The Right to Travel
(1950–1952)
In October 1949 Andrei Vyshinsky, Foreign Minister of the U.S.S.R., responded to charges at the United Nations that the “anti-fascist” trials in progress in Eastern Europe were in fact suppressions of civil liberties, by declaring that the United States had “no moral qualifications” for such a discussion; incidents like Peekskill, Vyshinsky retorted, suggested that “under the guise of freedom of expression” the United States allowed “pro-fascist” hooligans to break up peaceful assemblies. The following month Robeson appeared at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner in honor of Vyshinsky (and of the thirty-second anniversary of the Soviet state) sponsored by the Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a group that had been founded in the last years of the war with prominent mainstream Americans like Averill Harriman as participants but whose membership had narrowed with the onset of the Cold War.1
Welcoming Vyshinsky at the dinner, Robeson spoke of the peoples of Eastern Europe as “masters of their own lands,” of Tito—who had recently moved his country out of the Soviet sphere—as “disguising” himself as a revolutionary, and of Truman as an “imperialist wolf disguised as a benevolent watchdog.” He also denounced the “insolence” of those who questioned his love for his own country, asserting that “ONLY those who work for a policy of friendship with the Soviet Union are genuine American patriots.” This was not language designed for conciliation (or even entire accuracy). In his determination to avoid appearing cowed, in his anger at being caricatured, Robeson was taking on some of the polemically simplistic tones of his adversaries, trading in slogans. The brutality of the public attack on him had hardened his own rhetorical arteries, brought out the obstinacy that was always one of the constants (though usually better concealed) in his personality. The danger was that the suppleness of his inner process would be permanently affected, that opinionated and oracular defiance would become a reflex mannerism, that he would imitate and come to resemble his own dogmatic persecutors.2
A similar ideological-emotional constriction is apparent in the position Robeson took on the civil liberties of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. At a Bill of Rights Conference in New York City in late July 1949, a resolution was introduced calling for freedom for eighteen Trotskyists convicted in 1941 under the same provisions of the Smith Act currently being used against the leaders of the CPUSA. The chairman of the conference, Paul J. Kern, argued forcefully before the convention that free speech should never be denied because of a difference in political opinion—a view seconded by Professor Thomas Emerson of the Yale Law School. An impassioned Robeson took the platform to denounce the Kern-Emerson position. Like most pro-Soviets, Robeson had long blamed the followers of Trotsky for spreading exaggerated “slanders” about Stalin’s “police state.” Adherents of the Socialist Workers Party, Robeson exclaimed, “are the allies of fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world. Let’s not get confused. They are the enemies of the working class. Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?” NO, the delegates roared back. They defeated the resolution and passed a substitute that simply called for the defense of “all anti-fascist victims of the Smith Act.” It was not Robeson’s finest hour.3
Even some of the leaders of the CPUSA thought he ought to tone down his rhetoric. They had no trouble with the content, but did worry about the timing. On trial as “subversives,” a segment of the Party leadership feared that Robeson’s “refusal-to-fight-the-Soviets” line had inadvertently painted them as disloyal. Paul Robeson, Jr., recalls that one evening late in December 1949 his father asked that he accompany him to a West Side apartment. On entering, Paul, Jr., recognized several leaders of the Party, including the then chairman, Henry Winston. After some cordial talk, Winston suggested to Robeson that perhaps for the time being he might consider confining himself to singing—which to Paul, Jr., implied that Winston was urging his father to accept a rumored State Department “deal” to call off its surveillance if he returned to “art.” Paul, Jr., “felt” his father’s body stiffen; “I instinctively started to raise my right hand to block a blow which I thought he might direct at Winston’s head.” Robeson gripped the arms of his chair and, eyes narrowed, simply stared at Winston. “There was this dead silence, with everybody frozen. And he said, ‘No, Winnie, I don’t think that would be too good an idea.’ He sounded like a lion growling.” Then he rose and, his son following, went out the door. In Paul, Jr.’s view, Henry Winston and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn actually led a movement within the Party to issue some kind of disclaimer of Robeson’s Paris statement, but Ben Davis succeeded in derailing it. Paul, Jr., believes his father disliked Winston but was fond of Gurley Flynn. Politically, he felt close to neither; his own sympathies lay more with the Ben Davis-William Z. Foster “left-wing” faction in the Party, and sometimes with the centrist Eugene Dennis, whom he liked greatly. But finally, in the words of Doxey Wilkerson, Robeson “was bigger than the Party. He was an institution, if you will. He managed to deflect the kinds of jealousies that would ordinarily be leveled against a person of great magnitude. Everybody knew he was straight, honest, and what he wanted to do. He was universally respected.”4
That same week of December 1949, Robeson joined Du Bois, Patterson, Alphaeus Hunton, Ben Davis, Doxey Wilkerson, and others in cabling greetings to Joseph Stalin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The New York Amsterdam News commented that “when these ‘left wing Negro leaders’ go on record with expressions of love for the arch enemy of America, then we can expect the boys who run this country to suspect their motives … plac[ing] them even further on Uncle Sam’s black list.” Indeed, Army Intelligence reported to the FBI that “the Communists plan to shuttle Paul Robeson to rallies throughout the United States with the express intention of provoking riots and spreading propaganda to the effect that the Communist Party is ‘shedding blood’ in the interest of racial equality.” FBI surveillance became so constant that Robeson got to the point where he recognized plainclothesmen—though he did not let on, to avoid alarming his friends.5
Robeson did continue to travel and speak out, but his outlets were narrowing. He gave his first major address of the new year, 1950, at the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in February. At meetings just prior to the convention, the Progressive Party leaders agreed to disagree about the Tito-Stalin split (Robeson sided with Moscow), to unite behind a call for pardons for the eleven Communist leaders prosecuted under the Smith Act, and to emphasize commitment to the black struggle for civil rights. In his own remarks to the convention, Henry Wallace gave a speech that bordered on being anti-Communist (a few months later he would break with the Progressives over the issue of the Korean War, offering his support to the Truman administration). When Robeson’s turn came to address the delegates, he confined himself almost entirely to the issue of civil rights, barely alluding to the Soviet Union. He excoriated the two major parties for keeping blacks in a condition of second-class citizenship and praised the “magnificent role” of the Progressive Party in battling for civil rights, in having “proven to the Negro people that we mean what we say.” The delegates elected him cochairman.6
The country was in no mood for an appeal to tolerance. “Bad news” had begun to arrive with regularity, fraying nerves, souring the national disposition. Judith Coplon, a Justice Department employee, was arrested by FBI agents during an alleged rendezvous with a Soviet official and charged with espionage. Russia exploded an atomic device. The British scientist Klaus Fuchs was arrested and charged with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The State Department released its White Paper on China, conceding “the unfortunate” victory of the Communists. (When the news of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat came over the radio in October 1949, Paul and Helen and Sam Rosen headed out into the street on their way to an appointment and then, in a burst of high spirits, linked arms and sang “Cheelai,” the Chinese Communist song, at the top of their lungs—to the general astonishment of passers-by.) Late in January 1950, a New York jury found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury. Richard Nixon charged the administration with suppressing evidence of Hiss’s Communist connections. The right-wing press came close to labeling Secretary of State Dean Acheson a traitor. Senator Joe McCarthy journeyed to Wheeling, West Virginia, to deplore American impotence in the world and to hint darkly about the infiltration of the “enemy” into the highest echelons of the State Department.7
In the midst of this crescendo of alarm, Eleanor Roosevelt’s son Elliot announced that Paul Robeson would appear on his mother’s Sunday afternoon television show, “Today with Mrs. Roosevelt,” to debate with Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the black Mississippi Republican committeeman Perry Howard on “the role of the Negro in American political life.” He might just as well have announced the imminent appearance of the devil. NBC at once received hundreds of hostile phone calls; the state commander of the American Legion told the press that Robeson’s purpose would be to incite “hatred and bigotry”; the Catholic War Veterans demanded that the networks protect “decent Americans” from exposure to anti-American propaganda; and the Hearst paper the New York Journal-American put its front page anti-Robeson story right next to an article hailing Senator McCarthy for having “named” two “pro-Communist” State Department employees.8
Less than twenty-four hours after Robeson’s appearance had been announced, it was canceled. An NBC spokesman told the press that Mrs. Roosevelt had been “premature” and Paul Robeson would not appear on her program—indeed, would never appear on NBC as long as the network could help it—thereby making him the first American to be officially banned from television. Robeson told reporters that he hoped “Mrs. Roosevelt and Elliot Roosevelt will struggle, as I am sure they will, for the civil rights of everyone to be heard.… I cannot and will not accept the notion that because someone is accused of being a Communist or a ‘Communist sympathizer’ that he has no right to speak.” (This was precisely the right he had argued against extending to Trotskyists eight months earlier.) Howard Fast challenged Mrs. Roosevelt to speak out against censorship at a Robeson concert scheduled for the following week, but Mrs. Roosevelt declined any comment except for the non sequitur—after reporters pressed her—that the television discussion was to have been a “general” one and Robeson would not have had “unlimited time to express his point of view.” When a private citizen wrote to ask her why she had not publicly objected to cancellation of the program, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “… because I was away and in any case, the National Broadcasting Company has the final say on these programs. I can, of course, think of several other negro Americans who are better qualified to speak than Mr. Robeson because they are more objective. However, I would not be afraid of anything Mr. Robeson might say.”9
Refraining from any attack on the Roosevelts, Robeson aimed his fire at NBC. The banning was “a sad commentary on our professions of democracy,” he said, but he was not surprised that the network had balked at a candid discussion of “the Negro in politics”—it had always balked at any but stereotyped presentations of blacks (while freely opening its airways to white supremacists) and had consistently refused to hire any skilled blacks in its army of technicians. Support for Robeson came from limited quarters only. The Afro-American printed an editorial censorious of the NBC action—and soon after named Robeson to its 1950 National Honor Roll—but most of the black press remained silent. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., registered a protest, but it was lukewarm, leading the CP trade-unionist Ferdinand Smith to denounce Powell as “pussy-footing.” Roy Wilkins, speaking for the NAACP, delayed so long in issuing a statement that his lieutenant Henry Lee Moon sent him a memo expressing anxiety that the NAACP had failed to speak out expeditiously. The Progressive Party and the American Civil Liberties Union did back Robeson’s right to appear, and a few members of the left-wing Harlem Trade Union Council did picket NBC. But dominant opinion was represented by an editorial in the New York Telegram-Sun: Paul Robeson had been “publicly and rightly censured.”10
From abroad came a small flood of invitations asking Robeson to appear at peace gatherings. The peace movement (anti-Communists charged that it was sponsored by pro-Communists) had been gathering international momentum, and activists from around the world requested Robeson’s presence at their various meetings. He sent greetings to all—and recorded statements to several—but he had a raft of promises to fulfill at home. His bicoastal appearances within just a few months included benefit concerts for the Progressive Party, anniversary celebrations for the Morning Freiheit and the Jewish Peoples’ Fraternal Order, a fund-raiser for the California Eagle, speeches at the New York May Day parade and the National Non-Partisan Committee to defend the Communist leaders, an FEPC vigil in front of the White House, conferences with black trade-unionists in Chicago and California, and half a dozen testimonial dinners.11
Essie, meanwhile, was carrying out a full agenda of her own. Her politics had by now moved closer to Paul’s—though he rarely trusted her to speak in his behalf. Her style of public debate was less combative than his, her commitment less instinctive, but she was nonetheless an effective speaker. Returning in January 1950 from a three-month trip to China, she embarked on a well-received national speaking tour. The FBI agent who monitored her speech in St. Louis reported that she had denied the existence of slave camps or of anti-Jewish discrimination in the Soviet Union; when asked from the audience what the difference was between Western colonialism and the Russian satellite system, she purportedly replied, “colonialism meant controlling and exploiting while a satellite was just influenced.” By temperament an ingrained pragmatist, impatient with doctrinal dispute in any form, Essie devoted the central portion of her standard stump speech on “Communism” to redefining it under the blandly accessible rubric of “land reform.” Further expounding her loose approach to doctrine, she won over a group of conservative black ministers and their wives in Detroit by stressing their theological duty to take up issues of social justice. Her audiences were apparently less persuaded by her increasingly explicit—and in 1950 decidedly “premature”—feminism; in her speech “Women and Progressive America,” for example, she declared, “I think it is high time that women had some say in the running of their governments, and in the running of the world.” The FBI decided in August 1950 that Essie was, after all, a “concealed Communist” and once again issued a Security Index Card for her.12
In May, Paul made a quick trip to London to attend a meeting of the World Peace Council, of which he was a member. More than twenty thousand Londoners packed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to hear the leaders of the international peace movement, but saved their greatest applause for Robeson, who sang Chinese, Soviet, and American songs and told the crowd—once more calling on his reserves of optimism—that the working class in America was awakening to the realization that it (and not just those who were avowed Communists) was in danger of losing civil liberties; this awakening meant that fascism “will never be” revived in America. George Bernard Shaw, who had met Robeson two decades earlier, dropped him a humorous note demurring to a request for support of Progressive Party candidates: “If you connect my name and reputation with your campaign … you will gain perhaps two thousand votes, ten of them negro, and lose two million.… Keep me out of it; and do not waste your time courting the handful of people whose votes you are sure of already. Play for Republican votes and episcopal support all the time; and when you get a big meeting of all sorts, don’t talk politics but sing Old Man River.” Sympathetic though he was to Robeson, Shaw was not above a bit of well-meant patronization.13
Back in the States by June, Robeson went to Chicago to address a thousand delegates to the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights, many of whom were black packinghouse workers. To Marie Seton, who attended the meeting, “Robeson was never so much himself” as that night, “in the midst of his own to whom he spoke of all the world.” He exhorted black trade-unionists to “exert their influence in every aspect of the life of the Negro community” and “to accept the fact that the Negro workers have become a part of the vanguard of the whole American working class. To fail the Negro people is to fail the whole American people.” He spoke movingly of the need to end the persecution not only of black Americans, but of Jews and of the foreign-born as well, and asked the audience not to be deflected from that goal by divisive calls from press and politicians to save the world from the “menace” of Communism. “Ask the Negro ministers in Birmingham whose homes were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan what is the greatest menace in their lives.… Ask Willie McGee, languishing in a Mississippi prison.… Ask Haywood Patterson, somewhere in America, a fugitive from Alabama barbarism for a crime he, nor any of the Scottsboro boys, ever committed. Ask the growing numbers of Negro unemployed in Chicago and Detroit. Ask the fearsome lines of relief clients in Harlem.… Ask any Negro worker receiving unequal pay for equal work, denied promotion despite his skill and because of his skin, still the last hired and the first fired. Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, ‘What is the greatest menace in your life?’ and they will answer in a thunderous voice, ‘Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!’—in short White Supremacy and all its vile works. Our enemies,” Robeson concluded, “are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give FEPC the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers,” those who sustain injustice at home while shipping arms—here Robeson was surely prescient—to “French imperialists to use against brave Vietnamese patriots.” His black audience gave him a prolonged ovation.14
Two weeks later the daily press blazoned in screaming headlines that “COMMUNIST IMPERIALISTS FROM NORTH KOREA” had invaded their “PEACE-LOVING BROTHERS” to the south. The victors of World War II had put an end to Japan’s colonial rule in Korea and split that country into two, the North, under Kim II Sung, claiming to build socialism, the South, under Washington’s puppet Syngman Rhee, proceeding to bolster capitalism. From the first there had been constant sniping across the border, each side threatening to “liberate” the other, but when Sung’s well-equipped army finally crossed into the South, Rhee’s troops were unprepared and ill-equipped. Though Truman had in the past shown contempt for Rhee, he felt he couldn’t risk—not so soon after the Communist victory in China and the sensational publicity surrounding the fall of Hiss and the rise of McCarthy—having the Republicans charge that he was soft on Communism. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, secured a resolution condemning North Korea, and a week later Truman dispatched ground troops. Americans of almost all persuasions—including Henry Wallace—rallied around the President. Congress opened debate on passage of a new Internal Security Act, the infamous McCarran Act, which equated dissent with treason and established concentration camps to detain subversives in time of national emergency. When it passed in September, Truman vetoed it, at some political risk, but the House overrode him. The days when Robeson could count on at least minimal sufferance had passed.15
Yet he refused to trim his sails to any degree. Speaking out at a Civil Rights Congress rally at Madison Square Garden at the end of June 1950 to protest Truman’s action in sending troops to Korea, Robeson excoriated the President for tying the welfare of the American people “to the fate of a corrupt clique of politicians south of the 38th parallel in Korea.” The meaning of Truman’s order, Robeson predicted, would not be lost on black Americans: “They will know that if we don’t stop our armed adventure in Korea today—tomorrow it will be Africa.… I have said it before and say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home.…” When Robeson had “said it before,” in Paris in 1949, he had brought on a national debate; those same words, repeated in 1950, marked its foreclosure. The climate had changed. The government decided to muzzle him.16
He had planned to return to Europe at the end of the summer, but the State Department planned otherwise. It issued a “stop notice” at all ports to prevent Robeson from departing, and J. Edgar Hoover sent out an “urgent” teletype ordering FBI agents to locate Robeson’s whereabouts. Going first to Bert and Gig McGhee’s apartment, where Robeson had recently been staying—as a result of which the FBI had taken out a Security Index Card on Gig—they were told he was not at home. The agents waited outside the building through the night and, when Robeson failed to appear, contacted the Council on African Affairs. Through Louise Patterson, Robeson made arrangements to meet with the Internal Security agents sent out to confiscate his passport. When they arrived, he had an attorney with him, Nathan Witt of Witt & Cammer. Witt checked the agents’ credentials, and Robeson said he would have the passport for them in the morning. But when the agents called the next day, Witt informed them that on his advice Robeson had decided not to surrender the passport after all. The State Department immediately notified immigration and customs officials that Robeson’s passport was void and that they were “to endeavor to prevent his departure from the U.S.” should he make an attempt to leave.17
Robeson now joined other radicals whose right to travel had been or was soon to be restricted—Rockwell Kent, Charlotta Bass, Corliss Lamont, the writers Howard Fast and Albert Kahn, and Reverend Richard Morford (head of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship). Historically, the State Department, when denying passports, had given concrete reasons, chiefly citing lack of citizenship, the need to protect applicants from going to danger spots abroad, and the need to intercept criminal elements attempting to flee the country or to engage in drug trafficking. But increasingly in the early 1950s, the State Department gave no reason for lifting a passport other than the vague catchall explanation that travel abroad by a given individual would be “contrary to the best interests of the United States,” a cover for monitoring left-wing political dissent. The passport weapon had occasionally been used against dissenters in the past—anarchists and socialists in particular—but now it became widely employed, and directed pre-eminently at “Communists” (even though the U.S. government had previously protested the refusal of totalitarian governments to let their citizens travel freely as the denial of a fundamental human right).18
Witt wrote directly to Secretary of State Acheson requesting an explanation. A reply came from the chief of the passport division: “the Department considers that Robeson’s travel abroad at this time would be contrary to the best interests of the United States.” That, Witt responded, is not “a sufficient answer”; it presented “a conclusion” but gave no justification for it. He requested a meeting either with Acheson or his representatives. Word came back that passport officials would meet with Robeson and Witt on August 23, though “the Department feels that no purpose would be served.”19
The department was as good as its prediction: the August 23 meeting accomplished nothing. Along with Nathan Witt, Robeson was attended by four black attorneys, including William Patterson (who two weeks before had been called a “black son of a bitch” by Representative Henderson Lanham of Georgia during a hearing before the House Lobbying Committee; Essie, in a letter of protest, cleverly denounced the name-calling as “an all too typical incident illustrating UnAmerican behavior today”). When Robeson and his attorneys requested clarification as to why it would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States Government” for him to travel abroad, they were told that his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries—it was a “family affair.” Unless he would give a signed statement guaranteeing not to make any speeches while abroad, there could be no reconsideration of his passport application. When his attorneys protested that this amounted to an unconstitutional violation of the right of free speech, they were told that they were at liberty to take the matter up in court. Robeson’s lawyers prepared to do just that.20
There was no national outcry against the State Department’s lifting of Robeson’s passport. The minuscule left-wing press (led by the Daily People’s World, the Daily Worker, and the National Guardian) wrote editorials against the action; a number of European peace organizations telegraphed their indignation to Acheson; and scattered left-wing groups like the Progressives and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts registered their anger. But no important black leader joined the protest; as Bayard Rustin puts it, “I don’t know whether the leadership was sufficiently anti-Robeson or sufficiently intimidated.…” Robeson himself denounced the passport action as one more attempt by the Truman administration “to silence the protests of the Negro people”—but his statement was not widely carried in the press. He was being effectively isolated, which became clear early in September when, on the first anniversary of Peekskill, Madison Square Garden refused to rent its space to the Council on African Affairs for a planned concert rally in protest of the passport ban. The Daily Worker announced a demonstration outside the Garden, but only fifty people showed up.21
There was a much larger turnout in Harlem—the Daily Worker estimated the crowd at six thousand—on September 9, when Robeson supporters held an outdoor rally in Dewey Square, under the auspices of the Harlem Trade Union Council. Joined by Patterson, Ben Davis, Leon Strauss, and half a dozen other speakers, Robeson told the assembled crowd that he had definitely decided to bring suit against the State Department, denounced the action of the Madison Square Garden corporation as “an arbitrary edict in violation of the right of free assembly,” and described the various “security” proposals under discussion in the Congress—the Wood, McCarran, and Mundt-Nixon-Ferguson bills—as “police state” proposals. “There has not been a single bit of federal legislation passed to guarantee the economic, civil and political rights of the Negro people; but … we see such Congressmen as Rankin of Mississippi spearheading the hysterical drive to jail and muzzle Negro and other Americans who engage in … criticism of government policy.”22
Two months earlier it had also been possible to gather an audience in Harlem for a Hands Off Korea rally; the “red menace” did not strike most Harlemites as notably more invidious than the white one. Even after the Cold War climate deepened, Harlemites could not be stampeded into an automatic anti-Soviet response. Annette Rubinstein, state vice-chairman of the American Labor Party, remembers using a sound truck all over New York to gather signatures against the execution of the Rosenbergs: “We were in every neighborhood, and people were terrified.… Even in the Jewish neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, people would say, ‘Well, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. There must be something to it.’ … But in Harlem we didn’t have to argue or prove that it was a frame-up.”23
But Harlem’s mood was not the country’s. No longer friendly with Robeson, Carl Van Vechten commented with some satisfaction in a private letter on Paul’s fall from “the top of the heap” to “the dog house.” And the nationally syndicated columnist Robert C. Ruark expressed his double pleasure that Robeson, “the Negro press agent for the Communist Party, has finally been hanged high as Haman,” and that Negro troops in Korea had been acquitting themselves so well—thereby giving the lie, Ruark believed, to Robeson’s prior insistence that blacks would not fight against Communists. (Wasn’t it interesting, the black sociologist Horace Cayton—brother of Revels—noted, to see press attention being given to the exploits of black troops in Korea: could it be, Cayton asked, that the United States was “embarrassed” that “there have been no [other] non-white people fighting on their side?”)24
It did nothing for Robeson’s public image when it was announced that Moscow intended to present a play depicting scenes from his life. At the same time, his old friend Josh White—who had performed with him in John Henry in 1940—went before HUAC to express his “sadness” that Robeson was giving aid to people who “despise America” and to declare his own fervid willingness “to fight Russia or any enemy of America,” regretting that earlier he had allowed certain “subversive” organizations to “use” him. Robeson had in fact been forewarned—by Josh White himself. According to Revels Cayton, the two men talked it over in a bathroom in his house, turning on the tap water as a precaution against bugging. “They’ve got me in a vise,” White purportedly told Robeson. “I’m going to have to talk.” “Do what you have to but don’t name names,” was Robeson’s response—just as he generously warned others (like Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier) to avoid being seen or connected with him lest their own careers be damaged.25
Disparagement of Robeson at home began to alternate regularly with tributes to him from abroad. In October came word that Mayor Hynes of Boston had barred the display of Robeson’s picture in a touring exhibition of portraits of famous blacks—and nearly simultaneously the Second World Peace Conference in Warsaw announced that Robeson had been chosen to share the $14,300 International Peace Prize with Pablo Picasso. (In defending his action, Hynes announced, “We are not glorifying any avowed Communists, whether white, Negro or yellow,” and the Boston Post backed the mayor’s decision, declaring it unthinkable that, while “boys of every color and racial strain are today giving their life’s blood in far-off Korea, in a war inspired by Mr. Robeson’s friends in Moscow,” Boston could “in decency” honor such a man.) On November 6 the Associated Negro Press reported that in Alabama one James T. (“Popeye”) Bellanfont, a black school-bus driver, had begun a “crusade” to “stop Robeson from speaking for the Negro,” claiming to have already enrolled twelve hundred members in seventeen states—and on November 18 the ANP carried a bulletin that the town council in Lvov, Poland, had voted to name a street after Paul Robeson. That same week Life magazine published two pictures side by side: one of the black cadet Dave Campbell leading the graduation parade at the navy’s preflight school in Pensacola, the other of Robeson—“who has long been used by Reds to exploit the color line”—attending a party at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the thirty-third anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution; Robeson, Life reported, “came early, stayed late, seemed delighted to be there.”26
Robeson was now increasingly linked, in the press and in the public mind, with another black dissenter, W. E. B. Du Bois. The two had been working closely together since 1948, when Du Bois moved his office from the NAACP to the Council on African Affairs, and Du Bois had been elected along with Robeson to serve on the new World Peace Council. Now, in October 1950, Du Bois—as fit as he was venerable at age eighty-two—decided to run on the New York American Labor Party ticket for a seat in the United States Senate, opposing the popular incumbent, Herbert H. Lehman. Most of the black leadership came out for Lehman; A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, Channing Tobias, and the powerful Tammany Hall trio of New York black politicians, Hulan Jack, Joseph Ford, and J. Raymond Jones, all endorsed Lehman on the basis of his substantial civil-rights record. Those lining up for Du Bois were far less influential: the actress Fredi Washington, Ollie Harrington, Nina Evans (president of the Domestic Workers Union), and Bishop William J. Walls, head of the Second Episcopal District of the A.M.E. Zion Church. And, of course, Robeson.27
At a rally for Du Bois at Harlem’s Golden Gate Auditorium, Robeson introduced him as “the elder statesman of our oppressed people,” a man who stood against the determination of monopoly big business “to run the world, to make it over in the American Jim-Crow, ‘free enterprise’ image—or ruin it.” At a second rally just before election day, threats of violence led to the stationing of a 150-man police detail on rooftops and streets in the area. But there was no trouble, and in his speech to the gathering Robeson congratulated the American Labor Party for turning to Du Bois for leadership, “and not to the sycophants and flunkies of monopoly wealth and plantation power that clutter up the tickets of the twin parties of reaction.” (According to The New York Times, Robeson left the rally with seventeen bodyguards.) When the vote was in, Du Bois ran ahead of the rest of the American Labor Party ticket, tallying a respectable—indeed, in the deepening freeze of the Cold War climate, a remarkable—13 percent of the five million votes cast. Three months later the Justice Department indicted Du Bois as an “unregistered foreign agent.” His trial was scheduled for November 1951.28
In the interim, Du Bois and Robeson moved still closer together in cooperating on a new journal, Freedom. The publication was edited almost single-handedly in the beginning by Louis Burnham, former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Southern director of the Progressive Party—and an unusually able journalist. Burnham had to cope not only with deficient financing and an intransigently conservative national climate, but also with the “special ways” of his star contributor, Dr. Du Bois. The actress-writer Alice Childress, who worked on Freedom, recalls that, when Burnham requested an article from Du Bois, telling him frankly that they had no money to pay him, the Doctor reared up. He could not, he indignantly explained, work for nothing. Childress put in a placating phone call to say, “Somehow we’ll get you some money. What do you want?” Fifteen dollars, Du Bois replied, explaining to a relieved Childress that he had been offended merely by the notion that he was somehow “on call” to do the magazine’s bidding.29
With an article by Du Bois, the first issue of Freedom appeared in December 1950. It also carried a column, meant to inaugurate a regular feature, by Robeson. He worked out the columns with Lloyd L. Brown, a left-wing black writer (who would later collaborate with him on his autobiography); Brown wrote up the columns, and Robeson checked them over. “The people of America,” the first column read, “can save their land if they will. But this means the saving of every precious life.… I am not making great sacrifices which need fanciful explanation. I am simply fulfilling my obligation—my responsibility, as best as I can and know, to the human family to which I proudly belong.” Inadequately financed, Freedom struggled along for a few years, relying heavily for support on a national “Freedom Fund” established at the same time as the magazine—and was promptly labeled “a Communist Party front organization” by the FBI. To aid the fund, which never raised money commensurate with the need, Robeson lent his name and presence to a publicity campaign that included mailings and benefit appearances. He (and Essie, too) worked hard for the success of Freedom, which managed to hold on—barely—through 1955.30
The same month that Freedom began publication, December 1950, Robeson’s lawyers instituted in the United States District Court a civil action for the return of his passport, against Secretary of State Acheson “in his representative capacity” as head of the State Department. The complaint described Robeson as “a loyal, native-born American citizen” and insisted that the cancellation of his passport had not only deprived him of his constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech, thought, assembly, petition, association, and travel, but would also prevent him from practicing his profession and earning a living. The State Department’s lawyers responded by filing a motion to dismiss the suit, contending that historically the Secretary of State had always exercised the discretionary power to issue or refuse a passport and emphasizing that the United States was technically still at war (the state of national emergency proclaimed at the start of World War II had never been officially terminated). The Robeson passport case had begun its tortuous way through the courts. “In the modern emergency,” Robert C. Ruark wrote in his syndicated column, “Mr. Robeson is as worthy of internment as any Jap who got penned away in the last, since … he is an enemy of his own country and a passionate espouser of those people who are now declared enemies.… He goes to the court to have his passport restored so that he may rend America further abroad.…” Across the FBI copy of Ruark’s article, J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “certainly well said.” Panic momentarily seized the Passport Division when a U.S. customs agent reported that Robeson had booked passage on the Cunard ship S.S. Media for Liverpool. After much alarmed scurrying about, an embarrassed correction came through: the “Robeson” in question was a white member of the British equestrian team on his way home after competing in the international horse show in Madison Square Garden.31
The new year began with two more public assaults on Robeson from well-known black figures. Returning from a successful boxing tour of Europe, Sugar Ray Robinson told the Herald Tribune that “America provides opportunity for everyone, regardless of race, creed or color” and declared that assertions to the contrary were simply “Communist propaganda” put out by Paul Robeson. A more considered and substantial attack came from Walter White in his Ebony article, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson.” Utilizing private information gleaned from twenty-five years of friendship, and employing a tone of sympathetic puzzlement (“Robeson is a bewildered man who is more to be pitied than damned”), White, in urbane words, put a high gloss on a set of conventional Cold War accusations. He portrayed Robeson as having a penchant for luxury and a neurotic oversensitivity to discrimination, a man who for some “mysterious” reason had always harbored “deep resentment” over racial slights and therefore been particularly susceptible to the propaganda the Soviets put out about their bias-free society. “It has been inexplicable to Mr. Robeson’s friends,” White claimed, that he could be “so generous” toward Russia and yet have done “so little toward helping movements to correct the flaws in American democracy.” White further embellished his suave indictment by referring to Robeson as having lived in “magnificent” style in London’s “exclusive Mayfair section.” The Robesons had never lived in Mayfair, and Robeson’s impressive record of involvement in movements designed to “correct the flaws in American democracy” had included the Progressive Party, the trade-union movement, and the Council on African Affairs—all unmentioned by Walter White.32
Just before White’s article appeared, the American public-affairs officer in Accra, the Gold Coast, had sent a memo to the State Department suggesting that a piece be “specially written” about Robeson for use throughout Africa; it should be “told sympathetically, preferably by an American Negro devoted to his race, as the tragedy which in fact it is.… Much more with regret than rancor, it must detail Robeson’s spiritual alienation from his country and from the bulk of his own people … his almost pitiful (for so robust and seemingly dignified a person) accommodation to the Communist line.…” There is no evidence that Walter White had written to specification, but his article did at least obviate the need for the State Department to plant one of its own. Perhaps unwittingly, Walter White had done his Cold War service.33
Furious at White’s article, Essie dashed off an angry rebuttal to Ebony. She began by acknowledging that Paul “always went stubborn when anyone (including me) told him what to do; you could ask him, maybe persuade him, but you couldn’t tell him.… He doesn’t side-step the challenge, but goes right in, swinging.” But being stubborn in defense of one’s rights was neither “oversensitive” nor “neurotic”—unless one wanted to argue that an uncompromising insistence on equality was in itself a symptom of “disturbance” (would one then include as “neurotic” Gandhi and Nehru because of their intransigent fight for Indian independence against the British?). Perhaps, Essie suggested, it was time for a hard look at the assumptions of the current crop of black leaders in America. None of them pretended that “Negroes are satisfied with their present situation in the U.S.A.… that they like being lynched, attacked, abused … that they like being unjustly treated in our courts … that they like being segregated and discriminated against.… What, then, do these Negro leaders say?” They don’t dare claim, she went on, that Russia is responsible for the discrimination against blacks in the United States; instead they “go out of their way to insist that American democracy, with all its faults, is the best there is and therefore we must all fight if need be die for it. Since most of the faults and few of the benefits of this democracy apply directly to Negroes, these Leaders find themselves in the very strange position of insisting that Negroes fight and die for the faults of our democracy. Paul Robeson is far too clear-sighted … to be maneuvered … into such a position. He is fighting the faults of our democracy. That’s what all the fuss is about.” Ebony declined to publish Essie’s rebuttal; it finally appeared in the sympathetic black newspaper the California Eagle.34
White’s article was all the more effective because, unlike most black leaders, he had not previously participated in a direct personal assault on Robeson. Those who had led the earlier attacks, like Roy Wilkins, continued to do their bit to fan the accumulating animosity. When a New Jersey doctor wrote Wilkins asking if the written record proved that Robeson was a Communist, Wilkins replied, “Mr. Robeson is known far and wide as a Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party.… He is one of the few American Negroes who has been permitted behind the Iron Curtain and received enthusiasm [sic] in Moscow.” For two consecutive months, November and December 1951, the NAACP’s official organ, The Crisis, printed savage Cold War articles. The first, “Paul Robeson—the Lost Shepherd,” signed “Robert Alan”—purportedly “the pen name of a well known New York journalist” (Paul Robeson, Jr., believes it was Earl Brown)—directly attacked Robeson as a “Kremlin Stooge” who “spouts Communist propaganda as wildly as Vishinsky.” The second (“Stalin’s Greatest Defeat”), under Roy Wilkins’s own byline, denounced the CPUSA in terms comparable to those disseminated by the FBI: “The latest tactic of the party is infiltration into established organizations. Having failed under its own name, it seeks to operate under other labels, but in this it has been soundly rebuffed, particularly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a prime target of party strategists.…”35
In that same month of December 1951, the New York Amsterdam News listed previous winners of the NAACP’s coveted Spingarn Medal and omitted Robeson’s name (he had won in 1945). Soon after that, Don Newcombe, the black Dodger pitcher, nearly came to blows with Robeson at the Red Rooster Tavern in Harlem. A woman in Robeson’s party recognized Newcombe and asked Robeson to go over to his table to get his autograph for her. According to newspaper accounts, Newcombe was blunt and rude, and when Robeson tried to smooth things over, Newcombe purportedly shouted, “I’m joining the Army to fight people like you.” At that Robeson lost his temper, and the two men had to be separated by bystanders. In response to one of the newspaper accounts, Essie posed a series of rhetorical questions: “Does [Newcombe] think Robeson is responsible for having kept him and Campanella and Robinson out of big league baseball for so many years? Does he think Robeson is responsible for making him and the majority of the Negro people live under segregation and discrimination and persecution?” “All I can say,” she went on, “is Don Newcombe had better begin to talk and think for himself, if he ever wants to be more than a pitcher.” W. E. B. Du Bois had a more succinct response to the general assault on Robeson: “The only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great faith in human beings.”36
On April 9, 1951, messages of greeting arrived from around the world for Robeson’s fifty-third birthday. A few even arrived from the United States. But more emblematic of his country’s regard was notification that Federal Judge Walter N. Bastian had upheld the State Department and dismissed Robeson’s suit for the return of his passport. His lawyers immediately filed a notice of appeal; the next round in the protracted fight was not to come up for some five months.37
For a man with restricted travel rights, Robeson managed to keep exceedingly busy. He spoke in behalf of the Harlem Trade Union Council, participated in several peace crusades to the capital, attended numerous rallies, and helped organize appeals relating to the Willie McGee and Martinsville Seven cases (the latest in a lengthy series of legal outrages against blacks). He spoke at celebrations in honor of William Patterson’s sixtieth and William Z. Foster’s seventieth birthdays, and at the release from prison of three of the Hollywood Ten (John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, and Albert Maltz); and he gave the eulogy at the funeral of the ancient agitator herself, Mother Bloor. On May 5 Robeson celebrated a different event—the birth of a grandchild, David Paul Robeson. In June the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act convictions. Four of the eleven CPUSA leaders immediately went underground, and without delay the government inaugurated a drive against second-echelon Party officials. On June 20 a federal grand jury in New York returned Smith Act indictments against an additional twenty-one CP leaders, seventeen of whom were arrested. The daily press debated whether the administration planned prosecutions in the thousands, or merely the hundreds.38
Robeson declared himself “one hundred percent on the side of the condemned and arrested leaders.” At the mammoth Chicago Peace Congress at the end of June, he spoke out forcefully against the threat to civil liberties: “The First Amendment today lies temporarily gutted as a result of the validation of the Smith Act and the jailing of the Communist dissenters from American foreign policy. No other dissenter, whatever his politics, can feel safe in the exercise of the historic American right to criticize and complain so long as the Smith Act stands on the statute book and the Supreme Court decision remains unreversed.” Chatman C. Wailes, one of the young black organizers for the Chicago rally, was present in the lobby of the Persian Hotel when the jazz musician Charlie Parker spotted Robeson and went up to him. “I just wanted to shake your hand,” Wailes heard Parker say. “You’re a great man.”39
In Robeson’s mind, the domestic civil-liberties issue was inescapably linked to the international question of peace. He saw repression at home as a direct consequence of a pathological fear of the Soviet Union. “We affirm the undeniable fact,” he argued, “that the American people can live side by side with many different ways of life to achieve higher standards of living and eventual freedom for all.” He applauded the resolution introduced by Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson for an end to the Korean War as a first step in detoxifying Soviet-American relations, and unfavorably contrasted the warm reception Jacob Malik, U.S.S.R. representative to the UN, had given him in his capacity as a representative of the World Peace Council, with the blanket refusal of Warren Austin, chief U.S. delegate to the UN, even to receive him. Robeson released to the press a letter of protest he sent Austin in which, among other sharp remarks, he lectured him on the United Nations: “far from representing the hopes and aspirations of the greater portion of mankind, [it] just remains what it has tended recently to become—the parroting whisper of powerful American corporate interests which many officials in positions of public trust happen to represent.”40
Nonetheless, Robeson and other militant black leaders decided to turn to the United Nations to protest the recent rigged trial of Willie McGee, the case of the Martinsville Seven, and the conviction of the Trenton Six as confirmation of the institutionalized oppression of blacks in the United States. William Patterson spearheaded the drive to present a formal petition—“We Charge Genocide”—to the UN as a means for publicizing the terrible toll of racism in the United States. A number of prominent blacks—including Bishop W. J. Walls of Chicago, Reverend Charles A. Hill of Detroit, Du Bois, Charlotta Bass, Ben Davis, Jr., and Mary Church Terrell—supported the petition, but white liberals refused to endorse it. They, along with the established black leadership, balked at the petition’s “exaggeration,” its equation of official violence against blacks with a systematic governmental decision to wipe them out; institutionalized oppression, they argued, was not the same as institutionalized murder, though the one could sometimes spill over into the other. Robeson dismissed this distinction as a semantic one, and spent long hours with Patterson drawing up the UN petition. They insisted that their use of the term “genocide” was sanctioned by the United Nations’ own definition of the term, as established in its Genocide Convention (which in 1951 remained unratified by the U.S. government). The UN definition had gone beyond the usual understanding of genocide as referring to state-sanctioned mass murder to emphasize instead the doing of “serious bodily and mental harm” to individual members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. In its final form, the Patterson-Robeson petition went beyond even this elastic definition to embrace what it called “economic genocide,” the “silent, cruel killer” that reaped its harvest from the deprivations of daily life. In mid-December the two men presented the petition simultaneously: Robeson to the UN Secretariat in New York, Patterson to the UN General Assembly in Paris. Both were formally received—and informally circumvented; the United States successfully used its influence behind the scenes to prevent the Human Rights Commission of the UN from discussing the genocide charge.41
Robeson’s defiant words and actions continued to find far more response outside the United States. Word came from Bombay that he had been enthusiastically applauded in absentia at the All-India Peace Convention; from Paris that his was one of four huge pictures (FDR, Abraham Lincoln, and CP leader Eugene Dennis were the other three) carried by the crowd in the Bastille Day parade; from London offering a concert tour; from Aberdeen asking him to stand for election as rector of the university. (In responding to one of the Aberdeen students who had expressed concern that Robeson might misinterpret the invitation as support for Communism rather than, as intended, a protest against political persecution, Robeson repeated the theme he had already sounded several times in public that “the essence of my world outlook is that it is entirely possible for men and women of different political viewpoints to join hands in the common search for peace, equality and freedom.”) At home his reputation was faring far less well. Some union halls and some black churches continued to keep open their doors, but the announcement of his appearance in an American city now routinely produced a wave of opposition. The Harvard Dramatic Club delighted in sending him an invitation to play in Othello, but a letter more typical of the climate of fear came from a white former supporter who now suggested “you refrain in the future from contacting me.”42
The State Department moved to close down still further Robeson’s access to his foreign fans. Receiving word that he planned to give a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, in late January 1952, under the auspices of the United Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, the State Department took steps to prevent Robeson from leaving U.S. soil. The means for doing so were not obvious. No U.S. citizen needed a passport to travel to and from Canada, so access for Robeson could not be denied on those grounds. Nor could reliance be placed on Canadian Immigration to prevent his crossing over the border from Seattle to Vancouver: the Canadian authorities disclaimed any authority to inhibit such passage. And so the State Department fell back on legislation originally passed during World War I and amended during World War II allowing the U.S. government—“during the existence of the national emergency”—to prevent the entry or departure of its citizens. State notified U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in the Vancouver area to prevent Robeson from leaving U.S. soil. Instructions were also given to detain Vincent Hallinan, who had been scheduled to appear on the platform with Robeson at the Mine, Mill convention. Hallinan was defense counsel for longshoremen’s union leader Harry Bridges (currently appealing a perjury conviction that Robeson had protested); he was also the future standard-bearer of the Progressive Party in the 1952 election.43
Hallinan was removed from a Great Northern passenger train en route to Vancouver. Two hours later Robeson arrived by car at Blaine, Washington—the crossover town at the border—and was stopped by INS officials, who told the press that the action was taken on authority of the State Department. Hallinan boarded a southbound train after angrily accusing the immigration officers of “false arrest.” Robeson courteously accepted the ruling and returned to Seattle. When a delegation from the miners’ union protested to the U.S. Consul General, the official told them it was pointless to discuss the case, since redress, if any, lay in Washington. The miners, in consultation with Robeson, hit upon a more satisfying way to register their indignation.44
Through the device of a long-distance telephone hookup relayed to the public-address system, Robeson sang and spoke for seventeen minutes the following day directly from the Marine Cooks and Stewards Hall in Seattle to the miners’ convention, two thousand strong, in Vancouver. He began by singing “Joe Hill”—the song about the Western Federation of Miners’ organizer framed on a murder charge in Utah in 1915—and ended with a stirring speech. The government, Robeson told the miners, seemed determined to keep him in “a sort of domestic house arrest and confinement” because of his “passionate devotion to the full liberation of the black and brown peoples” of the world, and because of his insistence, toward that end, that the Western powers stop devoting their energies to preparations for war and try recommitting them to the notion that “all peoples can live in peace and friendly coexistence.” He emphasized that in his view the INS move had been “an act of the U.S. administration, not of the American people.” In response, the convention approved the suggestion of militant union leader Harvey Murphy that an across-the-border Robeson concert at the “Peace Arch” be arranged for that spring, and unanimously passed a resolution condemning the action of the State Department. The lack of a dissenting vote, Murphy announced—to a roar of laughter—meant that the representatives of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI who were present were in support of the resolution.45
The Peace Arch concert did take place, as planned, in May, but not without considerable effort. From New York, the Freedom Family (as the associates of the publication affectionately called themselves) worked hard to arrange the Vancouver concert as the centerpiece for a two-month Robeson tour designed to bring in revenue for the United Freedom Fund—a joint endeavor for the newspaper, CAA, NNLC, and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. But neither the engagements nor the revenue proved easy to come by. The group started its work without a penny, and was able to begin planning for the tour only after borrowing a thousand dollars from Freedom newspaper, itself desperate for money. That was only the initial hurdle. It remained to be seen whether people—even progressives—would run the risks of political ostracism and possible physical injury by coming out to hear Robeson sing.
The most successful single stop on the tour, from both a political and a financial point of view, was at the Peace Arch itself—largely because of the response from the Canadian side of the border. Thanks to the efforts of the Mine, Mill trade-unionists, twenty-five to thirty thousand Canadians turned up on the Vancouver side for the concert; no more than five thousand mobilized on the American side (the American press estimated total attendance at five thousand; the Canadian press put the figure seven times higher). The FBI, predictably, was also there. While the Border Patrol took license-plate numbers, FBI agents filmed and photographed the event itself. Nonetheless, there were no incidents, and the sponsors laid plans for making the Peace Arch concert an annual event.46
Seattle, the next stop, proved an altogether more complicated affair. Robeson’s experience in that city in mid-May 1952 illustrates, in microcosm, the specific difficulties he encountered throughout the tour, the sources of support and opposition generated by his presence, and the general state of his reputation at the time.
In Seattle, as everywhere else on the tour, the groundwork was done by the Freedom staff in New York—Louis Burnham; the newspaper’s general manager, George B. Murphy, Jr.; and its business manager, Bert Alves—in combination with local sponsoring groups, pre-eminently left-wing unions and black churches. In Seattle, Terry Pettus, head of the Northwestern Bureau of People’s World, the militant (the FBI said “Communist”) newspaper, was the key coordinating figure. A month before Robeson’s scheduled arrival, Pettus reported glumly to the Freedom people in New York that the city authorities had abruptly canceled their agreement to lease the civic auditorium for Robeson’s concert on the grounds that it would “tend to cause antagonism to the Negro race.” The Freedom staff responded with a double-pronged plan for counterattack: initiate court action and mobilize the local black community.47
The Seattle organizers did precisely that. They sent out special-delivery letters to leaders of black clubs, churches, and political organizations stressing the importance of giving the lie “to the white supremacy statement of the city officials” that Robeson’s appearance would create racial antagonism; and, for shrewdly calculated extra effect, they enclosed a recent editorial on Robeson and Du Bois from the Star of Zion, official organ of the A.M.E. Zion Church, praising the struggle of the two men in behalf of black people. Simultaneously, Pettus and the other organizers filed for a court injunction to prevent the city from canceling the contract for the civic auditorium. In New York, the Freedom staff got busy on its own phones, enlisting support from Coleman Young and the National Negro Labor Council in Detroit, Reverend Charles Hill, and black newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass.48
The combined efforts paid off. Though attorneys for the city scoured the black community, they were able to persuade only one person—a black police officer—to testify that Robeson was held in low esteem. According to a newspaper account, the officer appeared “obviously embarrassed” on the stand and let it be known that he had been called out of bed to testify that morning by the white officer who headed the local “red squad.” A number of Seattle’s black leaders—Vincent Davis, Lester Catlett, and James McDaniels—followed the officer on the stand and, contradicting his view, described Robeson as “recognized and loved by the overwhelming majority of the Negro people because of his consistent fight for full equality, political and economic, for his people.” When asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Catlett scornfully refused to answer: “We don’t ask people their political affiliation. I don’t know yours.…” In reference to the same issue, McDaniels responded, “I have heard more about that in this courtroom the past two days than I have heard among my people the past 20 years.” At the end of the three-day hearing, it was ruled that the city had failed to prove that Robeson’s appearance would engender racial antagonism. The judge instructed that the civic auditorium be made available for the concert.49
The moral victory did not translate into a financial one. Seventeen hundred people paid admission to the concert, and there was no disturbance of any kind, but the organizers had hoped for an attendance of twenty-five hundred. When expenses were paid, only $250 was left over for the Freedom Fund. Worse, there were local reprisals. Within three days of the concert, Jack Kinzell, one of its white organizers, was let go from his job as a popular radio announcer at station KIRO, and Vincent Davis, who had defended Robeson on the stand, was fired from his department-store job on direct order from management headquarters in New York.50
The events in Seattle set the tone for much of what followed on the rest of the tour. San Francisco, the next stop, was nearly an exact replay. Mayor Elmer E. Robinson had said he would refuse to let Robeson sing in the Opera House because he “has seen fit to vilify the United States of America at Communist sponsored gatherings at home and abroad.” The Oakland authorities simultaneously denied Robeson the use of Oak Auditorium—a facility opened to the fascist leader Gerald L. K. Smith that same month. Again, the local citizenry came to the rescue. Bill Chester, regional director of the longshoremen’s union, led the fight, with the black leadership taking a strong stand in support of Robeson—Chester reported to New York that 98 percent of the black community stood behind him—while in Berkeley twelve hundred people turned out for a town meeting that voted by a margin of four to one in favor of Robeson’s appearance. As a result, he gave two concerts in the area—one at the largest black-owned church hall—which together drew more than five thousand people.51
The rest of the tour—some fifteen cities in all—saw a repetition of official harassment, but not of aroused local support for Robeson’s appearance. In St. Louis a black minister withdrew his Prince of Peace Baptist Church as the site for Robeson’s concert after city officials warned him that “vandals” would be likely to wreck the church in reprisal. In Milwaukee the black churches stood firm, but their audiences did not, despite a house-to-house canvass for ticket sales. The tepid response perhaps accounted for the particular tone and emphasis of the speech Robeson gave that night: he pointed out that if he was indeed a Communist he would have been hauled before a congressional committee or a court long since, and he emphasized that, although he admired the Soviet Union for its support of minority rights, “the real core of my fight is not political but is based on … sympathy for my people and for all colored people of the world.… The only thing we must concern ourselves with is Negro liberation.” At the University of Minnesota the Young Progressives organization took up sponsorship of his concert and initially obtained approval from the authorities, but after the tickets were already printed President Morrill denounced Robeson as “an embittered anti-American, anti-democratic propagandist” and the university revoked its approval. In Pittsburgh the authorities outdid themselves in efforts to intimidate potential Robeson supporters: they condemned the concert building as unsafe and then, for good measure, prohibited “mixed occupancy.” The local sponsors repaired an exit door and a fire escape, thus permitting the concert to take place, but two FBI agents took motion pictures of the arrivals from an adjoining apartment. Not surprisingly, only 350 people turned up. Even a public celebration of Robeson’s fifty-fourth birthday had to be canceled after New York City’s Manhattan Center broke an oral agreement to rent its hall.52
When receipts were tallied at the end of the tour, the United Freedom Fund had grossed a little under fifteen hundred dollars. The sum was so small that the four cooperating organizations voted to put it toward organizing a possible 1952–53 tour instead of dividing the proceeds, contenting themselves for the moment with the notion that “politically and culturally” the tour, in reaching some seventy-five thousand people, had been a success. Robeson himself had averaged a three-hundred-dollar fee per concert—as compared with the two thousand dollars he had once commanded—but even that money he tried to turn over to Freedom. The tough-minded Bob Rockmore placed himself squarely in the path of Robeson’s magnanimity and for Robeson’s own good. Though recording royalties and investments continued to bring in substantial sums—Robeson’s income never fell to a level of serious hardship—he no longer had the extra cash to support his many generosities.53