Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  At the end of September 1949 Robeson, true to his public pledge after the first Peekskill incident, set out to carry his voice and message across the country, expecting—and meeting—resistance, but also meeting with redoubled proof that his ability to draw an audience, especially among black people, continued to be considerable. The Council on African Affairs handled the arrangements for the rapid cross-country trip, in cooperation with local sponsoring committees (the bulk of the work being done by Louise Thompson Patterson, William Patterson’s second wife, who had joined the Council a few months before as organizational director after having been vice-president of the International Workers Order).

  Robeson told the press with a smile that, along with singing, “I’ll also be saying a few words about things.” The musician Larry Adler, though himself an outspoken progressive, told Robeson he didn’t approve of putting political content into a professional performance; as Adler recalls it, “Robeson smiled that wonderful grin of his, and said, ‘You do it your way, Larry, I’ll do it mine.’” But even before he set off on the tour, some of the places Robeson planned to visit let it be known that his words were not wanted. American Legion officials led a fight to ban his proposed peace rally in Pittsburgh, and in Ohio local officials in both Akron and Cincinnati denied the use of facilities for Robeson concerts (his supporters in Cincinnati pointed out, in a public statement that the newspapers of the city refused to print, that the Board of Education denying Robeson its facilities had never had a black representative on it). Robeson himself canceled a scheduled appearance at Oberlin College after its president insisted he would have to share the platform with a black minister who opposed his views; the right of a citizen to be heard, Robeson said, was not a proper subject for debate (the Chicago Defender preferred to draw the implication that Robeson had “cold feet”). In the end, Robeson’s sole appearance in Ohio took place in Cleveland. That city’s mayor, supported by the state’s largest black weekly, had publicly suggested a boycott (rather than a ban), but the black population poured into the Paradise auditorium in the heart of the Cedar-Central ghetto to hear him.31

  In Chicago, all the major civic halls refused the use of their facilities to Robeson’s sponsoring host, the Civil Rights Congress. He sang instead at the Bakers Hall on the North Side, and the following night at the Tabernacle Baptist Church on the South Side (where the bulk of Chicago’s black population lived). Dr. Louis Rawls, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist, a man of deeply conservative religious and political values, had not hesitated to open his church to Robeson. “I saw no reason,” Rawls recalls, “why this church that serves the community should not allow these people to come in. Who are we to judge? They say Robeson ‘believes in Communism.’ Now, he never told me that. He said he wants freedom.” Rawls not only agreed to lend his church, but also reduced the usual fee from $150 to $75. On the face of it an unlikely candidate to provide Robeson with an outlet, Rawls to that exact extent represents the fact that no substantial segment of the black community was actively against Robeson—some prominent black pastors and national leaders, yes, but few among “ordinary” blacks.32

  And they turned out for Robeson. At both of his Chicago appearances the audience was largely black, and at both, the crowd overflowed to the streets. In a welcoming statement, Bishop W. J. Walls of the A.M.E. Zion Church compared Robeson to “the noble Frederick Douglass,” who also refused “to bask in the sunlight of his great advantages without always bringing to the front the cause of his enslaved people.… You have gone the second mile.” When Robeson attended a White Sox baseball game in Chicago, he was surrounded by autograph-seekers—but when he tried to get a meal at the Hotel Sherman, he was refused service. Veterans’ organizations had advised the FBI that there would be no protest pickets at Robeson’s appearances, disdaining to provide his “Communist followers with an excuse for disturbances.” Taking no chances, the FBI—plus the local offices of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence, and the Office of Special Investigations—were all on the alert, but no incidents were reported.33

  The prospects for trouble in Los Angeles seemed greater. The City Council dubbed Robeson’s coming concert “an invasion” and unanimously passed a resolution urging a boycott. (The Council then directed its attention to a bill designed to set up a municipal Fair Employment Practices Committee, and defeated it eight to six.) One councilman, Lloyd G. Davies, went out of his way to “applaud and commend those [in Peekskill] who had the courage to get out there and do what they did to show up Robeson for what he is. I’d be inclined to be down there throwing rocks myself.” An FBI agent reported to J. Edgar Hoover that “the Communist Party logically might endeavor to foment an incident at the concert in order to arouse the crowd.” Hollywood gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Jimmy Fidler fanned the flames with rumors of violence, and the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals published ads red-baiting Robeson. Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle, the black newspaper that sponsored Robeson’s Los Angeles appearance, was swamped with threatening phone calls and denied insurance coverage.34

  Robeson’s supporters fought back. The Los Angeles NAACP Youth Council passed a resolution calling on all young people, black and white, to attend the concert. The prestigious national black fraternity (Robeson’s own), Alpha Phi Alpha, announced that it would host a luncheon in his honor the day following the concert. His supporters deluged the City Council with angry protests over its call for a boycott, and they turned out in force for the event itself. A tiny group of race-baiters did go to hear a local realtor call for the expulsion of all blacks and Jews from Los Angeles—but fifteen thousand went to hear Robeson. And the rally came off without incident. A special force of black police officers (among them future Mayor Thomas Bradley) was assigned to protect Robeson. He thanked them from the podium and asked that the L.A. police force protect “every colored boy, every Mexican-American boy, every white boy on the streets of Los Angeles.” He thanked the Jewish people of Peekskill for having turned out in numbers to protect him in that town. And he thanked the crowd in front of him for having turned out to defend its own liberties. He would continue, he said, “to speak up militantly for the rights of my people”; he told the rally that when asked the question “Paul, what’s happened to you?” he replied, “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m just looking for freedom.” Then he sang “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and the last verse, “Black and white together, we shall not be moved,” brought the crowd to its feet.35

  Much the same pattern prevailed on the remaining stops of the tour. The opposition chose the tactic of boycotts over demonstrations, the authorities wavered between banning the rallies and guarding them, and supporters turned out in large numbers to fill the auditoriums to overflowing. The crowd at the Forest Club in Detroit was so great that Robeson had to give a repeat performance in the Shiloh Baptist Church that same evening. In Washington, D.C., seventeen of Washington’s black leaders, including Charles H. Houston, Mary Church Terrell, E. Franklin Frazier, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., W. H. Jernagin (past director of the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches), Rayford W. Logan, and Reverend Stephen Gill Spottswood (president of the local NAACP) issued a statement in advance of Robeson’s arrival declaring that, although “many of us find ourselves in sharp disagreement” with the public positions he has taken on certain issues, “we are united in affirming his inalienable right to speak and sing to all who wish to hear him.” A second group of black supporters, including his old friend Joseph L. Johnson, dean of the Howard Medical School, gave him a dinner at the Dunbar Hotel.36

  On the night of Robeson’s D.C. concert, police lined up three feet apart for a block on both sides of Turner’s Arena and on every corner for a radius of six blocks. Robeson told the mostly black audience in the packed auditorium that there could be “no question about my loyalty to America. I will give all I have for my country and my people. But I will have nothing to do with the Dewey and Dulles fascists and the Rankins.” He insisted that he
stood for peace and predicted that because the Soviet Union now had the atomic bomb, war was less likely, since “people don’t want to be blown up for the Duponts and Anaconda.” Richard L. Strout, staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor (and for three decades thereafter the highly respected “T.R.B.” columnist on The New Republic), did not like the fact that he saw “Communist literature … openly on display with that of non-Communist books” in the lobby of Turner’s Arena. Nor did he like what to his “practiced eye” was the compelling evidence of the “fellow-traveler or outright Communist direction” of the event, “and the evident Communist effort to fan a racial conflagration.” Still, when Robeson appeared on the platform to a roar from the crowd, even Strout confessed himself impressed; Robeson gave “every appearance of profound sincerity and deep consecration,” spoke not with “inclusive bitterness, but with a certain massive magnanimity regarding injustices to his race,” and gave the impression “as one listened of a tremendous new force unleashed among American Negroes by the presence of this powerful personality”—even though “this great new power was running on a transmission belt from Moscow.” The Washington Post, in an editorial following Robeson’s appearance, congratulated the residents of the capital for having avoided “a violent clash which would have enabled [the Communists] to pose as champions of civil liberties.” “Whatever the hostile press and our so-called leaders may say or fail to say,” Robeson wrote Franklin Frazier, he felt his reception “from east to west served to confirm the correctness of the stand I have taken and the people’s support of my stand.… Facts are facts: no wishful thinking can dissipate or explain away the reality of what the Negroes down below are at present feeling and thinking.”37

  Energized by the tour, Robeson returned to New York to find an additional wellspring of support in the letters and invitations that had arrived from overseas. The World Convention of Religions solicited his help in the interests of international peace; Joliot-Curie of France invited him to attend a conference in Rome; the Swedish Committee for the Defense of Peace telegraphed their solidarity with him; the All-India Peace Congress notified him of his selection as president of its forthcoming meeting in Calcutta; and Nan Pandit, currently serving as India’s Ambassador to the United States, wrote Essie with a private message from her brother, Nehru. Now Prime Minister, Nehru was coming to Washington on a state visit. Because he would be an official guest of President Truman, Nan Pandit wrote, “his engagements are checked up by the State Department,” but “He has written to say he wants to see you and Paul privately for a good talk” on November 6 in New York, where he would be arriving “incognito” after having officially left the country on the 5th. Robeson refused the invitation to see Nehru. In the continuing political strife in India, the Communist Party there had come under attack, and Robeson felt that Nehru had been responsible for the large number of deaths among the Communists. Essie exploded in anger at Paul for what she called the worst kind of dogmatism, blamed the Party for applying pressure on him, and determinedly went off on her own to greet Nehru. He was deeply hurt at Paul’s refusal to meet with him. Subsequently, however, the two men were reconciled, and Nehru would play a decisive role in the late fifties in the struggle to get the U.S. government to issue Robeson a passport.38

  In mid-October Ben Davis, Jr., and the other Communist leaders on trial at Foley Square were convicted. Judge Medina handed out prison terms of five years to all but one of the defendants, sentencing Robert Thompson to three years (in deference to his having received the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II—prompting a protest from Thompson, who said he took “no pleasure” in receiving special favors from a “Wall Street judicial flunky”). In response to his own five-year sentence, Ben Davis wrote, “One thought crowded everything else out of my mind—in the whole history of the United States, with more than 5,000 brutal and monstrous lynchings of Negroes, not one perpetrator had received a sentence of five months—to say nothing of five years.” Congressmen ranging from the South Dakota conservative Karl Mundt to the New York liberal Jacob Javits hailed the fairness of the verdict. The national press made Medina into the lion of the hour—with lone and muted dissenting voices from The New Republic, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Court of Appeals, however, did allow for bail, and after the Civil Rights Congress posted the required two hundred sixty thousand dollars, the Communist Eleven were temporarily set at liberty.39

  The news that Ben Davis was free on bail touched off a large rally in Harlem, and Robeson stood by Davis’s side as he was welcomed back. Toward the close of the rally, a brief skirmish broke out between bystanders and police. The Journal-American, in a banner headline, tried to blow up the marginal event into “360 Extra Police Ordered to Harlem After Red Riot,” seconded by the Daily News (“6 Arrested as Pro-Reds Fight Cops”), but in fact the clash, such as it was, developed over the issue of police brutality in Harlem and (as the New York Post reported) was in no sense planned or abetted by “Communists.” Davis, despite his indictment, had been renominated to the City Council, and his opponent in that contest, the conservative black columnist Earl Brown, immediately accused the CP of having incited the skirmish, charging that the Party had imported its workers “from all over the country specifically to start trouble.” In the few days remaining before the election, Robeson worked hard for Davis’s campaign but his bid was lost at the polls by a three-to-one majority. At a rally that night in Harlem, Davis’s campaign manager, Ollie Harrington, couldn’t figure out why Robeson hadn’t shown up as promised. Calling “downtown” to CP headquarters, he told them a no-show on Robeson’s part would be “a terrible mistake.” Within twenty minutes Robeson appeared at the rally and sang his heart out to the waiting crowd, but the incident upset Harrington; he saw it as a typical example of how the Party sometimes misused Robeson “and compromised his image with the black masses.” Yes, Revels Cayton concurs, “they used Paul in a kind of way that made him unacceptable to the masses of Negroes. This giant—they had not the slightest idea of how to work with him.” But on the issue of being “used,” Robeson himself deserves the final word: “The Communists use the Negro,” he once said with a chuckle, “and we only wish more people would want to use us this way.”40

  CHAPTER 19

  The Right to Travel

  (1950–1952)

  In October 1949 Andrei Vyshinsky, Foreign Minister of the U.S.S.R., responded to charges at the United Nations that the “anti-fascist” trials in progress in Eastern Europe were in fact suppressions of civil liberties, by declaring that the United States had “no moral qualifications” for such a discussion; incidents like Peekskill, Vyshinsky retorted, suggested that “under the guise of freedom of expression” the United States allowed “pro-fascist” hooligans to break up peaceful assemblies. The following month Robeson appeared at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner in honor of Vyshinsky (and of the thirty-second anniversary of the Soviet state) sponsored by the Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a group that had been founded in the last years of the war with prominent mainstream Americans like Averill Harriman as participants but whose membership had narrowed with the onset of the Cold War.1

  Welcoming Vyshinsky at the dinner, Robeson spoke of the peoples of Eastern Europe as “masters of their own lands,” of Tito—who had recently moved his country out of the Soviet sphere—as “disguising” himself as a revolutionary, and of Truman as an “imperialist wolf disguised as a benevolent watchdog.” He also denounced the “insolence” of those who questioned his love for his own country, asserting that “ONLY those who work for a policy of friendship with the Soviet Union are genuine American patriots.” This was not language designed for conciliation (or even entire accuracy). In his determination to avoid appearing cowed, in his anger at being caricatured, Robeson was taking on some of the polemically simplistic tones of his adversaries, trading in slogans. The brutality of the public attack on him had hardened his own rhetorical arteries, brought out the obsti
nacy that was always one of the constants (though usually better concealed) in his personality. The danger was that the suppleness of his inner process would be permanently affected, that opinionated and oracular defiance would become a reflex mannerism, that he would imitate and come to resemble his own dogmatic persecutors.2

  A similar ideological-emotional constriction is apparent in the position Robeson took on the civil liberties of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. At a Bill of Rights Conference in New York City in late July 1949, a resolution was introduced calling for freedom for eighteen Trotskyists convicted in 1941 under the same provisions of the Smith Act currently being used against the leaders of the CPUSA. The chairman of the conference, Paul J. Kern, argued forcefully before the convention that free speech should never be denied because of a difference in political opinion—a view seconded by Professor Thomas Emerson of the Yale Law School. An impassioned Robeson took the platform to denounce the Kern-Emerson position. Like most pro-Soviets, Robeson had long blamed the followers of Trotsky for spreading exaggerated “slanders” about Stalin’s “police state.” Adherents of the Socialist Workers Party, Robeson exclaimed, “are the allies of fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world. Let’s not get confused. They are the enemies of the working class. Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?” NO, the delegates roared back. They defeated the resolution and passed a substitute that simply called for the defense of “all anti-fascist victims of the Smith Act.” It was not Robeson’s finest hour.3