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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.

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
Stills
America
Still
Tried
States
Citizens
Right
Second
People
Class
Fighting
United

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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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I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. They are not-in Mississippi. They are not-in Montgomery. That is why I am here today. . . . You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the rights of his people!.
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The talents of an artist, small or large, are God-given... They are a sacred trust.
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Like any other people, like fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in every land, when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people, they have registered for peace.
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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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I am truly happy that I am able to travel from time to time to the USSR the country I love above all. I always have been, I am now and will always be a loyal friend of the Soviet Union.
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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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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.
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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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You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction.
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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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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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