I found it very offensive to my people. It makes the Negro childlike and innocent and is in the old plantation hallelujah shouter tradition... the sa… - Paul Robeson

I was not prepared for the happiness I see on every face in Moscow, said Robeson. I was aware that there was no starvation here, but I was not prepared for the bounding life; the feeling of safety and abundance and freedom that I find here, wherever I turn. I was not prepared for the endless friendliness, which surrounded me from the moment I crossed the border. I had a technically irregular passport, but all this was brushed aside by the eager helpfulness of the border authorities. And this joy and happiness and friendliness, this utter absence of any embarrassment over a 'race question' is all the more keenly felt by me because of the day I spent in Berlin on the way here, and that was a day of horror—in an atmosphere of hatred, fear and suspicion.

Could I say that the reason that I am here today, you know, from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.

The telling of these truths is an important part of our work in building a strong and broad peace movement in the United States...at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists.