Last week, on April 9th, the centennial of Robeson's birth was celebrated throughout the US, especially by Black organizations. There is no doubt, Robeson was a tremendously gifted individual.

The son of a former slave turned preacher, Robeson attended Rutgers University, where he was an All-America football player. Upon graduating from Rutgers at the head of his class, he rejected a career as a professional athlete and instead entered Columbia University. He obtained a law degree in 1923, but because of the lack of opportunity for blacks in the legal profession, he took up performing.

Robeson became world famous as Joe in the musical play "Show Boat" with his rendition of "Ol' Man River." He reprised this role in the 1936 film version.

He traveled extensively, and was welcomed as a celebrity in the Soviet Union. Robeson was ecstatic with this new-found society, concluding, according to New York Times Book Review contributor John Patrick Diggins, "that the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and that Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. 'Here, for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity.'"

While rightly criticizing the United States for laws which illegally discriminated against minorities, Robeson proclaimed the Soviet Union to be free of racial strife and division. In fact, Stalin carried out some of the most horrendous acts of genocide against racial minorities in this century. From 1930-1937 alone, an estimated 14.5 million people, many of them Ukrainians and Kazakhs, starved to death, died in Soviet labor camps, or were executed in a conscious effort to rid the Soviet Union of minority groups which stood in the way of Stalin's complete domination.

When asked about any differences he might have with Stalin, Robeson replied, "the coach tells you what to do and you do it." That this son of a slave could think of no higher purpose than to enslave his mind to the whims and vagaries of Soviet dictators; that this man, who was so fiercely independent and defiant in challenging authority in the United States, chose to blindly follow and support one of the most evil men to walk this earth, is sad in the extreme.

In a 1953 interview, long after Stalin's crimes were apparent to all, Robeson spoke eloquently of his admiration for Stalin: "They have sung - sing now and will sing his praise: 'Stalin, Glory to Stalin.' Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands. In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep: his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable. One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin - the shapers of humanity's richest present and future."

When Robeson's autobiography was published in 1958, leading literary journals, including the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune refused to review it. Robeson traveled again to the Soviet Union, but his health began to fail. He tried twice to commit suicide. Slowly deteriorating and virtually unheard from in the 1960s and 1970s, Robeson died after suffering a stroke in 1976.

His life, full of desire and achievement, passion and conviction, "the story of a man who did so much to break down the barriers of a racist society, only to be brought down by the controversies sparked by his own radical politics," Diggins concluded, "is at once an American triumph and an American tragedy."