Paul Robeson
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Though depressive symptoms were not manifest in 1956, they may have dominated earlier mood swings; Seton, for example, referred in our interviews of Aug.-Sept. 1982 to PR’s “always having the curtains closed” when she visited him at the McGhees’ apartment (though she was uncertain about the dates). There are almost no additional references in the surviving evidence to PR’s having sharp mood swings prior to 1956, except for an occasional elusive reference such as an AP report of March 16, 1951, that had PR “sweating profusely and gesticulating wildly” while addressing a mass rally for peace. But it would be unwarranted to attach much “medical” significance to the AP’s words, since (in the general context of its report) they seem designed as a political commentary, a strategy for discrediting his “tirade.”
20. Multiple conversations with Helen Rosen.
21. Interviews with Dr. Aaron Wells, Jan. 8, April 23, 1983; Dr. Morris Perlmutter, March 7, 1983; PR, Jr. (multiple); Helen Rosen (multiple). I have also benefited from discussion with Dr. Robert Millman, who went over some of the medical records with me and offered his observations.
22. ER to Rockmore, April 30, 1956, RA. Another new stress factor impeding recovery was receipt of the news in mid-April that Canada’s Department of Immigration had refused him a visa for a thirty-eight-day concert tour that had been in the planning stages, citing as the reason its sponsorship by a “Communist” booking agency. Details of the controversy, which included questions in the Canadian Parliament, are in the Toronto Daily Star, April 10, 11, 1956; the Canadian Tribune, April 16, 1956; The Globe and Mail, April 12, 1956; the National Guardian, May 7, 1956; correspondence from John Boyd of the Jerom Concert Bureau (sponsors of the tour), RA, and Boyd to Lloyd L. Brown, April 13, 1956 (copy), MSRC: Patterson. I got some additional details from my interview with Sylvia Schwartz (Jan. 16, 1983), who was active in protesting the visa cancellation. In William Patterson’s opinion, Canada’s refusal of a visa was “a heavy blow” (Patterson to Sylvia Schwartz, May 4, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR). The American Consul General in Montreal kept the State Department closely informed about the fate of PR’s Canadian tour (FBI New York 100-25857-2668, 2673).
23. Wiles, “To Whom It May Concern,” May 25, 1956; Wells, “To Whom It May Concern,” May 26, 1956; Richard Arens (director, HUAC) to Friedman, May 31, 1956 (postponement); Wells to Friedman, June 8, 1956—all in RA; FBI memo from L. B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson, May 31, 1956, FBI Main 100-12304-? (illegible).
24. Phone interviews with Milton Friedman, Aug. 27, Nov. 29, 1982. Freda Diamond (multiple interviews) is the source for Essie’s fainting scheme. The prepared statement is in RA. In it PR listed the more important of the many invitations he’d had to perform all over the world, declared it “would be more fitting for me to question Walter, East-land and Dulles than for them to question me, for it is they who should be called to account for their … truly un-American activities”—claiming that he, in contrast, had “won friends for the real America before the millions before whom I have performed”—and defiantly refused to back down one inch in “continuing the struggle at home and abroad for peace and friendship with all of the world’s people, for an end to colonialism, for full citizenship for Negro Americans, for a world in which art and culture may abound.…”
25. The transcript of the hearing is in RA. For Manning Johnson’s previous testimony on PR, see p. 359. It was referred to during the hearing, and Boudin angrily protested the tainted source (Boudin to Frances Knight, July 29, 1957, RA).
26. Transcript of the hearing, RA; Essie’s remark is in an article she wrote about the day, “Paul Robeson Goes to Washington,” ms., RA.
27. Transcript of the hearing, RA. In the summer of 1955 Sen. Eastland, as chair of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, had issued subpoenas to some three dozen journalists, two dozen of whom were current or former staff members of The New York Times, for hearings on the alleged influence of the CPUSA on U.S. newspapers. The Times management threatened to fire any employee pleading the Fifth Amendment, substituting private confessionals within the Times’ own “family.” For a history of the episode, see James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970) and his “The Fifth Remembered,” The Nation, Dec. 27, 1986-Jan. 3, 1987.
28. Transcript of the hearing, RA.
29. Transcript of the hearing, RA; phone interviews with Milton Friedman, Aug. 27, Nov. 29, 1982.
30. Washington Evening Star, June 12, 1956; New York Amsterdam News, June 13, 1956; Daily Worker, June 13, 1956; The Afro-American, June 23, 1956; Pittsburgh Courier, June 23, 1956.
31. FBI New York 100-25857-2729 (Davis phone call); Davis to PR, June 24, 1956, RA; Du Bois to PR, June 30, 1956, U.Mass.: Du Bois; Mary Helen Jones to PR, June 14, 1956; Aronson to PR, June 21, 1956; Williams to PR, June 14, 1956—all in RA; The Afro-American, June 16, 1956; San Francisco Sun Reporter, June 23, 1956; Pittsburgh Courier, July 7, 1956. Robeson was especially grateful for the sympathetic story Alice A. Dunnigan filed with the Associated Negro Press (PR and ER to Claude Barnett, June 20, 1956; Barnett to Dunnigan, June 16, 1956; Barnett to PR, June 27, 1956—all in CHS: Barnett). The most scathing negative voice in the black press was, predictably, that of George S. Schuyler (Pittsburgh Courier, June 23, 1956), a voice echoed more frequently in the white press (e.g., the New York Joumal-American, June 13, 1956: “Robeson’s performance was a combination of tirade and weaseling evasion”). On the other hand, Edward P. Morgan, a staunch anti-Communist, chided HUAC in his ABC broadcast of June 14, 1956, for having behaved “with all the punitive bravery of a school principal making a public spectacle of thrashing an ornery child” (transcript of his broadcast, RA).
32. The New Jersey visit is detailed in FBI Main 100-12304-377X; ER to Rockmore, Aug. 5, 1956, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2815; Daily Worker, Oct. 12, 1956 (Newark). It was a sign of the changing times that Rep. James Tumulty, who had been a strong supporter of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, spoke publicly in favor of PR’s right to sing at Newark (Daily People’s World, Oct. 16, 1956). During the visit to New Jersey, Robeson felt well enough to give an interview to the local paper (Orange Transcript, Aug. 2, 1956), in which he once more declared himself “optimistic about the future.” At this same time, when Ernest Thompson was expressing dismay over how the CP had misused Robeson, an FBI agent reported that an unidentified informant claiming acquaintance with PR had declared that during a conversation PR had said “he realizes now that the CP is not ‘following through’ on trying to break the interracial barrier which exists between the negroes and white people,” though he continued to believe “that the CP was sincerely interested in tearing down the interracial barrier” (FBI New York 100-25857-2775). But if Robeson had indeed expressed such doubts, they did not represent any generalized disillusion with socialism. In a lengthy handwritten ms. (undated [July 1956?]) in RA, in which he returned to the basic themes of his 1930s notes on African culture, he responded to a New York Times article of July 15, 1956, by Stuart Preston on African sculpture, first by taking issue with Preston for having asserted that African art had “nothing in common” with art in the West, despite its manifest influence on artists like Picasso; and then going on to hail “The triumphant emergence of new powers and of revolutionary socialism in Asia,” a development that revealed “that the Western led and capitalist phase of modern industrial civilization is rapidly giving way to an Eastern-led and Socialist phase.…”
33. Washington Post, Nov. 8, 1956.
34. The New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune, New York Journal-American, New York Daily News—all Nov. 14, 1956; FBI Main 100-12304-393, FBI New York 100-25857-2821; Foster to PR, Nov. 27, 1956, RA. It was in an interview with The Afro-American three days later (Nov. 17, 1956) that Robeson referred to the “somebody” at work. The ms. of his prepared remarks to the meeting made only one possible and indirect reference to Hungary: referring to the Soviet Union, he said, “… you have leaped forward time and again when civilization was in danger.” For comparabl
e views on Hungary from PR’s friend Pettis Perry (“it is an attempt to bring back into Hungary a reactionary regime”), see Perry to Rose Perry, Nov. 20, Dec. 25, 1956, Perry Papers: NYPL/Schm.
35. Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 12, 1957; San Francisco Sun Reporter, Jan. 5, 1957.
36. The Afro-American, Nov. 17, 1956. According to Essie (ER to George Murphy, Jr., Nov. 23, 1956, MSRC: Murphy), PR was “immensely pleased” with the Afro interview, largely the work of George B. Murphy, Jr.
37. The Afro-American, Nov. 17, 1956. The Patterson quote is from a letter he wrote protesting the Supreme Court decision, as printed in both the Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 1, 1956, and The Afro-American, Nov. 24, 1956. The New York Times, Nov. 6, 1956, and the National Guardian, Nov. 19, 1956, contain accounts of the Supreme Court decision against Robeson.
Following Judge Mathews’s Aug. 1955 ruling against Robeson in the passport case, William Patterson had taken charge of trying to raise additional support in the States, while a number of groups overseas, and particularly in England, had redoubled their efforts in PR’s behalf. Patterson’s correspondence in regard to the passport fight is in NYPL/Schm: PR. RA contains the large number of invitations from overseas. The notable activity in PR’s behalf in Britain included an appeal sent directly to President Eisenhower from twenty-five prominent musicians (Sir Adrian Boult, Rutland Boughton, Humphrey Searles, Alan Rausthorne, Lennox Berkeley, etc.), a petition from Scotland with over three thousand signatures (including a dozen MPs), protests in the press (for example, Tom Driberg in Reynolds News), and a Let Paul Robeson Sing Rally in Manchester addressed by Manchester MPs Will Griffiths and Konni Zilliacus; Liberal barrister Vaughan Davis; Foundry Workers Union President and member of the Labour Party National Executive R.A. Cassasola; and black former British middleweight boxing champion Len Johnson (Daily Worker, Feb. 22, 1956; National Guardian, March 12, 26,1956). Cedric Belfrage, coeditor of the Guardian, who had been deported from the States, wrote that “Among British workers the fight to liberate Robeson is taking on a new emphasis, as the central symbolic expression of their concern over American thought-control” (Guardian, Sept. 26, 1955); also, interview with Belfrage, May 29, 1984. For a time Diana and Franz Loesser played a particularly prominent role in organizing the National Paul Robeson Committee in London (Loesser to PR, May 31, Oct. 20, 1956; Loesser to ER, Oct. 27, 1956; Belfrage to PR, June 3, 1956—all in RA; interview with Diana Loesser, July 29, 1986). The success of a large rally the Loessers organized in Manchester in Dec. 1956, which included a showing of The Proud Valley and a concert by the Welsh Miners Choir, is described in Loesser to ER and PR, Dec. 18, 1956, and Marie Seton to PR, Dec. 7, 1956 (Seton attended), RA. USIA/London reported to USIA/Washington on the “renewed attention” being given the Robeson passport case in Britain. The report stressed that, although the case had long been “exploited at intervals by the Communist press in Britain,” currently numerous non-Communists were adding their voices, including members of “the Bevanite wing” of the Labour Party (FBI Main 100-12304-358). Summarizing the contrasting response to the passport fight from overseas and at home, Patterson wrote that the Europeans had “responded magnificently,” but the minimal reaction at home had been emblematic of the general American failure to fight “to safeguard constitutional liberties” (Patterson to Sylvia Schwartz, May 4, 1956, NYPL/Schm: CRC). A comparable view, citing the failure of the left to put up a fight for PR, is in James W. Ford to PR (citing Ferdinand Smith’s opinion to that effect), Oct. 27, 1956, RA.
CHAPTER 22 RESURGENCE (1957–1958)
1. The classic account is Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education”: Black America’s Struggle for Equality (Knopf, 1976). Harvard Sitkoff’s The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980 (Hill and Wang, 1981) is a reliable shorter summary.
2. Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, July 4, 1957 (King). Essie described the Montgomery bus boycott as “magnificent” and hailed the “new young brilliant courageous Negro leaders” who had emerged in an article for the Czechoslovak News Agency, Feb. 11, 1957 (ms. in RA). She expressed much the same sentiments in her Sept. 19, 1957, article for The Afro-American, “Passive, Massive Resistance” (ms. in RA). PR’s statement on Little Rock, dated Sept. 12, 1957, is in RA. The Afro-American carried it in the issue of Sept. 21, 1957; a brief summary appeared in the New York Amsterdam News that same day.
3. Phone interview with Anne Braden, May 5, 1985; FBI New York SAC to Hoover, Dec. 19, 1957–Jan. 8, 1958, FBI New York 100-25857-3186. Oscar Brown, Jr., puts it this way: “He stayed off on this left tangent.… He had gone so far out on that limb, there was no way he could get back, psychologically even” (interview, Dec. 27, 1986).
4. ER to Murphy, Easter Sunday 1957, MSRC: Murphy. In a private letter Essie referred to the Prayer Pilgrimage as “one of the most important events of our time here in this country” (ER to Zamiatin, May 25, 1957, RA). The FBI knew of the Robesons’ presence in Washington for the Pilgrimage (FBI New York 100-25857-2917). PR subsequently recalled that during the Pilgrimage, “Many Negroes came to me and said, ‘Paul, we might not be on these steps [of the Lincoln Memorial] today, but for certain of the things you have stood by and fought for your people’” (transcript of passport hearings, May 29, 1957, RA). The assertion that Robeson was testing the waters for an NAACP takeover was ascribed to Newell Johnson, PR’s public-relations manager during his 1957 California trip (SA, San Francisco, to N.Y., Dec. 19, 1957; then N.Y. to Hoover, Jan. 8, 1958, FBI New York 100-25857-3186); FBI New York 100-25857-3204, also 3210 (CPUSA).
5. He also began work on a never-to-be-completed book on his musical theories (ER to Diana Loesser, March 8, 1957, PR Archiv, GDR). PR’s notes, Aug.-Sept. 1957, RA, attest to his continuing absorption in pentatonic musical theory, and the surrounding scholarship on the subject. In a set of notes entitled “re: article by A. Medvedev on Aram Khachaturyan, USSR (No. 12),” Robeson gave a succinct version of his research design: “… there is a world body, a universal body of basic folk themes from which all folk music is derived, and is directly or in directly related. Interested as I am in the universality of mankind—in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another—this idea of a universal body of folk music intrigued me, and I pursued it along many fascinating paths. Confirmation came from many diverse sources.…”
6. Los Angeles Tribune, July 3, 1957; ER to George Murphy, Jr., May 30 (Cayton), Aug. 26, 1957, MSRC: Murphy. In the latter letter, ER characterized the Lomax article as “a dog” and claimed she had told Paul, “That’ll learn you to keep your big mouth shut long enough for some other people to get in a few words edgewise.” She also claimed that “Paul laughed when I suggested that, and admitted it was true.” Something of the same ramblingly immodest tone had characterized PR’s remarks during the May 29, 1957, hearing on his passport application in Washington; he described himself as “one of the great artists of the contemporary period” and referred to his recent recording as “some of the greatest singing I have done in the last 20 years” (transcript in RA). The possibility that Robeson may have experienced recurrent emotional trouble in California is hinted at in a letter from ER to Cedric Belfrage (May 30, 1957, RA) just before he left on the trip: “He is beginning to feel very tired, so we are going to curtail all his activities. When he returns from the coast, we will try to persuade him to take a long holiday, and get some real rest and relaxation.” She expressed the same doubts to the radical clergyman Rev. Stephen H. Fritchman, one of PR’s hosts in L.A.: “I don’t want him tied up to a wearing program even before he starts out. I have no idea whether he will be able to stand up to it or not” (May 2, 1957, RA).
Carlton Goodlett, the left-wing black physician and publisher in San Francisco, credits Rev. F. D. Haynes of the Third Baptist Church (the largest black church in San Francisco) for PR’s breakthrough singing engagement. Following that concert, the Baptist Ministers Union of Alameda County obtained the use of the Oakland Municipal Auditorium from the Oakland Cit
y Council for a Robeson concert—the first time since 1952 that a civic building had been made available to him. There was vigorous protest from right-wing groups, but the black community “developed a counterforce” and the City Council held firm. Despite torrents of rain on the day of the concert, the auditorium was filled to overflowing one hour before PR’s performance began. The Oakland police, Alameda County sheriff, and federal officers took down the license-plate numbers of those parked outside (Carlton Goodlett, ms. reminiscences of PR, in the PR Archiv, GDR). In L.A., Robeson gave two concerts at the progressive First Unitarian Church (Stephen H. Fritchman was its minister) to help the church defray the costs of raising additional tax monies resulting from its refusal to abide by California loyalty oaths. He was also sponsored in L.A. by the Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, on the Attorney General’s “subversive” list, and by the Los Angeles Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell, in prison on Alcatraz Island as a result of the Rosenberg case. While in L.A., PR stayed with black friends, Frankie and George Sims, both active in the L.A. National Negro Labor Council, and was guest of honor at a private dinner at the home of Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted screenwriter. The Los Angeles Herald Dispatch (July 4, 1957) described him editorially as “the man best fitted, by virtue of sincerity, integrity and courage, to give leadership to the Negro people in this day”—though at the same time it expressed the hope that he had “learned a lesson” about the “left progressives” he had surrounded himself with for fifteen to twenty years and who had “failed to give him the proper support”; they had “isolated [him] from his own people,” so that the “Negro masses (had also) failed to rise to support him because they were unfamiliar with his activities.” This affirmation from the black community, however tempered, gave PR a real boost: “a very happy experience,” is how ER described it (ER to Rev. Riley, Aug. 6, 1957, RA). Details of PR’s activities and the concert reviews are in: Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, July 4, 1957; California Jewish Voice, June 21, 1957; People’s World, June 29, Aug. 3, 10, 1957; California Eagle, July 4, 1957; San Francisco Sun Reporter, July 20, Aug. 31, 1957; FBI Main 100-12304-408, FBI New York 100-25857-2965, 3021.