Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The tour did bring in the expected income and generated some incidental pleasures as well, but, far from being a piece of cake, it proved a grueling ordeal. In Robeson’s opening press conferences in Sydney and Brisbane, several hostile reporters prodded him with sharp-edged questions, and Robeson rose angrily to the bait. Had the Hungarian uprising been justified? Robeson pointed his finger at the questioner and told him the uprising had been inspired by “fascists”—encouraged by Voice of America broadcasts to Hungary—and was not a revolt of the people. Had not the condition of blacks in the United States greatly improved of late? It had somewhat improved, Robeson shot back, primarily because blacks had become militant in demanding their rights and because the U.S.S.R. had supported the black struggle. Was he bitter about the way the U.S. government had treated him? Bitter? Robeson echoed, and then launched into what one newspaper later described as an “emotional outburst” and another as a “nauseating” political “tirade.” “If someone did something bad to me I wouldn’t be bitter—I’d just knock him down and put my foot into his face” (crashing his foot down on the floor to illustrate his point). He then went on—at least, so the press reported—to say that the Russians would “hammer out the brains” of any country, including America, who took arms against them, and to declare that, in the event of such a conflict, he would side with Russia. Paul “is angrier than ever,” Essie reported ruefully to Freda Diamond, “and it makes me shudder, because he is so often angry at the wrong people, and so often unnecessarily angry.”57

  Paul’s anger reflected not the momentary logic of events but storedup griefs, a nature unraveling. Behind the reporters’ hostile questions—which had been thrown at him now for two decades—he heard the smug, unspoken subtext: “Come on, Robeson, confess, confess that your hopes have run aground, confess that human beings stink, confess that the rest of us have always been right, that we’re perfectly entitled to go on leading the narrow, hardened, opportunistic lives you silly idealists once so righteously scorned.” He told Nancy Wills, an Australian woman he had first met in London in the forties, that he was afraid to walk the streets in Australia—“He didn’t believe that the people here loved him.” When Essie, in front of Wills, mentioned the possibility of stopping off in the Philippines on their way back to London, Paul flew into a rage, declaring that U.S. agents would kill him if he ever set foot in the Philippines—“It was frightening,” as Wills remembers the scene, “to see and hear anyone so distraught, so angry.”58

  Australia had not fully emerged from its own McCarthy-like deepfreeze, and the current Menzies government was, at the very moment of Robeson’s arrival, debating an anti-civil-libertarian Crimes Act Amendment. Having set him up with a string of loaded political questions, the Australian press proceeded to lambaste him for being too political. The Herald and Sun chain of newspapers headlined their stories of Robeson’s initial press conference, “Would Back Russia in a War,” and “Robeson Bitterly Critical of U.S.” while the Telegraph weighed in with “I Wish He Was Still Bosambo.” D. D. O’Connor, the sponsoring agent for Robeson’s tour, wrote Essie that the headlines “aroused a certain amount of resentment, particularly in official circles and of course in the wealthy and rather snobbish section of concert patrons.” Since tickets for the tour were scaled rather high, O’Connor expressed concern for its commercial success, a concern heightened when the director of adult education in Hobart promptly canceled Robeson’s scheduled appearance in that city (“My Board is reluctant to be identified with Mr. Robeson’s public statements, and cannot co-operate with you as previously arranged”).59

  Things simmered down once the tour itself began. The next three weeks were spent in New Zealand, and there the press was altogether more civil than in Australia. At a typical concert appearance Robeson (continuing his recent practice) would eschew a formal program and present instead an informal combination of talk and song. One reporter vividly caught his platform manner:

  Robeson treated the normal procedures … with something like kindly indifference, putting on thick-rimmed glasses to read the words of a song from a copy of the printed program, and commenting on many of his songs in the light of his own view of social justice (“If they call that politics, I plead guilty”). With a small lectern beside him, to hold notes and reminders, there were times when he stripped his glasses off at the end of a song and challenged his audience with the optical and vocal intensity of a preacher delivering a spiritual ultimatum.… This cosmic belch of a voice still has the power to astonish by sheer, carpeted magnificence.

  Not only did the music critics hail Robeson’s artistry, but the news reporters skirted political questions (according to one reporter, Robeson’s New Zealand agent phoned in advance to request that political topics be avoided). When his plane set down at Whenaupai Airport in Auckland, he was given a traditional Maori welcome, and he later visited the Maori Community Centre. “The Maoris are a wonderful people—beautiful copper colored,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore. They “have accepted us as of them and [are] very proud of our success.… Am over the dumps (the bad spots)—and riding high.” Despite his agent’s worry, and although local Catholic schools were instructed not to support Robeson’s concerts because he was a “Communist,” they in fact sold out.60

  Still, the fireworks, if dampened, continued to smolder. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly reported that Robeson at times seemed “edgy” when speaking to the press—“A quick answer, an impatience at any sidetracking.…” It also quoted him as saying he had no further musical ambitions and was now only ambitious “as a scholar”; he wanted “to be so fluent in one other language—any one—that I can find myself dreaming in that language, so that I am not forced, as I am now, to do all my thinking and talking in the tongue of my oppressor. That sounds bitter, I guess.” Robeson sometimes talked politics to the reporters even when they did not goad him into doing so. In Auckland he told the press he was “here to sing” and was “through with missions for the moment”—and then proceeded to criticize the United States for supporting Franco and Chiang Kai-shek. He declared himself still “a rigid Marxist,” expressed concern about mistreatment of the Maoris and the suppression of their culture, and even volunteered sardonic disappointment that blacks back home seemed wholly wedded to a prayerful, nonviolent struggle: “They say to me: ‘Paul, you’re black like we are but you don’t pray so much. You’re more likely to break a few heads. So you stay overseas where you are.’” The reporter from the conservative New Zealand Herald concluded, “He is a man who quite openly wears a chip on his shoulder.” Robeson further alienated conservative New Zealand opinion by singing to the waterside workers in Wellington, who were out on strike, and accepting membership in their union. Essie gave a few interviews in her own right and saw her function as being “especially gracious and pleasant, though always forthright, to try and counteract some of the anger.” But by the end of the tour, Essie was fed up with trying to pacify Paul and the press simultaneously. She let out her feelings to the Rosens: “Your Boy is full of bile and tension, and remains ANGRY at the drop of a hat. I’m very tired of coping with it. I’ve developed enough patience to last me the rest of my life, so there is no need to develop any more. You can have him. He’s tired out, but keeps on doing everything on the horizon, and so hereafter, I just don’t want to look at it. I’d rather not see it. Then I won’t need to protest, and try and save him, and try and fob off pests. He resents everything I do, no matter what. So, I’m up to here. Period.”61

  The U.S. Consul in Auckland was pleased to report back to the State Department that “no civil reception or other formal type of welcome was tendered to Robeson during his stay.” Peace groups took up the social slack. In both New Zealand and Australia, the Robesons were welcomed in every city by delegations drawn from the trade unions, the Communist Party, Soviet and Chinese friendship societies, peace committees, and the Union of Australian Women. In Sydney, the Soviet Ambassador came down from Canberra to attend a peace reception in
the Robesons’ honor, and the Tass representative in Australia solicited an article from Paul (written by Essie) about their impressions of the country. In that article, and frequently elsewhere as well, Robeson spoke out against New Zealand’s discrimination against the Maoris and Australia’s more overt brutality to its own native population, the aborigines. There were about seventy-five thousand aborigines in a total Australian population of ten million, driven off their land into a desert interior scarce in food and water and nearly devoid of the game they had traditionally hunted and lived on. Without the vote or representation, the aborigines roamed the Outback, a desperately abused people, Australia’s “niggers.”62

  The more Robeson learned about the condition of the aborigines as his tour progressed through the country, the more his indignation grew. Through Faith Bandler, an aboriginal activist, the Robesons saw a private showing of a fifteen-minute film made in the late 1950s on the plight of the aborigines in the Warburton Ranges. As she remembers it, “The tears started to stream down his face”; but when the film showed thirsty children waiting for water, his sorrow turned to anger. Flinging to the floor the black cap he had taken to wearing on his head for warmth, he swore aloud that he would return to Australia and help bring attention to the appalling conditions in which the aborigines lived. He repeated that promise a few days later to the press, and again at a large peace reception for him at Paddington Hall in Sydney. “There’s no such thing as a ‘backward’ human being,” he told the crowd. “There is only a society which says they are backward.” He cited the case of his own family: his cousins in North Carolina who worked the cotton and tobacco fields were also called “backward”; that meant they hadn’t been allowed to attend school. “The indigenous people of Australia,” he roared, “ARE my brothers and sisters.”63

  Arriving at the Perth airport in Western Australia toward the end of his tour, Robeson was met by Lloyd L. Davies, a lawyer and longtime aboriginal activist. Davies remembers that a throng of well-wishers was on hand at the airport to welcome Robeson but when he spotted a group of local aborigines shyly hanging back, he instantly headed for them, moving through the crowd “like a fullback.” When he reached them, “he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms,” and when he moved toward his waiting transport, the aborigines moved with him. Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.” In his speech to the West Australian Peace Council, Robeson referred to his “darker brothers and sisters” whom he had seen at the airport—“they’re good stockmen, they tell me, know how to handle those horses and sheep; they ain’t too dumb for that. Not too dumb to labor for nothing.” Robeson went on to say, “I wish I could be sweet all the time.… Sometimes what you read in the paper sounds a little rough. You’re right, it was rough. That’s right. I said it.” In Davies’s view, Robeson’s gestures and words during his visit to Australia “gave a tremendous boost to the Aboriginal cause.”64

  The Robesons returned to London in early December 1960, their bank balance improved, their pockets stuffed with excellent artistic notices and mixed political ones—and thoroughly exhausted from the effort. “Had a really wonderful—moving tour,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore right after they returned, “surely need no more ‘Proof’ of anything”; the tour “fulfilled its mission in a most complete way. The audience took me up at my own valuation and responded nobly.” Still, he felt “just tired out—Bored—to put it truthfully.” From one angle, he was “just not too interested in what comes up—will do what does as well as I can—but in a ‘normal world’—I’d just quit—retire in general—and do just enough to keep going well above water.” But “there is little excuse not to function without seeming very difficult and shirking,” and so he would try to be “philosophic.” Of one thing, though, he felt certain: “that’s the last tour, as such. I’ll sing at benefits as far as concerts are concerned—and professionally will do what I have to do.” Additional plaudits meant nothing to him; to be “perfectly honest,” he wrote Clara, they had become entirely overshadowed by “the absolute vacuum (emptiness) in my personal life.” He felt “terribly, terribly lonely.…” It was “almost unbearable.” “We are just beginning to feel the strain,” Essie wrote in innocent imitation of Paul’s freighted lines, “so we are taking time out for a couple of months, just to sit here with NOTHING to do!!” Essie, who was “feeling much better generally,” went to work on a new book about blacks and American politics, while Paul continued desultory work for a book on folk music and held occasional sessions with Larry Brown to prepare recital material for future concerts.65

  No one saw more of Robeson in these months than Harry Francis, the left-wing assistant secretary of the musicians’ union, who had become a friend and an intermediary. Francis told Paul, Jr., twenty years later that his father had returned from the Australian trip so depressed that he took to lying on the bed in a darkened room with the curtains drawn. Francis dropped in frequently, and also brought over Harry Pollitt’s (the leader of the British Communist Party) bodyguard, who played pinochle with Robeson by the hour. During one of Harry Francis’s visits, the phone rang and he answered it. Fidel Castro—so Francis tells it—was on the other end, calling from Havana, asking to talk with Paul Robeson. As the FBI was well aware, Robeson had been giving thought to a trip to Cuba (and to China and Africa as well); indeed, his uncertainty about whether to undertake another strenuous journey had contributed to his debilitating anxiety. He told Francis to explain to Castro that he couldn’t come to the phone at the moment. Only a few weeks later, anti-Castro forces, mobilized by the government of the United States, made their landing at the Bay of Pigs.66

  In early January, Essie and Paul gradually started to get around socially again, spending evenings at the Soviet and East European embassies, attending the Oistrakh (father and son) concert at the Albert Hall as guests of the Soviet Ambassador, and having a private hour-long visit with Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, who was in London for a Commonwealth prime-ministers’ conference (Essie did a series of articles on the conference for the Associated Negro Press). In addition, Paul put in an appearance on the television program “This Is Your Life” to honor his old acting partner Flora Robson (“… myself in Person very dignified,” he wrote self-mockingly to Clara Rockmore; thanking him for appearing on the show, Flora Robson wrote, “It was you who taught me to be kind”). He closely followed political events, watching in alarm as President-elect Kennedy tried to justify American involvement in Laos, reacting with fury to Lumumba’s assassination in the Congo, protesting vigorously against the continued imprisonment of his old friend Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya (“Let him be free, NOW, AT ONCE,” Paul wrote, “to take his rightful and dearly-won place; to give his courage, knowledge and perception to his too long-suffering folk”).67

  Deciding on plans for the future entailed additional strain. Essie was against traveling to regions restricted for U.S. citizens for fear Paul would lose his passport and they would be forced to leave England, where she preferred to live. Attractive offers arrived in abundance but had to be sifted through with one eye aimed at conserving energy and the other at fulfilling political obligations that might, ideally, combine with plausible career opportunities. Paul toyed with the idea of accepting an invitation to return to Australia in Othello, and he waited to see if Herbert Marshall, his colleague from Unity Theatre days, would be able to bring off a Russian film on the life of Ira Aldridge (for which Robeson would do the narration, not play the lead)—but he immediately turned down a proposal from the British producer Oscar Lewenstein that he appear as Archibald in Jean Genet’s The Blacks; returning the script, Essie wrote Lewenstein, “I’m sorry neither Paul nor I like it at all.”68

  Within a few months of having returned to London from Australia, the Robesons had consolidated their plans for the rest of the year. Paul would go alone to Moscow for a visit in late March; in April he would attend the Scottish Miners’ Gala in Edinburgh; late May and part of June would
be given over to the Prague Music Festival, with a return in between to participate in the Welsh Miners’ Gala in Cardiff; part of July would be spent in East Berlin; August was reserved for a much-delayed trip to Ghana; and then, in the fall, there would be return visits to Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the U.S.S.R. It was a full schedule but, given its emphasis on visits rather than concerts, seemed not overly exhausting. In a letter to Clara Rockmore, of uncommon length and explicitness, Paul explained that he had changed “a great deal,” had had a chance “to find out ‘who’ was ‘who’—to see some of the way things work”:

  In those years, [late fifties] I came very close to many of the Negro People—not “generally” only—but felt their warmth & generosity. I’m talking of the simple folk on the [West] Coast—etc.—not the “big shots.”

  He also recalled with affection “great sections of the American Jewish community who not only were close in many phases of the Peace struggle, etc. but also … were very warm & human.” Still, at this point he felt “completely desolate.” Summarizing his current mood, he explained to Clara why, despite his homesickness, he had no immediate plans to come home: