 1844, not in the 1830s as Aluko thought.
It's a bit sad as an American to see his remembrance being commemorated in this left-liberal British website while it is being ignored in left and liberal alternative media in the US. (I only found a rather sterilized and childish version of his life and its significance posted on Huffington Post.)
It is certainly true that Robeson has been erased from American history, but then there is so much real history of ordinary people and events that has been erased and substituted with a lot of indoctrination to insure that people growing up in the US receive the "proper" understanding of capitalist rule and the American ruling capitalist class with all its "democratic" freedoms. If the people knew their true history, they might not be so eager to join the armed forces and travel to foreign lands to kill people. They might question corporate media's reports about what goes on in this country and abroad. And, horrors of horrors, they might revolt against the capitalist state and establish an equitable and just society capable of co-existing with nature.
