The State Department had less control over Robeson’s movements and political utterances within the United States, but did whatever it could to restrict them. The Attorney General, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Subversive Activities Control Board between them made it as difficult as possible for Robeson to find platforms from which to expound his political views.
What they could not suppress, however hard they tried, was Robeson’s popularity. Although he had trouble getting bookings, it may be that Robeson’s passport ordeal backfired. For just when it seemed that the government had him silenced, Robeson came back fighting.
Robeson got a first taste of victory in October 1957 when Ebony, the country’s premier African-American magazine, published its first-ever interview with Robeson. On the front page of “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?” was a photograph showing Robeson sitting on a sofa, his head tilted slightly to the right, mouth open and eyes full and bright, his hands stretched out, caught in a moment of making a point to Carl Rowan, the interviewer, who can be seen sitting in profile, intently writing notes in his pad.
Rowan was one of America’s foremost black journalists. In 1955, as a staff writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, he had made a name for himself as the only African-American reporter to cover the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that followed Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. While reporting on the boycott he met its leader, the twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ebony, now in its twelfth year, had been styled after the mainstream magazine Life and although it did not shy away from sensitive issues such as civil rights, it nevertheless focused its coverage on stories about successful African Americans. It had a huge following and not just among black readers; its circulation was about a half million copies per month.
As Rowan remembered it, one day he received a call from Ebony’s managing editor telling him that John Johnson, the magazine’s owner, had decided to run a piece on Robeson and thought Rowan was the best person to do it. Johnson had said, “Paul Robeson is getting a raw deal in the media and everyplace else … You’re the only journalist in America who can write the truth and not get destroyed by the McCarthyites.” Rowan didn’t hesitate; he headed straight for Oakland, where Robeson could be contacted during a two-week concert tour of California.
The combination of Robeson and Rowan was sure to pack a punch. Not since the days of Freedom had Robeson been given such a platform. Moreover, Ebony readers were more diverse and influential geographically, socially, and politically than Freedom’s had been.
Rowan began his piece by recounting what he described as Robeson’s tragic decline over a period of three decades, from the days when he had been “the world’s most famous Negro [and] one of its really great personalities” to now: “Paul Robeson’s voice is silent today … [his] name is anathema.” Why, Rowan asked, had this happened? Why had he spent the past seven years in obscurity? Was it because the State Department considered him a Moscow stooge and clamped him for it? Or was it because—as Rowan said many African Americans thought—“the big white boss” had had enough of Robeson’s attacks on Jim Crow?
Robeson gave his version of events. He agreed that he had insulted white America, but he was certain that American foreign and domestic policy came “straight from the South”—that it was people like Senator James Eastland from Mississippi who ran the country. These people, Robeson argued, feared him because they saw in him “a symbol around which the Negro masses might rally to join hands with the ‘black power that now is flexing its muscles in Asia and Africa.’ ”
Robeson was quick to display his internationalist politics, linking the African-American struggle for freedom in the United States with anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia. The key to success for both, he pointed out, lay in unity. “We don’t have to go begging to these people,” Robeson argued. “All we have to do is face this nation with a unified voice.” But who should lead? Certainly not the current leadership, whom Robeson blamed for standing by and letting the State Department confine him without protest.
Rowan reminded his readers of the State Department’s case: that Robeson was not granted a passport because the department had cause to believe that he was a Communist and had current law behind them. So, Rowan asked Robeson, was he “working for the black masses or the Red comrades?” Robeson answered, “I am not a part of any international conspiracy. All I ever said or did was in the interest of freeing my people.” He noted that in 1946 at the Tenney Committee hearing he had testified under oath that he was not a Communist.
Rowan then allowed him the opportunity to expound on his political philosophy. Robeson pointed out the absurdity of men such as Senator Eastland, who themselves oppressed African Americans, telling their victims to fight the Russians, when without the presence of the Soviet Union and its military might there would have been no progress toward self-determination for former colonies in Africa and Asia. Without the Communist threat, white supremacists would have effectively crushed the movements for civil rights in those countries as they had done in the United States.
Rowan’s account of the interview made it clear to readers that up to this point Robeson had engaged with the questions. But when Rowan asked Robeson to comment on Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin, Robeson was evasive and uncomfortable, preferring to return to earlier themes. After trying several times to get him to talk about Khrushchev, without much success, Rowan gave up and changed the subject to what Robeson saw for the future. Robeson was optimistic and insisted that “the Negro should solve his problems within the American framework,” with solidarity and backing from “all the colored people of the world.”
As Rowan remarked to his readers, Robeson had engaged again. He began to hum snippets of material from what he hoped would be new concerts in a comeback: “I am singing at the top of my voice for my people’s freedom,” he exclaimed.
In the end, it was Robeson’s belief in black power that caught Rowan’s attention. Robeson, he concluded for his readers, was what he called a “black nationalist,” longing, “for the day when the power of the world’s black men will overwhelm the whites whom he sees as the blind purveyors of shame and misery for ‘his people.’ ”
The power of numbers and the power granted by history would pave the way to freedom for the African Americans. Robeson stood tall as the symbol of that power: “Jim Crow, that stubborn old bird whose wings form the cloak of martyrdom that Paul Robeson wears—and now waves high for the colored world to see.” Rowan ended his piece on an optimistic note—quoting Robeson, he remarked, “He is sure that the day will come when American Negroes will find that ‘black power’ holds the key to their freedom.”
The issue of Ebony carrying Rowan’s interview with Robeson hit the newsstands around the middle of September 1957. Included in the interview was Rowan’s question about the State Department’s reasons for keeping him silent, and Robeson’s scornful response: “They can keep me from going overseas, but they can’t keep news of Emmett Till and Autherine Lucy from going over.”
Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, had been brutally murdered two years earlier in Mississippi while on a family visit—a killing described as a lynching in the black press. Autherine Lucy had not been murdered, but her case nevertheless starkly showed Americans and those abroad the lawlessness of the South. In 1956, Lucy became the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Alabama. Just days after she begun her studies, mobs gathered to prevent her from attending classes; she was then expelled on the grounds that her presence was detrimental to the university. The story made it into every major American newspaper and soon appeared in newspapers throughout the world.
To these cases, Robeson could now add a third highly publicized instance of ugly race relations in the Southern states. At the beginning of September 1957, nine African-American students in Little Rock, Arkansas, were registered to attend previously all-white Little Rock Central High. Since 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated schools were unconstitutional, schools throughout the country had had to make plans to integrate. The Little Rock School Board had agreed to do just that, but on September 4, when the nine students showed up to enroll, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to stop them and make sure that the school would remain segregated.
Despite the school board condemning him and a personal plea from President Eisenhower that he abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling, Faubus remained adamant. Louis Armstrong, who had been chosen by the State Department to lead one of their sponsored tours to the Soviet Union, upon hearing of what had happened in Little Rock, changed his mind. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he told a reporter in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was touring with his band. Armstrong referred to Eisenhower as having “no guts,” and as for Faubus, he was nothing more than an “uneducated plow-boy.” “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country … The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country; what am I supposed to say?” Armstrong added.
No one reading Rowan’s interview in this context would fail to see how prescient and poignant Robeson’s remarks had been.
Early in October, Rowan appeared on a nationally broadcast radio program. When asked about the Robeson interview, he said, “When he’s talking about what’s happening to Negroes or when he’s crying out for freedom of Negroes or when he’s talking about a constitutional issue like the freedom to travel, I find it very difficult to disagree with him.” More than three decades later, Rowan published a memoir of his own full and controversial life. Recalling the interview, he said, “I felt proud that I had given the marvelous man a fair hearing, a decent break … journalistic peril does not lie merely in covering Saigon or Beirut; it lurks among the character assassins inside America who want to destroy those whose political and social views they detest.”
In spite of Robeson’s continuing problems with the State Department, in terms of his popular exposure his fortunes continued to ascend. Summer and autumn 1957 saw him on an extensive concert tour of the West Coast, where in all of the major cities Robeson pulled in crowds of stalwart left-wing unionists, religious leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary people.
And there was more to come. In the wake of the Ebony piece, in early 1958, Robeson self-published Here I Stand, a book part political statement and part autobiography. Written in conjunction with his friend Lloyd Brown, a labor activist and author, Here I Stand pulled no punches. It was a deeply assertive book. “I am a Negro” are its first words. Later Robeson adds, “I am an American,” and then, to make clear what he had always claimed—the words that had been so distorted, so mangled by white and black politicians, commentators and journalists—“I speak as an American Negro whose life is dedicated, first and foremost, to winning full freedom, and nothing less than full freedom, for my people in America …”
As he explained further into the book, the struggle to win this freedom had to be a black affair, but from the beginning he wanted his black readers to know that he had had enough of the white leaders of America:
I care nothing—less than nothing—about what the lords of the land, the Big White Folks, think of me and my ideas. For more than ten years they have persecuted me in every way they could—by slander and mob violence, by denying me the right to practice my profession as an artist, by withholding my right to travel abroad. To these, the real Un-Americans, I merely say: “All right—I don’t like you either!”
The book’s rhetoric placed Robeson firmly within the African-American freedom movement inspired by like-minded black trade unionists and black religious leaders—not the Communist Party. He resented and mistrusted a gradualist approach to civil rights, putting his trust instead in mass action and unity. In the book’s more than one hundred pages, Robeson elaborated on many of the themes he had mentioned in his interview with Carl Rowan several months earlier.
Wholly ignored by the white mainstream papers, Here I Stand was noticed by the African-American press. The Afro-American, one of the most widely read black newspapers, serialized the book in installments that spring. The FBI, always on the alert, picked up through an informant at the end of January that the book was going to be published on the first Monday in February. J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the special agent in charge in New York to get details and to make sure that a copy was sent back to Washington. For the next few days, memos were passed around giving details of publication and a synopsis of the book’s main argument; checks were made as to where the book could be purchased, what other literature was available at those stores, and who frequented them; and finally the name and political affiliation of the printing company and its owners was noted and filed. Typical FBI routine. The book did well. The 10,000-copy first run sold out within six weeks of publication and the book looked set to continue this success.
Robeson’s career was definitely picking up. In late January 1958 he landed the first contract with a commercial recording company he had been offered since his passport problems immobilized him. Vanguard Records, set up in 1950 as a predominantly classical label, had made the bold venture into folk music in 1955 when it recorded the Christmas Eve Carnegie Hall concert by the Weavers.
Pete Seeger’s group, which had been founded in 1948, after early success had been hounded during the Red Scare, like Robeson, and like Robeson they found their recording and performing opportunities disappearing rapidly. In 1953, Decca Records, which had signed them several years earlier, abruptly terminated their contract and deleted their back catalog. Vanguard stepped in to put them back on the recording road.
Besides their experiences together in Peekskill, Robeson and Seeger had many individual experiences in common. Seeger had appeared before a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in August 1955; he was cited for contempt of Congress two years later. Now both musicians were being pulled out of recording silence by the same label. Robeson’s first recording with Vanguard was made in February and March, and the following month The Essential Paul Robeson was released. He was back in the commercial record market.
Late March saw Robeson performing in Portland, Oregon, where he hadn’t been for more than a decade, and early April saw him traveling to Chicago where he had been invited to share his sixtieth birthday (April 9, 1958) with the Chicago Council for American-Soviet Friendship. The National Guardian, one of the only newspapers to have covered Robeson’s activities over the years, reported that birthday celebrations for the singer were going on simultaneously across the world in twenty-seven countries.
To the annoyance of the State Department, India, with over 400 million people, the world’s largest democracy, was planning the most extensive celebrations, in many of its major cities. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had given the planning his personal approval, referring to Robeson as a great humanist. The celebrations, Nehru argued, were as much a tribute to what Robeson stood for and had suffered as they were homage to a great individual.
Through Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador, the State Department tried to convince Nehru that Americans, among them “negroes prominent in all walks of American life … would certainly interpret the celebration as Communist-inspired and even anti-American and that many would regard celebration as evidence that India was going Communist.” There was no justification, the ambassador continued, to single out Robeson “for such unusual honor.” The celebrations went ahead anyway. American embassy officials were under strict instructions not to attend any of the events.
Robeson was back in demand as a concert artist. Offers were coming in from cities across the country and in Canada. In March, Paul Endicott, a concert manager based in Michigan, in a city close to Detroit, told Robeson that he had lined up a very well-paid ten-city tour for October. Near the end of April, the FBI learned from a source in Newark, New Jersey, that Robeson was scheduled to return to Carnegie Hall in New York on May 9. His last concert there had been in 1929, and he hadn’t performed in New York City at all since 1947. Art D’Lugoff, an impresario who would later in the year open one of New York’s most famous jazz clubs, the Village Gate, in Greenwich Village, made the engagement. The FBI checked its files on D’Lugoff and reported they had nothing on him; they concluded that he was just doing his job as an impresario.
The Carnegie Hall concert was sold out by early April. Twenty police officers, according to a reporter from the New York Times, were on hand to keep the peace, but they disbanded soon after it became apparent that there would be no disturbances. Robeson was greeted by a lengthy standing ovation. His program of folk music, sung in half a dozen languages, thrilled the audience. He sang, he lectured, and he recited from Othello. He was back on form. He gave three encores, the reporter noted, “among them ‘Joe Hill’ at which the audience started to applaud before he got into the music.” Two weeks later, just as he had done in 1929 Robeson returned to Carnegie Hall for a second concert, which was also sold out. This audience, many of whom had obtained tickets from Harlem outlets, even outdid the first, joining Robeson in singing his encores.
At the beginning of June, Robeson took a recital directly to his people when he performed at the Mother A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Zion Church, the first black church in New York, where Robeson’s brother, Ben, was the pastor. The church was filled to overflowing. Larry Brown accompanied Robeson for this historic moment. Robeson told the audience “A lot of the hard struggle is over … I’ve been waiting for this afternoon to come back and give my thanks …”
He didn’t know then that this would be his last concert in the United States, or that the Supreme Court was about to make its momentous decision on the constitutional right to travel.
Within a day of hearing the Supreme Court’s ruling, Robeson told Endicott that the Canadian tour was off. “We are literally packing our bags,” Eslanda wrote to Endicott, “and will be off the moment we get the passport.”
And so it was. On July 10, 1958, at 5:30 p.m., Paul and Eslanda Robeson settled into their seats for the transatlantic flight to London.