Quotes from Paul Robeson

My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave.

The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread.

Yes, I heard my people singing!-in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews-and my soul was filled with their harmonies.

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.

We ask for nothing that is not ours by right, and herein lies the great moral power of our demand.

This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen.

This is our home and this is our country. Beneath its soil lie bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled, and died. Here we were born and here we will stay.

The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.

As Americans, preserving the best of our traditions, we have the right- nay the duty-to fight for participation in the forward march of humanity

My father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you.

Four hundred million in India, and millions everywhere, have told you, precisely, that the colored people are not going to die for anybody: they are going to die for their independence.

You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction.

Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.

We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility.

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.

In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.

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.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

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.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

The talents of an artist, small or large, are God-given... They are a sacred trust.

Artists are the gate keepers of truth. We are civilization's radical voice.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

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.