Reply #9: I was a child caught up in the middle of it [View All]

[sherilocks]

My grandmother, a card-carrying Communist, was convinced that "Negroes" and labor got a better deal through Communism. After the Rosenbergs were executed she showed up at our house and began burning a lot of papers. She also attended the various Paul Robeson concerts, including the riots described here, ( Violence in Peekskill)

http://debs.indstate.edu/a505v5_1949.pdf

My father had to go out and rescue her and drive her and others back to NYC on the back of his flatbed truck, through back roads and a gauntlet of stone-throwing freeper types.

Earl Robinson came to our home to compose his music in order to escape his blacklisting. Robinson info here:

<snip>

In the mid-1940s, and then in the 1960s, following a blacklisting that stemmed from his association with the Communist Party, Robinson worked in Hollywood on film scores, The House I Live In, A Walk in the Sun, The Roosevelt Story, California, Romance of Rosy Ridge, among others. In the mid-1950s, he chaired the music department at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City.

<snip>

http://www.historylink.org/output.cfm?file_id=2029

I could go on and on, but this should give you some idea. I didn't learn of it, I was there.