A Centennial Tribute to an American Communist 49 person, was on the fringe of the communist movement and he was deeply committed to the Soviet Union. "If Communism means pointing out to the people that their lives are dominated by a handful,".he said in 1947, "I guess I'm a Communist." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, p.. 318. In 1955, Robeson noted that "Communist to me is not a dirty word. When you're working for the advancement of mankind it never occurs to you if a guy's a Communist or not." Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 430.] The CPUSA, from its early years, was militant in its stand against racism. The Comintern's 1928 document on the "Negro Question" strengthened the will of militant blacks to see the CPUSA as a part of the progressive black community. [The Communist Position on the Negro Question. Ed. William Z. Foster, Benjamin Davis, Jr., Eugene Dennis and others (New York: New Century Publishers, 1947).] Robeson, an underground party member, was close to its senior black leaders such as William Patterson and Ben Davis, Jr. When the government arrested, tried and sentenced many of these communists under the Smith Act, Robeson was on hand to defend them in the public arena. Robeson's attitude to communism was in diametrical opposition to that of people such as Aime Cesaire who left the French Communist Party in 1956 with the hope that "Marxism and Communism should serve Black people, not that Black people should serve Marxism and Communism." [David Caute, Fanon (London: Fontana, 1970), p. 48.] The opposition set-up between Marxism and Black liberation was incomprehensible to Robeson who once quipped that "the Communists use the Negro and we only wish more people would want to use us this way." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 380.] More bold than Paul Robeson was his wife Eslanda who moved rapidly towards the Left and left an indelible impression on the McCarthyites. Brought in front of McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities commission in 1949, she did not flinch. "I don't know anybody that is dedicated to overthrowing the government by force and violence," she said, "the only force and violence I know is what I have experienced and seen in this country, and it has not been by communists." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 413.] Robeson's well-known relations with the communist movement did not endear him to the world-wide anti-communist movement of the 1950s. There is an apocryphal story that relates to the UN delegate from India, P. Chakravarty who was also the permanent secretary of the Congress Party. Robeson planned to visit India in late 1958. At this time, Chakravarty sent a message to Christian Herter at the US Department of State expressing apprehension about this trip. Robeson's visit, he felt in the words of Herter, would "do great damage among the darker Indians if [he] gets away with the kind of propaganda he wants, allowing the already powerful Communist Party in India to attract still more converts." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, pp. 472, 473.] Chakravarty's "dark Indians" perhaps refers to dalits and other oppressed castes (given the erroneous notion that skin colour represents caste identity). The Congress' fears with regard to Communist influence amongst the oppressed castes may be seen in the crackdown on sanitation workers' unions as well as in concerted propaganda against communists conducted by the Congress in the neighbourhoods of the oppressed castes. [See my