Robeson rejected the Cold War framing that the NAACP would embrace

Evidence

Robeson could not have cared less about America’s moral standing around the globe. For him, the idea of the United States as the defender of the free world was a lie. Back home black people languished as second-class citizens subject to arbitrary violence. So, with Du Bois, he called for a massive gathering in Washington, D.C., an American Crusade to End Lynching, “to demand that the killers be prosecuted and the Congress enact a federal antilynching law.” More than 3,000 black and white delegates, including Albert Einstein, gathered in Washington on September 23, 1946. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up the fork between Robeson’s radicalism and Walter White’s mainstreaming — the two-roads structure the reader needs for the value-gap argument.