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I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own.

Paul Robeson

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Paul Robeson
Age: 77 †
Born: 1898
Born: April 9
Died: 1976
Died: January 23
Actor
American Football Player
Basketball Player
Film Actor
Lawyer
Musician
Politician
Singer
Stage Actor
Writer
Princeton
New Jersey
Paul Leroy Robeson
Makes
Oppressed
Found
Everywhere
Music
Songs
Take
Ones
World
Learned
Sung
People
Land
Lands
Common
Negro
Song
Bond

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With Othello, Shakespeare posed this problem of a black man in a white society in the role that he's playing. And Shakespeare gave Othello such dignity - he came not from - as he said - not from hate but from honor, from a sense of his own human dignity. And to me, to my mind, there could be no greater character played.
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This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen.
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I found a special eagerness among the younger, and I am sorry to say, the more intelligent Negroes, to dismiss the spiritual as something beneath their new pride in their race. It is as if they wanted to put it behind them as something to be ashamed of.
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Could I say that the reason that I am here today, you know, from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.
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I did a long concert tour in England and Denmark and Sweden, and I also sang for the Soviet people, one of the finest musical audiences in the world.
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The talents of an artist, small or large, are God-given... They are a sacred trust.
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I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.
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We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility.
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Artists are the radical voice of civilization.
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The faces and the tactics of the leaders may change every four years, or two, or one, but the people go on forever.
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Freedom is a hard-bought thing.
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I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.
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But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.
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In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.
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The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.
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I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population.
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As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.
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Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.
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Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.
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If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.
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