ABSTRACT
Some time in the mid-1930s C.L.R. James was outside the British Museum when he spotted Paul Robeson. They'd known each other since James had first arrived in London in 1932. Despite a politics which divided them —Robeson was loyal to the official Communist movement, James at this point to Trotskyism — they got on well. As James later recounted, on 'this day Paul was bothered'. The problem was that the press was speculating about a liaison between a black male singer and a female member of the royal family and Robeson was anxious lest people believed it to be him. 'It is not me', he declared with force. James was tickled by the passion of Robeson's denial, and (as the story goes) replied:
Paul, you are a Negro from the United States; you are living in England and you say that people are linking your name to a member of the British royal family. That, my dear Paul, for you is not a scandal, it is not a disgrace. I laugh because you seem so upset about it.
