Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  15. The issues involved in the Korean War have divided scholars for decades. The two most recent accounts, less polemical than much of the preceding scholarship, are: James Irving Matray, The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (University of Hawaii Press, 1985), and Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950–1953 (Cornell University Press, 1985).

  16. The typescript of Robeson’s June 28, 1950, speech in Madison Square Garden is in RA.

  17. FBI Main 100-12304-204; FBI New York 100-25857-1107, 1109, 1111. Revels Cayton had been urging Robeson to show himself more in Harlem, and in Aug. 1950 Louise Patterson found a one-room apartment for Paul at 270 Saint Nicholas Avenue. Essie sent down some furniture for it from Enfield. He shifted residences back and forth, sometimes staying with the Rosens or the McGhees, often taking meals at Lee and Revels Cayton’s apartment. Lee Cayton recalls that he was “very sensitive to the fact that we had limited funds” and insisted on giving her money each week for food (Patterson to Rockmore, Aug. 10, 1950; ER to Rockmore, Aug. 8, 1950, RA; interview with Lee Cayton, April 1982). Freda Diamond has stressed to me that Robeson always had a second place to retreat to. For the thirties in London, see note 5, p. 666. For the forties, Ted Rolfs has confirmed one hideaway on Saint Nicholas Avenue, to which Robeson gave him a key (Garber interview, Feb. 4, 1983, plus my follow-up phone interview, Feb. 17, 1987; Rolfs had known Robeson for about ten years—see note 47, p. 646, and note 19, p. 710); and the FBI claimed to have uncovered another “hide-out” (as they put it) on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village (FBI New York 100-25857-7871, Sept. 16, 1949).

  18. Warren Hall Saltzman, “Passport Refusals for Political Reasons: Constitutional Issues in Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal, Feb. 1952, for the historical dimensions of the dispute.

  19. FBI Main 100-12304-204; FBI New York 100-25857-1107, 1109, 1111; Witt to Acheson, Aug. 1, 1950; Shipley to Witt, Aug. 7, 1950; Witt to Shipley, Aug. 11, 1950; Willis H. Young (acting passport chief) to Witt, Aug. 17, 1950—all in RA. Prior to the State Department action, the American Consul General in Trinidad had reported that the acting governor of the island requested advance notice of PR’s rumored intention to make speeches in Trinidad “in support of leftist candidates,” with an eye to trying to prevent such activity; it was also reported that “The British Security Forces in the Caribbean Area are obviously not anxious to have Robeson visit British possessions because of his Communistic activities” (FBI Main 100-12304-? [illegible], March 22, 1950, 201, 214 [British]). According to the FBI, Witt had briefly been a member of the CPUSA in the mid-thirties (FBI Main 100-12304-255).

  20. The unnumbered State Department “Memorandum for File,” released under the FOIA, contains a firsthand account of the meeting; the version in the Daily Worker, Aug. 25, 1950, closely parallels the official memo; Patterson to Clyde Jackman, Jan. 31, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC. The three other lawyers attending PR were Judge James A. Cobb, Dean George A. Parker of the Terrill Law School, and George E. C. Hayes, a former member of the Washington, D.C., Board of Education and a Howard University trustee. The prestigious law firm of Cobb, Hayes and Howard (Perry Howard, GOP national committeeman from Mississippi) representing PR had been in existence for two decades and had a conservative reputation; it clearly felt uneasy about PR’s political radicalism (Pittsburgh Courier, April 28, 1951, in which Judge Cobb stresses his rock-ribbed Republican credentials and resents the suggestion of “pinkish leanings”)—which may be why PR soon shifted to another firm. ER’s comment is in an “open letter” she sent to the House Lobby Investigation Committee, Aug. 10, 1950, NYPL/Schm: CRC. She sent a copy of the letter to Vito Marcantonio, who replied, “I fully agree with you” (Marcantonio to ER, Aug. 19, 1950, NYPL: Marcantonio). In a speech on Oct. 24, 1950 (text in RA), PR made a critical reference to William Dawson, the black Representative from Chicago, in regard to the Patterson episode: he “might have spoken, but he chose to keep quiet—possibly because Mr. Lanham of Georgia is a member of his Committee on Executive Expenditures, a little plum which Mr. Dawson received for years of faithful service to the corrupt machine bosses of Chicago and Washington.” Oppositely, PR praised Marcantonio for having spoken out against Lanham’s attack on Patterson: “Marcantonio did not choose to remain silent. His voice resounded in the halls of Congress in defense of the Negro people as he has done so many times in the past.…” Marcantonio was defeated in his bid to be returned to Congress in 1950.

  21. Daily Worker, Aug. 9, Sept. 4, 8, 11, 1950; California Eagle, Aug. 11, Sept. 14, 1950; Daily People’s World (West Coast CP paper), Aug. 9, 1950; Daily Compass, Aug. 10, 1950; sample protests from abroad are John Takman to PR, Aug. 19, 1950, and J. Chore to Du Bois, Sept. 7, 1950—both in RA; statement on Madison Square Garden issued by Hunton (CAA), Aug. 31, 1950, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-1148 (Garden).

  22. The typescript of PR’s Harlem speech is in RA. The Harlem Trade Union Council had held its first convention in June 1950, opening with a concert by PR. The Council before that had been a body of delegates from various unions; after the convention it became a delegate-and-membership body. The National Negro Labor Council consisted of delegates from ten black labor councils throughout the nation, the New York City unit being the Harlem Trade Union Council, which in July 1951 changed its name to the Greater New York Negro Labor Council (Daily Worker, June 3, 1950, May 18, June 4, 1951. For more on NNLC, see note 47, p. 714). In all its manifestations, the FBI labeled it “A Communist Party front organization” (FBI Main 100-12304-255).

  23. According to a Naval Intelligence report, at the Hands Off Korea rally on July 3 Robeson “blistered the United States” (FBI New York 100-25857-1800); interview with Annette Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983. Not even in Harlem were all Robeson’s streetcorner rallies well attended; if Collier’s (Oct. 28, 1950) can be believed, one rally for “peace, freedom and jobs” drew a mere two hundred.

  24. CVV to Donald Angus, July 20, 1950, in Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, p. 242. In this same period CVV gave a party for Edith Sampson, the black UN delegate who was generally viewed on the left as an apologist for the U.S. State Department (CVV to Brion Gysin, Dec. 16, 1950, in Kellner, ed., Letters CVV, p. 244). Ruark’s syndicated column is dated Oct. 3, 1950. Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 19, 1950 (Cayton).

  25. Boston Traveler, Aug. 12, 1950 (Moscow); the Soviet play John—Soldier of Peace was written by Yuri Krotkov, starred the distinguished Soviet actor M. Nazvanov, and played more than a hundred times (Nazvanov to PR, March 8, 1952, RA). Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 9, 1950 (Josh White); Navasky, Naming Names, pp. 192–93 (Belafonte); interview with Revels Cayton, April 27, 1982; Rolling Stone, March 1976 (Gillespie); phone interview with Sidney Poitier, Oct. 20, 1986. Pete Seeger confirms that Josh White told Robeson about his HUAC appearance in advance, and also Robeson’s lack of bitterness over it—but has it happening over the phone rather than in person (interview with Seeger, July 4, 1986). When Seton was preparing her book on PR, he asked her “to cut down on quotes of fellow Black Americans who testified against him, because, as he said, he understood the predicament of the pressures they were put under ‘to clean [sic] their skirts.’ There was a total absence of mean or vindictive mindedness in Paul” (Seton to Geoffrey Baines, Nov. 30, 1978, courtesy of Seton).

  26. Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 11, 1950; Boston Post, Oct. 6, 11, 12 (editorial), 14, 1950; Boston Herald, Oct. 11, 12, 1950; Associated Negro Press releases, Nov. 6, 18, 1959, CHS: Barnett; Washington Star, Nov. 8, 1950 (Soviet party); New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 18, 1950; Life, Nov. 20, 1950. Reports on the Second World Peace Conference are in New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 17, 23, 1950; Daily Worker, Nov. 10, 20, 24, 1950; Morning Freiheit, Nov. 18, 1950. When Dorothy Bushnell Cole returned from the peace conference, a special FBI agent, “through the cooperation of the U.S. Customs Inspector,” photographed material in her baggage relating to the conference (FBI New York 100-25857-1800, Referral Doc. #3 from U.S. Customs, Department of Treasu
ry, to FBI). When the International Peace Prize was presented to PR at a rally on Dec. 11, 1950, Army Intelligence was present and reported that Robeson once again spoke out against the U.S. presence in Korea (FBI New York 100-25857-1800, Referral Doc. #21 from G-2 to FBI). The State Department also monitored the activities of PR, Jr., who had by then become active in the Labor Youth League (PR, Sr., had. addressed its founding convention at Stuyvesant Casino on Nov. 24, 1950; the typescript of PR’s address is in RA). In December, PR, Jr., was part of a group of two hundred young people who staged a peace demonstration in the main lobby of the UN headquarters; they cheered Mrs. Roosevelt when she walked through the lobby, but after she remonstrated with them, the cheers turned to boos (ANP release, Dec. 6, 1950, CHS: Barnett).

  27. A summary of Du Bois’s Senate race can be found in Home, Black and Red, ch. 13. Bishop Walls wrote Ben Robeson that he regarded Paul as “a Christian and a race hero” (Walls to B. C. Robeson, March 8, 1950, RA).

  28. Daily Worker, Oct. 6, 1950; FBI New York 100-25857-1800; Referral Doc. #20 from Army Intelligence (G-2); The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1950; the typescripts of PR’s two speeches, Oct. 5, 24, 1950, are in RA. Robeson attended a number of rallies protesting Du Bois’s indictment (Daily Worker, Feb. 6, 1951; New York World-Telegram and Sun, Feb. 22, 1951; FBI Main 100-12304-255).

  29. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984. It was also in 1950 that Alice Childress and Clarice Taylor decided to start a theater in Harlem. They went to John Barone, owner of Club Baron, a bar and grill at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue, and got free space from Mondays to Thursdays. When they asked Robeson for the use of his name, he readily agreed, but he warned the two women—as he did so many others—that association with him would not necessarily be an asset. For their first production, in 1950—Childress’s Just a Little Simple, adapted from Langston Hughes’s “Simple Speaks His Mind”—PR dropped by, brought in people, and even appeared at fund-raisers at Wells’ Chicken Shack in Harlem. He also wrote a personal check for five hundred dollars, (interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984; interview with Ruth Jett, April 2, 1982; Sterner interview with Ellsworth Wright). The theater managed to struggle along for a few years (in 1952 it performed Childress’s Gold Through the Trees, directed by Clarice Taylor), but, according to Ruth jett (interview, April 2, 1982), some of its own committee members “panicked” under McCarthyite pressure and padlocked the door.

  30. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 3, 9, 1984; Alice Childress to me, Aug. 23, 1984; Daily Worker, Oct. 23, Nov. 20, 1950; Burnham to ER, Nov. 15, 1950; assorted Freedom Associates memos from Burnham, RA; FBI Main 100-12304-255 (“front”); PR’s lengthy (twenty-seven handwritten pages) ms. for his first column, the early section containing valuable information on his youth, is in NYPL/Schm: PR, which also has a two-page outline of purpose of the Freedom Fund, and the minutes of the meeting of Freedom Associates, Feb. 12, 1952, which set up the Freedom Fund and organized a PR tour in its behalf.

  31. Copies of all the pertinent legal documents are in RA, as is Ruark’s column with the Hoover comment; the panic over the “Robeson” sailing is summarized in FBI Main 100-12304-220.

  32. New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 3, 1951; Ernest Thompson wrote an answer to Sugar Ray Robinson in the Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 20, 1951; “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in the Feb. 1951 issue of Ebony.

  33. Roger P. Ross, public-affairs officer, to State Department, Jan. 9, 1951 (the only legible file number on the document is from DC/R Central Files: 511.45K.21/1-951).

  34. The typescript of ER’s “The Not So Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in RA (it was printed in the California Eagle, April 5, 1951); Ben Burns (executive editor, Ebony) to ER, Jan. 22, 1951; ER to John Johnson, Feb. 1, 1951. Seton, too, was furious at White’s “snide utterly dishonest” article and wrote in protest to Ebony (Seton to ER, Jan. 5, 25, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck, on the other hand, replied coolly to Essie: “I suppose basically the trouble is that Walter thinks that Paul has given his major allegiance to a foreign power. I wish Paul could disprove this, publicly, for his own sake” (Buck to ER, Feb. 5, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck’s husband, Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day publishing company, had earlier written in disagreement to ER about Korea: “I still can’t take it when it is charged that anybody other than the North Koreans started the aggression” (Walsh to ER, Aug. 17, 1950, RA).

  35. William H. Brown to “Wilkinson” [sic], July 9, 1951; Wilkins to Brown, July 11, 1951, LC: NAACP; PR, Jr., ms. comments; The Crisis, Nov., Dec. 1951.

  36. The Afro-American, Jan. 26, 1952; San Francisco Voice, Feb. 15, 1952; ER to Hicks, Jan. 29, 1952, RA; Du Bois, Negro Digest, March 1950. When George Wood, Jr., the popular manager of the Red Rooster, died in 1955, PR sang at his funeral (The Afro-American, Sept. 24, 1955). Du Bois’s comment was part of a debate he had with Walter White in the pages of the Negro Digest on the question “Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong?” The debate preceded the appearance of White’s article in Ebony by nearly a year, and in this earlier article White took issue with PR in more measured tones, avoiding any insinuation about his supposed neuroticism or his inadequate prior contribution to the black struggle, and confining himself to questioning Robeson’s “uncritical” acceptance of Soviet accomplishments. In reply, Du Bois denied that Russia was an aggressor nation and argued eloquently that Robeson in fact spoke more for blacks than the Walter Whites liked to believe, chastising those who attacked PR for being “deathly afraid to act or talk or even think in any way which is in opposition or can be interpreted as opposing the current hysteria.”

  37. FBI Main 100-12304-230; The New York Times, April 13, 1951 (Bastian).

  38. Patterson to Clyde O. Jackson, Jan. 31, 1951 (Martinsville), NYPL/Schm: CRC; Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 295–99 (second-echelon); PR led a delegation to the UN to protest the Martinsville case (Daily Worker, Feb. 4, 8, 1951); Gaunzetta Mitchell to PR, Feb. 7, 1951, NYPL/Schm: PR (Martinsville); Morning Freiheit, Feb. 23, 1951 (Foster); New York Amsterdam News, March 24, May 26, 1951 (McGee); Daily Worker, Feb. 12, 1951 (McGee); FBI New York 100-25857-1321 (McGee); Daily Worker, April 12, 1951 (Hollywood Ten); ER to CVV and FM, May 24, 1951 (David Paul), Yale: Van Vechten; Daily Worker, May 7, 30, 1951 (HTUC), Aug. 21, 26 (Patterson); Amsterdam News, May 26, 1951 (HTUC). Though the National Maritime Union revoked Robeson’s honorary membership (Neal Hanley to PR, Feb. 26, 1951, RA), he continued to believe in the trade-union movement as a source for progressive social action; in the June 1951 issue of Freedom, he devoted his entire column to describing a trip to California with Revels Cayton to talk with trade-unionists, and he placed particular faith in the black union leaders Joe Johnson, Charles Nichols, Al Thibodeaux, and Bill Chester, as well as in surviving progressive unions like the United Cafeteria and Restaurant Workers in D.C. (Oliver Palmer to PR, Nov. 10, 1951, RA) and the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (MCS), which was 40 percent black and had been expelled by the CIO in 1949. Daily Worker, Feb. 1, March 18, 1951; The New York Times, Feb. 1, 1951 (American Peace Crusade). The APC attracted many distinguished figures, including Robert Morss Lovett, Prof. Philip Morrison of Cornell, and Prof. Henry Pratt Fairchild. Acheson denounced the APC as a “Communist front organization” (Herald Tribune, Feb. 21, 1951). Alvah Bessie, another of the Hollywood Ten, still imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana, Texas, wrote a touching poem about Paul (Bessie to PR, June 21, 1951, RA). The above events hardly cover the full spectrum of PR’s activities during these months. To but mention several others, he helped launch the New World Review, he marched in the May Day parade, he joined the plea to Truman not to provide U.S. military aid to Franco, and he was active in the National Committee to Defend Du Bois (Daily Worker, May 2, 17, 1951; Alice Citron to PR, May 29, 1951; Vincent Sheean to PR, April 10, 1951, RA). Essie, too, remained active, writing frequently in New World Review (e.g., Ju
ly 1951) and elsewhere (e.g., Freedom, July 1951) about colonialism and the role of women, but in June 1951 she took seriously ill with a combination of spastic colitis and phlebitis and was hospitalized in Washington, D.C., for a month (her old friends Minnie and Sadie Sumner, along with Nan Pandit, then India’s Ambassador to Washington, were particularly attentive: ER to Robert Rockmore, July 12, 1951, RA; ER to Vito Marcantonio, June 13, 1951, NYPL: Marcantonio).

  39. Daily Worker, June 28, July 2, 1951 (Chicago); Masses and Mainstream, Aug. 1951, and FBI New York 100-25857-1409 for Chicago remarks; interview with Chatman Wailes, July 1, 1986 (Wailes had gotten to know PR when he came through Gary, Indiana, in 1949, where Wailes was then living). The Chicago rally was a considerable event. The National Guardian (July 4, 1951) estimated that five thousand peace delegates attended. Among the sidelights, a poem, “Paul Robeson” by Beulah Richardson, recited at the convention, proved a minor sensation (Patterson to Richardson, Aug. 1, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC, which also contains the text of the poem).

  40. The typescripts of PR’s statements in regard to Malik (June 26, 1951) and Austin (June 12, 1951) are in RA, along with surrounding letters and telegrams. (PR reprinted his letter to Austin in his column, “Here’s My Story,” for the July 1951 issue of Freedom.) Additionally, NYPL/Schm: PR has memo drafts of the Robeson-Willard Uphaus report to U.S. members of the World Council for Peace of the meeting with Malik, and a letter from PR to Malik thanking him, in the name of the World Council of Peace (Burnham—“For Paul Robeson”—to Malik, June 29, 1951). CU: Minor has a letter to Dr. Henry A. Atkinson (Church Peace Union) dated June 23, 1951, and cosigned by PR and Willard Uphaus, asking him to be an observer for the June 26 presentation at the UN.