7

YOU CANNOT IMAGINE WHAT THAT MEANS

Moscow, Russia

I arrived at the beautiful Art Nouveau building late one winter afternoon. The long flight had delivered me to Moscow in a state of scratchy-eyed exhaustion, and then I’d walked out of Domodedovo airport into a snowstorm, for which the warm fug of the plane had been no preparation.

At Mokhovaya Street, an elderly porter in frockcoat and top hat swung open the hotel door with tremendous ceremony, and yet somehow his deference still signalled a faint disapproval at the foolishly under-dressed foreigner. I registered, vaguely, the splendour of the lobby — the marble columns sculpted into marble youths; the thick carpet, intricately patterned in scarlet; the chandeliers and the mirrors. But all that really mattered to me was the heat.

I had booked into the famous Hotel National, even though a single night’s lodging there substantially depleted my accommodation budget. But despite my exhaustion, I was much too wired to sleep and so, after dumping my bags in my room, I ventured back out into the storm.

This time, the doorman’s slight elevation of his eyebrow was a response to a surfeit rather than a deficit of clothing, for I’d layered almost all the garments I’d brought in an unflattering bulge beneath my jacket. It scarcely helped. Outside in the street, the Russian winter clawed at me again, nipping at my fingers and toes.

Still, Red Square was only five hundred metres away, and I could see the turrets of the Kremlin, just across the road. Paul had stayed in the National many times, and Paul had walked the path I was now taking, stepping over to the symbolic heart of Soviet power.

The defeat in Spain made a broader war inevitable, as Paul had predicted. In 1939, with that conflict looming, he and Essie and Pauli sailed back to America, determined to spend the duration of the Second World War in their native land.

That year, he recorded ‘Ballad for Americans’. Its lyrics celebrated the multitude of American ethnicities and faiths; they lauded ‘old Abe Lincoln’ as a man who ‘hated oppression’, and asserted that ‘man in white skin can never be free while his black brother is in slavery’. The song presented the United States as an unfinished project, a democracy that should and could extend its foundational principles to those historically marginalised by power.

Over the next decade, Paul enjoyed the greatest acclaim of his career. In 1943, Time magazine dubbed him ‘probably the most famous living Negro’. In 1944, when Paul turned forty-six, his birthday was marked with a huge celebration in New York. Twelve thousand people sought to attend; four thousand were turned away. The guests included Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, and Richard Wright, and almost every other African-American celebrity of note. Babe Ruth, the baseball legend, toasted Paul; so too did the African independence fighter Kwame Nkrumah, the singer Cab Calloway, and the variety host Ed Sullivan.

The breadth of affection might have seemed improbable, given Paul’s increasingly public radicalism. But the war had created a massive new audience for his politics.

Paul had returned from the Spanish carnage a fervent anti-fascist, committed to an international Popular Front: a global movement uniting democrats and radicals against Hitler, Mussolini, and their allies. That was how he understood the Second World War (at least, after 1941). The fight against Hitlerism was, he said, a People’s War, a new incarnation of the cause embraced by Oliver Law and his comrades in Spain. It would extend democracy at home, it would end colonialism abroad, and it would abolish racism everywhere.

Conservative America did not, perhaps, like such rhetoric. Certainly, mainstream politicians were more circumspect with their words and promises. But with the country struggling against both Germany and Japan, Paul’s long opposition to fascism provided him with more political capital than men who’d either sympathised with or been indifferent to the dictators and their regimes. Paul’s ideas were now aligned with the mainstream — or, more exactly, the mainstream was aligned with him.

Even his strident support for the Soviet Union became, for a time, an asset rather than a liability. For the moment, the USSR was a key wartime ally, with the Red Army keeping Hitler’s troops occupied on the Eastern Front. As the United States channelled billions of dollars in aid to the Soviets, President Roosevelt explained to his countrymen: ‘We are going to get along with [Stalin] and the Russian people — very well indeed.’ Hollywood duly consulted with the government’s Office of War Information in the production of a string of pro-Soviet movies, while Life magazine issued a special USSR edition (packaged with an avuncular cover portrait of Joe Stalin), in which readers learned that the Russians were ‘one hell of a people’, who ‘look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’. Paul’s passion for Soviet Russia suddenly seemed patriotic rather than subversive — so much so that President Roosevelt enlisted him to advertise US war bonds.

After ten minutes of slipping across cobbles gleaming with ice and moonlight, I reached Red Square. The cold felt somehow metallic, an assault on my extremities that began from the inside rather than the out. But I wiped the snow from my eyes and peered around. Lenin’s tomb looked much as I expected, an ugly cider-coloured ziggurat squatting morosely next to the Kremlin’s fortified walls. But I hadn’t anticipated the wheezing merry-go-round flashing its lights in the parade ground where the Soviet army had once marched past Stalin and his generals — and I certainly wasn’t prepared for the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed.

Though I’d seen pictures, somehow I’d still imagined the basilica in Western terms, as a Russian variant of the dour Anglican churches to which I was accustomed. But the snow fell faster and heavier and the cacophony from the hurdy-gurdy reverberated and the preposterous towers seemed to jump out of the night sky in psychedelic green and blue and apricot.

That was my first experience of Moscow: the city as a kind of slow-onset hallucination.

Yes, I was exhausted and frozen and ready to drop. All the same, there was something in that moment, a perception that remained with me throughout my stay. In some ways, Moscow presented as merely another modern European capital, equipped with the usual array of historical, architectural, and cultural attractions. Yet the city’s Russianness — a tradition defined, after all, as much against as with Western Europe — asserted itself unpredictably, confounding the expectations of the English-speaking visitor.

What had that meant for Westerners such as Paul, coming to the Soviet Union in the 1930s? What had it been like to simultaneously confront a radically different culture and a radically different social system? How, as an outsider, did you distinguish between the two? It would be easy to mistake the specifically Russian for the specifically communist. It would be easy, I realised, to go disastrously wrong.

‘I hesitated to come. I listened to what everybody had to say, but I didn’t think this would be any different for me from any other place. But — maybe you’ll understand — I feel like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being.’

Paul’s first outburst of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union occurred in the National, in a conversation with the film director Sergei Eisenstein, on whose invitation he and Essie and Marie Seton had voyaged to Moscow in 1934.

In the morning, when I was at least somewhat restored, I was better able to appreciate the National. The hotel had been built at the very beginning of the twentieth century to serve aristocrats, politicians, and other dignitaries, blending modernist and Renaissance elements in an architectural celebration of Russian opulence. Damaged by gunfire during the revolution and then expropriated by the Bolsheviks, the National had briefly provided accommodation for Lenin and Trotsky, before becoming home to the first Soviet government.

In the early 1930s, Stalin decided to encourage foreign visitors, through the state-run Intourist travel bureau. When the Robesons arrived, the National had just been re-opened as a luxury hotel. As honoured guests, they’d been provided with an extensive suite looking over Red Square, complete with a grand piano. Their bath was made of marble, an overawed Essie recorded, and a huge white bearskin rug stretched across their floor.

My room, the cheapest available, was significantly smaller: a serviceable but unspectacular billet, with no piano and no bearskin. Such was commerce, I told myself: you got what you paid for. But in the lobby, the corridors, and the dining hall, the extravagance in which Essie had luxuriated was still very much in evidence. All the lightshades were tassled and brocaded, all the marble was gilded, and the ornate chairs were so delicate and overstuffed that I found myself reluctant to ever sit.

On this, his first visit to Moscow, Paul was treated as an honoured guest — almost a head of state — by a regime conscious of the political importance of impressing him. This pattern would continue on all subsequent trips.

It would be easy, then, to see his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union as the drearily familiar tale of a gullible celebrity flattered by the attentions of a dictatorship. Yet that wasn’t the whole story.

Yes, the Robesons were taken on the customary tour of factories, schools, and hospitals, and yes, they were assiduously duchessed by the Soviet elite. But if Paul was impressed, it was also because Moscow in 1934 was genuinely impressive.

He had arrived in the midst of the so-called ‘Three Good Years’, when the effects of industrialisation were becoming apparent, and the worst manifestations of the Terror were yet to come. By then Paul knew something of working-class life in Britain: he’d seen the bleak squalor of the Welsh mining towns; he understood intimately how millions of lives had been blighted by the Great Depression. He couldn’t help but notice that Moscow, by contrast, was bounding forward, its economy apparently defying the worldwide slump.

From his window, he’d remarked to Essie on the scaffolding erected where the new underground metro system was being built.

On my first morning in Moscow, I went straight to Teatralnaya, the station whose construction Paul had witnessed. I let the escalators glide me under the ground and into a startlingly grand hallway, where the columns were lit with crystal lamps, and chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

The elegance reflected the sensibilities of the 1930s, yet the design remained futuristic rather than old-fashioned. The facility was intended as a palace of the people, an architectural anticipation of the world to come and an effusive statement about the value accorded to Soviet citizens and their daily commute.

The Moscow metro astounded me, far more so than the luxury in the National. The old stations were gorgeous, and, on every mundane journey I took in the city, I marvelled anew at the care lavished by those long-dead designers on a public utility, particularly when I contrasted the system with the general shoddiness of the privatised rail networks of the twenty-first century. The Moscow stations were spectacular now — and they must have been all the more so then, in a city dragging itself out of the starvation of the Russian Civil War.

That was why among young Muscovites, in particular, there was genuine enthusiasm in the 1930s for the Stalin regime and its grandiose plans. ‘We were born to make fairytales come true,’ proclaimed a popular song — and the belief in transformation, in the conscious remaking of the old order, lent credibility to the other claims Paul was hearing.

The leaders of the Soviet Union said they opposed racial prejudice. That didn’t seem so extraordinary today — but in 1934, of course, discrimination was state policy throughout the United States, even as the Russians were lavishing hospitality on the Robesons, a pair of visitors who both happened to be black.

Besides, Paul quickly developed an intense friendship with Eisenstein, the great filmmaker and pioneering film theorist, who explained the Soviet attitudes further. The two men bonded partly over the movie about Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture they planned to shoot, and partly over their ideas about national minorities and the relationship between different cultures.

Though Paul didn’t know it, Eisenstein had already fallen from Stalin’s favour (a situation that meant the Toussaint project would never be realised). But the director genuinely believed in what he saw as the USSR’s efforts to overcome racial and national oppression. Paul accompanied him to the state-funded Jewish Theatre, where a major Yiddish production of King Lear was rehearsing. The comparison was irresistible: Paul had struggled mightily to secure the opportunity to play Othello, the one Shakespearean role marked as non-white; in Moscow, Lear could be a Yiddish-speaking Jew.

One day on their trip, he was walking with Essie and Marie through the snow in Pushkin Square when they encountered a group of children. A girl spied Paul — so much bigger and darker than anyone else nearby — coming towards her, and she screamed. But it was a cry of delight, not of terror. She ran over and hugged Paul’s knees. When he picked her up, her playmates came running, too, until Paul was almost buried beneath a mound of children, all squirming to touch this fascinating stranger.

The encounter was, in a sense, utterly trivial. But it stunned Paul. In Moscow, white children could greet a dark-skinned stranger with unfeigned happiness. He put the girl down and said goodbye in Russian, and then he turned to the women. ‘They have never been told to fear black men,’ he said, with something like wonder.

Paul had long known that racism could be fought — William had taught him that. But in Soviet Russia, he thought he’d found practical evidence that it could be defeated. Suddenly, a society without discrimination by colour was not a mere fantasy; it was, he concluded, the everyday experience in a communist city.

That conviction sustained him for the rest of his political life. And in the 1940s, in particular, he was in a position to put his principles into action. Accordingly, throughout the war, he used his new stature as a weapon against Jim Crow, in interventions prefiguring some of the more famous protests of the civil-rights era.

Early in one concert in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942, Paul stopped performing and addressed the crowd. He’d suddenly realised, he told them, that his listeners had been allocated segregated seats, contrary to the explicit promises made to him.

He would continue with the show, he said, because he didn’t want to disappoint his African-American fans. But he would be singing under protest.

The apology Paul received from the booking agent illustrated his newfound political currency, with a local African-American editor approvingly declaring that his militant stance had ‘spurred the Negro citizens here to wage a campaign against discrimination in our tax-supported buildings’.

Again and again, Paul insisted that the destruction of fascism meant freedom for the people of India and the Caribbean; that after the war, Africa would not return to colonial subservience. America needed to accept, he declared, that the downfall of Hitler would herald massive social change, with the oppressed everywhere demanding their liberation.

He believed that so fervently because he thought he’d seen how liberation might look. That was the import of his discussion with Eisenstein, that day in the National.

‘Before I came, I could hardly believe that such a thing could be,’ Paul had said. ‘Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity. You cannot imagine what that means to me, as a Negro.’

‘Some people call me the Russian Oprah Winfrey,’ Yelena Khanga told me in one of our early telephone conversations.

The implications of that hadn’t really sunk in until, on my second day in Moscow, I headed down to meet her at an expensive inner-city restaurant.

Yelena was a Russian-born journalist and talkshow host. Slim and chic in elegant furs, she possessed the effortless charm of someone accustomed to public life. In the late 1990s, she’d hosted a television program on which sex had been discussed frankly and honestly. Her show broke taboos in a still-puritanical society, famously providing the first opportunity for gay Russians to talk about their lives on television.

Clearly, people remembered this — for, at the LavkaLavka restaurant, the proprietor greeted her with tremendous deference, making a show of fussily escorting us to our seats. Then, while we were studying the menu, a middle-aged man at the next table turned and addressed her. I couldn’t understand the Russian, but I sensed that he spoke with great formality, since at the end of the exchange he gave a bow before returning to his meal.

‘Are you famous?’ I asked her.

She considered the question, which I’d intended half as a joke.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Russia was a macho and very white society, and she was a black woman. That was, in fact, why I’d wanted to meet. Yelena was descended from an African-American man who’d chosen to live in communist Russia: a member of the small but influential community of black expats whose decisions influenced Paul greatly.

On his first trip to Moscow, Paul had been greeted by a surprising number of familiar faces. Essie’s brothers, Frank and John Goode, were both making good money in Russia: John, driving busses in Moscow; Frank, performing in touring circuses. Alongside them, Paul found William Patterson, his friend from Harlem. In the years since then, Patterson had become more and more radical, eventually becoming a Communist Party stalwart and moving to the USSR. Like the Goodes, Patterson assured Paul of Russia’s freedom from colour prejudice.

At the time, Yelena’s grandfather, a man called Oliver Golden, had agreed.

Later in the 1930s, Paul had been performing in the Soviet Union when a baby in the audience began to cry. He walked over and took the infant from its mother. Cradling it in his huge arms, he sang in English, ‘Sleep, baby, sleep.’

That child was Lily Golden, Yelena’s mother, who thereafter was known as ‘baby’. She passed the nickname on to her daughter. ‘People still call me “baby”,’ Yelena said, ‘and that came from Paul Robeson.’

A waitress arrived, and Yelena ordered us sparkling water and vodka.

Her grandfather, she explained, was born in Mississippi. Like Paul, Oliver Golden was the son of a slave. He was radicalised after realising that the only white men who would shake hands with him as an equal were communists, and had then travelled to Uzbekistan with a group of ‘Negro specialists’. Theirs was supposed to be a temporary visit, a brief trip to provide technical expertise for the Soviet cotton industry, but for Oliver it became a permanent relocation.

Bertha, Yelena’s grandmother, was a Polish Jew. She and Oliver had fallen in love in Harlem. A relationship between a black man and a white woman was difficult enough even in bohemian New York. But in the South, the only place a cotton specialist might expect work, a mixed-race baby could get Oliver lynched. How could they return to America?

Plus, there was Lily to think about. ‘They were scared that as a black female she wouldn’t be able to get an education in the United States,’ Yelena said. ‘Which was true. Instead, my mother went to a good high school, and then the Moscow State University. She could sing, she became the tennis champion of Uzbekistan: she had opportunities she’d never have been given in the United States.’

I nodded.

I’d found a 1953 article in which Paul explained his ongoing faith in the Soviet Union with an anecdote about the time he and Essie had spent with ‘an old friend of mine, Mr Golden’ in 1937. He discussed returning in 1949 to see Lily ‘now grown and in the university … a proud Soviet citizen’.

The Golden story exemplified for Paul the promise of the USSR: a triumphant narrative of social advancement in a single mixed-race family.

Of course, the story wasn’t true. But it wasn’t false, either — or, at least, not entirely.

‘Were you ever a believer in the Soviet system?’ I asked Yelena.

‘Oh, no!’ She sounded almost shocked to be asked. ‘Never!’

She’d always been acutely conscious of the failings of the regime; she felt no nostalgia at all, she said, for communism’s passing. Nevertheless, she acknowledged her good fortune. She’d been raised in privilege, attended a fine school and a prestigious university. Her career was a string of successes; she’d made a happy marriage and today lived in one of Moscow’s wealthiest suburbs.

And, by and large, she’d escaped racism — or at least the institutional racism that her grandparents knew in America.

The official rhetoric of the Soviet period dismissed colour prejudice as a remnant of the capitalist past. But in reality, racism had flourished under Stalin, particularly against Jews and particularly after the Second World War. Still, those of African descent weren’t a traditional target, simply because there weren’t very many of them. In the 1930s, the few black faces in Moscow belonged to foreigners — and foreigners were mostly understood as exotic, wealthy, and interesting (hence that little girl’s enthusiasm for Paul).

Even later, being black in Soviet Russia meant facing ignorance as much as oppression, Yelena told me. As a child, she rarely met others who looked like her, and when she visited the countryside, older people asked her — out of naivety rather than malice — whether her colour would rub off on the sheets.

‘I thought I was ugly. I thought that no one would ever date me, that I would never have children. I will not say that was racism — I had lots of friends, I had a beautiful childhood. But still, you can be traumatised if you don’t see anyone who looks like you.’

We talked, then, about the complexities of racism, about how oppression could give rise to a culture that mitigated the effects of bigotry.

She’d always known of her African-American heritage. She’d listened to black music growing up; she’d studied American literature. But, during perestroika, she’d finally travelled to the United States — and it was there she’d realised how Russian she was.

She explained that she went on a date with an African-American man while in New York. The restaurant they visited was full. When the proprietor offered them a table at the back near the bathroom, Yelena couldn’t grasp why her companion took offence. But for him, the restaurateur’s ‘solution’ was patently racist, a suggestion that would never have been presented to a white patron.

‘You’re not black,’ he’d snapped at her. ‘You don’t understand the things that black people see, that they feel with their guts.’

In a sense, she acknowledged, what he said was true. She’d been protected from the institutional bigotry of America, and so her experience of blackness was quite different.

That was why she could respect the choice that her grandfather and Paul Robeson had made, and their appreciation of the advantages that Russia offered, even though she didn’t share their socialist convictions.

Oliver Golden died in 1940 when his kidneys, damaged years earlier by a policeman’s truncheon during a protest in his New York days, finally gave out. For the remainder of her days, Bertha presided over Moscow’s African-American community, a small and ageing cohort still politically wedded to the Soviet Union even as they ached with nostalgia for the culture they’d left behind. She remained a loyal communist to the end of her days, for reasons that were entirely explicable. Had she and Oliver returned to America in the 1930s, the couple faced a very real risk of violence. In Moscow, at least, they’d made a life. In Moscow, they’d been together.

Yelena recalled Bertha as a very old woman unable to rise from her chair to greet visitors. ‘She couldn’t get up, but she’d say to me, “Go to them [the visitors] and tell them I made the right decision to come here.” She’d say, “It didn’t work out as we hoped, but the idea, the idea was right.”’

That idea, the great vision of equality and freedom, sustained Paul, too.

With some reluctance, I left the National and relocated to a less luxurious but more affordable billet in an apartment just to the south of the Moskva River. There, I was renting a room from Elena, a pleasant woman in her early thirties, who explained, on my first evening in her home, that she’d abandoned a successful career in publishing and now taught classes in the callisthenics developed by the twentieth-century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. I knew something of the Gurdjieff Movements from studying the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, a devotee of the cult in the 1920s. But Elena was a kind and attentive host, and, if I found her enthusiasm for Gurdjieff quite baffling, she clearly felt the same about my interest in Paul Robeson (whose name meant nothing to her), although she was polite enough never to say so.

As soon as I could, I caught the train to Tverskaya and then walked down Staropimenovskiy Street, looking for Moscow High School No. 175. It was in a fashionable inner-city location surrounded by chic apartments that reminded me, rather unexpectedly, of the Harlem brownstones.

In the 1930s, the building was School No. 25, the most famous educational institution in Soviet Russia. I could see that it had since been extended, with the addition of two extra floors. But other than that, it was the same school in which, in 1936, Pauli was enrolled among the offspring of the Communist elite — including two of Stalin’s children.

Paul and Essie had deliberated about their son’s future, mulling over the same issues that preoccupied Yelena’s grandparents when they thought about Lily and her prospects. The Robesons didn’t want Pauli stunted by the racism that had scarred their generation. Already, the boy had been racially abused in the United States and then snubbed by white children in England, whose nurse instructed them not to play with him. Essie had taken Pauli with her on a long expedition through Africa in 1936, a trip intended, at least in part, to expose the boy to different facets of black life. Then, when she joined Paul in Moscow (where he’d been performing), they resolved to educate Pauli there. Again, Ma Goode would tend to him, allowing him to attend classes in the school where I now stood.

School No. 25 was a model institution, designed to give its students the very best education Russia could offer. In that respect, it was comparable to a prestigious private institution in the United States — except that in the United States such a school wouldn’t have welcomed a black pupil.

The news of Pauli studying alongside Vasily Stalin, the dictator’s youngest son, circulated internationally, publicised by supporters and detractors alike as an illustration of Paul Robeson’s preference for Soviet mores. Paul didn’t care: in School No. 25, his boy would walk past the life-size portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the vestibule; in School No. 25, he would be taught about the equality of the races.

In actuality, Pauli didn’t stay in Moscow for very long. When the looming war threatened to isolate the Soviet Union from the West, Paul conveyed his son to England so the family could travel together to the United States.

But in a way, the school mattered less as a reality than an idea. In Paul’s mind, School No. 25 represented, like the nation whose values it trumpeted, an oasis of tolerance that, by its mere existence, reproached the capitalist order and offered a template for what the West might still become.

That was particularly important, since, in the next years, everything that Paul had learned over his journeying coalesced into a conviction that mighty changes were not only possible but also imminent. The USSR provided what he thought was a working model: a flourishing society in which black people were honoured. If poor and backward Russia could be reorganised to dignify labour and promote racial and social equality, what could be done with the phenomenal resources of the United States?

In this period, the era of Paul’s greatest fame, he and Essie settled, upon their return to America, into a pattern that seemed to suit them both. They often lived apart (she preferred the family home in Connecticut; he tended to stay in New York) but they remained an acknowledged partnership, bonded by their now teenage son and a shared commitment to progressive ideals.

In 1938, Paul had explained his politics to a journalist by outlining how, even within Hollywood — an industry centred on stars — ordinary people still possessed real power, if only they’d realise it. He spoke of being on set when the director had ushered in a major financial backer to assess the film’s progress, and of his astonishment that production had simply stopped. ‘[T]he electricians had decided,’ he said, ‘it was time to go and eat, and they put out the lights and went off and ate. That’s my moral to your readers.’

Upon his return to the United States, Paul was earning vast sums of money, but was just as generously subsidising and patronising an array of organisations and causes. In 1937, he’d helped found the International Committee on African Affairs (later known as the Council on African Affairs) to link black Americans with the anti-colonial movements in Africa. In 1940, he signed up (alongside Richard Wright and Alain Locke) to the new Negro Playwrights Company, an attempt to replicate within the United States the radical theatre he’d known in London. In 1941, he supported the campaign by the United Automobile Workers Union to organise against the Ford Motor Company; he sang and spoke for the convention of the National Maritime Union.

In 1942, he played a sharecropper in his last Hollywood film, Tales of Manhattan. Again, he was appalled by what ended up on screen: he’d hoped to dignify the lives of the rural poor, but instead the movie portrayed his character as a simple-minded rustic. He endorsed the pickets outside the film’s screenings and announced his retirement from Hollywood.

But throughout the war years, he was bolstered by the tremendous mobilisation of men and material necessitated by the conflict, something that, to him, demonstrated the capabilities of ordinary Americans, even as it made a moral case for a new post-war order in which their interests would be paramount.

In 1943, Paul reprised Othello on the Broadway stage. If his London performance had hinged on the line ‘Speak of me as I am,’ the wartime version emphasised a different aspect of the same soliloquy.

‘I have done the state some service, and they know’t,’ Robeson’s Othello growled, moments before sacrificing himself.

Inevitably the audience imagined not only the African-American recruits heading overseas, but also all the young men drawn — as soldiers invariably are — from the lower ranks of American society. If the poor and the outcast and the oppressed did the state some service, exactly what might they expect in return?

The circumstances surrounding the Broadway Othello production hinted at an answer. When Paul had launched his acting career in New York all those years ago, his presence next to a white woman led to bomb threats. Now, he was openly challenging American race codes, portraying a mighty black general in the bedchamber of his white wife.

When Othello toured, Paul insisted on the integration of audiences in all the theatres in which it played. His contract even stipulated that, at the first hint of segregation, Paul would walk from the stage and bring down the curtain.

Uta Hagen, the Desdemona of that production (and Paul’s sometime lover), remembered performing in Detroit and looking out into the venue at the horrified whites discovering themselves allocated seats next to elegantly dressed blacks. The onstage action, she said, affected the audience much less than the drama playing out in the stalls.

Everything was changing; anything seemed possible.

At Paul’s gala birthday celebration in 1944, the playwright Marc Connelly lauded the guest of honour as the representative of ‘a highly desirable tomorrow, which, by some lucky accident, we are privileged to appreciate today’. His words demonstrated how the meaning of Paul Robeson had changed in light of the expectations swelling as victory over Germany drew closer. Paul was, the toast implied, a living prefiguration of what the twentieth century would deliver.

Here was a man born in the humblest of settings — that little wooden church in Witherspoon Street — who talked with presidents and scientists and aristocrats. He’d taken folk songs to the concert hall; he’d brought Shakespeare to the factory worker. He’d struggled for equality for his people even as he showed, with his own achievements, what racial equality might enable. Paul’s greatness, in the midst of the people’s war he championed, was now collective, even democratic. With the banishment of poverty and prejudice — and wasn’t that what victory would deliver? — everyone would have opportunity to develop. Black or white, rich or poor, from the global North or the global South: all might become a Paul Robeson, a multifaceted human being equally at home on the lecture podium, the concert stage, or the athletics field.

Standing outside the gates at School No. 25, I decided that I might have been in any prosperous American or European city. The mothers wore smart furs; the cars into which they ushered their carefully bundled offspring were modern and stylish. It was hard to imagine Paul watching his son complete lessons here, in a room adorned with banners celebrating the building of socialism.

By the end of the Second World War, Paul — and a growing number of others — believed that the values in which he’d tried to educate his child were about to be realised in his native America.

He could not have been more wrong.

The Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, or Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva (VDNKh), offered, it seemed to me, a chance to see Russia as it had been — or, more exactly, as Paul had imagined it.

The permanent amusement park was a massive aggregation of stone pavilions and display buildings, opened in 1939 to showcase collectivisation, before being substantially renovated in 1953. The VDNKh was where the USSR displayed itself to its citizens and to visiting foreigners. It was the Soviet imaginary, spread out over 237 hectares.

Most of the park’s facilities had survived the regime’s fall, probably because such a quintessentially communist space couldn’t easily be repurposed. The area was instead renamed the All-Russian Exhibition Centre and allowed to fall into disrepair, with its crumbling architecture presiding, rather anomalously, over ad-hoc open-air markets, family picnics, and the occasional show or exposition. More recently, as nostalgia for the USSR revived, the old name had been restored and the old structures renovated, making the place almost a theme park for a vanished time.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had been so comprehensive as to retrospectively define Russian communism as, above anything else, an economic failure, a regime of shortages and stagnation and perpetual inefficiencies. But when I emerged from the VDNKh station, I found myself outside the cosmonautics museum, where the Monument to the Conquerors of Space curved high into the air, with the rocket at the sculpture’s peak supported by a long titanium exhaust trail. It was a soaring reminder of how different the USSR’s image had once been.

For decades, the fear of Western strategists was not that the Russian system would fail, but that it would succeed. The Soviet economy steadily expanded at a rate greater than that of most capitalist states, as the Soviet Union amassed a remarkable array of technical and scientific achievements.

By contrast, when the war ended, Paul saw an America reverting to its worst self, as the African-American soldiers returning from Europe and the Pacific confronted, just like their fathers in 1918, a concerted campaign of racial terror.

Between June 1945 and September 1946, fifty-six black people were murdered, in an outbreak of lynch law deployed to restore the pre-war social order. During one grim day in Georgia, four African-Americans — Roger Malcom, Dorothy Malcom, George Dorsey, and Mae Murray Dorsey — were gunned down outside the town of Monroe, at Moore’s Ford bridge, in a reprisal for the injury of a white man.

After the Moore’s Ford atrocity, Paul telegrammed the new president, Harry S. Truman, demanding the government ‘apprehend and punish the perpetrators of this shocking crime and to halt the rising tide of lynch law’. With his friend and mentor W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul endorsed a rally in Washington, D.C., to launch ‘an American crusade against lynching’. Three thousand delegates met at the Lincoln memorial; Paul led a smaller group to the White House, where he was ushered into a meeting with the President.

The encounter did not go well.

When the guns fell quiet, the wartime harmony gave way to violent discord, with the vision of the America-that-might-be crashing into the reality of the America-that-still-was. An upsurge of industrial combativeness was in progress, as unionists who’d accepted the imperative of military production insisted on their share of the peace.

‘We will not go back to the old days,’ proclaimed a placard during the general strike in Connecticut.

That was Paul’s attitude, too.

When Truman acknowledged the absence of any government plan to forestall the murder spree, Paul pointed to the alacrity of Washington’s intervention to break the recent rail dispute. Why hadn’t the prevention of lynching been an equal priority?

It was not good enough, he told Truman. The temper of black people was changing. African Americans had once again fought for their country — and unless they were provided with protection, they might cause ‘a national emergency that called for federal intervention’.

The President’s face reddened. He got to his feet. ‘That sounds like a threat.’

Paul rose, too. He was forty-eight years old but he was still huge — nearly twenty centimetres taller than Truman.

The secret-service men by the President’s side moved forward as if expecting a physical confrontation.

‘I meant no offence to the presidency,’ Paul said, calmly and evenly. ‘I was merely conveying the mood of the Negro people, who constitute ten per cent of the US population.’

The meeting came to an abrupt end. Outside, a journalist asked Paul if he thought that African Americans should adopt a stance of Christian non-violence. In the face of the brutality directed at them, shouldn’t they turn the other cheek and forgive their oppressors?

The answer he expected was obvious.

But Paul said slowly, ‘If a lyncher hit me on one cheek, I’d tear his head off before he hit me on the other one.’

The entrance to the park was marked by a gigantic propylaea supported by six great pillars and surmounted by a huge sculpted worker and a huge sculpted peasant. They jointly brandished a bundle of grain like triumphant athletes sharing a trophy.

The cold had kept away most visitors, and the emptiness of the central alley made the space seem more expansive, with the scale itself an illustration of the Soviet productive capacities the facility had been intended to laud. Alongside me, the lampposts emerging from the snow in rows were modelled after individual strands of wheat, collectively implying the bountiful harvest of a communist economy.

In the distance, I saw a huge stone Lenin. This was not the shrunken doll I’d encountered in the Red Square mausoleum, but a colossus in a long coat, glaring down at me with sardonic disapproval. As I came closer, the details of the gigantic central pavilion behind the statue emerged: an edifice of more classical columns larded with every conceivable emblem of the communist state — red stars, hammers and sickles, sheaves of wheat, brawny workers staring triumphantly at the sky, and so on.

That building, like most of what I was seeing, dated from the mid-1950s. But the Soviet power it celebrated was already apparent in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as Washington ceased hailing the USSR as America’s anti-fascist partner and reclassified it as a dangerous rival.

In March 1946, Winston Churchill announced that an Iron Curtain had descended on Europe. Bulgaria and Albania had both become communist states. The Soviets were consolidating in East Germany. Romania, Poland, and Hungary would adopt the Soviet system in 1947, as would Czechoslovakia in 1948. The Chinese revolution followed in 1949.

The emerging order entirely unsettled the foundation upon which Paul’s wartime popularity had rested. In 1943, progressives could enthuse over Soviet achievements and still proclaim their patriotism — the Russians were key allies, after all. But in the post-war climate, Communist Party members became associated not only with a radical domestic agenda but also with a hostile state. An accusation of communist sympathies thus implied disloyalty — and possibly treason and espionage.

Paul discovered that almost at once. In 1947, an actor called Adolphe Menjou (who’d once starred in Charlie Chaplin’s silent drama A Woman of Paris) appeared at the US House Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry. In response to a question from a young Richard Nixon, Menjou explained how he unmasked communists. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘attending any meetings at which Mr Paul Robeson appeared, and applauding, or listening to his Communist songs in America — I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind.’

Paul had never formally joined the Communist Party. But since the late 1930s, he’d accepted most of its ideas, and loyally followed its doctrinal twists and turns. He’d become close to leading communist activists in the United States, and he publicly defended the party’s right to exist as the government began a campaign against it.

For a while, his fame and personal popularity allowed him to shake the Red-baiters. He continued to speak and perform, and huge crowds continued to hear him. He sold out concerts in Symphony Hall in Boston, and Lewisohn Stadium in New York; he polled highly in a Gallup Poll selecting the public’s ‘ten favourite people’.

But in 1948, the FBI, which had been quietly monitoring Paul for years, approached venue owners, warning them not to allow Robeson to sing his ‘communist songs’. If a planned tour went ahead, they were told, the proprietors would be judged Red sympathisers themselves.

The same operation was conducted in all the art forms in which Paul excelled.

All at once, Paul could no longer record music, and the radio would not play his songs. Cinemas would not screen his movies. The film industry had already recognised that Paul was too dangerous; major theatres soon arrived at the same conclusion. The mere rumour that an opera company was thinking about casting him led to cries for a boycott.

With remarkable speed, Paul’s career within the country of his birth came to an end.

He did not realise, at first, quite what was happening to him, partly because his overseas popularity shielded him for a while. Indeed, his initial response to the domestic blacklist was a new European tour, which became, as one observer noted, ‘something like a triumphal procession’.

The enthusiasm of concert-goers in Britain and elsewhere probably convinced Paul that he could tough out the hostility in the United States. Certainly, when he spoke at an international peace conference in Paris, on 20 April 1949, he did not compromise. Instead, in his address, he linked the African-American struggle against Judge Lynch and Jim Crow with the cause of the USSR. Why, he asked, would black people oppose Russia, one of the few nations that explicitly rejected racism?

‘We shall not make war on the Soviet Union,’ he said. ‘We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the People’s Republics.’

Again, though, he’d misjudged how much the environment had changed. He had given similar speeches in the past without particular reaction. But the mood now was different, and the US press insinuated that Robeson had stood up in a crowd of foreign radicals and voiced a kind of treason. Even the African-American papers denounced him: ‘Nuts to Mr Robeson’ read the headline in The Chicago Defender, while the New York Amsterdam News assured its readers that ‘[Black] Leaders Disagree with Robeson’. The respected civil-rights activist Channing Tobias attacked Paul for choosing a foreign country in which to ‘declare his disloyalty to his native land’; Paul’s friend Mary McLeod Bethune distanced herself from what she called his ‘presumption’ in speaking for the African-American community.

Paul returned home to mounting hostility.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 set US troops battling against communist soldiers backed by both China and Russia. When journalists asked about the deployment of nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsula, President Truman pointedly refused to rule out their use.

For Paul, the violence in Korea further justified his comments in Paris. Why shouldn’t the long-suffering peasants of that nation embrace the Soviet system that seemed to be so successfully feeding the hungry? Why would African Americans, most of whom couldn’t vote or find a decent job or live where they chose, take up arms to prevent the self-determination of others? ‘I have said it before and say it again,’ he told an anti-war rally in New York, ‘that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home.’

It was only when the journalist Robert C. Ruark published a widely syndicated article calling for Robeson’s internment that Paul truly grasped the peril he faced. He realised that he needed to leave, to head back to Europe.

London had sheltered him once. It could do so again. In Britain, he could sing — and, just as importantly, he could speak.

But he’d waited too long, and now escape was no longer possible. When Paul applied for a passport, the state department simply refused to grant him the document. His movement abroad was, it said, ‘contrary to the best interests of the United States’.

Without a passport, he was effectively imprisoned, locked inside a nation that considered him a traitor and a threat.

I spent the day meandering around the VDNKh’s strange expanses, pausing every now and then to contemplate another ornate edifice or monument to a Soviet hero.

Each pavilion celebrated a unique endeavour, usually signalled in the architecture itself. Some were associated with specific regions. Pavilion 18, for instance, showcased the former Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, with the pillars garlanded with the region’s typical produce, and a rooftop sculpture honouring the local collective farmers. But just as often, the pavilions represented particular industries. At Pavilion 47, I admired the two handsome porkers displayed in relief on the doors, and then realised the building had been intended as a celebration of Soviet pig production. Just as at 44, I found motifs of bunnies frolicking across the walls in a tribute to the successes of communist rabbit-rearers.

After encountering the rocket sculpture, I’d expected the VDNKh to emphasise Soviet technology. I located buildings dedicated to chemical, oil, gas, and atomic energy, as well as a model of a Buran-class spaceship. But the celebrations were just as frequently of far more bucolic pursuits: poultry and tobacco, for instance; beekeeping and seeds.

The more I walked, the starker the gulf seemed between these agricultural accomplishments and the scattering of fashionable young Muscovites hurrying by on their way to the giant ice-rink — an urbanised generation more adept at Farmville than farming.

But, of course, it would have been different for Paul.

During my American trip, I’d travelled to Monroe, Georgia, to the site of the nation’s last mass lynching: that terrible event at Moore’s Ford bridge.

At the Cotton Cafe, a pleasant little coffee shop, I’d sat down with an African-American man named Norman Garrett and a woman called Sharon Swanepoel, a journalist on the local paper who’d written about the town’s past. She was a white South African, and that ethnicity brought with it a particular experience of racial reconciliation and the politics of memory.

‘When we met,’ she’d said, pointing at Garrett, ‘Norman told me he could tell that I was not from here because a white woman would not normally talk to a black man. It was strange: in South Africa, with all its history, we didn’t have that.’

At least a dozen people were involved in the murders of 1946 — a huge number in such a small community. It was whispered locally that the lynching had been arranged by some of the town’s most reputable citizens; that some of the streets in Monroe still carried the names of killers.

Garrett explained how the older generation of the black population shied away from the subject. ‘Even now, when I’m talking to my parents, you cannot get them to discuss what happened. It was a deterrent ... trying to keep you scared. And it succeeded, I can tell you that.’

Later, I’d driven about fifteen minutes along the highway from the town and turned off at Locklin Road, to the site of the murders. The bridge was a recent construction, but the field where the four people had been murdered looked, probably, much as it would have back in the 1940s: a green hill sloping down from the roadside and into scrubby forest. Once I stepped out of the hire car, I heard no sound other than the occasional bird cry, even though Athens, a substantial college town, was only a forty-five-minute drive away.

In 1946, it would have been even lonelier, even more isolated.

All four of the victims were sharecroppers, like most African Americans near the town. That meant they picked cotton for white landowners in an almost feudal arrangement, a system of grinding economic dependence that underpinned Georgia’s racial inequalities.

Yes, I could understand why the idea of collective farming mattered to Paul.

I could also see how the campaign to isolate Paul as a communist built upon the experience Garrett had described: that long American tradition of deterring ‘uppity blacks’ with violence and the threat of violence.

In 1949, when Paul returned from Europe, he’d been scheduled to sing for the Civil Rights Congress at a park near the town of Peekskill, just out of New York. But, in the new conservative atmosphere, the Peekskill Evening Star denounced the event, calling Paul ‘an avowed disciple of Soviet Russia’ and insinuating that if locals tolerated the performance they’d be approving communism.

Predictably, the concert was attacked by a right-wing mob and, predictably, the mob’s patriotism cloaked an old-fashioned bigotry. A cross burned on a nearby hill while the vigilantes searching for Paul chanted, ‘Lynch the fucking niggers!’

In his subsequent press conference, Paul decried a ‘preview of American stormtroopers in action’. It was precisely what he’d feared after Spain: KKKism blending with modern anti-communism into a star-spangled variety of fascism.

His second concert attracted twenty thousand Robeson supporters — and eight thousand right-wing protesters. The thugs warned, ‘You’ll get in but you won’t get out!’ — and then attacked the convoy of cars heading back to New York.

On my trip to Peekskill, I’d walked the only road leading to the green fields where the performance had been staged. I could see, even decades later, how terrifying driving along the narrow path must have been, with angry white men pulling black individuals from cars.

But it wasn’t just racists turning against Paul in those years. After the Paris speech, he’d been approached by his old Harlem friend Walter White. White, a NAACP activist, explained he’d come on behalf of the Secretary of State, and, by implication, the President. The authorities, he said, wanted to bargain. If Paul signed a private pledge refraining from political activity for at least a year, there would be no objection to him resuming performances. He could have his career back — so long as he kept quiet.

Paul refused, politely but firmly.

A few years earlier, there was an almost unstoppable momentum to social progress in America, with reform a cause to which most intelligent and well-meaning people adhered. Suddenly, though, everything had changed, so that even liberalism required considerable courage. In the Cold War, progress no longer seemed at all inevitable. In the Cold War, supporting a group on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations could ruin your life.

The playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed the period ‘scoundrel time’, not merely because demagogues such as Senator Joseph McCarthy built careers out of hunting Reds, but because the fear of contagion from those under suspicion fostered a culture of denunciation and betrayal, conformity and cowardice. African-American leaders, in particular, came under immense pressure. They all knew that if they didn’t attack Paul Robeson, they would receive the same treatment he did.

At a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player to break into the major leagues, was induced to condemn Paul’s Paris statement as ‘very silly’. A few years later, White himself published an article entitled ‘The Strange Case of Paul Robeson’, in which he described his former friend as ‘a bewildered man, to be more pitied than damned’. The NAACP derided Paul as a puppet of Moscow; the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson labelled him a communist propagandist.

With the support of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul tried to fight back by launching his own magazine, Freedom, through which he hoped to speak directly to ordinary blacks. But, unable to sing or act, he wasn’t earning enough to sustain a necessarily loss-making publication — and, inevitably, Freedom faltered and folded.

In January 1952, Paul was scheduled to perform for mine and mill workers in Vancouver, a trip made possible under Canadian law that allowed Americans to visit without passports. But at the border, a US official ordered Paul from his car. The state department had forbidden his journey, he was told, on the basis of wartime legislation restricting activities contrary to American interests.

As Paul said, the refusal essentially put him under domestic arrest without any charges being laid. He responded by singing to the unionists by telephone (an anticipation of the strategy he’d later use to reach audiences in Britain and Wales).

In May, a special concert was organised for forty thousand people in the Peace Arch Park straddling the boundary between Washington State (America) and Canada (British Columbia). Paul sang atop the back of a flatbed truck, with the deep notes of ‘Ol’ Man River’ rolling unimpeded across the border.

For four years, these so-called Peace Arch concerts became annual protests and a symbolic defiance of the restrictions on Paul.

‘I want everybody,’ he said at the second event, ‘in the range of my voice to hear, official or otherwise, that there is no force on earth that will make me go backward one-thousandth part [of] one little inch.’

Yet, for all his defiance, Paul would have been aware that each year’s concert drew a smaller crowd than the one before.

What kept him going in those grim years?

I’d hoped that the VDNKh would provide a kind of answer, not so much intellectually as emotionally. The revamped exhibition had opened just after the USSR had bestowed the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples on Paul, an award that signified how closely the Soviet authorities believed his ideals mirrored theirs.

Everywhere I walked in the park, I could see the iconography of Stalinism and I kept wondering if I’d feel even a hint of what such symbols had conveyed for Paul. The instances of Soviet design I’d seen from the decades immediately following the revolution still possessed a definite power, with the exuberant confidence of the metro a clear example. But the architecture in the VDNKh felt much more obviously phoney, a collection of visual clichés, as if the builders had a quota to fulfil. The place was, I reflected, like a speech by an orator who no longer believed his own words and compensated for his cynicism with increasingly florid rhetoric.

At the park’s centre, I stood at the huge and gaudy Friendship of the Peoples Fountain, where sixteen gold women — each in the national costume of a different Soviet republic — cavorted with the wheat I had now come to expect as inevitable, water jetting high around them. The thing was truly hideous, a piece of unabashed Stalinist kitsch. It was hard to work out what was worse: the sentimentalised femininity of the maidens, the clichéd depictions of regional cultures, or the blinged-out excess of the gold gloss in which the sculptures were slathered.

Again, though, mine was a response from a different time.

I reminded myself of the novelist Richard Wright’s early infatuation with the Soviet Union, an admiration spurred by accounts of Moscow’s policy towards its national minorities. He’d read of specialists preserving and celebrating the various local cultures, and then compared their efforts to those of his own country. ‘How different this was,’ he said, ‘from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America.’

Similarly, in 1937 the Robesons had shared a holiday with Yelena’s grandparents, in which Paul had been stunned by the support given to the Uzbeks (‘a rather dark Mongolian people of Southern Asia’) so they could celebrate their distinctive culture. For him, the fountain would likely have represented a Soviet commitment to the self-determination of the oppressed, a commitment that contrasted starkly with America’s role as the imperial power supplanting the declining British Empire.

For where Paul had imagined the fight against fascism growing inexorably into a struggle against colonisation, the reverse had taken place, with Washington identifying the anti-colonial movements as stalking horses for communism, to be treated with suspicion and hostility. I understood that the tenacity with which Paul clung to his views reflected everything he’d learned in his travels. By resisting the Red-baiters, he was fighting for his own people: African Americans denied their most basic rights at a time when any agitation against Jim Crow was smeared as ‘communism’. He was maintaining solidarity with the labour movement he’d come to appreciate in Wales, the anti-imperialists he’d met in London, and the anti-fascists who’d given their lives to Spain. All of that was embodied in his refusal to disavow the Soviet Union, the land where, for the first time in his life, he’d walked in full human dignity.

By the early 1950s, Pauli was a young man, married and living in New York. He convinced his father to establish the Othello Recording Company so at least he’d have one musical outlet. ‘When we attempted to market the albums,’ Pauli recalled decades later, ‘no commercial distributor would handle them, no stores would display them, nor would any radio station play them. The boycott of Paul Robeson was airtight.’

In 1953, only a fortnight after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted as communist spies, Essie was called before McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Committee. Ostensibly, the summons pertained to her 1945 book African Journey, passages of which had been judged un-American. But everyone knew she was also there as Paul’s wife.

Did she belong, they asked her, to an organisation dedicated to overthrowing the American government by force and violence?

‘I don’t know anybody that is dedicated to overthrowing the govern-ment by force and violence,’ Essie replied. ‘The only force and violence I know is what I have experienced and seen in this country, and it has not been by communists.’

The committee’s pointed questioning of Essie, and the defiance of her response, drew the Robesons closer, as their shared persecution compounded their shared suffering. Both were facing serious medical conditions, with Paul receiving treatment for prostate degeneration and Essie undergoing a double mastectomy after a breast-cancer diagnosis. For the first time in years, they began living together, presenting a united front against the hostile world.

What hurt Paul the most wasn’t the attack from conservatives, or his disavowal by African-American leaders. It was his new isolation from the African-American struggle that was slowly re-emerging.

At the end of 1955, Rosa Parks remained in her seat when a white passenger commanded her to stand. Naturally, Paul voiced his support for Parks and for Martin Luther King Jr and the new civil-rights activists engaged in the Montgomery bus boycott and other actions so reminiscent of the protests he’d pioneered in the 1940s. But his dogged commitment to his political views separated him from the very cause in which he believed the most. He could offer little more than a rhetorical endorsement of the Montgomery campaign, for anything else would embarrass a leadership desperate to avoid the taint of communism. Besides, he’d been excluded from public life for so long that he could no longer exert the same degree of influence on a generation of younger African-Americans who’d never heard him perform or seen his movies.

When Yolande Jackson had broken off with him in 1933, the disintegration of what he thought he’d forged in London had sent Paul into a deep depression. Now, as he became conscious of his separation from the African-American struggle, he experienced something similar: periods of mania alternating with debilitating lassitude. He developed a fascination with folk music’s deployment of the pentatonic scale, the universality of which, he thought, established fundamental links between widely separated peoples. Some days he’d argue the point obsessively, buttonholing acquaintances about musicology with a strange fervour. Other days, he’d remain in bed from morning to night.

But the Red-baiters still had not forgotten him.

When, in 1956, he received a summons before a committee investigating the use of passports ‘in the furtherance of the objectives of the Communist conspiracy’, Essie, his friends, and his doctor urged him to plead ill health.

For weeks, he’d been almost entirely inactive and unresponsive. All those around him judged him in no state to undergo the ordeal, an interrogation in which every answer would be parsed and analysed and used against him.

Paul disagreed. He had been threatened the entirety of his life. He’d never backed down. He wouldn’t start now.

The session began on the morning of 12 June, in a room crowded with journalists and photographers. HUAC hearings made for irresistible theatre, particularly with a star of Paul’s calibre facing the inquisitors. Besides, everyone knew the broader implications of the encounter. Francis E. Walter, HUAC’s chairman, was a crusader for immigration restriction. A link between lax passport allocation and communist subversion would provide him with invaluable material for future demagoguery.

Almost as soon as Paul appeared, Richard Arens, the HUAC staff director and a former aide to Senator McCarthy, cut to the chase. ‘Are you,’ he asked, ‘now a member of the Communist Party?’

Paul could have simply said no. Even at that late stage, had he disassociated himself publicly from the party, and laughed away his past commitments as youthful enthusiasm, HUAC would likely have left him alone.

Three years earlier, Langston Hughes had made that choice. Hughes had travelled to Spain and Russia, had celebrated communism, and had written poetry about revolution. But he’d come before HUAC as a friendly witness, praising the American justice system and thanking the investigators for their ‘courtesy and friendliness’. As a result, Hughes emerged with his career intact.

Paul embraced a different fate.

‘What do you mean by the Communist Party?’ he asked. ‘As far as I know, it is a legal party, like the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Do you mean a party of people who have sacrificed for my people, and for all Americans and workers, that they can live in dignity? Do you mean that party?’

Paul hadn’t acted on stage since 1945, eleven years earlier. This was a performance, too, a role every bit as gruelling as Othello — and with a lot more at stake. But, despite his recent illness, he displayed no sign of nervousness.

As a footballer, Paul played, as per his father’s instructions, entirely within the rules, using that scrupulous legality as protection when he landed the occasional (perfectly legitimate) blow against his white opponents. The method served him now. He answered the questions put to him with clipped courtesy — and he waited for a chance to strike.

‘Are you,’ pressed Arens, ‘now a member of the Communist Party?’

‘Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?’

The session was interrupted as Walter directed the press photographers to take their pictures. He craved as much publicity as possible; he knew that images would help his cause.

‘Do you want me to pose for it good?’ snapped Paul. ‘Do you want me to smile?’

Gordon H. Scherer, the most senior Republican panellist, protested about Robeson’s manner. The HUAC investigation, he said, was not a laughing matter.

‘It is a laughing matter to me,’ Paul answered. ‘This is really complete nonsense.’

Then Paul did something that the panel liked even less: he began to ask his own questions. When Walter spoke, Robeson insisted that the chairman introduce himself. Who was he? Where did he come from? Who, exactly, did he represent?

Almost certainly, Paul already knew the answers. Walter was famously racist, an overt white supremacist. A thin-lipped Democrat from Pennsylvania, he was a director with the Pioneer Fund, an organisation that promoted eugenics in the United States. He was also one of the architects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which allowed the United States to restrict entry to migrants based upon racial quotas and political affiliations.

After Walter announced his name, Paul said: ‘You are the author of all of the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people out of the country.’

‘No,’ Walter snarled back, ‘only your kind.’

Walter was heading an all-white panel interrogating a black man. The implications of the phrase ‘your kind’ escaped few listeners. Even so, Paul spelled them out for the journalists in attendance. ‘Colored people like myself, from the West Indies and all kinds. And just the Teutonic Anglo-Saxon stock that you would let come in.’

‘We are trying to make it easier to get rid of your kind, too.’

‘You do not want any colored people to come in?’

Walter refused to take the bait any further. ‘Proceed!’

‘I am being tried,’ Paul continued, ‘for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this country … You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people … And that is why I am here today.’

The verbal fencing resumed, until the committee returned, as they had always intended, to Paul’s attitude to the Soviet Union. It fell to Scherer to put the query so characteristic of the era. If, he asked Paul, you think so very highly of Russia, then why don’t you go and live there? You criticise the United States: why don’t you leave?

The question engendered one of the most ringing answers given to interrogators throughout the duration of scoundrel time.

‘Because my father was a slave,’ Paul said, ‘and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?’

Those three sentences, delivered with the stentorian elocution Paul had learned from William, a slave-born preacher, brought the moral weight of the African-American struggle crashing down upon the session. What did HUAC’s denunciations of the ‘communist threat’ mean to the millions of people denied decent jobs or education or houses merely because of their colour? How dare these wealthy white men lecture the children of the Middle Passage about freedom and justice!

It was the accusers who ended the conversation. ‘I’ve endured all of this that I can,’ muttered Walter, as he moved to adjourn.

The white press agreed with Walter: Paul, they reported, had been insolent and contemptuous. But the African-American papers took a different view. ‘Mr Robeson is Right’, declared the headline at the Afro-American, endorsing Paul’s contention that HUAC should investigate white bigots rather than black anti-racists, while the Sun Reporter suggested that he was voicing what all African Americans really thought about race relations.

With the civil-rights campaign spreading, a new mood was making itself felt in America, even as the international effort to restore Paul’s passport (those meetings in London and Wales) was gathering strength.

Not long after, Paul was permitted to sing in Canada, and he resumed touring within the United States.

On 16 June 1958, the Supreme Court decided, in a 5–4 split, that the secretary of state could not deny a passport on the basis of a citizen’s political beliefs. A little over a week later, the state department announced that Paul could have his passport again.

As quickly as possible, the Robesons prepared to leave.

The long ordeal was over, they thought. They would go to England, just as they had in the past. They would regroup and rebuild. Everything, at last, was going to be all right.