Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  16. The full transcript of the AP dispatch is in RA. In his testimony on the Mundt-Nixon Bill on May 31, 1948, Robeson had openly expressed sentiments close to those falsely ascribed to him in Paris a year later—but with the important difference that he claimed to be speaking only for himself: “Question: Would you fight for America if we were at war with Russia? Answer: That would depend on the conditions of war with Russia, how the war came up and who is in power at the time, etc.… That’s just too hypothetical.… I would like to say that I would be on the American side to have peace. I would struggle for peace at all points.… If the American government would be a Fascist government, then I would not support it.… I am an anti-Fascist, and I would fight Fascism whether it happens to be the German, the French or American species.… I would do it under the banner of being an American and protecting the Democratic rights of the American people.”

  17. In an interview with me (Sept. 7, 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]), Ivor Montagu, who heard Robeson’s speech, said he recalled nothing untoward or unexpected in it—nothing like the inflammatory words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. Randolph is quoted in Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (Oxford University Press, 1986).

  18. INS memos, April 25–May 6, 1949, FBI 56275-730.

  19. Marilyn Smith (State Department) to Walter White, April 21, 1949, LC: NAACP, enclosing a copy of the story she wrote for release to the news media following their phone conversation of that morning, along with a copy of the statement Mary McLeod Bethune had given to her over the phone (“Mr. Robeson’s remarks … chilled my blood. I just cannot understand it”). White’s comments were widely dispersed by the State Department—Voice of America, European Regional File, Middle East File, Wireless Bulletin, Mission Services, Far East File—and in various forms appeared in the press (e.g., New York Herald Tribune, May 1, 1949). For confirmation that the State Department had initiated White’s statement, see “Secretary to Mr. White” (not otherwise identified) to Mark Stanley Matthews, May 20, 1949, LC: NAACP: “Immediately upon receiving word of Mr. Robeson’s statement, the State Department called on Mr. White for a statement.” Earl Brown, “Once Over Lightly,” New York Amsterdam News, April 29, 30, 1949.

  20. Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Columbia, South Carolina, Record, April 26, 1949; The New York Times, April 24, 25, 26, Nov. 7 (Randolph), 1949; New York Amsterdam News, April 29, 30, 1949; Detroit Tribune, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, April 30, 1949; Chicago Defender, April 30, 1949 (editorial headlined “Nuts to Mr. Robeson,” attacking him for having gotten “so far away from the race” that he had lost his “moorings”); New York Age, April 30, May 7, 1949; Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 1949 (summary); Du Bois, Negro Digest, March 1950 (Morgan). Bethune also devoted a full column (Chicago Defender, April 30, 1949) to attacking Robeson’s “presumption” and to declaring that she “thoroughly disagreed with such an expression of disloyalty.…” Predictably, the conservative black columnist George S. Schuyler roasted Robeson for “brushing aside … the well-known brutalities, injustices and calculated fiendishness of Red concentration camps which have been filled largely with minority groups of the Soviet Union and the satellite countries” (Pittsburgh Courier, May 7, 1949). Less predictably, Fritz Pollard, Robeson’s old football buddy, offered a more-in-sorrow comment: “Paul’s at it again, playing Emperor Jones.… Sometimes he thinks he’s the Negro island liberator, Henri Christophe. Despite his spectacular popoffs, he’s no Commie, in his heart” (New York Age, April 30, 1949). There are in LC: NAACP a half-dozen letters congratulating Walter White on his remarks, in language more intemperate than any White himself had used (e.g., Robeson “has not ever bothered to take the pulse of a race he presumes to represent”: Capt. Leonard L. Bruce, April 22, 1949).

  23. Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983. William Pickens III corroborates Rustin’s view that (in Pickens’s words) “Down deep the black leadership had a warm spot for Paul Robeson”—they had no intention of falling behind him as “the leader,” but were nonetheless pleased that “somebody was raising the issues of fundamental racism in American life” (interview with Pickens, Oct. 3, 1983).

  24. Mark Solomon, “Black Critics of the Cold War”; Modjeska (Mrs. Andrew W.) Simkins (executive committeewoman of the Republican Party of South Carolina and prominent in the S.C. NAACP; she was to take part in the Welcome Home rally for PR on June 19, 1949, at Rockland Palace) to the Columbia Record, May 2, 1949; Durham, N.C., Times, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, June 25, 1949.

  25. Max Yergan’s letter is in the New York Herald Tribune, April 23, 1949.

  26. Abner Berry, New York Age, May 21, 1949. “As We See It,” Daily Worker, May 2, 1949; Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Daily Worker, May 8, 1949; Du Bois’s letter is in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 28, 1949, and the New York Amsterdam News, May 21, 1949.

  27. The typescript of ER’s speech is in RA.

  28. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (PR’s anger); Patterson to PR, May 17, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC; Charles P. Howard to ER, May 10, 1949, RA; Vito Marcantonio to ER, April 29, 1949, NYPL: Marcantonio; Congressional Record, April 28, 1949.

  29. The Crisis, May 1949, p. 137. The black California Eagle editorially protested the Crisis article (June 2, 1949). In his autobiography, Standing Fast, Wilkins backhandedly admits to having written the editorial (pp. 205–6). Yet, when Robeson died, in 1976, Wilkins wrote, “Anything to spread black culture and manhood was his lifelong doctrine.… Any Negro who protested the treatment of the black citizens was called a communist or worse.” Unless Wilkins was merely paying perfunctory homage to the recently dead, this statement amounts to a complete retraction of his 1949 Crisis editorial.

  30. Ben Davis, Jr., to ER, May 25, 1949, RA; Davis to White, May 28, 1949, LC: NAACP. In an article Davis wrote before the Crisis editorial appeared, he had already set Walter White apart from the “political street-walker Max Yergan,” the “foxy old reformist Channing Tobias,” and “Rep. Adam Powell with his double-talk,” as “more nearly reflect[ing] the feelings of the Negro people” (Daily Worker, May 8, 1949).

  31. Howard to Wilkins, May 26, 1949, CHS: Barnett. Howard not only sent Barnett (the head of the Associated Negro Press) a copy but also sent one to Alphaeus Hunton and another to Dr. Louis Wright (Howard to Wright, May 27, 1949, LC: NAACP); and he sent a form letter to key members of the Progressive Party soliciting letters of protest to Wilkins (Howard to Barnett, May 27, 1949, CHS: Barnett; Howard to “Dear Friend,” May 27, 1949; Howard to Hunton, May 26, 1949; Ben Davis, Jr., to Hunton, May 28, 1949, RA). C. B. (“Beanie”) Baldwin, executive secretary of the Progressive Party, was among those who wrote in: “I regard [Robeson] as one of the world’s great human beings”; he “happens to believe that the struggle for democratic rights for the Negro people cannot be separated from the struggle for peace” (Baldwin to Wilkins, June 2, 1949, RA). Larkin Marshall, cochairman of the Progressive Party in Georgia, was another who responded (Marshall to Hunton, May 28, 1949, enclosing a copy of a pro-Robeson editorial Marshall wrote for the Macon World, RA).

  32. Memo from White to Wilkins, June 3, 1949; memo from Wilkins to White, June 6, 1949, LC: NAACP.

  33. Wilkins, Standing Fast, pp. 205–6; AP dispatch, July 13, 1949 (NAACP convention), RA.(Mary Church Terrell to Hunton, June 6, 1949, RA).

  34. The New York Times, April 25, 1949; Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1949 (Stockholm); PR to Diamond, May 1, 1949, RA. FBI Main 100-12304-126 reports that during the Stockholm concert the trouble started when Robeson “sang a Russian anthem. The first verse, sung in Russian, was greeted quietly; however, when he sang the second verse in English, which most of the audience understood, a demonstration started, which for a time drowned out the singer. Anti-Communists answered with loud cheers and frantic applause. Following the an them, Robeson stepped to the microphone and
told the audience he could no longer draw the line between his art and his political convictions. He said he wanted universal peace, but above all peace with the Soviet Union.” FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2 (“beyond control”) also reports PR as saying, “I can assure you they [blacks] will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the Peoples Democracies.” An indication of how PR addressed criticism of his pro-Soviet stance before a predominantly black audience is in a speech he gave at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem on Aug. 30, 1949: “What did Soviet Russia ever do for me? (Laughter) I said, Just a minute now. One thing they did for you—in destroying fascism; you remember, you better remember this Hitler again. He destroyed six million Jewish people—burned six million Jewish people up. He was just hoping to get hold of ten or fifteen million Negroes to burn up. Well, the reason he couldn’t get hold of them happened to be because ten to twenty million Russians took him” (tape recording of speech, RA).

  35. National Guardian, May 2, 1949; Chicago Defender, May 21, 1949; Norfolk Journal and Guide, May 2, 1949; press release from the CAA, May 11, 1949, RA (second denial). The full text of the Copenhagen interview with Robeson is in RA.

  36. The Times (London), April 23, 1949 (Copenhagen); Ulf Christensen, “Paul Robeson’s Visit to Oslo,” June 6, 1949, RA. Apparently somewhat apprehensive, Rockmore wrote Larry Brown, “Thanks for your two notes from Oslo immediately before and after the concert. I breathed a sigh of relief with you” (Rockmore to Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

  37. John Payne to Larry Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown; PR, Jr., interview with Bruno Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr.

  38. National Guardian, June 13, 1949 (Prague reception); Pittsburgh Courier, June 4, 1949; Baltimore Afro-American, June 7, 1949; Josef Škvorecký, “Red Music,” in The Bass Saxophone (Knopf, 1977), p. 19. Škvorecký was speaking generally; he didn’t mean, he later explained, that PR was in Prague at the exact time of Horáková’s execution (Škvoreckyý to Barbara Bristol, Sept. 9, 1987, courtesy of Bristol). In fact, Horáková was executed on June 27, 1950. The New York Times (Dec. 7, 1949) and Time (Dec. 19, 1949) reported that in Prague, Harry James’s music was much preferred to Robeson’s.

  39. PR, Jr., interviews with Raikin (Sept. 8, 1982) and Blackman (Sept. 9, 1982), transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.; Seton, Robeson, pp. 201–02.

  40. Richard Yaffe, in The Jewish Week-American Examiner, Feb. 1–7, 1976, recalls Robeson singing “Zog Nit Kaynmal,” the song of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, during his 1949 Warsaw concert, but Yaffe’s article contains a number of inaccuracies and it is probable, nearly thirty years after the event, that he confused Robeson’s Warsaw performance with the concert that followed in Moscow. PR, Jr., interview with Peter Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In an article for the Polish newspaper Trybuna Ludu, June 2, 1949, Robeson expressed his be lief that “the strength of the progressive camp in America is greater than during the elections in 1948” and his conviction that “the reign of capitalism and imperialism will end.” The optimism may have been for the consumption of a particular audience, may have marked yet another resurgence of hopefulness—or may have been manufactured or misquoted by whoever ghost-wrote the article.

  41. FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2; PR.Jr., interviews with Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, and Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982 (transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.); The New York Times, June 8 (Scandalize), 15, 1949. The FBI had begun to entertain the possibility that Robeson had taken out Soviet citizenship (FBI New York 100-23857-557, report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service).

  42. Daily Worker, July 4, 8, 1943; Morning Freiheit, Feb. 19, 1948 (memorial); PR, Jr., “How My Father Last Met Itzik Feffer, 1949,” Jewish Currents, Nov. 1981; Lloyd Brown, “Setting the Record Straight,” Daily World, Dec. 24, 1981; “Paul Robeson Jr. Refutes Lloyd Brown,”Jewish Currents, Feb. 1982; Lloyd L. Brown to Morris U. Schappes (editor, Jewish Currents), Dec. 14, 1981; PR, Jr., to Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981, RA; Blackman interview with PR, Jr., Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In their 1943 visit to the States, Mikhoels and Feffer had been representing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. For additional background on the two men, as well as on the fate of other Jewish writers and cultural functionaries, see Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

  There are several variant versions of the meeting between Robeson and Feffer. Mikhoels’s daughter published an account very close to PR, Jr.’s version, except that she places the meeting in 1951, which is clearly inaccurate, since Robeson’s passport had by then been lifted (Natalya Mikhoels-Vovsi, Vremya imwi, no. 3 [Tel-Aviv, 1976], p. 190). Esther Markish, in her book The Long Journey (Ballantine paperback, 1978), pp. 171–72, asserts that Feffer dutifully performed the role demanded of him by the Soviet secret police and said nothing to Robeson about the purges. Yet a third version is in Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony (Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 188–89), who places the meeting in a restaurant, with Feffer accompanied by police agents. Shostakovich angrily denounces Robeson for maintaining silence after returning to New York: “Why don’t these famous humanists give a damn about us, our lives, honour, and dignity?”

  43. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. Partial documentation—confirming the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song—is in the Polish newspaper Kurjer Codzienny, June 10, 1949: “He was given an unusually cordial reception.… The song about the Warsaw Ghetto was enthusiastically received by the audience.” The New York Times (June 15, 1949) and New Times (June 22, 1949) alike refer to the outpouring of acclaim for Robeson during his Moscow visit, without specific reference to the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song. For another example of Robeson’s publicly protesting Soviet anti-Semitism, see note 44, p. 736.

  44. “Paul Robeson’s Soviet Journey,” an interview by Amy Schechter, Soviet Russia Today, Aug. 1949. At exactly this same time, the conservative black columnist Willard Townsend was arguing in the Chicago Defender (June 16, 1949) that “the open revival of anti-semitism in new forms is proceeding today at a rapid pace behind the formidable Iron Curtain.”

  45. The serious consideration in U.S. government circles of a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.S.R. is documented in Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (Knopf, 1980). Robeson went from Moscow to Stalingrad, where he sang at a tractor factory and where a survivor of the battle of “Mamaev’s Hill” took off the ring that only survivors of that battle were entitled to wear and put it on Robeson’s finger. The ring was inscribed “To Paul Robeson, the American Stalingrader.” Robeson responded by referring to Stalingrad as “the very spot where our civilization was saved” (PR’s handwritten notes, RA).

  46. The New York Times, June 17, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-575, 616 (report from U.S. Customs Service); news release from the Council on African Affairs, June 16, 1949, RA; ER to Larry Brown, June 9, 14, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

  47. Hunton to ER, n.d. (June 1949), RA; New York Amsterdam News, June 18, 1949; The New York Times, June 17, 1949; Daily Compass, June 17, 1949. On leaving the airport, a banner-decked cavalcade of five cars carried Robeson to Harlem; the FBI reported that the motorcade “received no ovation or recognition from Harlemites” (FBI Main 100-12304-? [illegible]). Testifying in opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 13, 1949, Hunton had given a rather fiery accounting of his own, not only strongly condemning the treaty but referring to Great Britain as “a prison-house of colored peoples” (his testimony is in RA).

  48. Interviews with Marilyn Robeson, Dec. 18, 1983, Jan. 4, 1984, Jan. 7, 15, 1985; New York Herald Tribune, June 20, 1949. Rather than making a scene, which was not his style, Marilyn’s father had withdrawn into silent opposition. Neither Paul, Sr., nor Essie, to Marilyn’s knowledge, showed any sense of insult or grievance. The accounts in the Daily Compass (June 20, 1949) and the New York Amsterdam News (June 25, 1949) do not cont
ain any reference to Robeson’s supposed remark about the Soviet Union; the Compass did report that he “shook his fist at one photographer and moved a pace toward him, but was blocked by the crowd.” Essie’s comment is in an undated handwritten note (possibly for a future speech), RA; she also wrote, “I felt like strangling them.… I was so angry I was calm.” Although the black press was generally friendly, the headline in The Afro-American (June 25, 1949) referred to “Junior’s Socialite Bride.”

  49. CVV to ER, July 6, 1949; ER to CVV, July 10, 1949, Yale: Van Vechten. Essie’s gracious letter included an extended thank-you to Carlo for having helped them get started back in the 1920s. “The fight then,” she explained, “was intellectual, artistic, and social. We Negroes were trying to be heard, to get started, to participate.… Now, I think this fight today is another phase of that same fight.… Now it is political. At least Paul and I think it is political.”

  Marilyn Robeson, in our interview of Dec. 18, 1983, described Essie as having been “very firm and very determined and very incensed also” during the wedding-party fracas; several newspaper accounts confirm this, with both the Daily Compass (June 20, 1949) and the Amsterdam News (June 25, 1949) referring to Essie’s efforts to ward off the news media. As well, Essie wrote an article, “Loyalty—Lost and Found,” in which she described her anger with the press (the article was enclosed for distribution in carbon letters to Hunton, George Murphy, and Charles Howard, June 22, 1949, RA). Soon after, Essie enlisted the help of Murphy and Howard in circulating a packet of her articles, including “Loyalty,” to the 108 chapters of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta: “I think Deltas are reasonably influential in their communities.… Sort of slow infiltration, what?” (ER to Murphy and Howard, July 12, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC.) Essie’s five-page covering letter to her sorority sisters (dated Aug. 4, 1949) is in NYPL/Schm: PR. In it she said point-blank, “… for the record, I am NOT A COMMUNIST,” but added that what needed questioning at the moment was not the loyalty of blacks to the country, but “THIS COUNTRY’S LOYALTY TO THE NEGRO.” Widely reprinted (e.g., Daily Compass, July 14, 1949; even Time printed excerpts, July 25, 1949), the “Loyalty” article prompted a warm letter of support from William Patterson to Essie, praising her for her “uncompromising” stand. Because of the underlying—but acknowledged—antipathy between them (see p. 187), Patterson sent his letter with some trepidation, lest Essie take “offense”; but he reminded her that he was well aware that they were both “on the same side of … the barricades” (Patterson to ER, July 7, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC). In her lengthy reply, Essie wrote, “It most definitely occasioned no offense. How on earth could it? … I consider praise from the Old Guard is praise indeed.” She went on to describe herself in general terms as someone who, when disagreeing, “open[s] up my big mouth and say[s] so—often far too vehemently I admit”; then, in specific terms, she referred to her past disagreements with Pat: “… I am unduly biased and sensitive on the matter of Big Paul, because I do think that everybody is very prone to exploit him. Me, I’m against exploitation,—not only of the masses, but also of individuals, especially of friends.” Polite though the tone, ER’s letter amounts to a considerable indictment of how the CP (the “Old Guard”) in her view “used” her husband. “As a peace token” ER sent Pat a copy of American Argument, the book she had co-authored with Pearl Buck (ER to Patterson, July 9, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC).