Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  When Eugene Dennis supplanted Browder as the Party’s pre-eminent leader, Robeson continued in close contact with the top echelon, for he and Dennis were also personal friends, Robeson admiring Dennis’s intelligence, his deep commitment to black equality, and his low-key, unimperious exercise of authority. When Dennis was on the eve of going to federal prison, Robeson asked him and his wife, Peggy, to attend his Carnegie Hall concert as his personal guests, and installed them in a box near the front of the stage; just before singing Blitzstein’s “The Purest Kind of Guy,” Robeson leaned into the microphone and announced he was dedicating the song to his dear friend Eugene Dennis; the spotlight went up on the Dennises’ box, and Paul sang the song directly to Gene. According to Peggy Dennis, the relationship between the two men involved considerable give-and-take: “Paul had his own very definite ideas, whether it was on the black question or on socialism or on the Soviet Union or on the Progressive Party or whatever else.” He was held in immense esteem by the leadership and the rank-and-file alike as “the voice of the black people,” as an artist who insisted upon being political. He also caught the imagination of some of the younger cadre, like Peggy Dennis herself, who had ambivalently learned “to smother all personal aspirations,” sublimating private passions into serving Party dictates; Robeson’s insistence on self-expression in combination with political responsibility released “a kind of subtle envy.” But although Robeson was widely regarded as a figure apart, “a very special human being in a very special relationship to the Party,” on the top level—where discussion took place, say, between Eugene Dennis and Robeson—Peggy Dennis believes that “no one was in awe of Paul as an artist”; the rule of thumb instead was an open give-and-take among equals.36

  Robeson never joined in any outright factional dispute within the Party. His characteristic style was to discuss his views with the few leaders with whom he felt closest, personally and politically—Dennis, Pettis Perry, and, above all, Ben Davis, Jr. (though he sometimes thought Davis too abrasively sectarian)—and to let those men serve as a conduit for conveying his views. To protect his independent standing further, he would sometimes hide behind the calculated disclaimer that he was “only an artist, after all, and not a political leader,” shrewdly sidestepping organizational responsibility and factional attachments. He remained privy to what was going on factionally, and his sympathies often leaned toward the “left-wing” (Foster-Davis) grouping in the Party. But though admiring Foster, he found him too dour for intimacy; besides, Robeson’s commitment to the left wing was a tendency only, not a firm adherence; his “outwardness and breadth” (in Peggy Dennis’s words) prevented him from taking any rigidly sectarian stance.37

  Robeson’s role essentially resembled that of a foreign ambassador to an allied country—to a close ally in time of war. His primary allegiance remained with his home base—with black people—but he believed that the Soviet Union, alone among the world’s political powers, was a genuine deterrent to Western imperialism (and thus an ally of black and colonial freedom struggles) and he therefore worked hard to champion the interests and to ensure the survival of the Communist movement. Still, deeply sympathetic and committed to close collaboration though he was, he functioned as an emissary to that movement, not as a citizen of the realm, not a participant either in the householder’s daily chores or in the quarreling discord of its officialdom. Like every good ambassador, Robeson could be most devious when appearing most open (he was not so invariably direct in his dealings as myth would have it). Like every good ambassador, too, he knew the region well and could accurately assess the shifting fortunes of the local players, even while standing aloof from their squabbles. He did, of course, have his preferences among the players, and sometimes disapproved their specific moves. But he picked his friendships from among all wings of the Party, much preferring, according to his son, the company of the centrist Eugene Dennis to that of left-wing black leaders James Jackson and Henry Winston. Despite the fact, moreover, that there was considerable ill-feeling between his closest associate, Ben Davis, Jr., and Gene Dennis, Robeson maintained friendships with both. He always remained adept at separating someone’s plausible political line from what he felt in his gut about the person’s human reliability. By the mid-fifties, for example, he began to distance himself from William Patterson, grateful for his devoted work on the passport case but increasingly wary of Pat’s self-glamorizing assumption of the Robeson mantle.38

  Except for a few brief meetings with Khrushchev in the late fifties, Robeson remained remote from the sources of real power in the Soviet Union and exercised no direct influence. Yet through the years he did come to know many of the Soviets’ most prominent ambassadors (Litvinov, Maisky, Malik, Feodorenko, Zarubin) and, in regard to one, Panyushkin, he bluntly told Paul, Jr., “that the SOB talked like a Nazi about the Jews.… He sounded like Goebbels at times.” But Robeson was careful never to express such views in public, and only rarely in private. He did not transfer his dislike of particular leaders into a condemnation of the cause they represented, however poorly, or the political entities they headed. His commitment to socialism and to black liberation took automatic precedence over his occasional trouble with particular individuals who happened temporarily to represent those causes to the public.39

  But that is not quite the whole story, either. Robeson also sat on his personal opinions because the individuals in question were designated leaders—endowed with the mantle of liberation, invested with the hope and authority of a revolutionary world movement. One generation removed from slavery himself, he knew that the success of a collective struggle took automatic precedence over the comparatively trivial tastes and preferences of any individual. He felt that by acceding to his father’s authority, he had been able successfully to navigate the shoals of white indifference and intimidation; if his people as a whole were to navigate the same treacherous waters, invested faith in the new father of international socialism would have to be sustained in public in the same obedient spirit—even if one harbored in private independent judgments of individuals and events. John Gates believed that Robeson’s “commitment to the leadership” was so complete that “he thought anything we proposed was wise”—but Gates did not realize that Robeson had also learned from his father that if he did not express his every feeling, he could thereby preserve his inner integrity.40

  Robeson’s unswerving public loyalty to the CPUSA was not always reciprocated in kind. In general the Party leaders accepted his support on its own uniquely independent terms, but now and then, in times of unusual pressure, a segment of the leadership would try to convert a treaty of alliance into a condition of vassalage. According to Ben Davis, Jr., Henry Winston (supported by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) strongly suggested that Robeson, following his 1949 Paris speech, “tone down” his “nationalistic” utterances or face public party criticism—to Robeson’s fury. And in 1951 Winston was enthusiastic about Robeson’s suggestion that, as an act of solidarity with the Smith Act victims, he join the Party; Winston apparently felt that Robeson’s personal prestige would help rescue Party fortunes and bowed reluctantly to the counterview of Eugene Dennis, Ben Davis, Jr., and others that the far more likely result would be to destroy Robeson’s own standing. At around this same time, Robeson discovered that one of his bodyguards, Walter Garland (a black American hero during the Spanish Civil War), had been planted by “a certain group in the top echelons of the Party” to report on his activities. He became livid, told Garland to get lost “and to tell those so-and-sos downtown, ‘Don’t ever pull that on me.’” Robeson complained directly to Ben Davis—who temporarily supplied him with his own bodyguard.41

  Robeson never allowed the occasional discontent he felt with his allies to mitigate the public contempt he expressed for his enemies—not the American people or the American experiment, but the “racist oligarchy” in control of the U.S. government. “I have shouted,” he told a reporter of The Afro-American in March 1954, “and will continue to shout at t
he top of my voice for liberation, full emancipation.” And he did just that. That same month, March 1954, he denounced U.S. intervention in Guatemala, loudly protested continuing persecutions under the Smith Act and the move by the Justice Department to have the Council on African Affairs register under the McCarran Act, and, in regard to events in the colonial world, raised his voice angrily against the imprisonment of Kenyatta and the effort to discredit the movement for Kenyan independence. “Is it ‘subversive,’” he asked reporters, “not to approve our Government’s actions of condoning and abetting the oppression of our brothers and sisters in Africa and other lands?”42

  Against equally imposing odds, he continued the fight for the return of his passport. Another round was inaugurated in the spring of 1954, with coordinated campaigns simultaneously launched from England and the United States to drum up petitions, letters, and cables to the State Department deploring Robeson’s continuing “domestic arrest.” The response from abroad was extensive, far more so than at home. Messages in support of Robeson arrived from around the world—from, among many others, Charles Chaplin, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ivor Montagu, Laurence Housman, René Maran, Pablo Neruda, Yussef Dadoo, J. D. Bernal, and peace groups from places as distant as Uruguay, Austria, Israel, South Africa, Iraq, and Finland.43

  In England a major “Let Robeson Sing” campaign was launched. It began when John Williamson (the American Communist Party leader who had been deported back to the land of his birth under the Smith Act) proposed a resolution at the Scottish Trade Union Congress in support of returning Robeson’s passport. A committee still in existence from the campaign to save the Rosenbergs from execution was activated by Franz and Diana Loesser in Robeson’s behalf. Centering their efforts at first in Manchester, the Loessers organized a meeting in the Free Trade Hall that featured the black boxer and CP member Len Johnson as a speaker and drew a spill-over crowd, with the local Labour Party and the strong Jewish community in Manchester turning out in particularly impressive numbers. An approach was made to Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Party leader, to lend official support to the campaign for Robeson’s passport, but, according to Diana Loesser, “Labour Party proscriptions against being associated with Communists—and several were sponsors of the campaign—kept Bevan necessarily at arm’s length”; he did, however, “make sympathetic noises” and avoided taking any steps against rank-and-file involvement. From this beginning, the British “Let Robeson Sing” campaign would grow by leaps and bounds; by 1957 it would be a considerable embarrassment to the U.S. government.44

  In the United States, the campaign focused on a “Salute to Paul Robeson” from his fellow artists—including Thelonious Monk, Pete Seeger, Leon Bibb, Alice Childress, Julian Mayfield, Karen Morley, and Lorraine Hansberry—at the Renaissance Casino on May 24, 1954. The casino was packed, with an overflow crowd of a thousand accommodated in an adjoining church. For a brief time it seemed, in the words of an enthusiast, as if “now we are really ready for a campaign that can in fact force the return of Paul’s passport.”45

  But the optimism was short-lived. Permission for a follow-up Robeson concert in Chicago was canceled at the last minute by the local Board of Education. And at the end of July, barely two months after the new passport campaign had been launched, the State Department announced that it was again denying Robeson’s application. Scores of protests followed, and Robeson told the press he would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. He hired new lawyers: the black Washington, D.C., attorney James T. Wright, and the white left-wing activist Leonard Boudin, who was himself shortly to be denied the right to travel. The State Department remained adamantly indifferent: as long as Robeson continued to refuse to execute an affidavit stating his relationship to the Communist Party—which he adamantly refused—his appeal for a passport was “precluded.” There the issue held fire for the moment, both sides immovable.46

  Robeson continued his piecemeal activities—singing again at the Peace Arch in August (to a still smaller crowd than the previous year), working to win amnesty for the Smith Act defendants and to provide succor for their families, attending the fourth annual National Negro Labor Council convention, allowing himself to be fêted, along with Essie, at a New World Review fund-raiser (where he spoke movingly of her contributions to his own development and her efforts “in behalf of first-class citizenship for the Negro people”), giving an occasional concert when the doors could be opened, and, when they could not, making additional recordings for distribution through the Othello Recording Company, to which Paul, Jr., was now devoting full time. But the accumulated stress was telling on him. Mary Helen Jones, the left-wing black community leader in California, reported to John Gray at Freedom in New York that, following an appearance by Paul on the West Coast, Essie had implored her to try to “keep him out here … for ten days incognito for a rest. She suggested a hospital but he prefers a private home where he can go on a diet and get some rest and get away from the crowds.” Jones discussed it with him, and initially he was “in favor of it,” but he then decided it was “out of the question.” “Frankly,” Jones reported back in New York, “I can’t understand why he ‘seemed’ to be receptive to the idea when I discussed it with him and then ‘froze’ after I left.… He is a very stubborn person when it comes to not looking out for himself.… Many people out here are thinking about Marcantonio [who had recently died of a heart attack] and that he left here at the age of 51.… Paul needs a rest.…”47

  The closest thing he could manage was a change of address. Following the sale of the house in Enfield in 1953, Essie had moved into the Hotel Dauphin in New York City—after staying with Paul, Jr., and Marilyn. Paul had continued on at the McGhees’ on East 89th Street, sometimes staying around the corner with Helen and Sam Rosen or with the Caytons, or with his brother Ben at the parsonage. But by the end of 1954, with FBI agents holding him under constant surveillance, Paul decided he would find more privacy and security in Harlem—a move also dictated by his fear of having become, through residing in the heart of white Manhattan, too isolated from the black community. The concern was not new. As early as 1947, leaders from the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America had called a private meeting with him in Washington, D.C., to express, “deferentially,” “how all of us feel about you, and how we love you. Well, we think you’re a great artist and a great man and all that, and while it may be true that you are a ‘Citizen of the World,’ we’d like you to let our folks know a little more strongly, that you are first a part of us and then ‘Citizen of the World.’” According to George Murphy, Jr., who attended the meeting and recorded the vets’ words, “Paul listened very carefully, told the vets he thought they were eminently correct, especially in thinking enough of him to come to him and say what they thought.” By 1949 columnist Dan Burley in the New York Age, a black newspaper, was remarking that Robeson “has been away from Harlem so long that people only know him by what they have read or heard.…” His close friend Revels Cayton urged him to do something about the continuing criticism, and that same year of 1949 he took over the St. Nicholas Avenue apartment of the black singer Aubrey Pankey and his wife, Kay (the couple had by now settled in Europe). But, according to Kay Pankey, Robeson moved back downtown within the year, “pestered too much” by the constant invasion of his privacy.48

  By 1954 the security and warmth of a Harlem haven had become more important than solitude, and when his brother Ben and his wife, Frankie, suggested he move into the parsonage of the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church at 155 West 136th Street, where Ben was pastor, Paul accepted. He would never have asked Ben to take him in, unwilling to subject his brother’s family to possible obloquy, but when Ben volunteered the invitation, Paul gratefully took him up on it. Ben and Paul had not seen much of each other during the forties, and Ben’s family thought Essie—with whom they did not get along—might have deliberately kept Paul away from the parsonage. But in fact Paul’s long absences were a characteristic pattern in all his relationships, and did not necessarily
reflect how important those relationships were to him. Paul always moved in and out of personal commitments, the pattern perhaps in part reflecting the childhood trauma he’d suffered at his mother’s sudden death, forever imprinting on him the lesson not to become overly attached. But the pattern also reflected the expansiveness of a nature that could never be content for long interacting exclusively with one other individual. Robeson’s middle-class white friends had particular trouble dealing with his in-and-out-again commitment to them. They tended to interpret the long stretches of time between visits, and his failure to stay in touch through letters and phone calls, as somehow a judgment on the quality of the friendship, a sign of its insignificance to him.

  Ben, sharing the same family culture as Paul, had the same view as he of the etiquette of relationships. Like Paul, he didn’t need the reassurance of constant declarations of concern in order to believe in its reality. The dutiful little attentions crucial to middle-class definitions of the proper contours of friendship and family were not given the same weight of importance—closeness was not measured by how often one saw someone or how much one revealed to him. Between Ben and Paul, as with Paul and his sister Marian, a profound sense of assurance that their ties were lasting and deep precluded any need for constant verification. Though Marian’s house in Philadelphia was always a haven for Paul—and he often retreated there—between visits he rarely communicated. What might be called a secure passivity—“I don’t need to make it happen”—best characterizes his attitude. The ties were there—or were not—and no amount of verbal reassurance or attentiveness would change that essential fact. Robeson’s belief in the ebb-and-flow of friendship, combined with his ingrained respect for the privacy of others, meant that he rarely commented on and never tracked the lives of his friends. The quality of intrusiveness—the need to keep talking about a bond in order to establish its validity—was foreign to Robeson’s sense of the natural history of relationships. He felt no need to analyze intimacy in order to reassure himself of its presence.49