الملوك والبيادق | جاكي روبنسون وبول روبسون في أمريكا

National Best Seller “I loved this book...I was looking forward to it more than any other book I've read in a long time, and Howard Bryant exceeded my high expectations. “[Kings and Pawns](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/kings-and-pawns-howard-bryant?variant=43822932000802)” is brilliantly designed and powerfully written.” - David Maraniss, author of _A Path Lit by Lightning_ A pioneering biography of two of America's giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives were forever changed by the Cold War and intersected explosively by its most famous weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee - by one of the best sports and culture writers working today. _Kings and Pawns_ tells a never-before-told story about sports and fame, about black America, and about the promise of integration through the lens of The Cold War, through two pivotal events. The first occurred on July 18, 1949, in Washington, D.C., when Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers star baseball player who contributed to the integration of blacks into the game, and then the most famous black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, impugning the credibility of Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone singer, and actor - who was himself the most famous black man in America. This testimony was a defining moment in Robinson's life, and contributed greatly to the destruction of his symbolic reputation in the eyes of America. The second incident occurred on June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last gasps of populist McCarthyism, when an exhausted and defiant Robeson - banned from leaving the United States - faced off with the Un-American Activities Committee in a decisive showdown at the same place where Robinson had appeared seven years earlier. These two moments will embody the ongoing struggle among black Americans between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of the emerging civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson represented two poles of a people torn apart by forces demanding loyalty without equality in return—one man testifying in conflicted service, the other harshly criticizing a country that would ultimately do them both great harm. In a time of intense division, in the midst of a new era of austerity in America, and in light of the silence of black athletes once again defending civil rights, the story of these two giants resonates today within the black American community and beyond. From the return of government abuses to restrict civil liberties to the Cold War rhetoric of the “enemy within” against citizens, Kings and Pawns tells the story of a moment that is still very present.