boro boys and had spoken for the Loyalist, anti-Franco side in the Spanish Civil War, now blasted Robeson. Contending that Communists "are not intellectually honest," and that "deceit and falsehood are part of their stock in trade," Kaltenborn concluded:
The issue of free speech for Communists would arise far less frequently and would be much easier to handle if we outlawed the Communist Party. It is an association of subversive agents of a foreign government. It is not a political party. There is no reason to grant freedom of speech to any member of a group which proposes to use it to destroy it.
Robeson had few supporters. Except for the Baltimore Afro-American which headlined "Air Not Free at NBC," the black press remained conspicuously silent. A few union members, mainly the Harlem Trade Union Council, picketed the NBC offices. The American Civil Liberties Union also backed Robeson's position. It formally protested the network action as "censorship by private pressure."
For her part, Eleanor Roosevelt was unrepentant. After first denying that she personally had asked Robeson to participate (the invitation was made to the Progressive party, and the party selected Robeson, its vice-president), Roosevelt told a delegation of angry Young Progressives that she would never share a program with Robeson "because it would give the impression that she endorsed his left-wing political views, with which she sharply differs."
Robeson, however, was not silent. He used the occasion to attack NBC. "It is not surprising to me," he asserted, "that a huge network which practically excludes colored persons from its large army of professional personnel should balk at a discussion of the colored group in American politics which professes to present all points of view."
According to Robeson, NBC "evidently does not want colored Americans reminded too forcibly of the fact which becomes increasingly evident ... that is, that there is no real hope for my people—American working men of the majority of the population—in the two old parties which are wedded to a program of Cold War abroad and privation and suppression of popular dissent at home.
The decision to ban Robeson from American television had political and racial dimensions. Politically, it was simply too controversial for a commercial network to air the views of an admitted leftist at a time when Cold War tensions were nationally unsettling. Further, a young network was not going to incur the wrath of government and the public at a time when its investment in the nascent industry was substantial and TV was still not entrenched as a mass medium. When Robeson was rebuked by people as diverse as the African-American baseball star Jackie Robinson and members of Congress, questions about free speech were academic to NBC.
Without being enunciated, there was a racial component to the Robeson affair. He was an outspoken political activist. A powerful man with deep convictions, he was not content with personal success gained while other African Americans remained deprived. And Robeson was unrelenting. The day before his NBC appearance was announced, he was quoted as saying that "Russia's program of raising the little people of all races to basic equality in their nation and in the world is the opposite of what our country and England and the Fascists stand for."
Because of his global prestige, Robeson was a political force. Because he was a black man, this force was inherently racial. Unlike other black spokesmen, Robeson was neither an academic like W. E. B. DuBois, nor narrowly focused like A. Philip Randolph—neither a reactive voice like those in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nor tied to an unjust national system like those few blacks in Congress. From his cultural position, he brought humanistic criticism to bear upon the American conscience. In his rhetoric, moreover, he linked the African-American cause with decolonization in Africa and Asia and with the plight of oppressed people around the world.
Except for rare appearances by men like Ralph Bunche of t