Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  51. Typed ms. of speech delivered at the commencement of the Manual Training School on June 10, 1943, RA.

  An encyclopedic listing of Robeson’s nonstop round of appearances during this period would be tediously repetitive, and I’ve decided instead to cite only a few of the more significant: At a “Defend America Rally” in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1941, called by the NNC in conjunction with “100 leading Negro citizens,” he encouraged the full mobilization of the black community (People’s World, Dec. 22, 26, 1941). In Dec. 1941 he gave a brief concert for the inmates at San Quentin Prison (The Other Side of the Inside!, December 25, 1941; Daily Worker, Dec. 27, 1941). His appearances at warbond rallies included one in Boston (Boston Post, Aug. 12, 1942) as well as the first interracial bond rally in Detroit, in which he was joined by Supreme Court Justice Murphy, Marian Anderson, Joe Louis, Olivia De Havilland, and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson (Detroit Evening News, June 1, 1942). His work for the troops included a radio broadcast, “Salute to the Champions,” for which Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sent him a letter of thanks (Oct. 1, 1941, RA). The following year Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, sent him a gold-embossed citation (dated May 17, 1942, RA) “In recognition of distinguished and patriotic service to our Country”—namely, a recital at West Point (Alvin D. Wilder, Jr., to PR, Jan. 12, 1942, RA), and a “Salute to Negro Troops,” a pageant celebrating black war heroes held at the Cosmopolitan Opera (New York Amsterdam Star News, Jan. 17, 1942). On March 22, 1942, PR was the guest of honor at a dinner “in tribute to Anti-fascist fighters” held at the Hotel Biltmore, chaired by Dorothy Parker and attended by a thousand people, including a large turnout of celebrities (Dorothy Parker to ER, March 17, 1942; New York Amsterdam Star News, March 28, 1942). Another dinner, however, was attacked as “Communist-inspired.” Also held at the Biltmore, it was a dinner-forum in behalf of exiled writers interned in French concentration camps, with Lillian Hellman and Ernest Hemingway as cochairs. Seven hundred people attended, but Governor Herbert H. Lehman and others withdrew after the World-Telegram attacked the event as “Communist-inspired.” At the dinner, Hellman protested the accusation. PM quoted her as saying (Oct. 10, 1941), “I am damn sick and tired of these attacks; I am sick of their ignorance, their irresponsibility, and their malice and their cowardice.” In her invitation to PR to attend, Hellman wrote, “It will make me feel much better to have you there, and it will make everybody else feel better, too” (Hellman to PR, Sept. 29, 1941, RA). Hellman would have felt sicker still had she seen the FBI report characterizing the Biltmore dinner as in reality designed to raise funds “for the transportation of Communists to Mexico and other Latin-American countries,” branding participants Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Webster as “of course close to the Communist Party” and describing Benny Goodman as having “long been an ardent Communist sympathizer” (report from San Antonio, Texas, dated March 16, 1942; the file number, FBI Main, is blurred but appears to be 100-12304-2).

  52. Chicago Defender, Feb. 21, 1942; People’s World, March 5, 1942; Kansas City Times, Feb. 18, 1942 (“stronger feeling”). A month before the Kansas City episode, while traveling by train across New York State, Robeson found himself seated alone at a table in the crowded dining car because no whites were willing to sit next to a black man. The incident—hardly the first such that Robeson had experienced—may have helped to fuel his anger in Kansas City (Judith Green, The Columbia Law Alumni Observer, April-May 1982; David W. Meltzer to Judith Green, July 16, 1982, courtesy of Green).

  53. Albuquerque Journal, Feb. 18, 1942; Bluford to PR, Feb. 21, 1942, RA; Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 28, 1942. Fred Schang, PR’s agent at the Metropolitan Musical Bureau, which booked the tour, applauded Robeson’s position and promised to redouble vigilance in the future when booking his concerts (Schang to PR, Feb. 18, 1942, RA). The following year PR canceled an appearance in Wilmington when he learned of discriminatory policies there against blacks; he had been reluctant to fill the engagement from the first after receiving a letter from the president of Wilmington Concerts Association that sought to “allay” his fears about segregation by assuring him, “There is not segregation because there are no negro members of our Association.… We have not discriminated against negroes becoming members of our Association since none applied for membership” (Harold W. Elley to PR, Dec. 28, 1942, RA). Robeson also, during a Robin Hood Dell concert in Philadelphia, refused to honor a request to sing “De Glory Road,” declaring it “an insult to the colored race” (The Afro-American, Aug. 1, 1942). Jacques Wolfe, the author of the ballad, wrote a letter to Variety (Aug. 12, 1942) protesting that he himself had played “Glory Road” for Robeson back in 1928 and Robeson had not only expressed approval of the song but had also recommended it to Schirmer’s for publication. Wolfe expressed puzzlement as to why a song Robeson found acceptable in 1928 “now suddenly becomes ‘an insult to the entire Negro race.’” But it was no puzzle. Robeson’s view of what was “acceptable” had undergone radical transformation in the intervening fourteen years.

  54. Yergan to PR, Feb. 18, 1942, RA; Yergan to PR, Feb. 10, 18, 1942, RA, are examples of Yergan’s itemizing and suggesting a calendar of political events for PR to attend. In his new capacity as Robeson’s political aide, Yergan tried to use the Kansas City incident as an opening to President Roosevelt. He telegraphed Roosevelt’s secretary, Stephen T. Early, requesting “an immediate appointment to confer on the larger aspects of ‘Negroes and the War,’” including its international ramifications. Yergan subsequently sent a proposed agenda (as the President’s office requested), using the occasion to plead as well for the release of Earl Browder, still confined in the Atlanta penitentiary. But the only response was a last-minute invitation to Robeson and Earl Robinson to sing Robinson’s new Roosevelt Cantata at the White House, which Robeson’s schedule prevented him from accepting. Yergan to PR, Feb. 18, 1942; PR to Watson, April 2, 1942; PR to FDR, April 2, 1942, RA; Earl Robinson to ER, April 5, 1942, RA.

  55. The original members of the Council of twelve people included seven black Americans, among them Hubert T. Delany, Channing Tobias, Ralph Bunche, and Mordecai Johnson, but the latter two soon resigned because (according to the FBI) “the organization was ‘too left.’” The FBI also reported that black CP leader James Ford had been active in helping to form the Council and that the “Communist leaders” became “increasingly active in controlling the organization” (FBI Report of SA, Oct. 20, 1950, 100-19377-545). At the time when E. Franklin Frazier was invited to join the Council late in 1941, it had only fourteen members, including officers; along with Frazier, eleven others were issued invitations in 1941, of whom five accepted (including Earl Dickerson and Dr. R. T. Bokwe of the Union of South Africa). By 1945 membership had grown to twentyseven, and in 1946 was augmented to seventy-two, 20 percent white, mostly politically radical Jewish intellectuals (Yergan to Frazier, Oct. 3, 1941, Jan. 29, 1946, MSRC: Frazier). Additional details on the early years of CAA, its membership, financing, and goals, is in Hollis R. Lynch, Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs 1937–1955 (Cornell University Press, 1978), especially pp. 17–28. For the background discussion of Pan-Africanism (along with the definition quoted), I have relied centrally on Mark Solomon’s fine “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in T. G. Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 205–11, and on Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Archon Books, 1978), especially ch. 10. My interview with Doxey Wilkerson on May 7, 1984 (PR, Jr., participating) was also helpful. Hunton’s quote is from an appendix he wrote to PR’s Stand, pp. 117–19 (“A Note on the Council on African Affairs”).

  56. FBI 100-28627-70, p. 22.

  57. The previous year, Walter White had tried to get Robeson to give a concert at the First Congregational Church (White’s family church) in Atlanta. Because “Paul has told me at various times about his unwillingness to go South,” White enlisted Essie in the project, but she wrote
back, “No, no south so far” (Eugene Martin to White, April 7, May 1941; White to Martin, May 6, 1941; White to ER, April 16, 1941; ER to White [appended to a letter from ER to Martin], April 29, 1941—all in LC: NAACP). Later that year, Robeson did venture to the all-black North Carolina College for Negroes where he sang “Ballad for Americans” and had “a grand time” (PR to ER, Oct. 7, 1941, RA).

  58. Interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 5, 1985; interview with Junius Scales, March 10, 1986. The quote is from the ms. of Scales’s autobiography, which he kindly showed me (since published as Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson, Cause at Heart (University of Georgia Press, 1987], pp. 164, 166).

  59. Klehr, Heyday, pp. 276–78 (SCHW); National Negro Congress News, April 24, 1942; “The Reminiscences of Harry L. Mitchell,” interview by Donald F. Shaughnessy, 1956–57, Oral History Project, Columbia University; Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” New York World-Telegram, April 22, 1942; Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle (University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 154–55, also has a brief account of PR’s appearance at SCHW. H. L. Mitchell sent me the list of a dinner committee “from the late 1930s” for the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, which includes among its sponsors both Robeson and Ronald Reagan (Mitchell to me, July 13, 1985). The year following SCHW, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote Robeson, “It gives me a thrill to know you and to know that you are a part of us” (Bethune to PR, Nov. 10, 1943, RA). In 1944 Robeson lunched with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, along with Judge Delany, Mrs. Pratt, and the Laskers, to discuss the Wiltwyck School for Boys, which Mrs. Roosevelt had founded (Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, was among its graduates). Subsequent to the luncheon, Robeson spent a day at Wiltwyck and offered to give a benefit concert for the school (Eleanor Roosevelt to PR, June 2, Sept. 23, 1944; PR to Roosevelt, June 30, 1944, RA).

  60. Pittsburgh Courier interview, Sept. 26, 1942 (rural poor); The Worker, Sept. 24, 1942; Deseret News, Sept. 23, 1942.

  61. Dan Burley’s review in the New York Amsterdam Star News, Oct. 3, 1942, hailed the film as “the most powerful indictment of the absentee landlord and sharecropping system in the South I have ever seen on the screen”—though it was that same paper, two months earlier (Aug. 15, 1942), that had headlined the negative review; PM, Sept. 25, 1942; Amsterdam Star News, Aug. 29, 1942 (Anderson meeting); Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 5, 12, 1942 (Muse). “Many persons,” Walter White later wrote, “wondered why he had not been perceptive enough to understand what he was doing while the picture was being filmed” (Walter White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” Ebony, Feb. 1951).

  62. Associated Negro Press, Oct. 1, 1942; PM, Sept. 22, 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 26, 1942; People’s World, Sept. 22, 1942. The film’s opening grosses were the highest recorded that week—topping Mrs. Miniver (Variety, Aug. 12, 1942). To some extent PR’s script suggestions were heeded (Boris Morros to Larry Brown, Nov. 22, 1941, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Boris Morros, producer of Tales of Manhattan, later became a counterspy for the FBI (My Ten Years as a Counterspy [Dell, 1959]). PR’s stage prospects could not have appeared any more appealing than filmic ones for a while: Vincent Burns (author of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) professed excitement about a play he was writing for PR that “begins in a chain gang and ends in heaven, with a chorus singing on the balcony of heaven” (Burns to ER, Jan. 25, 1943, RA.

  63. Phone interview with Sidney Poitier, Oct. 20, 1986; Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity,” p. 484. The New York Daily News (Oct. 13, 1942) outright called Robeson “a Communist or anyway a fellow traveller.” In 1945 Robeson was again tempted to make a film, this time on the life of Félix Eboué (the Guyanese-born Governor General of French Equatorial Africa during W.W. II), but the project never took off (ER to Larry Brown, Aug. 14, 1945, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

  In assessing PR’s abilities as an actor, Poitier characterized him as “a very strong presence and a capable actor. I would go so far as to say he was a good actor.” Agreeing that Robeson was not in a class with those few extraordinary performers who can both transcend the particular acting style of their own day and subordinate their own personality to the demands of a role, Poitier added, “But Robeson’s character was bigger than any he would have to create” (interview, Oct. 20, 1986). Donald Bogle has offered a much less generous estimate of PR’s film career in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks (Viking, 1973). He credits PR with conveying a view of black males far removed from the usual servile caricature, but further (and inexplicably) describes PR’s image as lacking “gentleness, an overriding interest and sympathy in all of mankind. No matter how much producers tried to make Robeson a symbol of black humanity, he always came across as a man more interested in himself than anyone else” (p. 70). I find this characterization far off the mark.

  64. A thorough account of Frontier Films and the making of Native Land is in Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942 (UMI Research Press, 1982). See also William Alexander, Film on the Left (Princeton University Press, 1981), ch. 6. At the time of its release, a number of reviewers hailed the film as pioneering and powerful (e.g., Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, May 13, 1942, and Joy Davidman in New Masses, May 19, 1942); the Daily News (May 13, 1942) was among those expressing doubt over timing. Sterner interview with Leo Hurwitz for the information about Robeson’s fee. In the interview Hurwitz also spoke of what an “absolute joy” it was to work with Robeson—he was free of vanity, a hard worker, and a man of “tremendous gentleness.” Later on Hurwitz and PR planned to make a film based on Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, but the onset of the Cold War made it impossible to raise money (interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986). The FBI report (Main 100-12304-7) also labeled Frontier Films “a Communist instrumentality.”

  65. Stretch Johnson, whose sister married “Stepin Fetchit” (Lincoln Perry) in 1937, has urged the point that even Perry was not widely resented for playing stereotypical roles. “The black community understood that that was the only way to succeed, and most black performers had to make that adaptation in order to function on the American stage or in American movies.… Robeson was regarded, despite the pro-British imperialist character of Sanders of the River, as a successful black artist who had much more dignity from the point of view of the roles that he played, even in imperialist films, than Stepin Fetchit. And even Stepin Fetchit was not regarded as a bad guy” (interview, March 5, 1985).

  CHAPTER 13 THE BROADWAY Othello (1942–1943)

  1. MW and PR discuss Othello on a tape, n.d., in RA; Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,” Our Time, June 1944. Even before Webster’s proposal, Lillian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic, had sounded Robeson out about the possibility of playing Othello to Laurence Olivier’s Iago—but there is no known follow-up to the suggestion (Baylis to PR, Nov. 13, 1936, RA).

  2. Margaret Webster, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage (Knopf, 1972), pp. 107–8.

  3. Born in 1905, Margaret Webster was an actress as her first career. In the 1920s she played the gentlewoman in John Barrymore’s Hamlet, and performed at the Old Vic in London in the early thirties under Harcourt Williams’s direction. His influence on her, and that of Harley Granville-Barker, is detailed in Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (McGraw-Hill, 1942; rev. ed., World, 1955), and Ely Silverman, “Margaret Webster’s Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States (1937–1953),” New York University, Ph.D. thesis, 1969. Webster’s successes as a director had included Richard II (1937), Hamlet (1938), and Macbeth (1941), all with Maurice Evans, and a 1940 production of Twelfth Night with Helen Hayes as Viola. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984. See also Susan Spector, “Uta Hagen, the Early Years: 1919–1952,” Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1982.

  4. Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; Webster, Daughter, pp. 109–11; the fantasy about Ben Davis was told to me by PR, Jr.

  5. Interviews with Hagen, June
22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

  6. Boston Post, Aug. 11, 16, 1942; Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 11, 28, 1942; Boston Herald, Boston Daily Globe, Boston Evening American, Boston Traveler—all Aug. 11, 1942; Harvard Crimson, Aug. 12, 14, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942; The New York Times, June 12, Aug. 16, 1942; Flora Robson to Webster and Whitty, Aug. 15, 1942, LC: Margaret Webster. Flora Robson confirmed her view in our interview of Sept. 1982 (PR, Jr., participating).

  7. Boston American, Post, Globe, Herald—all Aug. 11, 1941; The New York Times, Aug. 16, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942. The Times review praising PR’s performance was signed “E.N.”—almost certainly Elliot Norton of the Boston Post. Time magazine’s review (Aug. 24, 1942) voiced misgivings over Robeson’s “overacting”—he sometimes “throbbed awkwardly”—but on balance thought he gave a performance “that even at its worst was vivid and that at its best was shattering.”

  8. PM, Aug. 13, 1942; Variety, Aug. 12, 1942; see also Boston Post, Traveler, Globe—all Aug. 11, 1942.

  9. Webster, “PR and Othello”; Webster, Daughter, p. 113; Langner, Magic Curtain; Sterner interview: Marshall.

  The program for the McCarter engagement at Princeton of Aug. 17–22, 1942, is in ARC: Fredi Washington Papers. For that production, the black press was represented by the Pittsburgh Courier. Its correspondent reported (Sept. 5, 1942), “We sat in McCarter’s theater … and watched this whole scene bewildered … a Negro artist who courts, kisses, marries and kills a white woman.… A short time ago the whites would have advanced a thousand objections.… But today the audience and press applauded.… We were buoyant when we left the theater … the day of our redemption had not yet dawned, [but] the darkest part of the night has passed!”

  A black man recalled years later (“Discussion at Old People’s Meeting in Princeton,” Sterner) that his mother, who “worked in several of the homes in the university,” would overhear at parties after the tryout performances “much discussion about the fact that in the McCarter Theater Paul Robeson kissed a white woman.… It was a play but they could not accept that and they showed their Southern upbringing and their Southern attitudes.…” Also on the Princeton production: Jean Muir to PR, Dec. 31, 1942, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 18, 1942, Yale: Van Vechten.