Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  20. The quotations in this and the following paragraphs come from the stenographic transcript of the hearing in RA, which also has the handwritten notes Essie made after the hearings to set down her second thoughts—all those “brilliant things” she wished she had said at the time; among them was this imaginary question to the Senator: “Are you or are you not married? Why not?”

  21. Stenographic transcript, RA; ER to Seton.July 14,. 1953, RA. In her typed statement to the press, July 9, 1953, RA, Essie referred to McCarthy’s insistence that all Americans were equal in their citizenship as “that old American Party Line.”

  22. PR to Judy Rosen Ruben, July 28, 1953, PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

  23. The many letters of invitation from overseas are in RA. The offer to do Othello was from Leslie Linder. Robeson telegraphed his acceptance, pending receipt of a passport (Linder to PR, June 15, 1953; PR to Linder, n.d., RA). NYPL/Schm: PR contains considerable correspondence on both the ASP and Hartford incidents; some newspapers accounts have also been useful in reconstructing those events, particularly the Hartford Times, Nov. 17, 1952 (PR’s reaction to reporters); The Afro-American, Nov. 29, 1952; and The New York Times, Nov. 11, 12, 18, 1952.

  24. The plight of the CAA can be traced in two memos it issued (Oct. 23, Dec. 17, 1953), copies in LC: NAACP. Freedom fell four months behind in its publication schedule and when it finally reappeared, in Feb. 1954, ran a front-page appeal for support: “The existence of the paper is at stake.” Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984 (money problems at Freedom); Amsterdam News, Feb. 19, 1954. The FBI report on PR’s “heart trouble” has no legible serial number but is dated (from L.A.) Dec. 1, 1953. PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

  25. The two FBI memos dated Jan. 13, 1953, and April 27, 1954, do not have legible file numbers; a third (FBI New York 100-25857-1976) also refers to his “changing his views.” The Jet article appeared Jan. 28, 1954. When Cliff W. Mackay printed a story in his Jan. 23, 1954, column for The Afro-American—the black paper that had most consistently supported Robeson—that PR had taken out an ad in Pravda to extend New Year’s greetings to the Soviet people, Robeson wrote Mackay that Pravda did not accept ads and that the greetings in question had been in response to the paper’s request for “a message about the attitudes of the American people toward peace” (PR to Mackay, Feb. 9, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). An exchange of letters between Rev. J. Spencer Kennard, Jr., and PR contains a firm denial by PR of the Drew Pearson report (Kennard to PR, May 3, 1954; John Gray to Kennard, May 19, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). George B. Murphy, Jr., general manager of Freedom Associates, who had been an editor of the Washington Afro-American (and was a member of the family that owned the paper), had arranged a meeting in Baltimore a few years previously between Robeson and Carl Murphy, president of the Afro-American newspaper chain. (The chain had the largest circulation among blacks of any weekly in the country, reaching, on the basis of three or four persons reading one copy, some six hundred thousand each issue. The Pittsburgh Courier chain, about equal in influence to The Afro-American, had taken a more staunchly anti-Communist line in its editorial policy, and was therefore less sympathetic to Robeson’s plight.) His four-hour meeting with Carl Murphy went splendidly, and The Afro-American stopped taking snide potshots at PR and published a half-dozen favorable articles on him (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U. Mass.: Du Bois). As one sign of The Afro-American’s esteem, its assistant managing editor, Josephus Simpson, asked PR (along with other prominent figures) to reflect for The Afro’s readers on the events of 1953 and to forecast what lay ahead in 1954—and also to nominate “the outstanding American.” In his response, PR rejoiced that the issue of segregation in education had reached the Supreme Court, but warned that “the whole civil rights program” had been “scuttled by the Eisenhower administration in the President’s successful bid for Southern support.” Further, he characterized the administration as “largely a political vehicle for the giant corporations and entrenched greed” and pilloried it for embracing McCarthyism. As the two most significant achievements of 1953 he listed “the ending of the bloodshed in Korea” and “the further awakening of the colonial peoples, particularly our brothers in Africa, and now in the West Indies and Latin America.” He nominated two “outstanding Americans”—W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Mary Church Terrell, who at age ninety had been leading picket lines to desegregate the capital’s lunchrooms and had gone to Georgia to plead for clemency for Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper accused of killing a white man (Simpson to PR, Dec. 14, 1953; PR to Simpson, Dec. 19, 1953, NYPL/Schm: PR). When Mary Church Terrell died, seven months later, PR hailed her as one of America’s “great daughters” (handwritten draft, July 27, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR).

  26. The ms. of PR’s lengthy reply is in NYPL/Schm: PR. His formal statement through Freedom Associates, dated May 3, 1954, is in RA.

  27. Interview with Stretch Johnson, March 5, 1985; PR, “Their Victories for Peace Are Also Ours,” New World Review, Nov. 1955; The New Statesman and Nation, Sept. 24, 1955.

  28. ER to Seton, Aug. 11, 1952, RA. When the president of the Yale chapter of the NAACP invited Robeson to participate in a debate on “Is American fit to be the leader of the world?” or “Is the American Government moving toward equality and civil rights?” he wrote on the invitation, “This question not debateable—willing to come, speak & answer questions—no debate” (NYPL/Schm: PR).

  29. Conversations with PR, Jr. (20th Congress); but PR does seem to have discussed Khrushchev’s revelations later with Harry Francis (see pp. 505–06). On the need to distinguish between the visionary Bolshevism of the twenties and the authoritarian Stalinism that replaced it—a distinction few American Sovietologists have been willing to make—see Stephen F. Cohen’s illuminating discussion in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (Oxford University Press, 1985). According to PR, Jr., his father “had deep concern about the 1952 frame-up trial and execution of the leading Jewish cultural figures in the U.S.S.R.,” but when Paul Novick of Freiheit approached him in 1957 to sign a public statement on the matter, Robeson declined. Novick spoke to him again in Moscow in 1958 “about what was going on in the Soviet Union and the Jewish question and whatnot, and Dad was under no illusions about what had happened, and what was happening then, as a matter of fact” (multiple conversations with PR, Jr.; PR, Jr., to Morris U. Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981; PR, Jr., ms. comments).

  30. Interview with Sam Parks, Dec. 27, 1986. (For more on Parks and PR, see p. 457)

  31. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 27, 1982; letter from Dorothy Healey to me, June 22, 1982; multiple conversations with Helen Rosen. A California friend, Geri Branton, offered the same caution against making the CPUSA “all that important” in Robeson’s life (interview, April 2, 1982). One gauge of Robeson’s uninvolvement in CP organizational affairs is that he goes wholly unmentioned by Party memoirists of the period as having participated in factional struggles or daily routine. My analysis of Robeson’s relationship with the CPUSA and the Soviet Union is drawn from many sources, but has been especially enriched by personal interviews—with Peggy Dennis (April 27, 1982), John Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982), Dorothy Healey (May 1, 1982), Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Junius Scales (March 10, 1986), Carl Marzani (March 11, 1986), Ollie Harrington (July 29, 1986), and Sam Parks (December 27, 1986).

  32. Interviews with Healey (April 1982), Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984). Echoing Gates’s formulation, PR was reported in the undergraduate newspaper at Swarthmore as telling the students during a visit to that campus in 1955 that he “did not accept the opinion of the U.S. press about the degree of freedom within the USSR. For working class people,” he stated, “there is a great deal of freedom”; the reported slave-labor camps in the U.S.S.R., he supposedly went on to say, “were used for no other purpose than for the improvement [sic] in our sense of the word,” a necessity given the “historical backg
round of the present State” and “the fact that the Western powers have been trying to destroy the USSR since its inception” (Swarthmore Phoenix, May 3, 1955).

  33. For more details on these aspects of Soviet and CPUSA policy, see Isserman, Side, especially pp. 137–41, 215–16, 246–47. As Isserman points out (pp. 141–43), the CPUSA did continue to fight hard within CIO unions like the NMU and the TWU for better employment opportunities and high union posts for blacks.

  34. Interviews with Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982). The Pettis Perry papers, consisting of some 250 letters to his wife Rose as well as various notes and speeches, have recently (1987) been acquired by NYPL/Schm, and I am grateful to the staff for allowing me access before the materials were fully catalogued. Perry (b. Jan. 4, 1897) was an almost exact contemporary of PR and was somewhat close to him during the fifties. Perry had been born in poverty on a tenant farm near Marion, Alabama, had learned the trade of moulding at a pipe foundry in Tuscaloosa and during the Scottsboro trial had joined the International Labor Defense, serving as its Executive Secretary from 1934–36. He became a CP Section Organizer in 1936 and was ultimately elected to the National Committee. Indicted among the New York Smith Act defendants, he was jailed from 1955–57.

  35. Interviews with John Gates, June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984.

  36. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 1982; Peggy Dennis to me, March 24, 1984, Feb. 16, 1987.

  37. Ibid. PR admired Foster as a theoretician, though he did not feel especially close to him as a man; in notes dated April 30, 1956 (RA), he referred to Foster as “that master of Marxist theory and practice.…” The sympathy and depth of Foster’s views on black issues is best sampled in Foster’s own book, The Negro People in American History (International Publishers, 1954), especially chs. 42, 43, 48; Foster admiringly refers to PR several times in the book.

  38. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. PR turned down Patterson’s request that he appear at the eighth-anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Congress (Patterson to PR, March 16, 1954; John Gray to Patterson, March 25, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). From prison, Ben Davis, Jr., wrote Patterson a guarded but decipherable complaint about the Party’s racial obtuseness: “… There were missteps on our side that never should have occurred.… One cannot be satisfied that the groundwork for an assault on my 60 day contempt was not laid ahead of time.… I would be less than candid if I did not point out that the absence of certain counteractive measures left a deep and painful impression on me. Nor will I go into this; but I want you to think about it. And I want that this shall not be repeated with Pete [Pettis Perry] and above all with the great and horribly brutalized Claudia [Claudia Jones]”—Perry and Jones being black Communist leaders who had been arrested under the Smith Act (Davis to Patterson, n.d. [1954–56?], NYPL/Schm: PR). Robeson shared Davis’s concern and admiration for Claudia Jones, supporting the move in behalf of her parole after a year in prison, her health compromised (James W. Ford to PR, May 4, 1955, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2397); and when she was deported in late 1955, he sent “heartfelt greetings” to a gathering in her honor (dated Dec. 7, 1955, RA).

  39. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr.

  40. Interviews with John Gates (June 8, 1982 and Feb. 13, 1984).

  41. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. The story about “toning down” was Ben Davis’s, who told it to Robeson, who told it to PR, Jr.

  42. The Afro-American, March 13, 1954; Patterson to John Gray, Feb. 25, 1954; Richard Greenspan to Gray, March 8, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR (Guatemala); PR telegram to Neruda, July 12, 1954, RA (Guatemala); FBI New York 100-25857-1950? (Guatemala), 1981 (McCarran); minutes of the Formation of Kenya Aid Committee, NYPL/Schm: PR; Hunton to “Dear Friends,” May 18, 1954 (Conference in Support of African Liberation), LC: NAACP; Daily Worker, April 27, 1954 (subversive). In the March 1954 issue of Freedom, PR also wrote presciently about Vietnam in an article entitled “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China”: “Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom-fighters; and now we are told that soon it may be ‘advisable’ to send American GI’s into Indo-China in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the ‘free world’—meaning White Imperialism.”

  43. The large number of letters, cables, minutes, and memos relating to the spring 1954 passport campaign—as well as messages of thanks from PR—in both RA and NYPL/Schm: PR are too numerous for detailed citation. Additional sources for piecing together the story of the campaign are issues of the National Guardian, May-June 1954, and Bulletin of the World Peace Council, July, Aug., Sept., Oct. 1954.

  44. Interview with Diana Loesser, July 29, 1986. The Jewish-owned business concern NAHUM offered free space for future meetings, and the local Jewish paper, Jewish Chronicle, provided strong editorial support.

  45. The “Salute” did not bring out the number of blacks that had been hoped for: “… it was not what we wanted by any means as to composition” (John Gray to Mary Helen Jones, June 9, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR); interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984.

  46. Details of the Chicago incident are in correspondence between Ishmael P. Flory, secretary of the Committee for African Freedom (the sponsoring group), and John Gray, field representative of the Freedom Fund, NYPL/Schm: PR. Flory gave me additional details in our interviews of July 1–2, 1986, including the information that an alternate concert at a black church in Chicago was “packed,” with people “standing all along the walls.” Another left-wing Chicagoan, Norman Roth, told me (phone interview, June 26, 1986) that he witnessed black policemen forming a gauntlet for PR and telling him (while looking over their shoulders at their white officers), “Good work, Paul; good work, Paul.” The correspondence between Gray and James T. Wright, also at NYPL/Schm, details the hiring of Wright and Boudin. I am greatly indebted to Leonard Boudin for turning over to me his complete files on the Robeson passport case.

  47. Celia L. Zitron to PR, June 16, 1954 (Smith Act); Mary Helen Jones to John Gray, Nov. 17, Dec. 19, 1954; Jessica Smith to ER and PR, June 1, 1954 (New World Review)—all in NYPL/Schm: PR; (Essie served as editorial consultant on black and colonial questions for NWR); FBI New York 100-25857-2074, 2124 (New World dinner); Daily Worker, Oct. 20, 1954 (for PR on Essie’s contributions); Jessica Smith to “Dear Friend,” Aug. 11, 1954, MSRC: Smith Papers. There is a large correspondence in RA relating to the business affairs and recording arrangements of Othello Recording Company; in 1954 Othello issued a new PR album, Let Freedom Sing, and in 1955, Solid Rock: Favorite Hymns of My People, and entered into arrangements to send special language matrices to Hungary, the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, and Poland, bringing in for Robeson some needed funds (in Jan. 1955, for example, Paul, Jr., was able to send Rock-more a royalty check for PR’s account for $3,451.25, and in May another for nearly $3,000). Robeson paid tribute to Marcantonio, both in a private telegram to his widow (Aug. 10, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR) and in an article for Freedom (Aug. 1954). Through Freedom Associates, he hailed him as “the Thaddeus Stevens of the first half of the 20th century” and “the foremost spokesman for the rights of man the Congress of the United States has produced in the 20th century” (the statement, dated Aug. 12, 1954, is in RA).

  The National Negro Labor Council had been officially launched in a convention in Cincinnati in 1951 as a mass organization to fight against limited job opportunities and Jim Crow and to build unity between black and white workers. PR was given honorary membership in the Council and was present at its inaugural convention, speaking and singing to the delegates (his speech is reprinted in the Daily World, April 8, 1976). He remained active in the NNLC, playing a particularly dramatic role at the second annual convention, in Cleveland in 1952, when he brought the delegates to their feet with a resounding declaration that black youth should not participate in “shooting down the brave people of Kenya” (Daily Worker, May 7, 1951 June 16, 1952; Pittsburgh Courier, Nov. 10, 1951; New York Am
sterdam News, Dec. 3, 1951; Freedom, Jan., Dec. 1952). At the third annual convention, in Chicago in 1953, he reiterated yet again the sentiments of his 1949 speech in Paris: “No one has yet explained to my satisfaction what business a black lad from a Mississippi or Georgia sharecropping farm has in Asia shooting down the yellow or brown son of an impoverished rice farmer”; the audience, according to Freedom (Oct. 1953), responded “with a thunderous cheer.” At the 1954 convention, in New York, he gave a powerful speech assailing the U.S. government for refusing to trade with China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union while fostering trade with fascist Spain and with Malan’s South Africa: “If politics is to be the yardstick in international trade it means that the U.S. government is saying to 15,000,000 Negroes that it approves the politics of the most oppressive racist dictatorship on the face of the globe today” (ms. of speech in RA). PR did not engage in behind-the-scenes strategy sessions but, rather, “came in more or less as a great man” to sing and talk (interview with Oscar Brown, Jr., Dec. 27, 1986; Brown was especially active at the 1952 convention in Cleveland). PR, Jr., insists to the contrary that his father attended and spoke at committee sessions and met privately with the top leadership group (PR, Jr., ms. comments).