{"id":2601,"date":"1947-04-18T21:42:44","date_gmt":"1947-04-18T21:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/?p=2601"},"modified":"2014-09-09T18:08:24","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T18:08:24","slug":"peoria-bans-robeson-he-vows-to-sing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/1947\/04\/18\/peoria-bans-robeson-he-vows-to-sing\/","title":{"rendered":"Peoria Bans Robeson; He Vows to Sing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Chicago Tribune<\/em> reported that a Peoria performance by black singer Paul Robeson was cancelled after \u00a0the Peoria City Council moved to ban the appearance of &#8220;any speaker or artist who is an avowed or active propagandist for un-American ideology.&#8221; \u00a0The city council&#8217;s resolution was intended to prevent the &#8220;enthusiastic follower of the Communist party&#8221;\u00a0from performing.<\/p>\n<p>The event marked the beginning of the blacklisting of Robeson, who had been affiliated with radical causes through the 1930s and 1940s. Peoria&#8217;s City Council was responding, in part, to the investigation of Robeson by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a major arm of political McCarthyism through the early-1950s.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <em>Tribune,<\/em> Robeson was offered a smaller performance venue, Peoria City Hall, for his cancelled concert slot. Drawing on the fighting language of World War II, Robeson accused the city council of &#8220;fascist techniques.&#8221; The <em>Tribune <\/em>put a Cold War spin on Robeson&#8217;s word choice: it\u00a0noted that Robeson&#8217;s charge of fascism was\u00a0&#8220;often hurled at political opponents of communists.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Chicago Tribune reported that a Peoria performance by black singer Paul Robeson was cancelled after \u00a0the Peoria City Council moved to ban the appearance of &#8220;any speaker or artist who is an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,157,235,9,24],"tags":[162,146,124,145],"class_list":["post-2601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1946-52","category-robeson-blackballed-in-peoria","category-a-more-lonely-crusade","category-peoria-an-introduction","category-segregation-desegregation","tag-anti-communism","tag-paul-robeson","tag-segregation","tag-the-american-legion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2601"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2616,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions\/2616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}