Paul Robeson and the Peetskill Riots

Speaking at a news conference in Harlem the following day, a still-shaken Robeson indicted the violence, singling out the police in particular as "fascist storm troopers". Of course, it was only four years since the end of World War II, what many of Robeson's leftist colleagues called the "war against fascism".

The term had a concreteness and pungency that has, for many, declined over the decades. But raising the spectre of fascism was a rhetorical tactic that many in Robeson's circle used to bring vehemence to state-sponsored racist violence in the form of police brutality, and to link that violence to more sensationalised practices associated with the South, like lynching.

In a speech at Harvard University a few weeks after the riots, Robeson's friend and associate William Patterson, head of the radical, Black-led Civil Rights Congress, affirmed this focus, insisting that "the men who rule us are bent on fascism. They brought about the anti-Negro and Jew demonstrations at Peekskill just to see how the people would react to their big step to fascism."

Passengers hold up some of the rocks that battered their bus as they left the concert grounds in Peekskill 

By 1949, Paul Robeson was a household name, but for many white and some Black Americans, his left-wing politics had begun to overshadow achievements in previous decades as an athlete (football at Rutgers University and in the young NFL), student (a bachelor of arts from Rutgers and a law degree from Columbia University), riveting actor (on stage and in movies), and charismatic singer.

In the 1930s, he devoted increasing time and energy to supporting the labour movement, anti-racist agitation, and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. He vocally supported the Loyalist (socialist) side in the Spanish Civil War, and paid a friendly visit to the Soviet Union, where he claimed to "feel like a human for the first time in my life".

Peekskill Riot - Gus Stadler

Robeson, like others drifting past the left-most reaches of the Democratic party, noted similarities between European fascist ideology and American capitalism. State-sponsored racism was one of the main points of alignment. As genocidal energy accelerated in Germany, the Black left, in particular, saw parallels not only in the enforcement of Southern Jim Crow policies but also in police brutality in Northern cities.

After the war, President Harry Truman and much of America assumed a warlike stance toward the nation's recent allies, the Soviets. But Robeson and others on the left continued to praise the communist nation as an experiment in social and economic equality. The "Popular Front" alliance of liberals and radicals split, with liberal groups - including major civil rights groups such as the NAACP - taking up the anti-Red line and distancing themselves from groups and individuals who had not denounced communism.

In this political environment, Robeson's radical politics made him unpopular with a wide swath of Americans. And, to be sure, the combination of his Blackness with his accomplishments, confidence, intelligence, grace and many talents - his status as what cultural critic Shana Redmond calls an "everything man" - meant he drew extra resentment and derision from many white Americans.