CHAPTER 15 POSTWAR POLITICS (1945–1946)

1. His optimistic views are reflected in interviews with the Vancouver News-Herald, Jan. 11, 1945; Victoria (Canada) Daily Times, Jan. 13, 1945; Chicago Defender, Feb. 24, April 14, 1945.

2. Robeson’s activity, through the CAA, in preparing for the San Francisco conference was known in detail to the FBI, including an effort made to include the African leaders Nnamdi Azikiwe, Bankole (president of the Nigerian Trade Union Congress), and Esua (general secretary of the Nigerian Union of Teachers) in a broadcast dealing with the upcoming UN conference (FBI New York 100-25857-90). The FBI noted ominously (after tracking telephone conversations between Yergan and Rockmore) that PR had made a one-thousand-dollar contribution to the CAA in 1941 and, in response to Yergan’s special plea, an additional thousand in 1944 (FBI Main 100-12304-25, 27). New Africa, vol. 4, nos. 4–7 (May, June, July [“low ebb”], 1945). The CAA retained hope somewhat longer in the potential restraining power of the United Nations, a hope bolstered in 1946 by the successful passage in the General Assembly of a resolution introduced by Nan Pandit, chief of the Indian delegation, objecting to racial discrimination against Indians in South Africa. The Soviet Union supported the Indian resolution and the United States and Great Britain opposed it (New Africa, vol. 5, no. 11) [Dec. 1946]. I am grateful to my friend Rosalyn Higgins, the international law expert, for reading over this section on the United Nations.

3. New Africa, June 1945 (PR telegram); Stettinius to PR, June 6, 25, 1945, Jan. 19, 1946, NYPL/Schm: PR; Dulles to PR, Dec. 7, 1946, RA. Other Council members were also urged to telegraph Truman et al. (Hunton to E. Franklin Frazier, May 21, 1945, MSRC: Frazier).

4. New York Amsterdam News, June 16, 1945; Larry Brown to ER, Aug. 8, 1945; Abe Lastfogel (president, USO Camp Shows) to PR, Oct. 1, 1945; Chicago Defender, Aug. 25, 1945. FBI Main 100-25857-88 and 89 refer to attempted negotiations through Archibald MacLeish (then an assistant secretary with the State Department) for the Othello tour to Europe. Typical of the bizarre combination to be found in FBI documents of the arcanely well informed and the abysmally unfounded, the informant in FBI NY 25857–89 was unable to identify the “Joe” mentioned in the phone log as Joe Ferrer—though the Othello tour was currently in progress—but did at least suggest that “Joe” might “possibly [be] associated with Paul Robeson’s show.” A confidential informant reported to the FBI that Max Yergan, a “known active Communist” who exerted “considerable influence” over Robeson, had given him a going-away party on July 25, 1945, at his home, attended by “two Communist Chinese delegates to the San Francisco Conference” (FBI Main 100-12304-40, April 5, 1946).

5. FBI New York 100-25857-112 (disturbed); the quote about the “Sudeten soldiers” is from PR’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1948 (transcript in RA) in which he looked back to his views in 1945.

6. FBI New York 100-25857-112, 116, 120 (Yergan), 121, 123, 129; FBI Main 100-12304-40. Diane Sommers, Yergan’s secretary (and Ben Davis, Jr.’s lover), was another focal point of tension within the CAA office, since she was known to reproach Yergan for his “lavish personal expenses” paid for with CAA funds (Freda Diamond, ms. comments). FBI New York 100-25857-135, which is the log of a phone conversation between two unidentified people, reports their shared view that “Paul doesn’t know what’s going on [in terms of tension over Diane Sommers] so he would be rooting for her,” adding that Essie wasn’t aware of developments within the office, either; the log also contains the view of the two callers that Alphaeus Hunton and Doxey Wilkerson, the two respected, dignified, dedicated men who worked alongside Yergan in the CAA office, were temperamentally unsuited to deal with the tension, characterizing Hunton as a “guy [who] knows just one thing—his job. With all his guts he just sits there and pushes his pencil away … and [is] absolutely uninterested in anything else.” In 1948 Robeson joined Louise Bransten, Barney Josephson, Howard Fast, and Blackie Myers and Ferdinand Smith of the NMU in hosting a dinner for Frederick Field in “appreciation of his response whenever a progressive cause needed help” (PR to Corliss Lamont, April 21, 1948, courtesy of Lamont).

7. Robeson’s expressions of fear about the roles the U.S. State Department and Churchill were playing are also in The Afro-American, June 9, 1945, and the Boston Chronicle, Aug. 4, 1945. For confirmation of James F. Byrnes’s control of foreign policy during the last half of 1945, see Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

8. New Africa, vol. 2, no. 1 (Aug. 1943) (Labour conference); Robeson’s cable to Attlee is in the Manchester Guardian, Sept. 27, 1945.

9. New Africa, vol. 4, no. 8 (August-September 1945), no. 9 (October 1945).

10. Wilkins telegram to White, May 12(?), 1945; White memo of Aug. 24, 1945 (Rockmore’s suggestions); White memo to Wilkins, Sept. 5, 1945 (Welles, etc.)—all LC: NAACP; FBI NY 100-25857-10 (Clara Rockmore). Both Rockmore and Essie sent White lists of people to invite (RR to WW, Aug. 24, 1945; ER to WW, Aug. 25, 1945, LC: NAACP).

11. The text of Marshall Field’s remarks is in RA.

12. Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 22, 29, Oct. 27, 1945; the FBI document quoting PR is a blurred Xerox, the file date Nov. 28, 1945, the file number illegible. The Spingarn dinner is also reported in FBI Main 100-12304-40.

13. White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” Ebony, Feb. 1951.

14. The four-page typed ms. of PR’s speech at the World Freedom Rally on Nov. 14, 1945, and the six-page ms. of his talk at the Institute on Judaism, Nov. 25, 1945, are in RA. FBI reports on preparations for the Nov. 14 event, including a phone tap between Yergan and Robeson, are in New York 100-25857-124, 133. A month later, continuing to emphasize the same themes, Robeson gave a statement to The People’s Voice stressing that “the domestic fascists … have boldly stepped forward to take up the battle … are powerful and influential. Their influence extends up to the very top of our government.” He expressed continuing optimism that although “the enemy is powerful … the masses of peoples are more powerful,” and if they stood together would “win the struggle” (two-page ms. statement is in RA).

As a result of the appearance of PR and several other actors at a Madison Square Garden rally late in Sept. to aid the victims of the Franco regime—at which Harold Laski attacked the Catholic Church for its support of Franco—the Catholic actor Frank Fay formally protested to Actors’ Equity (the dispute is detailed in FBI phone taps, New York 100-25857-110, 115, 116, 129). PR wrote Equity a blistering letter in response to Fay, defending his right to appear and expressing the hope of finding Fay someday “on the side of the great forces of anti-fascists—Catholic and non-Catholic” (PR to Equity Council, Oct. 2, 1945, Actors’ Equity Association Records, NYU: Wagner). The Constitutional Educational League published a thirty-two-page pamphlet, The Fay Case (RA) by Joseph P. Kamp, portraying Fay as “an old fashioned American,” all those connected with the Madison Square Garden rally as “Communists,” and Robeson himself as “Mr. Moscow.”

FBI Main 100-12304-23 (for the report that PR had joined the CP—while on a tour in England, inspired by Harry Pollitt the British Communist leader); FBI Main 100-12304-34 (“definitely classify”). The FBI had also been investigating Essie—triggered, apparently, by the report she “has mailed several letters addressed to Nehru” (FBI Main 100-12304-10?) but, after lengthy investigation, concluded that there was “no known Communist activity” on her part (FBI Main 100-12304-21), although she was “vitally interested in the matter of racial discrimination” (FBI Main 100-12304-14). Still, the FBI issued a “security index card” for her (FBI Main, June 10, 1944, file number blurred; additional reports on ER: FBI Main 100-12304-15 and 17).

15. Duclos’s “On the Dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States” is reprinted in Political Affairs, July 1945. Of the secondary works covering the Browder crisis, I’ve found Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (Harvard University Press, 1972), particularly useful.

16. FBI Main 100-12304-29 (June 9, 1945). In FBI Main 100-12304-40 (April 5, 1946), a confidential informant advised that Ben Davis, Jr., and PR had talked over the import of the Duclos article and “Robeson expressed himself as thinking that William Z. Foster was correct in his thinking about the matter.”

17. Pittsburgh Courier, July 6, 1946; Seton, Robeson, pp. 168–72. Because of the voluminous number of newspaper reviews in RA—and their repetitive nature, adding little to Larry Brown’s succinct summary quoted above—I have decided against specific citations from the reviews here.

Difficulties developed between PR and “Willie” Schatzkammer, the pianist who often appeared as an associate artist on PR’s concert programs; for a while (according to Rockmore) Robeson felt Larry Brown was allied with Schatzkammer, and Rockmore warned Brown that he was likely to become the brunt of “a great deal of hostility” because of this. In his letter to Brown. (March 4, 1947, NYPL/Schm: Brown) Rockmore never specified the nature of the Robeson-Schatzkammer dispute and referred to it only cryptically, but he advised Brown not to take sides openly with Schatzkammer for fear of alienating Paul. He closed his letter on a more light-hearted note, saying that all this would one day be “grist” for Larry’s “memoirs” of his life on stage with “La Hayes [Roland Hayes] and Le Robeson.” Rockmore asked Brown “to tear this letter up after you have read it.” FBI Main 100-12304-40 (JAFRC). Robeson’s endorsement of Quill was the subject of a separate report, FBI New York 100-25857-126 (Nov. 5, 1945). Revels Cayton received many requests for a Robeson appearance (they are in NYPL/Schm: NNC), but he reported that Paul’s singing schedule was so tough he didn’t “have the heart to ask him to do something for the Congress” [NNC] while he was out in California (Cayton to Matt Crawford, Jan. 14, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

18. In my discussions of foreign policy, I’ve found myself leaning (strongly) in the direction of the revisionist historians and have found Marty Jezer’s The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945–1960 (South End Press, 1982) consistently useful. The following have also been significant resources: John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (Columbia University Press, 1972); Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Quadrangle, 1970); Thomas M. Patterson, Soviet-American Confrontation (Johns Hopkins Press, 1973); Richard Freedland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (Knopf, 1972). For a summary of Churchill’s unrelentingly anti-Soviet views and his insistence on maintaining British ascendancy in the Mediterranean, see Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1986). Harbutt argues that the new Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, worked with Churchill behind the scenes to shape a British anti-Communist consensus and that, in his Feb. 1946 visit to the United States, Churchill succeeded in recruiting a previously wavering Truman. In his impressive study, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (Columbia University Press, 1982), Lawrence S. Wittner concludes that the Soviet government took no direct action to aid the Greek left and that U.S. dealings with postwar Greece “are not very pretty” (see especially ch. 2).

19. FBI New York 100-25857-156 (March 21, 1946); California Eagle, March 14, 1946; Daily People’s World, March 26, 1946.

20. FBI New York 100-25857-156 (March 21, 1946).

21. Ibid. The FBI believed PR had “apparently increasingly come under the control of Max Yergan,” himself described as “a leader in Communist front activities,” and accurately characterized Robeson as being “reticent in giving his approval to send the [original] letter over signature” (Main 100-12304-40, April 5, 1946). Other prominent blacks, along with significant portions of the black press, protested Churchill’s speech (Mark Solomon, “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in T. G. Paterson, Cold War Critics (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 217–19.

22. The People’s Voice, March 30, 1946; New Africa, Jan. 1946 (famine); Yergan to Du Bois, Jan. 17, 1946, reports on the success of the famine campaign (U.Mass.: Du Bois); program on the April Win the Peace Conference and typed ms. of Temple Israel speech, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-158 (telephone log of PR phoning his Win the Peace speech).

23. The Win the Peace program is in RA. A “Big Three Unity for Colonial Freedom” rally held on June 6, 1946, in Madison Square Garden is a further example of the wide variety of prominent Americans in attendance: among others, Mary McLeod Bethune, Norman Corwin, Judy Holliday, Lena Home (Louise Hopkins to PR, April 25, 1946, RA). Nehru was among those who sent cables in support of the meeting (Nehru to PR, May 16, 1946, RA). Stettinius to PR, May 24, 1946, RA.

During 1946 Robeson made dozens of political appearances in addition to those cited above. He contributed to half a dozen Win the Peace rallies from coast to coast. He lent his presence both to organizational conferences and to mass meetings sponsored by the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs. And he put in single appearances in behalf of such causes and commemorative celebrations as the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the New Masses magazine, the 3rd American Slav Congress, the Oust Bilbo Dinner (at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York) and the Southern Youth Legislature (at Columbia, South Carolina). Because the sentiments he expressed on these occasions are already summarized in the detailed account above of several of his appearances in 1946, I have refrained from unnecessary duplication. One additional appearance, however, is worth special mention. On Dec. 29, 1946, PR spoke to the Convention of Alpha Phi Alpha, the leading black fraternity, which was not known as outspokenly political, and did not trim his sentiments to his audience. He deplored the role of the U.S. government “in extending loans and credits and even guns to the powers which are trying to maintain their empires,” hailed the role India and the U.S.S.R. had played in the United Nations in thwarting the attempt by General Smuts of the Union of South Africa to annex South-West Africa, applauded “the new democratic states which have been born in Central Europe since the end of the war: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia.…” In regard to domestic policy, he called for a determined effort to get the new Congress to pass antilynching legislation, create a permanent FEPC, and end poll-tax discrimination. “If the Democratic party and the Republican party cannot do this job,” he said, prefiguring the role he was soon to play in the Progressive Party campaign, “then it will be necessary for the people to form a new party of their own” (ms. of the talk is in RA).

24. Several versions of PR’s Sept. 12, 1946, speech at the Garden are in RA; a summarizing Associated Negro Press release is in CHS: Barnett. In the speech, Robeson singled out Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York for excoriation because of his whitewash of a Long Island policeman who had killed two black veterans. The black political cartoonist Ollie Harrington helped make Isaac Woodward’s blinding into a major NAACP case. Harrington invited only foreign correspondents to a press conference and presented Woodward, along with his doctors, to them. At a second press conference, Harrington recalls Robeson and Yergan looking reproachfully at him from the audience, as if to say, “This case belongs to us.” Harrington deeply admired Robeson but thought this attitude unworthy of him—“It was the saddest moment in my relation with Robeson” (interview with Harrington, July 29, 1986). Walter White asked Harrington to become public-relations director for the NAACP, but as red-baiting pressures mounted, he decided to live in Europe.

25. Robeson’s telegram to Du Bois asking him to join the call, dated Aug. 30, 1946, is in U.Mass.: Du Bois.

26. White to PR, Sept. 10, 1946; Gloucester B. Current (NAACP director of branches) to Edward M. Swan (executive secretary, Detroit branch of NAACP), special delivery, Sept. 20, 1946; memo from Franklin H. Williams to White, Sept. 17, 1946, denouncing the American Crusade as “irresponsible”; White to Du Bois, Sept. 19, Oct. 2, 1946; Du Bois to White, Sept. 23, 1946—all in LC: NAACP. The Rev. Charles A. Hill, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, like Du Bois denied that he had ever been told of the “broadly representative” National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence; now that he had belatedly been informed, he wrote White, he was nonetheless going to attend the Robeson gathering—“I will go representing my church.… If there is not a good showing … the reflection will be on all of the liberal forces” (Hill to White, Sept. 18, 1946, LC: NAACP). Revels Cayton, in line with the policy of the National Negro Congress to challenge the NAACP for leadership of black workers, urged attendance at the American Crusade gathering (Cayton to Jack Bjoze, executive secretary, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Aug. 30, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

In June 1946 the NNC had presented a petition to the UN calling for action in behalf of the oppressed black citizens of the United States. The list of the United Nations Campaign Committee is in NYPL/Schm: NNC and does not include a single member of the NAACP hierarchy (or that of any other mainstream black organization). It does include the names of many leading CP and left-wing figures, black and white, among them Robeson, Ben Davis, Jr., Du Bois, Frederick Field, Doxey Wilkerson, Albert Kahn, Ben Gold, Michael Quill, Irwin Potash, Lawrence Reddick, Ferdinand Smith, Henry Winston, and, among the “publicists,” Langston Hughes. In response to Yergan’s appeal for support of the petition drive, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote him, “… there is a question in our minds as to whether the approach to the existing conditions here in our own United States should come through the United Nations, whose problems for consideration are international rather than national” (Bethune to Yergan, Nov. 20, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

27. The People’s Voice, Sept. 28, 1946. Robeson also spoke on MBS radio on Sept. 83, 1946, denouncing lynching (the text of the talk is in RA; there was a lengthy excerpt in The People’s Voice, Jan. 11, 1947). The limited success of the Crusade meetings is described in the papers of the NNC (letter from Nellie Zakin to participants, NYPL/Schm), along with letters of thanks to the contributors, who included, among others, Roger de Koven, Mercedes McCambridge, and Jan Minor; memo from Gloucester Current to Walter White, Sept. 24, 1946, LC: NAACP.

28. The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1946; Philadelphia Tribune, Sept. 24, 1946; New York World-Telegram, Sept. 23, 1946; Chicago Sun, Sept. 24, 1946; The People’s Voice, Sept. 28, 1946 (which listed the delegates as [besides Robeson] Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Memorial Institute, Sedalia, N.C.; Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the Council of Church Women; Rev. W. H. Jernagin, National Baptist Convention; Dr. Joseph L. Johnson, dean of the Howard University School of Medicine; Dr. Max Yergan; and Aubrey Williams, editor of the Southern Farmer). Additionally, the Chicago Defender (Sept. 28, 1946) lists Metz T. P. Lorchard, editor-in-chief of the Defender; Rabbi Irving Miller, American Jewish Congress; and an “H. Murphy of Chicago” as being part of the delegation. The several FBI reports (New York 100-25857-188, 196) headed “Re: American Crusade to End Lynching,” have nearly their entire contents inked out. Apparently the decision to go from the meeting to the White House was spur-of-the-moment. Later recounting the event, George B. Murphy, Jr. (the left-wing scion of the family that owned the Afro-American), wrote, “… on the platform … the question came up about going down to the White House to picket.… Dr. Jernagin began to caution ‘restraint’: ‘Why Dr. Jernagin,’ [Paul said,] ‘it looks to me like these folks want us to lead them down to the White House and I think that is what we should do.’ Presto, Dr. Jernagin got his hat and went right along with Paul to do just that” (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U.Mass.: Du Bois).

29. The complete transcript of Robeson’s testimony before the Tenney Committee was printed in a California newspaper, the Westwood Hills Press, Oct. 18, 1946; unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the following paragraphs come from that source. Additional detail on the committee can be found in Edward L. Barrett, Jr., The Tenney Committee (Cornell University Press, 1951).

30. Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC.

31. As early as 1941, Robeson wrote of having been with “my friend Revels Cayton” (PR to Freda Diamond, Aug. 1941, courtesy of Diamond). Yergan to William Schneiderman, Aug. 23, 1945; Yergan to Jeanne Pastor, Dec. 12, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton (PR, Jr., participating), April 27–28, 1982; separate interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Cayton, 1987–88. There is an additional and revealing group of letters in NYPL/Schm: NNC concerning Cayton’s arrival at NNC and the need to reorient the Congress’s purpose (e.g., Thelma M. Dale to William L. Patterson, Sept. 26, 1945; Patterson to Cayton and Matt Crawford, July 2, 1945; Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945; Cayton to Crawford, Jan. 3, 14, Feb. 1, 1946; Cayton to James Hunter [CIO], Jan. 10, 1946). In explaining his attraction to the Party, Cayton sounded a note close to Robeson’s own: “I found a new world … a kind of equality with whites, within the Party, that I’d never known before. And it was attractive” (interview, April 29, 1982). Similar sentiments can be found in two other books by or about black Communists: Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson (Harvard University Press, 1979); Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Liberator Press, 1978). As an example of the personal closeness between the two men, Robeson talked to Cayton (and to few others) about his relationship with Lena Horne, telling Cayton that she broke up with him when he refused to marry her. Home’s own (platonic) version of the friendship is in In Person: Lena Home, pp. 181–87. She reiterated her denial of a love affair in our phone interview of Sept. 8, 1987: “It would never have occurred to me to be physical with him—he was too mythic.”

32. Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC (reorientation of NNC). Cayton correspondence, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Revels Cayton, 1987–88.

33. Interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982. Addie Wyatt, who worked with the Packinghouse Union in the early 1950s, also emphasized to me Robeson’s concern about unity among black and white workers in the trade-union movement (interview with Wyatt, Jan. 7, 1986). According to Annette Rubinstein, who worked closely with Vito Marcantonio in the American Labor Party, “Marc very much distrusted and disliked Ben Davis.” Marcantonio and Doxey Wilkerson were both “horrified” to learn that during the war Davis knew and kept quiet about the Party’s sanctioning segregated meetings in the South (interview with Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983). Angus Cameron recalls once asking Ben Davis directly what he thought about the question of whether American blacks constituted a nation. Davis’s reply was (according to Cameron): “The Party was wrong when it held that blacks in America were a nation, and also when it held they were not a nation” (Cameron to me, April 25, 1987).

34. Interviews with Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews 1987–88; Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC. Another description of Cayton and Robeson in action together, this time at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the NNC on May 31, 1946, in Detroit, is in New Masses, June 18, 1946, written by Abner W. Berry, the black Communist. For a negative view of the NNC, strongly “anti-Communist” in bias, see Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism (Cornell University Press, 1964).

Speaking to the delegates to the Longshore and Shipsclerks’ caucus at their convention in San Francisco in August 1943, Robeson had saluted Harry Bridges as a “courageous leader” (The Dispatcher, Sept. 3, 1943). And when Bridges, who was foreign-born, was being threatened with deportation in 1945, Robeson had written in his defense directly to President Roosevelt, stating that “Bridges has stood steadfastly against discrimination.” Bridges’s record was better than that of Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union, but privately Robeson would argue with him about the need to wage a stronger fight against racial discrimination in the ILWU. Bridges later came to resent the movement for black caucuses, insisting the effort would split his union (The Dispatcher, March 9, 1945; The Pilot [NMU], March 16, 1945). On the other hand, Bridges’s reputation as a champion of black rights remained high enough for the National Negro Labor Council to pass a special resolution in support of his fight against deportation at its second annual convention, in 1952 (The Dispatcher, Dec. 5, 1952).

35. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982. Sept. 28, 1984. Unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the account that follows are from these interviews.

36. Perhaps adding to PR’s concern, the following exchange took place at just this time during the House Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry:

Richard Nixon: “Have you any other tests which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?”

Adolphe Menjou: “Well, I think 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” (Hearings, Oct. 1946, p. 104).

PR, Jr., is the source for the information about the relationship between Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and his father (see also note 17, p. 695). For more on Bumpy Johnson, see Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party (Random House, 1972), ch. 9. Tension in the CP over relationships between black men and white women went back at least to the thirties (see Naison, Heyday, pp. 136–37; George Charney, A Long Journey [Quadrangle, 1968], p. 102). Freda Diamond has told me (multiple interviews) that, at one point in the mid-forties, Ben Davis, Jr., came to her on behalf of the CP and asked that she pointedly let Paul know that his relationship with Uta was causing a lot of talk. She refused.

37. “The Midnight Raid of José Ferrer,” Confidential, Sept. 1955.

38. Several members of Robeson’s inner circle share a version of one aspect of the breakup at odds with Hagen’s (and which they say Paul himself told them). According to this version, Hagen was so distraught at Paul’s attempt to disentangle himself that she swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills. Sensing something was wrong, this version continues, Robeson hastened to her apartment, found her comatose, walked her around, got her medical treatment, “saved her life.” Hagen hooted with derision when I ran that version by her. “I’ve never been in a coma. I took eight sleeping pills when my mother died in 1939, about five years before I met Paul, and I was walked around a room in St. James Hotel in Philadelphia by my brother and Joe Ferrer.… It sounds like a combination of two stories.… I’m sure I told Paul about what I did in Philadelphia when my mother died.” (A not-incidental reason for taking the pills in 1939, she added, was to get out of going on tour with the Lunts.) What a shame, she said—“The relationship was so phenomenal all by itself, there’s nothing to lie about.” I should add that I believe Hagen’s version, on the grounds that in all other ways I found her candid and forthcoming. Hagen last saw Robeson sometime in the fifties; he was coming out of the Astor Theater surrounded by bodyguards, and she had the impulse to run and embrace him but resisted it (interviews with Hagen).

39. RA contains itineraries for Essie’s extensive lecture tours plus a number of letters extolling her abilities on the platform (e.g., A. Ritchie Low to PR, April 11, 1947: “I heard Mrs. Robeson give a wonderfully fine lecture in San Francisco”). She applied to the Carnegie Corporation for funding on yet a third book—“a comprehensive SURVEY OF BLACK AFRICA”—but was turned down with the explanation that Carnegie was already funding Lord Hailey “to look at the scene with European eyes” (ER to Devereux C. Josephs, Nov. 22, 1946; Whitney H. Shepardson to ER, Dec. 23, 1946, RA). Essie wrote a pamphlet that the Council on African Affairs published in 1946 in which she was critical of U.S. policy on Africa, and predicted that the continent would soon be in the forefront of international politics. For further discussion of ER’s views on Africa, see Barbara Ransby, “Eslanda Goode Robeson, Pan-Africanist,” Sage, 3:2 (Fall 1986). Essie described her African trip to the Van Vechtens as “fabulous” (ER to CVV and FM, postcard, Sept. 12, 1946, Yale: Van Vechten). The background on Paul, Jr.’s finances is in ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, RA.

Essie’s lecture dates are partly detailed in a brief diary she kept for Feb. 1946, which also records some interesting encounters she had. In St. Louis, her “old beau from Indiana U,” Elmer Mosee, came to see her. In 1946 Mosee was the superintendent of the People’s Hospital in St. Louis (in Jan. 1947 Robeson sang in St. Louis under the hospital’s sponsorship), and Essie described him as the “closest Negro to Truman”; as such he gave her “all the low down,” describing Truman as “loyal, stubborn, devoted to his mother, honest, conservative, grass roots, cautious, firm. Says he removed a secretary on Elmer’s complaint” (ER Diary, Feb. 4, 1946, RA). In Pennsylvania she had a talk with Congressman Francis E. Walter, a “wonderful man, liberal, interesting, friendly, sound. Tells me Rankin is really mental case. Bilbo just a career politician with one item to sell—discrimination” (ER Diary, Feb. 15, 1946, RA). This same Francis Walter was later co-author of the infamous McCarran-Walter Act and a tormentor of Robeson—see pp. 440–42. In Philadelphia Essie saw the play Jeb and disliked it but thought Ossie Davis “gave a beautiful performance” (ER Diary, Feb. 16, 1946, RA). Back in New York, between lectures, she saw Bess Eitingon for dinner (the two had decided to write a play together on the atom bomb), along with Clifford Odets and his wife and Marc Blitzstein. She found Odets “insufferable. We got into a terrific row over [the play] Deep Are the Roots. I was so furious at his pompous stupid criticism I could have killed him. Marc is nice” (ER Diary, Feb. 19, 1946, RA). In the dining car of a train outside of Columbus, Ohio, she talked “with a white passenger at table who is opposite me in the sleeper. After he left I told the waiter—Negro of course—It’s some job educating these white folks. He said dont waste your time. You cant educate them. Why a guy came in the diner for breakfast this morning—white man—and asked one of the boys—Say why dont you smile? The waiter said—dead pan—Did you come in here to eat or to see me smile. He was so angry. The white man was furious. All the waiters froze up on him and he didn’t know what to do. Said he’d report the waiter. So all the waiters gave him bad service. White folks!! It never occurs to them we do double shift, long hours, what have we got to smile about?” (ER Diary, Feb. 25, 1946, RA.)

40. ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, RA.

41. ER to PR, Dec. 1, 1946, RA. Essie angrily threatened never again to communicate directly with Paul if he passed on to Rockmore the contents of her letter. Yet Essie herself made it all but certain Rockmore would learn of her angry discontent. When H. Lee Lurie, a partner in Rockmore’s law firm, was assigned to do Essie’s taxes and sent her a query about her checkbook stubs, she replied, “Honey, where would I get a checkbook, and for what? I havent had a checkbook since I arrived in this country, in 1939, and Bobby took over our personal affairs. Not only have I not had a checkbook, but I haven’t had an adequate housekeeping allowance since then.… I realize that I have had to live down a reputation for extravagance. I am still trying to figure out how I have been extravagant.… Paul has been living at the regular rate he used to, but I have been living on the rock bottom level.… Before then, abroad, Paul and I lived on the same level and hence, I daresay, I was considered extravagant” (Lurie to ER, Dec. 21, 1946; ER to Lurie, Jan. 3, 1947, RA).

42. ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, Jan. 28, 1947, RA.

43. ER to Revels Cayton, Jan. 6, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC. Essie made the comment about not being told anything specifically in reference to Cayton’s efforts, with Robeson’s support, to launch a national trade-union department in the NNC, but it seems to me to have broader applicability. Information on establishing the Labor Department is in Cayton’s correspondence for this period in NYPL/Schm; one letter particularly refers to “an extremely successful banquet for Paul Robeson” for that purpose, held in Detroit (Cayton to Max Perlow, secretary-treasurer of the Furniture Workers of America, Jan. 21, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

CHAPTER 16 THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY (1947–1948)

1. For background information on the inception of the Progressive Party, I’ve found three works of special value: Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army (Marzani & Munsell, 1965), 3 vols.; Allen Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives (University of California Press, 1974); and Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century (The Free Press, 1973). The two groups that sponsored Wallace’s Sept. 1946 speech were the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICC-ASP) and the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC). As early as Feb. 1946 Robeson spoke for the Minnesota ICC (Samuel A. Cordon to PR, Feb. 4, 1946, RA), and the month before that the nominating committee of ICC-ASP unanimously chose him to stand for election as a vice-chairman (Jo Davidson, national chairman, to PR, Jan. 17, 1946, RA; minutes of the We Want Wallace Committee of Harlem, Feb. 10, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

2. For information on the Win the Peace bannings, I’m grateful to Abbott Simon and Freda Diamond for a memo on the subject. The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1947 (St. Louis); FBI Main 100-12304-52, Jan. 29, 1947 (St. Louis); Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 1947 (“sing what I please”); Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 1, 1947. The car was being driven by Elmer Mosee, superintendent of the People’s Hospital of St. Louis; his son Elmer Mosee, Jr., and Larry Brown were the other passengers. Mosee had known the Robesons a long time (ER Diary, Feb. 4, 1946, RA). For more on Mosee, see note 39, p. 677. Hearing about PR’s announcement that he was leaving the concert stage, Bob Rockmore expressed annoyance at not having been consulted (Rockmore to PR, April 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

3. FBI Main 100-12304-50 (Hoover); Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1947 (Hopper); San Francisco Progress, April 4, 1947. At the same time, the FBI withdrew the Security Card Index on Essie, having decided “there is no evidence that Mrs. Robeson is presently active in Communist Party affairs” (FBI Main 100-12304-60 and 61, April 10, 1947).

4. Strong to Lawrence J. Campbell, April 22, 1947, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

5. I’ve drawn this account of the Peoria incident from a large number of sources. The most significant have been: PM, April 20, 1947; Hartford Courant, April 18, 1947; Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947; FBI Main 123405–65 and 72 (Patterson), with a number of enclosures including the important five-page “The People’s Side of the Robeson Incident” (which is also in the NYPL/Schm: CRC). Yergan, who had accompanied Robeson to Peoria, wrote Essie: “It was a nasty situation and is the clearest evidence of fascist tyranny dominating an entire city” (Yergan to ER, April 22, 1947, RA). Ferdinand C. Smith, secretary of the CIO National Maritime Union, wired a protest to the Peoria City Council against the ban on Robeson, and Frank Kingdon and Jo Davidson, cochairs of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), spoke out against it. The Cultural Division of the NNC also took an active role in protesting the ban (Vivian L. Cadden to “Dear Friend,” April 23, 1947, NYPL/Schm: NNC). The FBI agent in Springfield, Illinois, reported that Mayor Triebel “was deluged with correspondence from all over the United States censuring him and requesting that Paul Robeson be permitted to appear” (FBI New York 100-25857-468). Roy Wilkins, on behalf of the NAACP, was among those who protested abrogating “the cherished American right of freedom of speech” (Wilkins telegram to Triebel, May 1, 1947, LC: NAACP). Thomas J. Fitzpatrick, president of District Six, United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, wrote Mayor Triebel (May 2, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC), “Robeson is a threat, it is true, to the Thomas-Rankin Committee on Un-American Activities—a threat to all reactionary thought in America.” Milton Kaufman of the NNC wrote to Interior Secretary Ickes (April 30, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC) charging that “the industrial interests representing the Caterpillar Tractor plant” had worked behind the scenes to prevent Robeson’s appearance, a charge corroborated by Mary Sweat of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers of America (to Milton Kaufman, April 26, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC), who reported that, although some FE-CIO locals had passed resolutions condemning the mayor’s action in Peoria, “the large Caterpillar Tractor Local 105-FE-CIO has yet to take action.” She reported, too, that “we were unable to buy space in the newspapers” for an ad they had taken out protesting Robeson’s barring, “and were refused time on the air.”

6. The two clippings from the local press in RA are dated 1947 but are otherwise without identifying headings; Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947; Hartford Courant, April 18, 1947 (“fight”). The Ministerial Association in Peoria did issue PR an invitation “at some future date” to return, guaranteeing the use of a church (FBI Main 100-12304-65).

7. FBI Main 100-12304-77 (includes the Legion resolutions and the Dirksen correspondence). Hazelwood’s name has been inked out of all the FBI documents, but I have been able to deduce it from corollary accounts in the Peoria press about his public statements and his Legion/NAACP affiliations.

8. Chicago Sun, April 20, 1947.

9. PM, May 4, 1947; New York Tribune, April 25, 26, May 7 (Bookstein), May 11 (concert); Army Intelligence (War Department) to FBI, May 13, 1947, 100-25857-2891. Hazel Ericson (Dodge), Robeson’s friend from Somerville school, days, was among those in the audience, she and her husband attending “as a gesture of support”—for which she was subsequently followed by the FBI (interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; see ch. 1 for more on her). A number of individuals and groups outside Albany joined the protest, including the National Lawyers Guild and the Civil Rights Congress (PM, April 29, 1947; telegram from George Marshall, chairman of CRC, to PR, April 25, 1947, NYPL/Schm: CRC). Norman Corwin wrote Essie, “A dozen more fighters like Paul in this country, and reaction would not be winning so many bouts” (Corwin to ER, May 10, 1947).

10. Toronto Daily Star, May 19, 20, 1947; in an editorial on May 19, the Star reported that, “to enforce its order, the police commission had sent police to his concert—police with notebooks. Such is freedom of speech in Toronto.” PR’s typed CAA speech, dated April 25, 1947, is in RA. Edward Rettenberg, who had been in law school with Robeson, told me (phone interview, Dec. 10, 1982) that around this same time PR stopped calling on him, explaining that he “would be introuble” if known to be a friend; FBI agents did subsequently visit Rettenberg.

11. Newsweek, May 12, 1947; Times Herald, May 22, 1947 (Sokolsky); FBI Main 100-12304-76 (Hoover). By then Robeson had further inflamed opinion against himself by appearing on May 8 at a V-E Day Encampment rally of Communist veterans of World War II (Washington Post, May 9, 1947). First Army Headquarters reported to the War Department (which passed the information along to the FBI) that Robeson and Howard Fast “are expected to announce at the Encampment conference their intentions of joining the Communist Party” (FBI New York 100-25857-287). An FBI report dated March 10, 1947, quotes black Party leader Henry Winston telling Roy Hudson, the District 5 Party leader, “… It is time that a lot of people begin to speak out.… Thus the ball can be started rolling again by getting Paul Robeson and Howard Fast to publicly join the Party.… This will burn up the wires.…” They did not, but the Encampment may have marked the first public appearance Robeson made at an avowedly Communist-sponsored event, and, in the retroactive opinion of the ex–CPUSA leader John Gates, “The embrace was too tight” (interview with Gates, June 8, 1982). Reading the Sokolsky-like attacks in England, Joseph Andrews (“Andy”), Robeson’s valet and friend from his London days, expressed fear that “you may be fouled” (Andrews to PR, Aug. 29, 1947, RA). He expressed much the same sentiments to Larry Brown (May 27, 1947, NYPL/Schm: Brown). In another letter to Brown, Andy also expressed some resentment toward Robeson: “I was hoping to go home for the Sun this winter, and asked Paul to help toward this, but have heard not a word, so shall have to hold on here” (Jan. 8, 1948, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Since Robeson was never accused of a lack of generosity—except by Essie, who alternately accused him of extravagance toward others—the problem here was almost certainly Paul’s familiar failure as a correspondent and not as a friend. Harold Holt had offered Robeson an English tour, but Robeson turned it down (Rockmore to Holt, April 10, 1946, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

12. FBI Main 100-12304-69, 70, 73, 75, 77 (Canal Zone). PR’s Miami speech is summarized in an ANP release dated June 9, 1947 (CHS: Barnett). Apparently U.S. officials General F. T. Hines, General McSherry, and others initially promised to attend the Robeson concert (Edward Cheresh, UPWA-CIO, to Tom Richardson, April 28, 1947, NYPL/Schm: PR). FBI New York 100-25857-382(7?) (scholarship fund). The letter from PR, Du Bois, Bass, and Howard soliciting support for the Committee to End the Jim Crow “Silver-Gold” System in the Panama Canal Zone, dated Aug. 31, 1948, is in U.Mass.: Du Bois. Several letters from Panama in NYPL/Schm: Brown comment (in the words of one) “on the good your party has done for our community” (Sydney C. Fuller [a jeweler] to LB, June 30, 1947). In undated (1947) handwritten notes in RA, PR accounted it a “privilege” to have visited his “brothers and sisters” in Panama and the West Indies. “Your struggle is our struggle,” he wrote. Ewart Guinier has made reference (in “The Paul Robeson That I Knew,” The Black Scholar, March 1978, p. 45) to working with Robeson on “organizing non-white workers on the Panama Canal Zone and in Hawaii” (where Robeson went in 1948) while he, Guinier, was international secretary-treasurer of the United Public Workers (1946–53). More of this relationship and the organizing work the two men did together will become known once the Ewart Guinier Papers, currently held privately by Mrs. Guinier, are made available to scholars.

13. Look, June 24, 1947 (Gallup); Boston Chronicle, June 28, 1947; PM, July 20, 1947 (Lewisohn); FBI New York 100-25857-337, 341, 345; MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, p. 199 (Wallace). The FBI recorded a phone conversation between two members of JAFRC in which one argued that Robeson was being misused by progressive organizations because they were failing to coordinate their efforts, thereby scattering Robeson’s energies (FBI New York 100-25857-346, Oct. 29, 1947). Among other notable events to which Robeson lent his presence were the Madison Square Garden rally celebrating the seventeenth anniversary of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order and the sixth biennial convention of the NMU (New York Fraternal Outlook, Aug.-Sept. 1947; Tribune, Sept. 30, 1947).

14. Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, pp. 17–24; MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, chs. 7, 9; Markowitz, Rise and Fall, chs. 7–8. Late in March 1947 Truman had is sued Executive Order 9385, requiring a loyalty oath of all civil-service employees (it was later extended to all workers in defense industries); the oath had contributed to the alienation of organized labor.

15. Starobin, Crisis, ch. 7; Lichtenstein, Labor’s War, ch. 12; Markowitz, Rise and Fall, ch. 6.

16. Essie’s transcribed notes from the Oct. 6 and Nov. 8 meetings, along with the form letter of invitation and a list (of more than one hundred names) of those invited, are all in RA. Essie asked Walter White to join in sending out the invitation to the Nov. 8 meeting, but he did not sign the call, even though Essie again stressed in writing to him that the plan was “to bring together a powerful group of Negro leaders … without creating any new organization” (ER to White, Oct. 16, 1947, LC: NAACP). Initially, Hubert Delany, Channing Tobias, and Mary McLeod Bethune had told Essie they would attend the Oct. 6 meeting (ER to Du Bois, Oct. 1, 1947, U.Mass.: Du Bois). Du Bois told her he would have attended had not another meeting held him up, and he advised her that one stumbling block to unification would be the difficulty of weighing how much influence to parcel out to participating organizations (Du Bois to ER, Oct. 8, 1947, U.Mass.: Du Bois); to which Essie replied that the focus was on uniting powerful individuals, not organizations (ER to Du Bois, Oct. 16, 1949, U.Mass.: Du Bois).

17. Richard Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution,” in Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War (Quadrangle, 1969).

18. White to ER, Oct. 22, 1947, LC: NAACP. White suggested Essie show his letter to Paul and offered apologies for having “missed his telephone calls at the office and at the house.”

19. Quotes are from ER’s notes on Oct. 6 and Nov. 8 meetings, RA. All the participants felt that a promising base on which to place their demands was the progressive recommendations of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (“To Secure These Rights”) and the NNC initiated petition to the UN to investigate racism in the United States. Du Bois believed Walter White had dragged his feet in giving NAACP support to the petition (Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 [State University of New York Press, 1986]).

20. The flier for the June 2, 1948, event, along with a statement of purpose and a list of cosponsors, is in RA. Walter White to Comm. Adm., Jan. 24, 1948; WW to NAACP staff, Feb. 25, 1948, March 13, 1948, LC: NAACP. When the NAACP, in coordination with other national organizations, organized a National Civil Rights Mobilization to be held in Washington, D.C., in Feb. 1950, William L. Patterson, executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, requested that the CRC be allowed to participate. Roy Wilkins turned Patterson down (Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism, pp. 154–55).

21. Springfield Republican, Jan. 18, 1948 (Chicago); MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, pp. 301, 512. The other cochairs elected with Robeson were the sculptor Jo Davidson, the New Deal “brain truster” Rex Tugwell, the Progressive Party financial angel Anita McCormick Blaine, and Albert J. Fitzgerald, president of the CIO-UE union. During the campaign James Barfoot, the Progressive candidate for governor of Georgia, publicly stated that he “would like to see Paul Robeson secretary of state. No two nations of the world would go to war if he were” (New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 16, 1948). Again relating to public office, an FBI agent reported that the “Communist Party has given serious consideration to the possibility of running Paul Robeson for Congress against Adam Clayton Powell Jr.” (FBI New York 100-25857-368). In 1949 the Amsterdam News (Sept. 17, 1949) printed a rumor that the American Labor Party might run Robeson as its candidate for the U.S. Senate, and the Baltimore Afro-American reported that he was eying a run for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s seat in Congress (Nov. 22, 1949).

Essie served on the platform committee of the Progressive Party’s national convention, and campaigned widely for the ticket in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, though feeling ill much of the time. The FBI kept tabs on her activities. Quoting the Stamford Advocate for July 30, 1949, the FBI cited her as having said that Truman’s order concerning the armed forces “does not abolish Jim Crow—all it does is set up another committee.” It further quoted her as saying, “I am not a Communist.… It’s really not important anyway. If we lynched all the Communists in this country or sent them to Moscow, that would not solve the major problem of inflation or the housing shortage. The only way to solve them is to build for peace and not for war” (FBI Main 100-12304-182, Dec. 28, 1949). The day after the election, Essie went to Washington, D.C., for a full checkup. Dean Joseph Johnson of the Howard University Medical School—a strong supporter of the Progressive Party who had worked with Essie on the platform committee—arranged for her to be seen by Dr. Kelly Brown, who kept her in the hospital for three weeks, then diagnosed her as “suffering from prolonged chronic exhaustion.” He related her spastic colitis to amoebic dysentery contracted in Africa, but found her free of amoebic infection. He warned that a stellate tear of the cervix made when Paul, Jr., was born was often a precancerous condition and advised her to have it attended to. Paul, Jr., in his senior year at Cornell, came down to Washington to bring her home from the hospital (ER Diary, Sept. 18, Oct. 31, Nov. 2, 28, 1949, RA).

22. Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, ch. 3 (Clifford), 6 (ADA). Red-baiting the Progressive Party has continued well into the present, and among “objective” scholars as well as more consciously committed ideologues. As one example, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, in their 1957 study, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (Da Capo Press, 1974), pp. 475,478, refer to the Communists’ being “in full organizational command” of the Progressive Party’s founding convention and, in the arch, dismissive tone characteristic of their entire discussion of the Progressives, say of its final disintegration, “and still another Stalinist adventure had come to an end.” In the same vein, Michael Straight, who was centrally involved in the Progressive campaign but whose politics subsequently took a different course, has written in his memoirs, without qualification, that the Progressive Party “was created by the Communist Party” and that, when Wallace asked Straight in 1947 if Robeson was a Communist, Straight had replied, “I’m afraid so” (Michael Straight, After Long Silence [W. W. Norton, 1983], pp. 220, 222). When I interviewed Straight (April 3, 1985), I asked him what evidence he had for calling Robeson a Communist. He offered none.

23. Starobin, Crisis, ch. 7; David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism (Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 175.

24. Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, ch. 5, and the books previously cited by Gaddis, Gardner, Patterson and Freedland. As a corrective to the view of Truman’s deliberately inciting an anti-Soviet policy, see Alonzo Hamby, Beyond the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1973).

25. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, pp. 652–83.

26. Robeson’s account of his trips south on behalf of the Progressive Party, including the episodes described in the next two paragraphs, is on a tape in RA. The typed mss. of several of his speeches during the campaign are also in RA, along with many newspaper accounts of his appearances. The West Virginia Library Commission removed Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World (aimed at young adults) from its list of books recommended for children, leading her to protest the action to the book’s publisher, Julian Messner (Shirley Graham Du Bois to Kathryn Messner, n.d., U.Mass.: Du Bois). Annette Rubinstein passed on to me (interview, Dec. 5, 1983) the anecdote about Robeson’s travels in the South, as told to her by George Murphy. Theodora Peck, who headed the Progressive Party’s speakers’ bureau, told me (interview, April 8, 1982) that she had had few reports of hostility toward Robeson during his speaking engagements. According to MacDougall (Gideon’s Army, pp. 671, 676–77), Robeson, “a deeply sentimental person” with an “emotional nature,” was so “elated over his Memphis triumph” that “he hired a cab and drove, first into Mississippi and then into Arkansas, in order to set foot in two states where he knew his public appearances would be unwelcome.”

27. Detroit Free Press, April 10, 1948 (“known Communist”); FBI Main 100-12304, three reports dated March 18, April 10, 13, 1948, but only one file number (108 for March 18) is legible. Interview with Theodora Peck, April 8, 1982 (St. Louis); phone interview with Mrs. Harry White (her husband headed the Wallace campaign in Indiana), May 21, 1983 (Indianapolis). Robeson did speak just off the Ohio State campus to a gathering of some one thousand students and that evening addressed twenty-five hundred people in Columbus (FBI New York 100-25857-436).

28. Hoover to SAC, Honolulu, March 18, 1948, FBI Main 100-12304-103; SAC, Honolulu, to Hoover, June 2, 1948, FBI Main 100-12304-? (illegible); interview with Earl Robinson, Aug. 17, 1986. According to another FBI report (FBI Main 100-12304-126), on arriving in Honolulu, Robeson “was greeted by a number of prominent local Communists” and at a press conference prior to his departure on March 21, 1948, remarked that “he was a real Socialist, a ‘strong Wallace man,’ but one who goes beyond Wallace’s thinking on progressive capitalism.’” One of fifteen concerts Robeson gave was at a leper colony: he sang tirelessly to the audience, later telling Jean Seroity, a Progressive Party stalwart whom he saw soon after returning from the tour, “That was the most inspiring audience I ever had” (interview with Jean Seroity [PR, Jr., participating], May 3, 1982). On labor unrest in the islands during the years immediately preceding Robeson’s tour, see Charles H. Wright, Robeson: Labor’s Forgotten Champion (Balamp Publishing, 1975), pp. 49–55. According to Wright, the widows of the murdered labor leaders Jesus Mendenez and Manuel Joven each received checks for $1,250 from the territorial ILWU as a result of proceeds from Robeson’s tour.

29. Excerpts from Charles P. Howard’s diary are printed in MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, pp. 672–76.

30. Ibid., pp. 410–12.

31. The full transcript of Robeson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is in RA. The remaining quotations in this section are from the transcript, unless otherwise cited.

32. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that, after Robeson gave his testimony, there was some talk on the Senate Judiciary Committee of citing him for contempt—an action not taken, primarily out of concern about alienating the black vote in the upcoming presidential election. Afro-American, June 10, 1948; Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, June 1, 1948; FBI New York 100-25857-493 (pickets at White House); Pittsburgh, Courier, June 12, 1948 (“impressive”); Time, June 14, 1948.

33. Granger as quoted in Mac Dougall, Gideon’s Army, p. 655.

34. Interview with Doxey Wilkerson (PR, Jr., participating), Dec. 3, 1983.

35. I’ve pieced together this account of the struggle within the CAA from a large collection of documents in RA and elsewhere—too many to cite in full. As the account proceeds, I will specifically cite only the most important documents.

36. Du Bois to Yergan (same letter went to PR), March 5, 1948; two letters from Hunton to Council members, both dated March 7, 1948; Yergan to Council members, March 13, 1948—all in RA; Hunton to E. Franklin Frazier, March 19, 1948, MSRC: Frazier.

37. The minutes of the March 25 meeting are in RA; The New York Times, April 6, 1948; New York Herald Tribune, April 6, 7, 1948; Dean Albertson interview with William Jay Schieffelin, 1949, for Oral History Project: CU (“unfair”). Dorothy Hunton, wife of Alphaeus Hunton, has written disparagingly of Yergan’s “non-collective, one man rule” at the Council (Dorothy Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant, privately printed, 1986). In 1951 Hunton was jailed for six months for contempt of court for refusing to turn over the records of the Civil Rights Bail Fund. John Hammond, who was a member of the CAA in 1948, has told me that he, Judge Hubert Delany, and Thomas Russell Jones (then on the legal staff of the Civil Rights Congress, later to be a judge in Brooklyn) constituted a committee to look into the charges of financial misappropriation against Yergan. Hammond and Delany concluded that Yergan “was sloppy but he was not guilty of any malfeasance,” but to their surprise Tom Jones, “on orders from the Party,” filed a minority report accusing Yergan of malfeasance (interview with Hammond, Aug. 8, 1985).

38. Robeson’s statement to the press is in RA.

39. The telegram of protest from PR to Yergan, dated April 15, 1948, is in RA; ER’s letter to her fellow Council members, dated April 8, with a subsequent version—little changed—dated April 17, is also in RA. Robeson sought and got a private meeting with E. Franklin Frazier to relay “certain important bits of information.” Frazier voted with Robeson and remained on the Council (PR to Frazier, April 3, 1948; Frazier to PR, April 6, 1948, MSRC: Frazier). Robeson, on behalf of the executive board, sent out a letter to the Council members, dated April 15, 1948, in which he asked that the meeting Yergan had called for April 21 be postponed for a few days, since he had an engagement in Philadelphia within two hours of the scheduled meeting time and since he had previously asked Yergan to consult him before fixing on a date. Yergan refused to postpone (PR to council members, April 15, 1948, RA).

40. Press release dated April 21, 1948; letter from PR to all Council members, April 26, 1948, RA.

41. Minutes of the Sept. 17, 1948, meeting and PR’s press release of Sept. 28, 1948, are in RA, as well as a letter sent to “friends” of the Council on Oct. 7, 1948, declaring, “The long disruption of the Council’s work is at an end.” Essie was among the litigants; she brought suit against Yergan for the return of various African art objects and mss. that she had lent the Council for exhibition (Thomas Russell Jones to ER, April 27, 1948; ER to Yergan, April 28, 1948, RA).

42. An FBI report advised that Robeson had had a series of conferences with Mrs. Bethune. He supposedly “requested that Mrs. Bethune divorce herself from the Yergan faction,” promising that if she did he would sing a series of benefits for Bethune-Cookman College—and if she refused he “would fight her as he is fighting Yergan.” Internal evidence suggests (but does not prove) that the FBI informant was Yergan himself (FBI New York 100-25857-467A, June 11, 1948). Mrs. Bethune also resigned from the Civil Rights Congress; in response to her resignation, Patterson wrote her in reproach, dismayed at how many were being “intimidated” by fear of the Attorney General’s reprisals, and added, provocatively, that in earlier periods of our history some women, “like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth,” had preferred to confront their enemies and had “spat upon them” (Bethune to Patterson, Sept. 14, 1948; Patterson to Bethune, Sept. 15, 1948, NYPL/Schm: CRC). Robeson’s brother Rev. Ben Robeson was among the new members on the reconstituted Council (minutes of the Council’s Feb. 9, 1949, meeting, RA). Du Bois was elected vice-chairman and moved his office to the council at 23 West 26th St. Additional information on the CAA can be found in Lynch, Black American Radicals. It is likely that at least some of the enigmas of Max Yergan’s life and the role he played on the CAA will be more fully resolved by the materials in MSRC: Yergan; these papers are currently closed to scholars.

43. U.S. News & World Report, May 1, 1953 (Yergan article); PR column in Freedom, May 1953 (response to Yergan; also Dr. Z. K. Matthews’s response in Freedom, June 1953, and CAA press release, May 12, 1953). For a harsh evaluation of Yergan’s entire career (“All his life he merely sought gold for himself”), see Ben Davis, Jr., Communist Councilman from Harlem (International, 1969), pp. 199–203. For Yergan’s career in the sixties, see the summary in Carl T. Rowan, The Evening Star, Feb. 23, 1966. Joe Louis provided some unexpected outside support for Robeson. Appearing with him at a “Tribute to Negro Veterans” held at Uline Arena, in Washington, D.C., on June 26, Joe Louis issued a statement praising PR as “my friend and a great fighter for the Negro people.… There are some people who don’t like the way Paul Robeson fights for my people. Well, I say to that that Paul is fighting for what all of us want, and that’s freedom to be a man.… We’re with you, Paul, in the fight to the end” (Daily Worker, June 29, 1948). The June 26 Uline program, containing a strong printed statement condemning both Truman and Congress, is in RA.

44. The letter and statement, dated July 28, 1948, are in U.Mass.: Du Bois; the press release, dated Aug. 23, 1948, listing the signatories, is in RA.

45. For a discussion of the widespread protest against Du Bois’s firing in the black community, see Home, Black and Red, pp. 105–111.

46. The text of Robeson’s speech and the typescript of the Oct. 29 broadcast are in RA.

CHAPTER 17 THE PARIS SPEECH AND AFTER (1949)

1. The characterization of the National Guardian as “Stalinist” was made in a 1949 report of the California Committee on Un-American Activities (FBI Main 100-12304-408). The Guardian first appeared on the stands in Oct. 1948, edited by James Aronson and Cedric Belfrage. Their eloquent book, Something to Guard (Columbia University Press, 1978), recounts the central role their newspaper played in political life during the next two decades. FBI Main 100-12304-112; Jamaica Times, Nov. 13, 1948; Sunday Gleaner, Nov. 21, 1948; National Guardian, Nov. 15 (reaction), Dec. 20 (“fresh air”), 1948; Dec. 6, 1948; ANP press release, CHS: Barnett (Kingston); Adele Glasgow to Marilyn Alexander, Aug. 25, 1953 (Little Carib), Adele Glasgow to PR, Aug. 26, 1953 (“hero worship”), NYPL/Schm: PR; George B. Murphy, Jr., to Carl Murphy, n.d., MSRC: Murphy, for a crowd estimate of seventy-two thousand. Many years later, on the occasion of Robeson’s seventy-fifth birthday, Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica issued a statement recalling how his 1948 visit “filled our hearts with pride” (statement in RA).

2. Liberator (organ of Civil Rights Congress), March 1949 (Trenton Six); Life, Dec. 6, 20, 1948; FBI Main 100-12304-? (illegible); the New York office responded with a fifteen-page report (FBI Main 100-12304-126). A War Department memo to the FBI (FBI New York 100-25857-506, Nov. 12, 1948) refers to Robeson, without qualification, as the “well known Communist leader.” Bob Rockmore, far more conservative politically than Robeson, took the occasion of Levi Jackson’s election to write Larry Brown that if so conservative a school as Yale could manage to elect a black football captain, he was willing to be hopeful about the “American species of democratic process” (Rockmore note on a letter from Clara Rockmore to LB, Nov. 23, 1948, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

3. National Guardian, Jan. 24, 1948. At another meeting on behalf of the Trenton Six, held in Trenton itself, Robeson said, “I know what’s been done to these boys could have been done to my own boy” (National Guardian, Feb. 7, 1949).

4. FBI Main 100-12304-126. George W. Crockett, Ben Davis, Jr.’s lawyer, has said, “Paul Robeson gave definition to the meaning of friendship.… I met frequently with Ben Davis to prepare our defense, and in several of those meetings Paul was there” (Crockett speech as printed in World Magazine, 1973).

5. Telegram, dated Jan. 29, 1949, U.Mass.: Du Bois; Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Political Justice: The Smith Act, the Communist Party, and American Civil Liberties (Greenwood Press, 1977), ch. 3. Belknap (p. 78) points out that the jury finally chosen in March contained seven women and three blacks. Robeson joined in a further protest of the jury selection process at a rally at St. Nicholas Arena on Feb. 3, 1949 (FBI New York 100-25857-534).

6. Robeson described these events in a talk at the People’s Songs Conference in New York City on Aug. 13, 1949 (RA).

7. LB to ER, March 4, 24, 1949, RA. The importance of Desmond Buckle’s role in helping to manage PR’s affairs on tour is confirmed in Stockwell (of Harold Fielding agency) to LB, May 31, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown, and in Buckle to Patterson, March 21, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC. Robeson of course had his detractors, political objections merging into artistic ones. One of Larry Brown’s friends wrote of the Albert Hall concert, “I was able to take in my stride Paul’s haughty take-it-and-like-it attitude with his Soviet music and the other esoteric pieces that he sings to please himself. I still think he has more charm in his little finger than most other men I’ve ever known, but I greatly miss the old, gentle, ‘genial giant’ aura that surrounded Paul in the old days” (Jannett Hamlyn to LB, May 28, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Another correspondent, a Dr. Millard (apparently a West Indian physician), attacked Robeson more angrily, pronouncing a meeting called to protest the Trenton Six case in which Paul had participated in England a “failure” because he had not explained the case to the audience, instead “making himself a buffoon. He sang ‘Water Boy’ like a 3rd rate comedian and I am just a bit tired of Negroes who seek sympathy, pity and tolerance from whites by referring to the fact that their fathers or grandfathers were slaves.… I am no longer interested in him. Moreover he prefers the company of whites and his courtesies are reserved only for whites” (Millard to LB, July 3, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

8. PR to Helen Rosen, n.d. (March-April 1949), courtesy of Rosen.

9. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; The Autobiography of Samuel Rosen (Knopf, 1973). Henry Wallace was among those who commented on Helen’s being the driving political force (Dean Albertson interview with Wallace, 1950–51, Oral History, Columbia University).

10. The quotes are from three of PR’s 1949 letters from Europe to Freda Diamond and are courtesy of Diamond.

11. Ben Davis, Jr., to Blackman, Oct. 6, 1949, courtesy of Blackman via PR, Jr. Blackman told PR, Jr., that Paul, Sr., had helped him out financially (interview, Sept. 89, 1982, transcript PR, Jr.).

12. Daily Worker, March 31, 1949; Leader Magazine, March 12, 1949; Inkululeko (English-language weekly, London), April 9, 1949; Valentine Elliott in the June-August 1949 issue of Makerere, published at Makerere College in British East Africa; Manchester Guardian, April 21, 1949. For more on U.S.relations with South Africa, see Thomas J. Noer, Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (University of Missouri Press, 1985), especially ch. 2 for the contrast between Roosevelt and Truman. Desmond Buckle, in an article in New Africa, vol. 8, no. 4 (April 1949), reported on another of PR’s political appearances: a Speech at Friends’ House in which he blasted Premier Malan of South Africa, predicted this would be his last tour for some time (“This is no time to go about the world singing pretty songs. I want to use my voice like tonight with you”), sang the “Song of the Warsaw Ghetto,” and recited Langston Hughes’s “Freedom Train.” Robeson also found time—as George Padmore reported favorably in his column in the Chicago Defender (May 7, 1949)—“to give encouragement to the Colored Theatre Group founded by the West Indian baritone, Edric Connor, of Trinidad” and to pay “generous tribute to … [the] promising West Indian musicians and actors” he had found everywhere in his recent tour of the Caribbean. (For more on Robeson and Edric Connor, see note 16, p. 725; note 48, p. 750.) Robeson was also invited to the wedding of Nehru’s niece (and that of Nan Pandit’s daughter), Chandralekha Pandit, to Ashok Mehta on April 14 (the invitation is in RA).

13. CAA News Release, April 13, 1953 (“brothers and sisters”), LC; Tambo to PR, Nov. 1954, PR to African National Congress, Dec. 4, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR. Additional PR activities in behalf of South Africa are in Daily Worker, April 7, 1952; Spotlight on Africa (CAA newsletter), April 14, 1952; PR telegram to Advance (Cape Town newspaper), April 15, 1943, NYPL/Schm.

14. New York Herald Tribune, April 24, 1949; New Africa, vol. 8, no. 5, (May 1949); The New York Times, April 26, 1949.

15. The quotes in the text are taken from Alphaeus Hunton’s translation from the French (transcript in RA). Because there is controversy on this point, Ivor Montagu (a British delegate to the Congress) sent me the printed transcript in French (source uncited), in which the relevant phrases are: “Et nous ne voulons pas de ces imbécillités hystériques parlant de nous faire partir en guerre contre qui que ce soîl. Nous avons, nous, la ferme volonté de combattre pour la paix. (Applaudissements) Nous ne voulons pas partir en guerre pour n’importe qui et contre n’importe qui. (Acclamations) Nous ne voulons pas partir en guerre contre L’Union Soviétique. (Nouvelles acclamations)” The only full and unimpeachable record of what Robeson said in Paris is on a film of the event that is known to exist but has so far resisted all efforts at recovery; unless it can be found, Robeson’s actual words cannot be verified.

16. The full transcript of the AP dispatch is in RA. In his testimony on the Mundt-Nixon Bill on May 31, 1948, Robeson had openly expressed sentiments close to those falsely ascribed to him in Paris a year later—but with the important difference that he claimed to be speaking only for himself: “Question: Would you fight for America if we were at war with Russia? Answer: That would depend on the conditions of war with Russia, how the war came up and who is in power at the time, etc.… That’s just too hypothetical.… I would like to say that I would be on the American side to have peace. I would struggle for peace at all points.… If the American government would be a Fascist government, then I would not support it.… I am an anti-Fascist, and I would fight Fascism whether it happens to be the German, the French or American species.… I would do it under the banner of being an American and protecting the Democratic rights of the American people.”

17. In an interview with me (Sept. 7, 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]), Ivor Montagu, who heard Robeson’s speech, said he recalled nothing untoward or unexpected in it—nothing like the inflammatory words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. Randolph is quoted in Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (Oxford University Press, 1986).

18. INS memos, April 25–May 6, 1949, FBI 56275-730.

19. Marilyn Smith (State Department) to Walter White, April 21, 1949, LC: NAACP, enclosing a copy of the story she wrote for release to the news media following their phone conversation of that morning, along with a copy of the statement Mary McLeod Bethune had given to her over the phone (“Mr. Robeson’s remarks … chilled my blood. I just cannot understand it”). White’s comments were widely dispersed by the State Department—Voice of America, European Regional File, Middle East File, Wireless Bulletin, Mission Services, Far East File—and in various forms appeared in the press (e.g., New York Herald Tribune, May 1, 1949). For confirmation that the State Department had initiated White’s statement, see “Secretary to Mr. White” (not otherwise identified) to Mark Stanley Matthews, May 20, 1949, LC: NAACP: “Immediately upon receiving word of Mr. Robeson’s statement, the State Department called on Mr. White for a statement.” Earl Brown, “Once Over Lightly,” New York Amsterdam News, April 29, 30, 1949.

20. Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983.

21. Ibid.

22. Columbia, South Carolina, Record, April 26, 1949; The New York Times, April 24, 25, 26, Nov. 7 (Randolph), 1949; New York Amsterdam News, April 29, 30, 1949; Detroit Tribune, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949; Chicago Defender, April 30, 1949 (editorial headlined “Nuts to Mr. Robeson,” attacking him for having gotten “so far away from the race” that he had lost his “moorings”); New York Age, April 30, May 7, 1949; Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 1949 (summary); Du Bois, Negro Digest, March 1950 (Morgan). Bethune also devoted a full column (Chicago Defender, April 30, 1949) to attacking Robeson’s “presumption” and to declaring that she “thoroughly disagreed with such an expression of disloyalty.…” Predictably, the conservative black columnist George S. Schuyler roasted Robeson for “brushing aside … the well-known brutalities, injustices and calculated fiendishness of Red concentration camps which have been filled largely with minority groups of the Soviet Union and the satellite countries” (Pittsburgh Courier, May 7, 1949). Less predictably, Fritz Pollard, Robeson’s old football buddy, offered a more-in-sorrow comment: “Paul’s at it again, playing Emperor Jones.… Sometimes he thinks he’s the Negro island liberator, Henri Christophe. Despite his spectacular popoffs, he’s no Commie, in his heart” (New York Age, April 30, 1949). There are in LC: NAACP a half-dozen letters congratulating Walter White on his remarks, in language more intemperate than any White himself had used (e.g., Robeson “has not ever bothered to take the pulse of a race he presumes to represent”: Capt. Leonard L. Bruce, April 22, 1949).

23. Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983. William Pickens III corroborates Rustin’s view that (in Pickens’s words) “Down deep the black leadership had a warm spot for Paul Robeson”—they had no intention of falling behind him as “the leader,” but were nonetheless pleased that “somebody was raising the issues of fundamental racism in American life” (interview with Pickens, Oct. 3, 1983).

24. Mark Solomon, “Black Critics of the Cold War”; Modjeska (Mrs. Andrew W.) Simkins (executive committeewoman of the Republican Party of South Carolina and prominent in the S.C. NAACP; she was to take part in the Welcome Home rally for PR on June 19, 1949, at Rockland Palace) to the Columbia Record, May 2, 1949; Durham, N.C., Times, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, June 25, 1949.

25. Max Yergan’s letter is in the New York Herald Tribune, April 23, 1949.

26. Abner Berry, New York Age, May 21, 1949. “As We See It,” Daily Worker, May 2, 1949; Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Daily Worker, May 8, 1949; Du Bois’s letter is in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 28, 1949, and the New York Amsterdam News, May 21, 1949.

27. The typescript of ER’s speech is in RA.

28. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (PR’s anger); Patterson to PR, May 17, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC; Charles P. Howard to ER, May 10, 1949, RA; Vito Marcantonio to ER, April 29, 1949, NYPL: Marcantonio; Congressional Record, April 28, 1949.

29. The Crisis, May 1949, p. 137. The black California Eagle editorially protested the Crisis article (June 2, 1949). In his autobiography, Standing Fast, Wilkins backhandedly admits to having written the editorial (pp. 205–6). Yet, when Robeson died, in 1976, Wilkins wrote, “Anything to spread black culture and manhood was his lifelong doctrine.… Any Negro who protested the treatment of the black citizens was called a communist or worse.” Unless Wilkins was merely paying perfunctory homage to the recently dead, this statement amounts to a complete retraction of his 1949 Crisis editorial.

30. Ben Davis, Jr., to ER, May 25, 1949, RA; Davis to White, May 28, 1949, LC: NAACP. In an article Davis wrote before the Crisis editorial appeared, he had already set Walter White apart from the “political street-walker Max Yergan,” the “foxy old reformist Channing Tobias,” and “Rep. Adam Powell with his double-talk,” as “more nearly reflect[ing] the feelings of the Negro people” (Daily Worker, May 8, 1949).

31. Howard to Wilkins, May 26, 1949, CHS: Barnett. Howard not only sent Barnett (the head of the Associated Negro Press) a copy but also sent one to Alphaeus Hunton and another to Dr. Louis Wright (Howard to Wright, May 27, 1949, LC: NAACP); and he sent a form letter to key members of the Progressive Party soliciting letters of protest to Wilkins (Howard to Barnett, May 27, 1949, CHS: Barnett; Howard to “Dear Friend,” May 27, 1949; Howard to Hunton, May 26, 1949; Ben Davis, Jr., to Hunton, May 28, 1949, RA). C. B. (“Beanie”) Baldwin, executive secretary of the Progressive Party, was among those who wrote in: “I regard [Robeson] as one of the world’s great human beings”; he “happens to believe that the struggle for democratic rights for the Negro people cannot be separated from the struggle for peace” (Baldwin to Wilkins, June 2, 1949, RA). Larkin Marshall, cochairman of the Progressive Party in Georgia, was another who responded (Marshall to Hunton, May 28, 1949, enclosing a copy of a pro-Robeson editorial Marshall wrote for the Macon World, RA).

32. Memo from White to Wilkins, June 3, 1949; memo from Wilkins to White, June 6, 1949, LC: NAACP.

33. Wilkins, Standing Fast, pp. 205–6; AP dispatch, July 13, 1949 (NAACP convention), RA.(Mary Church Terrell to Hunton, June 6, 1949, RA).

34. The New York Times, April 25, 1949; Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1949 (Stockholm); PR to Diamond, May 1, 1949, RA. FBI Main 100-12304-126 reports that during the Stockholm concert the trouble started when Robeson “sang a Russian anthem. The first verse, sung in Russian, was greeted quietly; however, when he sang the second verse in English, which most of the audience understood, a demonstration started, which for a time drowned out the singer. Anti-Communists answered with loud cheers and frantic applause. Following the an them, Robeson stepped to the microphone and told the audience he could no longer draw the line between his art and his political convictions. He said he wanted universal peace, but above all peace with the Soviet Union.” FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2 (“beyond control”) also reports PR as saying, “I can assure you they [blacks] will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the Peoples Democracies.” An indication of how PR addressed criticism of his pro-Soviet stance before a predominantly black audience is in a speech he gave at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem on Aug. 30, 1949: “What did Soviet Russia ever do for me? (Laughter) I said, Just a minute now. One thing they did for you—in destroying fascism; you remember, you better remember this Hitler again. He destroyed six million Jewish people—burned six million Jewish people up. He was just hoping to get hold of ten or fifteen million Negroes to burn up. Well, the reason he couldn’t get hold of them happened to be because ten to twenty million Russians took him” (tape recording of speech, RA).

35. National Guardian, May 2, 1949; Chicago Defender, May 21, 1949; Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 2, 1949; press release from the CAA, May 11, 1949, RA (second denial). The full text of the Copenhagen interview with Robeson is in RA.

36. The Times (London), April 23, 1949 (Copenhagen); Ulf Christensen, “Paul Robeson’s Visit to Oslo,” June 6, 1949, RA. Apparently somewhat apprehensive, Rockmore wrote Larry Brown, “Thanks for your two notes from Oslo immediately before and after the concert. I breathed a sigh of relief with you” (Rockmore to Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

37. John Payne to Larry Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown; PR, Jr., interview with Bruno Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr.

38. National Guardian, June 13, 1949 (Prague reception); Pittsburgh Courier, June 4, 1949; Baltimore Afro-American, June 7, 1949; Josef Škvorecký, “Red Music,” in The Bass Saxophone (Knopf, 1977), p. 19. Škvorecký was speaking generally; he didn’t mean, he later explained, that PR was in Prague at the exact time of Horáková’s execution (Škvoreckyý to Barbara Bristol, Sept. 9, 1987, courtesy of Bristol). In fact, Horáková was executed on June 27, 1950. The New York Times (Dec. 7, 1949) and Time (Dec. 19, 1949) reported that in Prague, Harry James’s music was much preferred to Robeson’s.

39. PR, Jr., interviews with Raikin (Sept. 8, 1982) and Blackman (Sept. 9, 1982), transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.; Seton, Robeson, pp. 201–02.

40. Richard Yaffe, in The Jewish Week-American Examiner, Feb. 1–7, 1976, recalls Robeson singing “Zog Nit Kaynmal,” the song of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, during his 1949 Warsaw concert, but Yaffe’s article contains a number of inaccuracies and it is probable, nearly thirty years after the event, that he confused Robeson’s Warsaw performance with the concert that followed in Moscow. PR, Jr., interview with Peter Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In an article for the Polish newspaper Trybuna Ludu, June 2, 1949, Robeson expressed his be lief that “the strength of the progressive camp in America is greater than during the elections in 1948” and his conviction that “the reign of capitalism and imperialism will end.” The optimism may have been for the consumption of a particular audience, may have marked yet another resurgence of hopefulness—or may have been manufactured or misquoted by whoever ghost-wrote the article.

41. FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2; PR.Jr., interviews with Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, and Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982 (transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.); The New York Times, June 8 (Scandalize), 15, 1949. The FBI had begun to entertain the possibility that Robeson had taken out Soviet citizenship (FBI New York 100-23857-557, report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service).

42. Daily Worker, July 4, 8, 1943; Morning Freiheit, Feb. 19, 1948 (memorial); PR, Jr., “How My Father Last Met Itzik Feffer, 1949,” Jewish Currents, Nov. 1981; Lloyd Brown, “Setting the Record Straight,” Daily World, Dec. 24, 1981; “Paul Robeson Jr. Refutes Lloyd Brown,”Jewish Currents, Feb. 1982; Lloyd L. Brown to Morris U. Schappes (editor, Jewish Currents), Dec. 14, 1981; PR, Jr., to Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981, RA; Blackman interview with PR, Jr., Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In their 1943 visit to the States, Mikhoels and Feffer had been representing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. For additional background on the two men, as well as on the fate of other Jewish writers and cultural functionaries, see Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

There are several variant versions of the meeting between Robeson and Feffer. Mikhoels’s daughter published an account very close to PR, Jr.’s version, except that she places the meeting in 1951, which is clearly inaccurate, since Robeson’s passport had by then been lifted (Natalya Mikhoels-Vovsi, Vremya imwi, no. 3 [Tel-Aviv, 1976], p. 190). Esther Markish, in her book The Long Journey (Ballantine paperback, 1978), pp. 171–72, asserts that Feffer dutifully performed the role demanded of him by the Soviet secret police and said nothing to Robeson about the purges. Yet a third version is in Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony (Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 188–89), who places the meeting in a restaurant, with Feffer accompanied by police agents. Shostakovich angrily denounces Robeson for maintaining silence after returning to New York: “Why don’t these famous humanists give a damn about us, our lives, honour, and dignity?”

43. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. Partial documentation—confirming the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song—is in the Polish newspaper Kurjer Codzienny, June 10, 1949: “He was given an unusually cordial reception.… The song about the Warsaw Ghetto was enthusiastically received by the audience.” The New York Times (June 15, 1949) and New Times (June 22, 1949) alike refer to the outpouring of acclaim for Robeson during his Moscow visit, without specific reference to the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song. For another example of Robeson’s publicly protesting Soviet anti-Semitism, see note 44, p. 736.

44. “Paul Robeson’s Soviet Journey,” an interview by Amy Schechter, Soviet Russia Today, Aug. 1949. At exactly this same time, the conservative black columnist Willard Townsend was arguing in the Chicago Defender (June 16, 1949) that “the open revival of anti-semitism in new forms is proceeding today at a rapid pace behind the formidable Iron Curtain.”

45. The serious consideration in U.S. government circles of a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.S.R. is documented in Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (Knopf, 1980). Robeson went from Moscow to Stalingrad, where he sang at a tractor factory and where a survivor of the battle of “Mamaev’s Hill” took off the ring that only survivors of that battle were entitled to wear and put it on Robeson’s finger. The ring was inscribed “To Paul Robeson, the American Stalingrader.” Robeson responded by referring to Stalingrad as “the very spot where our civilization was saved” (PR’s handwritten notes, RA).

46. The New York Times, June 17, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-575, 616 (report from U.S. Customs Service); news release from the Council on African Affairs, June 16, 1949, RA; ER to Larry Brown, June 9, 14, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

47. Hunton to ER, n.d. (June 1949), RA; New York Amsterdam News, June 18, 1949; The New York Times, June 17, 1949; Daily Compass, June 17, 1949. On leaving the airport, a banner-decked cavalcade of five cars carried Robeson to Harlem; the FBI reported that the motorcade “received no ovation or recognition from Harlemites” (FBI Main 100-12304-? [illegible]). Testifying in opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 13, 1949, Hunton had given a rather fiery accounting of his own, not only strongly condemning the treaty but referring to Great Britain as “a prison-house of colored peoples” (his testimony is in RA).

48. Interviews with Marilyn Robeson, Dec. 18, 1983, Jan. 4, 1984, Jan. 7, 15, 1985; New York Herald Tribune, June 20, 1949. Rather than making a scene, which was not his style, Marilyn’s father had withdrawn into silent opposition. Neither Paul, Sr., nor Essie, to Marilyn’s knowledge, showed any sense of insult or grievance. The accounts in the Daily Compass (June 20, 1949) and the New York Amsterdam News (June 25, 1949) do not contain any reference to Robeson’s supposed remark about the Soviet Union; the Compass did report that he “shook his fist at one photographer and moved a pace toward him, but was blocked by the crowd.” Essie’s comment is in an undated handwritten note (possibly for a future speech), RA; she also wrote, “I felt like strangling them.… I was so angry I was calm.” Although the black press was generally friendly, the headline in The Afro-American (June 25, 1949) referred to “Junior’s Socialite Bride.”

49. CVV to ER, July 6, 1949; ER to CVV, July 10, 1949, Yale: Van Vechten. Essie’s gracious letter included an extended thank-you to Carlo for having helped them get started back in the 1920s. “The fight then,” she explained, “was intellectual, artistic, and social. We Negroes were trying to be heard, to get started, to participate.… Now, I think this fight today is another phase of that same fight.… Now it is political. At least Paul and I think it is political.”

Marilyn Robeson, in our interview of Dec. 18, 1983, described Essie as having been “very firm and very determined and very incensed also” during the wedding-party fracas; several newspaper accounts confirm this, with both the Daily Compass (June 20, 1949) and the Amsterdam News (June 25, 1949) referring to Essie’s efforts to ward off the news media. As well, Essie wrote an article, “Loyalty—Lost and Found,” in which she described her anger with the press (the article was enclosed for distribution in carbon letters to Hunton, George Murphy, and Charles Howard, June 22, 1949, RA). Soon after, Essie enlisted the help of Murphy and Howard in circulating a packet of her articles, including “Loyalty,” to the 108 chapters of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta: “I think Deltas are reasonably influential in their communities.… Sort of slow infiltration, what?” (ER to Murphy and Howard, July 12, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC.) Essie’s five-page covering letter to her sorority sisters (dated Aug. 4, 1949) is in NYPL/Schm: PR. In it she said point-blank, “… for the record, I am NOT A COMMUNIST,” but added that what needed questioning at the moment was not the loyalty of blacks to the country, but “THIS COUNTRY’S LOYALTY TO THE NEGRO.” Widely reprinted (e.g., Daily Compass, July 14, 1949; even Time printed excerpts, July 25, 1949), the “Loyalty” article prompted a warm letter of support from William Patterson to Essie, praising her for her “uncompromising” stand. Because of the underlying—but acknowledged—antipathy between them (see p. 187), Patterson sent his letter with some trepidation, lest Essie take “offense”; but he reminded her that he was well aware that they were both “on the same side of … the barricades” (Patterson to ER, July 7, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC). In her lengthy reply, Essie wrote, “It most definitely occasioned no offense. How on earth could it? … I consider praise from the Old Guard is praise indeed.” She went on to describe herself in general terms as someone who, when disagreeing, “open[s] up my big mouth and say[s] so—often far too vehemently I admit”; then, in specific terms, she referred to her past disagreements with Pat: “… I am unduly biased and sensitive on the matter of Big Paul, because I do think that everybody is very prone to exploit him. Me, I’m against exploitation,—not only of the masses, but also of individuals, especially of friends.” Polite though the tone, ER’s letter amounts to a considerable indictment of how the CP (the “Old Guard”) in her view “used” her husband. “As a peace token” ER sent Pat a copy of American Argument, the book she had co-authored with Pearl Buck (ER to Patterson, July 9, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC).

50. Pearl Buck to ER, June 26, 1949, RA; Springfield Union, June 28, 1949 (Roosevelt); New York Amsterdam News, June 25, 1949; the dozens of hate letters are in RA. Ma Goode’s frequent letters to Essie during this period (e.g., June 27, 28, 30, July 7, 9, 11, 13, Aug. 7, Sept. 4, 30, Oct. 2, 17, 1949, RA) are full of demands and directives; she may have been partly senile. Late in Oct. 1949 Ma Goode had to be shifted for ten days from Rest-haven to the Boston State Hospital for observation. At that point Essie described her as “rambling and wholly inattentive when I was there” (circular letter, n.d., apparently to family members, RA). Essie summed up her mother’s recent behavior, over a period of many years: “The moment I go away … she has made the most terrific scenes, stretched out in violent temper when she could not have her way instantly, and threatened suicide” (Dorothy Livingston of the Resthaven home to ER, June 24, 1949; ER to Mr. Benjamin, Nov. 1, 1949, RA).

51. The Du Bois and Howard speeches, excerpted in news releases from the CAA, are in RA, along with a full listing of speakers (others included Hunton, Ben Davis, Jr., Vito Marcantonio, and Louis Burnham, former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and currently Southern director of the Progressive Party, who would be centrally involved with Robeson politically in the future). Among those sending welcoming messages were Clifford Odets, the cast of Detective Story (Lee Grant, Alex Scourby, Joan Copeland, Lou Gilbert), and Henry Wallace (all are in RA).

52. The transcript of PR’s speech is in RA.

53. Interview with Kay Pankey, July 26, 1986. For more on Robeson and the Pankeys, see pp. 426, 518–19. For the wedding party, the married couple drew up the small guest-list, which consisted mostly of their own friends plus such family standbys as Minnie Sumner, Buddy and Hattie Boiling, Bert and Gig McGhee, Ben Davis, Jr., and Paul, Sr.’s sister, Marian Robeson Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia with her husband, Dr. James Forsythe.

54. The New York Times, June 20, 1949; Boston Advertiser, June 26, 1949; Congressional Record, June 27, 1949; Pitts burgh Courier, June 25, 1949.

55. New York Herald Tribune, June 20, July 15, 1949 (Truman); The Afro-American, June 25, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, June 25 (“richest artist”), June 25 (Granger), 1949; The California Eagle defended him (July 7, 1949). In his column in the Chicago Defender for July 2, 1949, A. N. Fields quoted Richard Wright (who had left the CP some five years previously) as disapproving of Robeson’s political activities and taking “sharp issue” with his statement in Paris. Dozens of letters suggesting Robeson leave the country are in RA (e.g., this telegram from the American Legion Post in Sayre, Oklahoma: “Our attitude toward you is the same as yours toward this country. Why stay?”). In an article in the National Guardian (June 27, 1949), reporter Yvonne Gregory decided to sample opinion in “the poorest parts” of Harlem and found that with few exceptions people were “reluctant to talk,” fearful of “getting mixed up in any politics”—“I’ve got enough trouble already”; “I don’t know nothing about these Communists.” But one woman told her, “My sons wouldn’t talk much when they came home from the war.… They were jealous and mad when they found we colored people still didn’t have our freedom.” The day after the Rockland Palace rally, the black conductor Dean Dixon and the graphic artist Raphael Soyer, on behalf of the CAA, hosted a private reception for Paul, Sr., to welcome him home (the invitation is in RA).

56. Madison S. Jones, Jr. (NAACP administrative assistant) to Wood, July 12, 1949; Wood to Jones, July 12, 1949, LC: NAACP.

57. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.); The New York Times, July 15, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, July 15, 1949; Boston Post, July 14, 1949; New Age, July 23, 1949; Chicago Defender, June 23, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 17, 1949 (PR on Stalin). On Manning Johnson, see Victor Navasky, Naming Names (Viking, 1980), pp. 14–15, 39, 68, 191. During the thirties, Johnson had been a trade union official of the Restaurant Workers and a district organizer from Buffalo for the CPUSA (Naison, Depression, pp. 135, 261, 294). The New York Amsterdam News reported (July 30, 1949) that Robeson “is alleged to have expressed his desire to be heard in the Nation’s capital” to “refute the charges made against him by Manning Johnson,” but the committee “has refused to permit Robeson to appear, because one member said, ‘Robeson only wants to use the Committee as a sounding board.’” I haven’t found any confirmation of Robeson’s alleged attempt to appear before HUAC.

58. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.). Young insisted that “Negro publishers, almost to a paper, completely repudiated Robeson’s statement” and in addition recounted an Alpha Phi Alpha smoker in October 1947 in Norfolk, Virginia, at which Robeson had purportedly said, “If this country ever went to war against Russia and my son took up arms to fight against Russia, he would no longer be my son.” Chicago Defender, June 23, 1949. The full text of Lester Granger’s statement to HUAC (July 14, 1949) is in LC: NAACP. Sandy F. Ray, chairman of the Social Service Commission of the National Baptist Convention and himself a minister, made a strong statement—and without attacking Robeson—about American racism (July 14, 1949, full text in RA).

59. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.); PR to Robinson, July 11, 1949, RA, enclosing a copy of his Rockland Palace speech so he could “acquaint yourself with the true statements made by me”; New Age, July 23, 1949; Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 23, 1949 (VFW).

60. The New York Times, July 19, 1949; Roosevelt, “My Day,” Nov. 2, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, July 23, 1949.

61. CAA press release, July 13, 1949, RA; Carolina Times, July 23, 1949; The Afro-American, July 19, 1949. Robeson wrote Carl J. Murphy, president of the Afro-American Company, to thank him—a rare example of his commenting on a newspaper mention of himself, pro or con, and by that much perhaps a gauge of his concern about reaction in the black community; PR to Murphy, July 14, 1949, RA. The Afro-American followed up (Aug. 20, 1949) with an article entitled “What’s Wrong with Paul Robeson?” by Ralph Matthews, which concluded, “There is nothing really wrong with Paul Robeson. He is quite sane and purposeful.” He was not anti-American, but “pro-peace.” To him America was not “the small clique of financial despots, the small one per cent who control the wealth”; he was “loyal to that large portion of America which wants to remain at peace with the world.” Robeson, The Afro-American concluded, spoke “not for the insignificant 15 million [black] Americans struggling for crumbs in a predominantly white America where they will always be a minority, but … for the hundreds of millions of black people in Africa and other sections of the world with whom he feels a kinship.” J. A. Rogers, Pittsburgh Courier, July 30, Oct. 15, 1949; New Age, July 23, 1949; New York Age, July 23, 1949 (Bill of Rights conference). The statement by the black delegates is in NYPL/Schm: CRC. A tape recording of PR’s speech at the June 28, 1949, Civil Rights Congress is in RA. The Afro-American (July 30, 1949) reported, though, that Robeson met with a mixed reception, having to cross a picket line of forty white and black veterans to get into the Mosque Theatre; George Stevens, Essex County commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, had issued a call for members of all forty-six posts to meet in front of the theater (FBI Main 100-12304-184). Even Earl Brown, the conservative Amsterdam News columnist, called “the whole show before the Committee … ridiculous and unnecessary” (July 23, 1949).

62. The Afro-American, July 30, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, July 23, 1949; text of statement issued to the AP from the CAA office by Robeson, dated July 20, 1949, RA; Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (Putnam’s Sons, 1972), p. 98. For more detail on Robinson’s later political views and activities, see Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment.

63. The Knoxville incident was reported in the Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 20, 1949.

CHAPTER 18 PEEKSKILL (1949)

1. A tape recording of Robeson’s People’s Songs Conference speech is in RA.

2. Daily Worker, July 24 (Davis), Aug. 6 (Bureau of Engraving), 7 (Clark), 8 (Winston), 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 5 (White House), 1949. A confidential informant of the FBI reported on two street meetings in Winston’s behalf (FBI Main 100-12304-184, Jan. 9, 1950). FBI Washington Smith Act Prosecution File 100-3-74-4351,4917 (income tax). Hoover had already sent for Robeson’s law-school, selective-service, and passport records (FBI Main 100-12304-135, 136, 137; New York 100-25857-673.

3. The Peekskill Star items, plus reports of subsequent developments, are conveniently and chronologically summarized in the privately printed Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A., a documentary report prepared by the Westchester Committee for a Fair Inquiry into the Peekskill Violence.

4. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen. I’m also grateful to her for contacting Sydney Danis in order to clarify certain details.

5. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 1949. The burning cross Helen had seen (Paul had, too) was confirmed as real in the subsequent grand-jury report (copy in RA)—though the report ascribed it to “an unfortunate prank by a few teen-age boys” bearing “no relation to the Ku Klux Klan or any other anti-social or anti-religious organization.”

6. Interviews with Ruth Jett (who introduced PR at the Hotel Theresa conference), April 2, 1982; Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984, Dec. 13, 1985; New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Aug. 29, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 3, 1949 (press conference); press release of Civil Rights Congress, Aug. 28, 1949, RA.

7. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; the FBI got a full report of the meeting at the Rosens’ (FBI New York 100-25857-747).

8. Daily Mirror, Aug. 29, 1949; Daily Worker, Aug. 29, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-743-746.

9. New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 31, 1949; The New York Times, Aug. 29, 30, 31, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.

10. RA contain dozens of tapes of radio broadcasts and eyewitness accounts, as well as a large file of newspaper reports. It is impossible to cite this bulky material in any detail. Among the most useful accounts summarizing the various statements are: New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 31, 1949; The New York Times, Aug. 31, 1949; New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1949. From my reading of the press accounts, I would say Time magazine (Sept. 5, 1949) is a representative example of national press response: the Peekskill riot, it wrote, was “an example of misguided patriotism and senseless hooliganism.” FBI New York 100-25857-753 for the pro-Robeson list.

11. New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1949.

12. New York Daily Compass, Aug. 31, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 3, 1949; Washington Star, Aug. 31, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-750. A tape recording of PR’s speech is in RA. The quotations are from that tape.

13. Interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 5, 1985.

14. New York Daily Compass, Aug. 30, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; interviews with Helen Rosen; FBI Main 100-12304-184; FBI New York 100-25857-754, 771 (which includes a Furriers’ Union circular), 760 (“Communists”). James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, “The Lessons of the Peekskill Riots,” Commentary, Oct. 1950, pp. 309–53, concluded that at Peekskill “the Communists unveiled … a strategical formula by which they hope to increase civil strife, to inflame the racial and religious passions and antagonisms that are already this country’s shame.…”

15. The New York Times, Sept. 4, 5, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 5,6, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 5, 1949; Daily News, Daily Mirror, Sept. 5, 6, 1949.

16. Interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982. The details of how Robeson was taken out after the concert are from PR, Jr., as told to him by his father. At the time of Peekskill, Essie and Freda Diamond were together at a Peace conference in Mexico City, while there, they visited with the resettled Fernando Castillo, who had been the Robesons’ escort in Spain, and his family (multiple interviews Diamond).

17. The New York Times, Sept. 5, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 5, 6, 1949; Daily Worker, Sept. 5, 1949; The Afro-American, Sept. 10, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 5, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; Howard Fast, Peekskill USA (Civil Rights Congress, 1951); interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986; FBI 100-25857-764 (list of injured and arrests), 773 (Fanelli); Dean Albertson interview with Henry Wallace, 1950–51, for Oral History Project, CU: by the time he gave the interview, Wallace had come out in support of Truman’s intervention in Korea, and he characterized the decision to return to Peekskill as a “serious mistake”—though certain that many of those attending were not Communists and while holding the townspeople “completely” responsible for the violence. Pete Seeger had felt confident there would be no violence and had brought along his two babies, his wife, and his father-in-law to the concert. On the ride home two stones shattered his car windows, spraying glass into the children’s hair; Seeger cemented the stones into a chimney he was building (phone interview with Pete Seeger, July 4, 1986). According to PR, Jr., Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the “Black Mafia” leader, offered that night to take a group of armed men back up to Peekskill to rescue the guards temporarily trapped in the hollow; news came that they were safe and Bumpy wasn’t needed. The son of the Peekskill chief of police and the son of an American Legion official were briefly detained for “malicious mischief in throwing rocks, but were released. Among those injured was Eugene Bullard, a black aviator in World War I who had won the Croix de Guerre. Stephen Szego, owner of the grounds on which the concert had been held, subsequently had shots fired at his house; an attempt at arson was also made. Dozens of affidavits and statements by people who attended the Peekskill concert and experienced some form of injury to body or property are in the NYPL/Schm: CRC.

18. New York Compass, Sept. 6, 15, 1949; New Age, Sept. 10, 1949; Washington Post, Sept. 6, 1949; People’s Voice, Sept. 15, 1949; The New York Times, Sept. 6 (tears), 15, 1949.

19. National Guardian, Sept. 19, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 8, 15, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 10, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 11, 15, 1949; The Dispatcher (ILWU), Sept. 16, 1949; Daily Worker, Sept. 11, 14, 16, 1949; Newsweek, Sept. 12, 1949; People’s Voice, Sept. 15, 1949; FBI New York 100-25859-809; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; Life, Sept. 26, 1949; Newsweek, Sept. 12, 1949. The New York Times (Sept. 8, 1949) challenged the accuracy of the Fanelli report, saying it was sharply at variance with photographs, eyewitness accounts, and the arrest record. The Fur and Leather Workers Union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers CIO, the International Longshoremen’s Union, the American Jewish Labor Council, and the New York State CIO were among the labor groups calling for an investigation. ACLU Director Roger Baldwin called Peekskill “the most shocking of all incidents aroused by the current anti-Communist hysteria.” And among the many protests was one signed by sixty artists, including Bette Davis, Ruth Gordon, Lee J. Cobb, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Chaplin, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Dewey’s charge to the grand jury is printed in its twenty-six-page typed report (a copy is in RA).

20. Rosen describes the problems he had with his medical practice after Peekskill in The Autobiography of Samuel Rosen, pp. 72–74. Interviews with Helen Rosen; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; New York Daily Compass, Oct. 18, 20, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-779A.

Three years later, Peekskill D.A. Fanelli and two carloads of police knocked on the door of the Rosens’ Katonah kitchen on an early Sunday morning. “We’ve found the head and have been looking in the field all night for the body,” he announced to Helen portentously. Swallowing her surprise—and then her amusement—Helen let Fanelli into the kitchen, made herself some tea, and did not invite him to sit down. The “head” was “Jonesy”—as the Rosen family dubbed one of the half-dozen specimens Dr. Sam kept in formaldehyde jars in the root cellar. The gardener, it turned out, had told his policeman brother about “Jonesy,” and the brother had conveyed the news to D.A. Fanelli. After Sam explained his “scientific arrangement” with a New York morgue, a disappointed Fanelli finally realized he was not going to be able to nab the “Commies” after all. “You know, Doc,” he said as he left, “what you’ve done is illegal, and I could pull you in if I wanted to, even if it isn’t for murder” (multiple interviews with Helen Rosen). The Rosens did not finally sell their house in Katonah until 1971.

The local informer turned up again in 1965, when the Robesons were in California (see note 23, p. 757). Recognizing him, Essie made sure that people on the left knew his history (interview with Claire “Micki” Hurwitt, May 14, 1982). In Jan. 1950 leaders of veterans’ organizations in the Peekskill area held the first in what was planned to be a series of meetings “to arouse America to the danger of Communism.” It was addressed by former Rep. Hamilton Fish, whose isolationist views had cost him his congressional seat during the war; he called for outlawing the Communist Party and preparing for a war with Russia (New York Daily Compass, Jan. 23, 1950). The National Guardian reported (Oct. 3, 1949) that in defense of the Cortlandt ordinance a Legion spokesman said, “It may be unconstitutional, but when the Constitution was written it was never considered what would happen later—people trying to overthrow the government.”

21. The full transcript of the grand-jury report is in RA. The New York Daily Compass (Oct. 24, 1949) reported on the rigged proceedings during the grand-jury investigation—including the with holding or cropping of crucial photographic evidence. In response to Dewey’s Sept. 14 statement, the CAA circulated an open letter to President Truman—the sixty-odd signatories included C. B. Baldwin, Charles Chaplin, Dean Dixon, E. Y. Harburg, Charles P. Howard, John Howard Lawson, and Rockwell Kent—declaring that the state of New York could “not be relied on to protect the basic constitutional rights of its citizens” and appealing to the federal government for an investigation. Truman did not respond, but he had earlier said that he agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt in deploring the lawlessness at Peekskill.

22. New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 16, 1949; New York Daily Mirror, Dec. 19, 1949 (Winchell); New York Daily Compass, Dec. 20, 1949, March 1, 1950; The New York Times, Dec. 16, 1949, Nov. 11, 1950, Jan. 24, 1952 (dismissal); New York Amsterdam News, March 24, 1951. O. John Rogge, a former assistant U.S. attorney general who had subsequently become active in the Progressive Party—and later became a conservative anti-Communist—headed the group of lawyers handling the action. One of the youthful lawyers was Bella Abzug; her extensive correspondence with William Patterson is in NYPL/Schm: CRC. In other subsequent developments, one of the rioters was appointed a police officer in Yorktown Heights, and Superintendent Gaffhey admitted before a Senate crime-investigating committee that he had covered up a report on gambling in Saratoga (Daily Worker, Jan. 19, 1950, March 19, 1951).

23. New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 9, 1949.

24. New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 21, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 24, 1949; Hartford Courant, Sept. 21, 1949; The Afro-American, Oct. 1, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-740 (shouldn’t have called Robeson). On Oct. 10 PR joined sixty others in a signed appeal to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath to quash the Foley Square indictment; McGrath refused to meet with the delegation (Daily Worker, Oct. 11, 1949). Belknap, Cold War Political Justice, pp. 106–7, states that “the singer had no knowledge of any facts relevant to the case and … his appearance was just a publicity stunt”; the comment seems gratuitous. The verbatim transcript of PR’s testimony is contained in a special agent’s report to Hoover, Sept. 22, 1949, FBI Main 100-12304-? (illegible).

25. Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 17, 1949. In a separate column accompanying the interview, Graves expressed his annoyance at the difficulty he had had in getting to PR and the fact that once he did, “The interview … was monitored by the inner circle of party dialecticians who had all the facile answers straight out of the book, in case Paul needed any help. Robeson, who knows the handbook very well himself, didn’t need much help.… One cannot escape the feeling that this man is deeply sincere in his desire to do something about the degrading humiliations and indignities suffered by Negroes in this country.… Whether Robeson is or is not a Communist (and there can be little doubt that he is in the minds of those who listen to him), the racial injustices which he so vigorously protests are real, not fancied.”

26. Congressional Record, Sept. 21, 1949, p. 13375; New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 1, 1949.

27. Four-page typed copy of Gwinn’s Sept. 23, 1949, remarks, RA. The AP reports are in Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A., which also remarks that in the week following the concert the Klan received 722 letters of application from people in Westchester County.

28. The Afro-American, Oct. 1, 1949. ER had just (Sept. 1949) returned from the Continental Peace Conference in Mexico—“The Boss,” she wrote Larry Brown, had sent her down to take his place (ER to LB, postcard, Sept. 11, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown). PR had apparently intended to attend the Congreso Nacional Por la Paz y La Democracia in Havana as well, but finally had to decline because (as he telegraphed) “Presence here imperative” (Edith Garcia Buchaca telegram to PR, July 13, 1949; Louise T. Patterson to Buchaca, July 14, 1949; Patterson to Dr. Ortiz, July 25, 1949; PR telegram to Buchaca, Aug. 1, 1949—all in RA). The FBI had followed PR’s Mexican plans (FBI New York 100-25857-752). In Nov. Essie went to peace conferences in Moscow and Peking. “This has been a marvellous experience,” she wrote Larry Brown from Peking, “which still seems like a terrific and wonderful dream” (Dec. 26, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown). The full transcript of the conference of women in Moscow is in RA; in it ER is quoted as emphasizing “the necessity for unity of the efforts of women throughout the world in the struggle for peace.” During this entire period ER continued to work hard at her writing, polishing yet again her novel about a black girl passing for white (which she now called Color), and writing Oscar Hammerstein II that she thought her ms. “may be the idea for a musical play” (South Pacific had just opened) and inquiring about the script Goodbye Uncle Tom she had earlier sent him (ER to Hammerstein, n.d. [Oct. 1949], RA). On at least one occasion, an effort was also made to block ER from speaking in public (at a Progressive Party meeting in Trenton, N.J. [Daily Worker, Oct. 21, 1949]).

29. “My Day,” Sept. 7, 1949. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote two other “My Day” columns relating to Peekskill, on Sept. 3 and Sept. 6, showing herself in the first one to be misinformed in her reference to the Peekskill meeting’s being sponsored by the ACLU (she apologized in the column of Sept. 6) and in saying that “Paul Robeson left this country and took his family to the U.S.S.R. until the coming of the war.” In Atlanta to attend a conference of Southern churchwomen on Sept. 8, she termed the recent violence at Peekskill “perfectly outrageous” and added that the North was “quite as bad” in its racial discrimination as the South (Boston Daily Record, Sept. 9, 1949). The ACLU statement, with a covering letter to Mrs. Roosevelt from John Haynes Holmes and Arthur Garfield Hays (Sept. 26, 1949), along with Mrs. Roosevelt’s reply (Sept. 30, 1949), is in the FDR Library. In one other reference to PR in a “My Day” column (Jan. 19, 1950), Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, in regard to his Paris Peace Conference remark, “It seems strange to me that Mr. Robeson does not refute that statement. I cannot believe that he made it, since his own son served brilliantly in World War II. [PR, Jr., in fact served in the Army Air Force in 1946–7, just after World War II, and was not sent overseas.] Also, I think he knows his own people too well really to believe that they [would] … refuse to defend this soil of ours.” The New Yorker, comparably, declared that when Robeson “mixes Ol’ Man River with Ol’ Man Marx he is being unfair to the Mississippi and is playing fast and loose with the Negro race, for whom he purports to speak. Robeson lost ‘the people’ as an audience when he began to make pronouncements that were largely unpopular” (Sept. 24, 1949).

30. Randolph’s letter, dated Sept. 30, is in The New York Times, Oct. 9, 1949; the text of Frazier’s remarks, which were made at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 13, 1949, is in RA. PR wrote Frazier to thank him (Oct. 27, 1949, MSRC: Frazier). Alice Dunnigan letter, n.d. (1949), CHS: Barnett (Hughes).

31. New York Daily Compass, Sept. 25, 1949; Larry Adler, It Ain’t Necessarily So (Grove, 1984), p. 130; The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1949 (Pittsburgh rally); Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 29, 1949 (cancellation); The Afro-American, Sept. 24, 1949 (Ohio); letter (Sept. 15, 1949) and statement from the Cincinnati Committee to Welcome Paul Robeson are in RA, as in the “Official Statement of the Cleveland Committee on the Oberlin Incident,” which contains PR’s rationale for cancellation; Chicago Defender, Oct. 15, 1949 (“cold feet”) (Newsweek, Oct. 17, 1949, took the same tack); Daily Worker, Oct. 12, 1949 (Cleveland); FBI New York 100-25857-904 (Cleveland).

32. Interviews with Ishmael Flory, July 1–2, 1986, and Rev. Louis Rawls, July 1, 1986; National Guardian, Oct. 3, 1949; (White Sox) Chicago Sunday Times, Oct. 8, 1949 (Sherman); Rawls was related to Claude Lightfoot, the Chicago CP leader, and was approached by Flory, also a CP activist.

33. Daily Worker, Sept. 26, 1949 (Walls); Chicago Defender, October 1, 1949 (overflow); FBI Main 100-12304-(illegible); The Afro-American, Oct. 1, 1949 (disturbances).

34. FBI Main 100-12304-172; FBI New York 100-25857-895A; San Francisco Voice, Sept. 29, 1949; National Guardian, Oct. 3, 1949; California Eagle, Sept. 22, 29, Oct. 5, 6, 13, 1949. Director Sam Wood, founder of Alliance of American Ideals, had decreed in his will that no beneficiary except his widow could collect his inheritance without first filing an “anti-Communist” affidavit with the probate court; the contents of Wood’s will were released to the press on the eve of PR’s concert.

35. National Guardian, Oct. 3, 1949; California Eagle, Sept. 29, Oct. 3, 13, 1949; Los Angeles Mirror, Oct. 1, 1949; Daily Worker, Oct. 4, 1949; The Afro-American, Oct. 15, 1949.

36. FBI Main 100-12304-161; FBI New York 100-25857-914A; Detroit News, Sept. 25, 1949; Daily Worker, Oct. 10, 12, 1949; The Afro-American, Oct. 29, 1949. Back in June, Dean Joseph L. Johnson had written to PR to say, “I want you to know that, in spite of all these attacks and smears, I have seen or heard nothing that I am willing to accept as evidence of disloyalty to our country, the United States of America. Your outstanding achievements and your courage, in my way of thinking, are still a credit both to yourself and your people” (June 14, 1949, RA).

37. Washington Star, Oct. 1, 1949; Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 14, 1949 (Strout); Washington Post, Oct. 19, 1949; PR to Frazier, Oct. 27, 1949, MSRC: Frazier.

38. Swami Avyaktananda to PR, Oct. 14, 1949 (World Religions); Curie telegrams to PR, Oct. 14, Nov. 11, 1949; PR to Jean Lafitte, Oct. 19, 1949 (Curie); Louise T. Patterson to Curie, Nov. 11, 1949; John Takman to PR, Sept. 13, 1949 (Sweden); telegram to PR, Oct. 17, 1949 (All-India); Nan Pandit to ER, Sept. 26, 1949—all in RA. PR, Jr., feels that another reason his father refused to see Nehru is that he was convinced the “secret” meeting would not remain secret (PR, Jr., ms. comments). While Nehru was away, Acting Prime Minister Patel apparently hinted to U.S. officials that he might take responsibility for refusing PR (who had been rumored to be making a trip to India) a visa (FBI Main 100-12304–176, 180).

Paul’s reaction to Nehru’s 1949 visit is from Seton (interviews, Aug.-Sept. 1982), as told to her directly by ER. But Annette Rubinstein recalls a somewhat different version, also told to her by ER. According to Rubinstein, Essie solved the dilemma of Paul’s refusing to see Nehru by scheduling a dinner party for a night when Paul would be out of town. She then sent Nehru a telegram in PR’s name expressing his regret at not being able to attend (interview with Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983). According to Geri Branton, Robeson later told her that he regretted his snub of Nehru—“I think it’s probably the only time I ever heard him say that—that there was a certain act he had regretted” (interview with Branton [PR, Jr., participating], April 2, 1982).

39. Ben Davis’s reaction to sentencing is in Ware, Hastie, p. 228.

40. New York Post Home News, Nov. 2, 6, 1949; New York Daily News, New York Daily Mirror, New York Telegram, New York Journal-American, New York Sun—all November 4, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-895; interview with Ollie Harrington, July 29, 1986; interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982; Cayton to me, May 30, 1988 (giant); interview with Dorothy Healey (PR, Jr., participating), May 1, 1982 (“use us”).

CHAPTER 19 THE RIGHT TO TRAVEL (1950–1952)

1. New York Daily Compass, Oct. 13, 1949 (UN debate). The Council of American-Soviet Friendship was originally set up with Edward Smith, former chairman of the NLRB, as its first executive director. After relations between the two countries soured, Richard Morford, a Christian Marxist, took over as director. PR was active in the Council from its inception (interview with Abbott Simon, March 27, 1982; Corliss Lamont to PR, March 4, 1946; Muriel Draper to PR, Dec. 18, 1947, RA).

2. The typescript of PR’s Nov. 10, 1949, speech at the Waldorf is in RA. The speech was reprinted as a pamphlet: Paul Robeson, The Negro People and the Soviet Union.

3. The New York Times, July 19, 1949; National Guardian, July 25, 1949.

4. Conversations with PR, Jr.; interview with Wilkerson (PR, Jr., participating), Dec. 3, 1983.

5. New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 31, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-888; The Afro-American, March 7, 1950 (surveillance).

6. New York Daily Compass, Feb. 21, 1950 (preliminaries); Daily News, June 2, 1950 (Tito); National Guardian, March 8, 1950 (Wallace); New York Post Home News, Feb. 27, 1950; two different versions of PR’s speech to the convention are in RA. According to Seton (Robeson, p. 222), PR moved from the white Croydon hotel in Chicago, where the Progressive Party convention was taking place, to the Evans Hotel in the black South Side, explaining his action to her this way: “I’m no longer going to stay in downtown white hotels where Negroes have to come and see me where they cannot live. Any of my white friends who want to see me here can come to the South Side and see me, or if they are afraid to come I never wish to see them again.”

7. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; PR, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom, May 1951 (applauding China’s new government).

8. National Guardian, March 22, 1950; New York Journal-American, March 13, 1950; David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (The Free Press, 1983), pp. 100–106; J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: Afro Americans in Television Since 1948 (Nelson-Hall, 1983), pp. 50–57.

9. Press releases from the Associated Negro Press, March 20, 22, 1950, CHS: Barnett; Daily Worker, March 21, 1950 (PR on Roosevelt); the “private citizen” was Mrs. Ethel Hykin, who kindly sent me a copy of Mrs. Roosevelt’s reply to her, dated March 27, 1950.

10. Daily Worker, March 17, 1950 (PR statement); FBI Main 100-12304–190 (Mrs. Roosevelt); The Afro-American, March 25, 1950; J. Fred MacDonald, Black and White TV, pp. 54–55; New York Amsterdam News, March 18, 1950 (Smith); Louise T. Patterson to William H. Gray, Jr. (editor-manager, Philadelphia Afro-American), March 29, 1950; Carl Murphy to PR, May 8, 1950; ER to Murphy, May 14, 1950 (Honor Roll), RA; statement by C. B. Baldwin, Progressive Party, March 13, 1950, NYPL/Schm: PR; memo from Henry Lee Moon to Wilkins, March 23, 1950, LC: NAACP; New York Telegram-Sun, March 1950. The following year a Conference on Equal Rights for Negroes (in which PR participated) spelled out some additional statistics on discrimination: the largest movie union, IATSE, had no black members; only thirty-six of the twenty thousand persons employed in advertising were blacks, and most of them held menial jobs; almost no blacks were employed in the symphonic-music field, in the editorial or business departments of the large newspapers, or in the production or technical side of television and radio (Daily Worker, Nov. 14, 1951).

11. Some of the letters containing invitations are in RA, others in NYPL/Schm: PR; I will not attempt to cite them individually. The following newspaper accounts detail Robeson’s various speeches and appearances: Daily Worker, March 17, 23, May 2, 18, 24, 25, 1950; Morning Freiheit, April 15, May 22, 1950; San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1950; also, Charlotta A. Bass to PR, March 31, 1950, NYPL/Schm: PR. Special-agent reports to the FBI contain additional details: FBI Main 100-12304-193, 195, 196, 198; FBI New York 100-25857-1043, 1075 (describing PR’s appearance at the funeral of Moranda Smith, leader of the tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, N.C., who had died in her mid-thirties of a cerebral hemorrhage).

12. PR, Jr. (multiple conversations), is the source for PR’s distrust of ER’s speaking for him. The details of ER’s national speaking tour are documented in a diary she kept during 1950 (RA) and in an exchange of letters with Louise Thompson Patterson (as well as between Patterson and some of Essie’s hosts), which are also in RA. The FBI St. Louis report is in FBI Main 100-12304-188, the reference to the Security Card in FBI New York 100-25857-1151. The typed mss. of ER’s speeches, including “Communism” and “Women and Progressive America,” are in RA. The description of the black ministers in Detroit is from ER to Charles Howard and George Murphy, March 10, 1950, NYPL/Schm: PR (in which she also denounces Herbert Hill). On Muriel Draper’s death in 1952, Essie was elected national co-chair (along with Virginia Epstein) of the Women’s Division of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and Jessica Smith was elected vice-chair, a position Freda Diamond had already held (Richard Morford to Patterson, Dec. 9, 1952, NYPL/Schm: CRC).

13. Daily World, June 2, 1950; Daily Worker, June 6, 1950; Shaw to PR, June 13, 1950, RA. At the conference Robeson joined the majority in voting against the readmission of delegates from Yugoslavia, telling the press that “Yugoslavia has tied itself firmly to the capitalist camp.…” (Time, June 12, 1950).

14. Interviews with Chatman Wailes, July 1, 1986, and Ishmael Flory, July 1–2, 1986; Seton, Robeson, pp. 225–27; the typescript of Robeson’s speech is in RA. The Harlem Trade Union Council published Robeson’s speech, under the title Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs, as a pamphlet in August 1950. Annette Rubinstein has contrasted Robeson’s attitude when traveling in behalf of left-wing causes in 1949–50 with that of some of the prima donnas in the progressive movement. One well-known writer threw a scene when told he would only have a berth rather than a private room during a scheduled train trip. By contrast, Paul—whose large bulk really did require something more than a berth—said that money for a roomette for him was better spent on organizational work (interview, Dec. 5, 1983).

15. The issues involved in the Korean War have divided scholars for decades. The two most recent accounts, less polemical than much of the preceding scholarship, are: James Irving Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (University of Hawaii Press, 1985), and Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953 (Cornell University Press, 1985).

16. The typescript of Robeson’s June 28, 1950, speech in Madison Square Garden is in RA.

17. FBI Main 100-12304-204; FBI New York 100-25857-1107, 1109, 1111. Revels Cayton had been urging Robeson to show himself more in Harlem, and in Aug. 1950 Louise Patterson found a one-room apartment for Paul at 270 Saint Nicholas Avenue. Essie sent down some furniture for it from Enfield. He shifted residences back and forth, sometimes staying with the Rosens or the McGhees, often taking meals at Lee and Revels Cayton’s apartment. Lee Cayton recalls that he was “very sensitive to the fact that we had limited funds” and insisted on giving her money each week for food (Patterson to Rockmore, Aug. 10, 1950; ER to Rockmore, Aug. 8, 1950, RA; interview with Lee Cayton, April 1982). Freda Diamond has stressed to me that Robeson always had a second place to retreat to. For the thirties in London, see note 5, p. 666. For the forties, Ted Rolfs has confirmed one hideaway on Saint Nicholas Avenue, to which Robeson gave him a key (Garber interview, Feb. 4, 1983, plus my follow-up phone interview, Feb. 17, 1987; Rolfs had known Robeson for about ten years—see note 47, p. 646, and note 19, p. 710); and the FBI claimed to have uncovered another “hide-out” (as they put it) on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village (FBI New York 100-25857-7871, Sept. 16, 1949).

18. Warren Hall Saltzman, “Passport Refusals for Political Reasons: Constitutional Issues in Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal, Feb. 1952, for the historical dimensions of the dispute.

19. FBI Main 100-12304-204; FBI New York 100-25857-1107, 1109, 1111; Witt to Acheson, Aug. 1, 1950; Shipley to Witt, Aug. 7, 1950; Witt to Shipley, Aug. 11, 1950; Willis H. Young (acting passport chief) to Witt, Aug. 17, 1950—all in RA. Prior to the State Department action, the American Consul General in Trinidad had reported that the acting governor of the island requested advance notice of PR’s rumored intention to make speeches in Trinidad “in support of leftist candidates,” with an eye to trying to prevent such activity; it was also reported that “The British Security Forces in the Caribbean Area are obviously not anxious to have Robeson visit British possessions because of his Communistic activities” (FBI Main 100-12304-? [illegible], March 22, 1950, 201, 214 [British]). According to the FBI, Witt had briefly been a member of the CPUSA in the mid-thirties (FBI Main 100-12304-255).

20. The unnumbered State Department “Memorandum for File,” released under the FOIA, contains a firsthand account of the meeting; the version in the Daily Worker, Aug. 25, 1950, closely parallels the official memo; Patterson to Clyde Jackman, Jan. 31, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC. The three other lawyers attending PR were Judge James A. Cobb, Dean George A. Parker of the Terrill Law School, and George E. C. Hayes, a former member of the Washington, D.C., Board of Education and a Howard University trustee. The prestigious law firm of Cobb, Hayes and Howard (Perry Howard, GOP national committeeman from Mississippi) representing PR had been in existence for two decades and had a conservative reputation; it clearly felt uneasy about PR’s political radicalism (Pittsburgh Courier, April 28, 1951, in which Judge Cobb stresses his rock-ribbed Republican credentials and resents the suggestion of “pinkish leanings”)—which may be why PR soon shifted to another firm. ER’s comment is in an “open letter” she sent to the House Lobby Investigation Committee, Aug. 10, 1950, NYPL/Schm: CRC. She sent a copy of the letter to Vito Marcantonio, who replied, “I fully agree with you” (Marcantonio to ER, Aug. 19, 1950, NYPL: Marcantonio). In a speech on Oct. 24, 1950 (text in RA), PR made a critical reference to William Dawson, the black Representative from Chicago, in regard to the Patterson episode: he “might have spoken, but he chose to keep quiet—possibly because Mr. Lanham of Georgia is a member of his Committee on Executive Expenditures, a little plum which Mr. Dawson received for years of faithful service to the corrupt machine bosses of Chicago and Washington.” Oppositely, PR praised Marcantonio for having spoken out against Lanham’s attack on Patterson: “Marcantonio did not choose to remain silent. His voice resounded in the halls of Congress in defense of the Negro people as he has done so many times in the past.…” Marcantonio was defeated in his bid to be returned to Congress in 1950.

21. Daily Worker, Aug. 9, Sept. 4, 8, 11, 1950; California Eagle, Aug. 11, Sept. 14, 1950; Daily People’s World (West Coast CP paper), Aug. 9, 1950; Daily Compass, Aug. 10, 1950; sample protests from abroad are John Takman to PR, Aug. 19, 1950, and J. Chore to Du Bois, Sept. 7, 1950—both in RA; statement on Madison Square Garden issued by Hunton (CAA), Aug. 31, 1950, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-1148 (Garden).

22. The typescript of PR’s Harlem speech is in RA. The Harlem Trade Union Council had held its first convention in June 1950, opening with a concert by PR. The Council before that had been a body of delegates from various unions; after the convention it became a delegate-and-membership body. The National Negro Labor Council consisted of delegates from ten black labor councils throughout the nation, the New York City unit being the Harlem Trade Union Council, which in July 1951 changed its name to the Greater New York Negro Labor Council (Daily Worker, June 3, 1950, May 18, June 4, 1951. For more on NNLC, see note 47, p. 714). In all its manifestations, the FBI labeled it “A Communist Party front organization” (FBI Main 100-12304-255).

23. According to a Naval Intelligence report, at the Hands Off Korea rally on July 3 Robeson “blistered the United States” (FBI New York 100-25857-1800); interview with Annette Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983. Not even in Harlem were all Robeson’s streetcorner rallies well attended; if Collier’s (Oct. 28, 1950) can be believed, one rally for “peace, freedom and jobs” drew a mere two hundred.

24. CVV to Donald Angus, July 20, 1950, in Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, p. 242. In this same period CVV gave a party for Edith Sampson, the black UN delegate who was generally viewed on the left as an apologist for the U.S. State Department (CVV to Brion Gysin, Dec. 16, 1950, in Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, p. 244). Ruark’s syndicated column is dated Oct. 3, 1950. Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 19, 1950 (Cayton).

25. Boston Traveler, Aug. 12, 1950 (Moscow); the Soviet play John—Soldier of Peace was written by Yuri Krotkov, starred the distinguished Soviet actor M. Nazvanov, and played more than a hundred times (Nazvanov to PR, March 8, 1952, RA). Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 9, 1950 (Josh White); Navasky, Naming Names, pp. 192–93 (Belafonte); interview with Revels Cayton, April 27, 1982; Rolling Stone, March 1976 (Gillespie); phone interview with Sidney Poitier, Oct. 20, 1986. Pete Seeger confirms that Josh White told Robeson about his HUAC appearance in advance, and also Robeson’s lack of bitterness over it—but has it happening over the phone rather than in person (interview with Seeger, July 4, 1986). When Seton was preparing her book on PR, he asked her “to cut down on quotes of fellow Black Americans who testified against him, because, as he said, he understood the predicament of the pressures they were put under ‘to clean [sic] their skirts.’ There was a total absence of mean or vindictive mindedness in Paul” (Seton to Geoffrey Baines, Nov. 30, 1978, courtesy of Seton).

26. Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 11, 1950; Boston Post, Oct. 6, 11, 12 (editorial), 14, 1950; Boston Herald, Oct. 11, 12, 1950; Associated Negro Press releases, Nov. 6, 18, 1959, CHS: Barnett; Washington Star, Nov. 8, 1950 (Soviet party); New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 18, 1950; Life, Nov. 20, 1950. Reports on the Second World Peace Conference are in New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 17, 23, 1950; Daily Worker, Nov. 10, 20, 24, 1950; Morning Freiheit, Nov. 18, 1950. When Dorothy Bushnell Cole returned from the peace conference, a special FBI agent, “through the cooperation of the U.S. Customs Inspector,” photographed material in her baggage relating to the conference (FBI New York 100-25857-1800, Referral Doc. #3 from U.S. Customs, Department of Treasury, to FBI). When the International Peace Prize was presented to PR at a rally on Dec. 11, 1950, Army Intelligence was present and reported that Robeson once again spoke out against the U.S. presence in Korea (FBI New York 100-25857-1800, Referral Doc. #21 from G-2 to FBI). The State Department also monitored the activities of PR, Jr., who had by then become active in the Labor Youth League (PR, Sr., had. addressed its founding convention at Stuyvesant Casino on Nov. 24, 1950; the typescript of PR’s address is in RA). In December, PR, Jr., was part of a group of two hundred young people who staged a peace demonstration in the main lobby of the UN headquarters; they cheered Mrs. Roosevelt when she walked through the lobby, but after she remonstrated with them, the cheers turned to boos (ANP release, Dec. 6, 1950, CHS: Barnett).

27. A summary of Du Bois’s Senate race can be found in Home, Black and Red, ch. 13. Bishop Walls wrote Ben Robeson that he regarded Paul as “a Christian and a race hero” (Walls to B. C. Robeson, March 8, 1950, RA).

28. Daily Worker, Oct. 6, 1950; FBI New York 100-25857-1800; Referral Doc. #20 from Army Intelligence (G-2); The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1950; the typescripts of PR’s two speeches, Oct. 5, 24, 1950, are in RA. Robeson attended a number of rallies protesting Du Bois’s indictment (Daily Worker, Feb. 6, 1951; New York World-Telegram and Sun, Feb. 22, 1951; FBI Main 100-12304-255).

29. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984. It was also in 1950 that Alice Childress and Clarice Taylor decided to start a theater in Harlem. They went to John Barone, owner of Club Baron, a bar and grill at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue, and got free space from Mondays to Thursdays. When they asked Robeson for the use of his name, he readily agreed, but he warned the two women—as he did so many others—that association with him would not necessarily be an asset. For their first production, in 1950—Childress’s Just a Little Simple, adapted from Langston Hughes’s “Simple Speaks His Mind”—PR dropped by, brought in people, and even appeared at fund-raisers at Wells’ Chicken Shack in Harlem. He also wrote a personal check for five hundred dollars, (interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984; interview with Ruth Jett, April 2, 1982; Sterner interview with Ellsworth Wright). The theater managed to struggle along for a few years (in 1952 it performed Childress’s Gold Through the Trees, directed by Clarice Taylor), but, according to Ruth jett (interview, April 2, 1982), some of its own committee members “panicked” under McCarthyite pressure and padlocked the door.

30. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 3, 9, 1984; Alice Childress to me, Aug. 23, 1984; Daily Worker, Oct. 23, Nov. 20, 1950; Burnham to ER, Nov. 15, 1950; assorted Freedom Associates memos from Burnham, RA; FBI Main 100-12304-255 (“front”); PR’s lengthy (twenty-seven handwritten pages) ms. for his first column, the early section containing valuable information on his youth, is in NYPL/Schm: PR, which also has a two-page outline of purpose of the Freedom Fund, and the minutes of the meeting of Freedom Associates, Feb. 12, 1952, which set up the Freedom Fund and organized a PR tour in its behalf.

31. Copies of all the pertinent legal documents are in RA, as is Ruark’s column with the Hoover comment; the panic over the “Robeson” sailing is summarized in FBI Main 100-12304-220.

32. New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 3, 1951; Ernest Thompson wrote an answer to Sugar Ray Robinson in the Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 20, 1951; “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in the Feb. 1951 issue of Ebony.

33. Roger P. Ross, public-affairs officer, to State Department, Jan. 9, 1951 (the only legible file number on the document is from DC/R Central Files: 511.45K.21/1-951).

34. The typescript of ER’s “The Not So Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in RA (it was printed in the California Eagle, April 5, 1951); Ben Burns (executive editor, Ebony) to ER, Jan. 22, 1951; ER to John Johnson, Feb. 1, 1951. Seton, too, was furious at White’s “snide utterly dishonest” article and wrote in protest to Ebony (Seton to ER, Jan. 5, 25, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck, on the other hand, replied coolly to Essie: “I suppose basically the trouble is that Walter thinks that Paul has given his major allegiance to a foreign power. I wish Paul could disprove this, publicly, for his own sake” (Buck to ER, Feb. 5, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck’s husband, Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day publishing company, had earlier written in disagreement to ER about Korea: “I still can’t take it when it is charged that anybody other than the North Koreans started the aggression” (Walsh to ER, Aug. 17, 1950, RA).

35. William H. Brown to “Wilkinson” [sic], July 9, 1951; Wilkins to Brown, July 11, 1951, LC: NAACP; PR, Jr., ms. comments; The Crisis, Nov., Dec. 1951.

36. The Afro-American, Jan. 26, 1952; San Francisco Voice, Feb. 15, 1952; ER to Hicks, Jan. 29, 1952, RA; Du Bois, Negro Digest, March 1950. When George Wood, Jr., the popular manager of the Red Rooster, died in 1955, PR sang at his funeral (The Afro-American, Sept. 24, 1955). Du Bois’s comment was part of a debate he had with Walter White in the pages of the Negro Digest on the question “Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong?” The debate preceded the appearance of White’s article in Ebony by nearly a year, and in this earlier article White took issue with PR in more measured tones, avoiding any insinuation about his supposed neuroticism or his inadequate prior contribution to the black struggle, and confining himself to questioning Robeson’s “uncritical” acceptance of Soviet accomplishments. In reply, Du Bois denied that Russia was an aggressor nation and argued eloquently that Robeson in fact spoke more for blacks than the Walter Whites liked to believe, chastising those who attacked PR for being “deathly afraid to act or talk or even think in any way which is in opposition or can be interpreted as opposing the current hysteria.”

37. FBI Main 100-12304-230; The New York Times, April 13, 1951 (Bastian).

38. Patterson to Clyde O. Jackson, Jan. 31, 1951 (Martinsville), NYPL/Schm: CRC; Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 295–99 (second-echelon); PR led a delegation to the UN to protest the Martinsville case (Daily Worker, Feb. 4, 8, 1951); Gaunzetta Mitchell to PR, Feb. 7, 1951, NYPL/Schm: PR (Martinsville); Morning Freiheit, Feb. 23, 1951 (Foster); New York Amsterdam News, March 24, May 26, 1951 (McGee); Daily Worker, Feb. 12, 1951 (McGee); FBI New York 100-25857-1321 (McGee); Daily Worker, April 12, 1951 (Hollywood Ten); ER to CVV and FM, May 24, 1951 (David Paul), Yale: Van Vechten; Daily Worker, May 7, 30, 1951 (HTUC), Aug. 21, 26 (Patterson); Amsterdam News, May 26, 1951 (HTUC). Though the National Maritime Union revoked Robeson’s honorary membership (Neal Hanley to PR, Feb. 26, 1951, RA), he continued to believe in the trade-union movement as a source for progressive social action; in the June 1951 issue of Freedom, he devoted his entire column to describing a trip to California with Revels Cayton to talk with trade-unionists, and he placed particular faith in the black union leaders Joe Johnson, Charles Nichols, Al Thibodeaux, and Bill Chester, as well as in surviving progressive unions like the United Cafeteria and Restaurant Workers in D.C. (Oliver Palmer to PR, Nov. 10, 1951, RA) and the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (MCS), which was 40 percent black and had been expelled by the CIO in 1949. Daily Worker, Feb. 1, March 18, 1951; The New York Times, Feb. 1, 1951 (American Peace Crusade). The APC attracted many distinguished figures, including Robert Morss Lovett, Prof. Philip Morrison of Cornell, and Prof. Henry Pratt Fairchild. Acheson denounced the APC as a “Communist front organization” (Herald Tribune, Feb. 21, 1951). Alvah Bessie, another of the Hollywood Ten, still imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana, Texas, wrote a touching poem about Paul (Bessie to PR, June 21, 1951, RA). The above events hardly cover the full spectrum of PR’s activities during these months. To but mention several others, he helped launch the New World Review, he marched in the May Day parade, he joined the plea to Truman not to provide U.S. military aid to Franco, and he was active in the National Committee to Defend Du Bois (Daily Worker, May 2, 17, 1951; Alice Citron to PR, May 29, 1951; Vincent Sheean to PR, April 10, 1951, RA). Essie, too, remained active, writing frequently in New World Review (e.g., July 1951) and elsewhere (e.g., Freedom, July 1951) about colonialism and the role of women, but in June 1951 she took seriously ill with a combination of spastic colitis and phlebitis and was hospitalized in Washington, D.C., for a month (her old friends Minnie and Sadie Sumner, along with Nan Pandit, then India’s Ambassador to Washington, were particularly attentive: ER to Robert Rockmore, July 12, 1951, RA; ER to Vito Marcantonio, June 13, 1951, NYPL: Marcantonio).

39. Daily Worker, June 28, July 2, 1951 (Chicago); Masses and Mainstream, Aug. 1951, and FBI New York 100-25857-1409 for Chicago remarks; interview with Chatman Wailes, July 1, 1986 (Wailes had gotten to know PR when he came through Gary, Indiana, in 1949, where Wailes was then living). The Chicago rally was a considerable event. The National Guardian (July 4, 1951) estimated that five thousand peace delegates attended. Among the sidelights, a poem, “Paul Robeson” by Beulah Richardson, recited at the convention, proved a minor sensation (Patterson to Richardson, Aug. 1, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC, which also contains the text of the poem).

40. The typescripts of PR’s statements in regard to Malik (June 26, 1951) and Austin (June 12, 1951) are in RA, along with surrounding letters and telegrams. (PR reprinted his letter to Austin in his column, “Here’s My Story,” for the July 1951 issue of Freedom.) Additionally, NYPL/Schm: PR has memo drafts of the Robeson-Willard Uphaus report to U.S. members of the World Council for Peace of the meeting with Malik, and a letter from PR to Malik thanking him, in the name of the World Council of Peace (Burnham—“For Paul Robeson”—to Malik, June 29, 1951). CU: Minor has a letter to Dr. Henry A. Atkinson (Church Peace Union) dated June 23, 1951, and cosigned by PR and Willard Uphaus, asking him to be an observer for the June 26 presentation at the UN.

41. Patterson, Man Who Cried Genocide, chs. 12, 13. NYPL/Schm: CRC contains considerable documentary material on the petition drive; of particular interest is Patterson’s letter to The New York Times (Nov. 26, 1951) chastising the paper for prominently reporting a call to investigate genocide charges against the Soviet Union while ignoring the genocide charges against the United States. Essie was one of the signatories to the final petition. Patterson recounts his disappointment with the genocide campaign (“It neither got the support nor recognition which I believed it deserved”) in WP to George B. Murphy, Jr., March 7, 1957, MSRC: Murphy. The 1951 petition to the UN on behalf of black Americans was in fact the third such. The first, presented by the NAACP, asked for a redress of grievances for black people in the United States and was edited by Du Bois. The second, presented by Yergan for the NNC, was initially drafted by Patterson. Both failed to secure a hearing in the Commission of Human Rights (Patterson to Oakley C. Johnson, June 10, 1952, NYPL/Schm: CRC).

42. Krishan Chandar to PR, June 11, 1951, RA (Bombay); Daily Worker, July 3, 1951 (Paris); Lynford Joel Concertato, telegram, August 28, 1951 (British tour); Peter Blackman to Patterson, Sept. 19, 1951 NYPL/Schm: CRC (London), which also sounds the frequent complaint among Robeson associates that “he must answer letters or otherwise nobody knows what he wants done”—for this same complaint see also Earl Robinson to Hunton, Nov. 18, 1949, RA; Michael Hamburger to PR, July 10, 1951 (Aberdeen); Warren Brody to PR, May 9, 1951 (Harvard), both in NYPL/Schm: PR; FBI Main 100-12304-233 (sample opposition to PR); Isidore M. Cohen to PR, June 11, 1951, NYPL/Schm: PR. An additional batch of foreign invitations are in RA for the first few months of 1952. By that time Robeson’s lawyers and friends were making something of a concerted effort to solicit such invitations as a vehicle for challenging the State Department’s ban; as Essie wrote in response to one such invitation, “Thank you.… Every invitation is of great importance for us. For each one, we go again to the State Department for a passport” (ER to C. Bogdan, Rumanian legate, Feb. 15, 1952, RA; see also, D. N. Pritt to Patterson, Dec. 14, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC). PR to Lionel Kenner, Oct. 28, 1951, RA (common search). His brief Christmas message for 1950 had similarly stated, “Peace depends on the friendly, though competitive co-existence of different systems” (RA).

43. The number of meraos, teletypes, and instructions relating to the Vancouver incident in RA are too numerous to cite individually. PR had attended a reception for Harry Bridges and had spoken out in his defense after the long-shoremen’s leader was convicted of perjury in a federal district court in California for denying under oath at the time of his naturalization that he had ever been a CP member (FBI Main 100-12304-255), a conviction subsequently reversed by the Supreme Court.

44. Bellingham Herald, Jan. 31, 1952; Freedom, March 1952 (PR’s own account of Vancouver); Vancouver Daily Province, Jan. 29, Feb. 1,12, 1952; Vancouver Sun, Jan. 31, Feb. 8, 9, 1952.) Jerry Tyler, one of four union men who helped Robeson find accommodations in Seattle—he “wanted to get a room in the Negro community”—and to arrange a press conference, described the hours he spent with Robeson as a “thrill and inspiration.… How can you paint a word picture of the impact on yourself of a man so full of warmth and love that he stands like a giant, yet makes you feel, without stooping to you, that you too are a giant and hold the power of making history in your own hands as well?” (Tyler to Eddie Tangen, secretary-treasurer, National Union MCS, Feb. 3, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR.)

45. Morning Freiheit, Feb. 12, 1952 (miners’ convention); People’s World, Feb. 8, 1952 (PR’s speech); FBI Main 100-12304-253; FBI New York 100-25857-1548.

46. John Gray, field representative for the United Freedom Fund, who accompanied PR on much of the tour, wrote Louis Burnham and business manager Bert Alves (May 22, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR), “Mobilization on this side of the border was non-existent, although some 1000 or so were there thru no special effort. Concert was tops. Response grand.” Bellingham Herald, May 19, 1952; Pacific Tribune, May 23, 1952; Vancouver Sun, May 10, 1952; FBI Main 100-12304-262, 263; a transcript of PR’s brief remarks at the Arch are in RA. There was some disagreement between Harvey Murphy, regional director of the miners’ union, and John Gray over what percentage of the money raised at the concert should go to the Freedom Fund and what percentage toward paying back union expenses (Murphy to Gray, May 30, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR, which also contains statements itemizing income and expenses from the tour and correspondence about making the Peace Arch concert an annual event).

47. Pettus to PR, Feb. 19, 1952; Murphy, Jr., to Pettus, April 14, 1952; Pettus to Freedom, April 16, 1952; Murphy, Jr., to Lester Catlett, April 18, 1952—NYPL/Schm: PR.

48. Murphy to Catlett, April 18, 1952; Pettus to Freedom, April 26, 1952; Eleanor Nelson to Murphy, May 1, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR.

49. Pacific Tribune, May 16, 1952; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 8, 1952; Daily People’s World, Northwest Edition, May 9, 1952; Seattle Times, May 8, 1952.

50. Gray to Burnham and Alves, May 22, 1952; Pettus to Robeson and Gray, May 24, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR; Daily People’s World, May 16, 1952 (which reported that two local newspapers had refused ads for the concert).

51. San Francisco Examiner, April 25, 1952; New York Daily Compass, May 23, 1952; The Nation, June 7, 1952 (Berkeley); Morning Freiheit, June 13, 1952; Daily People’s World, April 25, 1952; San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1952; Chester to Murphy, Jr., April 23, 25, 1952; Murphy, Jr., to Chester, April 27, 28, 30, 1952; Alves to Chester, June 2, 1952; Murphy, Jr., to Coleman Young, April 20, 1952; John Gray to Freedom, May 25, 1952—all NYPL/Schm: PR.

52. Hershel Walker to Bertram Alves, May 28, 1952 (St. Louis); Mike Walter to Alves, May 20, 1952 (Milwaukee), NYPL/Schm: PR; two-page typed report, unsigned, on the University of Minnesota, RA; Pittsburgh Courier, June 14, 28, 1952; FBI office memos, June 6, 9, 1952, and Main 100-12304-266X; Daily Worker, April 29, 1952 (birthday).

53. John Gray to Maurice Travis, July 17, 1952; Edith Roberts to Coleman Young, July 30, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR. Robeson’s income-tax returns in RA demonstrate that his financial situation was not acute, but PR was so indifferent to money matters that at one point Rock-more had to hound him for information about his tax returns (Rockmore to PR, Sept. 5, 1951, RA).

CHAPTER 20 CONFINEMENT (1952–1954)

1. Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, passim. In March 1952 Robeson sent a message to the World Peace Council excoriating the continuing U.S. involvement in Korea: “The enormity of this crime”—he was apparently specifically referring to rumors that the United States had used bacteriological warfare—“against the brave Korean & Chinese People should bring down the wrath of all decent humanity upon the heads of the military & shapers of this genocidal policy” (draft, March 21, 1952?, NYPL/Schm: PR). As newly released documents have revealed, high-level discussion and planning took place during the Eisenhower administration for deploying nuclear weapons against North Korea and Communist China (the revelations are reported in The New York Times, June 8, 1984).

2. Horace Alexander to PR, Feb. 24, 1952; Thelma Dale to PR, Feb. 26, 1952 (Progressive nominations), NYPL/Schm: PR; FBI New York 100-25857-1597 (convention); Horace Alexander to PR, n.d. (1952), NYPL/Schm: PR (California); interview with Annette Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983 (Bass remark); PR speech to NNLC convention, Cleveland, Nov. 21, 1952, RA (“fateful year”). I’m grateful to David Randall Luce, who was present in Ann Arbor, for his recollections, as well as pertinent Michigan state police documents, of that event (Luce to me, Sept. 19, 1982, plus enclosures).

3. In PR’s speech at the NNLC convention on Nov. 21, 1952 (ms. RA) he added: “Professor Mathews’s son is one of those arrested in Capetown for his defiance of unjust laws. I ask you now, shall I send my son to South Africa to shoot down Professor Mathews’s son on behalf of Charles E. Wilson’s General Motors Corporation? …”; PR’s column, Aug. 1952, Freedom (optimism).

4. Copies of the minutes of the Progressive Party national-committee meeting of Nov. 29–30, 1952, and the secretary’s report on the election are in RA.

5. Both RA and NYPL/Schm: PR contain batches of congratulatory messages, mostly from abroad. The Kent telegram is in RA; Ferrer’s statement is printed, among many other places, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 3, 1953. According to an FBI phone tap (FBI New York 100-25857-89), during World War II Robeson intervened to get a draft deferment for Ferrer, arguing that his presence in the cast was essential for the continuing run of Othello. Rockmore successfully sued in court to get the Stalin Prize money for Robeson tax-free because, like the Nobel, it was a “prize” (the five-year battle is described in the Herald Tribune, Feb. 5, 1959).

6. PR’s April 1952 Detroit speech, RA. Robeson’s lawyers had made appeals for the return of his passport in Sept. and Dec. 1951 and March and Aug. 1952. A large amount of documentation connected with these appeals, and the one in Dec. 1952, is in RA, NYPL/Schm: PR, NYPL/Schm: CRC, and assorted FBI files. The documentation is too extensive to warrant detailed citation here. Several additional points emerging from the documentation do, however, need to be stressed. First, PR’s European supporters, as mentioned earlier, deliberately worked to get him invitations for commercial engagements so that (in the words of Desmond Buckle) they could “give real point to our demand for the restoration of your passport” (Buckle to PR, Sept. 14, 1951, RA). Second, a Provisional Committee to Restore Paul Robeson’s Passport was formed late in 1951 to build up grass-roots support (Burnham/Patterson correspondence, NYPL/Schm: PR and CRC).

7. An especially persuasive analysis of the shaky assumptions behind the Government’s case is I. F. Stone in the National Guardian, March 14, 1952; Daily Worker, April 6, 1952; Freedom, April 1952.

8. Both ER and PR wrote effusive eulogies of Stalin in New World Review, April 1953; and on March 26, 1953, PR spoke at a memorial meeting under the auspices of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship about Stalin’s “magnificent leadership” (FBI Main 100-12304-677). Among the accounts of PR’s efforts in behalf of the Rosenbergs, are: The New York Times, Oct. 15, 1952; National Guardian, Nov. 6, 1952; The Worker, Nov. g, 1952, Jan. 12, 14, 1953; FBI 100-38128-9; FBI Main 100-12304-677. RA contains a typescript of PR’s remarks at the Rosenberg Theatre Rally on Nov. 19, 1952. Among the many accounts of PR’s continuing efforts to bring about an end to the Korean War are: The Worker, Sept. 28, Oct. 7, Nov. 16, Dec. 4, 1952; FBI New York 100-25857-1612, 1622; Freedom, Dec. 1952 (PR speech at NNLC convention).

9. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen.

10. Ibid.

11. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr.

12. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen. According to PR, Jr., they sometimes recorded in people’s living rooms, or alternately at Nola and Esoteric Studios, where the owner’s stood their ground even though FBI agents were all over them. Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten, had earlier tried to form a company “to move into a number of cultural projects,” of which the first was expected to be a PR recording, but nothing further came of the plan (Biberman to PR, July 14, 1951, RA). Robeson frequently saw Biberman and his wife, the blacklisted actress Gale Sondergaard, when he was in California. At around the same time, Howard Da Silva, Sam Wanamaker (who would play Iago to PR’s Othello in 1959), PR, and others had some notion of forming a theater-and-film group, but that, too, failed to materialize (Da Silva to PR, May 15, 1951, RA; Cleveland Herald, July 15, 1950; FBI Main 100-12304-255).

13. The itemization of the earnings from Robeson Sings is in PR, Jr., to Rockmore, Oct. 6, 1953, RA. The New York Times complained that Robeson Sings was “cheapened by slickly commercial orchestral backgrounds” (Feb. 7, 1954). Another Robeson album, I Came to Sing, a recording of his 1952 Peace Arch concert, was released in 1953 by the Mine, Mill union (Canadian Tribune, March 23, 1953, May 4, 1954). Although the IRS audited Robeson repeatedly, it never found anything untoward. Thanks to Rockmore, PR even had enough money to set up Bruce Liggins, husband of his niece Marian, in medical practice, and to pay for his daughter-in-law Marilyn’s school tuition. He also periodically lent money to Ben Davis and to his own brother Ben. PR’s voluminous financial records are in RA.

14. Dale to Crawford, April 6, 1953; Alves to Gray, July 1, 1953, NYPL/Schm: PR; J. Maceo Green, San Francisco Sun, June 13, 1953; interview with Thelma Dale Perkins, Nov. 11, 1986; interview with Stretch Johnson, March 5, 1985. Pete Seeger (phone interview, July 4, 1986) is the source for the NAACP story (having heard it from a member of the Oberlin NAACP chapter).

15. Interviews with Dr. Aaron Wells, Jan. 8, April 23, 1983, multiple interviews with Rosen (Hellman). Bishop Clinton Hoggard, in an interview with Sterner, recalled a similar episode involving the Alpha Phi Alpha chapter in Washington, D.C., late in the fifties. PR had asked “to meet with some of the brothers”; Hoggard had passed the word around but encountered considerable resistance: “They were very hesitant, especially those who were in government employ—‘Well, I can’t be in a room where he is.’” As an example of another kind, Langston Hughes, in three of the children’s books he published during the McCarthy years—First Book of Negroes (1952), Famous American Negroes (1954), and Famous Negro Music Makers (1955)—omitted all mention of Robeson (and Du Bois as well). Attempting to justify his action ten years later, Hughes cited pressure from his publishers (Hughes to William G. Home, Oct. 25, 1965, RA).

16. This analysis of local black reactions to PR’s tour is based on material in NYPL/Schm: PR, especially on the correspondence of Herschel Walker (St. Louis), Rev. Charles A. Hill (Detroit), John Gray (his letters back home to Freedom while on the road making tour arrangements), and Bernard Alves (particularly his letters from Atlanta and Cleveland when he was canvassing concert possibilities). A copy of McGowan’s speech, printed as a pamphlet by the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, is in RA.

17. Daily Worker, April 28, 1953; Rev. Charles A. Hill to John Gray, Nov. 30, 1953, NYPL/Schm: PR (Detroit); Bellingham Herald, Aug. 17, 1953; Vancouver Sun, Aug. 18, 1953 (Blaine); Freedom, May 1953. George Murphy, Jr., recalled “the plight we got into with Salem Methodist, even after the tickets were printed,” when the minister “got cold feet because of the pressure of some of his parishioners” (Murphy to ER, Feb. 22, 1958, MSRC: Murphy Papers). The Canadian organizers had predicted to Robeson that he would get a turnout of fifty thousand in Canada and five to ten thousand in the States (PR to Judy Rosen Ruben. July 28, 1963, courtesy of Rosen). According to The Afro-American (July 18, 1953), PR’s appearance at the Lawndale Baptist Church in Chicago attracted only 200 people because “a number of persons were ‘intimidated’ not to show up,” but he drew a large crowd for an outdoor concert in Washington Park. The Afro-American also reported that in Chicago “None of his activities received newspaper publicity; most of them received word of mouth notice or handbill announcement.”

18. Seattle SA report, Oct. 12, 1953, FBI Main 100-12304-? (blurred) (Seattle); FBI New York 100-25857-15563 (“hideout”), 2617 (Pettus); telephone interview with Chief Jim Richards, Enfield, Feb. 1, 1985. PR’s activities in behalf of the Smith Act defendants are too numerous to itemize. Some of the major rallies are described in The Worker, Feb. 24, March 17, 18, May 16, 1952, Feb. 11, 1953; important correspondence relating to plans for defense and protest are in NYPL/Schm: PR and CRC. Essie had also taken a highly visible role in the nationwide committee to aid the families of the Smith Act victims, which further persuaded the FBI that it had been right to reclassify her as a Communist (FBI Main 100-12304-297). In his autobiography, Junius Scales recalls that in the 1956–57 period, when the initial furor over the Smith Act trials had passed and funds were increasingly difficult to raise, PR came to the aid of his Defense Fund. He simply appeared one night when Scales (in his words) “was boring an audience of about a hundred or so in a wretched hall in the Bronx,” spoke eloquently of their common heritage as Southerners fighting against racism, and helped raise three or four times the sum Scales had hoped for. Moreover, that was the first of several appearances PR made in Scales’s behalf (ms. of Scales autobiography, courtesy of Scales; since published as Cause at Heart [University of Georgia]).

19. RA contains a multisided correspondence—between Essie and Rockmore, Rockmore and Julius Meltzer (the real-estate agent), and Bert McGhee and Rockmore (about rent)—relating to the Enfield sale in particular and PR’s finances in general; it is too bulky to cite in detail. It should be noted, though, that Rockmore occasionally wrote directly to Robeson admonishing him about his continuing indifference to his financial affairs (e.g., Rockmore to PR, Sept. 5, 1951, June 24, 1953, RA). The asking price on Enfield is in The New York Times, July 21, 1953. For a time Robeson himself seems to have agreed to Essie’s purchase of a building lot in the progressive residential area of Norwalk called Village Creek Colony (PR to Judy Rosen Ruben, July 28, 1953, courtesy of Rosen). In regard to PR’s finances, the black actress-activist Frances Williams has recorded a touching anecdote. Hearing that he was in bad straits, she told him, “‘Paul, I don’t want you to worry about that because, damn it, if we all have to stand on corners with cups, we’ll get enough money so you can keep going.’ He sat there and cried. I can see the tears coming down his face. He said, ‘Oh, baby you don’t have to worry about me and money.…’ This great man crying. Can you see me standing on the corner with a cup? I loved him. He was a great, great man” (Williams interview, 1981, with Kim Fellner and Janet Mac-Lachlan, transcript courtesy of Fellner). At this same time, the early fifties, Rock-more sold a small apartment PR had kept at 188 West 135th Street. The union activist Ted Rolfs (in an interview conducted for me by Eric Garber, Feb. 4, 1983, and my follow-up phone interview with him on Feb. 17, 1987) described the apartment as having a gigantic bed and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, along with iron protective guards on special windows and an iron floor-bolt on the front door. PR allowed Rolfs, who had been named a security risk, to stay in the apartment, but Rolfs described how difficult PR’s black neighbors in the building made it for him until they were finally persuaded he was not there to do Paul any harm. (For more on Rolfs, see note 47, p. 646, and note 17, p. 701.) PR sometimes stayed in this period at Ben Davis’s apartment and also at the Pettis Perry family’s apartment. A little later (around 1955) he used William Patterson’s apartment at 409 Edgecomb Avenue when Patterson was away.

20. The quotations in this and the following paragraphs come from the stenographic transcript of the hearing in RA, which also has the handwritten notes Essie made after the hearings to set down her second thoughts—all those “brilliant things” she wished she had said at the time; among them was this imaginary question to the Senator: “Are you or are you not married? Why not?”

21. Stenographic transcript, RA; ER to Seton.July 14,. 1953, RA. In her typed statement to the press, July 9, 1953, RA, Essie referred to McCarthy’s insistence that all Americans were equal in their citizenship as “that old American Party Line.”

22. PR to Judy Rosen Ruben, July 28, 1953, PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

23. The many letters of invitation from overseas are in RA. The offer to do Othello was from Leslie Linder. Robeson telegraphed his acceptance, pending receipt of a passport (Linder to PR, June 15, 1953; PR to Linder, n.d., RA). NYPL/Schm: PR contains considerable correspondence on both the ASP and Hartford incidents; some newspapers accounts have also been useful in reconstructing those events, particularly the Hartford Times, Nov. 17, 1952 (PR’s reaction to reporters); The Afro-American, Nov. 29, 1952; and The New York Times, Nov. 11, 12, 18, 1952.

24. The plight of the CAA can be traced in two memos it issued (Oct. 23, Dec. 17, 1953), copies in LC: NAACP. Freedom fell four months behind in its publication schedule and when it finally reappeared, in Feb. 1954, ran a front-page appeal for support: “The existence of the paper is at stake.” Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984 (money problems at Freedom); Amsterdam News, Feb. 19, 1954. The FBI report on PR’s “heart trouble” has no legible serial number but is dated (from L.A.) Dec. 1, 1953. PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

25. The two FBI memos dated Jan. 13, 1953, and April 27, 1954, do not have legible file numbers; a third (FBI New York 100-25857-1976) also refers to his “changing his views.” The Jet article appeared Jan. 28, 1954. When Cliff W. Mackay printed a story in his Jan. 23, 1954, column for The Afro-American—the black paper that had most consistently supported Robeson—that PR had taken out an ad in Pravda to extend New Year’s greetings to the Soviet people, Robeson wrote Mackay that Pravda did not accept ads and that the greetings in question had been in response to the paper’s request for “a message about the attitudes of the American people toward peace” (PR to Mackay, Feb. 9, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). An exchange of letters between Rev. J. Spencer Kennard, Jr., and PR contains a firm denial by PR of the Drew Pearson report (Kennard to PR, May 3, 1954; John Gray to Kennard, May 19, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). George B. Murphy, Jr., general manager of Freedom Associates, who had been an editor of the Washington Afro-American (and was a member of the family that owned the paper), had arranged a meeting in Baltimore a few years previously between Robeson and Carl Murphy, president of the Afro-American newspaper chain. (The chain had the largest circulation among blacks of any weekly in the country, reaching, on the basis of three or four persons reading one copy, some six hundred thousand each issue. The Pittsburgh Courier chain, about equal in influence to The Afro-American, had taken a more staunchly anti-Communist line in its editorial policy, and was therefore less sympathetic to Robeson’s plight.) His four-hour meeting with Carl Murphy went splendidly, and The Afro-American stopped taking snide potshots at PR and published a half-dozen favorable articles on him (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U. Mass.: Du Bois). As one sign of The Afro-American’s esteem, its assistant managing editor, Josephus Simpson, asked PR (along with other prominent figures) to reflect for The Afro’s readers on the events of 1953 and to forecast what lay ahead in 1954—and also to nominate “the outstanding American.” In his response, PR rejoiced that the issue of segregation in education had reached the Supreme Court, but warned that “the whole civil rights program” had been “scuttled by the Eisenhower administration in the President’s successful bid for Southern support.” Further, he characterized the administration as “largely a political vehicle for the giant corporations and entrenched greed” and pilloried it for embracing McCarthyism. As the two most significant achievements of 1953 he listed “the ending of the bloodshed in Korea” and “the further awakening of the colonial peoples, particularly our brothers in Africa, and now in the West Indies and Latin America.” He nominated two “outstanding Americans”—W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Mary Church Terrell, who at age ninety had been leading picket lines to desegregate the capital’s lunchrooms and had gone to Georgia to plead for clemency for Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper accused of killing a white man (Simpson to PR, Dec. 14, 1953; PR to Simpson, Dec. 19, 1953, NYPL/Schm: PR). When Mary Church Terrell died, seven months later, PR hailed her as one of America’s “great daughters” (handwritten draft, July 27, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR).

26. The ms. of PR’s lengthy reply is in NYPL/Schm: PR. His formal statement through Freedom Associates, dated May 3, 1954, is in RA.

27. Interview with Stretch Johnson, March 5, 1985; PR, “Their Victories for Peace Are Also Ours,” New World Review, Nov. 1955; The New Statesman and Nation, Sept. 24, 1955.

28. ER to Seton, Aug. 11, 1952, RA. When the president of the Yale chapter of the NAACP invited Robeson to participate in a debate on “Is American fit to be the leader of the world?” or “Is the American Government moving toward equality and civil rights?” he wrote on the invitation, “This question not debateable—willing to come, speak & answer questions—no debate” (NYPL/Schm: PR).

29. Conversations with PR, Jr. (20th Congress); but PR does seem to have discussed Khrushchev’s revelations later with Harry Francis (see pp. 505–06). On the need to distinguish between the visionary Bolshevism of the twenties and the authoritarian Stalinism that replaced it—a distinction few American Sovietologists have been willing to make—see Stephen F. Cohen’s illuminating discussion in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (Oxford University Press, 1985). According to PR, Jr., his father “had deep concern about the 1952 frame-up trial and execution of the leading Jewish cultural figures in the U.S.S.R.,” but when Paul Novick of Freiheit approached him in 1957 to sign a public statement on the matter, Robeson declined. Novick spoke to him again in Moscow in 1958 “about what was going on in the Soviet Union and the Jewish question and whatnot, and Dad was under no illusions about what had happened, and what was happening then, as a matter of fact” (multiple conversations with PR, Jr.; PR, Jr., to Morris U. Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981; PR, Jr., ms. comments).

30. Interview with Sam Parks, Dec. 27, 1986. (For more on Parks and PR, see p. 457)

31. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 27, 1982; letter from Dorothy Healey to me, June 22, 1982; multiple conversations with Helen Rosen. A California friend, Geri Branton, offered the same caution against making the CPUSA “all that important” in Robeson’s life (interview, April 2, 1982). One gauge of Robeson’s uninvolvement in CP organizational affairs is that he goes wholly unmentioned by Party memoirists of the period as having participated in factional struggles or daily routine. My analysis of Robeson’s relationship with the CPUSA and the Soviet Union is drawn from many sources, but has been especially enriched by personal interviews—with Peggy Dennis (April 27, 1982), John Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982), Dorothy Healey (May 1, 1982), Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Junius Scales (March 10, 1986), Carl Marzani (March 11, 1986), Ollie Harrington (July 29, 1986), and Sam Parks (December 27, 1986).

32. Interviews with Healey (April 1982), Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984). Echoing Gates’s formulation, PR was reported in the undergraduate newspaper at Swarthmore as telling the students during a visit to that campus in 1955 that he “did not accept the opinion of the U.S. press about the degree of freedom within the USSR. For working class people,” he stated, “there is a great deal of freedom”; the reported slave-labor camps in the U.S.S.R., he supposedly went on to say, “were used for no other purpose than for the improvement [sic] in our sense of the word,” a necessity given the “historical background of the present State” and “the fact that the Western powers have been trying to destroy the USSR since its inception” (Swarthmore Phoenix, May 3, 1955).

33. For more details on these aspects of Soviet and CPUSA policy, see Isserman, Side, especially pp. 137–41, 215–16, 246–47. As Isserman points out (pp. 141–43), the CPUSA did continue to fight hard within CIO unions like the NMU and the TWU for better employment opportunities and high union posts for blacks.

34. Interviews with Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982). The Pettis Perry papers, consisting of some 250 letters to his wife Rose as well as various notes and speeches, have recently (1987) been acquired by NYPL/Schm, and I am grateful to the staff for allowing me access before the materials were fully catalogued. Perry (b. Jan. 4, 1897) was an almost exact contemporary of PR and was somewhat close to him during the fifties. Perry had been born in poverty on a tenant farm near Marion, Alabama, had learned the trade of moulding at a pipe foundry in Tuscaloosa and during the Scottsboro trial had joined the International Labor Defense, serving as its Executive Secretary from 1934–36. He became a CP Section Organizer in 1936 and was ultimately elected to the National Committee. Indicted among the New York Smith Act defendants, he was jailed from 1955–57.

35. Interviews with John Gates, June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984.

36. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 1982; Peggy Dennis to me, March 24, 1984, Feb. 16, 1987.

37. Ibid. PR admired Foster as a theoretician, though he did not feel especially close to him as a man; in notes dated April 30, 1956 (RA), he referred to Foster as “that master of Marxist theory and practice.…” The sympathy and depth of Foster’s views on black issues is best sampled in Foster’s own book, The Negro People in American History (International Publishers, 1954), especially chs. 42, 43, 48; Foster admiringly refers to PR several times in the book.

38. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. PR turned down Patterson’s request that he appear at the eighth-anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Congress (Patterson to PR, March 16, 1954; John Gray to Patterson, March 25, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). From prison, Ben Davis, Jr., wrote Patterson a guarded but decipherable complaint about the Party’s racial obtuseness: “… There were missteps on our side that never should have occurred.… One cannot be satisfied that the groundwork for an assault on my 60 day contempt was not laid ahead of time.… I would be less than candid if I did not point out that the absence of certain counteractive measures left a deep and painful impression on me. Nor will I go into this; but I want you to think about it. And I want that this shall not be repeated with Pete [Pettis Perry] and above all with the great and horribly brutalized Claudia [Claudia Jones]”—Perry and Jones being black Communist leaders who had been arrested under the Smith Act (Davis to Patterson, n.d. [1954–56?], NYPL/Schm: PR). Robeson shared Davis’s concern and admiration for Claudia Jones, supporting the move in behalf of her parole after a year in prison, her health compromised (James W. Ford to PR, May 4, 1955, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2397); and when she was deported in late 1955, he sent “heartfelt greetings” to a gathering in her honor (dated Dec. 7, 1955, RA).

39. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr.

40. Interviews with John Gates (June 8, 1982 and Feb. 13, 1984).

41. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. The story about “toning down” was Ben Davis’s, who told it to Robeson, who told it to PR, Jr.

42. The Afro-American, March 13, 1954; Patterson to John Gray, Feb. 25, 1954; Richard Greenspan to Gray, March 8, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR (Guatemala); PR telegram to Neruda, July 12, 1954, RA (Guatemala); FBI New York 100-25857-1950? (Guatemala), 1981 (McCarran); minutes of the Formation of Kenya Aid Committee, NYPL/Schm: PR; Hunton to “Dear Friends,” May 18, 1954 (Conference in Support of African Liberation), LC: NAACP; Daily Worker, April 27, 1954 (subversive). In the March 1954 issue of Freedom, PR also wrote presciently about Vietnam in an article entitled “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China”: “Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom-fighters; and now we are told that soon it may be ‘advisable’ to send American GI’s into Indo-China in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the ‘free world’—meaning White Imperialism.”

43. The large number of letters, cables, minutes, and memos relating to the spring 1954 passport campaign—as well as messages of thanks from PR—in both RA and NYPL/Schm: PR are too numerous for detailed citation. Additional sources for piecing together the story of the campaign are issues of the National Guardian, May-June 1954, and Bulletin of the World Peace Council, July, Aug., Sept., Oct. 1954.

44. Interview with Diana Loesser, July 29, 1986. The Jewish-owned business concern NAHUM offered free space for future meetings, and the local Jewish paper, Jewish Chronicle, provided strong editorial support.

45. The “Salute” did not bring out the number of blacks that had been hoped for: “… it was not what we wanted by any means as to composition” (John Gray to Mary Helen Jones, June 9, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR); interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984.

46. Details of the Chicago incident are in correspondence between Ishmael P. Flory, secretary of the Committee for African Freedom (the sponsoring group), and John Gray, field representative of the Freedom Fund, NYPL/Schm: PR. Flory gave me additional details in our interviews of July 1–2, 1986, including the information that an alternate concert at a black church in Chicago was “packed,” with people “standing all along the walls.” Another left-wing Chicagoan, Norman Roth, told me (phone interview, June 26, 1986) that he witnessed black policemen forming a gauntlet for PR and telling him (while looking over their shoulders at their white officers), “Good work, Paul; good work, Paul.” The correspondence between Gray and James T. Wright, also at NYPL/Schm, details the hiring of Wright and Boudin. I am greatly indebted to Leonard Boudin for turning over to me his complete files on the Robeson passport case.

47. Celia L. Zitron to PR, June 16, 1954 (Smith Act); Mary Helen Jones to John Gray, Nov. 17, Dec. 19, 1954; Jessica Smith to ER and PR, June 1, 1954 (New World Review)—all in NYPL/Schm: PR; (Essie served as editorial consultant on black and colonial questions for NWR); FBI New York 100-25857-2074, 2124 (New World dinner); Daily Worker, Oct. 20, 1954 (for PR on Essie’s contributions); Jessica Smith to “Dear Friend,” Aug. 11, 1954, MSRC: Smith Papers. There is a large correspondence in RA relating to the business affairs and recording arrangements of Othello Recording Company; in 1954 Othello issued a new PR album, Let Freedom Sing, and in 1955, Solid Rock: Favorite Hymns of My People, and entered into arrangements to send special language matrices to Hungary, the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, and Poland, bringing in for Robeson some needed funds (in Jan. 1955, for example, Paul, Jr., was able to send Rock-more a royalty check for PR’s account for $3,451.25, and in May another for nearly $3,000). Robeson paid tribute to Marcantonio, both in a private telegram to his widow (Aug. 10, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR) and in an article for Freedom (Aug. 1954). Through Freedom Associates, he hailed him as “the Thaddeus Stevens of the first half of the 20th century” and “the foremost spokesman for the rights of man the Congress of the United States has produced in the 20th century” (the statement, dated Aug. 12, 1954, is in RA).

The National Negro Labor Council had been officially launched in a convention in Cincinnati in 1951 as a mass organization to fight against limited job opportunities and Jim Crow and to build unity between black and white workers. PR was given honorary membership in the Council and was present at its inaugural convention, speaking and singing to the delegates (his speech is reprinted in the Daily World, April 8, 1976). He remained active in the NNLC, playing a particularly dramatic role at the second annual convention, in Cleveland in 1952, when he brought the delegates to their feet with a resounding declaration that black youth should not participate in “shooting down the brave people of Kenya” (Daily Worker, May 7, 1951 June 16, 1952; Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 10, 1951; New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 3, 1951; Freedom, Jan., Dec. 1952). At the third annual convention, in Chicago in 1953, he reiterated yet again the sentiments of his 1949 speech in Paris: “No one has yet explained to my satisfaction what business a black lad from a Mississippi or Georgia sharecropping farm has in Asia shooting down the yellow or brown son of an impoverished rice farmer”; the audience, according to Freedom (Oct. 1953), responded “with a thunderous cheer.” At the 1954 convention, in New York, he gave a powerful speech assailing the U.S. government for refusing to trade with China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union while fostering trade with fascist Spain and with Malan’s South Africa: “If politics is to be the yardstick in international trade it means that the U.S. government is saying to 15,000,000 Negroes that it approves the politics of the most oppressive racist dictatorship on the face of the globe today” (ms. of speech in RA). PR did not engage in behind-the-scenes strategy sessions but, rather, “came in more or less as a great man” to sing and talk (interview with Oscar Brown, Jr., Dec. 27, 1986; Brown was especially active at the 1952 convention in Cleveland). PR, Jr., insists to the contrary that his father attended and spoke at committee sessions and met privately with the top leadership group (PR, Jr., ms. comments).

48. George B. Murphy, Jr., to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U. Mass.: Du Bois; New York Age, July 30, 1949; interview with Kay Pankey, July 26, 1986. Essie’s two-hundred-dollar monthly allowance was apparently provided in addition to her hotel bills and other standing expenses, leading Rockmore once again to warn Paul about “the monthly drain that goes on ceaselessly” (Rockmore to PR, May, 1954, RA). A confidential FBI informant reported that another reason propelling PR’s move was that McGhee was “at present, very ill and under doctor’s care” (FBI Main 100-25857-2273). The informant also claimed that until the move PR had visited his brother Ben only infrequently because the two “do not get along too well.” In fact it was Essie who did not get along with either Ben or his wife, Frankie.

49. My view of Robeson’s family culture and also the particular environment of the parsonage is especially indebted to insights from multiple conversations with Marilyn Robeson, and from my interview with Marian Liggins, Ben and Frankie Robeson’s daughter (Nov. 21, 1982).

50. Interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986; multiple interviews with Helen Rosen.

51. Spottswood to PR, Feb. 16, 1955, RA. When Frances (“Frankie”) Robeson died, in 1957, Paul attended the services along with A.M.E. Zion Bishops Rt. Rev. William J. Walls, Spottswood, and Brown (Chicago Defender, Dec. 21, 1957; Pitts burgh Courier, Dec. 28, 1957).

CHAPTER 21 BREAKDOWN (1955–1956)

1. Ms. of PR article for Liberation (Paris), dated June 19, 1954, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2063 (Ben Gold), 2108 (ALP), 2142 (Lightfoot); FBI Main 100-12304-316 (Patterson and Davis); Muriel Symington to John Gray, Nov. 20, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR (Patterson). A handwritten speech by Robeson in Patterson’s behalf is in MSRC: Patterson (n.d. [c. August 1954]); in it, Robeson reiterated his view that “When the Americans know the truth—the simple truth—they’ll put a fast end to many of these present fascist-like absurdities, an end to the blatant destruction of our Constitutional rights.” When the London Daily Herald asked Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to write a thousand-word profile on PR, he protested directly to the Herald on the basis of Powell’s support of “the aggressive war policy of the Republican government” and the “cold-war policy of the preceding Democratic administration. Though his ‘bipartisan’ political conformity qualifies Rep. Powell for a passport, I cannot see that it qualifies him in any way to present an objective report on me to your readers” (Powell to PR, July 16, 1954; PR to Herald, Sept. 11, 1954, RA). FBI New York 100-25857-2284 (“specific information”).

2. The New York Times, Feb. 24 (Hammett), 25, 26 (Robeson testimony); New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 24 (Hammett), 26 (editorial). For a particularly smooth bit of savagery against Robeson that appeared at this very time, see the ch. entitled “George” in Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time (Simon and Schuster, 1955). Among other claims, Kempton insists that the character of Sebastien Cholmondley (a fatuous, pretentious, self-deceived black man) in Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel Decline and Fall was meant as a portrait of Robeson.

3. PR to Josephus Simpson (assistant managing editor, The Afro-American), Dec. 19, 1953 (“magnificent”); Freedom, Feb. 1955; Swarthmore Phoenix, May 3, 1955. Robeson also used his involuntary idleness to further his musical studies and to return to the study of languages and cultures which had so preoccupied him twenty years earlier. In a short article in Spotlight on Africa (February 1955), he reiterated the familiar themes of his 1934–36 notes, i.e., the similarities between many African languages and other cultures such as Chinese, especially in their structures and in the “thinking” be hind the language.

4. There is considerable correspondence in NYPL/Schm: PR, especially between John Gray and Lynne Childs, Mary Helen Jones, Matt Crawford, Rev. Stephen H. Fritchman, and Horace Alexander, detailing the plans and difficulties of arranging a California tour for Robeson in 1955 (“We’re going to keep banging away,” Mary Helen Jones wrote Gray in a letter of Oct. 19, 1954, “because if we do give up the concert idea then Mr. Charlie will really know he’s got us down”). Robeson’s comments while in L.A. are from the Daily People’s World, March 17, 1955. Whether the car episodes represent a deliberate attempt to harm Robeson cannot be conclusively decided from the evidence, but both Paul Robeson, Jr., and Lloyd L. Brown believe that they did (Daily World, Oct. 25, 1979 [PR, Jr., interview]; Lloyd L. Brown, “Did They Try to Kill Paul Robeson?,” ms. in RA). In a similar vein, PR, Jr., asserts that he has “credible evidence that in the middle 1950’s and early 1960’s the CIA considered the possibility of assassinating Robeson” (ms. comments), but if so he has not shared it with me. Having carefully studied all the currently available evidence, I do not find PR, Jr.’s assertion persuasive.

5. Patterson to U Nu, Oct. 21, 1955, MSRC: Patterson; The Afro-American, May 21, 1955; The New York Times, April 23, 1955; New York Amsterdam News, May 14, 1955. Powell did, however, speak out several months later for the return of PR’s passport (London Daily Worker, Sept. 22, 1955). Two years later Essie wrote another blast at Powell, in relation to the violence against school integration at Little Rock High, Arkansas. When Louis Armstrong reacted to Little Rock by saying, “The Government can go to Hell; it’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” most of black America rejoiced (not least over the fact that Armstrong, who had long continued to play before segregated audiences, had at last spoken out). But Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., appearing on the TV program “Youth Wants to Know” on Sept. 19, 1957, said that Armstrong didn’t understand international affairs, that he was just a musician. Soon after that, in a sermon on Little Rock to his congregation at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Powell said the President could not send federal troops to Little Rock without making “a confession of our moral decadence,” precipitating “a second civil war and sending democracy down the drain for at least a generation and maybe forever.” On all these counts, ER excoriated Powell (“Daniel Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, Spokesman,” International Life, Oct. 1957). PR’s remarks at Swarthmore are from Freedom, May-June 1955. The earlier move to bar him from CCNY is reported in the Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 1, 1951, and Campus, Dec. 6, 1951. A confidential memo to Walter White (dated Nov. 28, 1951) in LC: NAACP reports a conversation with Dr. Kenneth Clark, then chairman of the committee in charge of the use of the Great Hall at CCNY, in which Clark said he “would like to be in a position to recommend that if the Hall is opened to Robeson it should be in a forum type of affair with a representative of our Association, preferably you, so that both sides of the question would be presented.” Walter White appended to the memo, “As there is a possibility that I shall be out of the country on January 10 [the suggested date for the forum] it is impossible for me to attend.”

6. The surveillance, monitoring, and phone taps have already been documented many times over in these pages; for evidence of PR’s mail’s being opened, see FBI New York 100-25857-3118, 3147. Among the informants cooperating with the FBI in this period was Noble Sissle, the partner of Eubie Blake, and a man who had known Robeson at least since the days of “Shuffle Along” in the early twenties (FBI Main 100-12304-405, 62–65252).

7. Dave Curtis to PR, March 3, 1955; PR to Curtis, March 7, 1955 (Workers’ Sports Association); Jacob Ori to PR, Jan. 26, 1955 (Tel Aviv); Sergei Yutkevich to PR, March 15, 1955 (Mosfilm). Once again, the documentation with regard to the passport case is too bulky to cite with any completeness. Suffice it to say that in this and the following paragraphs I have relied on the press releases of the Provisional Committee to Restore Paul Robeson’s Passport in RA; the complete files of the case Leonard Boudin turned over to me; detailed reports of the battle in the Daily Worker (especially Jan. 24, May 30, June 2, 3, 8, 1955) and The New York Times (especially Jan. 14, June 2, 3, 4, 7, 15, July 15, 1955); and private correspondence in both RA and NYPL/Schm: PR. A good summary of the issues in the case is in Boudin, “The Constitutional Right to Travel,” Columbia Law Review, Jan. 1956. For a historical overview arriving at a pro-State Department position see Louis L. Jaffe, “The Right to Travel: The Passport Problem,” Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1956.

8. PR, Jr., to Dave Curtis, Ferdinand C. Smith, Will Sahnow—all July 28, 1955, RA; Atlanta Daily World, July 28, 1955; The Afro-American, July 3, 30, 1955; Daily Worker, July 24, Aug. 14, 1955. The officials present at the meeting were Under secretary of State Loy W. Henderson (who as U.S. Ambassador to Iran had helped to engineer the overthrow of the democratic Mossadegh government two years earlier), Frances G. Knight (director of the Passport Division), Security Chief Scott McLeod, and Raymond Yingling, assistant legal adviser to the State Department. Just two weeks before PR’s passport conference in Washington, The New York Times had run an editorial recommending more cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In welcoming the Times’s suggestion, Pravda cited the “humiliating procedures” prescribed for Soviet visitors to the States and also protested the refusal of the U.S. government to allow Robeson to travel. Shortly before that exchange, the Times reported that the Soviets, having earlier named a mountain after Robeson, had now named the main street in a new state farm settlement after him as well (Times, April 3, 1955). Since the Times in this period reported no news of PR other than his passport case and his assorted Soviet ties, the paper directly contributed to the already firm public image of him as “a dangerous subversive.” Mount Paul Robeson is the highest peak in the AlaTau range in the Kirghiz Republic. A bronze bust of Robeson by Olga Manuilova is placed on top of the mountain. (See Thelma Dale Perkins, “A Letter to Paul Robeson on Our Visit to Mt. Robeson,” New World Review, 4th quarter 1973)

9. The New York Times, Aug. 17, 1955; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 17, 1955; PR, Jr.’s handwritten notes on the Aug. 16 meeting (“this man”), at which he had been present, are in RA; U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 1955 (an excerpted transcript of the proceedings); interview with Leonard Boudin, July 14, 1982.

10. Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 17, 1955; the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 10, 1955; PR’s press release (Oct. 1955) is in RA.

11. See p. 407 for the State Department’s 1952 assertion; Rover’s testimony is reprinted in U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 1955; PR’s statement is reprinted in the Philadelphia Tribune, Oct. 18, 1955.

12. The powerful historical argument in the amicus curiae brief was prepared by Milton Friedman, William Patterson, and Ralph Powe and then circularized (mostly among black Americans) for signatures. Essie took an active role in writing to potential signers. Du Bois, Alphaeus Hunton, and Rev. Charles Hill were among those who signed. Ben jamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College, was among those who refused (“… it would have been better to have argued the case for Mr. Robeson,” he wrote Patterson, “without indicting Mr. Dulles” [Mays to Patterson, March 1, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR]). In explaining the reluctance of Judge W. C. Huston to sign, George B. Murphy, Jr., wrote Essie (March 6, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR) that he “apparently never … recovered from the effect of his having signed a statement which he wrote himself, on the basis of his convictions in the Rosenberg case, which caused him some difficulties in the State of Michigan with the Elks State Association there.… [He] asked me to say to you and Paul that if there is something else he can do he will be happy to help” (see also March 5, 1956).

At the time of Emmett Till’s murder, PR sent a telegram to A. Philip Randolph (Sept. 24, 1954, RA) calling for black unity “in militant resistance to terror and oppression.” It was one of several gestures PR made in 1954–55 to reach out in common cause with the established black leadership. (He also telegraphed “greetings to the officers and delegates of the NAACP convention,” June 24, 1955, RA.)

13. Interviews with Dr. Aaron Wells, Jan. 8, April 23, 1983; multiple conversations with PR, Jr., and Helen Rosen; interview with Annette Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983 (making out a will); PR’s reference to himself as a “prisoner” is from the London Daily Herald, Oct. 21, 1955.

14. Interview with Lee Cayton, April 28, 1982. Helen Rosen recalls that her husband, Sam, had tried to persuade Robeson to go to a surgeon at Mt. Sinai, where Sam was on staff, but other friends persuaded him that “he must have a black doctor do it, and it has to be done uptown.” She also recalls that Sam was “absolutely furious” that the operation was done in two steps, an older surgical technique, thereby exposing Paul to a double dose of pain and anxiety (multiple conversations with Helen Rosen). According to PR, Jr., his father told him he didn’t want a downtown white doctor or a CP doctor and went on his own to Wells and Wiles—though agreeing to let Ed Barsky, the physician for several CP leaders, watch the operation at Sydenham. The FBI had a report on Robeson’s hospitalization from an unnamed source at Sydenham (FBI New York 100-25857-2518). Among the many get-well letters in RA is one from Eugene Dennis (Oct. 12, 1955) and one from Mike Gold (Oct. 18, 1955), who wrote, “We need you as we need sunlight!” PR’s hospital bills, revealing his private nursing care, are in RA. His medical expenses, totaling over two thousand dollars, put another dent in an income that (according to the official estimate on his 1955 tax returns in RA) for the year 1955 amounted to a gross of $12,751.90. Essie’s income for that year totaled a mere three hundred dollars, for three articles in New World Review (ER to Rockmore, Feb. 13, 1956, RA). PR’s finances got a boost the following year when he received a check for ten thousand dollars “as a fee for your records sold in the Soviet Union” (Yuri I. Gouk [cultural attaché, U.S.S.R. Washington Embassy] to PR, undated [enclosed check is dated June 7, 1956], RA).

15. For an understanding of why Paul returned to Essie, I’m especially grateful for the insights Marilyn Robeson provided in our several talks. The historians Judith Mara and Herbert Gutman got to know the Robesons fairly well during the 1950s (because of their close friendship with Paul, Jr., and Marilyn) and stressed to me, during an informal conversation on June 7, 1985, that they had found ER an unusually well-informed, astute political observer. In regard to Essie and the CPUSA, Rose Perry recalls that Essie “was always at loggerheads with some of the people in the Party,” and PR, Jr., adds, “She was very critical of Foster and Ben” (interview with Perry, April 27, 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]). The FBI, in 1955, was citing Essie as “active on behalf of numerous Communist fronts” (FBI Main 100-12304-317, 318). The FBI received information that Ben Davis, Jr., after completing a conditional-release sentence on Feb. 24, 1956, “possibly will live with” Robeson, having asked a friend to get him a larger apartment for that purpose (FBI Main 100-12304-360).

16. Interview with Thelma Dale Perkins, Nov. 11, 1986 (parachute); ER to “Nana,” Jan. 11, 1956, RA; talks with Marilyn Robeson. When the United Nations Department of Public Information gave Essie temporary accreditation, USUN Warren M. Chase suggested to the Justice Department in a confidential memo that “steps be taken” to have her credentials canceled. Since the department had a policy of not objecting to the accreditation of U.S. correspondents to the UN, Chase suggested that she be watched to see if she introduced herself in a status other than as a correspondent for a “Communist monthly,” and that if she did the department “might be asked to make an investigation directed at this specific point” (FBI Main 100-12304-336). The special agent in New York reported soon after that “no info has come to the attention of the NYC indicating that subject has misused her accreditation to the UN” (FBI Main 100-12304-353). Samples of ER’s political writings for New World Review are in the issues of June and Aug. 1956 (respectively, favorable reactions to Sukarno of Indonesia and Krishna Menon of India), May 1957 (“The Changing Face of the UN”), and June 1957 (“China and the UN”). ER suggested to Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that from time to time she send along from her UN post stories of special interest to black readers, for syndication by Barnett. But he replied that the material “really does not suit our needs” (ER to Barnett, Oct. 18, 1957; Barnett to ER, Nov. 15, 1957, CHS: Barnett). In a notebook in RA marked “1957 some notes and appointments,” Essie wrote regarding her UN job: “Be very careful, during debate, not to laugh or sneer or make any expression.”

17. Interview with Dr. Morris Perlmutter, March 7, 1983. Mine-Mill Herald, Feb. 1956; The Telegram (Canada), Feb. 13, 1956; Canadian Tribune, Feb. 20, 1956; Toronto Daily Star, Feb. 13, 1956; ER to Lloyd L. Brown, Jan. 29, 1959, RA. The ms. of PR’s Sudbury speech is in RA. In his Toronto speech PR also congratulated the city on having banned Little Black Sambo from the public schools; his support of the ban reflected both the limits of his civil-libertarian stand and the campaign against “white chauvinism” that had been gathering strength—and wreaking havoc—within the Communist Party. Six months before, PR had gotten a letter from Neruda, telling him, “I am speaking about you and your case in a great meeting for public freedom, here in Santiago in 15th August.… I send you my best regards, and the love and admiration of all my people” (Neruda to PR, July 2, 1955, RA).

18. For additional discussion of PR’s reaction to the Khrushchev revelations, see pp. 416–17; also, interviews already cited with Peggy Dennis, Dorothy Healey, John Gates, Stretch Johnson. The fate of the March 1956 passport appeal is traced in newspaper accounts (The New York Times, Jan. 1, 21, Feb. 12, March 9, 1956; Daily Worker, March 9, 1956; The Afro-American, March 10, 1956) and in correspondence from Robeson’s lawyers, Boudin and Wright, in NYPL/Schm: PR. Warren E. Burger, then Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, for the Justice Department, was one of the lawyers arguing the case against Robeson.

19. Interviews with Dr. Morris Perlmutter (March 7, 1983), Freda Diamond (liturgy), PR, Jr.; my interviews with Pete Seeger (July 4, 1986, phone) and Earl Robinson (Aug. 17, 1986) were especially useful in regard to the pentatonic scale. RA contains voluminous Music Notes in PR’s hand, written from 1955–57. In them, he sometimes speculates on the two pentatonic scales of the piano (e.g., Notes of Jan. 15, 1957) and far from claiming absolute originality for his theories, cites a large number of scholarly sources for them, including Béla Bartók, Hugo Leichtentritt. J. Rosamond Johnson, Marshall Stearns, F. M. Hornbostel, Marion Bauer, and Harold Courlander.

Though depressive symptoms were not manifest in 1956, they may have dominated earlier mood swings; Seton, for example, referred in our interviews of Aug.-Sept. 1982 to PR’s “always having the curtains closed” when she visited him at the McGhees’ apartment (though she was uncertain about the dates). There are almost no additional references in the surviving evidence to PR’s having sharp mood swings prior to 1956, except for an occasional elusive reference such as an AP report of March 16, 1951, that had PR “sweating profusely and gesticulating wildly” while addressing a mass rally for peace. But it would be unwarranted to attach much “medical” significance to the AP’s words, since (in the general context of its report) they seem designed as a political commentary, a strategy for discrediting his “tirade.”

20. Multiple conversations with Helen Rosen.

21. Interviews with Dr. Aaron Wells, Jan. 8, April 23, 1983; Dr. Morris Perlmutter, March 7, 1983; PR, Jr. (multiple); Helen Rosen (multiple). I have also benefited from discussion with Dr. Robert Millman, who went over some of the medical records with me and offered his observations.

22. ER to Rockmore, April 30, 1956, RA. Another new stress factor impeding recovery was receipt of the news in mid-April that Canada’s Department of Immigration had refused him a visa for a thirty-eight-day concert tour that had been in the planning stages, citing as the reason its sponsorship by a “Communist” booking agency. Details of the controversy, which included questions in the Canadian Parliament, are in the Toronto Daily Star, April 10, 11, 1956; the Canadian Tribune, April 16, 1956; The Globe and Mail, April 12, 1956; the National Guardian, May 7, 1956; correspondence from John Boyd of the Jerom Concert Bureau (sponsors of the tour), RA, and Boyd to Lloyd L. Brown, April 13, 1956 (copy), MSRC: Patterson. I got some additional details from my interview with Sylvia Schwartz (Jan. 16, 1983), who was active in protesting the visa cancellation. In William Patterson’s opinion, Canada’s refusal of a visa was “a heavy blow” (Patterson to Sylvia Schwartz, May 4, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR). The American Consul General in Montreal kept the State Department closely informed about the fate of PR’s Canadian tour (FBI New York 100-25857-2668, 2673).

23. Wiles, “To Whom It May Concern,” May 25, 1956; Wells, “To Whom It May Concern,” May 26, 1956; Richard Arens (director, HUAC) to Friedman, May 31, 1956 (postponement); Wells to Friedman, June 8, 1956—all in RA; FBI memo from L. B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, May 31, 1956, FBI Main 100-12304-? (illegible).

24. Phone interviews with Milton Friedman, Aug. 27, Nov. 29, 1982. Freda Diamond (multiple interviews) is the source for Essie’s fainting scheme. The prepared statement is in RA. In it PR listed the more important of the many invitations he’d had to perform all over the world, declared it “would be more fitting for me to question Walter, East-land and Dulles than for them to question me, for it is they who should be called to account for their … truly un-American activities”—claiming that he, in contrast, had “won friends for the real America before the millions before whom I have performed”—and defiantly refused to back down one inch in “continuing the struggle at home and abroad for peace and friendship with all of the world’s people, for an end to colonialism, for full citizenship for Negro Americans, for a world in which art and culture may abound.…”

25. The transcript of the hearing is in RA. For Manning Johnson’s previous testimony on PR, see p. 359. It was referred to during the hearing, and Boudin angrily protested the tainted source (Boudin to Frances Knight, July 29, 1957, RA).

26. Transcript of the hearing, RA; Essie’s remark is in an article she wrote about the day, “Paul Robeson Goes to Washington,” ms., RA.

27. Transcript of the hearing, RA. In the summer of 1955 Sen. Eastland, as chair of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, had issued subpoenas to some three dozen journalists, two dozen of whom were current or former staff members of The New York Times, for hearings on the alleged influence of the CPUSA on U.S. newspapers. The Times management threatened to fire any employee pleading the Fifth Amendment, substituting private confessionals within the Times’ own “family.” For a history of the episode, see James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970) and his “The Fifth Remembered,” The Nation, Dec. 27, 1986-Jan. 3, 1987.

28. Transcript of the hearing, RA.

29. Transcript of the hearing, RA; phone interviews with Milton Friedman, Aug. 27, Nov. 29, 1982.

30. Washington Evening Star, June 12, 1956; New York Amsterdam News, June 13, 1956; Daily Worker, June 13, 1956; The Afro-American, June 23, 1956; Pittsburgh Courier, June 23, 1956.

31. FBI New York 100-25857-2729 (Davis phone call); Davis to PR, June 24, 1956, RA; Du Bois to PR, June 30, 1956, U.Mass.: Du Bois; Mary Helen Jones to PR, June 14, 1956; Aronson to PR, June 21, 1956; Williams to PR, June 14, 1956—all in RA; The Afro-American, June 16, 1956; San Francisco Sun Reporter, June 23, 1956; Pittsburgh Courier, July 7, 1956. Robeson was especially grateful for the sympathetic story Alice A. Dunnigan filed with the Associated Negro Press (PR and ER to Claude Barnett, June 20, 1956; Barnett to Dunnigan, June 16, 1956; Barnett to PR, June 27, 1956—all in CHS: Barnett). The most scathing negative voice in the black press was, predictably, that of George S. Schuyler (Pittsburgh Courier, June 23, 1956), a voice echoed more frequently in the white press (e.g., the New York Joumal-American, June 13, 1956: “Robeson’s performance was a combination of tirade and weaseling evasion”). On the other hand, Edward P. Morgan, a staunch anti-Communist, chided HUAC in his ABC broadcast of June 14, 1956, for having behaved “with all the punitive bravery of a school principal making a public spectacle of thrashing an ornery child” (transcript of his broadcast, RA).

32. The New Jersey visit is detailed in FBI Main 100-12304-377X; ER to Rockmore, Aug. 5, 1956, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2815; Daily Worker, Oct. 12, 1956 (Newark). It was a sign of the changing times that Rep. James Tumulty, who had been a strong supporter of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, spoke publicly in favor of PR’s right to sing at Newark (Daily People’s World, Oct. 16, 1956). During the visit to New Jersey, Robeson felt well enough to give an interview to the local paper (Orange Transcript, Aug. 2, 1956), in which he once more declared himself “optimistic about the future.” At this same time, when Ernest Thompson was expressing dismay over how the CP had misused Robeson, an FBI agent reported that an unidentified informant claiming acquaintance with PR had declared that during a conversation PR had said “he realizes now that the CP is not ‘following through’ on trying to break the interracial barrier which exists between the negroes and white people,” though he continued to believe “that the CP was sincerely interested in tearing down the interracial barrier” (FBI New York 100-25857-2775). But if Robeson had indeed expressed such doubts, they did not represent any generalized disillusion with socialism. In a lengthy handwritten ms. (undated [July 1956?]) in RA, in which he returned to the basic themes of his 1930s notes on African culture, he responded to a New York Times article of July 15, 1956, by Stuart Preston on African sculpture, first by taking issue with Preston for having asserted that African art had “nothing in common” with art in the West, despite its manifest influence on artists like Picasso; and then going on to hail “The triumphant emergence of new powers and of revolutionary socialism in Asia,” a development that revealed “that the Western led and capitalist phase of modern industrial civilization is rapidly giving way to an Eastern-led and Socialist phase.…”

33. Washington Post, Nov. 8, 1956.

34. The New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune, New York Journal-American, New York Daily News—all Nov. 14, 1956; FBI Main 100-12304-393, FBI New York 100-25857-2821; Foster to PR, Nov. 27, 1956, RA. It was in an interview with The Afro-American three days later (Nov. 17, 1956) that Robeson referred to the “somebody” at work. The ms. of his prepared remarks to the meeting made only one possible and indirect reference to Hungary: referring to the Soviet Union, he said, “… you have leaped forward time and again when civilization was in danger.” For comparable views on Hungary from PR’s friend Pettis Perry (“it is an attempt to bring back into Hungary a reactionary regime”), see Perry to Rose Perry, Nov. 20, Dec. 25, 1956, Perry Papers: NYPL/Schm.

35. Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 12, 1957; San Francisco Sun Reporter, Jan. 5, 1957.

36. The Afro-American, Nov. 17, 1956. According to Essie (ER to George Murphy, Jr., Nov. 23, 1956, MSRC: Murphy), PR was “immensely pleased” with the Afro interview, largely the work of George B. Murphy, Jr.

37. The Afro-American, Nov. 17, 1956. The Patterson quote is from a letter he wrote protesting the Supreme Court decision, as printed in both the Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 1, 1956, and The Afro-American, Nov. 24, 1956. The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1956, and the National Guardian, Nov. 19, 1956, contain accounts of the Supreme Court decision against Robeson.

Following Judge Mathews’s Aug. 1955 ruling against Robeson in the passport case, William Patterson had taken charge of trying to raise additional support in the States, while a number of groups overseas, and particularly in England, had redoubled their efforts in PR’s behalf. Patterson’s correspondence in regard to the passport fight is in NYPL/Schm: PR. RA contains the large number of invitations from overseas. The notable activity in PR’s behalf in Britain included an appeal sent directly to President Eisenhower from twenty-five prominent musicians (Sir Adrian Boult, Rutland Boughton, Humphrey Searles, Alan Rausthorne, Lennox Berkeley, etc.), a petition from Scotland with over three thousand signatures (including a dozen MPs), protests in the press (for example, Tom Driberg in Reynolds News), and a Let Paul Robeson Sing Rally in Manchester addressed by Manchester MPs Will Griffiths and Konni Zilliacus; Liberal barrister Vaughan Davis; Foundry Workers Union President and member of the Labour Party National Executive R.A. Cassasola; and black former British middleweight boxing champion Len Johnson (Daily Worker, Feb. 22, 1956; National Guardian, March 12, 26,1956). Cedric Belfrage, coeditor of the Guardian, who had been deported from the States, wrote that “Among British workers the fight to liberate Robeson is taking on a new emphasis, as the central symbolic expression of their concern over American thought-control” (Guardian, Sept. 26, 1955); also, interview with Belfrage, May 29, 1984. For a time Diana and Franz Loesser played a particularly prominent role in organizing the National Paul Robeson Committee in London (Loesser to PR, May 31, Oct. 20, 1956; Loesser to ER, Oct. 27, 1956; Belfrage to PR, June 3, 1956—all in RA; interview with Diana Loesser, July 29, 1986). The success of a large rally the Loessers organized in Manchester in Dec. 1956, which included a showing of The Proud Valley and a concert by the Welsh Miners Choir, is described in Loesser to ER and PR, Dec. 18, 1956, and Marie Seton to PR, Dec. 7, 1956 (Seton attended), RA. USIA/London reported to USIA/Washington on the “renewed attention” being given the Robeson passport case in Britain. The report stressed that, although the case had long been “exploited at intervals by the Communist press in Britain,” currently numerous non-Communists were adding their voices, including members of “the Bevanite wing” of the Labour Party (FBI Main 100-12304-358). Summarizing the contrasting response to the passport fight from overseas and at home, Patterson wrote that the Europeans had “responded magnificently,” but the minimal reaction at home had been emblematic of the general American failure to fight “to safeguard constitutional liberties” (Patterson to Sylvia Schwartz, May 4, 1956, NYPL/Schm: CRC). A comparable view, citing the failure of the left to put up a fight for PR, is in James W. Ford to PR (citing Ferdinand Smith’s opinion to that effect), Oct. 27, 1956, RA.