Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The level of trust between Paul and Ben Robeson, despite the long periods of absence, had never wavered. The two men were entirely comfortable with each other. When Paul moved into the parsonage in the winter of 1954 (where he would remain for about a year), he felt in a real sense that he was coming home—back into the bosom of his immediate family and back into the larger family of the black community. Robeson always enjoyed sitting around—black people only—and talking “colored talk.” Howard Fast remembers his astonishment once when he tried to find Robeson at a party they had gone to in the late forties in a fashionable black suburb of Detroit. Directed to the basement, Fast opened the door to find half a dozen prosperous, middle-aged black men smoking good cigars, jackets off, all attention on Robeson, who was holding forth in a “raw, black, Deep-Southern language,” telling “rich, earthy stories with no restraint, no polite talk like upstairs.” It was the only time, Fast felt, that he ever saw Robeson “with his wall down.” Helen Rosen remembers coming upon the same sort of earthy talk at the parsonage, with brother Ben—despite his staid outward appearance—joining in with equal gusto.50

  Among much else that the two brothers shared was a profound concern for the welfare of black people. Ben—a registered Republican (he was a friend and an admirer of Nelson Rockefeller), sedate and traditional in manner—worked out his commitment through the church. Paul’s was expressed through art and politics, but in Paul, too, the family “preacher” temperament was ingrained. His “calling” seemed so obvious to Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood of A.M.E. Zion, after he heard Paul’s passionate platform delivery once in a black church, that he wrote and begged him “to give the remaining years of your life to the work of the ministry,” reporting that Bishop Walls of Chicago was also “enamoured of the idea.”51

  Comfortable though Paul felt at the parsonage, it was not the tranquil environment it outwardly appeared to be. There was a lot of drinking, and at times—when Ben and Frankie’s daughters periodically returned home, in retreat from their difficult marriages—considerable family friction. Paul was fond of all three of his nieces, but eventually the increasingly frequent storms at the parsonage proved too much for him. He needed a respite from the turbulence he encountered in the outer world, not a recapitulation of it. Throughout his life, he could never stay for long in an unquiet home. His domestic requirements, ultimately, were for solitude, stability, and protection.

  CHAPTER 21

  Breakdown

  (1955–1956)

  On the national scene, scattered signs were emerging to indicate a thaw in the conservative deep-freeze. The army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954 precipitated a Senate censure vote against McCarthy on December 2. Cold War tensions, too, began to dissipate by 1955: the long-standing Russian-American deadlock over a treaty with Austria was finally broken, a United Nations Conference on Disarmament produced some positive results, and an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting eased relations so notably that “the Geneva spirit” became a tag reference for every intimation of international cooperation. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court pendulum took a swing toward the liberal side; the Justices modified a host of loyalty-security laws, reasserted concern with protecting the rights of political dissenters, and, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, struck down segregation in the nation’s public schools. Such developments, of course, were auguries only, not automatic guarantors of a new day.

  Robeson hailed these “tokens of sanity,” these “hopeful signs that the commonsense of rank-and-file America will yet prevail,” but he was not ready to discount the power of the “atom-maniacs in Washington.” He noted that one of the immediate effects of the Supreme Court’s shift to the left was to produce a countervailing shift to the right, uniting Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans behind a defense of segregation and militant anti-Communism. He was therefore not surprised when the black Communist Claude Lightfoot in Chicago, and Ben Gold, the Communist leader of the Fur and Leather Union, drew jail sentences, when William Patterson was remanded for contempt, and when Ben Davis, after serving nearly four years in the penitentiary, was rearrested. Robeson spoke out at public rallies in their defense and in the 1954 fall elections supported the American Labour Party in New York State, which ran John T. McManus, general manager of the National Guardian, for governor. Robeson did not know it at the time, but the Justice Department was giving thought to indicting him as well. Despite its best efforts, however, the FBI was still unable to come up with any “specific information from any source” directly linking him to the Communist Party.1

  Early in 1955, however, Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before a joint state legislative committee. It had been empowered to investigate alleged misappropriations in philanthropic fund-raising charged against three “Communist-front” organizations with which he was closely affiliated: the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and the Civil Rights Congress. The prosecution claimed that “millions of dollars given by public-spirited citizens for a variety of causes” had been “diverted to subversive uses.” Dorothy Parker, the economist George Marshall, and Dashiell Hammett (who had headed the New York State Civil Rights Congress from 1946 to 1951, when he went to prison for six months for contempt of court) were among the witnesses called during the three-day hearing; Hammett testified that “Communist to me is not a dirty word. When you’re working for the advancement of mankind it never occurs to you if a guy’s a Communist or not.” Robeson’s turn on the stand proved stormy. He said he was “very proud” to be a national director of the Civil Rights Congress and, when asked for specifics about how the CRC raised and dispensed funds, replied, “I sing for Hadassah and the Sons of Israel and any number of worthwhile causes and no one asks me how much money they raise.” The New York Times pronounced his answer evasive, and an editorial in the Herald Tribune fulminated against “Red-fronters” whose “refusal to give accounting” of their “dangerous … double-dealing … charity rackets … cannot be tolerated.” No, Robeson decided, the Cold War had not yet evaporated, any more than the national climate had been miraculously purged of unbalanced suspicion.2

  He remained wary. Delighted though he was with the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision—he characterized it as “a magnificent stride forward in the long battle of colored Americans for full equality”—he noted the white South’s negative reaction and warned of the need for black vigilance and firmness in equal measure. “As might be expected,” he wrote in Freedom, “the Dixiecrats have responded with howls of anguish and threats of retaliation.… The planters have organized a new Ku Klux Klan. They have laundered it a bit, given it a face-lifting, and called it White Citizens Councils. But no Negro in Mississippi will be fooled. He knows the Klan when he sees it, by whatever name it’s called.” Robeson hailed Mississippi’s “heroic” black people for the “stirring chapter” they were writing in the history of resistance and, four months after the Supreme Court decision, called on blacks everywhere to “fight to see that it is enforced”; he warned, in the face of spreading white opposition, that the decision could turn out to be merely “a token gesture,” yet another paper promise falling far short of the “full freedom” he continued to demand. Robeson’s health might be weakening, his outlets for singing and speaking all but gone, but his tenacity, his galvanizing sorrow held.3

  He used the occasion of a concert booking in California early in 1955—his earlier hope for a full-scale tour of the state had been dashed by a lack of response—to express enthusiasm about the unity movement developing between black organizations to break Jim Crow barriers in television and radio, and about the recent election of the radical Norman Manley to head the government in the British West Indies (“a powerful voice for dignity and equality of colored peoples everywhere”). While Robeson was in Los Angeles, the front wheel twice came off the car in which he was being driven by Frank Whitley. There had been a similar incident in St. Louis in 1947, and there would
be two more in 1958. Whitley’s conclusion was that the wheel had been tampered with, but if so, the uncertain evidence makes it impossible to say by whom—whether racists, red-baiters, or even, conceivably, federal agents (who had both Robeson and Whitley under close surveillance in L.A.), acting either under orders or on their own.4

  When the conference of Asian and African nations—denounced in advance by Secretary of State Dulles as a misguided form of self-segregation—assembled in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 Robeson sent a message hailing the gathering as a certain sign of “the power and the determination of the peoples of these two great continents to decide their own destiny.” Prior to the Bandung gathering, William Patterson wrote directly to Prime Minister U Nu of Burma appealing for a statement from Asian and African leaders deploring the continuing “persecution” of Robeson by his own government. Instead, at Bandung, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., took it upon himself to rebuke Robeson and to dismiss “Communist propaganda” that no progress was being made in the United States toward equality for its black citizens. Essie sent an angry response to The Afro-American in which she accused Powell of exaggerating the amount of progress made, but Robeson himself continued to sound a positive note. Invited to sing and speak at the City College of New York (having been barred four years earlier) and also at Swarthmore, he expressed delight at the overflow crowds, at “the stirrings of new life” among students, at the “fresh breeze of free expression beginning to filter into the stale atmosphere of the cold-war classrooms.”5

  Robeson’s often reiterated public optimism was a function both of temperamental expansiveness and of a proud refusal to let the enemy know he had been hit, to concede the toll taken from a decade of being followed by agents, of having his mail intercepted, his phone conversations bugged, his public appearances monitored and reported. Years of downplaying, perhaps even to himself, the wearing negative effects of his confinement and of refusing, as well, fully to acknowledge the profound psychic costs—in one so naturally affirmative—of having always to maintain a stance of opposition, contributed to building up a potentially explosive amount of anguish and rage. The crunch—the moment when anguish overwhelmed affirmation—finally came in late 1955, triggered by a particularly bruising round in the ongoing fight to regain his passport.6

  The receipt of several unusually appealing offers from abroad became the occasion for going back once more into court. From Prague had come an invitation to appear in concert at the National Opera House, from the British Workers’ Sports Association the prospect of doing a series of concerts in celebration of the association’s silver jubilee, from the leading cultural agency in Tel Aviv an inquiry about coming to Israel, and from Mosfilm Studios in the Soviet Union the offer to star in a planned film version of Othello. Singly each invitation presented a notable opportunity; taken together they held out the real promise of a restoration of Robeson’s international career. There was reason to believe, this time around, that the courts might finally rule favorably on his application. In February 1955 a U.S. district court had returned a passport to Otto Nathan (Albert Einstein’s executor), and in subsequent legal actions passports had been given back to Clark Foreman, Joseph Clark (foreign editor of the Daily Worker), the atomic scientist Dr. Martin Kamen, and others previously refused on security grounds. On May 10, 1955, with Robeson’s hopes higher than they had been for years, his attorneys, Leonard Boudin and James T. Wright, started up the judicial process again by making application to the Passport Division of the State Department. The application was immediately denied; Robeson was again told he had to sign a “non-Communist” affidavit before a passport for him could even be considered.7

  Late in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Max Schachtman—whose organization, the Independent Socialist League, was on the Attorney General’s “subversive” list—that “the right to travel is a national right” that could not be withheld except by due process of law. The ruling was widely hailed as historic and also as presenting an exact precedent for justifying the return of Robeson’s passport. Following that logic, Robeson’s attorneys reapplied in mid-July. “In view of recent court decisions,” his application read, “and the granting of passports to others whose passports were previously refused, I insist that my right to travel be granted at once.” He and his attorneys were called to Washington for a conference.

  In the course of the seventy-five-minute meeting on July 18, the State Department officials promised “careful and prompt” attention to Robeson’s passport request, and he left Washington feeling buoyed. His spirits got a further boost a few days later, when official word arrived that he would henceforth be allowed to travel to Canada—though still not to other places where Americans normally went without a passport, like Hawaii, Jamaica, and British Guiana. Singing his fourth annual Peace Arch concert at the Canadian boundary line the following week, Robeson told the crowd that he was jubilant at the partial victory and predicted he would soon be granted the right to travel anywhere.8

  He was wrong: the State Department quickly announced that it had decided not to issue Robeson a passport. His attorneys immediately took the matter before Judge Burnita S. Mathews in a hearing on August 16 at the district court in Washington. Judge Mathews had recently returned a passport to Clark Foreman (for whom Boudin had also been counsel), but in the Robeson case she decided that the plaintiff “had not exhausted his administrative remedies”—meaning he had not signed a “non-Communist” affidavit. Leo A. Rover, the federal district attorney representing the State Department, argued that the Robeson case was different, that “this man” (he was called “Mr. Robeson” only once during the hearing) was “one of the most dangerous men in the world.” In Leonard Boudin’s recollection, Rover addressed the court in “stentorian tones,” passionate in his conviction that Robeson was a direct threat to the security of the United States. In accepting Rover’s argument and denying Robeson his passport, Judge Mathews blasted his raised hopes. The effect on him, in Boudin’s opinion, was “traumatic”—he keenly felt that he had been singled out for unjust treatment.9

  So did the black press. “Why is the State Department more afraid of Robeson than of the whites to whom it is giving passports?” asked J. A. Rogers, the Pittsburgh Courier columnist. The obvious answer was echoed widely in black newspapers: racism. As Rogers put it, “it’s getting to the point where to prove you’re not a subversive you must be a Ku Kluxer, a McCarthyite, or some other ‘thousand percent American,’ that is a Fascist at heart.” The conservative New York Amsterdam News stood apart from most of the black press in calling on Robeson to sign the affidavit: “We think he should level with all of the necessary facts in the case, if he is really in dead earnest.” In response, Robeson issued a public statement thanking the black news media for their support and taking issue with the Amsterdam News for ignoring two important facts: that the affidavit was not a standard requirement demanded of other Americans, and that he was not being charged with membership in the Communist Party or accused of any illegal act, such as espionage, for which he would be subject to indictment. An affidavit had been demanded of him, Robeson argued, because he had refused to keep silent about the treatment of blacks in America and of people of color throughout the colonial world. He suggested the State Department stop persecuting him for advocating better conditions for blacks and start prosecuting those in Mississippi “who have unleashed against our people a reign of terror and bloodshed.” He was a “threat” (a security risk) because he told the truth.10

  The State Department had openly acknowledged the accuracy of Robeson’s interpretation as early as 1952 when, in a legal brief submitted to the Court of Appeals, it had argued that the revocation of his passport was justified because his activity in behalf of independence for the colonial peoples of Africa was potentially a “diplomatic embarrassment.” At the August 1955 hearing, U.S. Attorney Rover had reconfirmed that Robeson’s interest in colonial liberation abroad and equality for blacks at home constituted the basis
for the animus against him. In explaining to Judge Mathews why Robeson was peculiarly “dangerous,” Rover had pointed directly and solely to his speeches and writings: “During the concert tours of foreign countries he [Robeson] repeatedly criticized the conditions of Negroes in the United States,” and in his message to the Bandung conference he had asserted—as, indeed, he had—that “the time has come when the colored peoples of the world will no longer allow the great natural wealth of their countries to be exploited and expropriated by the Western world while they are beset by hunger, disease and poverty.”11

  To deny black Americans the right to disclose their grievances abroad was tantamount to denying them one historic means they had always employed for winning their struggle at home. As early as 1830 the black abolitionist Reverend Nathaniel Paul had gone to England to promote the antislavery cause, later followed by Charles L. Remond, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, who in 1845 had said, “So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” This historical point was forcefully made the following year in an amicus curiae brief that a group of black Americans submitted in support of Robeson’s passport claim. The brief further pointed out that Robeson’s views were in fact wholly in accord with officially declared U.S. opposition to colonialism and with its formal ratification of the Charter of the Organization of American States, which, among other things, supported the right to work and the right to free speech. Had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the brief went on) once raised his voice to denounce the persecution of black people in the South—for example, over the recent murder of Emmett Till—Afro-Americans would feel less need to look overseas for support. Instead Dulles had spoken out in support of the Portuguese claim to Goa and—exercising his constitutional right to utter unorthodox views—had issued his notorious “brink-of-war” statement, bringing down on his head the rebuke of Governor Harriman of New York, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and ex-President Harry Truman, who said Dulles had “brought dishonor to our national reputation of truth and honesty.” No one, however, had suggested that Dulles’s passport be revoked.12