In his senior year Robeson was inducted into the Cap and Skull honor society as one of four men who best represented the ideals of Rutgers, and was also selected as valedictorian of the graduating class. President Demarest of Rutgers asked Paul to give the Commencement Oration on six days’ notice, after the scheduled student became ill. Demarest called Paul into his office and asked if “he had an old speech” he could give, since six days was scant time for writing and memorizing a new one. Paul said he did, but added that he would prefer to try a new effort that (as Demarest later remembered his words) would “touch upon the racial question” and would “show the dawn of a renaissance for the Negro.” Paul explained that this idea was “burning in his soul for expression.” Demarest told him to go ahead.22
As Paul made his way down the aisle to the speaker’s stand on Commencement Day, the board of trustees, the faculty, the many distinguished guests and recipients of honorary degrees all rose, in a rare and perhaps unprecedented tribute, and remained standing until he had reached the platform. He proceeded to deliver a stirring speech, “The New Idealism,” in which he carefully alternated patriotic cadences with temperate (yet unmistakable) challenge. In theme and tone the young Robeson sounded far closer to Booker T. Washington than to “upstart” militants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter. Dutifully praising the nation for having “proved true to her trust,” and her soldiers for having successfully preserved her “liberties” in the recently concluded war, Robeson went on to restate Booker T. Washington’s familiar doctrines of racial progress through self-help. “We of this less favored race realize,” he told the Commencement Day audience, “that our future lies chiefly in our own hands. On ourselves alone will depend the preservation of our liberties and the transmission of them in their integrity to those who will come after us. And we are struggling on attempting to show that knowledge can be obtained under difficulties; that poverty may give place to affluence; that obscurity is not an absolute bar to distinction, and that a way is open to welfare and happiness to all who will follow the way with resolution and wisdom; that neither the old-time slavery, nor continued prejudice need extinguish self-respect, crush manly ambition or paralyze effort; that no power outside of himself can prevent a man from sustaining an honorable character and a useful relation to his day and generation.”23
But of course it could and did, as Robeson well knew, and as he gently asserted in his concluding remarks. While calling on his own race to practice the “virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, industry, perseverance and economy,” he added that “in order for us to successfully do all these things it is necessary that you of the favored race catch a new vision,” act according to a new spirit of “compassion” in relieving “the manifest distress of your fellows.” It remained true, he emphasized, that “neither institutions nor friends can make a race stand unless it has strength in its own foundation; that races like individuals must stand or fall by their own merit,” and he was careful to assure his almost entirely white audience that the new “fraternal spirit” he wished to evoke “does not necessarily mean intimacy, or personal friendship.” It implied only “courtesy and fair-mindedness,” a willingness to fight for the great principle that “there will be equal opportunities for all.” Robeson closed his oration with words closer in spirit to those Du Bois might have chosen, though the tone remained conciliatory rather than militant: “… may I not appeal to you … to fight for” an “ideal government” whereby “character shall be the standard of excellence … where an injury to the meanest citizen is an insult to the whole constitution,” and where “black and white shall clasp friendly hands in the consciousness of the fact that we are brethren and that God is the father of us all.” The Commencement Day crowd roared its approval.24
Robeson’s cautious yet challenging valedictory words were as far as he ever went, as a young man, in expressing in front of whites something of the range of his feelings. He talked less guardedly only among his circle of black friends, that small group of collegians, male and female, drawn from the Philadelphia-New York area and (as one of them has put it) from “well-to-do middle class homes.… We met regularly for dances, forums, picnics, athletic games, and the usual events that engage college students. There were also profound discussions about the Negro in our society.” Sadie Goode, who dated (and later married) Robert Davenport, the black student a year behind Robeson at Rutgers, recalls Paul as distinctly “aware and disturbed” about racial questions. Another young black woman, Frances Quiett, who met Robeson soon after he graduated from Rutgers and dated him seriously for a year, remembers his talking about the prejudice he had encountered growing up in Princeton: “He was race-conscious at an early stage,” and “it showed when we met in groups together.” Robeson would often draw the others (who were “not as aware”) into a serious discussion of racial prejudice, and would describe the hopes he had of someday being able “to do something about it”—though “he wasn’t clear at that early age about what he might be able to do.”25
Of his contemporaries, Robeson was probably closest in these years to Geraldine Maimie Neale, the young black woman with whom he had an intense undergraduate romance. They met when he was a sophomore and Gerry was completing high school in a nearby town; his last two years at Rutgers paralleled her two years at Teachers Normal School in Trenton, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher and also took newly introduced special-education courses for teaching mentally retarded children.26
She and Paul did not see each other, according to Gerry Neale, “frequently, as students do today. There were no automobiles among us. We were both serious students.” Paul would call on Gerry at the boarding-house in Trenton where she roomed with other students; they wrote letters to each other between visits, and with other friends had song fests in parents’ living rooms (Paul never had to be coaxed: “If he was asked to sing, he made no excuse, set no limitations,” and sang everything from the Sorrow Songs to love songs. “I Love You Truly” was their song, “sending out a shy, tender message”). When together with friends, Paul and Gerry would manage to find “a special grassy spot—a little away from the rest—where we talked, dreamed, created a world of the future where love, romance, happiness would be forever.” He gave her “the football he cherished most and the gold baseball which he prized most among his athletic awards”—the one that recorded the savored victory of the Rutgers baseball team over Princeton (savored because it was the first time in fifty years that Rutgers had defeated Princeton in an athletic contest—and because “Proud Princeton” had turned down his brilliant brother William’s application for admission out-of-hand).27
When Gerry Neale was a young girl, her teacher in the small segregated school she attended in her hometown of Freehold had taught her “pride in African history as well as the history of the Negro in America”—taught her so well that, when she later spoke out time and again in class in Teachers Normal “about the Negro who made this or that contribution,” her white history teacher, “with genuine kindly amusement,” commented, “Miss Neale will make us all regret we are not Negro.” Gerry also insisted, as a young girl, in seating herself on the main floor of the segregated movie theater in Freehold—while her friends went to the balcony as directed. Even so, Gerry felt Paul was ahead of her—and of those few others in their crowd who were concerned with social issues. “His voice got earnest, vigorous (not loud) when speaking about the subject of race discrimination.” She adds that she is not implying that Paul’s ideas at the time were well formed or that he was a “radical activist” in the subsequent sense of that term: his tone was not militant and his tactics were not confrontational. He cared deeply about the plight of black people, yet as a young man “believed fully that the promises of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could be realized if people worked hard at it,” if they relied on the efficacy of a conciliatory appeal to the nation’s conscience. Some fifteen years later Robeson told an English friend that during his adolescence there was “still no
questioning of accepted values,” and during his college years—a “period of comparative harmony”—his “creative impulses [were] driven underground and interest centered in athletics”; he added, significantly, that it was “a period of apparent triumph, yet not really satisfying.”28
Robeson’s confidence in the essential beneficence of the American system, even when he was a young man, had its limits. Passive reliance on the “inevitability” of progress was, he felt, a chimera and a trap; neither time, patience, nor even reliance on the tender mercies of the Divinity could guarantee desirable social change. That would come about only “if people worked hard at it.” When Gerry and her classmate Bessie Moore (Robeson had been close to the Moore family of Princeton since childhood) decided to take some action against segregation in the women’s dormitory at Teachers Normal, Paul joined them for planning sessions, encouraging their purpose. After a “very polite but earnest” letter to the college president, Gerry and Bessie pressed their case in a personal interview with him. The president expressed sympathy. He thought he had “the right answer”: the school owned an unoccupied house whose basement it used for storing coal. It was a lovely house, he said. He would let the female black students use it for their very own dormitory. Gerry expressed “appreciation for the color scheme he had in mind: black coal, black women students,” but said the offer was unacceptable. She and Bessie held out for a change in college policy that would allow any black woman who wanted to live in the regular dormitory to do so. Somewhat to their own surprise, that permission was granted—perhaps in part because it was felt that the black women currently on campus were already settled in private homes and therefore unlikely to avail themselves of the offer. That turned out to be the case; Gerry, who was tempted, couldn’t afford to move. Still, they had worked hard for a victory, and won it. “Paul was pleased.”29
But Gerry and Paul did not see eye to eye on all matters. He was more interested in marriage than she: “I was not sure I loved him enough.” Her friends were astonished—“Who would ever raise such a question if they could marry Paul Robeson?!” She explained that she did not think her feelings were strong enough to survive the difficulties of marriage to a man who “would be called upon around the world to be Everyman.” Gerry, like most middle-class young women of the day, believed that “a good marriage” took precedence over other priorities. Though Paul had been able to persuade her that she was the center of his universe (a charismatic quality that men and women responded to and remarked on all through his life), Gerry was shrewd enough to realize that, as a “man of destiny,” he would in time inevitably move on to someone else. So when Paul did actually propose marriage, Gerry turned him down. He refused, however, to accept her decision and for some time longer would continue to try to change it.30
In June 1919 they both graduated. The undergraduate “class prophecy” for 1919 confirmed Gerry’s instincts by predicting that Paul, by 1940, would be governor of New Jersey, would have “dimmed the fame of Booker T. Washington,” and would be “the leader of the colored race in America.” That summer Gerry enrolled at Rutgers, to study Shakespeare for her own enjoyment and to take craft courses in preparation for teaching mentally retarded boys in Atlantic City that coming fall. Paul moved to Harlem to prepare for his entrance into Columbia University Law School. Reverend Robeson had wanted him to become a minister, and for a time Paul had felt the inclination himself. From boyhood he had actively worked in his father’s church and when Reverend Robeson was indisposed had occasionally deputized for him, “reading and talking a little to keep things going in his absence.” But during college Paul decided that he lacked zeal for the ministry and that a career in law better suited his combined wish to make a name for himself and to serve his people. If Reverend Robeson had been disappointed, he never said so—“He made no attempt to upbraid me, or to persuade me to change my resolution.” The fact that another son, Ben, was due to become a minister had undoubtedly softened his father’s disappointment.31
Paul returned to New Brunswick often that summer to see Gerry, but, as she had sensed, his “destiny” was about to unfold, precipitately, taking him off in a variety of new directions.
CHAPTER 3
Courtship and Marriage
(1919–1921)
In 1910 more than 90 percent of the Afro-American population still lived in the South, mostly in rural areas; the chief characteristics of daily life were grinding poverty, social segregation, racial violence, and political impotence. The era of Progressivism, heralded then and since as the rebirth of a humane political vision, was not designed to include blacks; white reformers considered the disfranchisement of blacks a necessary corollary of “good government,” their degraded status the inescapable consequence of biological inferiority. In 1914 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the rightness of “separate but equal,” and President Woodrow Wilson, busy fighting to make the world “safe for democracy,” refused to speak out publicly against lynching. He did, however, speak out against what he called “a social blunder of the worst kind”—namely, the effort to appoint black officials in the South, a region without a single black policeman, in a country that could count exactly one black judge, two black legislators, and a total of two thousand black college students.1
In search of a better life, blacks for generations had drifted toward Northern urban centers. After 1910 the drift became a tide. The “Great Migration” of the next two decades saw nearly two million blacks leave the rural South, with the black population in cities rising from 22 percent in 1900 to 40 percent in 1930. No promised land awaited the new migrants to the North, yet amid the endemic squalor and discrimination they did manage to make some improvement in their daily lot: decreased death, illiteracy, and infant-mortality rates, a rise in school enrollment and political participation (blacks could vote in the North). Fierce white resistance to residential integration—including bombings and beatings—forced blacks into ghettos, where the development of community institutions like churches and fraternal orders provided some sense of refuge, a potential political base, and a focus for cultural cohesion.
Nowhere were these developments more pronounced than in Harlem. When Paul Robeson arrived in “the Negro capital of the world” in the summer of 1919, it was in transition from an upwardly mobile white enclave to an all-black one, from an outpost of gentility to slumming headquarters for liberated flappers, from a cultural backwater to the cultural center for the self-conscious proclamation of a New Negro—newly militant, newly conscious, newly assertive—and the literary and artistic Renaissance that his emergence brought in train.
Robeson’s reputation preceded him. Before he set foot on 135th Street, he had become one of “Harlem’s darlings,” the personification of the richly talented, unapologetically ambitious New Negro. As an undergraduate football star, he had played at the Polo Grounds, and had become a more conspicuous figure still from his stint on the St. Christopher basketball team; the excitement of those games at Manhattan Centre (later Rockland Palace) had spilled over into nights on the town, the last stop always being Streeter’s Chinese Restaurant on 136th Street. Within a few months of moving to Harlem, Robeson had become a familiar figure, strolling down Seventh Avenue on a summer day “with a pretty girl on his arm, greeting friends and admirers all along the way,” something of a prince in his kingdom—but an approachable prince, his good-natured modesty deflecting envy, making it possible to think of him, despite all his accomplishments, as “one of us.”2
It was a heady summer in Harlem, that year of 1919, a summer of dramatic counterpoint. On the one hand, returning black veterans of the much-decorated 369th Regiment, led by Lieutenant James Europe’s famed jazz band, were given a high-spirited reception as they wound in triumphal procession up Lenox Avenue. On the other hand, there were daily bulletins about rampaging white mobs shooting, burning, torturing, and lynching black victims—as if to announce that New Negroes would be treated in the same ruthless spirit as had the old. The violence during that �
��Red Summer” included a two-day riot in the nation’s capital that left a hundred people injured and was only aborted when Secretary of War Baker called out the infantry. Paul’s older brother William, who had become a doctor and was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, told him vivid stories of how blacks had armed themselves and successfully fought back against their attackers.3
Harlem was feistily alive that summer, filled with demobilized officers and men, smart in Sam Browne belts and khaki, and with black students from nearly every state in the Union attending Columbia University’s summer session. Very much a part of the scene were Paul Robeson and his two buddies, Jimmy Lightfoot, a young musician with whom he shared an apartment on 135th Street, and Rudolph (“Bud”) Fisher, Paul’s closest friend at the time, a 1919 Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Brown who was to study medicine at Howard. (Fisher would become a prominent psychiatrist and a major literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance—his two novels, The Walls of Jericho and The Conjure Man Dies, are still widely admired—before his early death in 1934.) “The pretty girl on Robeson’s arm” in those days was often Frances (“Frankie”) Quiett, while Fisher’s steady date was May Chinn. Frankie had come to New York from Virginia in 1918, worked in a milliner’s shop, attended the church of Reverend John Haynes Holmes (the progressive white minister who was one of the interracial founders of the NAACP), and roomed for a time with May Chinn, who introduced her to Robeson. May had probably gotten to know him at Columbia, where she became the first black woman graduate of Bellevue and the first black woman intern at Harlem Hospital—having earlier been discouraged by a racist teacher from going on with her first love, music.4
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