40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST On 9 April 1958, Robeson was to turn 60. In these six decades, this man of African and other ancestry, made a name for himself as an American football player, as a fine singer of Opera and of slave spirituals, as a capable actor (notably in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones) and finally, as a bold speaker for the cause that he championed with a passion, the fight for social justice. This latter activity earned him disapprobation from his government and from too many of his fellow US citizens who capitulated to the terror of McCarthyism. From the early 1940s until the end of his life (1976), Robeson was harassed by the US government and its political police, the Federal Bureau of Investigations [FBI] for his membership in the Communist Party of USA [CPUSA]. FBI agents followed Robeson, tapped his phones, read his mail, intimidated his friends and attempted to destroy his career. On the last score, the US State Department denied Robeson his passport from 1951 to 1958; he refused to sign an anticommunist oath and he used this denial as a means to campaign for the release of the CPUSA leaders held as political prisoners under the Smith Act. The US government made every attempt to malign Robeson in the media. In 1950, a US official in Accra proposed that a black public figure write an article that "must detail Robeson's spiritual alienation from his country and from the bulk of his people." Such an article would reduce the immense importance of Robeson and communism for the anti colonial struggles in Africa. [Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson, A Biography (New York: The New Press, 1996), p. 394.] Like any fighter for justice, Robeson was alienated, but not from the masses of the people. He was alienated from the power elite and the dominant classes. After the anti-Robeson riots fomented by "American stormtroopers" in Peekskill in August 1949, Robeson declared that he was a loyal American: "I will be loyal to the America of the true traditions; to the America of the abolitionists, of Harriet Tubman, of Thaddeus Stevens, of those who fought for my people's freedom, not of those who tried to enslave them. And I will have no loyalty to the Forrestals, to the Harrimans, to the Wall Streeters..." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 367.] He was loyal, in other words, to the class culture of the working people and not to the state that ruled at the behest of the dominant classes. This admirable man, hounded by the country who denied him even a passport, was to turn 60 on 9 April 1958. In India, Nehru released a statement asking for widespread celebration of the occasion "not only because Paul Robeson is one of the greatest artists of our generation, but also because he has represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us—the cause of human dignity." [Duberman, Paul Robeson, p. 461.] US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, US Consul General Turner and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles attempted to stop the celebrations (incidentally, Bunker was later US Emissary in Indonesia during the 1965 CIA-inspired coup in Indonesia and US Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1967-73). Turner approached Chief Justice M. C. Chagla, president of the All-India Paul Robeson Celebration committee, and asked him to cancel the event since "Americans would certainly interpret [the] celebration as Communist-inspired and even anti-American and that many would regard [it] as evidence that India was going Communist." [W.