Boyhood
(1898–1914)
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the century—and to some extent down to the present day—was known as the northernmost outpost of the Confederacy. Long before the Civil War, Southern aristocrats had enrolled their sons at Princeton University, considering it the only “safe” educational institution for those willing to venture north at all. Some Southern families even sent along—in one of those fits of inadvertent irony in which American history abounds—trusted black servants to insulate their scions from the potential hazards of an alien white culture. And thus from an early time the town of Princeton had a black population—and antiblack attitudes.
Even without the infusion of Southern aristocrats, Princeton had its own native tradition of hostility toward blacks, a hostility found in abundance everywhere in the country. By the early years of the twentieth century, that hostility was resurgent and the explicit Jim Crow principle in schooling, transportation, and restaurants had replaced even the marginal ambiguities of the post-Reconstruction period. Black teachers lost their jobs in integrated schools; black citizens were denied access to hotels; black workers were eliminated from trade unions. Social scientists in the universities (Franz Boas, the anthropologist, was among the notable exceptions) had begun bolstering the old doctrines of innate inferiority with their new “objective” expertise, uniting around the “scientific” doctrine that blacks were a separate species, one step above the ape on the evolutionary scale. Books appeared with such inflammatory, unapologetic titles as The Negro a Beast and The Negro: A Menace to Civilization. On the eve of World War I, the movie Birth of a Nation summarized the accumulated ideology and practice of the preceding two decades by portraying noble-hearted whites reluctantly taking the law into their own hands in order to curb the excesses of savage blacks—and was a resounding popular success. Rural areas of the South added burning at the stake to lynch law’s already potent arsenal of terror (there were more than eleven hundred lynchings of Southern blacks in the years 1900–14) and in the cities mob violence edged northward to explode with special ferocity in 1908 at Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln.1
Physical intimidation was matched by political, social, and economic proscription. Between 1896 and 1915 every Southern state passed legislation decreeing white-only primaries, backed up by poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy and property requirements that, taken together, effectively disenfranchised blacks. The federal government added its weight to the campaign to hold blacks in their “place.” Both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, their policies differing in much else, combined in these years to sanction the prosecution and dismissal of black soldiers for responding to the violence directed against them by the townspeople of Brownsville, Texas. Woodrow Wilson, born in the South and elected to the presidency in 1912, continued the policies of his predecessors by extending segregation in federal office buildings and rebuffing black applicants for jobs.
At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington was chief spokesman for his race, and blacks—at least in public and for white consumption—generally accepted his counsel for accommodation, conciliation, and deference. Washington defined economic rights for blacks as the right to be trained for low-paying jobs in factories and farms, cautioned patience in demanding political rights, and eschewed all interest in social intermingling. In the years immediately preceding World War I, both the militant “Niagara Movement,” spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would emerge to challenge Washington’s views, but in 1900 his philosophy held sway—and the escalation of white violence against blacks served notice that it could be overturned only at terrible cost.
Paul Leroy Robeson was born in the town of Princeton on April 9, 1898. His father, William Drew Robeson, had himself been born a slave, the child of Benjamin and Sabra, on the Roberson plantation in Cross Roads Township, Martin County, North Carolina. In 1860, at age fifteen, William Drew had made his escape, found his way north over the Maryland border into Pennsylvania, and served as a laborer for the Union Army (making his way back to North Carolina at least twice to see his mother). At the close of the Civil War, he managed to obtain an elementary-school education and then, earning his fees through farm labor, went on for ministerial studies at the all-black Lincoln University, near Philadelphia (receiving an A.B. in 1873 and a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree in 1876). A classmate later described “the ‘Uncle Tom’ tendencies” among many of the students at Lincoln—but singled William Drew out as “among the notable exceptions.”2
While studying at Lincoln, William Drew met Maria Louisa Bustill, eight years his junior, a teacher at the Robert Vaux School. Her distinguished family traced its roots back to the African Bantu people (as William Drew did his to the Ibo of Nigeria), and in this country its members had intermarried with Delaware Indians and English Quakers. The many prominent descendants included Cyrus Bustill, who in 1787 helped to found the Free African Society, the first black self-help organization in America; Joseph Cassey Bustill, a prominent figure in the Underground Railroad; and Sarah Mapps Douglass, a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Louisa Bustill’s own sister, Gertrude, wrote for several Philadelphia newspapers and married Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell, the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (as well as a considerable activist for racial justice). When Louisa Bustill married William Drew Robeson in 1878, the impressive legacy of Bustill achievements, past and current, became part of their son Paul’s heritage. But it was not the part he emphasized. He always identified more with the humbler lives on his father’s side, often alluding affectionately as an adult to his simple, good North Carolina kin—while scarcely ever referring to his Bustill relatives.3
At the time of Paul’s birth, his father was fifty-three years old and his mother forty-five. She had already given birth to seven children, five of whom had survived infancy. As the youngest, Paul was the doted-upon favorite, and in later life always spoke of his family with deep affection. The firstborn, William Drew, Jr., later became a physician in Washington, D.C., and died in 1925 at the youthful age of forty-four; Paul later credited him as the most “brilliant” member of the family and his own “principal source of learning how to study.” (William’s nickname among his contemporaries was “schoolboy.”) Marian, the one girl, became, like her mother, a teacher; Benjamin, like his father, went on to the ministry. The fiery Reeve (called Reed) rejected any traditional path or cautionary attitude; he was the family brawler, the boy who reacted to racial slurs with passionate defiance—and became something of an alter ego to his younger brother, Paul. “His example explains much of my militancy,” Paul wrote later in life. “He often told me, ‘Don’t ever take it from them, Laddie—always be a man—never bend the knee.’” As an adult, Paul would look back lovingly on his “restless, rebellious” brother, “scoffing at convention, defiant of the white man’s law.” But after street fights (Reed carried a bag of small, jagged rocks for protection) and brushes with the police, Reed was packed off to Detroit, became part owner of a hotel, apparently got involved in bootlegging and gambling, and is rumored to have died on Skid Row.4
The town of Princeton was a strictly Jim Crow place, with black adults held to menial jobs and black youngsters relegated to the segregated Witherspoon Elementary School (which ran only through the eighth grade; parents who wanted their children to have more education—like the Robesons—had to send them out of town). Emma Epps, a contemporary of Paul’s, remembers walking home with a pack of white kids at her heels yelling “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Later in life, Paul scornfully rejected Princeton as “spiritually located in Dixie,” and he referred angrily to blacks living there “for all intents and purposes on a Southern plantation. And with no more dignity than that suggests—all the bowing and scraping to the drunken rich, all the vile names, all the Uncle Tomming to earn enough to lead miserable lives.” Still, the black community in Princeton was large (15–20 percent of the population) and cohesive, with a sizable contingent from rural North Carolina that continued in its Southern speech and traditions, and with Reverend Robeson’s relatives, Huldah Robeson, Nettie Staton, and cousins Carraway and Chance all living nearby. As Paul himself later wrote, blacks “lived a much more communal life” in Princeton “than the white people around them,” a communality “expressed and preserved” in the church.5
Within that church, Reverend Robeson was an admired figure. He had been pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton for nearly twenty years when his son Paul was born in 1898. Of the three black churches in Princeton at the turn of the century, Witherspoon was the largest, the possessor of an auditorium, a parish house, and several additional properties, together valued at more than thirty thousand dollars. As pastor of Witherspoon, Reverend Robeson would later be recalled as having initially “made many improvements in the church methods and church property.” He would also be recalled, by blacks, as “ever the defender of justice—standing firmly for the rights of our race.” A contemporary commented that “you could move the Rock of Gibraltar” more easily—William Drew Robeson was made of “flintstone, unwilling to compromise on moral principles, even if it meant economic harm.”6
It did. After twenty years of service, Reverend Robeson was forced out of his Princeton pastorate. The initial charges against him focused on the inability of the Witherspoon Church to become financially self-sustaining. An investigating commission appointed by the Presbytery of New Brunswick reported in January 1900 that no misappropriation of funds had taken place but that there had been “great carelessness” in keeping business records. Finding insufficient improvement six months later, the commission recommended “the dissolution of the Pastoral Relation existing between Rev. William D. Robeson and said Church.” No reasons were given, and no charges, or even intimations, were made against Reverend Robeson’s character. Seventy-two members of the Witherspoon Church—including all three of its Elders and three of its four Trustees—promptly petitioned against his discharge. Reverend Robeson himself, in a lengthy speech before the Presbytery, “made an eloquent appeal” (according to the local press) in his own behalf. He “intimated that the Presbytery was inclined to be hard on him and his church because colored.” The chairman of the investigating commission replied that “if Mr. Robeson had been a white pastor, Presbytery would have dissolved the relation long before this,” and declared that “there is a misfit at the Witherspoon Street Church and that it is useless for Mr. Robeson longer to continue in that field.”7
Further discussion before the full Presbytery “brought out the fact that Mr. Robeson had been kind to his people, administering to the wants of the most needy in times of their suffering out of his own substance, often thereby imperilling his own financial interests and bringing upon himself the very conditions which formed the basis of some complaints made against him.” With “neither pastor nor people” asking for a dissolution and with Reverend Robeson’s character having been shown to be “above reproach,” the Presbytery—for the moment—decided that the commission’s suggestion for separation was not “sustained by facts necessary to warrant a recommendation of such grave moment.” It voted to recommit the report and instructed the commission to provide concrete reasons for its view that Reverend Robeson’s pastoral relations with his church should be severed.8
The commission’s animus was only momentarily deflected. According to the later testimony of two contemporaries, Reverend Robeson had gotten “on the wrong side of a church fight,” having apparently refused to bow to pressure from certain white “residents of Princeton” that he curtail his tendency to “speak out against social injustice” in the town. Many years later, after Reverend Robeson’s son Paul (still a toddler at the time of his father’s troubles) had himself become the target of public abuse, a family friend from the early days commented on how Paul’s “ideas, thoughts and effort were misinterpreted by the white man to keep his black brother in the dark and keep us from making progress,” adding, “They did it to his father.”9
The commission went back into session and in October 1900 issued a “supplemental report” testy in tone and adamant in its recommendation that Reverend Robeson be separated from his pastorate. Forced this time to assign reasons, the commission mostly resorted to vague charges about a falling-off in membership at the Witherspoon Church and a “disrelish” for its services “as at present conducted.” In further alluding to “a general unrest and dissatisfaction on the part of others”—meaning white residents of Princeton—“who have been the Church’s friends and helpers,” the commission tipped its actual hand, for the “lack of sympathy” toward Reverend Robeson that it cited could not have referred to his own black congregation. On the contrary, its members, meeting several times under the independent auspices of a white faculty member from the Princeton Seminary, spoke out forcefully and voted nearly unanimously in favor of retaining Reverend Robeson as pastor.10
That made no impression on the commission. The “welfare and prosperity” of the Witherspoon Church, it announced, would be “greatly enhanced” by Reverend Robeson’s departure. Bowing to the commission’s intransigence, William Drew Robeson resigned, effective February 1, 1901. His salary (about six hundred dollars a year) and his use of the pastor’s residence were continued until May 1. On January 27, 1901, the day of Reverend Robeson’s farewell sermon, chairs and benches had to be placed in the aisles to accommodate the overflow crowd, and many stood at the rear of the church. He began by acknowledging that “I have made some mistakes and committed some blunders, for I am human and faulty; but if I know my own heart, I have tried to do my work well.” Throughout his speech he made only one oblique reference to those who in the church’s “darkest need forsook it,” but otherwise advocated “forgetting the things that are behind.” With the largeness of spirit that his son Paul would always admire and emulate, Reverend Robeson eschewed any desire “to recriminate and rebuke.” “As I review the past,” he said, “and think upon many scenes, my heart is filled with love.” He closed by urging his congregation, “Do not be discouraged, do not think your past work is in vain.” The words would prove emblematic for his son Paul’s own life.11
Within just a few years of losing his pastorate, Reverend Robeson had to face a second, more devastating tragedy. His wife, Louisa, had long been afflicted with impaired eyesight and ill health. When, on a wintry day in 1904, a coal from the stove fell on her long-skirted dress, she failed to detect it. Fatally burned, she lingered on for several days in great pain. Paul, not yet six years old, was away at the time of the accident, but his brother Ben was home. Throughout Ben’s life, according to his daughter, the mere sight of a flame was enough to upset him.12
As an adult Paul claimed to have scant memory of his mother—perhaps a predictable effect of trauma. Yet he did several times confide to intimates, “I admired my father, but I loved my mother,” and he had a vivid recall of the day of her funeral: “He remembers his Aunt Gertrude taking him by the hand, and leading him to the modest coffin, in the little parlor at 13 Green St.—to take one last, but never forgotten look at his beautiful, sweet, generous-hearted Mother.” Otherwise, Louisa Bustill Robeson is barely present in the historical record; a scattered reference or two hint at a woman of considerable intellect and education (she wrote many of her husband’s sermons and is also recalled as a “poetess”), generous toward those in need, strong yet gentle—a temperament much as her son’s would be.13
The Bustill clan showed disinterest in the “dark children” Louisa had left behind (she herself had been light-skinned and high-cheekboned, reflecting the mix of African with European and Delaware Indian heritage), which was perhaps another reason Paul identified deeply with his father’s uneducated relatives, who treated him with unfailing kindness. Reverend Robeson, bereft of his pastorate and his mate, struggled to regain his balance. He was occasionally called on to give a sermon in this church or that, but to piece out an income he became a coachman, driving Princeton students around town, and in addition got himself a horse and wagon to haul ashes for the townspeople (the ashes, Paul later recalled, “piled up in the back yard in such mass as if one were looking at a coal heap in the Rhonda [sic] Valley in Wales …”). “Never once,” Paul remembered, did Reverend Robeson “complain of the poverty and misfortune of those years.” He retained “his dignity and lack of bitterness.” But for a time he could barely sustain a livelihood. The Princeton Packet, wanting in all other news about blacks, printed a notice that William Drew Robeson owed $12.25 in unpaid taxes on his house.14
At the time of their mother’s death in 1904, Ben and Paul were the only children still at home (Marian, next youngest to Paul, was staying with relatives in North Carolina and studying at the Scotia Seminary for young black women). It wasn’t until 1907 that Reverend Robeson managed to relocate himself and his two sons in the town of Westfield, but even then economic hardship continued. Reverend Robeson worked in a grocery store, slept with Paul and Ben in the attic under the roof of the store, cooked and washed in a lean-to attached to the back of the building. Shifting his denominational affiliation from Presbyterian to African Methodist Episcopal, he somehow managed to build a tiny church, the Downer Street St. Luke A.M.E. Zion (Paul and Ben helped lay the first bricks “in this Pillar of Zion”), and to hold together its flock of rural blacks from the South. They, in turn, helped Reverend Robeson hold together his family. The woman who ran the grocery store downstairs, along with other church sisters and neighbors, brought food from time to time (supplemented by bags of cornmeal, greens, yams, and peanuts sent up by relatives from Robersonville, North Carolina); and if Reverend Robeson had to visit a parishioner or be away overnight, one of the sisters would take young Paul home, sewing on his buttons, darning his socks, making him rice pudding and chocolate cake. “There must have been moments,” Paul later wrote, “when I felt the sorrows of a motherless child, but what I most remember from my youngest days was an abiding sense of comfort and security.” The townspeople, in turn, remembered him as a “a nice, open-hearted kind of boy.… Made people want to help him, just being what he was.” Later the whole town of Westfield would claim him, yet he “was always aware of that subtle difference between my complete belonging to the Negro community and my qualified acceptance (however admiring) by the white community.”15
In 1910 Reverend Robeson was finally able to re-establish himself in a parish, St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion, in the town of Somerville, New Jersey. By then Ben had gone off to Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith) in North Carolina, destined from there to enter the seminary and later to become the pastor of Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem. That left Paul and his father living alone together. Despite a fifty-three-year gap in their ages, the two were mutually devoted, Paul’s respect for his father bordering on awe. The one anecdote Robeson repeatedly recounted as an adult to illustrate his deep regard for his father, and his fear of displeasing him, centered on the consequences of disobeying:
I remember once he told me to do something which I did not do and he said “come here.” I ran away. He ran after me. I darted across the road. He followed, stumbled and fell. I was horrified. I hurried back and helped “Pop” to his feet. He had knocked out one of his most needed teeth. I shall never forget my feeling. It has remained ever present, and I sometimes experience horror, shame, ingratitude, selfishness all over again, for I loved my “Pop” like no one in all the world.… Never in all my life afterwards, and this happened in 1908, when I was ten, did he have to admonish me again.
The old man’s “rock-like strength and dignity” (in Paul’s words) took on added authority from his habit of dressing in the long black coat of the “old school,” square-cornered and worn down to the knees—and also by his remarkable speaking voice. Paul later called it “the greatest speaking voice I have ever heard … a deep, sonorous basso, richly melodic and refined, vibrant with the love and compassion which filled him.” In the mid-twenties in New York, Robeson would sometimes amuse friends with an affectionate imitation of his father, the “voice going down like an organ” as it delivered a soul-stirring sermon.16
Reverend Robeson had a passion for oratory—those were the days of Gladstone and Parnell, prime declaimers of the spoken word—and in his youngest son the dream of passing on his vocal powers was realized. He gave Paul speech after speech to memorize, going through them with him line by line, “dwelling on the choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, or the potency of an inflexion.” Evenings, Paul would perform his prepared orations for his father’s judgment. That done, Reverend Robeson would then often play checkers with his son, and on rare occasions would talk to him about his own early years as a slave. If the tales were infrequent, they were also graphic; later in life Paul would recall how they had haunted his memory and infused his singing of the slave spirituals with a special knowledge and poignancy. He marveled at his father’s refusal to remain in bondage and, “in all the years of his manhood,” his refusal “to be an Uncle Tom.” Though he himself witnessed his father “taunted by the hideous injustices of the color ‘bar,’” he never once saw in him a “hint of servility”; Reverend Robeson taught his children that the black man “was in every way the equal of the white man.” Paul marveled, too, that his father always acted like “a perfect Christian,” rejecting bitterness or even unkindliness. He taught Paul that he had a special responsibility to his race—but also taught him to care “for all people who were unfavorably treated,” and never to assume that whites, by definition, were as a group incapable of caring, reminding him “that whites as well as blacks had given him aid and comfort in his trek for Freedom.” As if to illustrate his words, Reverend Robeson counted among his friends in Somerville the Woldins, a white family who lived almost directly across West Cliff Street. He and Sam Woldin, who had escaped from czarist persecution of the Jews, would often sit on the porch “puffing contentedly on pipes or little Recruits or sweet Caporals, sharing tales of their respective flights to freedom.” As an adult Paul would counsel others in the same theme: neither suffering nor compassion is confined to a single race.17
As a parent, Reverend Robeson was loving but demanding, a strict disciplinarian whose perfectionist standards his son eventually internalized (“It was not like him to be demonstrative in his love, nor was he quick to praise,” he later wrote of his father). Paul was expected to play an active role in church life, to shoulder a full share of family chores, to turn in a superlative academic performance—and to work at odd jobs to help pay his school fees. He met all the expectations, and then some (beyond the requirements a perfectionist parent articulates usually lies the unarticulated final demand that the child surpass any goal he manages to meet—an insatiable process, once inaugurated, never allowing for surcease). At twelve Paul worked as a kitchen boy, at fourteen on a farm, at fifteen at a man’s job in brickyards and shipyards, and then, as an older teen-ager, he became a waiter during the summers at the small Imperial Hotel at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island.18
The waiter’s job had its special indignities: the hotel guest list was entirely white, the staff entirely black, and there were no alternate social outlets, no chance to blow off steam in the town. Yet there were compensations. In his “Memory Book” Paul described Narragansett as “wonderful … plenty of bathing and summer pleasure,” and good “chaps” on the staff to hang around with. One of the chaps was Oscar C. Brown, later a Chicago real-estate developer and civil-rights activist. Brown worked in the hotel as a bellhop and part-time secretary, and recalls being pleased that he could take home sixty dollars for the summer’s work—“I didn’t have to be amused, I was in school.” The congenial black staff also included Fritz Pollard; he, like Robeson, would become a storied athlete (in 1916 at Brown, Pollard became the first black All-American football player, named the year before Robeson became the second). The ten or so young black men on the staff enjoyed one another’s company, threw a football around on the beach, now and then discussed “current questions,” and cheered Paul on when the hotel sponsored an oratorical contest. (He won.) “Paul didn’t know anything about waiting on tables,” Oscar Brown recalls, “but he did know everything else—the things we struggled to learn, he could get them just by rote almost.” He was a big hit with the rest of the staff. “Everyone loved Paul,” another friend from those days remembers, “and wherever we went there was a great demand to hear his beautiful voice.”19
In school, too, Robeson seems from the beginning to have been the outstanding scholar and the most popular boy—a double palm only the most graceful can carry off. On first arriving in Somerville, in 1910, Paul attended James L. Jamison’s “Colored School” (Jamison had moved north after the Ku Klux Klan burned down the schoolhouse he had insisted on keeping open during cotton-picking season, when blacks were expected to be in the fields). Paul was one of three graduates from the Jamison School in June 1911, and at the closing exercises, after his father had given the invocation, he “quite captured the audience” (according to the local paper) “by the genuine ring of oratory displayed in his declamation of Patrick Henry’s ‘An Appeal to Arms.’” Following Paul, one speaker, in “a very practical address to the graduates,… urged them to do something.” And another (white) encouraged them to continue their education by expressing “his pleasure that a colored boy … [had] graduated from the high school this year and he thought others would get through.”20
Following his graduation from the Jamison School, Paul shifted briefly to Westfield’s unsegregated Washington School, graduated at the head of his class, spent eighth grade in a segregated Somerville school, then entered Somerville High in 1912. The town of Somerville had neither Princeton’s entrenched racism nor its close-knit black community. By his own later testimony, Robeson “came to know more white people” and made more friendly connections with them than he had when growing up in Princeton. He realized, however, that his own “easy moving between the two racial communities” was “rather exceptional,” that “barriers between Negro and white existed,” and that his own partial exemption from them was neither typical nor indicative of full acceptance.21
Somerville High, reflecting the racial composition of the town, had fewer than a dozen black students in a total enrollment of about two hundred. Robeson and a boy named Winston Douglas were the only blacks in their class of some forty. The “colored fellas,” one white classmate asserts, “fitted in very easily.” There was “no antiblack feeling in the town,” a second classmate insists. “It was a nice small town, very good, and the Robesons were highly respected, really.” “There was no prejudice at all,” claims a third classmate, “never any mention of any prejudice.”22
That the youthful Robeson was well liked and widely admired is certain. Those who knew him in high school remark upon his “sweetness and modesty,” his “warm, easygoing, laid-back” temperament, his “refined, clean-minded, wholesome” qualities—offering, without irony, a set of attributes that, in their suggestion of constraint and lack of spontaneity, would not be universally regarded as the apogee of adolescent development; and showing, too, no awareness of the psychological costs of always having to appear, and be seen, in so restricted a guise. In the same way, those who knew Paul in Somerville have no trouble citing the astonishing range of his gifts in sports, studies, singing, and debating, but have uniform trouble recalling or crediting any obstacles placed in the way of those accomplishments. They cite the civility of his manner and emphasize the smoothness of his path.23
Most of Paul’s white classmates apparently believed—at the time and since—that his unfailingly courteous, Christian demeanor reflected the full range of his feelings, and that his penchant for remaining somewhat apart merely reflected a loner’s temperament. “Well,” Robeson later laconically observed, “I was a good boy, sure enough—but I wasn’t that good!” And, indeed, one classmate, J. Douglas Brown, remembers that Paul “was so busy with other activities … that he was not always fully up on his assignments” and recalls, too, that far from being a joyless ascetic, Paul “was fun to be with.” When the two boys put on the funeral scene from Julius Caesar (Paul playing Mark Antony) before the entire school, Paul flung off the sheet from Caesar’s “corpse” to reveal “a dozen gory splotches of tomato catsup” they had secretly added to heighten the effect. He also took part in an apparently unsupervised theatrical evening filled with songs and jokes so “coarse and of the low variety type” (in the words of the local paper) that the audience “expressed amazement at the audacity of some of the performers,” and the Board of Education, after calling a special meeting to consider the grave offense, passed a resolution of “severe censure” on the boys who had participated.24
Somerville High also heard the first Robeson Othello—a burlesque version. The year was 1915, the occasion a presentation by Miss Miller’s English class, before the entire school, of “Shakespeare at the Water Cure,” a potpourri of characters from the plays—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello, etc.—who meet as contemporaries at a health resort in England. Teacher Anna Miller later recalled her hesitation in asking Paul to take on the parodic role of Othello as a hotel waiter, especially since the performance was designed to raise money for a class outing to Washington, D.C., that Paul could not join because no hotel in the capital would accept a black guest. “But of course Paul was willing” to perform—and proved a huge hit with the audience.25
On that evening, and many others, he sang as well. Another teacher at Somerville High, Miss Elizabeth Vosseller, had early spotted Paul’s remarkable voice, put him in the school chorus—where he carried the bass section single-handedly—and thereafter took special interest in his progress. Paul’s own family had recognized his musical gifts even earlier. As the tale goes—doubtless with the touch of highlighting usual in family lore—the moment of revelation came when Paul and his older brothers Ben and Bill were “chording up on a few tunes” one day. Sailing through their repertoire—“Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Silent Night”—Paul “bore down with boyish glee” on “one of those minors known only to home-loving groups”—and “put it out of the lot.” Brother Bill purportedly yelled, “You can sing!”; Paul purportedly told him to stop making “stupid jokes.” According to Ben’s later account, the good-natured battle about Paul’s talent “raged” for weeks. But mutual encouragement and support were hallmarks of Robeson family life, and the “debate” soon concluded, a consensus emerging that “there might be a grain of truth in Bill’s position.” Thereafter Paul gave himself “with more attention” to singing in the choir of his father’s church and took to entertaining at family gatherings.26
Searching their memories many years later, several of Robeson’s classmates have ultimately managed to recall some “isolated” instance of bigotry, only to dismiss it as atypical of the prevailing racial harmony in Somerville. In the context of the bitter, often violent antiblack feeling then endemic in the United States, the townspeople are pardonably proud of their record. Somerville was indeed something of an oasis—yet not a Utopia. “Your visiting teams, of course,” one man recalls, “some of them were a little prejudiced against the colored, you know, and naturally they would endeavor in some way, not to intentionally injure him, but really to take it out on him.” But at least once Paul was injured in a game: against the much heavier team of Bound Brook, his collarbone was broken. In another incident, Somerville was playing the rival town of High Bridge in baseball, with Robeson catching and Leslie Kershaw pitching. The game had been close until a late inning, when Robeson hit the ball over the center-field fence, giving Somerville the victory. Kershaw claims he heard the High Bridge principal say “big nigger” as Robeson crossed home plate. Whether or no, Paul and everybody else clearly heard shouts of “Nigger!” coming from elsewhere in the stands.27
Robeson experienced that kind of overt racism less often during high school than most teen-age black males do, but the subtler variety—the kind that allowed him, through practice and forewarning, to keep his temper under wraps—was more frequent. A distinct social line was drawn. He often walked to and from school with a white girl in his class, but she acknowledges that he never entered her house: “There never really was an occasion to ask him in.” Though everyone was “very nice to Paul” and Paul in turn was famously nice to everyone, he and his classmates didn’t exactly “pal around” together. As one of his teachers put it, “He is the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can’t forget that he is a Negro.” Another of his teachers did urge him to attend high-school parties and dances, but Paul himself knew better. “There was always the feeling,” he later wrote, “that—well, something unpleasant might happen.” Yet a third teacher applauded Paul’s discretion: he remained an “amazingly popular boy” because “he had the faculty for always knowing what is so commonly referred to as his ‘place.’” Early habituated to solitude, Paul would all his life seek it, deeply marked, in the eyes of some, by the melancholy of confirmed apartness. Yet he would never be a true loner. Unwilling ever to live by himself, he would prefer later in life to sleep on a friend’s sofa rather than to stay alone. His ideal situation would always be to have loving friends in near proximity, but to be able to retreat at will to an inner monastic fortress.28
He learned early that accomplishment can win respect and applause but not full acceptance—although he tried to follow the established protective tactic of Afro-American life in America: to “act right,” to exhibit maximum affability and minimal arrogance. Even while turning in a superior performance, he had to pretend it was average and that it had been accomplished offhand, almost absent-mindedly. Any overt challenge to the “natural supremacy” of whites had to be avoided, and on any occasion when whites were surpassed, the accompanying spirit could never smack of triumph. “Above all,” Robeson later wrote, as if repeating a litany drummed into his head by his father, “do nothing to give them cause to fear you, for then the oppressing hand, which might at times ease up a little, will surely become a fist to knock you down again!”29
This balancing act required enormous self-control. Robeson could safely stay on one side of the exceedingly fine line that separated being superior from acting superior only by keeping the line in steady focus. The effort contributed to the development of an acute set of antennae that he retained all his life—he later told a reporter that he could size someone up immediately, could sense, when introduced to a stranger, “what manner of man he is,” regardless of the words he spoke. But having to maintain constant self-control took its emotional toll. “I wish I could be sweet all the time,” he once said when under intense pressure, “but I get a little mad, man, get a little angry, and when I get angry I can be awful rough.” No young man of Robeson’s energetic gifts could continuously sustain a posture of bland friendliness without the effort’s exacting some revenge—especially since his father had also taught him to be true to himself. The tension was further heightened by a lifetime conviction that “in comparison to most Negroes” he had had an easy time of it growing up in white America, and complaint might appear, even to other blacks, as ungrateful and unwarranted. He preferred to “keep silent,” a tactic for coping with emotional distress that he maintained throughout his life. As an adult he could never reflect with ease on his youth, once confessing to a friend that, when he did recall some of his experiences, they only “aroused intense fury and conflict within him.”30
Robeson’s natural talents were so exceptional that he had to make a proportionately large effort in order to forestall resentment in others. He learned early: even as a boy in Westfield he is remembered as “a shy kid who did everything well, but preferred to keep in the background.” Had his warmth and modesty not been quite so engaging, the astonishing record he compiled at Somerville High might well have stirred more fear and envy. Several of his classmates swore he never took a book home at night—even as Paul sat each evening under his father’s rigorous eye reviewing the day’s lessons in Virgil and Homer. He was wise enough to appear occasionally as less than thoroughly prepared, or to use humor to “take the teachers on a bit, in a nice way.” Even so, one classmate confessed, “He used to get my goat, everything seemed so easy to him.”31
Indeed it did—in athletics especially. Robeson excelled in every sport he attempted. In baseball he played the positions of shortstop and catcher with equal facility, ran fast, and hit well. In basketball—in those days essentially a guarding game—his height and dexterity made him “good at stopping a man.” He also ran track and (after school) played a fair game of tennis. But it was his skill as a fullback in football that gained him the most attention. Paul “had such a big strong hand,” one contemporary said, that “he could almost wrap [it] around a football” (somewhat rounder than the modern ball) “and throw that thing just like a baseball.” Envy of such prowess (especially in someone of his race) did occasionally surface. In a game against the superior team of Phillipsburg High (known as “a rough bunch of kids” and outweighing Somerville ten pounds to a man) the opposition “lay for him” and piled on—but the attack energized him and he scored a touchdown; still, “handicapped by the work of officials” (as the local paper put it), Somerville lost “the greatest game ever played” on the Phillipsburg grounds. Reverend Robeson was often on hand for the games. A contemporary recalls that “he would keep his eyes upon Paul through every second of play. The fellows on the team said he was like a lucky stone. They liked to know he was watching.” Far from disapproving of sports, he wanted his son to distinguish himself in that area, as in all others—and stood on the sidelines to remind him that, should adversity arise, he had to resist both the sin of lashing out and the sin of stunting his purpose.32
The double injunction to avoid confrontation while simultaneously being self-assertive could in the long haul prove a prescription for paralysis or despair. But for a young man not yet burdened with too great an accumulation of anger, and with a disposition that lent itself naturally to cordiality, the instruction to be proud and pleasant does not seem to have been borne with undue strain. Paul’s ability for the time being to thrive under rather than succumb to his father’s difficult set of standards was illustrated by an episode during his senior year at Somerville. New Jersey had announced a statewide oratorical contest for high-school boys, and Robeson, Somerville’s prize debater, entered it. The panel of judges included Frederick K. Shield, then a senior at Rutgers, and the event so impressed him that seventy years later he remembered it vividly. In addition to Paul, Shield recalls, there were five or six other contestants—all white boys, all good orators, all well prepared. Each gave his speech, each performed well, one scarcely divisible in merit from another.33
Then, as Shield remembers it, “this handsome big Negro’s turn came.” He chose for his text Wendell Phillips’s famed oration on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black Haitian revolutionary who defeated Napoleon’s troops in a successful rebellion against slavery. Many years later, in his autobiography, Robeson claimed that he had “had no real appreciation” of the oration’s meaning, had given “no thought to … the flaming words.” Nonetheless, this was not the sort of topic in 1915 that a black boy bent solely on being polite would have chosen for public declamation. (In a similar spirit, during a senior-year debate with another school on the topic “whether immigration into the United States should be restricted by a literacy test,” Paul’s plea for the country to welcome all the poor and downtrodden was “so eloquent and moving”—according to Douglas Brown, who was also on the platform—“that many in the audience were in tears.”) Nor, had Paul been bent on being merely restrained and courteous, would he have invested his Toussaint oration with the passion he did. “It was as if,” Shield recalls, “somebody’s life was being saved, somebody important.” So closely did the boy and the subject seem to merge, and “so great” were the young orator’s powers, that Reverend Robeson, sitting in the front row in an audience of some 250 people, “broke out at times”—uncharacteristic of that dignified gentleman—“in emotional expression.” Nonetheless, Robeson was awarded only third prize.34
In that same year of 1915, the seventeen-year-old Robeson took a statewide written exam for a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University. His family preferred all-black Lincoln University, from which both his father and his brother Bill had graduated, but the strain on the Reverend Robeson’s limited income made the possibility of a scholarship appealing. Besides, Paul himself did not prefer Lincoln. As his teacher Anna Miller recalled, “Several of the Negro colleges were suggested to him but Paul had his heart set on a large school and no hints as to the difficulties he might encounter on that path could daunt him.… ‘I don’t want to have things handed to me,’ he declared. ‘I don’t want it made easy.’” The other students competing for the Rutgers scholarship had previously taken a test covering their first three years of high school; not knowing of the test in time, Robeson had to write an exam that included the entire four-year course of work. Nonetheless, he won the competition. “Equality might be denied,” he later wrote, “but I knew I was not inferior.”35
Like everyone who grows up black in white America, Robeson had experienced his share of racial abuse. Unlike most, it had not become the overwhelming fact of his existence. He had been called a nigger but not consistently treated like one. Accidents of geography, family, and talent had insulated him from the brutalities of daily life commonplace for black Americans in the pre-World War I years. He would later tell a white reporter—underplaying the indignities he had suffered—that his “impressionable years” had been spent “almost entirely in friendly intelligent white society,” an experience that kept him “from distrusting the white race as most Negroes do and from having a feeling of forced inferiority.” Having grown up among whites, Robeson would find it difficult ever to view them as unredeemable demons—or controlling gods. “I came up an idealist,” he once said, “interested in human values, certain that all races, all peoples are not nearly as different one from the other as text books would have it.”36
His father had passed on to Paul an intricate strategy for survival. He had taught him to reject the automatic assumption that all whites are malignant, to react to individuals, not to a hostile white mass. At the same time, Reverend Robeson knew the extent of white hostility—he had, after all, been born a slave—and he counseled his son to adopt a gracious, amenable exterior while awaiting the measure of an individual white person’s trustworthiness. But William Drew was no Uncle Tom; Paul was constantly reminded of his “obligation to the race,” constantly reminded of its plight. Taught to be firm in his dedication to freeing his people, Paul was also taught to avoid gratuitous grandstanding. His job was to protest and to stay alive; outright rebellion against a slave system was as suicidal as subservient capitulation to it.
The moral precepts of Reverend Robeson coincided with the facts of Paul’s youthful experience. His father preached that it was right and necessary to try to get along with whites; Paul’s daily life in Somerville had proved that such a strategy was feasible. The lesson was ingrained for life—though in adulthood severe provocation would test and cast doubt on its reliable limit. By talent and upbringing, Robeson had been ideally equipped to bridge both racial worlds, if both would have him, and if bridging was what he wanted to do.