He also believed Russia was free of racism. ``I was under the impression that perhaps socialism was better than capitalism,'' he reflects, speaking slowly and deliberately. The American depression had just begun as the only skilled black laborer at Ford, he felt insecure about his future.
They offered him almost twice what he was earning, free housing, and other luxuries to make tools and teach in the Soviet Union. His just-released book, ``Black on Red,'' chronicles his 81 years.Ī naturalized American citizen born in Jamaica, Robinson was working for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1930 when the Russians came calling. It was not until recently, with renewed American citizenship, that he felt free to tell his story. Finally, in 1974, he did ``escape,'' as he put it in an interview with the Monitor, to Uganda, with the help of Idi Amin's ambassador to Moscow. This is but one episode in the extraordinary life of a man who ended up spending 44 years in the Soviet Union - most of them as a Soviet citizen, the last 27 of them trying to get out.
Sooner or later, if properly primed by Moscow, they will `arise and slash thraldom's chains' as the Soviet anthem puts it.''Īnd so, the article continued, ``that coal-black prot'eg'e of Joseph Stalin, Robert Robinson, was elected, somewhat to his surprise, to the Moscow Soviet.'' Two weeks later, Time magazine wrote: ``Negroes, so every Soviet child is taught, are the Black Hopes of Communism in the US. But fearing he would lose his contract, which would almost certainly mean returning to unemployment in a United States gripped by the depression, he accepted. On that day, the black American working as a toolmaker at the First State Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow was ``elected'' to the city council.
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