Confinement
(1952–1954)
Following the close of his tour, Robeson turned full attention to the 1952 Progressive Party campaign for the presidency, speaking widely in behalf of its national ticket. It was an unpropitious time for a left-wing campaign: “subversion” had become a national preoccupation. The Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate, and when Truman dismissed General MacArthur rather than yield to his call for escalating American military commitments, Senator McCarthy loudly blamed the “Communists” for having led a “smear campaign” against the general. In McCarthy’s view—and the polls showed him strongly supported in the country—the continuing indictments of second-level Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act would not be sufficient to expose and contain the enormity of the Red Menace. His pursuit of the Asian expert Owen Lattimore as Alger Hiss’s “boss,” though fantasy, proved an effective headline-grabber; and when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and charged with conspiracy to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets, the ensuing hysteria in the country finally seemed a match for McCarthy’s own inflamed imagination. There were air-raid drills in the urban centers and calls in Congress for a preventive first strike against Russia (an option seriously considered for a time as realistic). Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, was thought by some to be quietly antagonistic to McCarthy’s wilder tactics, but the force of public opinion seemed so strongly mobilized behind the Senator that Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate and a purported liberal, began moving to the right, announcing support for the Smith Act convictions, for loyalty programs, and for the firing of “Communist” teachers.1
Tweedledum and Tweedledee: in Robeson’s view the two national candidates and their parties were near-carbon copies of reaction. He and Essie attended the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in July, she as a delegate from Connecticut and a member of the platform committee, he as one of the Party’s national leaders and a member of the nominating committee which chose Vincent Hallinan for president and Charlotta Bass for vice-president. Both Essie and Paul went on to play active roles in the campaign, Paul going as far as California to participate in a Culver City Stadium rally that drew ten thousand. During one California stop, Charlotta Bass, who was lighter-skinned than Robeson, was asked by an audience member, “Why don’t you look like Paul?” “Honey,” Mrs. Bass replied, “I should, but I’ve been tampered with.” Robeson’s appearances rarely produced so lighthearted a note. Local opposition to him from veterans’ groups surfaced frequently, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they attempted to get a court injunction to prevent him from speaking in public. Everywhere he went Robeson told audiences that 1952 “has been a fateful year” and, for black people particularly, “one of gathering crisis,” epitomized by the all-white jury in North Carolina that had tried the black tenant farmer Mack Ingram for “leering” at a white woman dressed in men’s clothes and standing seventy-five feet away: “The United States,” Robeson commented, “is certainly making a unique contribution to the jurisprudence of the so-called ‘free’ nations of the West.”2
In Cleveland, speaking to the National Negro Labor Council and deliberately echoing yet again the words ascribed to him at Paris in 1949, he asked whether black youths should “join with British soldiers in shooting down the brave peoples of Kenya” or in firing on the crowds in South Africa currently engaged in a civil-disobedience campaign. Of course not, Robeson replied: “I say again, the proper battlefield for our youth and for all fighters for a decent life is here … where the walls of Jim Crow still stand and need somebody to tear them down.” Despite his starkly spoken opposition to the reactionary drift in American life, Robeson was still occasionally able to strike a hopeful note: he told his audiences that, although the Republican and Democratic conventions had evaded civil-rights planks, the issue had at least moved toward the center of the nation’s attention.3
But that hopefulness found scant confirmation in the election results. In a record-breaking turnout, Eisenhower won a landslide victory, while the Progressive ticket polled an abysmal nationwide total of under two hundred thousand votes—about a fifth of their minuscule count in 1948. Meeting for a postelection rehash, the Progressive Party national committee (of which Essie was a member) managed to find a ray of hope in the outcome of some state contests—in Corliss Lamont’s receiving nearly a hundred thousand votes on the Progressive line in his New York run for the Senate, and in the trailing of McCarthy’s vote in Wisconsin behind Eisenhower’s. But this was a desperate clutching at straws. The Progressives had suffered a crushing rejection at the polls, and the Party never again ran a national ticket (or many local ones).4
A month after the election, Moscow announced that Paul Robeson was one of seven recipients—and the only American—of the 1952 International Stalin Peace Prizes. Established three years earlier in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday and carrying an award of a gold medal and a hundred thousand rubles (about twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars), the prizes had been established as a kind of counter-Nobel, to honor citizens of any country of the world for outstanding service in “the struggle against war”; Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pietro Nenni, and Jorge Amado had been among its distinguished previous recipients. The award carried the mark of great prestige among Communists—Stalin had not yet been revealed to them as a mass killer—and the mark of enduring infamy among anti-Communists. The reaction to Robeson’s designation as a Stalin Prize medalist varied according to one’s allegiance. Rockwell Kent telegraphed him, “In you, Paul, we greet a hero.” Oppositely, José Ferrer, who had had his own trouble with the “red” label, told the press that in accepting the award Robeson would do “irreparable harm” to his race. The right-wing columnist George Sokolsky applauded Ferrer for having “served his country well” by “pinpointing” Robeson’s “unforgiveable sins against his native land.”5
In accepting the prize, Robeson told the press he did so “not merely as an individual, but as a part of the growing peace movement in the United States, a peace movement that has been honored by the leadership of the great scholar, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois.” As Robeson had already said during a speech at Reverend Charles Hill’s Hartford Avenue Baptist Church in Detroit, “I’m very proud that somewhere people understood that I’m struggling for peace, and that I shall continue to do [so].” He announced that he would again apply for a passport in order to be able to receive the prize in person. The State Department, in turn, announced—within a week—that Robeson’s application was denied. “We see nothing to indicate,” a spokesman said, that Robeson’s “attitude has changed.” The Passport Division also notified him, with no hint of irony, that its reluctance to sanction American citizens’ visits to the Soviet Union was based on an inability “to assure them in that country the degree of protection which it likes to afford to American citizens traveling abroad.”6
The State Department was accurate in one particular: Robeson’s “attitude” had not changed. His whole point was that the right to a passport did not and should not hinge on a citizen’s politics. Under the Constitution, “attitudes” were not actionable; they were instead at the core of the country’s protected heritage of free speech. The government’s case rested on dubious interpretations of the President’s war powers, the Secretary of State’s discretionary power in issuing passports, and the actual state of the current “national emergency.” Not only were the State Department’s justifying arguments cloudy, but its underlying racist animus was revealed with startling clarity in a footnote to one of the briefs it used when arguing the Robeson case before the Court of Appeals in March 1952: “…he has been for years extremely active politically in behalf of independence of the colonial peoples of Africa. Though this may be a highly laudable aim, the diplomatic embarrassment that could arise from the presence abroad of such a political meddler, traveling under the protection of an American passport, is easily imaginable.” The State Department was apparently admitting, however inadvertently, that advocating the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa was not in the best interests of the United States—a revelation reported in the Daily Worker and in Freedom, but ignored by the national press.7
Two months later, Joseph Stalin was dead. The new leaders in the Kremlin soon began speaking openly of détente with the West, a possibility heightened by Eisenhower’s nomination of Chip Bohlen, a known proponent of “peaceful coexistence,” to the ambassadorial post in Moscow—a nomination fought fiercely by Senator McCarthy. When an armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953 officially ended hostilities there, another element for the easing of Cold War tensions fell into place. But an actual thaw was still in the future, as the execution of the Rosenbergs in June 1953 pointedly illustrated. Robeson had worked hard for the commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence, telling one rally, “My people are not strangers to frameups—they know what to expect from the courts of this land.” He called upon those present to work for “the possibility of restoring to the American people their social sanity, their democratic bearings, their dedication to justice and due process.”8
Thwarted politically and circumscribed artistically, Robeson relied more and more during the fifties on his restorative relationship with Sam and Helen Rosen. At their apartment in New York City, and more especially at their house in Katonah, he found with the Rosens a needed family atmosphere of deep bonds of affection and congeniality, a respite from political tensions, a chance to relax. He talked sports for hours with Sam, taught the Rosens’ son John football plays on the rug, and sang while their daughter Judy accompanied him on the living-room piano. He would curl up for hours reading or studying Chinese calligraphy, taking time out to consume mammoth portions of chocolate ice cream and peanut brittle. Mornings—which for Paul usually started at noon—he would beguile Odessa, the housekeeper, into making him pancakes, plus biscuits with honey, while she was trying to plan lunch. He was an astonishing eater. He and Sam would have “corn races,” demolishing two dozen ears of Wallace Hybrid (developed by the former Progressive Party candidate) during its August glory; Paul invariably won, and Sam invariably accused him of cheating by not finishing each ear. At 2:00 a.m., or 4:00 a.m., Paul would coax Helen into cooking him a hamburger or fried eggs over lightly—“You know,” he’d say, laughing, “not hardly.”9
Paul disliked cold weather, and in wintertime Helen would manage to find him a size 12½ snow boot and an extra-large lumber jacket; he would then tramp happily through the clean country snow, tossing snowballs at family members who mockingly protested his “professional” throwing arm. Summers, Helen would try to teach him to swim in the pond. He was always a bit frightened of the water, even after she bought him a size 50 life jacket and a pair of water wings besides—“we used to launch him,” Helen remembers. She remembers, too, that he preferred to walk with her in the secluded stand of large fir trees right near the house. They were always careful, but when they were alone in the woods he would put his head on her lap and drowsily sing her favorite, “The Riddle Song.” During their quiet talks, the political issues that concerned them both often came up, as they conjured images of a world without bigotry and war, and Paul would say—“It will be, it must be.” When they were sitting among the sweet pines, everything still seemed possible.10
His own son, Paul, Jr., had been having a difficult time professionally. Though he had graduated in engineering from Cornell in the top 10 percent of his class, he had found himself blocked from employment opportunities in his field. A number of firms, including GE and Westing-house, gave him interviews, but none followed through. He finally landed a job with a physics lab in Long Island City, but the next day the FBI was on the phone to the prospective employer, warning that the firm would lose defense contracts if it hired him. For several years, he taught electronics at private technical schools, and then became a free-lance translator of Russian scientific journals. Despite Paul, Jr.’s restricted opportunities, he does not describe himself as “suffering greatly” in those years: he was a happily married family man, with his second child, Susan, born in 1953, and was deeply engaged with his CP organizing activities in Harlem.11
For two of those years, 1953–55, Paul, Jr., ran Othello Recording Company, which he and Lloyd Brown set up to provide an artistic outlet for his father after professional recording studios closed their doors to him. For want of any other available space, one of the recording sessions was held in the Rosens’ New York apartment, with their daughter Judy accompanying on the piano (alternating with a professional accompanist, Alan Booth). The walls were hung with rugs to muffle outside noise, and the “boy genius” in the apartment next door—who invariably began practicing his piano every time they got ready to record—was eventually silenced after Helen made a diplomatic appeal to his parents.12
The first of the three albums Robeson made with the Othello Recording Company, Robeson Sings, was the only one recorded in a commercial studio. Performed with orchestra and chorus, based on arrangements by Don Redmond, it had a slick sound throughout which made it musically undistinguished. Still, the album sold well. Released in December 1952 and publicized through small ads in the left-wing press, the record within four months sold some five thousand copies at five dollars each. That brought Robeson a net royalty (computed at 15 percent) of about four thousand dollars, hardly a munificent sum for a man who at the height of his fame had earned that amount of money in two nights of singing. Fortunately, Bob Rockmore’s shrewd investments continued to provide Robeson with a comfortable if diminished income. Without Rockmore’s loyal services Robeson would have suffered severe financial stringency, since by 1953 new opportunities for him to earn money from singing or acting had evaporated.13
In June 1953 he set off on a second tour to benefit Freedom Associates, but overall it failed to meet even the moderate expectations of the previous year. It was decided this time to aim his appearances more than previously at the black community (“not artificially excluding the white community, but the balance must be on our side rather than the other way around,” wrote one Freedom staff member). But resources in the black community were limited, and the reservoir of good will toward Robeson, while profound, was neither inexhaustible nor uncontested. The central Washington office of the NAACP threatened its Oberlin chapter with the removal of its charter if it sponsored Robeson in a concert (when he heard about that decision six years later, Robeson said with a grim smile, “Yes, those were the people who did the final hatchet job on me”). “The Negro masses love him,” Bert Alves of Freedom wrote to John Gray, another staff member. “The Negro middle class admire him but are fearful of his hold on the masses,” and frightened that “the disapproval of white leaders will injure the special position of leadership and privilege these middle class folk enjoy.” The black paper the San Francisco Sun agreed: “The working class Negro feels that Robeson says the things which they would like to say.” He had, Stretch Johnson adds, “a Teflon coating in the black community.”14
The coating was thinnest, though, among the black bourgeoisie. Aaron Wells (who became Robeson’s doctor in 1955) remembers an evening in 1950 when he invited a few of his Harlem neighbors in the Riverton Apartments to meet Paul: “One happened to have been a banker; the other was a prominent lawyer. I’ll never forget how they rode me the next day—‘How dare you invite us to your home when Paul Robeson is there?’” (Many whites, of course, including some who called themselves political radicals, were afraid to be in Robeson’s company. Helen Rosen recalls that Lillian Hellman upbraided her fiercely for having Paul as a fellow dinner guest, insisting his presence put them all in danger since the FBI was known to be following his movements.) A few years later Wells went with Robeson to a meeting on St. Nicholas Avenue of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity of which they were both members. Several of those present reproved Robeson to his face for “not having been with us when you were at the height of your career,” and one lawyer (later a federal judge) openly attacked him on the issue of Communism. Robeson simply responded (as Wells recalls his words), “You know, brothers, you are really hitting at the wrong enemy. I am not your enemy. You’re hitting in the wrong direction.”15
The churchgoing black masses were not automatically put off—as so many white churchgoers were—by accusations that Robeson was a “godless” Communist. He didn’t sound godless. He personified the spirituals in his music, and nothing about his presence when he sang them suggested an antireligious man. Nobody who didn’t “have God in him” could sing “Deep River” the way Robeson sang it; even if he himself didn’t know it, or consciously denied it, he “had God in him.” But in fact he didn’t deny it. His own family—with both his father and his brother Ben pastors of A.M.E. Zion—gave him impeccable credentials in the black church, and Robeson himself had turned to it in times of trouble. If he never showed any particular devotion to the institutional church or the literal pronouncements of Scripture, he never expressed even the remotest allegiance to “materialistic atheism.” If he was not a religious man in any formalistic sense, he was nonetheless an intensely spiritual one, convinced that some “higher force” watched over him, and drew fundamental strength from a deep cultural identification with his people and their religion.
Even if Robeson was a “communist” with a small “c,” believing in a society where a larger number of people could share in its opportunities and rewards, he was no “subversive.” Blacks were well aware that if there had been any proof he was a “Communist” with a capital “C”—a registered member of the Party—J. Edgar Hoover would have long since had him hauled into court under the Smith Act. To the average black churchgoer, working for civil rights was an integral and proper part of the church’s business. The black church had been in the forefront of the freedom struggle from its inception, and it was assumed that the church was a natural recruiting ground and fount of strength for that kind of political work in the world. Robeson was seen primarily as a champion of black rights—not as the agent of a foreign power—and to that large extent it was not doubted that he was a proper church person. “We are convinced,” the black Methodist minister Reverend Edward D. McGowan said in a 1953 speech before the National Fraternal Council of Churches, “that we must come to the defense of all Negro leaders who are attacked. We will not succumb to the enemies of the Negro people who would divide us by name calling and smear tactics. For we know that a better life for our people will not be achieved by a divided people. And so … I will come to my own conclusions about Paul Robeson—no one else can tell me what I must think or believe about this great leader of the Negro people.”16
This is not to say that every black church automatically opened its doors to Robeson; those dominated by the black bourgeoisie, or its values, were not receptive; nor were those closely identified with a politically ambitious and self-protective minister—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., for example, never invited Robeson to his influential Harlem church. Yet the basic contrast holds. When Robeson appeared in the black churches of Detroit in 1953, the enthusiastic response suggested a revival meeting rather than the stiff atmosphere of a concert. But when he appeared for the second annual Peace Arch concert in Blaine, Washington, an essentially “white” event, he drew only half the crowd he had the preceding year—and almost all of that from the Canadian side of the border. Yet his defiance was not dampened: “I want everybody in the range of my voice to hear, official or otherwise, that there is no force on earth that will make me go backward one-thousandth part [of] one little inch.”17
While in Seattle as part of his tour, Robeson took the occasion (duly noted by FBI agents) to put in a public appearance at the U.S. Federal Court. Six defendants—including Terry Pettus, the editor of People’s World, who had helped to arrange Robeson’s tour the previous year—were on trial under the Smith Act for conspiracy; during recess, Robeson made a point of talking with the defendants, and because one of them was under a contempt citation and not permitted to leave the courtroom, Robeson met with him in the U.S. marshal’s office. It was hardly the first time, of course, that Robeson had insisted on publicly identifying himself with those under federal indictment. From the first round of Smith Act arrests back in 1949, he had played an active role on committees and at rallies to defend the victims and their families. At one point the FBI had even speculated that Essie and Paul had turned their house at Enfield into a secret hideout for CPUSA leaders who had gone underground. An over-zealous neighbor had excited the Justice Department with tales about an unfamiliar Dodge parked near the Robeson home; in the retrospective opinion of the Enfield chief of police, the mystery vehicle more likely belonged to FBI agents themselves; their presence around the Robeson house had become a commonplace.18
The Enfield property was put on the market. Bob Rockmore’s careful management had allowed Robeson to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, but as his income shrank and his legal fees mounted, some belt-tightening did become necessary. For two years Rockmore had been exerting pressure on Essie to put the house up for sale; as he saw the financial picture worsening, he wrote her that “something” had to be done “to get Enfield off Paul’s back.” She dragged her feet for a while: she had loved the house, and it had also served—even if rarely—as the one domestic meeting ground she still shared with Paul. But as his relationship with Helen Rosen deepened in the early fifties, any real domestic life he had was with the Rosens, and he had stopped coming to Enfield altogether. In New York City he based himself at the McGhees’ apartment (where he paid a regular monthly rent) and sometimes stayed at his brother Ben’s parsonage in Harlem. Even after Essie came around to the idea of selling Enfield, it became difficult to get a buyer. It wasn’t until the spring of 1953, after dropping the asking price from thirty-five to twenty-two thousand—with only six thousand down—that Rockmore was able to dispose of the property. Essie tried hard to persuade Paul that they should build a small house in Norwalk, but he gladly deferred to Rockmore’s insistence that such a project would be beyond his means. Just at this time, Ma Goode died, after many years in a Massachusetts rest home. Essie, bereaved and uprooted, reluctantly took up hotel life in New York, while Paul continued to stay with the McGhees and to spend much of his time at the Rosens’.19
Essie’s mind was temporarily taken off her displacement by a summons to appear before McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Committee on July 7, 1953. The Senator had recently “discovered” that the Voice of America and the Overseas Library Program were hotbeds of sedition, and while trampling through those vineyards a McCarthy staff member’s eyes lit upon this statement in Essie’s 1945 book, African Journey: “… the one hopeful light on the horizon … [is] the exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia, where for the first time in history our race problem has been squarely faced and solved.…” Eslanda Robeson was summoned to Washington to explain, if she could, her traitorous words. Short of bagging Robeson himself—and the lack of government evidence had thus far made that impossible—this seemed a delicious prospect for the redbaiters.
But Essie denied them the triumph. Accompanied by her lawyer, Milton H. Friedman, she gave a feisty account of herself, turning the session, if not into the rout she later claimed, nonetheless into an impressive draw. She set a tone of charming belligerence with her very first response on the stand: “You are Mrs. Paul Robeson, is that correct?” counselor Roy Cohn asked her. “Yes,” she answered, “and very proud of it, too.” She then surprised the committee by pleading the Fifteenth as well as the First Amendment in refusing to answer whether she was a member of the Communist Party. Witnesses had routinely been citing the First Amendment (and after 1950, the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination), but no one before Essie had called upon the Fifteenth. “The Fifteenth Amendment?” the surprised McCarthy asked. “This solely deals with your right to vote. You cannot refuse to answer questions about a conspiracy to destroy this nation because you have the right to vote.… Before this committee we do not have Negroes or whites.… We have American citizens. They all have the same rights.…” He repeated his standard warning that witnesses would be cited for contempt if they based their refusal to answer a question on any grounds other than selfincrimination.20
Essie was not intimidated. “I don’t quite understand your statement,” she said, “that we are all American citizens.… I am a second class citizen now, as a Negro. That is the reason I claim this fifteenth amendment. I would be very happy if we didn’t have to discuss race, and I hope we will at some point get to a place where we don’t have to. But in the meantime you are white and I am Negro and this is a very white committee and I feel I must protect myself. I am sorry it is necessary.” “The only person who has been discussing race today is yourself,” McCarthy shot back. Senator Symington tried to inject a conciliatory note: “Would you be more willing to answer questions with respect to Communism and the possibility of your being a Communist, if you were more satisfied with your position in this country as a Negro?” Essie did not bend: “The reason I refuse to answer the question is because I think that … my opinions are my private personal affair.…” But did not the government, Symington persisted, “have a right to ask you whether you are dedicated to an organization which in turn is dedicated to overthrowing the American government by force and violence?” Essie refused to bite: “I don’t know anybody that is dedicated to overthrowing the government by force and violence. The only force and violence I know is what I have experienced and seen in this country, and it has not been by Communists.”
McCarthy then defended his all-white committee on the grounds that the people had not chosen to elect any black senators, a sloppy argument that Essie punctured by pointing out that most blacks lived in the South, where they were commonly denied the right to vote. When he tried to trap her into telling whether she had ever attended Communist cell meetings, Essie insouciantly asked him to define what a cell was; when he shifted to the word “unit,” she professed not to know what a unit was either. McCarthy remained polite, perhaps even impressed. He pronounced Essie “very charming” and “intelligent.” “I am not going to order you to answer those questions and cite you for contempt.… You are getting special consideration today.… I do not propose to argue with a lady.” Essie thanked him, announced she was “a very, very loyal American,” and stepped down from the stand. It was “hilarious,” she wrote Marie Seton, “all sweetness and light, very clear, very respectful and reasonable.” “Paul is VERY pleased, the Children are very proud, and all our friends are simply delighted. So.”21
Paul’s pleasure in Essie’s performance was momentary. As the number of rebuffs continued to mount and as government surveillance intensified, the cracks in his public good spirits, and even in his health, became more discernible. It’s “tough sledding,” he wrote Helen Rosen’s daughter Judy from the road. “Whole weight is thrown against us—in every city, town & hamlet.” He added, though, that when in St. Louis he had gone to the last session of the NAACP convention “and the whole audience recognized me (I also was in the audience) and I was hour & half getting away—signing autographs etc.—Gave top brass (White & Co) a fit.…” To Helen Rosen he wrote, “I miss you terribly. Miss the quiet and sweet-warm response of chatting about this & that—of reading as a kind of lovely communion—of philosophizing—and the ever recurrent theme of life and being.… I have grown to love you ever so deeply.… I have almost no defenses where you are concerned.”22
By late 1953 rejections and disappointments were arriving in bunches. Invitations from England to perform Othello and from Wales to sing at the Eisteddfod festival—as well as a host of additional requests for overseas appearances at peace conferences and political events—had to be turned down for lack of a passport. At home, the governing board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music refused to honor its contract with ASP (National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions) for a cultural festival when it learned that Robeson would be participating—his presence would create a “danger of disorder.” At Hartford, Connecticut, he was belatedly allowed to appear onstage—protected by a police detachment of 250 men—only after the local Board of Education had successfully resisted the demand of the City Council to bar the concert. Baited by reporters afterward for “hurting your cause by allying yourself with Communists,” Robeson lashed out in anger: “Is this what you want?” he asked them, pretending to bend at the waist. “For me to bend and bow and shuffle along and be a nice, kindly colored man and say please when I ask for better treatment for my people?—Well, it doesn’t work.”23
The government was determined to scotch the notion that militancy would work, either. The Attorney General put the Council on African Affairs on its list of “Communist-front” organizations and ordered it to appear for a hearing before the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington. The CAA categorically denied the allegation that it was Communist-controlled but acknowledged that in the current climate, where parallelism of ideas was considered a sufficient basis for establishing guilt, it was powerless to exonerate itself: “the only defense we have is to get rid of McCarthyism and the McCarran Act!” That, the Council stressed, was “the prime task of the hour.” But the hour was not at hand. Freedom magazine also began to feel the heat. With subscriptions and revenues declining, Robeson had to extend a personal loan—which his straitened finances could ill afford—to keep the publication going. (For the first three months of 1954, Robeson took only three hundred dollars in artist’s fees from Freedom Associates, even as the Amsterdam News was reporting, “Don’t go feeling sorry for Paul Robeson, he still makes $600 at each left-wing rally he appears at.”) The prolonged, accumulated stress on him began to show. FBI headquarters in Washington received a report from a field agent that Robeson was “suffering from heart trouble.” That specific rumor was unfounded, but Robeson did have to enter a strictly supervised diet program for several weeks in Washington, D.C., to control his ballooning weight. “It’s been really restful,” he wrote Helen Rosen. “I’ve taken off some 18–20 lbs.… I was around 278 when I arrived here. I had no idea.”24
It was the briefest respite. The new year opened with Jet magazine’s republishing a rumor that columnist Cholly Knickerbocker had originated in the conservative Journal-American that Robeson “would like to break with the Communist Party, but is being hindered by his wife and his son.” A year earlier a “confidential informant” had supplied similar information to the FBI, claiming that Robeson “is still a Marxist, but is disillusioned with Stalinism.… He is primarily a Negro Nationalist and secondarily a Marxist.” The rumor of his disillusion—without any known basis in fact—persisted. From a second source entirely, the FBI received another report several months later that Robeson “is about to make a public break with the Communists,” and on May 2 Drew Pearson, in his regular Sunday-evening broadcast, climaxed the accumulating hearsay with the assertion that Robeson had been meeting with black leaders and becoming persuaded “to change his left-wing views.”25
Robeson categorically and publicly denied all such reports. In a lengthy reply to Jet, he strenuously reasserted his respect for the “many fine, sincere, great-hearted radicals” he knew in this country, as well as his own devotion to the Soviet people and “the building of their new magnificent society.” He reiterated his belief that the “socialistic” countries of Eastern Europe and Asia were actively working to abolish racial discrimination and to help “former colonial peoples to reach full dignity,” and were thereby continuing to highlight the hypocrisy of “the so-called Free Western imperialist nations. Please tell me why I should … attempt to lay hands upon these friends from across the seas? My reason tells me that if I am going to get rough, I know just where the enemy is, close at hand”—Messrs. “Byrnes of South Carolina, Talmadge of Georgia, McCarran, McCarthy and their ilk.” “Am I expected,” he asked in a formal statement issued through Freedom Associates in 1954, “to ignore the continuing massacre of my brothers in Kenya? And here in America, is Jim Crow dead and buried? Has Congress passed the Anti-Lynching Law and the F.E.P.C.? Have my people’s demands for economic, political and social equality been granted? If not, why should Paul Robeson, who has dedicated his life to the struggle for these goals, change his mind about them now?”26
In asserting his “respect and affection” for the people of the Soviet Union, Robeson rarely made any distinction between them and the government that ruled them—an equivalence that was common parlance in the world Communist movement of the time, yet has opened him ever since to alternating charges of naïveté or rigidity. The New Statesman and Nation echoed the view of many in 1955 when it wrote, “Paul is courageous but not sophisticated about politics.… His personal warmth and generosity, his bigness and his kindness, made him everybody’s friend—and many of those friendships have lasted despite the naivete of his political activities in recent years. Even today, when Paul makes some outrageous statement, one which would seem silly or vicious in the mouth of a hard-boiled party official, one feels more embarrassment than anger.” But Robeson, in the words of Stretch Johnson (the entertainer and second-echelon black CPUSA leader), was “not so much naïve as trusting.” He deeply believed in human nature, even though he had learned deeply to distrust human beings—his faith was in the potential, not in current distortions of it. He had seen, and come to expect, the world’s every mean trick—yet in his heart he continued to believe that people were good and that socialism would create an environment that would allow their better natures to emerge. The world has never had much tolerance for those who persist in arguing unseen possibilities against the abundant evidence of their eyes, for the champions of what might be as against what is. The powers that be, bent on inculcating narrow-gauged formulas about the “necessities” of human nature and human society—on the acceptance of which the continuation of their hegemony depends—must always vilify those purveying a more sanguine message. This is not to say that Robeson never dealt in simplicities but, rather, that those making the charge usually did so on the basis not of greater sophistication, but of competing simplicities.27
Robeson did refuse, adamantly, ever to engage in public criticism of the Soviet government for mistaken or malignant policies. Perhaps in reaction, he sometimes overweighed the indictment against the government of the United States. Thus, in presenting his 1951 petition to the UN, Robeson had come close to equating institutional oppression of blacks with a policy of official genocide against them. It was an equation that stuck in the craw—then and since—of some of those who otherwise admired Robeson. Even Essie, who leapt to his political defense in public, confided privately to Marie Seton that “Paul is inclined to be a bit arrogant sometimes when people don’t agree with him, especially politically. Not in any other field, as I think of it now. Only politically.” He always strenuously insisted that his indictment of the American government was not an indictment of the American people, and he constantly reiterated his view that the “real” America was a progressive America, that the American people, good in their hearts, ultimately would set everything to rights. But this faith in the American people, his detractors felt, was as rhetorically overdrawn in the one direction as his indictment of their government was in the other. Besides, they asked, why did Robeson find it possible to distinguish between the American people and its rulers and yet so resolutely refuse to make any comparable separation in regard to the Soviets?28
Even in private, even among intimates, Robeson would not dwell on that distinction. When Khrushchev revealed the full extent of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, early in 1956, Robeson read the complete text in The New York Times and put down the newspaper without comment. As Paul, Jr., recalls, “He read it, he knew it was true,” but “he never commented on it to my knowledge in public or in private to a single living soul from then to the day he died”—not to Helen Rosen, or to Freda Diamond, or to Revels Cayton. As early as the thirties Robeson had had some knowledge of the purges, and in the late forties some of his friends—Itzik Feffer, for one—had disappeared. He possibly regarded the trials of the thirties, as did many of those who were pro-Soviet, as necessary reprisals against the malignant “intrigues of the Trotskyists,” believing that subsequent reports on the extent of the purges were exaggerations designed to discredit the Revolution. He adopted the standard argument “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” justifying the purges as occasional injustices, as the inevitable excesses inherent in any effort to create a new society, the excesses to be excused, if not justified, on the principle that collective welfare takes precedence over the rights of individuals. Robeson would have approved the analogy offered by André Malraux: though Christianity has had its murderous inquisitions, few have demanded that Christians abandon their religion because of its past depravities. Paul, Jr., says that his father told him and Lloyd Brown that “it was incomprehensible to him that American Communists would leave the Party over what happened in the Soviet Union.” Still, Khrushchev’s revelation of the sheer number of Stalin’s crimes, his policy of systematic murder, shook the faith of many in the eggs-omelet analogy; and it suggested to some that brutality may have been endemic to the centralized authoritarianism that had come to characterize the Soviet system, displacing its earlier, visionary ideals.29
There is no evidence that Robeson either disputed the accuracy of Khrushchev’s revelations or discounted reportage of them in the Western press as exaggerated. His reaction probably—this must remain a “best guess,” given the lack of concrete evidence—fell into the middle ground of disappointed acceptance: disappointment that the socialist experiment in which he believed had been derailed by the acts of an unsound leader, acceptance (and continuing faith) that in the long run the derailment would prove temporary and that socialism, still humanity’s best hope, would triumph. Even this much he could have said had he wanted to clarify his position publicly. But he chose not to, chose silence instead, preferred to be called a stubborn dupe—naïve at best, criminal at worst—rather than join the growing legion of Soviet detractors, rather than become himself (as he saw it) an obstacle to the eventual triumph of socialism.
However naïve his continuing faith may have appeared to the world at large, it was an accurate reflection of one strain in his complex personality. While he essentially trusted no one, Robeson had, at the same time, a fundamental belief in the decency of most people, and held to the sanguine view that they were potentially as generous, as aware and as concerned about the sufferings of mankind as he was. He expected much of others—as he did of himself. He had never learned as a youngster, as had almost all black Americans, to deal in limited expectations; treated in his own family like a god, he had met in the outside world far fewer institutional humiliations than afflict most blacks attempting to make their way. Ingrained optimism had become a characteristic attitude; he expected every set of hurdles, with the requisite hard work and determination, to be cleared as handily as those of his youth had been.
But Robeson was hardly naïve. Even as a young man he had experienced enough discrimination in his own life, and seen enough desperation everywhere around him in the black world, always to have carried with him the knowledge that society was cruel and individuals frail. When awareness of the brutalities of daily life further deepened in adulthood, however, and disappointments over political attempts to mitigate them continued to mount, Robeson could somehow never entirely digest the world’s bad news. “He was a softie,” the black trade-unionist Sam Parks remembers with reproving admiration. “He never wanted to hurt anybody—it used to make me mad at him.” With time, Robeson came to temper his faith only to the degree of accepting the view that social transformation would be a longer process than he had originally thought—simply because human nature had been more disabled than he had once assumed. But he did remain full of faith—faith that one day humanity would rise to its better nature, that a cooperative social vision would supplant a ruthlessly competitive one, that human beings would somehow turn out better than they ever had, that the principle of brotherhood would hold sway in the world. There was no other attitude—with disappointments on every hand—that would have allowed him to persevere. Nor one, resting as it did on accumulated denial, more likely in the long run to produce an emotional breakdown.30
Robeson’s political identification was primarily with the Soviet Union in its original revolutionary purity, and not with its secondary manifestation, the American Communist Party. On the most obvious level, he was never a member of the CPUSA, never a functionary, never a participant in its daily bureaucratic operations (he told Helen Rosen that its internecine warfare and rigidity made him miserable). He was a figure apart and above, his usefulness to the Party directly proportionate to the fact that his stature did not derive from it. The Party, as Eugene Dennis’s widow, Peggy Dennis, has put it, “was just a small part of Paul’s life.” “I have a hunch,” Dorothy Healey, the ex-Communist leader in California, has added, “that 90% of the inner-C.P. stuff was either unknown to Paul or, if known, considered unimportant.” He had aligned himself with the Soviet Union by the late thirties because it was playing the most visible role in the liberation of American and colonial peoples of color; he had aligned himself with the principles of black liberation and socialism, not with national or organizational ambitions. From his early visits to the Soviet Union, he had taken away the overwhelming impression of a nation devoted to encouraging the independent flowering of the cultures of different peoples—including nonwhite people—within its borders, a policy in basic opposition to the “melting-pot” view for which the United States officially stood. The socialist principle could in practice be sabotaged or misdirected—as it was in the Soviet mistreatment of the Crimean Tatars—but to Robeson the principle remained uniquely attractive.31
Despising American racism and viewing the Soviets as the only promising counterbalancing force to racism, Robeson was inclined to look away when the U.S.S.R. acted against its own stated principles, to look away fixedly as the perversions multiplied over the years, discounting them as temporary aberrations or stupidities ultimately justified by the long view, the overall thrust, the “correct” direction. Explaining Robeson’s view (and her own), Dorothy Healey describes him as “well aware” of the Soviet Union’s “terrible weaknesses” but nonetheless convinced that “it’s going in a direction that you think is a proper direction.… You never settle it once and for all,” but “you’re not going to get caught in the company of the anti-Sovieteers.” In ex-CP leader John Gates’s comparable if more bellicose version, Robeson took “the classic point of view that all of us did.… This is a revolution, and you have to fight all kinds of people in revolutions, and sometimes innocent people get killed. It’s a war.”32
In refusing to vent any public criticism of Soviet or CPUSA policy, Robeson did not always agree with its twists and turns. When in disagreement, he followed his own counsel without stating his disagreement publicly; to do that, in his mind, would have meant giving comfort to conservative-minded bigots, as well as involving him more than he wanted in the temperamentally distasteful daily routine of factional infighting. Instead, he simply went his way. During World War II, when the CP staked everything on the struggle against fascism, downplaying all “secondary” issues such as black demands for a fair employment commission and for the elimination of the poll tax and of segregation in the armed forces, Robeson continued to function with black issues at the center of his activities, calling everywhere in his speeches around the country for a double victory—against fascism abroad and racism at home. When British tanks, late in 1944, crushed Communist-led resistance to the monarchy in Greece, the Soviet Union remained silent, and Browder, for the CPUSA, cautioned against “shallow agitation”—but Robeson spoke out publicly against what he viewed as the suppression of a democratizing impulse. When, in the postwar period, under William Z. Foster’s leadership, the CPUSA emphasized the “imminence” of economic depression, the triumph of fascism in the United States, and a coming World War III, Robeson—though generally sympathetic to the Foster left wing—publicly sounded an optimistic counternote about the possibility of peaceful coexistence between socialism and capitalism far more reminiscent of the discredited Browder, whose removal from CP leadership Robeson agreed had been necessary.33
In 1948, similarly, he threw all his energy into the Wallace movement, not because the CP told him to but because, despite internal dissension within the CP over the wisdom of supporting the Progressive Party, he was convinced that it offered the best current vehicle for championing black rights in the United States. And when, under the tutelage of Revels Cayton, Robeson came to believe in the necessity for black caucuses within the left-wing trade unions, he campaigned widely for them among black workers—even though the CP leadership tended to view the caucuses with uneasy suspicion as representing a resurgence of deviationist black “nationalism” and dual unionism.
In the fifties, according to Stretch Johnson, Robeson believed the Party “could do more in the struggle for Negro rights” than it was doing, and felt that he himself “was not being used enough in the black community”—that being featured as the American figure in the world peace movement had diminished his specific stature as a spokesperson for black and colonial peoples. Rose Perry, the wife of Pettis Perry (the black executive secretary of the Party’s National Negro Commission from 1948 to 1954), recalls that at one point, around 1950, Robeson’s concern with being isolated from his own black constituency became so acute that he would talk far into the night with Pettis Perry about possible ways to solve his public-relations problem with Harlem—a problem partly met by the establishment in 1950 of Freedom magazine, and by Robeson’s increased number of appearances at his brother Ben’s A.M.E. Zion Church and at black gatherings elsewhere.34
But by the fifties Robeson no longer had the luxury of independent maneuver; he felt it was a matter of conscience to declare solidarity with the victims of the Smith Act, voluntarily binding himself to their plight. To the extent that he did still harbor disagreements with CP policies—and his disagreements had always been marginal—he felt as a matter of principle bound in loyalty to maintain his commitment to the persecuted Party leadership. In 1951 he even offered to join the Party as a public gesture of solidarity, just before its leaders were jailed. The gesture was rejected, out of hand. All four of the leaders (Eugene Dennis, Ben Davis, Jack Stachel, and John Gates) present when Robeson made the offer at a small private meeting refused even to entertain the idea, considering it a personal disservice to Robeson—it would have further reduced his influence in the black community—and thereby a disservice to the Party as well. “Nobody hesitated,” is how John Gates remembers the occasion; “we were smart enough to say no. And without any hesitation. All of us.”35
Robeson functioned in relationship to the CPUSA primarily through the Party leadership—not through participation in rank-and-file activities. The pre-eminent leader of the CPUSA during the early forties, when Robeson initially became a prominent ally, was Earl Browder. Studious, strong-willed, intensely private, he and Robeson had much in common temperamentally, and the two became personal friends, even though Browder, like most of the “right wing” of the Party, was closer to mainstream liberalism on the black question than William Z. Foster and Ben Davis, Jr. In those years Browder and Ben Davis were Robeson’s main contacts with the Party. During World War II, when black issues took a back seat to the struggle against fascism, Robeson privately expressed annoyance—especially to his closest friend in the Party, Ben Davis—over the CP’s quiescence on issues like anti-poll-tax and antilynching legislation or the passage of an FEPC. But Robeson never criticized the Party or Earl Browder in public—nor did the Party ever caution him to tone down his strenuous public advocacy of black issues. Yet, when the Duclos Letter appeared in 1945, Robeson did let it be known within CPUSA leadership circles that he sided with the opposition to Browder, going along with most of the black rank-and-file leadership in support of the Dennis-Foster coalition.
When Eugene Dennis supplanted Browder as the Party’s pre-eminent leader, Robeson continued in close contact with the top echelon, for he and Dennis were also personal friends, Robeson admiring Dennis’s intelligence, his deep commitment to black equality, and his low-key, unimperious exercise of authority. When Dennis was on the eve of going to federal prison, Robeson asked him and his wife, Peggy, to attend his Carnegie Hall concert as his personal guests, and installed them in a box near the front of the stage; just before singing Blitzstein’s “The Purest Kind of Guy,” Robeson leaned into the microphone and announced he was dedicating the song to his dear friend Eugene Dennis; the spotlight went up on the Dennises’ box, and Paul sang the song directly to Gene. According to Peggy Dennis, the relationship between the two men involved considerable give-and-take: “Paul had his own very definite ideas, whether it was on the black question or on socialism or on the Soviet Union or on the Progressive Party or whatever else.” He was held in immense esteem by the leadership and the rank-and-file alike as “the voice of the black people,” as an artist who insisted upon being political. He also caught the imagination of some of the younger cadre, like Peggy Dennis herself, who had ambivalently learned “to smother all personal aspirations,” sublimating private passions into serving Party dictates; Robeson’s insistence on self-expression in combination with political responsibility released “a kind of subtle envy.” But although Robeson was widely regarded as a figure apart, “a very special human being in a very special relationship to the Party,” on the top level—where discussion took place, say, between Eugene Dennis and Robeson—Peggy Dennis believes that “no one was in awe of Paul as an artist”; the rule of thumb instead was an open give-and-take among equals.36
Robeson never joined in any outright factional dispute within the Party. His characteristic style was to discuss his views with the few leaders with whom he felt closest, personally and politically—Dennis, Pettis Perry, and, above all, Ben Davis, Jr. (though he sometimes thought Davis too abrasively sectarian)—and to let those men serve as a conduit for conveying his views. To protect his independent standing further, he would sometimes hide behind the calculated disclaimer that he was “only an artist, after all, and not a political leader,” shrewdly sidestepping organizational responsibility and factional attachments. He remained privy to what was going on factionally, and his sympathies often leaned toward the “left-wing” (Foster-Davis) grouping in the Party. But though admiring Foster, he found him too dour for intimacy; besides, Robeson’s commitment to the left wing was a tendency only, not a firm adherence; his “outwardness and breadth” (in Peggy Dennis’s words) prevented him from taking any rigidly sectarian stance.37
Robeson’s role essentially resembled that of a foreign ambassador to an allied country—to a close ally in time of war. His primary allegiance remained with his home base—with black people—but he believed that the Soviet Union, alone among the world’s political powers, was a genuine deterrent to Western imperialism (and thus an ally of black and colonial freedom struggles) and he therefore worked hard to champion the interests and to ensure the survival of the Communist movement. Still, deeply sympathetic and committed to close collaboration though he was, he functioned as an emissary to that movement, not as a citizen of the realm, not a participant either in the householder’s daily chores or in the quarreling discord of its officialdom. Like every good ambassador, Robeson could be most devious when appearing most open (he was not so invariably direct in his dealings as myth would have it). Like every good ambassador, too, he knew the region well and could accurately assess the shifting fortunes of the local players, even while standing aloof from their squabbles. He did, of course, have his preferences among the players, and sometimes disapproved their specific moves. But he picked his friendships from among all wings of the Party, much preferring, according to his son, the company of the centrist Eugene Dennis to that of left-wing black leaders James Jackson and Henry Winston. Despite the fact, moreover, that there was considerable ill-feeling between his closest associate, Ben Davis, Jr., and Gene Dennis, Robeson maintained friendships with both. He always remained adept at separating someone’s plausible political line from what he felt in his gut about the person’s human reliability. By the mid-fifties, for example, he began to distance himself from William Patterson, grateful for his devoted work on the passport case but increasingly wary of Pat’s self-glamorizing assumption of the Robeson mantle.38
Except for a few brief meetings with Khrushchev in the late fifties, Robeson remained remote from the sources of real power in the Soviet Union and exercised no direct influence. Yet through the years he did come to know many of the Soviets’ most prominent ambassadors (Litvinov, Maisky, Malik, Feodorenko, Zarubin) and, in regard to one, Panyushkin, he bluntly told Paul, Jr., “that the SOB talked like a Nazi about the Jews.… He sounded like Goebbels at times.” But Robeson was careful never to express such views in public, and only rarely in private. He did not transfer his dislike of particular leaders into a condemnation of the cause they represented, however poorly, or the political entities they headed. His commitment to socialism and to black liberation took automatic precedence over his occasional trouble with particular individuals who happened temporarily to represent those causes to the public.39
But that is not quite the whole story, either. Robeson also sat on his personal opinions because the individuals in question were designated leaders—endowed with the mantle of liberation, invested with the hope and authority of a revolutionary world movement. One generation removed from slavery himself, he knew that the success of a collective struggle took automatic precedence over the comparatively trivial tastes and preferences of any individual. He felt that by acceding to his father’s authority, he had been able successfully to navigate the shoals of white indifference and intimidation; if his people as a whole were to navigate the same treacherous waters, invested faith in the new father of international socialism would have to be sustained in public in the same obedient spirit—even if one harbored in private independent judgments of individuals and events. John Gates believed that Robeson’s “commitment to the leadership” was so complete that “he thought anything we proposed was wise”—but Gates did not realize that Robeson had also learned from his father that if he did not express his every feeling, he could thereby preserve his inner integrity.40
Robeson’s unswerving public loyalty to the CPUSA was not always reciprocated in kind. In general the Party leaders accepted his support on its own uniquely independent terms, but now and then, in times of unusual pressure, a segment of the leadership would try to convert a treaty of alliance into a condition of vassalage. According to Ben Davis, Jr., Henry Winston (supported by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) strongly suggested that Robeson, following his 1949 Paris speech, “tone down” his “nationalistic” utterances or face public party criticism—to Robeson’s fury. And in 1951 Winston was enthusiastic about Robeson’s suggestion that, as an act of solidarity with the Smith Act victims, he join the Party; Winston apparently felt that Robeson’s personal prestige would help rescue Party fortunes and bowed reluctantly to the counterview of Eugene Dennis, Ben Davis, Jr., and others that the far more likely result would be to destroy Robeson’s own standing. At around this same time, Robeson discovered that one of his bodyguards, Walter Garland (a black American hero during the Spanish Civil War), had been planted by “a certain group in the top echelons of the Party” to report on his activities. He became livid, told Garland to get lost “and to tell those so-and-sos downtown, ‘Don’t ever pull that on me.’” Robeson complained directly to Ben Davis—who temporarily supplied him with his own bodyguard.41
Robeson never allowed the occasional discontent he felt with his allies to mitigate the public contempt he expressed for his enemies—not the American people or the American experiment, but the “racist oligarchy” in control of the U.S. government. “I have shouted,” he told a reporter of The Afro-American in March 1954, “and will continue to shout at the top of my voice for liberation, full emancipation.” And he did just that. That same month, March 1954, he denounced U.S. intervention in Guatemala, loudly protested continuing persecutions under the Smith Act and the move by the Justice Department to have the Council on African Affairs register under the McCarran Act, and, in regard to events in the colonial world, raised his voice angrily against the imprisonment of Kenyatta and the effort to discredit the movement for Kenyan independence. “Is it ‘subversive,’” he asked reporters, “not to approve our Government’s actions of condoning and abetting the oppression of our brothers and sisters in Africa and other lands?”42
Against equally imposing odds, he continued the fight for the return of his passport. Another round was inaugurated in the spring of 1954, with coordinated campaigns simultaneously launched from England and the United States to drum up petitions, letters, and cables to the State Department deploring Robeson’s continuing “domestic arrest.” The response from abroad was extensive, far more so than at home. Messages in support of Robeson arrived from around the world—from, among many others, Charles Chaplin, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ivor Montagu, Laurence Housman, René Maran, Pablo Neruda, Yussef Dadoo, J. D. Bernal, and peace groups from places as distant as Uruguay, Austria, Israel, South Africa, Iraq, and Finland.43
In England a major “Let Robeson Sing” campaign was launched. It began when John Williamson (the American Communist Party leader who had been deported back to the land of his birth under the Smith Act) proposed a resolution at the Scottish Trade Union Congress in support of returning Robeson’s passport. A committee still in existence from the campaign to save the Rosenbergs from execution was activated by Franz and Diana Loesser in Robeson’s behalf. Centering their efforts at first in Manchester, the Loessers organized a meeting in the Free Trade Hall that featured the black boxer and CP member Len Johnson as a speaker and drew a spill-over crowd, with the local Labour Party and the strong Jewish community in Manchester turning out in particularly impressive numbers. An approach was made to Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Party leader, to lend official support to the campaign for Robeson’s passport, but, according to Diana Loesser, “Labour Party proscriptions against being associated with Communists—and several were sponsors of the campaign—kept Bevan necessarily at arm’s length”; he did, however, “make sympathetic noises” and avoided taking any steps against rank-and-file involvement. From this beginning, the British “Let Robeson Sing” campaign would grow by leaps and bounds; by 1957 it would be a considerable embarrassment to the U.S. government.44
In the United States, the campaign focused on a “Salute to Paul Robeson” from his fellow artists—including Thelonious Monk, Pete Seeger, Leon Bibb, Alice Childress, Julian Mayfield, Karen Morley, and Lorraine Hansberry—at the Renaissance Casino on May 24, 1954. The casino was packed, with an overflow crowd of a thousand accommodated in an adjoining church. For a brief time it seemed, in the words of an enthusiast, as if “now we are really ready for a campaign that can in fact force the return of Paul’s passport.”45
But the optimism was short-lived. Permission for a follow-up Robeson concert in Chicago was canceled at the last minute by the local Board of Education. And at the end of July, barely two months after the new passport campaign had been launched, the State Department announced that it was again denying Robeson’s application. Scores of protests followed, and Robeson told the press he would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. He hired new lawyers: the black Washington, D.C., attorney James T. Wright, and the white left-wing activist Leonard Boudin, who was himself shortly to be denied the right to travel. The State Department remained adamantly indifferent: as long as Robeson continued to refuse to execute an affidavit stating his relationship to the Communist Party—which he adamantly refused—his appeal for a passport was “precluded.” There the issue held fire for the moment, both sides immovable.46
Robeson continued his piecemeal activities—singing again at the Peace Arch in August (to a still smaller crowd than the previous year), working to win amnesty for the Smith Act defendants and to provide succor for their families, attending the fourth annual National Negro Labor Council convention, allowing himself to be fêted, along with Essie, at a New World Review fund-raiser (where he spoke movingly of her contributions to his own development and her efforts “in behalf of first-class citizenship for the Negro people”), giving an occasional concert when the doors could be opened, and, when they could not, making additional recordings for distribution through the Othello Recording Company, to which Paul, Jr., was now devoting full time. But the accumulated stress was telling on him. Mary Helen Jones, the left-wing black community leader in California, reported to John Gray at Freedom in New York that, following an appearance by Paul on the West Coast, Essie had implored her to try to “keep him out here … for ten days incognito for a rest. She suggested a hospital but he prefers a private home where he can go on a diet and get some rest and get away from the crowds.” Jones discussed it with him, and initially he was “in favor of it,” but he then decided it was “out of the question.” “Frankly,” Jones reported back in New York, “I can’t understand why he ‘seemed’ to be receptive to the idea when I discussed it with him and then ‘froze’ after I left.… He is a very stubborn person when it comes to not looking out for himself.… Many people out here are thinking about Marcantonio [who had recently died of a heart attack] and that he left here at the age of 51.… Paul needs a rest.…”47
The closest thing he could manage was a change of address. Following the sale of the house in Enfield in 1953, Essie had moved into the Hotel Dauphin in New York City—after staying with Paul, Jr., and Marilyn. Paul had continued on at the McGhees’ on East 89th Street, sometimes staying around the corner with Helen and Sam Rosen or with the Caytons, or with his brother Ben at the parsonage. But by the end of 1954, with FBI agents holding him under constant surveillance, Paul decided he would find more privacy and security in Harlem—a move also dictated by his fear of having become, through residing in the heart of white Manhattan, too isolated from the black community. The concern was not new. As early as 1947, leaders from the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America had called a private meeting with him in Washington, D.C., to express, “deferentially,” “how all of us feel about you, and how we love you. Well, we think you’re a great artist and a great man and all that, and while it may be true that you are a ‘Citizen of the World,’ we’d like you to let our folks know a little more strongly, that you are first a part of us and then ‘Citizen of the World.’” According to George Murphy, Jr., who attended the meeting and recorded the vets’ words, “Paul listened very carefully, told the vets he thought they were eminently correct, especially in thinking enough of him to come to him and say what they thought.” By 1949 columnist Dan Burley in the New York Age, a black newspaper, was remarking that Robeson “has been away from Harlem so long that people only know him by what they have read or heard.…” His close friend Revels Cayton urged him to do something about the continuing criticism, and that same year of 1949 he took over the St. Nicholas Avenue apartment of the black singer Aubrey Pankey and his wife, Kay (the couple had by now settled in Europe). But, according to Kay Pankey, Robeson moved back downtown within the year, “pestered too much” by the constant invasion of his privacy.48
By 1954 the security and warmth of a Harlem haven had become more important than solitude, and when his brother Ben and his wife, Frankie, suggested he move into the parsonage of the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church at 155 West 136th Street, where Ben was pastor, Paul accepted. He would never have asked Ben to take him in, unwilling to subject his brother’s family to possible obloquy, but when Ben volunteered the invitation, Paul gratefully took him up on it. Ben and Paul had not seen much of each other during the forties, and Ben’s family thought Essie—with whom they did not get along—might have deliberately kept Paul away from the parsonage. But in fact Paul’s long absences were a characteristic pattern in all his relationships, and did not necessarily reflect how important those relationships were to him. Paul always moved in and out of personal commitments, the pattern perhaps in part reflecting the childhood trauma he’d suffered at his mother’s sudden death, forever imprinting on him the lesson not to become overly attached. But the pattern also reflected the expansiveness of a nature that could never be content for long interacting exclusively with one other individual. Robeson’s middle-class white friends had particular trouble dealing with his in-and-out-again commitment to them. They tended to interpret the long stretches of time between visits, and his failure to stay in touch through letters and phone calls, as somehow a judgment on the quality of the friendship, a sign of its insignificance to him.
Ben, sharing the same family culture as Paul, had the same view as he of the etiquette of relationships. Like Paul, he didn’t need the reassurance of constant declarations of concern in order to believe in its reality. The dutiful little attentions crucial to middle-class definitions of the proper contours of friendship and family were not given the same weight of importance—closeness was not measured by how often one saw someone or how much one revealed to him. Between Ben and Paul, as with Paul and his sister Marian, a profound sense of assurance that their ties were lasting and deep precluded any need for constant verification. Though Marian’s house in Philadelphia was always a haven for Paul—and he often retreated there—between visits he rarely communicated. What might be called a secure passivity—“I don’t need to make it happen”—best characterizes his attitude. The ties were there—or were not—and no amount of verbal reassurance or attentiveness would change that essential fact. Robeson’s belief in the ebb-and-flow of friendship, combined with his ingrained respect for the privacy of others, meant that he rarely commented on and never tracked the lives of his friends. The quality of intrusiveness—the need to keep talking about a bond in order to establish its validity—was foreign to Robeson’s sense of the natural history of relationships. He felt no need to analyze intimacy in order to reassure himself of its presence.49
The level of trust between Paul and Ben Robeson, despite the long periods of absence, had never wavered. The two men were entirely comfortable with each other. When Paul moved into the parsonage in the winter of 1954 (where he would remain for about a year), he felt in a real sense that he was coming home—back into the bosom of his immediate family and back into the larger family of the black community. Robeson always enjoyed sitting around—black people only—and talking “colored talk.” Howard Fast remembers his astonishment once when he tried to find Robeson at a party they had gone to in the late forties in a fashionable black suburb of Detroit. Directed to the basement, Fast opened the door to find half a dozen prosperous, middle-aged black men smoking good cigars, jackets off, all attention on Robeson, who was holding forth in a “raw, black, Deep-Southern language,” telling “rich, earthy stories with no restraint, no polite talk like upstairs.” It was the only time, Fast felt, that he ever saw Robeson “with his wall down.” Helen Rosen remembers coming upon the same sort of earthy talk at the parsonage, with brother Ben—despite his staid outward appearance—joining in with equal gusto.50
Among much else that the two brothers shared was a profound concern for the welfare of black people. Ben—a registered Republican (he was a friend and an admirer of Nelson Rockefeller), sedate and traditional in manner—worked out his commitment through the church. Paul’s was expressed through art and politics, but in Paul, too, the family “preacher” temperament was ingrained. His “calling” seemed so obvious to Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood of A.M.E. Zion, after he heard Paul’s passionate platform delivery once in a black church, that he wrote and begged him “to give the remaining years of your life to the work of the ministry,” reporting that Bishop Walls of Chicago was also “enamoured of the idea.”51
Comfortable though Paul felt at the parsonage, it was not the tranquil environment it outwardly appeared to be. There was a lot of drinking, and at times—when Ben and Frankie’s daughters periodically returned home, in retreat from their difficult marriages—considerable family friction. Paul was fond of all three of his nieces, but eventually the increasingly frequent storms at the parsonage proved too much for him. He needed a respite from the turbulence he encountered in the outer world, not a recapitulation of it. Throughout his life, he could never stay for long in an unquiet home. His domestic requirements, ultimately, were for solitude, stability, and protection.