Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  40. Shaw telegram to PR, June 28, 1958; Patrick O’Donovan to PR, June 28, 1958 (The Observer); Neruda to PR, July 1958; Alexan to Middleton, July 6, 1958; Iwasaki to PR, July 2, 1958; ER to Shaw, June 30, 1958; ER to Indira Gandhi, June 30, 1958—all in RA. Multiple interviews with Freda Diamond (“applause”). Not wanting to cause Nehru any political embarrassment, ER wrote Indira Gandhi, in regard to a visit to India, “You are to be absolutely frank with me, because we want to become, wherever it is possible, a UNIFYING force, not in any way a divisive or controversial force. We women have to by pass diplomatic nonsense and be practical.” After the Robesons were settled in London in July, Indira Gandhi arrived in England for a visit and asked Essie to meet her at the airport and “had a good talk”; it was apparently at that time that Mrs. Gandhi okayed a visit to India (ER to Freda Diamond, July 22–27, 1958, RA). To a Soviet friend (Mrs. Kislova), ER wrote (June 30, 1958, RA) that Paul thought probably the first thing he would want to do on a visit to the Soviet Union would be “something with the Soviet children, who have sent him so many letters of love and encouragement.…” According to an FBI report—based apparently on a phone tap—PR called the passport decision “an important political victory” and called the offers coming in from overseas “fantastic” (FBI New York 100-25857-3842).

  41. Interview with James Aronson, May 31, 1983.

  42. Essie’s two pages of notes are in RA.

  43. Daily Mail, June 28, 1958; Pitts burgh Courier, July 5, 1958; World-Telegram and Sun, July 9, 1958 (Ruark).

  CHAPTER 23 RETURN TO EUROPE (1958–1960)

  1. Interviews with Cedric Belfrage (May 19, 1984) and Harry Francis (Aug. 1982); National Guardian, July 21, 1958; West Indian Gazette, Aug. 1958; Sunday Times, July 13, 1958; News Chronicle, July 12, 1958; Reynolds News, July 13, 1958; Daily Mail, July 12, 1958; Daily Sketch, July 12, 1958. In its welcoming issue of July 11, 1958, the Daily Worker printed greetings to PR from, among others, the bandleader Johnny Dankworth, the actor Bernard Miles, and Dame Sybil Thorndike (“We welcome him to England with all our hearts and wish him a triumphal success once more”).

  2. Daily Express, July 6, 1958; News Chronicle, July 12, 1958 (“most remarkable”); Daily Sketch, July 12, 1958 (“royal personage”); Reynolds News, July 13, 1958 (Driberg); New York Herald Tribune, July 14, 1958; interviews with Cedric Belfrage (May 29, 1984) and Harry Francis (Aug. 1982). Both dailies quoted Robeson as making the same later statement, thereby increasing the likelihood that it was reported accurately (Edinburgh Evening News, The Bulletin, both Nov. 10, 1958). Bernard Levin, the highly regarded critic, chided PR for constantly saying people of color were “walking in freedom” in the Soviet Union: “In the Soviet Union no man, whatever his colour, can walk or carry out his task freely” (The Spectator, Aug. 29, 1958).

  3. James Aronson, “Notes on a Reunion,” National Guardian, Aug. 25, 1958; interview with Aronson, May 31, 1983.

  4. A typed schedule of PR’s appearances is in RA; the many letters of invitation from organizations, ambassadors, and friends are also in RA. The Daily Telegraph (July 14, 1958) reported that PR’s ITV fee was “believed to be the largest ever paid to an American performer for three appearances.” The Nigerian dinner is described in a report from AmConGen, Lagos, to State Department, July 30, 1958. Nigerian Premier Azikiwe himself wrote PR (Aug. 23, 1958, RA) to welcome him to London.

  5. PR, Jr., interview with Bruno Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982; interview with Alan Bush (PR, Jr., participating), Sept. 3, 1982; ER to Brown, Aug. 6, 1958; ER (with appended PR note) to Freda Diamond, July 22–27, 1958, RA; London Times, July 28, 1958; also Variety, Aug. 6, 1958; Sunday Dispatch, July 27, 1958; The Stage, July 31, 1958. Soon after his television debut, PR sang at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Introduced by Aneurin Bevan and his wife, Jennie Lee, Robeson was given a rousing, heartwarming reception by the miners and their families. Though the reunion was emotional, Rachel Thomas, who had appeared with him in The Proud Valley, did not think he was in particularly good voice (Sterner interview with Thomas).

  6. Larry Brown had apparently answered the call to London reluctantly (Rockmore to LB, Aug. 4, 8, Sept. 17, 1958; Marie Dokens to LB, Aug. 6, 1958, NYPL/Schm: Brown), and once he arrived was apparently as nervous about the concert as PR (ER to Lloyd Brown, Aug. 6, 1958, RA). While in London, Brown negotiated with Dennis Dobson for a “Paul Robeson Song Book,” which never saw print, though the projected table of contents can be found in Dobson to Brown, Aug. 14, 1958, NYPL/Schm: Brown. LB stayed with the Robesons for a while when he first arrived in London. PR, Jr., interview with Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982; Telegraph and Morning Post, News Chronicle, London Times, Evening News, Daily Mail—all Aug. 11, 1958; News Chronicle, Aug. 14, 1958 (backstage with Belafonte). Beaverbrook’s Daily Express printed a savagely negative review (Aug. 11, 1958): “… a sad shock … dull and monotonous”; Reynolds News, Aug. 19, 1958; also Daily Mirror, July 12, 1958; National Guardian, Aug. 25, 1958 (Belafonte). Yet, the following year, in the Herald (Dec. 19, 1959), Belafonte is quoted as saying, “I disagree violently with Paul Robeson. He’s always giving out with that stuff about ‘the Africans are on the march.’ He makes me think sometimes that his influence might start a Negro movement that could get out of hand. And he would regret that.”

  7. Along with an official “Moscow tour” schedule, there is a ten-page typed itinerary, with comments by Essie, in RA. The opening-day reception is described in the Moscow News, Aug. 16, 20, 1958; the Daily Worker, Aug. 16, 18, 1958; the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (London), Aug. 16, 1958. ER to family, completed Aug. 31, 1959; this letter and several others were found in duplicate in CIA files, proof that the Robesons’ mail was intercepted.

  8. David E. Mark, first secretary of Embassy, to State Department, Aug. 18, 1958, FBI Main 100-12304-(no file number), and distributed, as marked on the dispatch, to the CIA, the USIA, and intelligence units of the army, navy, and air force. The account of PR’s TV show in the National Guardian (Sept. 8, 1958) also has him saying that “things are better for the Negroes in America.”

  9. Pravda (the only Moscow paper appearing on Monday morning) devoted a four-column spread with photographs to Robeson’s Lenin Stadium appearance (Aug. 18, 1958, issue); Daily Worker, Aug. 18, 1958; Moscow News, Aug. 20, 1958; Washington Post, Aug. 18, 1958. The New York Times did report (Feb. 4, 1959) that the Soviets were making a film about PR, adding with a hint of derision that it would show him as an “unbending peace champion.”

  10. Typed ms. of ER’s “Southern Hospitality (Soviet Style),” RA, published as the first of a two-part series by Essie in The Afro-American, Oct. 11, 18, 1958. Later, in Tashkent, the Robesons spent time with Bertha and Lillie Golden, wife and daughter of the deceased John Golden, the black American from the Tuskegee Institute who had helped the Russians with their fledgling cotton industry.

  11. Vasily Katanian’s recollections (recorded about 1978) were made available to me by PR, Jr. All the quotes are from Katanian’s memoir, except the one about Robeson’s dancing, which is from ER’s typed ms. “Paul Robeson Jitterbugs in Middle Asia,” dated August 20, 1958, RA. Katanian (in a letter to me, May 1987) has approved the accuracy of the quotations from his memoir. Soviet Weekly (October 2, 1958) reported PR’s visit to the collective.

  12. ER’s annotated schedule, RA; Katanian’s memoir; ER, article on the boat trip, San Francisco Sun Reporter, Nov. 8, 1958; ER to family, completed Aug. 31, 1959, RA.

  13. Phone interview with Sally Kent Gorton, Sept. 28, 1986; Gorton to me, Oct. 1, 1986; Konstantin Kudrov, “Paul Robeson: A Russian Remembrance,” Rutgers Alumni Magazine, Winter 1974, pp. 26–27 (Yalta). Ivan S. Koslovski, ms. reminiscence of Robeson—including singing with him at Yalta—in the PR Archiv, GDR; Katanian’s memoir; Moscow News, Sept. 17, 1958 (Chekhov). RA contains a film script by Paul Delmer, Caravan in Russia, which he sent along to the Robesons, asking for their help in promoting it.

  14. ER to family, completed Aug. 31, 1959, RA; ER’s ms. “Kill The Umpire!!! U.
S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” RA (Khrushchev joke). PR also recorded several songs especially for Katanian’s film; when he couldn’t remember the words, Essie wrote them in chalk on a blackboard in large letters. On Aug. 31, 1958, The New York Times printed a captioned picture of the two men, “Khrushchev Receives Robeson,” but with no accompanying article. In the Aug. 31 letter home ER described Mrs. Khrushchev as “delightful, very motherly and warm.” PR told the Soviet News Bulletin (a publication of the press office of the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Canada), Sept. 18, 1958, that on meeting Khrushchev he had been “greatly impressed by his penetrating mind, a clear understanding of the affairs all over the world, and his concern and sincere striving for the further development and prosperity of the Soviet Union, for an all-round increase in the welfare of his people”; he commented, too, on Khrushchev’s “cheerful disposition and optimism … his good-heartedness and hospitality, his subtle racy humor.…”

  In a news conference in Moscow about his visit to the United States, First Deputy Premier Anastas J. Mikoyan charged that the Voice of America was “the chief spokesman of the cold war” and said its broadcasts were “not pleasing to our ears.” Paul Robeson, he added, was “also a voice of America and he is pleasing to our ears” (The New York Times international ed., Jan. 26, 1959). When Khrushchev was in the States in Sept. 1959, he made comments much like Mikoyan’s at a dinner of the Economic Club of New York. Asked why the Russian people were not allowed to listen to American broadcasts, he replied that they were anti-Soviet in content, and inquired why the voice of Paul Robeson, which was not unfriendly, had been “jammed” by Robeson’s government (The Afro-American, Sept. 26, 1959). Essie’s friend from the UN, Ruth Gage Colby, went up to Khrushchev at the Togo reception for him at the UN and on behalf of the Robesons offered their greetings of welcome and affection. According to Colby, Khrushchev thanked her profusely (Colby to ER, Sept. 22, 1960, RA).

  15. RA contains a large collection of tour reviews; almost uniformly positive and nearly uniform in their descriptions, they would be redundant to cite individually. PR, Jr., interview with Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982. Halfway through the concert tour, PR again came down with a cold, and some of the dates had to be canceled (ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959, RA).

  16. Ernest Bradbury in The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury (Oct. 9, 1958) had this comment on Robeson’s musical theories: “Robeson has discovered—afresh if not for the first time—the international language of folk songs, and he is caught up in the idea of universality in music … and demonstrated the mystery of the pentatonic scale with all that seriously boyish enthusiasm which is so much part of his charm.” The New York Times, Sept. 22, 1958; Essie’s rebuttal is in The Afro-American (Nov. 22, 1958); Carl Murphy to ER, Nov. 20, 1958, RA. About the only political comment made on tour—at least as reported by the press—was to criticize U.S. policy on Formosa (The Scotsman, Sept. 23, 1958); he also described himself as “perhaps a little to the left of the British Labour party” (Daily Telegraph, Sept. 28, 1958) and expressed the view that recent race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill “do not typify the general feeling in this country” (Leicester Evening Mail, Sept. 25, 1958). The Boston Evening News (Sept. 22, 1958) reflected the minority reaction to PR’s announcement about staying in London by commenting that, if he claims “the greatest measure of freedom” is to be found in the Soviet Union, “isn’t it surprising” that he should have decided to seek refuge in Britain instead.

  17. London Times, Daily Mirror, Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Manchester Guardian—all Oct. 13, 1958; ER’s ms. “Paul Robeson Sings in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” RA (reprinted in the San Francisco Sun Reporter); Peggy Middleton typed ms. “Paul in St. Paul’s,” Oct. 13, 1958, RA (reprinted in the National Guardian).

  18. The invitation to attend the Accra conference (which is in RA) had actually been to Paul, and he sent a message (also in RA) with “warmest greetings” expressing his deep disappointment at being held in England by tour commitments. Marie Seton’s book, Paul Robeson (Denis Dobson, 1958), has been referred to and commented on at several points in this text, and I will not undertake a repetitive assessment here. I would only add in general that the book, though valuable in places for its firsthand recollections, is sketchy overall and in details frequently inaccurate, suffering from a lack of archival sources. At the time it appeared, Robert Rockmore wrote Larry Brown regretting that it “was not more accurate and less ‘slanted’” (Sept. 8, 1958, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

  Claude Barnett and his wife, Etta Moten, were also at Accra and seemed so impressed (so Essie described it) “with the respect and affection the Africans paid me—all of them—and also the way Nkrumah treated me,” that Barnett decided to syndicate her articles (ER to Freda Diamond, Dec. 12, 1958, Feb. 8, 1959; ER to Tamara, Feb. 3, 1959; Barnett to ER. Jan. 19, 1959, RA). The notes Essie took during the UN sessions and the Accra convention are in RA. She hailed the conference in her articles as opening “a new page of history for the African Continent,” chided Western press representatives for trying to pit Nasser against Nkrumah, and complained that “the women of Africa were not adequately represented” (only ten of the two hundred delegates were women, and only two addressed the plenary, Shirley Du Bois being one). One of ER’s articles on Accra, in which she had written that Africans “are no longer passive (because the situation seemed hopeless) under foreign domination” and advising the white minority that “if they are sensible” they would find themselves “well treated,” was reprinted in the West Indian Gazette, a London monthly, and alarmed the American Embassy. In a confidential dispatch to the State Department, the Embassy characterized ER’s piece as “a most devastatingly destructive article, calculated as it obviously is to stir Africans and Asians alike against Westerners” (Francis J. Galbraith, first secretary of Embassy, to State Department, Jan. 27, 1959, FBI Main 100-12304-566).

  19. Memo of Washington-Herter phone call, plus Skofield to Oulashin reporting it, Dec. 9, 1958, no file number, State Department. Consul General Turner in Bombay reported to Dulles that the same individuals who had organized PR’s birthday celebration were behind his visit and that therefore “we may confidently predict strong anti-American propaganda along color lines.”

  20. Bunker to Dulles, Dec. 10, 1958, Jan. 8, 1959; memo Dec. 24, 1958, of State Department meeting involving Val Washington and Kenneth Bunce “to counteract communist exploitation of visit of Paul Robeson to India”; Dulles to Bunker, Jan. 12, 1959; Turner to Dulles, Jan. 20, 1959; CIA dispatch, Jan. 6, 1959—no file numbers listed.

  21. ER, ms., “Purely Personal,” dated Jan. 14, 1959, RA (also the source for the following paragraph).

  22. Daily Worker, Aug. 21, 1958; ER to Lloyd Brown, Aug. 6, 1958, RA. Du Bois sat for the sculptor Lawrence Bradshaw while staying in the Robeson apartment, and ER was later asked to present the finished head as a gift to the People’s Republic of China (Shirley Graham to George Murphy, Jr., Oct. 20, 1959, MSRC: Murphy).

  23. Shirley Graham Du Bois, Pittsburgh Courier, June 20, 1959; Shirley Graham Du Bois, ms. reminiscences of PR, PR Archiv, GDR. While in Moscow, PR also saw the Stratford Company perform Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; according to Essie, he thought Michael Redgrave “simply marvelous” (ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959, RA).

  24. ER to PR, Jr., Jan. 12, 1959; ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959; ER to Seton, March 12, 1959; ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959—all in RA.

  25. ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959, RA (“duty idea”); ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 12, 16, 1959, RA.

  26. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 16, 1959, RA.

  27. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 14, 16, 18, 1959; ER to Freda Diamond, Feb. 8, 1959; ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959, RA. Nehru expressed his personal disappointment at the cancellation of PR’s trip to India (Nehru to ER, Nov. 30, 1959, RA). In her letter to Patel, Essie refers to the doctors’ diagnosing “a slight strain on the heart due to exhaustion.” She also mentioned, in a letter to Glen Byam Shaw (Jan. 20, 1959, RA), that the doctors w
ere “not at all satisfied with his heart condition.” PR himself later told a reporter, “The doctors thought I had heart trouble” (News Chronicle, March 10, 1959). Rumors that Paul had had a heart attack, or possibly even cancer, prompted his sister, Marian Forsythe, to telephone him for reassurance (The Afro-American, Feb. 14, 1959). Marian’s husband, Dr. James Forsythe, had died in January 1959; Paul, from the hospital, wrote her one of his rare letters (PR and ER to Marian Forsythe, January 31, 1959, RA). In a phone conversation between two unidentified people (tapped by the FBI), a woman told her caller that she had recently received a letter from the Robesons and that they were “very upset and nervous.… She added that he had not been well since he had that business a couple of years ago” (FBI New York 100-25857-650, March 3, 1959).

  28. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 16, Feb. 6, 1959, RA; ER to Shaw, Jan. 20, 1959; Shaw cable to PR, Feb. 4, 1959, RA.

  29. Alphaeus Hunton to George Murphy, Jr., April 9, 1959 (weight), MSRC: Murphy; ER to PR, Jr., Feb. 6, 1959; PR and ER cable to Shaw, Feb. 5, 1959; ER to Shaw, Feb. 6, 1959; Shaw to ER, Feb. 13, 1959; Shaw to PR, Feb. 13, 1959—all in RA. On Feb. 21 and March 3, PR felt strong enough to attend a meeting of the World Peace Council in Moscow (ER to family, Feb. 28, 1959, RA). He also consulted with the Russian film crew on the documentary. Katanian organized a special showing for Essie, of whom he was very fond, in the hospital (Katanian memoir). PR gave a speech to the World Peace Council on Feb. 21, 1959 (ms. in RA). It is notable for his repeated references to the “deep-seated will and desire of the American people” (as opposed to “a powerful minority”) for “lasting peace.” Even more significant, PR attended a special evening to honor Shalom Aleichem; according to ER, he “was pleased to make this gesture on the ticklish question of Jewish culture” (ER to family, March 4, 1959, RA).