Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Furious at White’s article, Essie dashed off an angry rebuttal to Ebony. She began by acknowledging that Paul “always went stubborn when anyone (including me) told him what to do; you could ask him, maybe persuade him, but you couldn’t tell him.… He doesn’t side-step the challenge, but goes right in, swinging.” But being stubborn in defense of one’s rights was neither “oversensitive” nor “neurotic”—unless one wanted to argue that an uncompromising insistence on equality was in itself a symptom of “disturbance” (would one then include as “neurotic” Gandhi and Nehru because of their intransigent fight for Indian independence against the British?). Perhaps, Essie suggested, it was time for a hard look at the assumptions of the current crop of black leaders in America. None of them pretended that “Negroes are satisfied with their present situation in the U.S.A.… that they like being lynched, attacked, abused … that they like being unjustly treated in our courts … that they like being segregated and discriminated against.… What, then, do these Negro leaders say?” They don’t dare claim, she went on, that Russia is responsible for the discrimination against blacks in the United States; instead they “go out of their way to insist that American democracy, with all its faults, is the best there is and therefore we must all fight if need be die for it. Since most of the faults and few of the benefits of this democracy apply directly to Negroes, these Leaders find themselves in the very strange position of insisting that Negroes fight and die for the faults of our democracy. Paul Robeson is far too clear-sighted … to be maneuvered … into such a position. He is fighting the faults of our democracy. That’s what all the fuss is about.” Ebony declined to publish Essie’s rebuttal; it finally appeared in the sympathetic black newspaper the California Eagle.34

  White’s article was all the more effective because, unlike most black leaders, he had not previously participated in a direct personal assault on Robeson. Those who had led the earlier attacks, like Roy Wilkins, continued to do their bit to fan the accumulating animosity. When a New Jersey doctor wrote Wilkins asking if the written record proved that Robeson was a Communist, Wilkins replied, “Mr. Robeson is known far and wide as a Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party.… He is one of the few American Negroes who has been permitted behind the Iron Curtain and received enthusiasm [sic] in Moscow.” For two consecutive months, November and December 1951, the NAACP’s official organ, The Crisis, printed savage Cold War articles. The first, “Paul Robeson—the Lost Shepherd,” signed “Robert Alan”—purportedly “the pen name of a well known New York journalist” (Paul Robeson, Jr., believes it was Earl Brown)—directly attacked Robeson as a “Kremlin Stooge” who “spouts Communist propaganda as wildly as Vishinsky.” The second (“Stalin’s Greatest Defeat”), under Roy Wilkins’s own byline, denounced the CPUSA in terms comparable to those disseminated by the FBI: “The latest tactic of the party is infiltration into established organizations. Having failed under its own name, it seeks to operate under other labels, but in this it has been soundly rebuffed, particularly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a prime target of party strategists.…”35

  In that same month of December 1951, the New York Amsterdam News listed previous winners of the NAACP’s coveted Spingarn Medal and omitted Robeson’s name (he had won in 1945). Soon after that, Don Newcombe, the black Dodger pitcher, nearly came to blows with Robeson at the Red Rooster Tavern in Harlem. A woman in Robeson’s party recognized Newcombe and asked Robeson to go over to his table to get his autograph for her. According to newspaper accounts, Newcombe was blunt and rude, and when Robeson tried to smooth things over, Newcombe purportedly shouted, “I’m joining the Army to fight people like you.” At that Robeson lost his temper, and the two men had to be separated by bystanders. In response to one of the newspaper accounts, Essie posed a series of rhetorical questions: “Does [Newcombe] think Robeson is responsible for having kept him and Campanella and Robinson out of big league baseball for so many years? Does he think Robeson is responsible for making him and the majority of the Negro people live under segregation and discrimination and persecution?” “All I can say,” she went on, “is Don Newcombe had better begin to talk and think for himself, if he ever wants to be more than a pitcher.” W. E. B. Du Bois had a more succinct response to the general assault on Robeson: “The only thing wrong with Robeson is in having too great faith in human beings.”36

  On April 9, 1951, messages of greeting arrived from around the world for Robeson’s fifty-third birthday. A few even arrived from the United States. But more emblematic of his country’s regard was notification that Federal Judge Walter N. Bastian had upheld the State Department and dismissed Robeson’s suit for the return of his passport. His lawyers immediately filed a notice of appeal; the next round in the protracted fight was not to come up for some five months.37

  For a man with restricted travel rights, Robeson managed to keep exceedingly busy. He spoke in behalf of the Harlem Trade Union Council, participated in several peace crusades to the capital, attended numerous rallies, and helped organize appeals relating to the Willie McGee and Martinsville Seven cases (the latest in a lengthy series of legal outrages against blacks). He spoke at celebrations in honor of William Patterson’s sixtieth and William Z. Foster’s seventieth birthdays, and at the release from prison of three of the Hollywood Ten (John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, and Albert Maltz); and he gave the eulogy at the funeral of the ancient agitator herself, Mother Bloor. On May 5 Robeson celebrated a different event—the birth of a grandchild, David Paul Robeson. In June the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act convictions. Four of the eleven CPUSA leaders immediately went underground, and without delay the government inaugurated a drive against second-echelon Party officials. On June 20 a federal grand jury in New York returned Smith Act indictments against an additional twenty-one CP leaders, seventeen of whom were arrested. The daily press debated whether the administration planned prosecutions in the thousands, or merely the hundreds.38

  Robeson declared himself “one hundred percent on the side of the condemned and arrested leaders.” At the mammoth Chicago Peace Congress at the end of June, he spoke out forcefully against the threat to civil liberties: “The First Amendment today lies temporarily gutted as a result of the validation of the Smith Act and the jailing of the Communist dissenters from American foreign policy. No other dissenter, whatever his politics, can feel safe in the exercise of the historic American right to criticize and complain so long as the Smith Act stands on the statute book and the Supreme Court decision remains unreversed.” Chatman C. Wailes, one of the young black organizers for the Chicago rally, was present in the lobby of the Persian Hotel when the jazz musician Charlie Parker spotted Robeson and went up to him. “I just wanted to shake your hand,” Wailes heard Parker say. “You’re a great man.”39

  In Robeson’s mind, the domestic civil-liberties issue was inescapably linked to the international question of peace. He saw repression at home as a direct consequence of a pathological fear of the Soviet Union. “We affirm the undeniable fact,” he argued, “that the American people can live side by side with many different ways of life to achieve higher standards of living and eventual freedom for all.” He applauded the resolution introduced by Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson for an end to the Korean War as a first step in detoxifying Soviet-American relations, and unfavorably contrasted the warm reception Jacob Malik, U.S.S.R. representative to the UN, had given him in his capacity as a representative of the World Peace Council, with the blanket refusal of Warren Austin, chief U.S. delegate to the UN, even to receive him. Robeson released to the press a letter of protest he sent Austin in which, among other sharp remarks, he lectured him on the United Nations: “far from representing the hopes and aspirations of the greater portion of mankind, [it] just remains what it has tended recently to become—the parroting whisper of powerful American corporate interests which many officials in positions of public trust happen to represent.”40

  Nonetheless, Robeson and other militan
t black leaders decided to turn to the United Nations to protest the recent rigged trial of Willie McGee, the case of the Martinsville Seven, and the conviction of the Trenton Six as confirmation of the institutionalized oppression of blacks in the United States. William Patterson spearheaded the drive to present a formal petition—“We Charge Genocide”—to the UN as a means for publicizing the terrible toll of racism in the United States. A number of prominent blacks—including Bishop W. J. Walls of Chicago, Reverend Charles A. Hill of Detroit, Du Bois, Charlotta Bass, Ben Davis, Jr., and Mary Church Terrell—supported the petition, but white liberals refused to endorse it. They, along with the established black leadership, balked at the petition’s “exaggeration,” its equation of official violence against blacks with a systematic governmental decision to wipe them out; institutionalized oppression, they argued, was not the same as institutionalized murder, though the one could sometimes spill over into the other. Robeson dismissed this distinction as a semantic one, and spent long hours with Patterson drawing up the UN petition. They insisted that their use of the term “genocide” was sanctioned by the United Nations’ own definition of the term, as established in its Genocide Convention (which in 1951 remained unratified by the U.S. government). The UN definition had gone beyond the usual understanding of genocide as referring to state-sanctioned mass murder to emphasize instead the doing of “serious bodily and mental harm” to individual members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. In its final form, the Patterson-Robeson petition went beyond even this elastic definition to embrace what it called “economic genocide,” the “silent, cruel killer” that reaped its harvest from the deprivations of daily life. In mid-December the two men presented the petition simultaneously: Robeson to the UN Secretariat in New York, Patterson to the UN General Assembly in Paris. Both were formally received—and informally circumvented; the United States successfully used its influence behind the scenes to prevent the Human Rights Commission of the UN from discussing the genocide charge.41

  Robeson’s defiant words and actions continued to find far more response outside the United States. Word came from Bombay that he had been enthusiastically applauded in absentia at the All-India Peace Convention; from Paris that his was one of four huge pictures (FDR, Abraham Lincoln, and CP leader Eugene Dennis were the other three) carried by the crowd in the Bastille Day parade; from London offering a concert tour; from Aberdeen asking him to stand for election as rector of the university. (In responding to one of the Aberdeen students who had expressed concern that Robeson might misinterpret the invitation as support for Communism rather than, as intended, a protest against political persecution, Robeson repeated the theme he had already sounded several times in public that “the essence of my world outlook is that it is entirely possible for men and women of different political viewpoints to join hands in the common search for peace, equality and freedom.”) At home his reputation was faring far less well. Some union halls and some black churches continued to keep open their doors, but the announcement of his appearance in an American city now routinely produced a wave of opposition. The Harvard Dramatic Club delighted in sending him an invitation to play in Othello, but a letter more typical of the climate of fear came from a white former supporter who now suggested “you refrain in the future from contacting me.”42

  The State Department moved to close down still further Robeson’s access to his foreign fans. Receiving word that he planned to give a concert in Vancouver, British Columbia, in late January 1952, under the auspices of the United Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, the State Department took steps to prevent Robeson from leaving U.S. soil. The means for doing so were not obvious. No U.S. citizen needed a passport to travel to and from Canada, so access for Robeson could not be denied on those grounds. Nor could reliance be placed on Canadian Immigration to prevent his crossing over the border from Seattle to Vancouver: the Canadian authorities disclaimed any authority to inhibit such passage. And so the State Department fell back on legislation originally passed during World War I and amended during World War II allowing the U.S. government—“during the existence of the national emergency”—to prevent the entry or departure of its citizens. State notified U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in the Vancouver area to prevent Robeson from leaving U.S. soil. Instructions were also given to detain Vincent Hallinan, who had been scheduled to appear on the platform with Robeson at the Mine, Mill convention. Hallinan was defense counsel for longshoremen’s union leader Harry Bridges (currently appealing a perjury conviction that Robeson had protested); he was also the future standard-bearer of the Progressive Party in the 1952 election.43

  Hallinan was removed from a Great Northern passenger train en route to Vancouver. Two hours later Robeson arrived by car at Blaine, Washington—the crossover town at the border—and was stopped by INS officials, who told the press that the action was taken on authority of the State Department. Hallinan boarded a southbound train after angrily accusing the immigration officers of “false arrest.” Robeson courteously accepted the ruling and returned to Seattle. When a delegation from the miners’ union protested to the U.S. Consul General, the official told them it was pointless to discuss the case, since redress, if any, lay in Washington. The miners, in consultation with Robeson, hit upon a more satisfying way to register their indignation.44

  Through the device of a long-distance telephone hookup relayed to the public-address system, Robeson sang and spoke for seventeen minutes the following day directly from the Marine Cooks and Stewards Hall in Seattle to the miners’ convention, two thousand strong, in Vancouver. He began by singing “Joe Hill”—the song about the Western Federation of Miners’ organizer framed on a murder charge in Utah in 1915—and ended with a stirring speech. The government, Robeson told the miners, seemed determined to keep him in “a sort of domestic house arrest and confinement” because of his “passionate devotion to the full liberation of the black and brown peoples” of the world, and because of his insistence, toward that end, that the Western powers stop devoting their energies to preparations for war and try recommitting them to the notion that “all peoples can live in peace and friendly coexistence.” He emphasized that in his view the INS move had been “an act of the U.S. administration, not of the American people.” In response, the convention approved the suggestion of militant union leader Harvey Murphy that an across-the-border Robeson concert at the “Peace Arch” be arranged for that spring, and unanimously passed a resolution condemning the action of the State Department. The lack of a dissenting vote, Murphy announced—to a roar of laughter—meant that the representatives of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI who were present were in support of the resolution.45

  The Peace Arch concert did take place, as planned, in May, but not without considerable effort. From New York, the Freedom Family (as the associates of the publication affectionately called themselves) worked hard to arrange the Vancouver concert as the centerpiece for a two-month Robeson tour designed to bring in revenue for the United Freedom Fund—a joint endeavor for the newspaper, CAA, NNLC, and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. But neither the engagements nor the revenue proved easy to come by. The group started its work without a penny, and was able to begin planning for the tour only after borrowing a thousand dollars from Freedom newspaper, itself desperate for money. That was only the initial hurdle. It remained to be seen whether people—even progressives—would run the risks of political ostracism and possible physical injury by coming out to hear Robeson sing.

  The most successful single stop on the tour, from both a political and a financial point of view, was at the Peace Arch itself—largely because of the response from the Canadian side of the border. Thanks to the efforts of the Mine, Mill trade-unionists, twenty-five to thirty thousand Canadians turned up on the Vancouver side for the concert; no more than five thousand mobilized on the American side (the American press estimated total attendance at five thousand; the Canadian press put the figure seven times higher
). The FBI, predictably, was also there. While the Border Patrol took license-plate numbers, FBI agents filmed and photographed the event itself. Nonetheless, there were no incidents, and the sponsors laid plans for making the Peace Arch concert an annual event.46

  Seattle, the next stop, proved an altogether more complicated affair. Robeson’s experience in that city in mid-May 1952 illustrates, in microcosm, the specific difficulties he encountered throughout the tour, the sources of support and opposition generated by his presence, and the general state of his reputation at the time.

  In Seattle, as everywhere else on the tour, the groundwork was done by the Freedom staff in New York—Louis Burnham; the newspaper’s general manager, George B. Murphy, Jr.; and its business manager, Bert Alves—in combination with local sponsoring groups, pre-eminently left-wing unions and black churches. In Seattle, Terry Pettus, head of the Northwestern Bureau of People’s World, the militant (the FBI said “Communist”) newspaper, was the key coordinating figure. A month before Robeson’s scheduled arrival, Pettus reported glumly to the Freedom people in New York that the city authorities had abruptly canceled their agreement to lease the civic auditorium for Robeson’s concert on the grounds that it would “tend to cause antagonism to the Negro race.” The Freedom staff responded with a double-pronged plan for counterattack: initiate court action and mobilize the local black community.47

  The Seattle organizers did precisely that. They sent out special-delivery letters to leaders of black clubs, churches, and political organizations stressing the importance of giving the lie “to the white supremacy statement of the city officials” that Robeson’s appearance would create racial antagonism; and, for shrewdly calculated extra effect, they enclosed a recent editorial on Robeson and Du Bois from the Star of Zion, official organ of the A.M.E. Zion Church, praising the struggle of the two men in behalf of black people. Simultaneously, Pettus and the other organizers filed for a court injunction to prevent the city from canceling the contract for the civic auditorium. In New York, the Freedom staff got busy on its own phones, enlisting support from Coleman Young and the National Negro Labor Council in Detroit, Reverend Charles Hill, and black newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass.48