Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  12. DAB, suppl. I, vol. II (Scribners, 1944), pp. 457–58. Additional information on Kahn’s generosity to black artists is in Lewis, Harlem in Vogue.

  13. PR to Kahn, March [Feb.?] 13, 1923; Kahn to PR, March 12, 1923, William Seymour Theatre Coll., Kahn Papers, Princeton University (hereafter PU: Kahn).

  14. This, incidentally, throws further doubt on the theory that O’Neill himself had offered to read Robeson for Emperor Jones back in 1920 (see note 23, p. 580). Nothing in Robeson’s letters to Kahn or in Duncan’s letter to O’Neill refers to any prior contact—which surely would have been mentioned if it had in fact occurred. Duncan to O’Neill, Feb. 23, 1923, RA; Duncan to PR, May 10, 1924, RA (in which he thanks Robeson for having credited him in a recent letter—not, so far as I know, extant). On still another occasion, Duncan notified Robeson that a new play was about to be produced with “a very unusual Negro part in it” and suggested he drop by to see him about it (Duncan to PR, Sept. 14, 1923, RA).

  15. For classmates and professors, see William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man: The Early Years (Random House, 1974), pp. 138–39. Interview with Martin Popper, Jan. 17, 1987 (Stone); Columbia University Oral History interview (by Tom Hogan, 1971) with Charles Ascher, CU. PR’s academic record in law school is in CU, Law Archives. Interview with Edith Tiger, June 17, 1985, for the view that Robeson never took to law; the same view is expressed by Woollcott in While Rome Burns, pp. 127–28.

  16. Essie’s remark is in PR, Negro, p. 70; his brother Ben’s comments are from his ms. “My Brother Paul” (1934), RA; Tammany Hall is from Seton, Robeson, p. 26. Once, when Essie was teasing Paul about his inactivity, their close friend and physician, Louis Wright, told her that Paul “was the most intelligently lazy man he had ever known.”

  17. This account of Robeson’s law-firm tenure is taken from the following sources: ER, PR, Negro, pp. 70–72; ER, Ms. Auto., RA; interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983; phone interview with S. A. Russell, July 31, 1982. Russell got to know Robeson through the writer Philip Van Doren Stern, also a Rutgers alumnus and the brother-in-law of Freda Diamond, later one of Robeson’s intimates. Russell was recounting to me the version of his law-firm experience that Robeson gave him at a dinner party in the mid-1950s. The information on Stotesbury comes from the files on him at RUA.

  18. ER, PR, Negro, p. 72; PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929. Sounding a “proper-young-man” (rather than a racial) note, which he perhaps calculated to appeal to the British, Robeson is quoted as telling a newspaper reporter two years later, “I have studied law, but law in New York is not a dignified profession as it is in London: it is too mixed up with politics” (Star, Sept. 11, 1925). Still later Robeson said, “I could never be a Supreme Court judge; on the stage there was only the sky to hold me back” (Time, Nov. 1, 1943).

  19. Macgowan to PR, Dec. 19, 21, 1923, RA. An undated note from O’Neill to PR in RA, which from internal evidence seems to have been written in Nov. 1923, suggests—if I’ve correctly dated it—they were in touch shortly before Macgowan contacted him about reading the new play. O’Neill’s letter refers to Hopkins (Arthur Hopkins, the Broadway producer, who presented some of O’Neill’s plays in London) as having been “extremely favorably impressed by your talk with him,” advised “you will like being associated with him I know,” and reported that Hopkins “agreed with me before he left that ‘Jones’ would be best to follow ‘A.C.’ [Anna Christie] if it could be so arranged with Cockran over there” (in the spring of 1923, Hopkins had opened Anna Christie, to a positive reception in London); O’Neill promised to let Robeson know “whatever information I get.” In other words, it seems PR had been contacted no later than Nov. 1923 about doing Jones (in London, apparently) and then in Dec. was asked by Macgowan to have a look at the new Chillun script as well.

  Interview with Bess Rockmore (Eitingon), March 30, 1982.

  20. For background on the Provincetown Players, see Sheaffer, O’Neill, Son and Artist (Little, Brown: 1973), and the still-useful book by two Provincetowners, Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown.

  21. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, pp. 101–2, for details on redoing the theater; Sheaffer, O’Neill, 123, for the Mercury; ER, Ms. Auto., RA, for “profoundly impressed”; ER Diary, Jan. 8, 1924, RA (Spook).

  22. ER Diary, Jan. 21 (record company), Feb. 1, 21, March 3 (Ethiopian), Feb. 10 (YWCA), Jan. 23 (St. Christopher), April 13 (Du Bois), April 10 (Broun), Feb. 10, 19, 26 (NAACP), Jan. 20, 26, 30, Feb. 4, 9, 10 (Greeks), Feb. 18, April 25 (Anderson), Jan. 3 (Hayes), Jan. 4 (Changeling), April 11 (Cyrano)—all 1924, RA. Apparently there were two nibbles from record companies at the same time; ER, in her diary for Jan. 21, mentions an appointment with the Brunswick Co., and in RA there is a letter to PR from J. Mayo Williams of the Chicago Music Publishing Co. (Feb. 7, 1924, RA). Williams mentioned that he got PR’s address from Fritz Pollard, his old football buddy. Nothing seems to have come of this contact immediately, though there was additional correspondence the following year (Williams to ER, March 14, 1925, RA). Robeson had heard Du Bois for the first time in 1918 at a banquet for Assistant District Attorney F. Q. Morton at Terrace Garden. “Fine speeches,” he wrote in his notebook (“School and Social Functions,” RA), “A real insight into political life of New York City.”

  23. Johnson, Black Manhattan, p. 192; Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 135; Anderson, This Was Harlem, p. 112; Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United Slates (Duffield and Co., 1930), pp. 130–32; The New York Times, May 7, 1924. Gilpin had opened in the role of the preacher in the revival of Roseanne; PR subsequently replaced him. For more on the Lafayette Theater, see Sister M. Francesca Thompson, O.S.F., “The Lafayette Players, 1917–1932,” in Errol Hill, ed., The Theater of Black Americans (Prentice-Hall 1980), vol. II, pp. 13–32. For more on Theophilus Lewis, see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “Theophilus Lewis and the Theater of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, essays edited with a memoir by Arna Bontemps (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1972); another version of the essay is in Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair.

  24. Philadelphia Record, April 1, 1924.

  25. There is reason to believe that Helen MacKellar was originally offered the part of Ella but withdrew when she learned she would be playing opposite Robeson (Evening Star [Washington, D.C.], Feb. 22, 1924; Syracuse Herald, July 14, 1929; PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun [London], Jan. 13, 1929).

  26. Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 193–94; Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 547–57; Sheaffer, op. cit., pp. 134–40; Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, pp. 107–13; the newspaper clippings are in RA.

  27. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 22, 1924; New York World, May 18, 1924.

  28. Extended portions of O’Neill’s statement are printed in Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, and Sheaffer; a shorter version is in Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown.

  29. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 141.

  30. Deutsch and Hanau, The Provincetown, p. 108 (press-clipping bill); Sheaffer, op. cit., p. 140 (Light quote); Gelb and Gelb, O’Neill, p. 552 (bomb).

  31. Sheaffer, O’Neill, pp. 137–38, 140; ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

  32. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

  33. Ibid.

  34. ER Diary, April 28, 1924, RA; ER, PR, Negro, p. 75.

  35. ER, PR Negro, p. 75; undated (early 1930s?) two-page handwritten manuscript in RA, simply titled “Paul, Theatre.”

  36. Millia Davenport to me, June 7, 1982; Malcolm Cowley to me, Nov. 5, 1982.

  37. For more on the precursors of “black theater” and especially on the pivotal role played by Alain Locke and the Krigwa Little Theater Movement, see Abiodum Jeyifous, “Black Critics on Black Theater in America,” The Drama Review, vol. 18 (Sept. 1974), pp. 37–39.

  38. ER Diary, May 4, 5, 6, 1924, RA; Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 140 (cool response). According to Sheaffer’s sources (p. 141), at the opening night party held at set designer Cleon Throckmo
rton’s apartment, O’Neill spent most of the evening playing the tom-tom that had been used in the play. At one point during the party, Robeson, Throckmorton, and Light took their shirts off to compare physiques, a tourney O’Neill joined at his wife’s urging.

  39. ER Diary, May 6, 1924, RA (quarrel); Brawley, Negro in Literature, pp. 130–31; Sheaffer, O’Neill, pp. 32–36 (League).

  40. Telegram and Mail, May 7, 1924 (O’Neill/Gilpin); O’Neill to Mike Gold, July 1923, courtesy of Louis Sheaffer (see note 42).

  41. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 37.

  42. ER Diary, May 6, 1924, RA. O’Neill’s letter to Mike Gold July 1923, and the entries from his “work diary” were kindly sent to me by Louis Sheaffer, whose splendid biography of O’Neill has been indispensable in my reconstruction of Robeson’s opening night (see Sheaffer, O’Neill, especially pp. 32–37). Jimmy Light’s opinion was given in an interview with Sheaffer, who passed its contents on to me. Opportunity, Dec. 1924, pp. 368–70 (PR on Gilpin). O’Neill did use Gilpin in Jones again. Over the next few years, the Provincetowners periodically revived the play, usually with Robeson, but in 1926 with Gilpin again assuming the lead. Apparently he continued to change lines in 1926 as he had in 1920. Essie and Paul went to see his performance twice, and Essie expressed “shock” in her diary at Gilpin’s “sacrilege and blasphemy” in rewriting lines—and at his generally “ordinary” performance (ER Diary, Feb. 24, March 1, 1926, RA). Despite his preference for Gilpin, O’Neill’s admiration for Robeson’s talent was keen. In 1925, on the flyleaf of a presentation copy to the Robesons of the collected edition of his plays, O’Neill wrote: “In gratitude to Paul Robeson in whose interpretation of ‘Brutus Jones’ I have found the most complete satisfaction an author can get—that of seeing his creation borne into flesh and blood! And in whose creation of ‘Jim Harris’ in my ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings’ I found not only complete fidelity to my intent under trying circumstances but, beyond that, true understanding and racial integrity. Again with gratitude and friendship” (the presentation copy is in RA; Essie referred to the inscribed volume as “one of the Robesons’ most valued possessions” [ER, Ms. Auto., RA]). For additional commentary on Jones as a play, and the contrasting strengths Robeson and Gilpin brought to it, see John Henry Raleigh, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Southern Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 108–10; Arnold Goldman, “The Culture of the Provincetown Players,” American Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (1978), pp. 291–310; and Dr. Nick Aaron Ford’s denunciation of the play (The Afro-American, April 23, 1955) as merely another stereotype: Brutus Jones, “the superstitious dupe, egotistical braggart, razor-toting crapshooter.”

  43. The New York Times, New York World, New York Herald Tribune—all May 7, 1924.

  44. New York Evening Graphic, Dec. 16, 1924; New York Evening Post, May 7, 1924; New York Telegram and Evening Mail, May 7, 1924; Dallas Herald, June 1924 (“magnificent”); Cleveland News, May 18, 1924 (“all your life”).

  45. ER Diary, May 11, 12, 1924, RA.

  46. Sheaffer, O’Neill, p. 142.

  47. Interview with PR, Star (London), Dec. 28, 1929 (“shots”); O’Neill, “Work Diary,” May 15, 1924 (courtesy of Sheaffer); ER ms., “Paul, Theater,” undated (probably early 1930s), RA; ER Diary, May 15, 1924, RA. Clara Alexander Weiss, of the Provincetown Players’ office staff, told Louis Sheaffer that everyone was so relieved when Chillun went off without violence that the party afterward was “particularly jubilant,” and Robeson sang spirituals and other songs “for hours” (interview courtesy of Sheaffer).

  48. New York World, May 16, 1924 (Broun); New York Sun, May 16, 1924 (Woollcott); The Nation, June 4, 1924 (Lewisohn); New York Daily News, May 17, 1924 (Mantle); New York World, June 21, 1924 (Stallings). The casting of two of the secondary roles in Chillun was noteworthy. Dora Cole (no longer Dora Cole Norman), who had been responsible for urging Robeson into the theater in her production of Simon (see p. 43), played the role of Hattie, sister to Jim Harris (the Robeson role), and the fine black actor Frank Wilson, who had earlier appeared in O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid and would later star, with great success, in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom and in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, played the role of Joe. Both Cole and Wilson received excellent notices in Chillun.

  49. Essie, interestingly, proudly reprinted Nathan’s review in PR, Negro (pp. 76–77) without taking any issue with its sentiments.

  50. Krutch, The Nation, Oct. 26, 1927.

  51. The “peeps” of white dissent included Arthur Pollock, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who found Robeson “a sad disappointment”—an earnest, hardworking amateur and nothing more; Burns Mantle, who in a second column on the play, noted “the awkwardness of the amateur” in Robeson’s performance; and Percy Hammond in the Times, who was caustic about the play, and referred to Robeson as “a dignified and handsome negro of the earnest type.”

  The Afro-American, May 23, 1924; Chicago Defender, May 24, 1924; the clipping of Pickens’s newspaper column, undated, is in RA. Sheaffer (O’Neill, p. 138) cites two additional negative comments from black leaders: Rev. A. Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (and father of the Congressman) called the play “harmful because it intimates that we are desirous of marrying white women,” and Rev. J. W. Brown of A.M.E. Zion Church felt the play would do his people “only harm.” But both these comments were made to—and perhaps distorted by—Hearst’s American (March 15, 1924), which had been doing its best for months to stir up trouble. Johnson, Black Manhattan, pp. 195–96, also deplored the play as “shifting the question from that of a colored man living with a white wife to that of a man living with a crazy woman,” claiming it had “failed to please coloured people.” In regard to Emperor Jones, Langston Hughes wrote an account (quoted in Jeyifous, “Black Critics,” p. 42) of a somewhat later production of that play in Harlem that the audience “hounded with laughter”; it “wanted none of The Emperor Jones”—“that was the end of The Emperor Jones on 135th Street.”

  52. The playbill, with Du Bois’s comments, is in RA.

  53. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

  54. Opportunity, Dec. 1924, pp. 368–70. The magazine had a peak circulation of ten thousand, about 40 percent of it white. In an interview the following year, when he was playing Jones in London, Robeson told a newspaper interviewer: “O’Neill has got what no other playwright has—that is, the true, authentic negro psychology. He has read the negro soul, and has felt the negro’s racial tragedy” (Reynold’s Illustrated News, Sept. 20, 1925).

  55. Duncan to PR, May 10, 1924, RA. By Aug., Mayor Hylan had lifted his ban against children’s playing in Chillun. In mid-Sept., Dorothy Peterson replaced Mary Blair, and Essie thought she “did very well” (Diary, Sept. 15, 1924). Peterson (whose father, Jerome Bowers Peterson, had founded the black paper, New York Age) remained a long-time friend of the Robesons. During the summer, Robeson gave two open-air performances of Jones in the Mariarden Theater, Peterboro, N.H., where it was well received (newspaper clippings, RA).

  56. ER Diary, Aug. 15, 1924, RA. The salary total is in a receipt to PR in RA, signed “M. Eleanor Fitzgerald”—the manager of the Playhouse. Some sketchy evidence suggests that Robeson was offered the position of assistant district attorney of New York some time before 1925, but turned the offer down (program notes for his Dec. 17, 1924, Rutgers concert, RUA).

  CHAPTER 5 THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE SPIRITUALS (1924–1925)

  1. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Salemmé had been born in 1891, in Gaeta, Italy. He came to the U.S. at the age of eleven and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with George L. Noyes (a pupil of Monet’s) and later with William Paxton, the neoclassicist.

  2. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983. Essie later worked out the formal agreement with Betty Salemmé, whereby Tony got two-thirds and Paul one-third of the sale price. Betty had suggested a fifty-fifty split, but Essie decided that was too generous: “Tony had had a great deal of experience and training, and should therefor
e get more than Paul, who had the beautiful body and gave his time” (ER Diary, May 14, 1925, RA).

  3. Newspaper editorialists, North and South, had a field day chastising Philadelphia. If such action had been taken by a Southern city, a North Carolinian wrote, “It would have been condemned as just another manifestation of Southern nigger hate,” and the New York World suggested that “Perhaps the average Pennsylvanian, secretly a little ashamed of the civic and political record of his State, becomes a bit hysterical at the thought that some one may conceive the notion of a statue of Pennsylvania in the nude. That would be appalling. There are some people and some States that need all the concealment possible.” The Brooklyn Museum put the statue on display for a few months, cataloguing it as Negro Spiritual. The French showed it in the Salon des Tuileries, and the jury for the Art Institute of Chicago initially awarded the statue a prize but then, not wishing to over-emphasize the representation of a “colored man,” demoted it to honorable mention. The Union League Club of New York invited Salemmé to exhibit the statue but then decided not to show it, out of deference to “the ladies.” Salemmé dutifully applied a plaster figleaf as a poultice but that, too, failed to please and the statue was removed. When Dr. George F. Kunz, chairman of the club’s art committee, was asked if the statue had been ruled out on racial grounds, he replied indignantly that the question was absurd: “Do you know of any other club that employs all Negro waiters and servants?” he asked (Time, Dec. l, 1930; Express, Jan. 4, 11, 1980; Sunday Bulletin, Feb. 8, 1976). The statue thereafter disappeared, never to be recovered. Philadelphia’s racial problem was not solved. Interview with Antonio Salemmé, March 31, 1983; interview with Salemmé, Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 20, 1926 (highest achievement); ER to Otto Kahn, Aug. 21, 1925, PU: Kahn; ER Diary, Aug. 4, 1925, RA (Ruth Hale); New York Herald Tribune, May 23, 25, 1930; Raleigh, North Carolina, News Observer, May 24, 1930; New York Evening World, May 23, 1930. According to Salemmé (unpublished ms.), Leonor Loree, president of the D & H Railroad, at one point planned to buy the statue with Otto Kahn and donate it to Rutgers. Loree agreed to Salemmé’s price of $18,000 for the sculpture in bronze, but the sale fell through when the Rutgers Board of Trustees decided that Robeson was too young to be honored with a statue. Salemmé later (1927) made a head of Robeson, which still exists (he shipped the head, in bronze, to Robeson in London for exhibition and sales—asking $700–1,250 per head (Antonio Salemmé to ER, March 24, 1930, RA). When I interviewed Salemmé in 1983, he was—at age ninety-three—back to work on a new version of the life-size statue.