The Paris Speech and After
(1949)
“I do not fear the next four years,” Robeson told a reporter ten days after the election. Talking to the National Guardian (the new non-Communist left-wing paper, which Un-American Activities instantly labeled “notoriously Stalinist”), he elaborated, “I do not foresee the success of American reaction. I see only its attempt and its failure. By 1950 there will be no fascist threat in our land.” Exuding public confidence, he immediately set off on a concert tour through Jamaica and Trinidad. The FBI set off with him, its agents alerted to watch for any evidence of “non-musical function.” They found none. Robeson himself found his “first breath of fresh air in many years.” Although Jamaica and Trinidad were still under British rule, “for the first time I could see what it will be like when Negroes are free in their own land. I felt something like what a Jew must feel when first he goes to Israel, what a Chinese must feel entering areas of his country that are now free.” Robeson’s gratis, open-air concert at the Kingston race course was so jammed (estimates range from fifty thousand to eighty thousand) that a small building crowded with spectators collapsed. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, he laid the cornerstone for Beryl McBurnie’s Little Carib Theater, an attempt to use “the music and dance of the people to arouse a national consciousness and pride of heritage.” His concert in Port of Spain was greeted with “a spontaneous demonstration of hero worship [that] has never been equalled in this community.” As Robeson told the National Guardian, “If I never hear another kind word again, what I received from my people in the West Indies will be enough for me.”1
He would need the remembered solace. By December, when he returned to the States, the forces of reaction, whose ultimate success Robeson doubted, were moving into high gear. A threatened Dixiecrat filibuster in the Senate seemed likely to block any action on civil rights. The Mundt-Nixon Bill, with strengthened provisions, was reintroduced in Congress. The Truman “loyalty-oath” program for civil-service employees was fully operative. In Trenton, New Jersey, an all-white jury, on transparently trumped-up charges, condemned six blacks (the “Trenton Six”) to death for murder. And in New York, the Smith Act trial of the twelve Communist Party leaders began its initial skirmishing. Life magazine took the occasion to applaud the Yale football squad’s election of a black captain, Levi Jackson, as proof that the American Way “worked” and that the “extremist” tactics of a Paul Robeson were as unnecessary as they were misguided. On January 17, 1949, J. Edgar Hoover specifically requested that the New York FBI Office update its files on Robeson: “… it is felt that in view of the tense international situation at the present time, a new report should be submitted setting forth the extent of the subject’s present activities in connection with the Communist Party and related groups.…”2
Robeson maintained his political activity on all fronts. At the end of January 1949 he joined six hundred eighty delegates to the legislative conference of the Civil Rights Congress (his old friend William Patterson was now its national executive secretary) in Washington, D.C. The night before the gathering, Walter Winchell warned the American people in a national broadcast that the delegates were coming armed with baseball bats. Government officials needed no inducement to bar the doors. President Truman refused to see a group of CRC delegates that included Bessie Mitchell (whose brother and two relatives sat in Trenton’s death house) and the widow of Isaiah Nixon, who had been killed when he tried to vote in Georgia. Vice-President Barkley, cornered in a corridor by another group of CRC delegates, expressed the view that nothing could be done about Jim Crow in the capital, and, when asked what measures the government would take to prevent further lynchings, turned his back and returned to the Senate chamber. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee, told the delegation that came to see him, “The only reason Negroes are segregated is because the army’s so big.” Representative McCormick of Massachusetts remarked to the group of delegates who visited his office to protest the Smith Act trials that “Communists are not Americans—they’re outside the law.”3
Returning to New York, Robeson put in an appearance at the Foley Square courthouse in New York, where the trial of the Communist leadership was about to begin. He shook hands with each of the defendants, announced, “I, too, am on trial,” explained that he was there not only as a private citizen but as cochairman of the Progressive Party, as a leader of the Civil Rights Congress, and as chairman of the Council on African Affairs, and stated that Communists had risked their lives for his people as early as the Scottsboro case.4
Attempting to get a postponement of the trial on the assumption (incorrect, it turned out) that with sufficient time a mass movement could be mobilized to protest the indictments, the CPUSA leaders launched a challenge to the court’s system of jury selection. Robeson joined the challenge. Along with forty others (including Dashiell Hammett, William Patterson, Vito Marcantonio, Muriel Draper, Fur Workers union President Ben Gold, and Howard Fast), he called an emergency conference to demand reform of a nonrepresentative jury system that precluded the prospects of a fair trial. The protest succeeded in demonstrating that handpicked juries overrepresenting white male professionals and under-representing minorities, the poor and women, did not afford—as the Constitution guaranteed—a jury trial by one’s peers. But Harold Medina, the judge sitting on the case—a brilliant jurist who on the Communist issue tended to be alternately flippant and abrasive—ruled that they had not demonstrated the deliberate exclusion of the underrepresented, and after six months of skirmishing turned down all further defense motions for postponement. Medina ordered the trial to begin on March 7, 1949, at Foley Square. The symbolic judicial battle of the Cold War was about to begin. Robeson, by then, was in Europe on an extended concert tour, but he publicly announced that he would return to testify at the trial whenever needed.5
The overseas tour was a replacement for eighty-five concert dates within the United States that had been canceled. Robeson’s agents, Columbia Artists Management, had had no initial trouble in booking the engagements at top fees after Robeson decided, in the fall of 1948, to return to the professional concert stage. But following the presidential election, and in the wake of the furor surrounding the indictment of left-wing filmmakers subsequently known as the “Hollywood Ten,” the entertainment industry took a quick dive to the right; local agents caved in and canceled Robeson’s bookings. The symptoms of reaction were growing ominous, but the unexpected offer of an extended European concert tour temporarily took Robeson away from the heat.6
Starting in the British Isles late in February 1949, he and Larry Brown began a four-month tour that demonstrated that in Europe, at least, Robeson’s popularity had not diminished. It had been nearly a decade since his last appearance in Britain, but he had not been forgotten—the tour was “something like a triumphal procession,” Desmond Buckle (a black member of the British CP) reported to William Patterson. The concerts were sellouts, and, as Larry wrote Essie, “the English public seems as fond if not fonder of Paul than ever.” (“Felt almost like Frank Sinatra,” Robeson later said.)7
Despite his reception, Robeson felt disquieted, for the first time in his memory “homesick.” It had “never even occurred” to him before that “such a thing was possible—but I really am. This will remain for me the outstanding fact of this tour. A truly qualitative dialectical change. I think it has much to do with the Struggle—my being so much a part of it—it is the most important in the world today—I’m sure of that—But it also has something to do with people who have become very dear to me.”8
Robeson wrote those sentiments to Helen Rosen, a woman he had first met when playing Othello on Broadway. She had been doing volunteer work for the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions (a forerunner of the Progressive Party), and Paul used to drop in to ASP headquarters, which were just around the corner from the theater. Helen invited him home to dinner one night, and the Rosens ultimately became close friends. She was a fifth-generation New Yorker of the Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish van Dernoot family (Paul used to call her teasingly “Miss van Der Snoot”). Both her parents were lawyers, and she herself had been educated at the Ethical Culture School and Wellesley College. In 1928 she married Sam Rosen, who became a well-known ear specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Sam was warm, perceptive, and outgoing; Helen, the driving force behind the couple’s political commitment, was dynamic, beautiful, immensely shrewd about people, and indomitable, a woman whose integrity, emotional and political, could not be breached (Sam once said she “had a whim of steel”). In every way she was the kind of woman to whom Robeson was drawn. The Rosens would both be devoted to Paul for the rest of his life. Helen would become one of his few intimates.9
But Robeson was not writing to Helen Rosen of his “homesickness” merely to signal his growing attachment to her. In several letters written to Freda Diamond at the same time, he confided to her, too, that “for the first time, I can’t transfer and function.” He “had been going every moment,” and he was eager to come home. “This time,” he wrote her, “I’ve no desire to see anyone here in general or particular. Have many friends but it’s so hard to get started. I just want to get concerts done (these are very important) and return.… About the first time that this has happened. I evidently—whatever the difficulties—pressures, etc.—like my life back there—and I’m afraid I like the whole pattern—whole mosaic—so to say.…” He also acknowledged to Freda in a subsequent letter that “somewhere, at most unexpected times, I do something to destroy much of your security. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. But I know that I love you very deeply and know that you are certainly one of [the] people dearest to me in this world.…” Indeed, Robeson would never lose his deep affection for Freda Diamond, but increasingly, after his return to the States, his emotional life would come to be centered more and more on Helen Rosen.10
During the four-month tour in Britain, Peter Blackman, a left-wing West Indian writer living in London, helped Desmond Buckle look after Paul’s arrangements, serving as general aide to him. Blackman was appalled at the “creative chaos” of Paul’s habits—a suitcase full of unanswered mail, an obliviousness to the mechanics of daily living—and wrote Ben Davis, Jr., to complain that the Party, in not helping Paul to organize himself better, was showing insufficient appreciation for his unique importance. Davis wrote back genially, reminding Blackman that the entire leadership of the Party was currently fighting for its life in court and reassuring him that Paul was recognized as “one of the brightest jewels of the international working class movement,” though “the magnitude of the man is so overwhelming that it is difficult to contain him.”11
Robeson made several political appearances while in Britain, most notably at a conference called in London by the India League to protest Premier Malan’s apartheid “revolution” of 1948 in South Africa. The Coordinating Committee of Colonial Peoples sponsored the event, and Krishna Menon, later India’s controversial delegate to the United Nations, and Dr. Yussef M. Dadoo, the Communist Indian leader of the African National Congress in South Africa, organized it. An East African student in the audience described Robeson’s oratory as “thrilling … the great voice was low and soft but with the suggestion of enormous power behind it.… The audience sat intent and still.… This was no trickster.… There was emotion in his voice all right … but all that he said was carefully reasoned.… There was forcefulness indeed but no arrogance. Instead, there was humility, combined with a deep pride in his race.… [But] he did not confine himself to the struggle of his own race for freedom. He is evidently a man who has got beyond mere racialism. He told us about the Chinese. He described white people of English descent he had seen living in appalling conditions in America. In many parts of the world there were black spots of Fascism, whatever name it might be called by locally and [he said] it was his business and the business of freedom-loving people everywhere to combat it.…” Following the meeting, the South African government—about to become a loyal U.S. ally in the Cold War, in return for Washington’s working to postpone any direct UN action on South-West Africa—announced that henceforth the playing of Paul Robeson’s records on the radio would be banned. Robeson told the Manchester Guardian that the only parallel he could think of was when the Nazi gauleiter of Norway banned his records during the war—“But the Norwegian underground still played them right through the occupation.”12
Robeson was not deflected from giving outspoken support to the liberation movements in South Africa and Kenya. In the fifties, mostly through the auspices of the Council on African Affairs, he would keep his unintimidated voice raised in behalf of his “African brothers and sisters … jailed by the Malan Government for peacefully resisting segregation and discrimination” and tried and imprisoned in Kenya “for insisting upon the return of their land.” Invited by Oliver Tambo in 1954 to send a message to the African National Congress at its annual conference, Robeson forcefully linked arms with its struggle:
I know that I am ever by your side, that I am deeply proud that you are my brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces—that I sprang from your forebears. We come from a mighty, courageous people, creators of great civilizations in the past, creators of new ways of life in our own time and in the future. We shall win our freedoms together. Our folk will have their place in the ranks of those shaping human destiny.13
In April 1949 Robeson went to Paris to attend the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace. Tensions and suspicion were running high on both sides of the Cold War. The Chinese Communists had captured Nanking and were advancing to the outskirts of Shanghai, the symbol of Western influence in East Asia. The New York Times termed the Communist advance “a cataclysmic development” which “doomed the first buds of a Chinese democracy that sprouted under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule.” The imminent Communist victory in China, the Times warned, had resulted from the “fatal miscalculation” of trying to negotiate with Communists; “all Asia” was now threatened “with a similar fate” unless “more effective steps” were taken “to insulate” the Chinese Communists. Simultaneously, hearings were in progress before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on passage of the North Atlantic Treaty, a mutual-defense pact among the Western powers that the Soviets denounced as yet another harbinger of (in the words of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the French Communist atomic scientist) “a new war they are preparing.”14
In this heated international atmosphere, two thousand delegates from fifty nations gathered in Paris for the World Peace Congress. Du Bois headed the American delegation; Picasso, Louis Aragon, and J. D. Bernal were among the celebrated figures in attendance; and Robeson and Joliot-Curie were the most prominently featured speakers. The State Department denounced the gathering in advance as “part of the current Cominform effort to make people think … that all of the Western powers are governed by warmongers.” By the time Robeson stepped up for his turn at the podium, Du Bois, Joliet-Curie, Pietro Nenni of Italy, and the British left-wing leader Konni Zilliacus had already ignited the delegates, Zilliacus saying, “workers of Britain will not fight or be dragged into fighting against the Soviet Union.” Robeson sang to the gathering and then made some brief remarks, most of them unexceptional echoes from a dozen previous and more elaborate speeches in which he had spoken out for colonial peoples still denied their rights. But then he tacked on a less familiar refrain. The wealth of America, he said, had been built “on the backs of the white workers from Europe … and on the backs of millions of blacks.… And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. (Applause.) We shall not make war on anyone. (Shouts.) We shall not make war on the Soviet Union. (New shouts.)” Though Robeson could not know it at the time, those comparatively innocuous words (scarcely different from those Zilliacus had just used) were to reverberate around the world, marking a fateful divide in his life.15
An Associated Press dispatch purporting to “quote” from Robeson’s speech was picked up and reprinted across the United States:
We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels.… It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.…”16
Robeson had not spoken the words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. But almost no one paused to check its accuracy. And no one seems to have noticed that, even if Robeson had said the offending words, it would not have been the first time a prominent black figure had angrily asked whether blacks should fight in the country’s foreign wars; during World War II, A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger had thundered in an editorial, “No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it presently exists.” But Robeson’s (alleged) words were treated as if they were the unprecedented, overwrought excesses of a single misguided “fanatic.”17
The outcry was immediate, the denunciation fierce. The white press rushed to inveigh against him as a traitor; the black leadership hurried to deny he spoke for anyone but himself; agencies of the U.S. government excitedly exchanged memos speculating about possible grounds for asserting that he had forfeited his citizenship. Robeson was perceived as having stridden across—not merely crossed—an impermissible line. For many years his success had served white America doubly well: as proof that a “deserving” black man could make it in the system; and as one who, during the New Deal years anyway, had talked with appropriate optimism and patriotism about the country’s democratic promise. In the four years since Roosevelt’s death, Robeson’s increasingly disenchanted public pronouncements had steadily eroded his assigned image; the AP account from Paris suggested that he had now wholly discarded it. The showcase black American had turned out not to be suitably “representative” after all—and it became imperative to isolate and discredit him.18
Eager applicants for the job appeared on all sides. Anyone who could hold a pen—quite a few of whom had apparently learned to wield it like a machete—seemed impelled to comment. The gloating of the right-wing press (Robeson “may hereafter be dismissed and forgotten”) came as no surprise. Less predictable were the swiftness and severity with which the black establishment moved to distance itself. Black leaders, in the forties, were supposed to “act nice” and “not make a lot of noise,” not call militant attention to a militant set of goals, however much they might in fact be in sympathy with them. Most of the black leadership believed at the time that hope for accomplishing even a modest civil-rights program hinged on placating the white power structure, convincing it that blacks had benign and patriotic aims.
Walter White, responding to a request from the State Department, immediately issued a statement. He cautioned that white America “would be wise to abstain from denunciation of the Paul Robesons for extremist statements until it removes the causes of the lack of faith in the American system of government” that Robeson exemplified. White even acknowledged that “many Negroes will be glad he [Robeson] spoke as he did if it causes white Americans to wake up to the determination of Negroes to break the shackles which race prejudice fastens upon them.” But White then went on to reaffirm that “Negroes are Americans. We contend for full and equal rights and we accept full and equal responsibilities. In event of any conflict that our nation has with any other nation, we will regard ourselves as Americans and meet the responsibilities imposed on all Americans.” Walter White’s voice turned out to be the moderate one in a nationwide assault on Robeson that became instantly vituperative (Robeson “is just plain screwy,” the black columnist Earl Brown wrote in the New York Amsterdam News).19
Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph’s chief lieutenant, later remembered “very distinctly” Roy Wilkins’s phoning Randolph and asking him to convene a meeting of black leaders. According to Rustin, Randolph himself “had no objections whatever to calling upon blacks not to participate in the military” (soon after, during the Korean War, he successfully threatened to call for a black boycott of the armed services if Truman failed to issue an executive order dismantling segregation, and Rustin acknowledged that Robeson “had sort of helped lay a radical approach to this matter”). But Randolph and other black leaders did object, according to Rustin, to Robeson’s stressing “politics” (the Soviet theme) over “principle” (the issue of a segregated armed forces). “Paul was saying they shouldn’t go into the army to fight against Communists”; Randolph was saying they shouldn’t go into a segregated army “to fight against anybody.” In Rustin’s view, Robeson had further compounded the risk that blacks would be branded “black and red” by making his announcement on foreign soil—“There’s a sort of unwritten law that if you want to criticize the United States you do it at home; it’s a corollary of the business where you’re just a nigger if you stand up and criticize colored folks in front of white folks—it’s not done.… We have to prove that we’re patriotic.” Besides, Rustin added, there was resentment against Robeson’s assuming the posture of political leadership when in fact he “did not ever take any organizational responsibility for what was happening in the black community.… Here is a man who is making some other country better than ours, and we’ve got to sit here and take the gaff, while he is important enough to traipse all over the country, to be lionized by all these white people, saying things for which he will not take any responsibility.”20
Rustin himself made arrangements for the “meeting of black leaders,” and according to him “most” of the civil-rights establishment showed up, a total of about twenty people, including both Randolph and Roy Wilkins. The meeting was designed to create “a united front to make sure that America understood that the current black leadership totally disagreed with Robeson.” There was no thought of approaching Robeson himself: “The general theory was that he was being used, and anybody who had to barter with him on these issues was going to end up being used, too, if not by the Soviets, by Robeson himself.” The meeting decided that the most effective strategy would be not to issue a joint statement—“That’s the habit in the black community,” Rustin explained, “not to look as if there’s been an organized effort” but, rather, to have a group of similar statements emanate from what would appear to be a variety of quarters.21
In a statement read at all services of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, of which he was pastor, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., proclaimed, “By no stretch of the imagination can Robeson speak for all Negro people.” Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women, told the press, “American Negroes have always been loyal to America, they always will be”; Robeson “does not speak for the National Council, and I am not aware that any other national Negro organization has appointed or designated him to speak for them in Paris.” Charles H. Houston, the prominent Washington attorney and chairman of the NAACP legal staff, said, “We would fight any enemy of this country,” Robeson’s view to the contrary. Edgar G. Brown, director of the National Negro Council, characterized Robeson’s speech as “pure Communist propaganda.” Channing Tobias, who had recently become head of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, declared that Robeson’s statement marked him “not only an ingrate but a striking example of disloyalty.” And Bishop William Jacob Walls of the A.M.E. Zion Church insisted that, in defense of “religious liberty in the greatest adventure in self government in the world—the American nation,” the “colored race” would move “at the command of the American republic.” Du Bois, scheduled to give the June commencement address at Morgan College, received word from the college president begging him “frantically not to come” because he had “‘been present’ when Robeson spoke in Paris.”22
And so it went, with the designated leaders of every major black organization stepping forward—without waiting to learn whether Robeson had been quoted accurately in Paris—to declare their loyalty to the nation and to cast out the reprobate son. But what the black establishment felt it had to do publicly did not represent the full range of its reaction to Robeson. “It is very difficult to know what black leaders and others think from what they say,” Rustin cautions. It was important, he feels, for “the public to see that Robeson was completely isolated,” but in fact it was recognized that the radically outspoken position he had taken “was ultimately a positive thing to have done.” His “wild” statement helped to make their demands, by comparison, appear reasonable and even modest; his implied threats of future disorder made the passage of their “responsible, middle-of-the-road” program seem more urgently necessary. As blacks would analogously say in the sixties, “First we had to have the riots; then we got the Great Society.”23
In denying Robeson’s “fantastic and presumptuous” claim (which in fact he had never made) to speak for blacks, the black leadership in turn never hesitated to assert its own summary of “the general feeling of the Negro masses” (in Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s phrase). Yet it is not at all clear that their representations were either more legitimate or more accurate than Robeson’s. Indeed, the popular reaction in the black community to his alleged remarks in Paris did not fully coincide with the black leadership’s presentation of it.
“Ordinary” black citizens had long known that allies are always imperfect and that conservatives are always fond of linking the black struggle with Communist subversion—and accordingly had been far more indifferent than whites to the official description of the Cold War as a Manichaean contest between good and evil. As one editorial letter put it, “a person does not have to be a Communist, a fellow-traveler, or ‘to echo the Communist line’ in order to be conscious of the thousands of indignities suffered daily by Negroes.” “There is hardly a Negro living in the South,” a black newspaper in North Carolina editorialized, “who, at some time or another, has not felt as Robeson expressed himself as being unwilling to lay down his life for a country that insults, lynches and restricts him to a second-class citizenship, whether it be in a war against Russia, Germany or Great Britain.” And in the Pittsburgh Courier the columnist Marjorie McKenzie wrote, “Paul’s remark that Negroes in the U.S. will refuse to fight an imperialistic war against Russia burns along the edges of the American conscious [sic] like sagebrush in a forest fire.… I think the vitality of Paul’s remark lives on because it suggests, though it does not articulate, a deeper question.… He must see the present political and economic context as an impossible vehicle for Negro aspirations. Else he would not advocate that Negroes should, not predict that they will, react in so drastic a fashion. If our situation is truly hopeless at the hands of a Truman administration and its successors, [the] revolt against selective service for a war makes sense.… The Government ought to regard the exaggerated response to Paul’s statement as a storm signal.”24
Such views were directly at variance with the contentions of Max Yergan. In a lengthy letter he fired off to the Herald Tribune (which was printed in full), he denounced Robeson’s statements as having had “as their purpose the vicious and cynical effort which Communists in America have for a long time been putting forth to drive a wedge between American Negroes and their fellow American citizens.…” He also denounced Robeson’s actions on the Council on African Affairs as “disgracefully unfair and undemocratic” and condemned him for his “slavish following of the Communist instructions with regard to the organization.…” In his own view, Yergan added, “this country is moving forward on all fronts and in all of its geographical areas in bringing about social well being, democracy and a realization of constitutional guarantees for all of its citizens.”25
The black columnist (and Communist) Abner Berry angrily disputed the right of “the cold-war boys” like Yergan to repudiate Robeson in the name of fifteen million blacks, doubting whether their “breast-beating declarations” of patriotism could succeed in tying most Afro-Americans to a “my country right or wrong” stand. A black technical sergeant wrote to the New York Age, “As a vet who put in nearly five years in our Jim Crow Army, I say Paul Robeson speaks more for the real colored people than the Walter Whites and Adam Powells.… I saw the U.S. bring democracy to Italy, while white officers kept informing the Italians that the [black] 92nd Infantry men were rapists and apes.” Ben Davis, Jr., believed that blacks had “gotten pretty sick and tired of Truman’s empty talk and Republican lies about civil rights, and are not in any mood to die in a jimcrow war,” particularly not to fight against the colonial peoples of Africa, Asia, and the West Indies to safeguard the profits of a minority of whites. But Du Bois probably struck the bottom-line note in declaring, “I agree with Paul Robeson absolutely that Negroes should never willingly fight in an unjust war. I do not share his honest hope that all will not. A certain sheep-like disposition, inevitably born of slavery, will, I am afraid, lead many of them to join America in any enterprise, provided the whites will grant them equal rights to do wrong.”26
With Paul still in Europe, Essie decided to join the debate. At a Progressive Party dinner at the Hotel Commodore in New York, she directly took on “the professional Negro leaders” who had “rushed into print” to deny the mere suggestion that black Americans might not enthusiastically take up arms in defense of the republic. Even if the black establishment did speak for the “theoretical 2 million” of their followers, who, she asked, spoke for “the other 12 million unorganized Negroes—the vast majority of the Negro people?” She believed the large majority of blacks would rally to the defense of the country if it were invaded, but that was not the same as going off “to fight a war in Greece for a King the Greeks don’t want, to fight a war in China for Chiang Kai-shek whom the Chinese people don’t want.” She claimed that “every sensible Negro in this country—professional leaders notwithstanding—feels that if he must fight any future war for Democracy, the proper place to begin such a fight is RIGHT HERE.” Why? Because “our country keeps telling us, time after time, in heartbreaking ways, that we have no rights and privileges as American citizens—except those it chooses to grant us when it feels indulgent.”27
Paul was angry at Essie for not having consulted with Alphaeus Hunton before presuming to quote “exactly” words he in fact had not said at Paris. But William Patterson, still believing, apparently, that the quote was accurate, wrote Paul that Essie had dealt skillfully and effectively with those—among their own people—who were “crawling on their bellies trying to prove worthy” of the esteem of the very people who were assailing their constitutional rights. Congressman Vito Marcantonio was so impressed with Essie’s speech that he read it into the Congressional Record, and the Progressive Party stalwart Charles P. Howard wrote her that he thought it was “tremendous”—“the finest answer I have ever heard to the question of the Negro’s loyalty.” Howard himself was among the few nationally prominent blacks to defend Robeson publicly. He took the lead, along with Ben Davis Jr., when a venomous editorial in the May 1949 issue of The Crisis, official organ of the NAACP, pushed the debate to a still more strident level.28
The unsigned editorialist (Roy Wilkins) was not content to insist that in his Paris speech Robeson “was speaking for himself.” The column went on to imply that “his record of service to his race” hardly entitled him to even a personal opinion. The sum total of Robeson’s contribution, Wilkins asserted, was to have “inspired them by his singing and given them a ‘great one’ to cite in their briefs for better treatment.” As for the rest, Robeson had simply concentrated on making money and keeping his fellow blacks at “a safe distance.… While Negroes in Dixie were struggling to do something about conditions here and now, Mr. Robeson was lavishing his attention on an outfit called the Council on African Affairs, long ago labeled a Communist front by the Department of Justice.” In truth, the Crisis editorial concluded, “Robeson has none except sentimental roots among American Negroes. He is one of them, but not with them.”29
The editorial is “one of the dirtiest, gutter attacks upon Paul that I’ve ever seen,” Ben Davis Jr. wrote Essie, and “from a source that considers itself progressive and decent.” He correctly guessed that it had been the work of Roy Wilkins, not Walter White. Ben Davis believed that other members of the NAACP board—like Louis Wright, the chairman, and an old friend of the Robesons’—agreed with “the mild liberal tendencies of Walter” and, unlike Roy Wilkins, “would not stoop to such a malicious slander.” He therefore advised against attacking the whole NAACP, though he himself did write directly to Walter White, denouncing Wilkins’s editorial as “one of the most shocking personal attacks upon a great American leader I have ever seen.”30
But Charles P. Howard felt otherwise. He had toured the country, sometimes with Robeson, for the Progressive Party, and was smarting at the NAACP for having extolled the virtues of Truman in the recent election—even while claiming to be a nonpartisan organization. Writing directly to Wilkins, Howard exploded with anger at the Crisis editorial in particular and the NAACP in general: “The NAACP is no longer best serving the people whom it was organized to serve, but has been sidetracked into serving the very interests it was organized to fight.” “It is inexcusable,” he continued, for a publication like The Crisis to assault Robeson: “Nobody may have ever heard it around NAACP Headquarters, but Paul Robeson is recognized by the great masses of the Negro people as more nearly their ideal leader than all of the Walter Whites and Roy Wilkinses in the country and he doesn’t get a dime for doing it, only the kicks of Negroes who ought to be appreciating him.” How dare The Crisis defame the man as having only “sentimental roots” among black people—a man who had given up his concert, radio, and stage career for a year “to go out and sing and fight for the common people”? “Even school children know that fact.”31
Wilkins also had at hand Ben Davis’s letter to Walter White, which White had passed on to him with a notation: “This letter … will make your ears singe if they haven’t been singed already by some of the other comrades.” He suggested to Wilkins that “it would be a good idea for it to be placed before the Board, if it meets with your approval, and then let the Board go on record as backing your position.” But that did not meet with Wilkins’s approval. “I do not favor bringing it to the Board,” he wrote back to White. “I have a few letters hitting the Robeson editorial and just as many praising it. The Davis letter is all in the day’s work of running a magazine.”32
But although the issue did not come before the NAACP board, Roy Wilkins did agree to meet with what he called “the leading members of the Robeson front.” He told them he had received a total of fourteen letters of protest about the editorial, thirteen of them from miscellaneous “left-leaners.” (Mary Church Terrell, the distinguished community leader and reformer, may have been the fourteenth; she had already written Alphaeus Hunton to say she held Robeson “in the highest esteem” and to denounce the attempt to “belittle” his sacrifice and contribution.) Wilkins did not, he said, consider leftist displeasure to be “a very representative sample of support” for Robeson, and if his friends wanted to make an issue of the editorial, he “would simply cite the letters” as additional proof that Robeson was the spokesman for a tiny clique, not for all black people. “The Robeson matter died right there,” Wilkins later claimed. For good measure, he took an indirect swipe at Robeson in his speech at the fortieth annual convention of the NAACP that July: “We do not cry out bitterly that we love another land better than our own, or another people better than our own.”33
But of course the controversy did not end there. The New York Times, probably echoing a widely held view among whites, commented in an editorial that Robeson was “mistaken and misled” in deciding to “devote his life to making speeches” and suggested that he return to using “his great gifts” as a concert artist: “We want him to sing, and to go on being Paul Robeson.” He did remain abroad for two months after his Paris speech, completing his concert tour. But additional developments in Europe further fed the dispute. Robeson had flown to Stockholm on the evening of April 20, immediately following his speech in Paris, and performed there the next day before an overflow crowd, part of which booed when he sang a Soviet song (irritating Robeson, according to an FBI report, “beyond control” and launching him into a speech “extremely critical of the treatment of the American Negro in America”). At a hostile press conference following the Stockholm concert—and not yet having heard about the instantaneous uproar his Paris speech had set off—he asked should blacks “ever fight against the only nation in the world [the U.S.S.R.] where racial discrimination is prohibited and where the people live freely? Never!” he answered, and then, using words he had avoided in his Paris speech (though they had been ascribed to him), he sounded as if he was claiming to speak on behalf of all black Americans: “I can assure you they will never fight against the Soviet Union or the People’s Democracies.” A few days later, Alphaeus Hunton, by telegraph and telephone, brought Robeson up to date on the outcry he had produced. On May 1 Paul wrote Freda Diamond (in his usual shorthand style), “This has been such a long, long ache that I’m numb.… I have read much of stuff from home. Distorted—but let it rest. There is just one thing I will stress: I said: ‘Negroes would fight for peace, would become Partisans of peace rather than be dragged into a war against the Soviet Union and East where there is no prejudice.’ I said: ‘Take a questionnaire and give Negro sharecropper an honest appraisal—peace with nations who are raising their former minorities, or war in interest of those who just refused him his civil rights.’” Then he added, “I can understand their using Walter, but Max!!! I’m ready enough.”34
Hunton translated verbatim a French newspaper account of Robeson’s actual words in Paris, and as early as May 2 part of that text was printed in the National Guardian (and subsequently by limited portions of the black press—but not by establishment newspapers). Arriving in Copenhagen, Robeson gave an interview in which he issued a second denial, telling the reporter, “what I said has been distorted out of all recognition.” When he referred to “Negroes,” he had been thinking, besides Afro-Americans, of the 40 million West Indians and 115 million Africans, who obviously had no stake in a war against the Soviet Union—or any other designed to foster imperialist interests. In an accurate summary of the actual words he had used, he declared, “The emphasis in what I said in Paris was on the struggle for peace, not on anybody going to war against anybody.” Again no one seemed to be listening: his corrective remarks were not widely reprinted.35
Robeson’s two concerts in Copenhagen had been arranged by the Liberal paper Politiken. When he learned that the paper advocated Denmark’s joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he asked to be released from his contract. Politiken complied, and Robeson sang under the auspices of Land og Folk, the Danish Communist paper. In Oslo, his next tour stop, Friheten, the chief organ of the Norwegian Communist Party, arranged a mass meeting at Youngstorget that drew a huge crowd and was climaxed by a singing of the “Internationale.” In addition to his regular concert, Robeson spoke five times while in Oslo—including talks to the Norwegian-Russian Society and the World Federation of Women for Peace. From Oslo he returned for another round of concerts in England, then embarked on the final leg of the tour, which called for stops in Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow.36
Larry Brown decided against participating in the East European part of the trip, so Robeson brought along Bruno Raikin as his accompanist. Only recently arrived in England, Raikin was a white South African who had been involved in left-wing politics and been a personal friend of Dr. Yussef Dadoo, the South African Communist leader of Indian descent. Dadoo had introduced Raikin to Robeson, and the two men had quickly taken to each other. Fortunately Raikin could transpose music at sight, so he wasn’t unnerved by Robeson’s periodic request, sometimes five minutes before a performance, to “put it down, put it down”—to transpose to a lower key (Robeson was trying to save his voice, as he grew older, by shifting to a key closer to an extension of his speaking voice). Raikin still considers the trip with Robeson a high spot in his life—“He was a man of enormous generosity … a big man, not in size but in character. There was nothing puffed up about him.”37
The hospitality that greeted them in Prague was lavish—luxurious suites of rooms, adoring crowds for the concerts, extravagant receptions hosted by the country’s highest dignitaries (including Czechoslovak President Gottwald). Arriving at the National Theater one night to hear Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Robeson entered just behind a British Communist leader who mistook the enormous applause as meant for him and—to general amusement—smilingly acknowledged the crowd. But not every segment of Czech opinion welcomed Robeson or thought well either of his musical tastes or his political friends. Josef Škvorecký, a young writer, jazz aficionado, and anti-Stalinist, later wrote bitterly of Robeson’s image among his circle:
In place of [Stan] Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us, and how we hated that black apostle who sang, of his own free will, at open-air concerts in Prague at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horáková to the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in Czechoslovakia by Czechs, and at a time when great Czech poets (some ten years later to be “rehabilitated” without exception) were pining away in jails. Well, maybe it was wrong to hold it against Paul Robeson. No doubt he was acting in good faith, convinced that he was fighting for a good cause. But they kept holding him up to us as an exemplary “progressive jazzman,” and we hated him. May God rest his—one hopes—innocent soul.38
Desmond Buckle, on the other hand, told Peter Blackman that Prague Party circles were full of rumors that Robeson was a U.S. spy, an agent, and that he had no political judgment. Robeson never hinted to Blackman that he was aware of such a rumor—or aware that some young Czechs like Škvorecký resented his presence. Robeson spent his last evening in Prague talking with a group of blacks who had sought him out—perhaps having heard that earlier in his visit he had told a political rally that “ninety-five percent of United States Negro leadership is corrupt” (a remark reprinted in several black newspapers in the States). After the group left, Robeson went on talking to his old friend Marie Seton, whom he had unexpectedly met in the city, into the early morning hours:
“‘You know, I have no illusion,’ he said, ‘I know how hard it’s going to be in America. I don’t know if I’ll live to see the end of the struggle.… I’ve overcome my fear of death, I never think about death now. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to Warsaw and then to Moscow. I’m going to the people I love. It’s my great wish to live among the Russians for a time before I die, but can you understand it? Even at this moment I’m homesick. Even this very night I’d rather be in America than any place on earth. I’ll go back. I’ll never leave America as long as there is something I can do.’”39
Peter Blackman joined Robeson and Raikin in Warsaw. The city was unseasonably hot and (along with two factory concerts) Robeson sang in an outdoor stadium before a huge gathering. Though warned not to risk Polish resentment by singing in Russian, he did sing the Soviet “Fatherland Song”—after explaining to the crowd that he regretted not knowing enough Polish to communicate fluently with them in their native language. At the close, the audience gave him a standing ovation. After a moving tour of the field of brick once known as the Warsaw Ghetto, Robeson flew to Wroclaw, where he sang first in a factory and then, in the evening, in Liubdova Hall—to the same warm welcome: deputations of townspeople with flowers followed in a seemingly unending procession.40
On June 4 Robeson arrived in Moscow in time for the celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, accompanied by Blackman but not Raikin. The anti-“Zionist” campaign was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and Raikin—perhaps because he was Jewish—had been denied a visa. Raikin was not only surprised but “also a little bit shocked” that the Soviets would refuse to admit Robeson’s official accompanist (and at the last minute, to boot). But if Robeson took that as an insult, or a portent, he never showed it: he shrugged and told Raikin how sorry he was that the visa had failed to come through. Peter Blackman was at least as shocked—and angry—when the customs officials thoroughly searched Robeson at the Moscow airport. Again he shrugged the incident off, saying he was no more entitled than anyone else to preferential treatment. However, The New York Times was soon reporting that Robeson was being received in Russia with “greater acclaim than had been given in recent years to any United States visitor” (and reporting, too, that during a concert he had dedicated the song “Scandalize My Name” to “the international bourgeois press”). The Moscow press brimmed with laudatory interviews, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, journal of the Communist youth movement, published a series of articles by and about him. Addressing a concert crowd in Gorky Park, Robeson said he found it difficult to express “how deeply touched and moved” he was to be “on Soviet soil again” and declared in ringing tones, “I was, I am, always will be a friend of the Soviet people.”41
But at the same time, Robeson himself felt some uneasiness over his inability to locate Jewish friends from previous visits to Moscow. Eisenstein had died in 1948. Solomon Mikhoels, the actor-director Robeson had known, admired, and played host to when he, along with the Jewish writer Itzik Feffer, had visited New York in 1943, had been found brutally murdered on January 13, 1948 (on Stalin’s personal order, it later turned out), his body smashed and mutilated. At the time, Mikhoels’s “mysterious” death had been widely mourned in the Jewish community, and the following month Robeson had participated in a memorial meeting for him in New York. But where was Itzik Feffer? Finally, on the eve of Robeson’s departure, his persistent inquiries produced Feffer (who, unbeknownst to Robeson, had been arrested on December 24, 1948). Feffer was brought, unaccompanied, to Robeson’s hotel. Paul later told his son—pledging him to silence during his lifetime—that Feffer, through mute gestures, had let him know that the room was bugged. The two kept their talk on the level of superficial pleasantries, while communicating essential facts through gestures and a few written notes. Mikhoels, Robeson learned, had been murdered by the secret police; other prominent Jewish cultural figures were under arrest; there had been a massive purge of the Leningrad Communist Party and of many in the Moscow Party, and Feffer’s own likely fate (here he drew a hand across his throat) would be execution (three years later he was shot). According to Peter Blackman, in the days that followed, Robeson never once verbalized any distress but—in perhaps an indirect signal—he did ask Blackman to “stick around” during the rest of their stay in Moscow, saying he wanted someone he knew with him. Blackman also recalls Robeson’s cautioning him to “watch what you say because they”—the Soviet Party—“think you are a nationalist.” “Nationalism,” like “Cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism,” had become a term of slander.42
Robeson decided to conclude his last Moscow concert program with a direct reference to Feffer. Asking the audience for quiet, he announced that he would sing only one encore. Then he expressed with emotion the sense he had of the deep cultural ties between the Jewish peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union, and of how that tradition was being continued by the present generation of Russian-Jewish writers and actors. He then referred to his own friendship with Mikhoels and Feffer, and spoke of his great joy in having just come from meeting with Feffer again. Robeson then sang in Yiddish, to a hushed hall, “Zog Nit Kaynmal,” the Warsaw Ghetto resistance song, first reciting the words in Russian:
… Never say that you have reached the very end,
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend,
For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive,
And our marching steps will thunder: we survive! …
After a moment’s silence, the stunned audience, Great Russians and Jews alike, responded with a burst of emotion, people with tears in their eyes coming up to the stage, calling out “Pavel Vasilyevich,” reaching out to touch him.43
Having made that public gesture in Moscow in behalf of Feffer and other victims of Stalin’s policies—all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer’s life—Robeson clammed up on returning to the United States. He told a reporter from Soviet Russia Today that the charges of anti-Semitism being laid against Russia in the Western press failed to square with what he had himself observed: “I met Jewish people all over the place.… I heard no word about it.” He reiterated his belief that the Soviets “had done everything” for their national minorities and recalled that while in Moscow he had attended the Kazakh Art Festival and had thought it “a tremendous thing that these people could be there with their literature, music, theater—not after a thousand years, but in hardly one generation.” To those who would say the Soviets had no black problem because they had no blacks, Robeson answered, “There are of course tens of millions of dark peoples there who would be vigorously Jim Crowed in the United States. Take the peoples of Georgia. The people you see in Tiflis; they are very dark, like the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans; and there are millions of yellow people—I have seen how the Chinese are treated in San Francisco.”44
Robeson had come to believe so passionately that U.S. racism and imperialism were the gravest threats to mankind, including the real possibility in 1949 that the United States would launch a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union, that he felt public criticism of anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. would only serve to play into the hands of America’s dangerous right wing. If his judgment on that point ever wavered, he never revealed it. To the end of his life he would refuse to criticize the Soviets openly, never going further than to make the barest suggestion in private, to a few intimates, that injustice to some individuals must always be expected, however much to be regretted, in an attempt to create a new world dedicated to bettering the lot of the many. He continued to believe that the best chance for reaching his primary goal—improving the condition of oppressed peoples—lay with the egalitarian impulses originally unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Convinced in the thirties of the Soviets’ unique freedom from racial prejudice, and seeing no major Western power in the ensuing years developing a comparable commitment to the welfare of its minorities, he resisted every pressure to convert any private disappointment he may have felt in the Soviet experiment into public censure.45
Robeson touched down at La Guardia Airport on June 16. Some sixty friends (including Rockmore, Patterson, and Hunton) waited on the one side, two dozen police on the other. According to The New York Times, “twenty uniformed policemen [was] a routine number for the arrival of prominent personages at La Guardia,” but Robeson didn’t think so, and laconically contrasted leaving Eastern Europe surrounded by well-wishers with being greeted in New York by a grim police squad. FBI agents were present during the careful search made at customs of his luggage—the officials reporting that “no documents or papers were found that would indicate subversive activities.” Paul, Jr., having arrived home the week before with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Cornell, greeted his father first. (Essie had planned to meet the plane, too, but Paul’s last-minute shift in arrival dates had meant she was addressing the National Conference of Social Workers in Cleveland.) Robeson then turned to the waiting array of reporters and photographers.46
Hunton had suggested to Robeson that he say nothing more at the press conference than that he was glad to be back, had had a marvelous tour, and would save further comments for the Welcome Home rally planned in his honor three days hence. Robeson turned in an altogether more sizzling performance, blasting the American press for having distorted his overseas statements. When a reporter objected that no conspiratorial “higher-ups” had given them instructions to “distort,” Robeson shot back, “You don’t need them.” When another reporter asked whether a story that quoted him as loving the Soviet Union “more than any other country” was accurate or not, Robeson replied, “I happen to love America very much—not Wall Street and not your press. I love the working classes of Britain and France and the people of the Soviet Union. I love them for their struggles for the freedom of my people and the working white people.” Asked if he planned to testify in defense of the Communist leaders on trial in Foley Square, he gave an unequivocal yes: “I consider the trial a complete test of American civil liberties.” Then, contrasting the scene at home with what he had found in Europe, he said, “No one is hysterical except in America.” Robeson, clearly, had not arrived home in a compromising mood.47
His mood had not softened three days later. June 19 began with a major personal event and concluded with a major political one. Paul, Jr., and Marilyn Paula Greenberg, who had been a fellow student at Cornell, both aged twenty-one, had decided to marry. Marilyn Greenberg came from a lower-middle-class Jewish family; her mother (but not her father) had been involved with the politically active left-wing community of Sunnyside. Paul and Essie were both entirely supportive of the marriage—Essie told the press, “our new daughter-in-law is a darling, and we are awfully glad to get a daughter”—but Marilyn’s father would not attend the wedding; he was (in her words) “very resistant to the idea of my marrying a black man.” The young couple made all plans for the wedding themselves, choosing the progressive minister Reverend John Whittier Darr, Jr., to officiate at an ecumenical ceremony in his own apartment, with only immediate family present. If they had also hoped thereby to avoid any public hullabaloo, that hope was thwarted. Turning the corner into Reverend Darr’s block, they saw (in Marilyn Robeson’s words) “the street filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, standing there and screaming all kinds of hostile things at us as we got out of the cab. We had to push our way through people to get into the house, and as we went up the stairs, photographers kept running up and down, getting ahead of us and sticking their cameras in our faces …just swarming all over us.” Paul, Sr., according to the Herald Tribune, told the newsmen that he “resented their presence, as the wedding was private. This would cause no particular excitement in the Soviet Union,” he supposedly commented. According to Essie, he “nearly punched an impertinent reporter.”48
Coming back downstairs after the brief ceremony, the wedding party faced a rerun of the earlier scene—reporters crowding around for a statement, onlookers taunting bride and groom, photographers poking cameras in their faces. When they tried to pull away in cabs, one photographer stuck his head into the taxi carrying Marilyn’s mother and Paul, Sr. When Robeson lifted his hand toward the man, the photographer bumped his head against the window frame and dropped his camera on the sidewalk as he tried to extract himself—an incident the press delighted in playing up as an “assault.” Carl Van Vechten, long disaffected from Paul’s politics, wrote Essie: “I have observed that anyone who quarrels with the press usually gets the worst of it. Would you quarrel with Pravda, which certainly misrepresents people by the wholesale?” He also wanted to know, “Why werent we asked to [the] wedding?” Essie answered him on both counts: “I wouldnt quarrel with PRAVDA because Russia is not my country and I dont know all the ins and outs of their situation.… But this IS my country … and I insist upon sounding off … when I reach boiling point. That’s what keeps me from bursting.… You weren’t asked to the wedding party, My Dears, because it wasnt OUR party, it was Marilyn’s and Pauli’s.” “Our friends,” she reminded him, “are our friends.… If you are not political, that’s alright too.… We are still friends, and have faith in and affection for each other. That’s the way I feel about it, anyway, and I hope you do too.” But in fact the Robeson-Van Vechten friendship, already attenuated, from this point effectively ceased.49
“What a disgrace to us all,” Pearl Buck wrote Essie a few days after the wedding, having read accounts of the crowd’s behavior. “How such stupidities and crassness drag the honor of [our] country down, before other peoples!” She added: “I like to see these good marriages between superior people. They blaze a trail.…” Eleanor Roosevelt, asked to comment on the wedding at a press conference, refused: it was, she said, “a marriage of two Americans and completely personal.” The arriving hate mail struck a quite different note. “Congratulations on marrying your son to a white girl (tho she is only a kike),” read one representative letter. “Now you have achieved the ambition of all niggers, to mix with white blood. Enjoy your future black and tan grandchildren.” As if all this was not difficult enough, Essie’s mother, Ma Goode, unhappily ensconced in a Boston nursing home, wrote her daughter a string of querulous letters advising them all to leave the country for Russia (where she, Ma Goode, would open an orphan home for black children and then send them around the world as “missionaries” to demonstrate “the mentality of those who [are given] the opportunity”).50
The “go-back-to-Russia” theme was soon sounded by parties who saw in that prospect not (as did Ma Goode) a refuge from cowardly racists but, rather, a deserved perdition. The chorus went into full cry as a result of the words Robeson spoke that same day, June 19, at a Welcome Home rally staged for him by the Council on African Affairs at the Rockland Palace in Harlem. The wedding party, with only a few hours’ respite, went directly from the hostile mob scene at Reverend Darr’s to the cordial frenzy of forty-five hundred political fans, roughly half of them white, gathered at the Rockland Palace.
The rally ran for four and a half hours, replete with a dozen speeches and again as many announced messages of greeting. Du Bois gave a lengthy, formal address, declaring, “American Negroes have lost their world leadership of the darker people,” and Charles P. Howard gave a brief and impassioned personal defense of Robeson in which he denounced the attacks on him as “the basest kind of character assassination” and lamented the “shameful” truth that “some of the lowest, meanest attacks upon Paul have come from our own press, the Negro press.” But it was Robeson himself who provided the real fireworks. His anger already aroused by the shenanigans at the wedding ceremony, he threw the full weight of his enormous emotional gravity into one of the most powerful polemics of his career, the passionate eloquence of his voice washing over the occasional patches of rhetoric.51
“I defy any part of an insolent, dominating America, however powerful,” he said, “I defy any errand boys, Uncle Toms of the Negro people, to challenge my Americanism because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death. I’m looking for freedom—full freedom, not an inferior brand.” He insisted that most black Americans, unlike some of their leaders, were “not afraid of their radicals who point out the awful, indefensible truth of our degradation and exploitation.… What a travesty is this supposed leadership of a great people! And in this historic time, when their people need them most. How Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass must be turning in their graves at this spectacle of a craven, fawning, despicable leadership.… You stooges try to do the work of your white bourbon masters, work they have not the courage to do. Try it, but the Negro people will … drive you from public life!” Defending his personal record, Robeson recounted how he had had to go to Europe to renew a singing career after his scheduled concerts in this country had been canceled because of his political activities in behalf of civil rights. In thunderous tones he denounced the “vicious” Atlantic Pact (“American big business tells all of Western Europe what to do”), the continuing enslavement of colonial peoples, the betrayal of the American worker by labor leaders like Reuther, Murray, Carey, and Townsend. He hailed those progressives he had met in Europe—“in great part Communists”—who had been “the first to die for our freedom.” Just as they had defended his people, black people, he would continue to defend the CPUSA leaders on trial in Foley Square.52
“I am born and bred in this America of ours,” he said. “I want to love it. I love a part of it. But it’s up to the rest of America when I shall love it with the same intensity that I love the Negro people from whom I spring, in the way that I love progressives in the Caribbean, the black and Indian peoples of South and Central America, the peoples of China and Southeast Asia. Yes, suffering people the world over—in the way that I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union. That burden of proof rests upon America.” Black Americans, he insisted, “must have the courage to shout at the top of our voices about our injustices and we must lay the blame where it belongs and where it has belonged for over three hundred years of slavery and misery—right here on our own doorstep, not in any faraway place.”
Then, deliberately employing a subtle modification of the words which had been falsely ascribed to him in Paris (but actually said by him in Stockholm), Robeson converted the earlier version—a prediction that black Americans would not fight their friends—into urging that they should not fight: “We do not want to die in vain any more on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia. Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings. Let this be a final answer to the warmongers. Let them know that we will not help to enslave our brothers and sisters, and eventually ourselves.” Kay and Aubrey Pankey (the black singer who later expatriated himself to Europe) drove Paul and Essie home after the rally. He was “strung out,” Kay Pankey remembers nearly forty years later, “and soaked right through his suit. And he was irritable. Essie was being overprotective—and it was the last straw, Essie being so nice.” In spite of the tensions, the difficult day ended with a large and happy wedding party for Paul, Jr., and Marilyn at Freda and Barry’s home.53
“Loves Soviet Best, Robeson Declares,” blared the headline on The New York Times story the following morning. “An Undesirable Citizen,” ran the heading on a front-page editorial carried by Hearst newspapers all over the country—the editorial going on to declare, “It was an accident unfortunate for America that Robeson was born here.” (That statement so impressed Representative Thomas J. Lane that he had it read next day into the Congressional Record.) In answering the Hearst editorial, and the dozens of other vitriolic anti-Robeson articles that poured out, the Pittsburgh Courier, though not often sympathetic to Robeson, defended his “right to become angry.… He is joined by millions of other real American citizens of every racial, religious and economic group, who have felt the sting of segregation and discrimination.”54
On the whole, though, the black press was not kind to Robeson. The Afro-American ran a story headlined, “‘I Love Above All, Russia,’ Robeson Says,” and the New York Amsterdam News printed a feature (picked up from the Sunday Express in England and entitled “Why Doesn’t Paul Robeson Give More to His Own Negroes Instead of Russian Reds?”) that described Robeson as the “world’s richest artist,” who had changed his politics because his son had been denied admittance to a public school in England. Lester Granger, head of the National Urban League, published a column in the Amsterdam News lambasting Robeson’s “predictably hackneyed statement” and adding: “He is probably the biggest personal asset the Communist Party possesses today.… The Communist leaders here in America, when they say their prayers at night and turn their faces toward the Moscow god whom they worship, must assuredly say a special prayer for the continued health and vitality of their current star attraction. They’d better, for he’s the last bit of glamor their raggedy party can produce these days.” At a press conference, President Truman was quoted as using the word “gang” in denouncing Robeson, Wallace, and Clifford J. Durr, president of the National Lawyers Guild (the three had jointly called for an FBI investigation of the Klan). Did you say “gang”? an incredulous reporter asked. Yes, “gang,” the President replied, brusquely adding that he had taken care of them in the last election.55
Worse soon followed. The House Un-American Activities Committee decided it wanted to hear testimony—pledges of loyalty, the cynics said—from prominent Afro-Americans in response to Robeson’s statement that American blacks would or should not fight in a war against the Soviet Union. The NAACP telegraphed Representative John S. Wood, chairman of HUAC, protesting the hearings on the ground that “There never has been any question of the loyalty of the Negro to the United States of America” and stating that the “NAACP fails to see the necessity of holding hearings to be assured of what is already known to be true by our government.” Wood replied that HUAC was not undertaking an investigation of the loyalty of the black citizenry but, rather, graciously responding to “requests [that] have been received by this committee from members of his [Robeson’s] race that a forum be afforded for the expression of contrary views” to the “disloyal and unpatriotic statements” he had made. “This is a privilege which the Committee feels should be granted.”56
The hearings opened in mid-July. Alvin Stokes, a black investigator for HUAC, testified on the stand that the Communists planned to set up a Soviet republic in the Deep South and that “Robeson’s voice was the voice of the Kremlin.” Manning Johnson, the black anti-Communist (and professional informer) who had previously testified in numerous loyalty cases, declared unequivocally and falsely that Robeson was a member of the Party, had “delusions of grandeur,” and was “desirous of becoming the Black Stalin.” (Asked by a reporter two months later whether he had such ambitions, Robeson dryly replied that he “was in no way trained for political leadership.”) And a disabled black veteran pledged his loyalty to the United States.57
Next to testify were some heavyweights. Charles S. Johnson, president of Fisk University and earlier a friend of Robeson’s, limited himself to saying on the stand that he saw no evidence of Communists’ trying “to impregnate Negro schools.” Thomas W. Young, president of the Guide Publishing Company in Norfolk, Virginia (publishers of the newspaper Journal and Guide), declared that Robeson had broken the bond he once had with black people and had “done a great disservice to his race—far greater than that done to his country.” Lester Granger of the Urban League, who had already published a column attacking Robeson, used his opportunity in front of HUAC to suggest that it investigate the activities of such organizations as the KKK, “to reassure Negro leadership that while it is fighting against one enemy of this country, Communism, our Government is helping to fight off the other, Racism.”58
Now came HUAC’s final and star witness, Jackie Robinson, whose entry into major-league baseball Robeson had worked to facilitate. With movie and television cameras grinding away and the committee room packed, he read a prepared statement apparently written for him by Lester Granger. He had been urged, Robinson began—and “not all of this urging came from Communist sympathizers”—not to show up at the hearing. But he had, out of “a sense of responsibility,” decided to “stick my neck out.” He made it clear that he believed black Americans had real grievances, and “the fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges”; racial discrimination in America was not “a creation of Communist imagination.” Robeson had written Robinson just before his HUAC appearance to warn him that the press had “badly distorted” his remarks in Paris, and Robinson commented that “if Mr. Robeson actually made” the statement ascribed to him about American blacks’ refusing to fight in a war against Russia, it “sounds very silly to me.… He has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that is his business and not mine. He’s still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.” As for himself, Robinson continued, as “a religious man” he cherished America as a place “where I am free to worship as I please”; “that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting race discrimination in this country until we’ve got it licked,” but it did mean “we can win our fight without the Communists and we don’t want their help.” Three members of the committee joined in complimenting Robinson on his “splendid statement.” He left the capital immediately for New York, thereby escaping, as the black newspaper New Age pointed out, “being Jim Crowed by Washington’s infamous lily-white hotels.” That same week, Republican Representative Kearney of New York, a former national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, recommended that Robinson receive the VFW’s medal for good citizenship.59
The New York Times put Robinson’s testimony on page one, printed his HUAC statement in full (claiming that at the completion of his testimony a voice had called out “Amen” from the audience), and for good measure ran an editorial the same day declaring, “Mr. Robeson has attached himself to the cause of a country in which all men are equal because they are equally enslaved.” Joining the denunciation of Robeson and the praise of Robinson in her nationally syndicated “My Day” column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Mr. Robeson does his people great harm in trying to line them up on the Communist side of the political picture. Jackie Robinson helped them greatly by his forthright statements.” The New York Amsterdam News was equally supportive of Robinson, reporting that in its survey of 239 Brooklynites “not one person disagreed” with his position—“Jackie Robinson apparently batted 1,000 percent in this game.”60
But black reaction, in fact, was far from unanimous. The Council on African Affairs predictably issued a statement that “The Un-American Committee is out to smear Robeson because he challenges and refuses to accept any brand of second-class Jim-Crow Americanism.” And the following week, at a Bill of Rights conference sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, the twelve hundred delegates gave Robeson a standing ovation at the conclusion of his militant address—“I am a radical. I am going to stay one until my people are free to walk the earth”—and three hundred and sixty black delegates passed a resolution declaring that Paul Robeson “does indeed speak for us not only in his fight for full Negro democratic rights, but also in his fight for peace.” But, discounting the views of such interested parties, some black establishment voices were also sounded in Robeson’s behalf. The Afro-American ran a cartoon depicting a frightened little boy labeled Jackie Robinson with a huge gun in his hand, uncertainly tracking the giant footprints of Paul Robeson, with the caption “The leading player in the National Baseball League is only a tyro as a big-game hunter.” The respected black columnist J. A. Rogers expressed agreement with many of Robinson’s sentiments but disapproved of the auspices under which he had delivered them; he was convinced, Rogers wrote, that Robeson was “as loyal an American as any other” and convinced, too, that “Negroes are responding to him.” And New Age reported that “Harlemites … split sharply on the issue of whether the popular ballplayer should have gone before the committee.… Opinion was both congratulatory and condemnatory.”61
Robeson’s own reaction to Robinson’s testimony was muted. He as sailed the HUAC proceedings in general terms as “an insult to the Negro people” and an incitement to a terrorist group like the Klan to step up its reign of mob violence; he also challenged the loyalty of HUAC to the ideals of the republic, because it maintained an “ominous silence” in the face of the continued lynchings of black citizens. But he refused to “be drawn into any conflict dividing me from my brother victim of this terror,” insisting that he had only respect for Jackie Robinson, that Robinson was entitled to his opinion, and—realizing that, in the context of the day, Robinson’s statement had actually been mild—that there was “no argument between Jackie and me.” When reporters tried to draw him out further, he refused the bait, saying only, “We could take our liberties tomorrow if we didn’t fight among ourselves.” Though Jackie Robinson became more active in the civil-rights struggle after he retired from baseball in 1956, he campaigned actively for Richard Nixon in 1960 and stated in his 1972 autobiography that he had no regrets about the remarks he’d made before HUAC. But in fact he did. Disillusioned himself in his final years with the conservative leadership of the NAACP and the seeming impasse over improving the lot of the average black person, he also wrote in his autobiography:
… in those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today. I would reject such an invitation if offered now.… I have grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness. And I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson who, over a span of twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people.62
The cauldron, in any case, was aboil. When a black man in Knoxville, Tennessee, refused to move to the rear of a bus, a cop shouted at him, “You’re just like Paul Robeson!”63