A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Saturday, December 3, 2016
BALM FOR THE SOUL
A reader sent me this link. It won't mean much to my younger readers, but the oldsters like me will tear up as we listen to it. This is a time when we need to recall our better angels.
The Peekskill riots were fascist and racist riots against Robeson and the video is of Pete Seeger singing "Hold the Line" about how they stood up to the same riots.
My parents often rented a summer "bungalow" in Mohegan Colony; I spent parts of several summers there. Since I was born in 1948, I missed some of this history! My father, a union pharmacist, would only bus up there on weekends.
(see http://forward.com/culture/113279/sixty-years-since-the-peekskill-riots/ : " The prominent singer and actor Paul Robeson (described in those days as a “Negro”), along with other artists such as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, was scheduled to give an open-air concert in Peekskill. This was not to be the first time that Robeson was to appear in the Peekskill area. Indeed, it was to be the fourth Robeson concert in as many summers. Mohegan Colony east of Peekskill near Yorktown, a cooperative community that served as an experiment in egalitarian living and child rearing, had hosted the concert in 1946. In 1947, the site was Peekskill Stadium, and in 1948 it was in nearby Crompond. But 1949’s concert was to be different. Guthrie, Seeger and Hays were all prominent leftists. So, famously, was Robeson."
I hope I still qualify as a younger reader, and I sang that song in my (socialist, Jewish) summer camp in a building named after Robeson.
ReplyDeleteThings haven't changed much in the U.S.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill_riots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOKMx1xfj-4
The Peekskill riots were fascist and racist riots against Robeson and the video is of Pete Seeger singing "Hold the Line" about how they stood up to the same riots.
My parents often rented a summer "bungalow" in Mohegan Colony; I spent parts of several summers there. Since I was born in 1948, I missed some of this history! My father, a union pharmacist, would only bus up there on weekends.
ReplyDelete(see http://forward.com/culture/113279/sixty-years-since-the-peekskill-riots/ : " The prominent singer and actor Paul Robeson (described in those days as a “Negro”), along with other artists such as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, was scheduled to give an open-air concert in Peekskill. This was not to be the first time that Robeson was to appear in the Peekskill area. Indeed, it was to be the fourth Robeson concert in as many summers. Mohegan Colony east of Peekskill near Yorktown, a cooperative community that served as an experiment in egalitarian living and child rearing, had hosted the concert in 1946. In 1947, the site was Peekskill Stadium, and in 1948 it was in nearby Crompond.
But 1949’s concert was to be different. Guthrie, Seeger and Hays were all prominent leftists. So, famously, was Robeson."