Paul Robeson
Page 56
At 6:00 a.m. on September 4, the first union guards arrived to set up defense lines at the concert site at Hollow Brook Golf Course, three miles outside of Peekskill. The state police, under the direction of Superintendent John Gaffney, set up a command post in a nearby area. Overhead a police helicopter circled. Four ambulances stood by. As some twenty thousand concertgoers began to arrive at midday, a veterans’ protest parade—only about eight thousand strong rather than the thirty thousand the Associated Veterans’ Group had called for—marched outside the grounds under the eyes of state and local police, yelling anti-Semitic and anti-black remarks and taunting the arrivals with shouted threats: “We’ll kill you!,” “You’ll get in but you won’t get out!”15
Robeson, under the advice of the security men, remained in his car. Promptly at two o’clock the concert began. Union guards, Revels Cayton among them, ringed the platform. Pete Seeger sang. Pianists Ray Lev and Leonid Hambro played Bach and Chopin. There were no speeches, political or otherwise. At four, Robeson, accompanied by an admittedly terrified Larry Brown, performed, ringed around by fifteen or so union men; after opening the concert with “Let My People Go,” he brought the crowd to its feet with a rendition of “Ol’ Man River” that emphasized his earlier change in lyrics: “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” Helen Rosen noticed several men with guns on the ridge surrounding the hollow; Paul, an easy target in full view, was clearly taking his life in his hands. (Cayton had predicted before the concert that, “With so many people watching, they wouldn’t dare go for him,” that Robeson “was going to be like the safest man in New York.” For years afterward, when setting off on some chancy engagement, Robeson would laughingly say, “I guess I’ll be the safest man in the country.”) The security force flushed two men with high-powered rifles out of a nest in a hill overlooking the hollow. The uneasy truce held throughout the concert. When it was over, Robeson was taken out in a convoy of cars whose windows were shaded with blankets; Robeson himself lay on the rear floor, while two of the trade-union bodyguards covered him with their bodies.16
Then the crowd started home. Or tried to. As the line of buses and cars crawled along the steep road winding out of the hollow, it ran into a gauntlet of enraged locals. Some hurled rocks from the embankment; others stopped cars, dragged out the occupants, and beat them. The police did nothing to intervene. Some of the troopers joked with the anti-Robeson forces on the embankment; others joined the attackers below. One eyewitness saw the driver of a car in front of him hit in the kidneys by a cop; another was clubbed by a group of fifteen to twenty policemen; a third was dragged face down in the dirt and then told to “Get going, you red bastard!,” “Go back to Jew town, if we catch you up here again we’ll kill you!” Before long the scene was “a nightmare of crashing rocks, flying glass, blood, and swerving cars.”
Hundreds of the volunteer union guards were trapped in the hollow, surrounded by the stone-throwing mob and by a thousand state policemen who refused to let the union men return to their buses. Leon Strauss, vice-president of the Fur and Leather Workers, who was in charge of the defense force, later insisted that Superintendent Gaffney and District Attorney Fanelli had done nothing to clear away the threatening crowd or to restrain some of their own men, who encircled and then charged the trapped guards, beating them with their clubs. Twenty-five of the guards were arrested. Called at his home and asked to intervene, Henry Wallace tried to get through to Governor Dewey on the phone but could get no further than James C. Hagerty, the governor’s press secretary, who told him it was “just a bunch of Communists who had started violence.” The melee went on until 1:30 a.m. By the time it was over, dozens of buses and cars had had their windows smashed and been overturned, and a hundred and fifty people were injured seriously enough to require medical treatment (among them Revels Cayton and Irving Potash, who nearly lost his eye from flying glass and appeared the next morning as a defendant at the Foley Square trial wearing dark glasses). District Attorney Fanelli congratulated the police on having done “a magnificent job.”17
The next day Robeson held a ninety-minute press conference in the library of the Council on African Affairs. Newsmen jammed the room to hear fifteen witnesses, several bandaged from injuries, give eyewitness accounts, and to hear Robeson explain that the concert had ended in violence because the “police who were supposed to protect us, attacked and assaulted us.” He called the marauding state troopers “Fascist storm troopers who will knock down and club anyone who disagrees with them,” charged Governor Dewey with complicity, and demanded federal intervention to restore law and order. When he added that “we Negroes owe a great debt to the Jewish people, who stood there by the hundreds to defend me and all of us yesterday,” tears started from his eyes. In Albany, James C. Hagerty said the governor would not comment until he had full reports from District Attorney Fanelli and State Police Superintendent Gaffney. In nearly the same breath, and with no hint of irony, Hagerty announced that Governor Dewey had ordered a full police mobilization to take immediate action against an “outbreak of lawlessness” among UAW strikers at the Bell Aircraft plant near Niagara Falls.18
Fanelli made his report to the governor on September 7. It exonerated veterans’ groups and police from responsibility for the violence: “Every precaution possible was taken to insure the safety of all present. All police departments that took part in the plan should be commended for their excellent work.” After meeting with Fanelli and Gaffney, Dewey issued a statement the following week that went the D.A. one better. Characterizing the concertgoers as “followers of Red totalitarianism,” Dewey asserted that the “Communist groups obviously did provoke this incident.” He sounded as his only note of regret that the demonstrators, in responding, had given “the Communists effective propaganda.” In the same spirit, Life magazine stated flatly that the Communists had aimed for “the calculated, purposeful incitement of racial conflict” at Peekskill and that Robeson had “baited the Communist trap.” Newsweek, similarly, declared that “with the aid of anti-Communist hot-heads, the Communists had won a smashing propaganda triumph.” Bombarded from many quarters—the ACLU, labor unions, the National Committee of the Progressive Party, the American Jewish Congress, the National Lawyers Guild, groups of clergymen, law professors, and a fair portion of the press—with the demand for an impartial inquiry, Dewey did finally order a grand-jury investigation. But he carefully hedged the bet, charging the jury with instructions to inquire whether the breach of peace had been “a part of the Communist strategy to foment racial and religious hatreds” and placing in charge of the investigation none other than D.A. Fanelli.19
Back in Katonah, the Rosens hung on for another few weeks but then, in the face of a torrent of hate mail and obscene phone calls, temporarily closed up their house (to return in the late fall, with Paul as a frequent though hidden guest). In Manhattan, Sam Rosen’s medical practice dramatically dwindled, despite his superb reputation as an ear specialist. (Undaunted, Sam undertook basic research and in 1953 invented stapes surgery, a major breakthrough in the treatment of deafness.) In the immediate aftermath of Peekskill, the vigilante spirit was not confined solely to hobbling the Rosens. The Peekskill Star editorially compared the recent “incident” to the Boston Tea Party. Stickers reading “Communism Is Treason, Behind Communism Stands—the Jew!” were pasted on cars (and in the neighboring village of Harmon, the only Jewish home was stoned, its windows smashed). The American Legion requested that books by “known Communists” be removed from the Peekskill library. Veterans from fourteen posts in Westchester and Putnam counties held a “patriotic rally,” and in Cortlandt town officials announced an anti-“disturbance” ordinance so loose—imposing fines and jail sentences for those “disturbing the public peace”—that it threatened to destroy the right of assembly. Among the residents active in resisting the wave of repression, one local man stood as a bulwark; it later turned out he was a plant—during subsequent grand-jury proceedings he fingered the very people he had
professed to be working with.20
Impaneled in October, the grand jury held lengthy hearings, listening to the testimony of some two hundred and fifty witnesses. At the close it issued a report that read as if dictated by D.A. Fanelli, with a few embellishments peculiar to the jury itself—like the reference in its report to the union security guards as “goon squads,” the claim that the colonies of summer residents in the Peekskill area harbored active Communists, and the assertion that the underlying cause of the outbreak had been Robeson’s own inflammatory statements “derogatory to his native land” during 1949. The grand jury concluded that the Communists had deliberately fomented “racial and religious hatred” on September 4 and at the same time insisted that the violence “was basically neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Negro in character.” “The fundamental cause of resentment and the focus of hostility was Communism … and Communism alone.” Given the provocations, the grand jury commended the police for not having used “any more force than was justified.”21
The other legal and quasi-legal proceedings following on the riot likewise ended in defeat for the Robeson forces. Three months after Peeks-kill, Robeson and twenty-seven other plaintiffs filed a two-million-dollar damage suit against various veterans’ organizations and county officials—including Fanelli and Gaffney—charging personal injuries, property damages, and deprivation of constitutional rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and the provisions of the 1870 and 1871 civil-rights acts. Walter Winchell, who had already blasted Robeson in a radio commentary, announced, “It is too bad the law doesn’t allow a counter-claim by the veterans of 1 billion dollars—for service rendered in defending the U.S. Constitution and the privileges of the plaintiffs to abuse it.” The action dragged on through various delays and rulings until New York Supreme Court Justice James W. Bailey dismissed the suits fifteen months later.22
In the immediate aftermath of the “battle of Peekskill,” defense attorneys for the Communist leaders on trial in Foley Square moved for a mistrial, on the grounds that the riot had been “a conclusive manifestation of the prejudice existing” against the eleven defendants. Judge Medina characterized the events at Peekskill as an “outrage,” but denied the motion as irrelevant to the trial at hand. When the defense attorneys pressed their demands for an investigation of Peekskill, Medina exploded—such tactics were “part and parcel of the endeavor to launch a counter-attack on society instead of meeting the issues of the trial.” He ordered testimony to continue. Ten days later Robeson took the stand facing Medina, his old law professor from Columbia.23
He was on the stand about twenty minutes. Every time the black defense attorney, George W. Crockett, Jr., asked Robeson a question, U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey objected—and each time Judge Medina sustained the objection, ruling the question irrelevant (among the questions Crockett asked Robeson was whether his father had been born in slavery). Robeson managed to make only two points: that he personally knew all eleven defendants (but had not been allowed to serve as a character witness) and that he had studied under Judge Medina. Unable to get the testimony he wanted from Robeson, Crockett withdrew him. “I don’t think you should have called him.” Medina remarked.24
Stymied in court, Robeson held a press conference at the Federal Court House. He blasted Medina’s rulings. He had wanted to say, he told the newsmen, that “the Communist Party has played a magnificent role in fighting for the freedom of the American Negro,” and he hadn’t gotten the chance to because “they don’t want the truth.” “Are you a Communist?,” a reporter asked. “That question is irrelevant,” Robeson replied. That same week, the black columnist Lem Graves, Jr., printed an exclusive interview with Robeson in the Pittsburgh Courier during which he asked Robeson if he wanted “a new kind of economic and political system in America.” Robeson is quoted as replying that he wanted “any kind of system the people want.… I don’t want America to adopt a system for which it is not ready.… This country is not ready for either the socialization which was adopted in England or the system which is in operation in Russia. But it is ready for the extension of democratic principles.…” He also called for a redistribution of wealth “to eliminate the situation where 1 per cent of the people own 60 per cent of the wealth.” Asked if he would approve of a revolution in the United States, “he answered that he did not think a physical revolution would be successful and added that he disliked physical violence.”25
The day after Robeson testified at the Foley Square trial, New York Congressman Jacob Javits spoke briefly in the U.S. House of Representatives, deploring the Peekskill riot as a violation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. That brought Representative John Rankin of Mississippi storming to the microphone. “It was not surprising to hear the gentleman from New York defend that Communist enclave,” Rankin shouted, but he wanted it known that the American people are not in sympathy “with that N——Communist and that bunch of Reds who went up there.” On a point of order, Representative Vito Marcantonio of New York protested to speaker Rayburn that “the gentleman from Mississippi used the word ‘nigger.’ I ask that the word be taken down and stricken from the RECORD inasmuch as there are two members in this House of the Negro race, and that word reflects on them.” Rayburn said he understood the gentleman from Mississippi to say “Negro.” “I said ‘Niggra,’” Rankin yelled, refusing to let Rayburn off the hook, “just as I have said since I have been able to talk, and shall continue to say.” Marcantonio insisted Rankin had said “nigger.” Standing at his place on the floor, Rankin shouted back, “If that N——Robeson does not like this country, let him go to Russia, and take that gang of alien Communists with him.”26
Speaker Rayburn ruled that “the gentleman from Mississippi is not subject to a point of order. He referred to the Negro race, and they should not be ashamed of that designation.” Thus encouraged by the Speaker, Representative Gene Cox of Georgia took the floor to denounce Robeson as a “Communist agent provocateur,” demanding to know why he, too, was not on trial in Foley Square. Two days after that, Representative Walton W. Gwinn, whose district included Peekskill, made extensive remarks about “the Communist military raid” on Peekskill, ending with the peroration that “Our people need to awake to the danger in their midst, from soft shilly-shallying compromises, in the name of tolerance.” The AP reported that in at least two places—Tallahassee, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama—effigies of Robeson were tied to trees and burned.27
For Essie, who was fearless, the threats became so numerous that she had an alarm system installed in Enfield and took to sleeping at night with a hunting knife next to her pillow (the police having turned down her request for a gun permit). “If anyone I don’t know enters this house, I will kill him first and find out afterwards why he came here,” she told a reporter. She went on to say that she was “in complete harmony” with her husband “on major issues,” though they disagreed about “a million things,” and she was convinced an effort was being made to silence him because “he personifies the resistance of the colored man to enslavement and repression.”28
The national debate on Peekskill raged for many months. Eleanor Roosevelt struck perhaps its most recurrent note when, in one of her syndicated “My Day” columns, she simultaneously expressed her dislike for “everything that Paul Robeson is now saying” and denounced the “lawlessness” of the anti-Robeson forces at Peekskill as “quite disgraceful.” When the American Civil Liberties Union asked for Mrs. Roosevelt’s signature on a public statement deploring current efforts “aimed at putting penalties upon political opinions,” she declined, declaring herself in disagreement with the part of the statement that called for “every encouragement” to be given “to the fullest freedom of expression by Communists as by all others in order that the American people may determine through public debate of all issues, the road to progress.” Her reluctance to assert the importance of preserving the right of free speech for Communists represented the “liberal” view.29
&
nbsp; In the black community, Mrs. Roosevelt’s counterpart was A. Philip Randolph. In a lengthy letter to The New York Times, Randolph, too, adopted a pox-on-both-your-houses posture. He deplored the violence at Peekskill but also deplored the willingness of “Robeson and his followers … to seize upon, capitalize and even aggravate the situation.…” Above all, Randolph expressed concern with “dissociating this whole affair from the cause of the Negro and his fight for liberation.” The Peekskill riot, he wrote, “was not racial,” and Robeson was not a spokesman for black people. “Men must earn the right to become the responsible voice of an oppressed group,” and Robeson, Randolph asserted—in much the same way Roy Wilkins had earlier—had been insufficiently engaged in “struggle, suffering and sacrifice and service for said group” to qualify. Taking quite an opposite tack, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier praised Robeson for refusing to play the white-assigned role of “humility and forgiveness,” for insisting instead on “represent[ing] the Negro man in the masculine role as a fearless and independent thinker”—thereby earning the enmity of white America. Langston Hughes asked in print “why a concert singer cannot have political opinions, too—even if he is colored.” And in response to hostile editorials on Robeson, the black reporter Alice Dunnigan wrote Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that instead of “blasting Robeson because the white newspapers blast him,” Afro-American papers should be “praising Robeson for his courage to speak what 99 and 44/100 percent of our population thinks.”30