Peekskill
(1949)
The deep animus against Robeson that the HUAC hearings disclosed did not serve to slow his activities. Opposition, typically, emboldened him; pressure brought out his intransigence. And he could be profoundly intransigent, surface geniality notwithstanding. His powerful will and his ardor for principle, combined with his ingrained optimism, allowed him all at once to proceed in the face of resistance, to close his mind to counterarguments, and to feel confident of ultimate results. In a talk at the left-wing People’s Songs Conference on August 13, he told the crowd, “In Europe and since I’ve come back … I’ve thrown down the gauntlet, and it’s going to stay.”1
Four days after Jackie Robinson’s HUAC appearance, Robeson, as good as his word, publicly assailed the “machine politicians” who had entered an alternate candidate against Ben Davis, Jr., in his re-election bid for the New York City Council. The following week he joined a hundred people picketing the White House in protest against discriminatory hiring practices at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (the demonstration had been called by the United Public Workers of America, CIO—of which Robeson was an honorary member). The next day he denounced President Truman’s appointment of Attorney General Tom Clark to the Supreme Court as a “gratuitous and outrageous insult to my people,” for Clark had listed multiple organizations fighting for civil rights as “subversive.” The day after that, from a loudspeaker truck in Harlem, Robeson addressed a rally demanding the freedom of Henry Winston, the black Communist leader, who had been jailed by Judge Medina for contempt of court in the ongoing trial of the Communist leaders at Foley Square. That same day, J. Edgar Hoover received photostats of Robeson’s federal income-tax returns for the years 1939–47, Part of the “documentary evidence” he had been soliciting from Bureau agents which would prove “suitable for cross-examination” should Robeson, as expected, testify at the trial of the Communist leaders.2
In that same week in mid-August 1949, People’s Artists Inc., a left-wing New York theatrical agency, announced a Robeson concert at the Lakeland Acres picnic grounds, outside of Peekskill, for August 27, the proceeds to go to the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress. (It would be the fourth Robeson concert in the Peekskill area; the preceding three had all been successful.) The Peekskill Evening Star immediately ran a front-page story on Robeson’s upcoming appearance with a three-column headline: “Robeson Concert Here Aids ‘Subversive’ Unit—Is Sponsored by ‘People’s Artists’ Called Red Front in California.” The Star’s editorial, on the inside page, insisted, “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” and it printed a letter from an American Legion officer (headlined “Says Robeson and His Followers Are Unwelcome”) that declared, “Some of the weaker minded are susceptible to their [the “Communists”] fallacious teachings unless something is done by the loyal Americans of this area”; “I am not intimating violence,” he added, “but I believe that we should give this matter serious consideration.…” The Star’s coverage set off a rash of activity. The president of the Peekskill Chamber of Commerce issued a statement attacking the concert; the Junior Chamber of Commerce called it “un-American” and called for “group action” to “discourage” it; the town supervisor of Cortlandt, where the Lakeland picnic grounds were located, said he was “deeply opposed to such gatherings”; the Joint Veterans’ Council urged its members to join the anti-Robeson demonstration.3
The town of Peekskill, in New York’s Westchester County, was a typically mainstream blue-collar place, set apart from ten thousand others by the pockets of left-wing sympathizers in surrounding areas, mostly Jewish and mostly summer residents. The year-round citizens had long felt distaste for these “rich, radical outsiders,” and a potentially volatile tension had long existed. Sam and Helen Rosen were part of this world, often journeying up from their apartment in Manhattan to their house in the estate area of Katonah, about fifteen miles from Peekskill. On Saturday, August 27, the day of the scheduled concert, Paul called Helen Rosen from Grand Central Station, where he was about to board a train for Peekskill, to say he’d heard rumors of possible trouble. Sam—confined at home with a broken leg—turned on the radio and, sure enough, reports came over that various groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and St. Joseph’s, the Catholic high school, were mobilizing. Helen told Paul she’d meet his train. She then phoned a friend in Croton, Sydney Danis, and asked him for backup help. He agreed “to get two stalwart fellows” and meet her at the Peekskill station. Helen set out with her fourteen-year-old son, John, who insisted on accompanying her. (“Nobody’s going to hurt our Paul.” His eighteen-year-old sister, Judy, shared his sentiments; as soon as she heard the news of trouble, she flew home from California, where she had been vacationing, and arrived in Katonah the following day.)4
At the train station, as Helen recalls it, “it was just like any Saturday afternoon, with people coming up for the weekend” and cars lined up to greet them. While awaiting Paul’s arrival, Helen heard on the radio that protesters were massing at the picnic grounds. Paul got off the train without incident, but it was decided that he should go in Danis’s car, with Helen and John driving in front of them in their station wagon. As they neared the picnic grounds, it was immediately apparent that a brawl was in progress. A truck was deliberately parked in the middle of the road, effectively blocking it, forcing traffic to a crawl, allowing marauding groups of young men to check the occupants of each car, yanking some of the passengers out while a jeering crowd on the sidelines yelled “Dirty Commie” and “Dirty kike,” tossing rocks, mauling suspicious strays. Police were visible on the sidelines, some smiling, none making a move to interfere with the mob; although the identities of the townspeople were familiar—St. Joseph’s School had proudly unfurled its banner—the police arrested no one. Helen saw a burning cross on the hill. She got John down on the floor of the station wagon and ran to the car behind her, where Paul was. He was enraged and, according to Helen, “We had a hard time keeping him from getting out of the car.” “Get him the hell out of here!” she yelled to Danis and his friends. “Get the hell out of here! Get him to New York!”5
Somehow Danis managed to back out of the line of cars and drove Robeson first to the Danis house in Croton and then to the Rockmores’ summer place in Ossining, thirty minutes from Peekskill. Helen and John inched their way home while the anti-Robeson mob moved on to attack the concertgoers, smash the stage, torch the camp chairs set up around it—and put a dozen Robeson supporters in the hospital. Clara Rockmore remembers that when Paul arrived he was more agitated than angry, not quite able to believe the awful reality of what had happened. He put in a call to the Rosens to tell them he was safe; then he and the Rockmores sat up most of the night on the porch overlooking the lake. In the morning a car came to take him back to New York City. He went straight to a press conference at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he called for a Justice Department investigation, characterized the rioting as “an attack on the whole Negro people,” and suggested that a boycott of Peekskill merchants might prove an effective way to put pressure on those decent but indifferent souls who deplored violence but did nothing to prevent it.6
That same afternoon, the Rosens opened up their place in Katonah for a protest meeting. Already inundated with hate calls, Helen asked the state police for protection. “They promised to be there, but nobody came.” John Rosen owned a .22 for target practice; after he strapped it on, he and a friend booby-trapped the driveway with wire fencing and then personally patrolled it. Fifteen hundred people showed up at the Rosens’, formed the Westchester Committee for Law and Order, and invited Robeson to return to Peekskill. Representatives from several left-wing unions—the Fur and Leather Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the Longshoremen—pledged to mobilize their members to serve as a cordon of defense for a rescheduled concert—“come what may,” as a statement signed by union leaders put it. Ten union men bedded down right then and there on the Rosens’ porch to guard the family.7
The following day—Monday, August 29—the first newspaper accounts of the riot hit the stands. “Robeson: He Asked for It,” headlined the Daily Mirror. The Daily Worker, in contrast, reported its story under the lead “Lynch Mob Runs Amuck at Robeson’s Concert.” While the press furiously debated who had provoked whom to do what, the FBI’s own agent, in a teletype message sent the night of the riot, acknowledged twice that it had been “started by vets.” That was to prove the outer limit of official candor. The FBI dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the Justice Department, but J. Edgar Hoover decided he would “conduct no investigation unless requested.”8
By now statements, charges, and protests flooded the media. The Joint Veterans Council of Peekskill disclaimed any involvement in a “riot,” describing its activities as a “protest parade … held without any disorder and … peacefully disbanded.” The national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars also denied any responsibility for the lawlessness, acknowledging only that the local post had engaged in “a spontaneous demonstration.” The Peekskill police chief said the picnic grounds had been outside his jurisdiction; a spokesman for the state police said he had never received a request for troopers. The commander of Peekskill Post 274 of the American Legion disdained excuse or apology: “Our objective was to prevent the Paul Robeson concert and I think our objective was reached.”9
On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement signed by John Haynes Holmes, Roger Baldwin, and Arthur Garfield Hays, declared it was “unfortunate and inexplicable that during the three hours of rioting which took place, a sufficient number of law enforcement officials … did not appear on the scene.” The music critic Olin Downes and the novelist Howard Fast led a protest meeting of the New York State Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Vito Marcantonio accused Westchester County officials of direct complicity. The state commander of the Jewish War Veterans, denouncing the riot as “a shameful blot,” denied that local officials could be relied on for an unbiased report and called for a special investigator. A large number of concerned individuals added their voices—among them Henry A. Wallace, Lindsay H. White (president of the New York NAACP), and Rabbi Irving Miller (chairman of the American Jewish Congress). The FBI carefully noted the names of those speaking out in Robeson’s behalf.10
Governor Thomas E. Dewey at first refused to comment on events at Peekskill, but as calls for an investigation mounted, he bowed to the pressure and ordered Westchester County District Attorney George M. Fanelli to make a report to him. Fanelli immediately announced that he had studied pictures of the mêlée and was subpoenaing prints of one “particularly revealing” photograph published in the New York Daily News: a black holding a knife in his hand. Fanelli also portentously announced that in the litter on the picnic ground a pamphlet entitled Political Economy in the Soviet Union had been retrieved, as well as a cardboard coin container bearing the label “1949 Lenin Memorial.”11
On Tuesday, August 30, an overflow crowd of three thousand gathered at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem in response to a call put out by the Emergency Committee to Protest the Peekskill Riot. The turnout was so large that speakers at the rally repeated their remarks to those who waited outside the hall. The New York Amsterdam News described the huge crowd as “composed of Robeson fans, Communist Party leaders … rank and file Harlemites and the curious representing all shades of political opinion.” Robeson handled the crowd masterfully, interjecting into his long speech singing, talking, and confidential asides. He began by emphasizing that “It’s been a long struggle that I’ve waged, sometimes not very well understood,” and he reiterated, as so often in his public statements, that the struggle was not just by and for Communists and blacks but included an alliance of the oppressed everywhere. Then he launched into a political polemic as fierce and telling as he ever delivered: “I will be loyal to the America of the true traditions; to the America of the abolitionists, of Harriet Tubman, of Thaddeus Stevens, of those who fought for my people’s freedom, not of those who tried to enslave them. And I will have no loyalty to the Forrestals, to the Harrimans, to the Wall-Streeters.…” Calling the Peekskill riot “a preview of American storm troopers in action,” he added, with perhaps calculated optimism, that it also meant “a real turn in the anti-Fascist struggle in America.” Peekskill had opened people’s eyes. “We are a part of a very historic departure. This means that from now on out we take the offensive. We take it! We’ll have our meetings and our concerts all over these United States. That’s right. And we’ll see that our women and our children are not harmed again! We will understand that … the surest way to get police protection is to have it very clear that we’ll protect ourselves, and good! … I’ll be back with my friends in Peekskill.…” As the crowd cheered, a special detail of more than a hundred police and detectives kept an eye out for trouble. None came. When the meeting ended, at midnight, the police escorted the Robeson supporters in a torchlight parade down Lenox Avenue to 135th Street.12
According to Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a second-echelon CP leader who at the time was the Party’s New York State educational director, “There was a big debate in the Party as to what kind of reaction we should have” to the Peekskill riot. A segment of the Party leadership was already annoyed at Robeson for his “nationalistic” speech in Paris (the rumor was that Ben Davis, Jr.’s vigorous defense of Robeson had imperiled his own position for a time), and so when Peekskill erupted, “the dominant white [New York State] leadership,” particularly Robert Thompson, wanted to “follow the path of least resistance” and confine protest to the Harlem rally. But Johnson and others successfully led the opposing group in arguing that they had to “beard the lion in his own den and go back to Peeks-kill.” Robeson agreed. He announced that he would give a rescheduled concert on September 4.13
When it was learned in Peekskill that Robeson would return, tension quickly mounted. The Associated Veterans’ Group, representing fourteen posts, announced that it would stage a mammoth protest parade on the day of the concert. Flag salesmen appeared on the streets of the town, and most businessmen—for fourteen dollars—prudently bought one for display. Signs and car stickers began to appear everywhere with the slogan “Wake Up America—Peekskill Did!” To deal with the rash of threatening phone calls coming in to pro-Robeson supporters, the Peekskill telephone company had to hire extra operators. The New York Compass reported that, under the threat of the anonymous calls, vacationers were closing up their houses and returning to New York. Helen Rosen, determined to go to the market in order to feed the union men guarding her house, discovered that nobody in town would talk to her. (One neighbor did, though: he came over with an offer to buy the Rosen place. It’s yours, Helen told him—for a million dollars, to be paid now. He declined.) The Fur and Leather Workers Union and several other left-wing groups organized a security force to protect the concertgoers (the FBI lumped all such activity together as “Communists … endeavoring to recruit delegations”). The Westchester Committee for Law and Order spent the forty-eight hours preceding the concert, largely without sleep, contacting state and local officials in an effort to ensure a peaceful outcome. Two effigies of Robeson were hanged on the night before the rescheduled concert.14
At 6:00 a.m. on September 4, the first union guards arrived to set up defense lines at the concert site at Hollow Brook Golf Course, three miles outside of Peekskill. The state police, under the direction of Superintendent John Gaffney, set up a command post in a nearby area. Overhead a police helicopter circled. Four ambulances stood by. As some twenty thousand concertgoers began to arrive at midday, a veterans’ protest parade—only about eight thousand strong rather than the thirty thousand the Associated Veterans’ Group had called for—marched outside the grounds under the eyes of state and local police, yelling anti-Semitic and anti-black remarks and taunting the arrivals with shouted threats: “We’ll kill you!,” “You’ll get in but you won’t get out!”15
Robeson, under the advice of the security men, remained in his car. Promptly at two o’clock the concert began. Union guards, Revels Cayton among them, ringed the platform. Pete Seeger sang. Pianists Ray Lev and Leonid Hambro played Bach and Chopin. There were no speeches, political or otherwise. At four, Robeson, accompanied by an admittedly terrified Larry Brown, performed, ringed around by fifteen or so union men; after opening the concert with “Let My People Go,” he brought the crowd to its feet with a rendition of “Ol’ Man River” that emphasized his earlier change in lyrics: “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” Helen Rosen noticed several men with guns on the ridge surrounding the hollow; Paul, an easy target in full view, was clearly taking his life in his hands. (Cayton had predicted before the concert that, “With so many people watching, they wouldn’t dare go for him,” that Robeson “was going to be like the safest man in New York.” For years afterward, when setting off on some chancy engagement, Robeson would laughingly say, “I guess I’ll be the safest man in the country.”) The security force flushed two men with high-powered rifles out of a nest in a hill overlooking the hollow. The uneasy truce held throughout the concert. When it was over, Robeson was taken out in a convoy of cars whose windows were shaded with blankets; Robeson himself lay on the rear floor, while two of the trade-union bodyguards covered him with their bodies.16
Then the crowd started home. Or tried to. As the line of buses and cars crawled along the steep road winding out of the hollow, it ran into a gauntlet of enraged locals. Some hurled rocks from the embankment; others stopped cars, dragged out the occupants, and beat them. The police did nothing to intervene. Some of the troopers joked with the anti-Robeson forces on the embankment; others joined the attackers below. One eyewitness saw the driver of a car in front of him hit in the kidneys by a cop; another was clubbed by a group of fifteen to twenty policemen; a third was dragged face down in the dirt and then told to “Get going, you red bastard!,” “Go back to Jew town, if we catch you up here again we’ll kill you!” Before long the scene was “a nightmare of crashing rocks, flying glass, blood, and swerving cars.”
Hundreds of the volunteer union guards were trapped in the hollow, surrounded by the stone-throwing mob and by a thousand state policemen who refused to let the union men return to their buses. Leon Strauss, vice-president of the Fur and Leather Workers, who was in charge of the defense force, later insisted that Superintendent Gaffney and District Attorney Fanelli had done nothing to clear away the threatening crowd or to restrain some of their own men, who encircled and then charged the trapped guards, beating them with their clubs. Twenty-five of the guards were arrested. Called at his home and asked to intervene, Henry Wallace tried to get through to Governor Dewey on the phone but could get no further than James C. Hagerty, the governor’s press secretary, who told him it was “just a bunch of Communists who had started violence.” The melee went on until 1:30 a.m. By the time it was over, dozens of buses and cars had had their windows smashed and been overturned, and a hundred and fifty people were injured seriously enough to require medical treatment (among them Revels Cayton and Irving Potash, who nearly lost his eye from flying glass and appeared the next morning as a defendant at the Foley Square trial wearing dark glasses). District Attorney Fanelli congratulated the police on having done “a magnificent job.”17
The next day Robeson held a ninety-minute press conference in the library of the Council on African Affairs. Newsmen jammed the room to hear fifteen witnesses, several bandaged from injuries, give eyewitness accounts, and to hear Robeson explain that the concert had ended in violence because the “police who were supposed to protect us, attacked and assaulted us.” He called the marauding state troopers “Fascist storm troopers who will knock down and club anyone who disagrees with them,” charged Governor Dewey with complicity, and demanded federal intervention to restore law and order. When he added that “we Negroes owe a great debt to the Jewish people, who stood there by the hundreds to defend me and all of us yesterday,” tears started from his eyes. In Albany, James C. Hagerty said the governor would not comment until he had full reports from District Attorney Fanelli and State Police Superintendent Gaffney. In nearly the same breath, and with no hint of irony, Hagerty announced that Governor Dewey had ordered a full police mobilization to take immediate action against an “outbreak of lawlessness” among UAW strikers at the Bell Aircraft plant near Niagara Falls.18
Fanelli made his report to the governor on September 7. It exonerated veterans’ groups and police from responsibility for the violence: “Every precaution possible was taken to insure the safety of all present. All police departments that took part in the plan should be commended for their excellent work.” After meeting with Fanelli and Gaffney, Dewey issued a statement the following week that went the D.A. one better. Characterizing the concertgoers as “followers of Red totalitarianism,” Dewey asserted that the “Communist groups obviously did provoke this incident.” He sounded as his only note of regret that the demonstrators, in responding, had given “the Communists effective propaganda.” In the same spirit, Life magazine stated flatly that the Communists had aimed for “the calculated, purposeful incitement of racial conflict” at Peekskill and that Robeson had “baited the Communist trap.” Newsweek, similarly, declared that “with the aid of anti-Communist hot-heads, the Communists had won a smashing propaganda triumph.” Bombarded from many quarters—the ACLU, labor unions, the National Committee of the Progressive Party, the American Jewish Congress, the National Lawyers Guild, groups of clergymen, law professors, and a fair portion of the press—with the demand for an impartial inquiry, Dewey did finally order a grand-jury investigation. But he carefully hedged the bet, charging the jury with instructions to inquire whether the breach of peace had been “a part of the Communist strategy to foment racial and religious hatreds” and placing in charge of the investigation none other than D.A. Fanelli.19
Back in Katonah, the Rosens hung on for another few weeks but then, in the face of a torrent of hate mail and obscene phone calls, temporarily closed up their house (to return in the late fall, with Paul as a frequent though hidden guest). In Manhattan, Sam Rosen’s medical practice dramatically dwindled, despite his superb reputation as an ear specialist. (Undaunted, Sam undertook basic research and in 1953 invented stapes surgery, a major breakthrough in the treatment of deafness.) In the immediate aftermath of Peekskill, the vigilante spirit was not confined solely to hobbling the Rosens. The Peekskill Star editorially compared the recent “incident” to the Boston Tea Party. Stickers reading “Communism Is Treason, Behind Communism Stands—the Jew!” were pasted on cars (and in the neighboring village of Harmon, the only Jewish home was stoned, its windows smashed). The American Legion requested that books by “known Communists” be removed from the Peekskill library. Veterans from fourteen posts in Westchester and Putnam counties held a “patriotic rally,” and in Cortlandt town officials announced an anti-“disturbance” ordinance so loose—imposing fines and jail sentences for those “disturbing the public peace”—that it threatened to destroy the right of assembly. Among the residents active in resisting the wave of repression, one local man stood as a bulwark; it later turned out he was a plant—during subsequent grand-jury proceedings he fingered the very people he had professed to be working with.20
Impaneled in October, the grand jury held lengthy hearings, listening to the testimony of some two hundred and fifty witnesses. At the close it issued a report that read as if dictated by D.A. Fanelli, with a few embellishments peculiar to the jury itself—like the reference in its report to the union security guards as “goon squads,” the claim that the colonies of summer residents in the Peekskill area harbored active Communists, and the assertion that the underlying cause of the outbreak had been Robeson’s own inflammatory statements “derogatory to his native land” during 1949. The grand jury concluded that the Communists had deliberately fomented “racial and religious hatred” on September 4 and at the same time insisted that the violence “was basically neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Negro in character.” “The fundamental cause of resentment and the focus of hostility was Communism … and Communism alone.” Given the provocations, the grand jury commended the police for not having used “any more force than was justified.”21
The other legal and quasi-legal proceedings following on the riot likewise ended in defeat for the Robeson forces. Three months after Peeks-kill, Robeson and twenty-seven other plaintiffs filed a two-million-dollar damage suit against various veterans’ organizations and county officials—including Fanelli and Gaffney—charging personal injuries, property damages, and deprivation of constitutional rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and the provisions of the 1870 and 1871 civil-rights acts. Walter Winchell, who had already blasted Robeson in a radio commentary, announced, “It is too bad the law doesn’t allow a counter-claim by the veterans of 1 billion dollars—for service rendered in defending the U.S. Constitution and the privileges of the plaintiffs to abuse it.” The action dragged on through various delays and rulings until New York Supreme Court Justice James W. Bailey dismissed the suits fifteen months later.22
In the immediate aftermath of the “battle of Peekskill,” defense attorneys for the Communist leaders on trial in Foley Square moved for a mistrial, on the grounds that the riot had been “a conclusive manifestation of the prejudice existing” against the eleven defendants. Judge Medina characterized the events at Peekskill as an “outrage,” but denied the motion as irrelevant to the trial at hand. When the defense attorneys pressed their demands for an investigation of Peekskill, Medina exploded—such tactics were “part and parcel of the endeavor to launch a counter-attack on society instead of meeting the issues of the trial.” He ordered testimony to continue. Ten days later Robeson took the stand facing Medina, his old law professor from Columbia.23
He was on the stand about twenty minutes. Every time the black defense attorney, George W. Crockett, Jr., asked Robeson a question, U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey objected—and each time Judge Medina sustained the objection, ruling the question irrelevant (among the questions Crockett asked Robeson was whether his father had been born in slavery). Robeson managed to make only two points: that he personally knew all eleven defendants (but had not been allowed to serve as a character witness) and that he had studied under Judge Medina. Unable to get the testimony he wanted from Robeson, Crockett withdrew him. “I don’t think you should have called him.” Medina remarked.24
Stymied in court, Robeson held a press conference at the Federal Court House. He blasted Medina’s rulings. He had wanted to say, he told the newsmen, that “the Communist Party has played a magnificent role in fighting for the freedom of the American Negro,” and he hadn’t gotten the chance to because “they don’t want the truth.” “Are you a Communist?,” a reporter asked. “That question is irrelevant,” Robeson replied. That same week, the black columnist Lem Graves, Jr., printed an exclusive interview with Robeson in the Pittsburgh Courier during which he asked Robeson if he wanted “a new kind of economic and political system in America.” Robeson is quoted as replying that he wanted “any kind of system the people want.… I don’t want America to adopt a system for which it is not ready.… This country is not ready for either the socialization which was adopted in England or the system which is in operation in Russia. But it is ready for the extension of democratic principles.…” He also called for a redistribution of wealth “to eliminate the situation where 1 per cent of the people own 60 per cent of the wealth.” Asked if he would approve of a revolution in the United States, “he answered that he did not think a physical revolution would be successful and added that he disliked physical violence.”25
The day after Robeson testified at the Foley Square trial, New York Congressman Jacob Javits spoke briefly in the U.S. House of Representatives, deploring the Peekskill riot as a violation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. That brought Representative John Rankin of Mississippi storming to the microphone. “It was not surprising to hear the gentleman from New York defend that Communist enclave,” Rankin shouted, but he wanted it known that the American people are not in sympathy “with that N——Communist and that bunch of Reds who went up there.” On a point of order, Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York protested to speaker Rayburn that “the gentleman from Mississippi used the word ‘nigger.’ I ask that the word be taken down and stricken from the RECORD inasmuch as there are two members in this House of the Negro race, and that word reflects on them.” Rayburn said he understood the gentleman from Mississippi to say “Negro.” “I said ‘Niggra,’” Rankin yelled, refusing to let Rayburn off the hook, “just as I have said since I have been able to talk, and shall continue to say.” Marcantonio insisted Rankin had said “nigger.” Standing at his place on the floor, Rankin shouted back, “If that N——Robeson does not like this country, let him go to Russia, and take that gang of alien Communists with him.”26
Speaker Rayburn ruled that “the gentleman from Mississippi is not subject to a point of order. He referred to the Negro race, and they should not be ashamed of that designation.” Thus encouraged by the Speaker, Representative Gene Cox of Georgia took the floor to denounce Robeson as a “Communist agent provocateur,” demanding to know why he, too, was not on trial in Foley Square. Two days after that, Representative Walton W. Gwinn, whose district included Peekskill, made extensive remarks about “the Communist military raid” on Peekskill, ending with the peroration that “Our people need to awake to the danger in their midst, from soft shilly-shallying compromises, in the name of tolerance.” The AP reported that in at least two places—Tallahassee, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama—effigies of Robeson were tied to trees and burned.27
For Essie, who was fearless, the threats became so numerous that she had an alarm system installed in Enfield and took to sleeping at night with a hunting knife next to her pillow (the police having turned down her request for a gun permit). “If anyone I don’t know enters this house, I will kill him first and find out afterwards why he came here,” she told a reporter. She went on to say that she was “in complete harmony” with her husband “on major issues,” though they disagreed about “a million things,” and she was convinced an effort was being made to silence him because “he personifies the resistance of the colored man to enslavement and repression.”28
The national debate on Peekskill raged for many months. Eleanor Roosevelt struck perhaps its most recurrent note when, in one of her syndicated “My Day” columns, she simultaneously expressed her dislike for “everything that Paul Robeson is now saying” and denounced the “lawlessness” of the anti-Robeson forces at Peekskill as “quite disgraceful.” When the American Civil Liberties Union asked for Mrs. Roosevelt’s signature on a public statement deploring current efforts “aimed at putting penalties upon political opinions,” she declined, declaring herself in disagreement with the part of the statement that called for “every encouragement” to be given “to the fullest freedom of expression by Communists as by all others in order that the American people may determine through public debate of all issues, the road to progress.” Her reluctance to assert the importance of preserving the right of free speech for Communists represented the “liberal” view.29
In the black community, Mrs. Roosevelt’s counterpart was A. Philip Randolph. In a lengthy letter to The New York Times, Randolph, too, adopted a pox-on-both-your-houses posture. He deplored the violence at Peekskill but also deplored the willingness of “Robeson and his followers … to seize upon, capitalize and even aggravate the situation.…” Above all, Randolph expressed concern with “dissociating this whole affair from the cause of the Negro and his fight for liberation.” The Peekskill riot, he wrote, “was not racial,” and Robeson was not a spokesman for black people. “Men must earn the right to become the responsible voice of an oppressed group,” and Robeson, Randolph asserted—in much the same way Roy Wilkins had earlier—had been insufficiently engaged in “struggle, suffering and sacrifice and service for said group” to qualify. Taking quite an opposite tack, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier praised Robeson for refusing to play the white-assigned role of “humility and forgiveness,” for insisting instead on “represent[ing] the Negro man in the masculine role as a fearless and independent thinker”—thereby earning the enmity of white America. Langston Hughes asked in print “why a concert singer cannot have political opinions, too—even if he is colored.” And in response to hostile editorials on Robeson, the black reporter Alice Dunnigan wrote Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that instead of “blasting Robeson because the white newspapers blast him,” Afro-American papers should be “praising Robeson for his courage to speak what 99 and 44/100 percent of our population thinks.”30
At the end of September 1949 Robeson, true to his public pledge after the first Peekskill incident, set out to carry his voice and message across the country, expecting—and meeting—resistance, but also meeting with redoubled proof that his ability to draw an audience, especially among black people, continued to be considerable. The Council on African Affairs handled the arrangements for the rapid cross-country trip, in cooperation with local sponsoring committees (the bulk of the work being done by Louise Thompson Patterson, William Patterson’s second wife, who had joined the Council a few months before as organizational director after having been vice-president of the International Workers Order).
Robeson told the press with a smile that, along with singing, “I’ll also be saying a few words about things.” The musician Larry Adler, though himself an outspoken progressive, told Robeson he didn’t approve of putting political content into a professional performance; as Adler recalls it, “Robeson smiled that wonderful grin of his, and said, ‘You do it your way, Larry, I’ll do it mine.’” But even before he set off on the tour, some of the places Robeson planned to visit let it be known that his words were not wanted. American Legion officials led a fight to ban his proposed peace rally in Pittsburgh, and in Ohio local officials in both Akron and Cincinnati denied the use of facilities for Robeson concerts (his supporters in Cincinnati pointed out, in a public statement that the newspapers of the city refused to print, that the Board of Education denying Robeson its facilities had never had a black representative on it). Robeson himself canceled a scheduled appearance at Oberlin College after its president insisted he would have to share the platform with a black minister who opposed his views; the right of a citizen to be heard, Robeson said, was not a proper subject for debate (the Chicago Defender preferred to draw the implication that Robeson had “cold feet”). In the end, Robeson’s sole appearance in Ohio took place in Cleveland. That city’s mayor, supported by the state’s largest black weekly, had publicly suggested a boycott (rather than a ban), but the black population poured into the Paradise auditorium in the heart of the Cedar-Central ghetto to hear him.31
In Chicago, all the major civic halls refused the use of their facilities to Robeson’s sponsoring host, the Civil Rights Congress. He sang instead at the Bakers Hall on the North Side, and the following night at the Tabernacle Baptist Church on the South Side (where the bulk of Chicago’s black population lived). Dr. Louis Rawls, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist, a man of deeply conservative religious and political values, had not hesitated to open his church to Robeson. “I saw no reason,” Rawls recalls, “why this church that serves the community should not allow these people to come in. Who are we to judge? They say Robeson ‘believes in Communism.’ Now, he never told me that. He said he wants freedom.” Rawls not only agreed to lend his church, but also reduced the usual fee from $150 to $75. On the face of it an unlikely candidate to provide Robeson with an outlet, Rawls to that exact extent represents the fact that no substantial segment of the black community was actively against Robeson—some prominent black pastors and national leaders, yes, but few among “ordinary” blacks.32
And they turned out for Robeson. At both of his Chicago appearances the audience was largely black, and at both, the crowd overflowed to the streets. In a welcoming statement, Bishop W. J. Walls of the A.M.E. Zion Church compared Robeson to “the noble Frederick Douglass,” who also refused “to bask in the sunlight of his great advantages without always bringing to the front the cause of his enslaved people.… You have gone the second mile.” When Robeson attended a White Sox baseball game in Chicago, he was surrounded by autograph-seekers—but when he tried to get a meal at the Hotel Sherman, he was refused service. Veterans’ organizations had advised the FBI that there would be no protest pickets at Robeson’s appearances, disdaining to provide his “Communist followers with an excuse for disturbances.” Taking no chances, the FBI—plus the local offices of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, and the Office of Special Investigations—were all on the alert, but no incidents were reported.33
The prospects for trouble in Los Angeles seemed greater. The City Council dubbed Robeson’s coming concert “an invasion” and unanimously passed a resolution urging a boycott. (The Council then directed its attention to a bill designed to set up a municipal Fair Employment Practices Committee, and defeated it eight to six.) One councilman, Lloyd G. Davies, went out of his way to “applaud and commend those [in Peekskill] who had the courage to get out there and do what they did to show up Robeson for what he is. I’d be inclined to be down there throwing rocks myself.” An FBI agent reported to J. Edgar Hoover that “the Communist Party logically might endeavor to foment an incident at the concert in order to arouse the crowd.” Hollywood gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Jimmy Fidler fanned the flames with rumors of violence, and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals published ads red-baiting Robeson. Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle, the black newspaper that sponsored Robeson’s Los Angeles appearance, was swamped with threatening phone calls and denied insurance coverage.34
Robeson’s supporters fought back. The Los Angeles NAACP Youth Council passed a resolution calling on all young people, black and white, to attend the concert. The prestigious national black fraternity (Robeson’s own), Alpha Phi Alpha, announced that it would host a luncheon in his honor the day following the concert. His supporters deluged the City Council with angry protests over its call for a boycott, and they turned out in force for the event itself. A tiny group of race-baiters did go to hear a local realtor call for the expulsion of all blacks and Jews from Los Angeles—but fifteen thousand went to hear Robeson. And the rally came off without incident. A special force of black police officers (among them future Mayor Thomas Bradley) was assigned to protect Robeson. He thanked them from the podium and asked that the L.A. police force protect “every colored boy, every Mexican-American boy, every white boy on the streets of Los Angeles.” He thanked the Jewish people of Peekskill for having turned out in numbers to protect him in that town. And he thanked the crowd in front of him for having turned out to defend its own liberties. He would continue, he said, “to speak up militantly for the rights of my people”; he told the rally that when asked the question “Paul, what’s happened to you?” he replied, “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m just looking for freedom.” Then he sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and the last verse, “Black and white together, we shall not be moved,” brought the crowd to its feet.35
Much the same pattern prevailed on the remaining stops of the tour. The opposition chose the tactic of boycotts over demonstrations, the authorities wavered between banning the rallies and guarding them, and supporters turned out in large numbers to fill the auditoriums to overflowing. The crowd at the Forest Club in Detroit was so great that Robeson had to give a repeat performance in the Shiloh Baptist Church that same evening. In Washington, D.C., seventeen of Washington’s black leaders, including Charles H. Houston, Mary Church Terrell, E. Franklin Frazier, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., W. H. Jernagin (past director of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches), Rayford W. Logan, and Reverend Stephen Gill Spottswood (president of the local NAACP) issued a statement in advance of Robeson’s arrival declaring that, although “many of us find ourselves in sharp disagreement” with the public positions he has taken on certain issues, “we are united in affirming his inalienable right to speak and sing to all who wish to hear him.” A second group of black supporters, including his old friend Joseph L. Johnson, dean of the Howard Medical School, gave him a dinner at the Dunbar Hotel.36
On the night of Robeson’s D.C. concert, police lined up three feet apart for a block on both sides of Turner’s Arena and on every corner for a radius of six blocks. Robeson told the mostly black audience in the packed auditorium that there could be “no question about my loyalty to America. I will give all I have for my country and my people. But I will have nothing to do with the Dewey and Dulles fascists and the Rankins.” He insisted that he stood for peace and predicted that because the Soviet Union now had the atomic bomb, war was less likely, since “people don’t want to be blown up for the Duponts and Anaconda.” Richard L. Strout, staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor (and for three decades thereafter the highly respected “T.R.B.” columnist on The New Republic), did not like the fact that he saw “Communist literature … openly on display with that of non-Communist books” in the lobby of Turner’s Arena. Nor did he like what to his “practiced eye” was the compelling evidence of the “fellow-traveler or outright Communist direction” of the event, “and the evident Communist effort to fan a racial conflagration.” Still, when Robeson appeared on the platform to a roar from the crowd, even Strout confessed himself impressed; Robeson gave “every appearance of profound sincerity and deep consecration,” spoke not with “inclusive bitterness, but with a certain massive magnanimity regarding injustices to his race,” and gave the impression “as one listened of a tremendous new force unleashed among American Negroes by the presence of this powerful personality”—even though “this great new power was running on a transmission belt from Moscow.” The Washington Post, in an editorial following Robeson’s appearance, congratulated the residents of the capital for having avoided “a violent clash which would have enabled [the Communists] to pose as champions of civil liberties.” “Whatever the hostile press and our so-called leaders may say or fail to say,” Robeson wrote Franklin Frazier, he felt his reception “from east to west served to confirm the correctness of the stand I have taken and the people’s support of my stand.… Facts are facts: no wishful thinking can dissipate or explain away the reality of what the Negroes down below are at present feeling and thinking.”37
Energized by the tour, Robeson returned to New York to find an additional wellspring of support in the letters and invitations that had arrived from overseas. The World Convention of Religions solicited his help in the interests of international peace; Joliot-Curie of France invited him to attend a conference in Rome; the Swedish Committee for the Defense of Peace telegraphed their solidarity with him; the All-India Peace Congress notified him of his selection as president of its forthcoming meeting in Calcutta; and Nan Pandit, currently serving as India’s Ambassador to the United States, wrote Essie with a private message from her brother, Nehru. Now Prime Minister, Nehru was coming to Washington on a state visit. Because he would be an official guest of President Truman, Nan Pandit wrote, “his engagements are checked up by the State Department,” but “He has written to say he wants to see you and Paul privately for a good talk” on November 6 in New York, where he would be arriving “incognito” after having officially left the country on the 5th. Robeson refused the invitation to see Nehru. In the continuing political strife in India, the Communist Party there had come under attack, and Robeson felt that Nehru had been responsible for the large number of deaths among the Communists. Essie exploded in anger at Paul for what she called the worst kind of dogmatism, blamed the Party for applying pressure on him, and determinedly went off on her own to greet Nehru. He was deeply hurt at Paul’s refusal to meet with him. Subsequently, however, the two men were reconciled, and Nehru would play a decisive role in the late fifties in the struggle to get the U.S. government to issue Robeson a passport.38
In mid-October Ben Davis, Jr., and the other Communist leaders on trial at Foley Square were convicted. Judge Medina handed out prison terms of five years to all but one of the defendants, sentencing Robert Thompson to three years (in deference to his having received the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II—prompting a protest from Thompson, who said he took “no pleasure” in receiving special favors from a “Wall Street judicial flunky”). In response to his own five-year sentence, Ben Davis wrote, “One thought crowded everything else out of my mind—in the whole history of the United States, with more than 5,000 brutal and monstrous lynchings of Negroes, not one perpetrator had received a sentence of five months—to say nothing of five years.” Congressmen ranging from the South Dakota conservative Karl Mundt to the New York liberal Jacob Javits hailed the fairness of the verdict. The national press made Medina into the lion of the hour—with lone and muted dissenting voices from The New Republic, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Court of Appeals, however, did allow for bail, and after the Civil Rights Congress posted the required two hundred sixty thousand dollars, the Communist Eleven were temporarily set at liberty.39
The news that Ben Davis was free on bail touched off a large rally in Harlem, and Robeson stood by Davis’s side as he was welcomed back. Toward the close of the rally, a brief skirmish broke out between bystanders and police. The Journal-American, in a banner headline, tried to blow up the marginal event into “360 Extra Police Ordered to Harlem After Red Riot,” seconded by the Daily News (“6 Arrested as Pro-Reds Fight Cops”), but in fact the clash, such as it was, developed over the issue of police brutality in Harlem and (as the New York Post reported) was in no sense planned or abetted by “Communists.” Davis, despite his indictment, had been renominated to the City Council, and his opponent in that contest, the conservative black columnist Earl Brown, immediately accused the CP of having incited the skirmish, charging that the Party had imported its workers “from all over the country specifically to start trouble.” In the few days remaining before the election, Robeson worked hard for Davis’s campaign but his bid was lost at the polls by a three-to-one majority. At a rally that night in Harlem, Davis’s campaign manager, Ollie Harrington, couldn’t figure out why Robeson hadn’t shown up as promised. Calling “downtown” to CP headquarters, he told them a no-show on Robeson’s part would be “a terrible mistake.” Within twenty minutes Robeson appeared at the rally and sang his heart out to the waiting crowd, but the incident upset Harrington; he saw it as a typical example of how the Party sometimes misused Robeson “and compromised his image with the black masses.” Yes, Revels Cayton concurs, “they used Paul in a kind of way that made him unacceptable to the masses of Negroes. This giant—they had not the slightest idea of how to work with him.” But on the issue of being “used,” Robeson himself deserves the final word: “The Communists use the Negro,” he once said with a chuckle, “and we only wish more people would want to use us this way.”40