Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  It was important to understand, Robeson emphasized, that ordinary Russians backed their government, felt it represented “their leadership.” He likened the situation to his experience as a football player—“The coach tells you what to do and we do it”; it was not a question of being under a “dictatorship” but of agreeing to work for a common goal believed to be in the interest of all. If you wanted to talk about such matters as “freedom of speech,” Robeson suggested, you might better turn to the American South, where blacks were being “shot down” for speaking their minds, for asserting their right to the supposed guarantees of American citizenship (“The Negro people,” he added, “are no longer willing to be shot down”).

  “You don’t find that sort of thing in California, do you?” Chairman Tenney asked. “Yes, in California,” Robeson replied, and recounted a recent experience in Fresno. He had gone into a restaurant with friends and been told they were not serving. “But you are serving,” Robeson said, seeing people sitting around eating. He was asked what he meant by “coming in here with your hat on with white folks.” “I started for the guy,” Robeson said, but a friend saw the man reach for a gun and warned Robeson to hold back. “I could have been dead” in Fresno, California, he said, “exactly like I would have been dead in Georgia. I am not saying the state of California wouldn’t have done more [about] it, but I would have been good and dead.” Plenty of white workers were “just as bad off” in California, Robeson added; moreover, he’d gone into the fields and seen the abominable conditions under which Mexican laborers suffered. The struggle against inequality, he believed, was a “unified struggle [of] … Negro and white workers, both divided because the fellows at the top keep them divided; but their essential interests are the same.” Still, in his view, neither this internal struggle at home nor the worldwide struggle between competing American and Soviet systems necessitated violence. He himself believed that “the only way people can get back on their feet is to nationalize the means of production,” but he also believed “there is still plenty of room for private enterprise” in the world—“we shouldn’t have to go to war with Russia because they haven’t got free enterprise.” Revels Cayton, the black union leader, who had accompanied Robeson on a series of political appearances in California just preceding the Tenney hearing, reported to Max Yergan that “This red-baiting outfit took the shellacking of their life. Paul made a tremendous talk … extremely timely and to the point.”30

  Cayton and Robeson had known each other earlier but had drawn close together after Cayton’s arrival in New York City in the summer of 1945 to become executive secretary of the National Negro Congress. An exuberant, earthy, outspoken man, Cayton was the grandson of Hiram Revels, the black Senator from Mississippi during Reconstruction, and the brother of the distinguished sociologist Horace Cayton. A veteran trade-unionist (he had for years been chairman of the California CIO’s state committee on minorities), Revels Cayton was also a CP stalwart who was rambunctiously independent of the Party when it came to black issues.31

  In 1946 Cayton was intent on orienting the work of the NNC around the needs of the black working class and the trade unions, challenging the domination of “the NAACP and the other conservative organizations.” That much was fine with the Party. But when, in the late forties, Cayton came to argue for the necessity of forming separate black caucuses within the industrial unions, part of the CP leadership would balk—even though these early attempts, in Cayton’s own view, never amounted to more than “a quiet gathering of blacks to talk things over.” Nonetheless, Cayton would continue to insist that the caucuses were needed in order to push for more job opportunities for blacks, an effort that, by the early fifties, even the left-wing unions had become reluctant to undertake—and the Party became reluctant to press them for fear of jeopardizing its influence. By the fifties, the Party leadership came to distrust, in varying degrees, what it viewed as a resurgence of black nationalism and of dual unionism—divisive threats to its continuing and overriding concern for black-white unity based on shared class interests. It was the character of the unity—integration without equality—that Cayton would challenge in the early fifties. In practice, he argued, “unity” had meant whites leading blacks and putting the interests of whites first. In the United States, Cayton understood, divisions based on race were often a more important determinant of behavior than commonalities based on class. Like any good Marxist, Cayton believed that class unity would ultimately be the instrument of liberation—but in the interim, he insisted, injustices based on race could best be attended to by the unification of blacks.32

  Cayton came to have an important influence on Robeson. Increasingly in the postwar years, they shared political platforms, and Paul would often stay over at Revels and Lee Cayton’s apartment, sharing meals, crooning their baby to sleep, arguing political points into the night. He came to agree with Cayton that the black working class had become the central agency in the struggle for black rights. The black trade-unionists who had gotten a toehold in industry during World War II were (like Robeson) strongly connected to the black churches and strongly identified with black culture—but otherwise had scant patience with any form of black nationalism (whether it be Marcus Garvey or the Nation of Islam) that called for a separatist political solution. In the early thirties especially, Robeson had stressed the importance of preserving a black cultural identity, but he had never sought to preserve its integrity through political separation. He remained committed all his life to a strategy of political coalition and, after his exposure to socialism in the late thirties, had vigorously supported alliance with the white oppressed.

  Robeson believed the Party emphasis on “Black and White Together” represented a genuine commitment to the ideal of brotherhood, but by the late forties he recognized, too, that this could serve some of the less racially enlightened whites in the Party with a rationale for ignoring black aspirations and for maintaining their own control. As early as 1946 Robeson brought Ben Davis, Jr., over to Cayton’s house one night, “just to see,” according to Cayton, “if Ben and I would get into an argument.” Cayton and Davis never got along more than passably well; Ben represented Party orthodoxy, Cayton represented the mavericks. That night, running true to form, Davis accused Cayton of “petit-bourgeois nationalism” in pushing for black power within the unions, of forgetting that the Party, not a separate group of black trade-unionists, was the vanguard of struggle. As Cayton recalls it, he told Davis to “just look at the facts: the white working class is supposed to be leading us, and where the hell are they going?! God help us if we follow their lead. They’re not doing a goddamn thing for blacks! When are they going to start leading, Ben? Our folks are really moving, and if I have to decide between the two, I’m going to go with my people.” Robeson had brought the two men together to let them argue it out, and for most of the evening he simply sat quietly and listened. Then he took off the month of October 1946 to stump with Cayton on the West Coast in behalf of the National Negro Congress.33

  Cayton reported back to the NNC staff in New York that he and Paul were “pounding away on the need of building” that organization, speaking on the radio, at community meetings, in churches and to a variety of union gatherings: to striking maritime workers on the San Francisco waterfront, to a luncheon gathering “of practically every ranking official of the CIO in San Francisco,” to Dishwashers Local 110, to Cayton’s own local union (the Shipscalers and Painters Local 10 in Seattle), to the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union in Los Angeles, and in that same city to Harry Bridges’s International Longshoremen and Warehousemen union. They met everywhere with “tremendous good will and enthusiasm,” but also, in Cayton’s view, “the circle of followers was growing smaller, due in part to the deepening of the Cold War; not only was there a basic lack of understanding of the Congress’ program,” but the black working class was preoccupied with pending “economic annihilation” due to the closing down of wartime industry. Indeed, the heralded “rebirth” of the NNC
never materialized. In Cayton’s words, “We didn’t have a base, we didn’t have any credentials in the black community.” With no significant growth in membership, the NNC, in less than two years, folded into the newly formed Civil Rights Congress—for which another Robeson friend, William Patterson, would become the chief spokesman. Patterson was more of a doctrinaire Party man than Cayton, who over the years would become estranged from the CP and would eventually leave it.34

  At several times during the fall of 1946, Uta Hagen had flown out to be with Paul as he crisscrossed the country filling political and concert engagements. By Christmastime he was back in New York briefly, and Uta planned a festive holiday. She and Joe Ferrer had recently separated—he went to stay at their country place in Ossining, she kept the New York town house—but had remained on friendly terms. On Christmas Eve, Uta went to Joe’s dressing room (he was performing Cyrano), put up a German Christmas tree complete with candles and a little music box, left gifts from herself and their daughter, Letty, and told the cast seamstress to light the candles just before Joe came in. Then she went home to wait for Paul’s arrival at her house for their planned Christmas Eve dinner together.35

  It was a cozy evening. Paul and Uta exchanged gifts, had dinner, and curled up—Paul in an armchair, Uta on the sofa—to talk (sex was out: “I was having a bladder attack and was in pain,” Uta later said; “The Lord was with me—we weren’t doin’ nuthin’”). Uta suddenly thought she felt a draft. At the door to the room, she had put a high screen which stood about six inches off the floor. Glancing over to see where the draft was coming from, her eyes fixed on a man’s feet showing under the screen. She jumped up, went to the door, found Joe there, and impulsively threw her arms around him—“Oh! You came to wish me a Merry Christmas!” As she hugged him, she found herself face to face with two men standing in the doorway. One was a lawyer, the other a detective. Joe strode into the living room. “I’ll never forget it,” Uta recalls. “Joe looked so little and Paul so big. He looked up at Paul and said something like ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ All Paul said, in a quiet, sorrowful voice, was ‘Oh, Joe, no.’ It was just awful. Finally Joe got embarrassed, and the lawyer got very embarrassed,” and the detective just stood there—and then all three walked out.

  Paul, in Uta’s view, “had a most peculiar reaction, and got very paranoid. He panicked. He called all his friends. He had them come—I forget who they all were—they came in a limo, they came with guns.… One of them was a pale black man with light white hair. I remember him vividly. And I’d never seen any of them before. They went off in a big limo. It was like a Chicago gangster movie.” Indeed it was. “They” may well have been members of the “Black Mafia,” lieutenants of the famed Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a friend—and devoted protector—of Robeson’s. The “panic” can only be guessed at, assuming in the first place that Uta read it right, that Paul was not to some significant degree consciously embellishing his distress for secondary gains (such as perhaps wanting to disentangle himself from Uta anyway). Yet, if Hagen’s further details are reliable, panic is what it certainly sounds like: while awaiting his friends—they didn’t arrive until two o’clock in the morning—Paul paced up and down the room “in a sweat,” “talking himself into more and more fear,” mumbling that if Joe would raid them he was capable of anything, that he might even then be waiting outside with a gun. “I still think it was unreal,” Uta said some thirty-five years later, “to assume Joe was going to do him bodily harm, that he needed an escort to get out of my house.… It was paranoid. What would they shoot him for?”—though she does agree that in those years a black man found with a white woman could easily be accused of rape, especially a famous black man who had recently defied the President of the United States and was a plausible target for an FBI setup.36

  Ferrer’s behavior was grounds enough for shock; the affair between Uta and Paul was, after all, two years old, and Ferrer seems up to then to have treated it with exemplary understanding—indifference, even. He had never done or said anything to suggest outrage, or even shown any diminution of his affection for Paul. To this day Uta finds Joe’s motives for the raid puzzling. They probably hinged, she thinks, on the fact that divorce proceedings were in progress and Joe wanted to avoid paying alimony. But, beyond the shock at Joe’s behavior, Paul must have been reacting to the certain knowledge that publicity about being “caught with a white woman” could be used to ruinous effect—to his career, to his credibility as a political spokesman, to his standing with the black community. The raid did become common gossip, and some accounts did appear in the press; but the only overtly sensationalistic—and wholly garbled—version appeared in Confidential, and then not until 1955.37

  The raid marked the end of the affair between Paul and Uta. “It was like suddenly the relationship had become a threat,” as Uta recalls, “and he had to end it. But he did not say so in so many words.” After that night, through the intercession of the actress Rita Romilly, they exchanged a few letters and met a few times—“maybe six times after that”—but when they did get together Paul made no attempt to explain his remoteness other than to say that they “had to be careful until the whole thing calmed down.” In short order the “silences got longer and longer.” Paul soon stayed away entirely, and the affair “just disintegrated.” Between her husband’s raid and her lover’s disengagement, Uta “was mad at men for a long time.” Mad, and flat broke. Ferrer refused to give her a nickel of alimony, and Paul volunteered only a couple of hundred dollars now and then for a short time; it wasn’t until her starring role in A Streetcar Named Desire a few years later that she got back on her feet, financially and professionally. The last time she saw Paul was in Chicago in 1949, when he came to see her in Streetcar. They had dinner afterward and, according to Uta, it was “unbelievably nostalgic,” Paul “making a very big pitch towards me again.” She felt “rather objective about it all—I still adored him, but the spell was broken, completely broken that one night.”38

  Paul and Essie’s life together had become so attenuated that, whether or not she knew of the raid, she had long since learned that any attempt to interfere with Paul’s privacy could only jeopardize her standing with him. It was a time in her life, in any case, when her newfound success as writer and lecturer had given her a sense of independence. She had spent May through November 1946 in French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, was writing a book about it, and was collaborating with Pearl Buck on another. Feeling riskily outspoken, she wrote Paul a thirty-five-hundred-word letter in December 1946—just before the raid—on the subject of money, her lack of it and Bob Rockmore’s “vindictive” withholding of it. The letter had been triggered by a recent episode involving Paul, Jr. Inducted into the Air Force in the spring of 1946, he had been stationed in Spokane, had found a girlfriend out there and needed a little extra money. When he wired Essie for forty dollars from his own savings, she used the occasion—to Paul, Jr.’s dismay—to sit down and write Rockmore, asking him to send Paul, Jr., a hundred dollars. According to Essie, Rockmore got “very angry” and reluctantly agreed to send him an additional fifty. Essie decided to use the episode as an occasion for challenging Rockmore’s stewardship—which she had always resented—over her own finances.39

  Rockmore feels, Essie wrote Paul, Jr., that “you should behave like a modest little colored boy, efface yourself, play it low,” dutifully applying to him as a supplicant so he could feed his “power complex”—he “wants to run everybody”—and his “VERY patriarchal attitude toward Negroes”; it seems we have “a lot of folks among our friends who will always TELL you what to do, and how to do it. YOU must always be the last word for YOU. Even against me and The Papa. And I mean that.” As for herself, she refused to be patronized any longer; she intended to be polite to Rockmore “but that’s all.” None of this, she stressed to Paul, Jr., had been Paul, Sr.’s fault—“The Papa is too generous, he has never been tight in his whole life.”40

  Yet, when she wrote to Paul,
Sr., herself a day later, she felt the need to expound again on the subject of finances. Her set of grievances turned out to be much broader than that, but she started with a restatement of her money problems—“to get it off my chest,” so that “the few times we do meet,” money would not have to be discussed. “I’ve never had a personal allowance of any kind ever since we’ve been back in America,” she wrote, “and I’ve never had enough to run the house properly”; on occasion she had been reduced to cutting the grass herself after Rockmore announced they couldn’t afford a gardener. The breaking point had come when she came back from Africa late in 1946 and had had to put Ma Goode into a nursing home; Rockmore’s reaction had been to cut her allowance from ninety dollars a week to eighty. “I suddenly saw the light: He’d never have dared to do that to a white woman. Never. But I’m colored folks, and so I can take low.… I really don’t believe, in all fairness to Bobby, that this kind of explanation has ever crossed his mind. (He tries consciously, VERY consciously, to be pretty liberal).… Suddenly, I’ve had my stomach full. I feel at 50 [her upcoming birthday was December 15] … I’m going to start a new life altogether. I’m going to get myself settled and straightened out, so I’ll know where I am, where I’m going, and how.”