Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The combined efforts paid off. Though attorneys for the city scoured the black community, they were able to persuade only one person—a black police officer—to testify that Robeson was held in low esteem. According to a newspaper account, the officer appeared “obviously embarrassed” on the stand and let it be known that he had been called out of bed to testify that morning by the white officer who headed the local “red squad.” A number of Seattle’s black leaders—Vincent Davis, Lester Catlett, and James McDaniels—followed the officer on the stand and, contradicting his view, described Robeson as “recognized and loved by the overwhelming majority of the Negro people because of his consistent fight for full equality, political and economic, for his people.” When asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Catlett scornfully refused to answer: “We don’t ask people their political affiliation. I don’t know yours.…” In reference to the same issue, McDaniels responded, “I have heard more about that in this courtroom the past two days than I have heard among my people the past 20 years.” At the end of the three-day hearing, it was ruled that the city had failed to prove that Robeson’s appearance would engender racial antagonism. The judge instructed that the civic auditorium be made available for the concert.49

  The moral victory did not translate into a financial one. Seventeen hundred people paid admission to the concert, and there was no disturbance of any kind, but the organizers had hoped for an attendance of twenty-five hundred. When expenses were paid, only $250 was left over for the Freedom Fund. Worse, there were local reprisals. Within three days of the concert, Jack Kinzell, one of its white organizers, was let go from his job as a popular radio announcer at station KIRO, and Vincent Davis, who had defended Robeson on the stand, was fired from his department-store job on direct order from management headquarters in New York.50

  The events in Seattle set the tone for much of what followed on the rest of the tour. San Francisco, the next stop, was nearly an exact replay. Mayor Elmer E. Robinson had said he would refuse to let Robeson sing in the Opera House because he “has seen fit to vilify the United States of America at Communist sponsored gatherings at home and abroad.” The Oakland authorities simultaneously denied Robeson the use of Oak Auditorium—a facility opened to the fascist leader Gerald L. K. Smith that same month. Again, the local citizenry came to the rescue. Bill Chester, regional director of the longshoremen’s union, led the fight, with the black leadership taking a strong stand in support of Robeson—Chester reported to New York that 98 percent of the black community stood behind him—while in Berkeley twelve hundred people turned out for a town meeting that voted by a margin of four to one in favor of Robeson’s appearance. As a result, he gave two concerts in the area—one at the largest black-owned church hall—which together drew more than five thousand people.51

  The rest of the tour—some fifteen cities in all—saw a repetition of official harassment, but not of aroused local support for Robeson’s appearance. In St. Louis a black minister withdrew his Prince of Peace Baptist Church as the site for Robeson’s concert after city officials warned him that “vandals” would be likely to wreck the church in reprisal. In Milwaukee the black churches stood firm, but their audiences did not, despite a house-to-house canvass for ticket sales. The tepid response perhaps accounted for the particular tone and emphasis of the speech Robeson gave that night: he pointed out that if he was indeed a Communist he would have been hauled before a congressional committee or a court long since, and he emphasized that, although he admired the Soviet Union for its support of minority rights, “the real core of my fight is not political but is based on … sympathy for my people and for all colored people of the world.… The only thing we must concern ourselves with is Negro liberation.” At the University of Minnesota the Young Progressives organization took up sponsorship of his concert and initially obtained approval from the authorities, but after the tickets were already printed President Morrill denounced Robeson as “an embittered anti-American, anti-democratic propagandist” and the university revoked its approval. In Pittsburgh the authorities outdid themselves in efforts to intimidate potential Robeson supporters: they condemned the concert building as unsafe and then, for good measure, prohibited “mixed occupancy.” The local sponsors repaired an exit door and a fire escape, thus permitting the concert to take place, but two FBI agents took motion pictures of the arrivals from an adjoining apartment. Not surprisingly, only 350 people turned up. Even a public celebration of Robeson’s fifty-fourth birthday had to be canceled after New York City’s Manhattan Center broke an oral agreement to rent its hall.52

  When receipts were tallied at the end of the tour, the United Freedom Fund had grossed a little under fifteen hundred dollars. The sum was so small that the four cooperating organizations voted to put it toward organizing a possible 1952–53 tour instead of dividing the proceeds, contenting themselves for the moment with the notion that “politically and culturally” the tour, in reaching some seventy-five thousand people, had been a success. Robeson himself had averaged a three-hundred-dollar fee per concert—as compared with the two thousand dollars he had once commanded—but even that money he tried to turn over to Freedom. The tough-minded Bob Rockmore placed himself squarely in the path of Robeson’s magnanimity and for Robeson’s own good. Though recording royalties and investments continued to bring in substantial sums—Robeson’s income never fell to a level of serious hardship—he no longer had the extra cash to support his many generosities.53

  CHAPTER 20

  Confinement

  (1952–1954)

  Following the close of his tour, Robeson turned full attention to the 1952 Progressive Party campaign for the presidency, speaking widely in behalf of its national ticket. It was an unpropitious time for a left-wing campaign: “subversion” had become a national preoccupation. The Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate, and when Truman dismissed General MacArthur rather than yield to his call for escalating American military commitments, Senator McCarthy loudly blamed the “Communists” for having led a “smear campaign” against the general. In McCarthy’s view—and the polls showed him strongly supported in the country—the continuing indictments of second-level Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act would not be sufficient to expose and contain the enormity of the Red Menace. His pursuit of the Asian expert Owen Lattimore as Alger Hiss’s “boss,” though fantasy, proved an effective headline-grabber; and when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and charged with conspiracy to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets, the ensuing hysteria in the country finally seemed a match for McCarthy’s own inflamed imagination. There were air-raid drills in the urban centers and calls in Congress for a preventive first strike against Russia (an option seriously considered for a time as realistic). Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, was thought by some to be quietly antagonistic to McCarthy’s wilder tactics, but the force of public opinion seemed so strongly mobilized behind the Senator that Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate and a purported liberal, began moving to the right, announcing support for the Smith Act convictions, for loyalty programs, and for the firing of “Communist” teachers.1

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee: in Robeson’s view the two national candidates and their parties were near-carbon copies of reaction. He and Essie attended the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in July, she as a delegate from Connecticut and a member of the platform committee, he as one of the Party’s national leaders and a member of the nominating committee which chose Vincent Hallinan for president and Charlotta Bass for vice-president. Both Essie and Paul went on to play active roles in the campaign, Paul going as far as California to participate in a Culver City Stadium rally that drew ten thousand. During one California stop, Charlotta Bass, who was lighter-skinned than Robeson, was asked by an audience member, “Why don’t you look like Paul?” “Honey,” Mrs. Bass replied, “I should, but I’ve been tampered with.” Robeson’s appearances rarely produced so lighthearted a note. Local opposition
to him from veterans’ groups surfaced frequently, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they attempted to get a court injunction to prevent him from speaking in public. Everywhere he went Robeson told audiences that 1952 “has been a fateful year” and, for black people particularly, “one of gathering crisis,” epitomized by the all-white jury in North Carolina that had tried the black tenant farmer Mack Ingram for “leering” at a white woman dressed in men’s clothes and standing seventy-five feet away: “The United States,” Robeson commented, “is certainly making a unique contribution to the jurisprudence of the so-called ‘free’ nations of the West.”2

  In Cleveland, speaking to the National Negro Labor Council and deliberately echoing yet again the words ascribed to him at Paris in 1949, he asked whether black youths should “join with British soldiers in shooting down the brave peoples of Kenya” or in firing on the crowds in South Africa currently engaged in a civil-disobedience campaign. Of course not, Robeson replied: “I say again, the proper battlefield for our youth and for all fighters for a decent life is here … where the walls of Jim Crow still stand and need somebody to tear them down.” Despite his starkly spoken opposition to the reactionary drift in American life, Robeson was still occasionally able to strike a hopeful note: he told his audiences that, although the Republican and Democratic conventions had evaded civil-rights planks, the issue had at least moved toward the center of the nation’s attention.3

  But that hopefulness found scant confirmation in the election results. In a record-breaking turnout, Eisenhower won a landslide victory, while the Progressive ticket polled an abysmal nationwide total of under two hundred thousand votes—about a fifth of their minuscule count in 1948. Meeting for a postelection rehash, the Progressive Party national committee (of which Essie was a member) managed to find a ray of hope in the outcome of some state contests—in Corliss Lamont’s receiving nearly a hundred thousand votes on the Progressive line in his New York run for the Senate, and in the trailing of McCarthy’s vote in Wisconsin behind Eisenhower’s. But this was a desperate clutching at straws. The Progressives had suffered a crushing rejection at the polls, and the Party never again ran a national ticket (or many local ones).4

  A month after the election, Moscow announced that Paul Robeson was one of seven recipients—and the only American—of the 1952 International Stalin Peace Prizes. Established three years earlier in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday and carrying an award of a gold medal and a hundred thousand rubles (about twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars), the prizes had been established as a kind of counter-Nobel, to honor citizens of any country of the world for outstanding service in “the struggle against war”; Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pietro Nenni, and Jorge Amado had been among its distinguished previous recipients. The award carried the mark of great prestige among Communists—Stalin had not yet been revealed to them as a mass killer—and the mark of enduring infamy among anti-Communists. The reaction to Robeson’s designation as a Stalin Prize medalist varied according to one’s allegiance. Rockwell Kent telegraphed him, “In you, Paul, we greet a hero.” Oppositely, José Ferrer, who had had his own trouble with the “red” label, told the press that in accepting the award Robeson would do “irreparable harm” to his race. The right-wing columnist George Sokolsky applauded Ferrer for having “served his country well” by “pinpointing” Robeson’s “unforgiveable sins against his native land.”5

  In accepting the prize, Robeson told the press he did so “not merely as an individual, but as a part of the growing peace movement in the United States, a peace movement that has been honored by the leadership of the great scholar, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois.” As Robeson had already said during a speech at Reverend Charles Hill’s Hartford Avenue Baptist Church in Detroit, “I’m very proud that somewhere people understood that I’m struggling for peace, and that I shall continue to do [so].” He announced that he would again apply for a passport in order to be able to receive the prize in person. The State Department, in turn, announced—within a week—that Robeson’s application was denied. “We see nothing to indicate,” a spokesman said, that Robeson’s “attitude has changed.” The Passport Division also notified him, with no hint of irony, that its reluctance to sanction American citizens’ visits to the Soviet Union was based on an inability “to assure them in that country the degree of protection which it likes to afford to American citizens traveling abroad.”6

  The State Department was accurate in one particular: Robeson’s “attitude” had not changed. His whole point was that the right to a passport did not and should not hinge on a citizen’s politics. Under the Constitution, “attitudes” were not actionable; they were instead at the core of the country’s protected heritage of free speech. The government’s case rested on dubious interpretations of the President’s war powers, the Secretary of State’s discretionary power in issuing passports, and the actual state of the current “national emergency.” Not only were the State Department’s justifying arguments cloudy, but its underlying racist animus was revealed with startling clarity in a footnote to one of the briefs it used when arguing the Robeson case before the Court of Appeals in March 1952: “…he has been for years extremely active politically in behalf of independence of the colonial peoples of Africa. Though this may be a highly laudable aim, the diplomatic embarrassment that could arise from the presence abroad of such a political meddler, traveling under the protection of an American passport, is easily imaginable.” The State Department was apparently admitting, however inadvertently, that advocating the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa was not in the best interests of the United States—a revelation reported in the Daily Worker and in Freedom, but ignored by the national press.7

  Two months later, Joseph Stalin was dead. The new leaders in the Kremlin soon began speaking openly of détente with the West, a possibility heightened by Eisenhower’s nomination of Chip Bohlen, a known proponent of “peaceful coexistence,” to the ambassadorial post in Moscow—a nomination fought fiercely by Senator McCarthy. When an armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953 officially ended hostilities there, another element for the easing of Cold War tensions fell into place. But an actual thaw was still in the future, as the execution of the Rosenbergs in June 1953 pointedly illustrated. Robeson had worked hard for the commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence, telling one rally, “My people are not strangers to frameups—they know what to expect from the courts of this land.” He called upon those present to work for “the possibility of restoring to the American people their social sanity, their democratic bearings, their dedication to justice and due process.”8

  Thwarted politically and circumscribed artistically, Robeson relied more and more during the fifties on his restorative relationship with Sam and Helen Rosen. At their apartment in New York City, and more especially at their house in Katonah, he found with the Rosens a needed family atmosphere of deep bonds of affection and congeniality, a respite from political tensions, a chance to relax. He talked sports for hours with Sam, taught the Rosens’ son John football plays on the rug, and sang while their daughter Judy accompanied him on the living-room piano. He would curl up for hours reading or studying Chinese calligraphy, taking time out to consume mammoth portions of chocolate ice cream and peanut brittle. Mornings—which for Paul usually started at noon—he would beguile Odessa, the housekeeper, into making him pancakes, plus biscuits with honey, while she was trying to plan lunch. He was an astonishing eater. He and Sam would have “corn races,” demolishing two dozen ears of Wallace Hybrid (developed by the former Progressive Party candidate) during its August glory; Paul invariably won, and Sam invariably accused him of cheating by not finishing each ear. At 2:00 a.m., or 4:00 a.m., Paul would coax Helen into cooking him a hamburger or fried eggs over lightly—“You know,” he’d say, laughing, “not hardly.”9

  Paul disliked cold weather, and in wintertime Helen would manage to find him a size 12½ snow boot and an extra-large lumber jacket; he would then tramp happily thr
ough the clean country snow, tossing snowballs at family members who mockingly protested his “professional” throwing arm. Summers, Helen would try to teach him to swim in the pond. He was always a bit frightened of the water, even after she bought him a size 50 life jacket and a pair of water wings besides—“we used to launch him,” Helen remembers. She remembers, too, that he preferred to walk with her in the secluded stand of large fir trees right near the house. They were always careful, but when they were alone in the woods he would put his head on her lap and drowsily sing her favorite, “The Riddle Song.” During their quiet talks, the political issues that concerned them both often came up, as they conjured images of a world without bigotry and war, and Paul would say—“It will be, it must be.” When they were sitting among the sweet pines, everything still seemed possible.10

  His own son, Paul, Jr., had been having a difficult time professionally. Though he had graduated in engineering from Cornell in the top 10 percent of his class, he had found himself blocked from employment opportunities in his field. A number of firms, including GE and Westing-house, gave him interviews, but none followed through. He finally landed a job with a physics lab in Long Island City, but the next day the FBI was on the phone to the prospective employer, warning that the firm would lose defense contracts if it hired him. For several years, he taught electronics at private technical schools, and then became a free-lance translator of Russian scientific journals. Despite Paul, Jr.’s restricted opportunities, he does not describe himself as “suffering greatly” in those years: he was a happily married family man, with his second child, Susan, born in 1953, and was deeply engaged with his CP organizing activities in Harlem.11