Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  As it was, he managed—while playing seven performances of Othello a week—to put in a nearly nonstop string of appearances, lending his voice time and again against fascism, racism, and colonialism, and constantly reiterating the same themes: the first requirement for realizing a democratic America was to win the war against fascism; the best hope for blacks lay in an alliance with progressive (CIO) forces in the labor movement; the continued denial of full rights to black Americans was “the argument of fascism”—the exaltation of a “Master Race”; the fact that blacks continued to be “hurt and resentful” was “for good and sufficient reasons”; the remedy was for blacks everywhere to continue to demand the abolition of the poll tax, the end of segregation, the right of equal access to upgraded jobs; the Soviet Union had already provided a concrete example to the world of how racial prejudice could be eradicated within a single generation; the right of African peoples to self-government had to be high on the agenda of the postwar world, necessitating a worldwide coalition of progressive-minded people to combat the “new imperialists” who were using the argument of caution in dismantling the colonial systems as a blind for maintaining the status quo. Given the continuing bigotry, the seemingly endless blasting of hopes, Robeson marveled over and over again at the patience and patriotism of his own people: “They may not be allowed to vote in some places—but they buy bonds. They cannot get jobs in a lot of places—but they salvage paper and metal and fats. They are confronted, in far too many places, with the raucous, Hitleresque howl of ‘white supremacy’—but they are giving their blood and sweat for red, white and blue supremacy.”6

  Of Robeson’s public efforts, his participation in the campaign to desegregate major-league baseball brought him special satisfaction. The pressure created by the long-standing arguments of the Negro Publishers Association and other groups for the desegregation of baseball was heightened in 1943 when Peter V. Cacchione, Brooklyn’s Communist councilman, introduced a desegregation resolution. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the high commissioner of baseball, agreed to let eight black newspapermen and Robeson attend the annual meeting of the club owners in December 1943 and plead their case. Rumors spread that Landis was preparing to recommend that the owners immediately sign black players, but Landis had avoided the issue before, allowing the negative arguments of Larry McPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to carry the day.

  Robeson took along to the meeting two friends, William Patterson and the Chicago-based Ishmael Flory (who was executive secretary of the left-wing Negro People’s Assembly and managing editor of its newspaper, The New World)—but both were kept cooling their heels in the anteroom. Robeson, however, was allowed to address the club owners. “I come here as an American and former athlete,” he told them. “I come because I feel this problem deeply.” For twenty minutes he used his own history to make an impassioned appeal, citing his earlier experience in college football and his current performance as Othello as arguments against the assumption that racial disturbance automatically follows desegregation. When Robeson finished, the owners applauded him vigorously but did not ask questions. Speaking to the press later, Landis reiterated for the record his previous position that no law, written or unwritten, existed to prevent blacks from participating in organized baseball—again tossing the issue back into the laps of the owners, who were not prepared, for the moment, to move. Still, a step in that direction had been taken: for the first time the owners had listened in person to the pleas of black representatives—and applauded them. As the New York Amsterdam News put it, the meeting “had a cleansing, if not wearing, effect.” Although the color barrier in baseball was wobbling, it would not fall until two years later, when Branch Rickey would ease Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers’ squad. Four years after that, Jackie Robinson was to take the stand in Washington before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and disparage Paul Robeson to the country.7

  Robeson’s efforts in behalf of Ben Davis, Jr., were more immediately successful. Davis, a Communist, decided to run for a City Council seat in a campaign marked by a black alliance with progressive labor; this was precisely the coalition Robeson had been urging, and he enthusiastically lent support to the campaign. At the Golden Gate Ballroom two weeks before the election, he performed a scene from Othello in an all-star Victory Rally organized by Teddy Wilson, the pianist and band leader, at which an ecumenical range of black performers—Coleman Hawkins, Hazel Scott, Billie Holiday, Pearl Primus, Mary Lou Williams, and Ella Fitzgerald—contributed their talents. On election night, bedlam broke loose in the Harlem Lincoln-Douglass Club when the official count confirmed a Davis victory, and Robeson joined the celebrants at Smalls’ Paradise, happily partying away the night. (In thanking Robeson for his help in the campaign, Teddy Wilson wrote him, “You have endeared yourself more than ever in the hearts of our people.”) Davis’s victory marked a point of considerable recovery for the CP’s Harlem Section from the loss of support following the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. As early as the preceding April, Ben Davis had reported cheerfully that the Harlem Section “is beginning to break records. We have doubled our membership (securing 400 new members in three months).” With the Harlem CP back up to Popular Front levels and Ben Davis’s victory symbolizing the Party’s renewed ability to forge alliances with influential Harlem trade-unionists and intellectuals, there was reason for Davis and Robeson to believe (in Davis’s words), “We’ve just begun.” An FBI informant reported soon after Davis’s victory that Robeson would run for Congress on an independent ticket in 1944, but there is no evidence he had any impulse in that direction.8

  Life was not all hardworking politics and performing. During the forties Robeson was a regular at Café Society, where he would often drop by after the evening performance of Othello, often with a group of friends. It had been opened in 1938 by Barney Josephson as the first mainstream nightclub in a white area to cater to a mixed-race audience (earlier “Black and Tan” cabarets had been in black neighborhoods), and soon became a gathering spot for the left. Café Society also pioneered in offering a career boost to a host of performers—including Lena Home, Hazel Scott, Josh White, Jimmy Savo, Pearl Primus, and Zero Mostel. But even as Robeson enjoyed himself, he was aware of the fledgling performers struggling in front of the Café Society microphone against the double obstacle of stage fright and noise from the boisterous clientele. Lena Home remembers well his soothing encouragement; Pearl Primus recalls how he came up to dance with her in order to calm her jitters; and Sarah Vaughan, about to be drowned out by the din of clinking glasses and laughter, was rescued when Robeson stood up in the audience and silenced the crowd with a polite “Ladies and gentlemen, quiet, please! I came to hear the young lady sing.” Even in Café Society there were occasional racial incidents. Barney Josephson remembers the night an out-of-town couple, seeing Robeson dancing with a white woman, called Josephson over to the table to protest. He told them that if they didn’t like it they could leave. They did. Uta Hagen remembers that one particularly ugly incident caused Paul to “really lose his cool” in public for the only time she could remember. A white Southerner at another table—“drunk as a skunk”—called out to Paul that his name was also Robeson and said, “Your daddy was probably one of my daddy’s slaves. You probably belong to me.” According to Uta, “Paul jumped up and started shouting, ‘You Bastard!’” and Barney Josephson, who was very fond of Paul, intervened.9

  The affection Robeson inspired, the extent of endearment felt for him, was made clear in a mammoth celebration of his forty-sixth birthday on April 16, 1944, which also commemorated the anniversary of the Council on African Affairs. Under the auspices of the Council, twelve thousand showed up at the Armory at Thirty-fourth Street and Park Avenue—four thousand were turned away for lack of space—for five hours of entertainment and tribute. The list of performers was a veritable who’s who from stage, film, music, and radio—including Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Jimmy Durante, Mary Lou Williams, and Duke Ellington. Dozens of letters and telegram
s poured in from various walks of life and from around the world: Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, Sidney Hillman (president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers), Edward G. Robinson, Earl Browder, Babe Ruth, Eugene Ormandy, Vito Marcantonio, Pearl S. Buck, Andrei Gromyko, W. C. Handy, Harry Bridges for the Longshoremen’s Union, Canada Lee, Walter Damrosch, Oscar Hammerstein II, André Maurois, Rockwell Kent, Charles Boyer, Theodore Dreiser, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Thomas W. Lamont, Lillian Hellman, and, from the playwright Marc Connelly, perhaps the most memorably eloquent message: “I suppose by that dreary instrument, the calendar, it can be contended that you are the contemporary of your friends. But by more important standards of time measurement, you really represent a highly desirable tomorrow which, by some lucky accident, we are privileged to appreciate today.”10

  Mary McLeod Bethune, in her message, hailed Robeson as “the tallest tree in our forest,” and Joseph Curran, Max Yergan, Ben Davis, Jr., the author Donald Ogden Stewart, and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, president of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, were among those who spoke at the celebration itself. Robeson responded briefly, his voice choked, tears on his cheeks—“Save your voice, Paul!” someone in the crowd yelled—calling for unity among the world’s progressives, paying tribute to the African masses, and emphasizing the need to win self-determination for colonial peoples.11

  As the crowd joined an all-black soldiers’ chorus in singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Paul,” Army Intelligence agents scanned the audience for familiar faces and forwarded a detailed report, which was shared with the FBI. The agent covering the rear floor observed the arrival of Raissa and Earl Browder, and noted that “Browder, who did not speak, was seated in a front row and was observed placing his arm around Zero Mostel in a very friendly fashion.” The government agents also noted that they had been unable to locate Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Roy Wilkins, or “other leading figures in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the Urban League” in the crowd, and that no mention was made of their names during the course of the celebration. The significance, according to the intelligence report, was that “a rift may be developing among the Negro leaders due to possible rivalry between Robeson, Powell, and A. Philip Randolph for the national leadership of the American Negro”—and the report added, portentously, that Robeson was not scheduled to participate in a forthcoming gathering to present A. Philip Randolph with an award. The intelligence reports exaggerated a “rift”—that was still a few years off—but did accurately spot a growing unwillingness on the part of established black leaders to associate with “Communist sympathizers.”12

  Three months after the birthday celebration, Othello ended its Broadway run in preparation for a national tour. At the time of the show’s closing, it was still playing to standees, had taken in nearly a million dollars at the box office, and had set an all-time Broadway record for a Shakespearean production with 296 performances. After a two-month vacation, the show embarked on a thirty-six-week coast-to-coast tour of the United States and Canada, beginning in Trenton, New Jersey, in September 1944 and ultimately taking the company to forty-five cities in seventeen states, covering nearly fifteen thousand railroad miles. The tour proved a personal as well as a professional milestone: on it Robeson and Uta Hagen intensified a love affair that had begun during the New York production.13

  The striking young actress was an appealing combination of innocence and high spirits, of ebullient humor and serious purpose. Her European background (in Germany, her mother was an opera singer, her father a distinguished academic) gave her a bedrock of traditional values, which played off in easy tandem against the enthusiastic ardor acquired during an American girlhood; she was a woman simultaneously passionate, proper, and strong-willed. Hagen had not initially thought of Robeson romantically or sexually—“I thought of him as a fabulous older friend,” she later recalled. Then one night they were standing in the wings waiting for an entrance and joking together. Suddenly, with total boldness and confidence, Robeson “took his enormous hand—costume and all—and put it between my legs. I thought, What happened to me?! It was being assaulted in the most phenomenal way, and I thought, What the hell, and I got unbelievably excited. I was flying! Afterwards I looked at him with totally different eyes. He suddenly became a sex object.” In retrospect Hagen is convinced that her initial lack of sexual interest in him had been a challenge; pursued all his life by white women, Robeson by his mid-forties found indifference a stimulant. Up to this point in her life, Hagen had seen herself as utterly conventional; sex and love for her were inseparable, and the idea of a spontaneous sexual response to someone, let alone an extramarital affair, had seemed entirely foreign.14

  As Paul and Uta began to spend more time together, and as rumors of their liaison spread, Joe Ferrer, according to Uta, seemed indifferent. He was himself seeing a member of the Othello touring company, and he seemed to Uta “unbelievably happy to pass me off onto Paul.” Joe proved altogether cooperative, and even took to whistling outside a closed door to avoid surprising the couple. He would later claim not to have known of the affair initially, but both Uta and Paul believed he was well aware of it from the beginning.

  When in New York, the Ferrers continued to live together, and Robeson continued to stay at the home of Freda Diamond and Barry Baruch. Since Uta and Paul sometimes rendezvoused there, the idea never crossed Uta’s mind that he and Freda were themselves involved (though he did talk to her often about how much he had loved Yolande Jackson). “I was naïve enough to think,” Uta said years later, “that this only happened if one was deeply in love. In other words, that it was a consequential relationship. That it was just ‘a fling’ never occurred to me. To just ‘do it’ for fun, I’d never done in my life. I had no idea he was doing anything with Freda. I had no idea he was doing anything with anybody!” When she finally realized that Paul and Freda were lovers as well as friends, she confronted Paul. He not only acknowledged the truth but expressed surprise that Uta had not known. He also agreed to stop seeing Freda—which he did not do. Uta moved him into her house, maneuvering Joe Ferrer into issuing the invitation on the pretext that Paul had had a fight with Barry and Freda and could no longer live with them.

  Paul had not, up to that point, ever mentioned marriage to Uta—on that score he had been scrupulous. He did tell her that he “despised” Essie, that he never saw her except from necessity (Uta met her only three or four times in the two years she and Paul were together), and he constantly denigrated her, mocking what he saw as her pretentions, expressing scorn, for example, for the white-pillared “Southern mansion” at Enfield in which she took such pride. Uta was persuaded that he “loathed Essie,” but sometimes wondered whether his unaccented negativism wasn’t partly calculated for her benefit. It may have been. On occasion he certainly did loathe Essie—and she him, a condition not unknown even to the most devoted pair-bonders (which Paul and Essie were not). But residual affection, intertwined with dependency, could sometimes resurface as well. He was still capable of sending off a loving note to her as late as 1942, while preparing Othello: “Love me—Hug me often. I adore you—Love you.”15

  But, whether he did indeed “loathe” Essie, Paul made it clear that he would never leave her, and particularly not for a white woman; he knew that the outcry against him in the black community would be too great, destroying his effectiveness as a public figure. Although this was true enough, Uta got the additional sense that Essie had come to serve Paul over the years as a convenient cover: he could sleep around freely while using his “unbreakable” ties to her as a plausible device for avoiding any binding commitment to a new partner. And he did sleep around, as Uta gradually came to realize: “He had many, many that I know of personally. There was a girl in every port. When we went around to these homes on the tour I had the feeling that every hostess we went to he’d had a thing with. I think there were many, many, many women.” But, he told Uta, there were relatively few black women (and they tended to be light-skinned)—though
perhaps, too, there were not quite so few as he suggested.16

  All this dawned on Uta slowly—these were all the “questions I had after I grew away from him.” During most of their two years together, “I loved him so much that I kind of passed it off,” persuaded that their importance to each other was profound, of a different order from his frequent flings. And Paul encouraged that view; though he avoided any serious discussion of marriage, he would sometimes talk passionately, romantically, of “running off together—to Russia maybe, to anywhere.” Uta later came to realize that he was uninterested in committing himself permanently to any one woman—“I wanted to marry Yo [Yolande Jackson],” she quoted him as saying many times; “she’s the only woman I ever wanted to marry”; he talked about Yolande “continuously, with tenderness, with enormous respect, with nostalgia”—and told Uta that she and Yolande were a lot alike. Uta tried not to prod him into agreeing to a permanent arrangement he did not authentically want, tried to stay satisfied with the apparent intensity of his devotion.

  The nine months on tour with Othello were, from Uta’s perspective, particularly “wonderful.” Joe Ferrer carried off his side of the arrangement with contented aplomb, sharing like a true comrade in the tense adventures of a racially mixed traveling company. And the adventures were many.