Resurgence
(1957–1958)
The enforced inactivity in Robeson’s life coincided, ironically, with an upsurge of movement for black Americans in general. The beaching of a man who had spoken out for two decades against the paralyzing oppression of black life now stood in stark contrast to the quickened hope that swept black communities across the nation. Not that the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision had in itself marked the swift demise of Jim Crow. Far from it. The court’s own implementing decision rejected the notion of rapid desegregation in favor of a “go-slow” approach, which itself proved too radical a notion for President Eisenhower; initially he refused to endorse the Brown ruling, remarking, “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,” and calling his own appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”1
The caution of official Washington was matched on the state level by fierce white resistance. On March 12, 1956, 101 Southern members of Congress issued a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which called on their states to refuse implementation of the desegregation order. Defiance became the watchword in the white South, massive resistance the proof of regional loyalty. Every item in the white-supremacist bag of tricks—from “pupil-placement” laws to outright violence—was utilized to forestall integration of the schools. The Ku Klux Klan donned its masks and hoods; the respectable middle class enrolled in White Citizens’ Councils; the press and pulpit resounded with calls to protect the safety of the white race. A tide of hatred and vigilantism swept over the South. Some blacks knuckled under in fear; many more dug in, prepared once again to endure—and this time overcome. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress, stubbornly refused to give up her bus seat to a white man—thereby launching the Montgomery bus boycott, energizing black resistance, catapulting Martin Luther King, Jr., and his strategy of nonviolent direct action to the forefront of the movement. An epoch of black insurgency had been ushered in.
Robeson, of course, applauded it—but from the sidelines, where he had been shunted. Confined by the white ruling elite, ostracized by the black establishment, he and his influence had been effectively neutralized. His limited access to the media, in combination with his disinclination to write, meant that he had few public opportunities to express his support for the burgeoning civil-rights movement. When one did present itself in July 1957, during a rare series of engagements in California, he told the press that he “urged the Negro people to support Reverend Martin Luther King—the strength of the Negro people lies within their organizations and churches, as demonstrated by the magnificent Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott and other activities conducted by the Negro people in the South.” And in September 1957, when the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas, under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, prevented nine black students from enrolling in Central High, Robeson issued a statement calling for a national conference to challenge “every expression of white supremacy.”2
But no one much was listening. Only one black paper, The Afro-American, printed his statement in full—and his call for a national conference was ignored. Not only was Robeson’s name no longer instantly recognized, but, to the extent that he was still known among the new activists, his pro-Soviet stance was regarded as something of an irrelevance, even a hindrance. Anne Braden, who with her husband, Carl, was active in the civil-rights struggle in Kentucky, remembers that most of the young black activists “really knew nothing about Paul Robeson,” and those who had heard of him “would have been scared to death if he’d shown up at one of their meetings.” That would change somewhat by the early sixties; by then young blacks would be more militant, would have learned more about their own history and learned, too, that their white “friends and protectors” in Washington, who had been advising them against associating with “Communists,” might not after all have their best interests at heart.3
When Paul, along with Essie and Paul, Jr., went to Washington in May 1957 to take part in the Prayer Pilgrimage, he was largely ignored: the organizers asked Robeson antagonists Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (who had bolted to Ike in 1956), to speak, but not Robeson. (A month before the Pilgrimage, struck by how little organizing had been done, Essie speculated that Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph were actually trying to sabotage the event, and she wrote George Murphy, Jr., “The more I think of the NAACP the more dangerous I think it is. They always calm the waters when something concrete and really good is cooking.”) At about this same time, ironically, the head of the FBI’s New York Office was confidentially advising J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson’s recent California trip “had been conducted for the purpose of determining whether he had enough of a following to attempt to take over the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on a national scale.” A few weeks later that allegation had been transmuted into a CPUSA takeover of the NAACP, and Hoover directed the New York Office to “follow Robeson’s activities.” Robeson and Roy Wilkins would have been equally astonished at the news of a pending coup. Though the FBI apparently did not realize it, the government and the media had, over nearly a decade, done its work better than it knew in making Robeson invisible to a new generation of black youth, in moving him to the margins of the black struggle.4
During the first half of the fifties, Robeson could take some solace from the fact that his isolation had been imposed by white authorities in response to his militant stand in behalf of the rights of the world’s colored peoples. During the second half of the fifties, as a mainstream black protest movement emerged within his own country and seemed uninterested in his presence, his sense of isolation became more acute and painful. In contrast to his former wide-ranging public life, he now spent his time engaging in pentatonic musical studies and pursuing his passport fight. They did not absorb his energies. He read over Marie Seton’s manuscript for a book about him and worked with Lloyd L. Brown on an autobiographical volume, but these were retrospective activities; he was, for the time being, not living fully in the present. Nor could continuing recognition from the peace movement overseas and periodic visits from Ben Davis, Jr., or William Z. Foster compensate for the deafening lack of interest in his services at the Prayer Pilgrimage and the failure of any call for consultation from the Montgomery boycotters or from Martin Luther King, Jr. As if to assuage his own hurt, to compensate for being bypassed, Robeson’s public statements occasionally became boastful and overweening, traits in jarring contrast to his once characteristic modesty. The dissonant strain of braggadocio—and an occasional penchant for the imagery of martyrdom—marked a poignant bid for the attention and affirmation that he had never before had any need to summon up.5
A reporter picked up the false new note during Robeson’s six-week trip to California in the summer of 1957 (he traveled with Revels Cayton) to perform several concerts that left-wing friends had finally managed to arrange—the only series he gave that year. Understandably expansive in the glow of a rare chance to sing in public, and delighted at his well-attended and well-reviewed concerts in the black community (“a welcome far beyond anything I could have expected,” he told a reporter), Robeson held a two-hour press conference in Los Angeles, which left the black journalist Almena Lomax of the Tribune with an overall impression of “total self-absorption.” Even while declaring admiration for Robeson’s “gifts and the richness of personality of the man,” Lomax expressed disquiet at his nearly nonstop discourse about his own accomplishments—“a sort of antic quality, overall.” Possibly Robeson, basking in the now unaccustomed light of publicity, was having nothing more than a cheerful and perfectly human burst of vanity. Possibly it had been triggered by a mild clinical recurrence of mania. Whatever the cause and combination of circumstances, his personality seemed to have lost its once-characteristic emotional centeredness, the solidity and surety of purpose that had long given him such easy, magnanimous grace.6
Some sustenance came from overseas. His many friends in England, mobilized as the National Paul Robeson Committee, accelerated their campaign for the return of his passport. By the spring of 1957 the list of notables in support had grown to include twenty-seven members of Parliament and such distinguished—and in many cases nonpolitical—figures as the classicist Gilbert Murray, Leonard Woolf, the economist Barbara Wootton, Augustus John, Julian Huxley, Benjamin Britten, Pamela Hansford Johnson, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, the Shakespearean scholar J. Dover Wilson, and Robeson’s old acting partner Flora Robson. (Clearly, Tom Driberg wrote in his regular column for Reynolds News, this movement in Robeson’s behalf “is not, as some Washington bureaucrats pretend, a mere political stunt.”) In late April 1957 British Actors Equity in its annual meeting—after some heated exchanges, during which the actress Helena Gloag suggested that the resolution had originated from “an international subversive movement, Communism”—voted a resolution in support of efforts currently being made to enable Robeson to perform in Britain.7
To cap off the campaign, Cedric Belfrage, editor-in-exile of the National Guardian, organized a concert which Robeson sang via transatlantic phone circuit to an audience assembled in a London theater—in ringing symbolic defiance of the passport ban. It came off wonderfully. At an all-day Robeson celebration before the concert, actress Marie Burke shared her recollections of Robeson in Show Boat, followed by speeches from Gerald Gardiner, QC, the miners’ leader Arthur Horner, black Labour parliamentary candidate David Pitt, and the Kenyan Joseph Murumbi of the Movement for Colonial Freedom. That same evening, with one thousand people crowded into St. Pancras Town Hall to hear the “live” Robeson concert, the actor Alfie Bass took the stage to entertain while everyone excitedly awaited the hookup. After a few false starts (“We all thought Somebody was starting to sabotage the show,” Belfrage later wrote Essie), they succeeded in making connection with New York just five minutes before the event was scheduled to begin.8
The stage now empty except for an enormous blowup photo of Robeson on the back wall, the Union Jack on one side, Old Glory on the other, his resonant bass suddenly flooded the hall. He sang six songs in all, with the audience “jumping out of their seats” to shout approval. The reception—over the new high-fidelity transatlantic telephone cable—was superb, and the audience (according to Belfrage) went home “spiritually ‘high.’” Press coverage, though, was minimal: Belfrage had invited all U.S. papers with representatives and agencies in London, but none came. Except for an unexpected article in the Manchester Guardian—which said the concert had succeeded in making “the United States Department of State look rather silly”—only a few small items appeared in British papers. Still, Robeson was profoundly grateful to his British friends. He was “so deeply moved,” Essie reported to Belfrage, that by the end of the concert “he was close to tears,” thrilled at the prospect of “a new means for communication from the jailhouse.”9
Three months later, and perhaps to some unmeasurable degree influenced by the mounting Robeson campaign abroad, the State Department finally made a partial concession on his right to travel. For the better part of a year, Leonard Boudin had sought in vain to get a hearing from the Passport Division, which had alternately delayed any response to his letters and then, when it did reply, stipulated still more procedural requirements not asked of other passport applicants. But just as Boudin had become convinced that they would have to go back into court in order to get any action, the State Department granted Robeson an administrative hearing.10
Boudin and Essie accompanied him to Washington on May 29 for what turned into a six-hour marathon session. As Robert D. Johnson for the Passport Division relentlessly posed loaded questions and presented hearsay evidence about Robeson’s purported CP membership, Boudin consistently refused to allow his client to respond, on the grounds that personal and political associations were irrelevant to the issue of the right to travel. When the lengthy charade was over, Johnson declared that Robeson’s refusal to “make a full disclosure” automatically halted the administrative processing of his passport application (Johnson reported to the FBI that, although he had “thrown the book” at Robeson, the hearing had been a “‘wash out’ inasmuch as Robeson did not admit any Communist connections or activities”). Allowed to make a statement at the end, Robeson repeated his view that the real reason his passport was being withheld concerned his outspoken protests over the condition of black people at home and abroad. “My Negro friends,” he said, “tell me I am a little too excited about it. I don’t see how you can get too excited about it—not so much whether one has even bread to eat at a certain point, but the essential human dignity, the essential human dignity of being a person.”11
The passport stalemate seemed unbroken. The government refused to reconsider unless Robeson first signed a “non-Communist” affidavit, and Robeson refused to yield on a point he considered central to his constitutional rights (fearing, too, that if he did say he had never been a CP member, the Justice Department could then call out its stable of informers to swear, falsely, that he had been—thereby allowing an indictment against him for perjury). But then—the jockeying completed, the mutually contradictory positions laid out—in August 1957 the State Department unexpectedly made its first concession to Robeson in seven years: though still refusing him a passport, State announced that henceforth he would be allowed to travel to Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa—places in the Western Hemisphere where a passport was not required of U.S. citizens. It had become an embarrassment, at a time of easing Cold War tensions and mounting black protest, to have Robeson remain the one citizen of the United States (excepting only Dave Beck, indicted president of the Teamsters Union, who had been placed on travel restriction at the specific request of the Senate’s McClellan Investigating Committee) against whom an interdiction to nonpassport areas of the Western Hemisphere remained—restraints that had already been removed by national committee members of the CPUSA. When rumors immediately began to circulate that Robeson would shortly visit the West Indies, U.S. Naval Intelligence in Trinidad telegraphed Washington that it doubted the British would allow him to enter—though doubtless the “Communist” husband-and-wife team, Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan and his American-born wife, Janet, would “welcome him with open arms” to British Guiana.12
Robeson’s sights, however, were leveled not on the West Indies or on South America but on England. Hard on the heels of the State Department’s refusal to lift the passport ban came an alluring invitation from Glen Byam Shaw, general manager of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon: would Robeson be available during the 1958 season to star as Gower in Pericles, the production conceived by Tony Richardson, a young director who had recently won acclaim in both London and New York for his staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger? (Shaw sent the additional word that Peggy Ashcroft—Robeson’s Desdemona in the 1930 Othello—had been “overjoyed” when told of the invitation to him.) With rehearsals due to begin in June 1958, and citing this “very great opportunity,” Boudin immediately asked the State Department to reconsider its recent refusal and issue Robeson a passport of limited duration and purpose so he could accept the engagement in England.13
Flattering though the offer was, and potentially serviceable in his passport fight, Robeson in fact viewed it with some trepidation. He accepted the role immediately—pending, of course, State Department acquiescence—but after reading the play began to have doubts (as Essie wrote Shaw) whether he had “the traditional classic Shakespearean background and experience and style and accent, to play this role in the midst of an experienced and beautifully trained English cast in the shrine of the Shakespeare tradition.” Othello was the only Shakespearean role he had ever undertaken, and that more than a decade ago; Othello, moreover, had called for (in Essie’s words) “a foreigner, dark, different from the rest of the cast, and it was a foreignness which he thoroughly understood and actually was.” Tony Richardson was in New York to stage The Entertainer, and met with Robeson to encourage him. Shaw, moreover, sent a long letter “begging” him to have no doubts that he would do the part of Gower superlatively well: “Gower is, as it were, detached from the rest of the play.… He is the great storyteller.… It doesn’t matter what nationality he is provided the actor has a compelling power of personality, the feeling of deep understanding of humanity and, of course, a wonderful voice with which to tell his story. All these qualities you possess in a degree that no other actor does.” Robeson thanked Shaw for the kind words, and said he felt reassured.14
The London press played up Robeson’s pending arrival as big news (contrarily, the development was entirely ignored by the major media in the United States). The Daily Herald carried an eight-column headline, “I’m-a-Comin’, Says Robeson,” with a subheading that proclaimed “And Paul’s Head Will Not Be Bendin’ Low Here in Britain.” However, the British press was not unanimous in hailing him; Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, predictably, announced that he “would be a most unwelcome visitor”; with an unforgiving memory, the Express recalled that “In the dark days of the war,” Robeson had said that Britain’s reactionary influence had inspired Finland to attack the Russians, and later had called Britain “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings in the world.” Still, additional British offers quickly came in: to star in England’s biggest television show, “Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and also to perform on a “Spectacular” for Associated Television. London’s Royal Festival Hall offered him a concert, and Harold Davison, the theatrical agent, started making preliminary arrangements for a tour. “Excitement and anticipation,” Tony Richardson reported, were keen. Essie replied that “The spread in the British press … has had great effect here. The State Department is frantically defending itself.…”15
That was wishful thinking. The State Department refused to budge, coolly notifying Boudin that it continued to deem it necessary for Robeson to “answer the questions with respect to Communist Party membership before consideration can be given to his request for passport facilities.” Two other passport cases—those of Walter Briehl and Rockwell Kent—pending before the Supreme Court and involving the constitutional issue of the right to travel, held out the hope of establishing a precedent favorable to Robeson, but the court was unlikely to hand down a decision in those cases until June. While awaiting that verdict, the State Department remained obdurate; even had it wanted to, it could not have given Robeson a limited passport without weakening its case against Briehl and Kent. By late February, with no hope of an immediate break in the situation, Robeson felt obliged (and perhaps relieved) to notify Glen Byam Shaw that he would have to withdraw from the role of Gower. “You can imagine how we hate to say this,” Essie wrote Shaw, “but fair is fair, and plans are plans, and we know we are not going to make it.” The news, Shaw wrote back, was “a bitter disappointment.… It would have not only been a great joy but also an honour for me if he could have appeared at this Theatre during the time of my directorship.”16
The offer was aborted, but not the impulse it represented. As if a signal had been given, some attractive invitations within the United States began to trickle in, themselves a reflection of a decline of McCarthyite influence on the national scene. In reaction to these first “mainstream” opportunities offered him in a decade, this prospective armistice, Robeson showed at least a bit more circumspection, a modicum of prudence when addressing the public—especially the black public. Still vigilant about his integrity, still loyal to past friends and his own past opinions, he nonetheless responded with a subtle new regard, around the edges, for the prospects of rehabilitation. He would to no degree compromise with the John Foster Dulleses—the white power structure, which he continued to regard as racist, militarist, and colonialist—but, to enhance his reputation with mainstream black America, he began to downplay his “Communist” image and revivify his black one. He would not leave the mountain, but he was willing to take a few sideways steps to avoid the direct path of the lava flow.
Early in 1958 he made a discernible shift away from public pro-Soviet activities. In the last two months of 1957 he had been as outspoken and conspicuous as ever in defense of the U.S.S.R., traveling to Washington in November to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution at the Soviet Embassy, speaking at American-Soviet Friendship’s annual event at Carnegie Hall on November 10, 1957, wiring congratulations to the Soviets on the orbiting of Sputnik. The FBI reports from late 1957 even have him privately saying “that people who are losing courage should get out of the way,” and characterized him as “solid as a rock … with the ‘supers’ (super left) all the way.” But in the opening months of 1958 Robeson fell comparatively silent, confining his public statements to a set of perfunctory “New Year’s greetings” to the peoples of China, Eastern Europe, and the U.S.S.R. (not omitting the Albanians, whom he hailed for their “demonstration of what a Peoples Socialism can do to transform a whole land”).17
His retreat from a high level of open commitment to the Soviet Union was a reflection not of disillusion but, rather, of a conscious determination to restore his reputation as a spokesman for black people. When, for example, Tony Richardson sent him a script for consideration, he rejected the suggested role of an unsavory West Indian as unsuitable, as “not constructive at this time.” Black people, Essie wrote Richardson, “would resent it” if Paul should appear in such a role, given their intense interest currently “in the coming independence of a Federated West Indies; he could not afford to consider only artistic angles.” In that same spirit of mending ties in the black community, Essie broadened her New Year’s greetings list to include such one-time friends as Fritz Pollard and such new heroines as Daisy Bates, the NAACP organizer who had coordinated the effort to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. And when boxing champion Archie Moore sent Paul a fan letter (“I’m not a hero worshipper by a long shot but there are men I admire and you are one of the few”), Robeson telephoned to thank him.18
In a comparable spirit, he took care, when filling his first commercial concert dates in years in California, Portland, and Chicago early in 1958, to present a less belligerent public image. In Sacramento a critic commented on his “new gentleness.” In San Francisco he told a reporter, “I am sorry now that I quit the concert stage because of politics.… Any ‘politics’ in the future will be in my singing,” leaving the surprised reporter—who apparently could not distinguish a tactic from a conviction—to conclude, prematurely, that Robeson was now “more interested in musicology than in politics.” In Portland, perhaps to avoid such simplicities, he told an interviewer, “I’m here as an artist”—but was also careful to add, “My political position is precisely the same now as it has always been.”19
The FBI understood this better than the press. Far from believing—as part of the press kept announcing—that Robeson was retiring from politics, the FBI theorized that he was bent on trying to restore his influence in the world of black politics. Its agents dutifully reported the occasional rumors adrift that Robeson was about to defect from Communism, but the Bureau recognized that no proof existed to support them. It preferred to believe in its own previously floated fantasy that Robeson’s effort to present an image of himself more acceptable to mainstream blacks was in the name of capturing the NAACP for his own nefarious (i.e., Communistic) purposes.20
The FBI’s special agent in Los Angeles even reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson might in fact be the “real leader” of the left-wing Foster-Davis faction of the CPUSA and may have designed his trip to California in 1958 as an effort to sway that “right-wing” CP stronghold to the left. The L.A. agent passed on his informants’ opinion that Robeson “is much more dangerous to the security of this country than those who have taken the position of extreme ‘right.’” Hoover did not doubt it. He advised the Bureau’s L.A. Office to explore fully and attempt to corroborate its information, noting that the FBI lacked “recent evidence” (actually it had never had evidence) that Robeson “has taken a direct part in the policy or other affairs of the CP.” The best that the L.A. agent could do was to report back that in California Robeson had seen “a great deal” of black CP leader Pettis Perry, and that subsequent to his visit to the state, the left-wing faction had succeeded in gaining new prominence. The recollections of Rose Perry, Pettis’s widow, are a good deal more mundane: Pettis and Paul spent most of their time talking about black issues, and she and her husband spent most of theirs “terribly afraid that something might happen to Paul physically.” According to Paul, Jr., their fear was justified: the left-front wheel came off of the car that Paul had been riding in. Although he was not a passenger at the time, and no one was hurt, it was a disturbing reminder of the incidents in St. Louis in 1947 and in Los Angeles in 1955.21
The California music critics gave Robeson’s 1958 comeback concerts enthusiastic notices. One of them remarked that “it would be too much to expect the velvety smoothness of that magnificent bass voice to continue as consistently as of old,” but the larger number expressed amazement that “the years have done virtually nothing to the greatest natural basso voice of the present generation”; and there was unanimous agreement that his dramatic, gracious personal presence remained singularly powerful. The audience response was also keen, with most of the concerts selling out in advance to enthusiastic crowds. More important to Robeson, off the concert stage he succeeded once again in drawing reinvigorated support from the black community. Attending the twentieth anniversary of the founding of People’s World (the FBI attended as well), he heard Pastor Livingston introduce him as “a champion fighter” for his race; in response Robeson reaffirmed his belief in socialism but did not mention Communism or the Soviet Union or the CPUSA. Even the FBI reports stressed that Robeson had been “increasingly effective … among the Negroes and especially among some of the Negro clergymen,” his appearances in their churches helping them to raise “a considerable amount of money.”22
In Pittsburgh two months later, his reception in the black community was again heartening. The management of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall canceled his announced concert, but two of the leading black churches, Central Baptist and Wesley Center A.M.E. Zion, opened their doors to him, and the packed assemblies gave him deafening receptions. After the concerts, the local chapter of his own powerful Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity entertained him, and P. L. Prattis of the Courier sent Essie a private report of the combined events:
Your “man” came, saw, conquered and knocked their eyeballs out—even mine.… But you would never have known he was proud, for as they applauded him, he applauded them. His pride was in them, not himself, for they had come to bring him comfort and he had lain himself on their bosom.… The Alpha boys tell me that he stormed their place for two hours, his eyes sparkling, never tiring. He defined himself, laid himself on the line, so to speak. And with all his greatness, he was modest.
A relative in Pittsburgh reported to Paul’s sister, Marian Forsythe, that “Paul acts rejuvenated once more. He had seemed so quiet for a while, but it all seems to be in the past now.”23
By the time Robeson reached Chicago in April, his spirits had soared, and the reception in that city further cheered him. Essie had written in advance to Margaret Burroughs (schoolteacher, political activist, and later founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History), “Paul wants you, if you will do so, to coordinate whatever he can do in the Negro community. He does NOT want any of this to go through the manager, Mr. [Paul] Endicott, who is white.… He would like the people to know that he wants to sit down with them.” Essie facilitated matters by herself sending letters accepting invitations for Paul to a local black minister and to the Chicago chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, which had offered to give him a smoker (introducing Robeson to the Alphas, Oscar Brown, Sr., told them, “Brothers, you are looking at immortality”).24
Margaret Burroughs, angry at the “black bourgeoisie” in Chicago for having earlier, in her opinion, turned its back on Paul, and sharing his commitment to a socialist vision, felt “it was an honor to open my home to him.” For her straightforward advocacy, she was called before the Board of Education and questioned about whether it was true that she was “sympathetic to that red, Paul Robeson.” Yes indeed, she responded, she was sympathetic, she was even downright proud of him—since, from everything she could gather, he was “a fine artist and a fine human being”; Burroughs kept her job, but by a hair. Julia and Metz Lorchard (he was editor of the Chicago Defender), who were also friendly with Robeson and had housed him on several visits to Chicago, were likewise threatened with reprisals. Julia Lorchard worked for the Cook County welfare office, and for a time her job was in serious jeopardy; one neighbor even denounced the Lorchards for playing Robeson records in their own home.25
On this trip to Chicago, Robeson spent the first night with Cathern and Ishmael Flory, the black Communist whom he had known from the forties, when Flory was the international representative for the Mine, Mill union. Robeson, Flory recalls, was “a very considerate man” who warned them that he was a late riser and “wasn’t much good” until after 2:00 p.m. But he was good for a late-night talk, and he and the Florys stayed up discussing the “change for the better” they all saw taking place in the country—“I think I’m on my way back among the people,” Robeson told the Florys. On the second night Robeson went to stay with Johnnie Mae and Sam Parks. Johnnie Mae was a master “downhome” cook, and Paul had gotten friendly with the earthy, outspoken Sam when he headed the predominantly black Packinghouse Workers local in the late forties and when the two worked together in the early fifties on the National Negro Labor Council. (Parks contrasts himself with Revels Cayton: “I was a worker who attained some intellectual understanding; he is an intellectual who became a worker.”)26
Sam Parks was exactly the kind of man in whom Robeson had come to invest high hopes, a man with strong ties both to the black church and to the black trade-union movement, and he showed Parks a side of himself that he did not reveal to Flory. Talking again late into the night, Robeson acknowledged to Parks that left-wing white trade-unionists had not proved, under the pressure of the conservative Cold War climate, as staunchly committed to the welfare of the black working class as he had anticipated. He acknowledged, too, that the “worldwide coalition” represented by Freedom magazine had not sufficiently addressed the specific needs of American blacks—that the “internationalist view” had too often bypassed rather than incorporated the black perspective. Robeson’s disappointment in the failure of the trade-union movement to remain a militant force at home was paralleled by his sense (as Parks recalls) “that the rose beds he’d seen in other countries weren’t rose beds but beds of thorns.” He expressed no word of disillusion with the Soviet Union but, rather, a generalized grief that the “world movement” for liberation seemed in disarray, and his eyes filled with tears when he talked about his “mistake” in having let “whites front me off to my own people,” keep him at a distance from his own grass roots. Still, he believed he had begun to repair that damage, had made significant strides in the past year in restoring his image as “a race man” and an artist.27
His stay in Chicago confirmed that estimate. Flory arranged a public meeting for Robeson at the Parkway Ballroom, and the turnout—five hundred people “from all over the county”—exceeded expectations. So did the enthusiasm. People clamored to say hello, including some who, in Flory’s compassionate phrase, “had gotten scared and lost their way”—not so much people on the street, who had never gone as far as the black leadership in renouncing Robeson, but rather some recalcitrant members of the black bourgeoisie. One such member, a prominent black physician in Chicago and a fellow Alpha, on this visit described Robeson as “one of the heroes of our fraternity.” (The reception among whites in Chicago was far less favorable: when a local public-affairs television program announced that Robeson would be a guest, negative popular reaction forced cancellation of his appearance.) In April, Jet magazine reported that both Robeson and Du Bois “suddenly are enjoying popularity sprees,” and George Murphy, Jr., wrote Essie, “With the two biggest Negro papers in the country [The Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier] behind Paul … and with the Negro church, our most important political institution increasingly behind him, and, with Sister Essie Robeson in there methodically pitching every day … how can our Paul fail?”28
Nothing did more toward refurbishing Robeson’s image than the publication, early in 1958, of Here I Stand, the 111-page manifesto-autobiography he wrote with Lloyd L. Brown, who had collaborated with Robeson earlier on speeches and writings. The book amounted to a subtle yet clear declaration to black America that Robeson viewed his primary allegiance as being to his own community and not to international Communism. The very first line of the Author’s Foreword read, “I am a Negro.” On the second page he added, “I am an American.” In addition, he tried to demystify his continuing refusal, ever since his 1946 Tenney Committee statement, explicitly “to give testimony or to sign affidavits” as to whether or not he was a Communist: “I have made it a matter of principle, as many others have done, to refuse to comply with any demand of legislative committees or departmental officials that infringes upon the Constitutional rights of all Americans.” He made it clear that he would continue to refuse, but pointed out that “my views concerning the Soviet Union and my warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land … have been pictured as something … sinister by Washington officials.… It has been alleged that I am part of some kind of ‘international conspiracy.’ … I am not and never have been involved in any international conspiracy or any other kind, and do not know anyone who is.” He insisted that “my belief in the principles of scientific socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life—that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private profit … have nothing in common with silly notions about ‘plots’ and ‘conspiracies.’”29
Without making any apology for his own past actions, without acknowledging any “lapses” in the integrity of Soviet policy—like all proud-spirited people, he lacked the habit of berating himself in public—Robeson looked forward, not back. He did reaffirm his friendship for the Soviet Union and for individuals like Ben Davis, Jr. (who hold “nonconformist or radical views”), but his own primary allegiance, he made clear, was to the interests of black people. In the struggle for those interests, he cited black trade-unionists and the black church—not the Communist Party—as the vanguard institutions, and also as the wellspring of his own personal strength. He advised black leaders, moreover, that they “must rely upon and be responsive to no other control than the will of their people”; allies—“important allies among our white fellow-citizens”—were welcome, but “the Negro people’s movement must be led by Negroes.… Good advice is good no matter what the source and help is needed and appreciated from wherever it comes, but Negro action cannot be decisive if the advisors and helpers hold the guiding reins. For no matter how well meaning other groups may be, the fact is that our interests are secondary at best with them.”
In publicly declaring independence from the CP, Robeson was also distancing himself from accusations of white domination in general. He put his faith in “aroused and militant” black mass action, siding with what he perceived—long before most prominent blacks did—as “a rising resentment against control of our affairs by white people, regardless of whether that domination is expressed by the blunt orders of political bosses or more discreetly by the ‘advice’ of white liberals which must be heeded or else.” In contrast to well-intentioned white liberal and establishment black leaders alike, Robeson rejected the notion of “gradualism” in the struggle for civil rights as “but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are lawbreakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of law.” The insistence that progress must be slow was, he argued, “rooted in the idea that democratic rights, as far as Negroes are concerned, are not inalienable and self-evident as they are for white Americans.” How long? he asked rhetorically. “As long as we permit it.” Black people had the “power of numbers, the power of organization, and the power of spirit” to “end the terror”—now. Robeson’s concept of “mass militancy, of mass action,” was an appeal for coordination that he knew “full well … is not easy to do.…” But, “despite all of our differences,” he felt a “nonpartisan unity” among blacks was nonetheless possible, because there was “a growing impatience with petty ways of thinking and doing things.” Robeson was attempting to heal divisions within the black community by a transcending appeal to move beyond them—and somehow to transcend as well the powerful resistance to change within the dominant white culture. If he slighted practicalities, his clarion call for black unity in Here I Stand at once prefigured the language and vision soon to be taken up by militant young blacks, and served to announce his own primary commitment to the black struggle in the immediate present.30
Except for the minuscule left-wing press, white publications wholly ignored Here I Stand (The New York Times failed even to list it in its “Books Out Today” section, a courtesy extended to some of the most obscure publications). But the black press not only reviewed the book widely, but also got its message: “I Am Not a Communist Says Robeson,” blared a headline in The Afro-American (hailing it in an editorial as a “remarkable book”). “Paul Robeson States His Case,” ran the front-page article in the Pittsburgh Courier, its chief editor, P. L. Prattis, declaring in a separate column that he had been “deeply stirred” by Robeson’s words. The Chicago Crusader expressed delight that Robeson had finally answered those calling him a Communist and a traitor—his “refusal to defend himself has isolated him at a time when we sorely need the type of courageous leadership he represents”; the Crusader now hailed him as “one of the mightiest of all Negro voices raised against world oppression of people based on race, color, national origin and religion.” The only negative review in the black press came, predictably, from Roy Wilkins in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Wilkins repeated his decade-old assertion that blacks had “never regarded” Robeson as a leader, and dismissed him as a man who “imagines his misfortunes to stem, not from his own bungling, but from the persecution of ‘the white folks on top.’” With no help from Wilkins or from the general press, the first edition of Here I Stand was exhausted within six weeks, and by May 1959, without benefit of a commercial distributor, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. Robeson, after a decade in the wilderness, was re-emerging into prominence and favor.31
Just prior to Robeson’s successful California-Chicago trip, the mainstream black magazine Ebony had somewhat prefigured his re-emergence by publishing an interview with him by the respected journalist Carl T. Rowan. Entitled “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?,” Rowan’s article concluded that he had not: “even Negroes who consider Robeson politically naïve and tactically dumb find reasons to sympathize with him.…” The Rowan piece was not entirely laudatory (George Murphy, Jr., characterized it as “collaborationist”), describing Robeson at one point as looking like “a sad-voiced martyr,” and at another—when Rowan asked him directly about Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin as a murderer—as acting like “a singer who has forgotten his lyrics; he mumbles vaguely.…” Rowan subsequently amplified his reaction to Robeson on the popular “Tex and Jinx” radio program. Though complaining that Robeson had never answered his question about Stalin, and while disagreeing with him “greatly on a great many issues,” Rowan said, “when he’s talking about what’s happening to Negroes or when he’s crying out for freedom of Negroes or when he’s talking about a constitutional issue like the freedom to travel, I find it very difficult to disagree with him.”32
At the same time the Ebony piece appeared, Robeson began to be rediscovered by the recording industry. Thanks to the valiant efforts during the early fifties of Paul, Jr., and Lloyd Brown, Robeson’s voice had found a marginal outlet through their Othello Recording Company. But in the beginning of 1958 Vanguard put him back in a commercial studio for the first time in seven years. According to Essie, “Paul was nervous as a cat,” but everyone deemed the sessions a success—“Paul was never in better voice. The sound technicians were amazed, and the Vanguard folks were simply thrilled, and so was Paul, of course.” Then, in April 1958, another breakthrough came in the form of an Actors’ Equity resolution. Following the lead of their British counterparts, the quarterly membership meeting on March 28 voted 111–75 to urge the State Department to issue Robeson a passport (Equity President Ralph Bellamy was one of the negatives).33
It was a nice present, arriving just before Robeson’s sixtieth birthday, on April 9, 1958. That occasion provoked many additional tributes. Before the birthday rites were concluded, no fewer than twenty-seven countries had held celebratory events of one kind or another, with Peggy Middleton, the London County Council member from Greenwich and executive secretary of the London Paul Robeson Committee, coordinating the assorted arrangements as if from a command post. In Mexico City, twenty leading figures in the arts sponsored a concert; in South Africa, a group of students and faculty at Cape Town University arranged a recital of Robeson recordings; in East Berlin, a Robeson song-film made on direct commission to Earl Robinson especially for the occasion premiered in the city’s biggest hall; in Stockholm, the literary magazine Clarté put out a special Robeson issue; in Hungary, commemorative concerts were performed throughout the country; in Japan, Radio Tokyo broadcast Robeson songs and speeches; in Port-au-Prince, the celebrants gathered at the Société Nationale d’Art Dramatique; in Peking, a rally was staged in the new Capital Theatre that lasted over three hours, preceded by two days of Robeson songs on national radio; in Moscow, the celebration took place in the enormous Hall of Columns—and in New York the Soviet representative to the UN, A. Sobolev, hosted a dinner for Robeson.34
The festivities in India threatened for a time to produce serious political repercussions. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself issued a proclamation hailing the planned celebration of Robeson’s sixtieth birthday as a fitting tribute, “not only because Paul Robeson is one of the greatest artists of our generation, but also because he has represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us—the cause of human dignity.” The American press, which ignored all other birthday tributes to Robeson, did publicize Nehru’s comment—disturbing U.S. Embassy officials in New Delhi, especially Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and briefly threatening to damage diplomatic relations between the two countries.35
Attempting to exert pressure on the Indian government to cancel plans for the celebration, Ambassador Bunker found a sympathetic ear in Secretary General Pillai, who purportedly told him that he, too, was “very concerned” about the Robeson affair: he was himself “continually having difficulty with ‘woolly headed Nationalists’ who were easy dupes of Communists.” American Chargé d’Affaires Turner in Bombay called on M. C. Chagla, Chief Justice of the High Court, to express “puzzlement” at the decision to honor an American “who is currently engaged [in a] lawsuit with [the] U.S. government, who is critical of his own country and has compared it unfavorably with [the] USSR.” Turner warned that “Americans would certainly interpret [the] celebration as Communist-inspired and even anti-American and that many would regard” it “as evidence that India was going Communist.” Unintimidated, Chagla “stoutly defended” the purpose of the celebration, and added with dignity that his own presence on the committee “was guarantee against political flavor or Communist inspiration.” In Washington, India’s Ambassador Mehta stood up just as strongly. Called in by the State Department, he pointed out that Robeson was not a “convicted Communist” and that Prime Minister Nehru, Judge Chagla, and others involved in the birthday event were not Communists—“he didn’t understand why anyone was concerned about this celebration in India.”36
Nehru slightly modified his tribute to Robeson in a subsequent statement but refused to withdraw it. He did, however, leave additional planning and comment to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who actively promoted the birthday celebration. Unable to budge the Indian government, Secretary of State Dulles and Ambassador Bunker, as a fallback protest, instructed all U.S. officials to refuse invitations. The elaborate festivities climaxed in simultaneous events in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and Luck-now, with Chief Justice Chagla presiding in Bombay—and with no U.S. officials present. Essie sent thanks to both father and daughter: “There are just no words,” she wrote Nehru, “to express how deeply grateful we are for your statement.… It was beautifully said, and at exactly the right time for maximum effectiveness.”37
The following month Robeson logged another milestone on the road to restoration. After more than a decade’s absence from the New York City concert stage, he reappeared at Carnegie Hall for what turned into a jubilant occasion. Fifteen policemen were stationed at the hall for the sold-out concert, but not even the whisper of a disturbance occurred. The crowd cheered Robeson on his arrival, rose to its feet three times during the concert to cheer him again, and at the conclusion shouted and whistled its approval. The critics were almost as kind. Those who felt his voice had “lost much of its old glow” (in the words of one reviewer) charitably focused instead on his undiluted power over an audience—his “incomparable vigor of presentation and limitless charm.” Sonorous and playful, Robeson treated his listeners to a recital that mixed song with comments, laughter, reminiscence, even a bit of dancing. He was delighted to be performing again and gratified by his reception; the success of the concert, he told Ben Davis, opened up “entirely new vistas.” His only disappointment was that the hall had mostly been filled with whites. To remedy that, he scheduled a second concert and saw to it that hundreds of tickets were distributed through Micheaux Bookstore and other Harlem outlets. That one, too, sold out. (Still, when Edith Tiger, who had known him well during Progressive Party days, went backstage, she found him feeling “awful.” He told her his kidneys were causing him trouble. Then he said that it was his “nerve endings,” that he had shingles and couldn’t wear clothes comfortably. Edith thought something else was wrong: “His eyes were terrible.”) Two weeks later, Robeson gave a memorable concert at Mother A.M.E. Zion, his brother Ben’s church. Alan Booth had been accompanying him for most of his few concerts of recent years, but for the A.M.E. Zion event Robeson was reunited with Larry Brown. “I want the folks of Mother Zion to know,” Robeson told the overflow crowd, “that a lot of the hard struggle is over and that my concert career has practically been reestablished all over this land.… I’ve been waiting for this afternoon just to come back to give my thanks here.…”38
The best news of all finally—incredibly, when measured against the years of deflating delays—came in June. The Supreme Court, in a 5–4 split decision (William O. Douglas writing for the majority) on the related Rockwell Kent and Walter Briehl cases, announced that the Secretary of State had no right to deny a passport to any citizen because of his political beliefs. The court added that the Passport Division had no right to demand that an applicant sign an affidavit concerning membership in the Communist Party. Suddenly it was all over.
The State Department (in Leonard Boudin’s words) “immediately capitulated,” acknowledging that the Kent-Briehl ruling encompassed the Robeson case as well. Two weeks later Robeson was in Boudin’s office, smiling broadly, holding up his passport so photographers could get a good shot of it, telling them he would soon be traveling, that the victory was not just a personal one but, rather, “a victory for the ‘other America,’” and illustrative of the “change of climate in the United States.” In private, Robeson expressed some trepidation, concerned that, at a time when his people were at last in motion, he would be leaving the struggle behind if he traveled abroad—and concerned, oppositely, that if he did not go he would disappoint those all over the world who had worked for his release and had been waiting to see and hear him. His friends, anyway, were jubilant. An FBI tap of a phone call between Ben Davis and Lloyd Brown memorialized Davis’s high-spirited remark that as a result of the court’s decision he, Davis, should now be able to “go to New Jersey”; in a second call a few weeks later the two men exulted that “the Negro from the chain gang made it.” “We keep pinching ourselves,” Essie wrote, “wondering if we’ll wake up and find it all a dream.”39
It must have seemed that way, after eight years of stalemate and confinement, as congratulations poured in from around the world and as a stack of glamorous offers began to accumulate. Glen Byam Shaw instantly telegraphed asking Robeson to open Stratford’s 1959 season—its historic hundredth anniversary—in the role of Othello. The Observer wanted to publish a “Profile”; Pablo Neruda asked him “to sing for the Chilean people”; others invited him to Berlin, to Paris, to Tokyo, to Sydney, to New Delhi. Dream or no dream, the Robesons started packing their bags, sorting out music, getting medical and dental checkups. “It will be good to hear applause again,” Paul told Freda Diamond, “but it won’t mean anything.” The Robesons decided to plan no further than London; once there, they would sit down and leisurely sort through the pile of offers. Essie was very much back in the role of coordinator for Paul’s schedule. “I want him to take his time,” she wrote Indira Gandhi, “and not rush headlong into a back-breaking schedule of work.”40
On July 10 Paul and Essie drove out to Idlewild Airport along with his brother Ben (who accompanied them to London), Lloyd Brown, Paul, Jr., and Marilyn, and their two grandchildren, David and Susan. Television, radio, and the press were all out in force. To avoid them, Paul lingered in the parking lot until the last moment. He had already told the press that he expected to be overseas for a considerable time but intended to return to the States at intervals. He would not, he said, discuss politics; he was going to Europe “as an artist.” No, he added, he harbored no bitterness. But James Aronson (coeditor of the National Guardian) recalls a small farewell dinner party at the Rosens’ a few nights before the Robesons left the country at which Paul expressed such a depth of anger that Aronson was “shocked and touched”; as he remembers it, Paul said he “owed this country—or at least its leaders—nothing.” He insisted on a BOAC plane, rather than an American carrier. When friends chided that the U.S. government was not about to sabotage a commercial plane in order to “get” him, Robeson grinned sheepishly and said he just didn’t trust them.41
The plane took off for London at 5:30 p.m. As Paul settled in the seat beside her, Essie jotted down a few quick notes: “It has been an 8 yr pull, struggle all the way, for this trip. Paul is … quiet, happy, relaxed, ‘on his way’ at long last. He is humming, singing softly, trying out his voice. It’s there, alright.…”42
In a send-off column, Robert Ruark, Robeson’s old antagonist, wrote that he was “willing to bet” the British would meet him in the same spirit of hooting derision with which they had greeted that other “anti-American,” Charlie Chaplin, the year before.43
The British had something quite different in mind.