Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  For the time being, national and personal priorities coalesced. President Roosevelt’s reaffirmation of democratic values on the home front, in tandem with the country’s joining hands internationally with a Russian ally Robeson believed free of racial and colonialist bias, meant that national purpose coincided with his own special vision more fully than he had ever imagined would be possible in his lifetime. The juncture galvanized him, releasing in him a torrent of energy and resolve. Over the next three years—until the death of Franklin Roosevelt, in April 1945—Robeson operated at the summit of his powers, in an escalating spiral of activity and acclaim, and in the glow of a political optimism that would be as brutally shattered as it had been, briefly, unexpectedly plausible.

  Even at its height, Robeson’s optimism was not unblinkered. Roosevelt might now speak kindly of his “heroic” Russian ally, but Robeson hardly took that to mean the President had converted to socialism. In the same way, he did not regard New Deal domestic policies, promising though he found them, as signifying the imminent attainment of social justice. The Roosevelt administration did much to excite the hopes of black Americans: it opened itself to the counsels of such notable black figures as Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, William H. Hastie, and Walter White; it issued the President’s 1941 Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) order; it included blacks in the AAA-sponsored voting on cotton-control referendums. Yet, as Robeson well knew, the Democratic Party remained tied to its racially unreconstructed Southern wing, and the actual execution of policy had produced only marginal changes in the oppressive pattern of daily life for the black masses. In the mid-forties Robeson told a friend that he thought Roosevelt’s reformism would have as its chief result the guarantee that capitalism would exist for another fifty years.49

  As Robeson crisscrossed the country in a whirlwind of rallies, concert appearances, meetings, dinners, and testimonials, he tempered his enthusiasm for the nation’s wartime mission to defeat fascism with reminders about its obligation to combat oppression at home. The CP opted for primary attention to the war overseas, downplaying the black struggle at home; Robeson did not. He encouraged blacks to support the war effort, warning that the victory of fascism would “make slaves of us all”—but he simultaneously called on the administration to make the war effort worth supporting for blacks by destroying discriminatory practices in defense industries and the armed forces. “Racial and religious prejudices continue to cast an ugly shadow on the principles for which we are fighting,” he told a commencement audience at Morehouse College in 1943. At the prestigious and widely broadcast annual Herald Tribune Forum that same year, he devoted most of his speech to warning that continuing economic insecurity, poll-tax discrimination, and armed-forces segregation were arousing “the bitterest resentment among black Americans”; they recognized that under Roosevelt some progress was being made but rightly felt that the gains thus far had been “pitifully small” and that their own struggle for improved conditions was intimately bound up with “the struggle against anti-Semitism and against injustices to all minority groups.”50

  Robeson insisted that “The disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism [appear] to the Negro and are, in fact, first cousins if not brothers of the Nazis. They speak the same language of the ‘master race’ and practice, or attempt to practice, the same tyranny over minority peoples.” He called on the Western democracies to match the Soviet Union in the explicitness of their stated war aims: “abolition of racial exclusiveness; equality of nations and integrity of their territories; the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes.” He gave the same two-pronged message to trade-unionists, applauding the breakthrough efforts during the war of left-wing CIO unions to lower racial barriers, but reminding his audiences of how many barriers still remained before any biracial trade-union movement worthy of the name could come into being. Robeson raised his eloquent voice everywhere in praise of the national purpose, singing for the troops, appearing at war-bond rallies. But he also sought to universalize the struggle against oppression, linking the cause of black Americans with that of Spanish Americans, Asians, Africans, and underprivileged white Americans: “this is one of the great ends of this war—that the very concept of lower classes, colonial or backward peoples, disappear[s] from our minds and actions. For Fascism means degradation and inferior status. A people’s war is fought for dignity and equality.” And everywhere he went Robeson kept his incomparably sharp ears and eyes open for continuing signs of racial bigotry.51

  In Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942, those eyes scanned the concert audience gathered to hear him sing and saw that blacks had been seated in the top balcony. When he reappeared on the platform after the intermission, Robeson abruptly announced to the startled audience that he was continuing with the second half of the program under protest. “I have made a lifelong habit,” he told them, “of refusing to sing in southern states or anywhere that audiences are segregated,” and had accepted the Kansas City engagement on the assurance there would be no segregation in the auditorium. He agreed to finish the concert, but only because “many local leaders of my own race have urged me to.” Robeson then proceeded to sing a group of Russian songs, followed by the “Jim Crow” song, delivering it, as a local critic reported, “with stronger feeling that he had put into any other number.” At that point several whites in the audience left; a hundred more trickled out before the close of the concert.52

  The very next day, a hotel in Santa Fa canceled Robeson’s advance reservation. When the chairman of the Santa Fe concert series at which he had been due to appear justified the hotel’s policy by citing “New Mexico’s proximity to the southern states,” Robeson promptly refused to fulfill his upcoming concert date. The Kansas City and Santa Fe incidents were widely reported in the national press. Lucile Bluford, news editor on the black Kansas City paper, the Call, wrote to thank Robeson “for the stand you took against segregation in the Municipal Auditorium here. I think that your protest has spurred the Negro citizens here to wage a campaign against discrimination in our tax-supported buildings. You have given us a good start.” The black columnist Joseph D. Bibb wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier that by his action Robeson had “held himself out in bold relief to the majority of ‘shoot crap, shortening bread Sambos’ of radio, screen and stage.”53

  Max Yergan was one of several who reported to Robeson that everyone was “tremendously pleased and proud” of the stands he had taken. Yergan had resigned his YMCA post in South Africa in 1936 and returned to the United States, gradually becoming an influential public figure as an officer in the National Negro Congress, a sympathetic adherent (though not a member) of the Communist Party, and the executive secretary of the Council on African Affairs. By 1942 Yergan had become Robeson’s political liaison to the same pronounced degree that Rock-more had become his artistic one. Yergan filtered requests for political appearances, Rockmore for concert ones, the two comparing notes to avoid scheduling conflicts. As regarded the CPUSA, however, Robeson maintained an independent liaison through Ben Davis, Jr., who was in the Party’s highest councils and whom Robeson trusted as fully as he did anyone—which is to say, with only minimal reservation. The only other direct channel to Robeson during most of the forties was Essie, though her centrality had been greatly reduced since their return to the States in 1939. She sometimes had to fall back on her close personal friendship with Yergan to exert influence (which she could not do with Rockmore; the two disliked each other, even while maintaining formal appearances of friendship).54

  Yergan’s own public prominence had come to hinge increasingly on his role in the Council on African Affairs (CAA). The Council had been founded in 1937, and by 1941 Robeson had become chairman and Yergan executive director; in 1943 Alphaeus Hunton (a Marxist who had taught at Howard University) became its educational director. The Council’s central purpose was to “provide a sound basis of accurate information so that the American people might play their proper part in the
struggle for African freedom.” Pan-Africanism—“the conviction that all persons of African descent are commonly oppressed by a common enemy”—can be traced in the United States to such early-nineteenth-century proponents as Martin R. Delany and Alexander Crummel, but in the twentieth century the view is centrally associated with W. E. B. Du Bois, who was arguing its tenets for two decades before World War II. By the end of the war, though, concern with the fate of black Africa—and the linkage of its fate to that of black America—had become a commonplace among Afro-American intellectuals and organizations. The Council on African Affairs was designed as a clearinghouse of accurate information on Africa and as a lobbying force for African interests, not as a mass organization. Although Hunton periodically argued for conversion into a mass-membership organization, in the early forties the Council had fewer than two dozen members and met only three times a year, with subcommittees convening somewhat more frequently and with Hunton and Yergan carrying out most of the daily administrative work. Robeson involved himself far more with the actual organizational mechanics of the Council—though rarely on a day-to-day basis—than with any of the other manifold groups that counted him as a supporter. The CAA—as Alphaeus Hunton later put it—“was the one organizational interest among many with which he was identified that was closest to his heart.”55

  In its fusion of anticolonial and pro-Soviet sentiments, the Council did accurately reflect Robeson’s basic perspective. Because the United States was relatively unencumbered by a history of colonialist activity in Africa, Robeson and the CAA hoped that the United States might spearhead the drive among the Western democracies to apply the principle of self-determination to the African continent. Even before Roosevelt’s death (which shattered that hope), the brilliant West Indian theorist George Pad-more, less sanguine than the CAA, had argued that the United States would emerge from the war not as a liberating force but as the dominant imperialist power, using dollar diplomacy rather than outright annexation to control the key commercial and strategic routes on the African continent. By 1942 the FBI had decided that the CAA was not just a Communist front organization, but first among those groups “presently active in creating considerable unrest among the negroes by stressing racial discrimination.…”56

  Soon after the Kansas City and Santa Fe episodes, Robeson made his first trip into the Deep South to attend a convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was dominated by CP activists. The SNYC gathering at Tuskegee of over five hundred representatives from twenty Southern states, Mexico, and British Guiana heard a message from President Roosevelt calling for unity in the fight against fascism and declaring his conviction that out of victory “will come a peace built on universal freedom such as many men have not yet known.” The conference responded with a unanimous pledge of “the full and unswerving loyalty of Negro youth,” coupled with a letter of reply to the President expressing concern about the extent to which “discriminatory barriers remain against our fuller participation in our democratic way of life.”57

  The SNYC conference marked Robeson’s initial contact with a number of future Party activists, including Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Ed Strong, Louis Burnham, and James Jackson. Stretch Johnson recalls the vivid impression Robeson made on him: “He was awesome. He exuded magnetism and charm and charisma. And then he was so gentle and nonegocentric. He had the … common touch. You know, you felt you could communicate with him directly. There was no screen. He was available to you.” Five years later, at another SNYC convention, another rising young figure in the Party, Junius Scales, had much the same initial reaction to Robeson: “He strode onto the crowded stage with a combination of dignity, grace and responsive enthusiasm.… When the gentle thunder of his greeting broke over them, it was as though each person there had been struck by the lightning of that smile, the grandeur of that presence. There were no formal phrases; he spoke straight to the hearts of all present.… Robeson was as genuine and magnetic socially as he had been on the stage. He managed to listen to every word spoken to him and to reply graciously. When I was introduced to him he made me feel like the guest of honor.”58

  Leaving the Southern Negro Youth Conference in Tuskegee, Robeson went directly to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at Nashville. The short-lived SCHW, concerned with both economic and civil rights in the South, was denounced by conservatives as a Communist front, but in fact, like so many liberal organizations of the period, it was conceived and controlled by progressives of varying affiliations. Mrs. Roosevelt joined Robeson on the SCHW platform, presenting awards for “service to the South in 1942” to Mary McLeod Bethune (the black director of the National Youth Administration and president of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida) and to Dr. Frank P. Graham (president of the University of North Carolina and a leading white advocate of black rights); in her remarks, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the need to accept responsibility for the “miniature world of all races right here in America.” Robeson, in turn, repeated his call for “full integration” and again added an appeal for the release of Earl Browder. According to H. L. Mitchell, a founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who was in the audience when Robeson spoke, his appeal to free Browder “was enough to convince the southern liberals that they were being used to advance the cause of the Communist Party and they abandoned the Southern Conference for Human Welfare”—but it is at least as plausible to believe that they were driven out by Robeson’s demand for “full integration.” In her “My Day” column the next morning, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote that hearing Robeson sing “Ballad for Americans” at the conference had been “a thrilling experience.… It always stirs me as a ballad, but last night there was something peculiarly significant about it.”59

  Robeson’s reputation as “hero of the race” was slightly dented in May 1942 when Tales of Manhattan, a film he had made in Hollywood the previous year, was released for public showing. The picture follows the trail of a dress coat as it passes from owner to owner, spinning a vignette about each in turn, until finally the coat, stuffed with money, drops from an airplane into the hands of a group of sharecroppers who divide it up and “praise de Lawd.” Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Eddie (“Rochester”) Anderson played the resident sharecroppers—and the film’s vignettes were peopled with an array of stars that included Ginger Rogers, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth, Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and Edward G. Robinson. This glittering gallery of co-workers may have been part of the film’s attraction to Robeson, but the more potent appeal lay in a chance to depict the plight of the rural black poor, shown in the film, additionally, as investing the bulk of their windfall in communal land and tools, and as believing in share-and-share-alike, with “no rich an’ no mo’ po’.”60

  Some black reviewers, focusing on the film’s depiction of sharecropping, came out in its favor. But the majority did not, with the New York Amsterdam Star News headlining its negative review “Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters Let Us Down,” and declaring, “It is difficult to reconcile the Paul Robeson, who has almost single-handedly waged the battle for recognition of the Negro as a true artist, with the ‘Luke’ of this film … a simple-minded, docile sharecropper.” The left-wing white-run paper PM was no less brusque, denouncing the film’s “utter failure to visualize Negroes in any realer terms than as a Green Pastures flock in a Thomas Hart Benton setting.” The black actor Clarence Muse spoke out in Robeson’s defense, claiming that the “ideological” words spoken by Luke in the film gave the lie to dismissals of the character as a mere Uncle Tom; and from Hollywood came reports of a “secret meeting” at Eddie Anderson’s home to deny that “the human interest sequence of rural Negro life” was in any sense “disgraceful.”61

  Still, the outcry against the film was sharp, and when it opened in Los Angeles, the militant Sentinel and Tribune organized pickets to demonstrate. Robeson threw in his lot with the demonstrators, declaring he would join any picket line that might appear during the film’s New York showing. In a widely publicized series of interv
iews, he explained how his initial hopes for the film had been dashed during production, the portrayal of a Negro sharecropper degenerating into just one more “plantation hallelujah shouter,” into a simple-minded, docile darky mistaking money dropped from an airplane for a gift from the Lord. Robeson denied that he’d made the picture for money—correcting his reported fifty-thousand-dollar salary to an accurate ten thousand, and pointing out that he had recently turned down more lucrative offers. He had been led to believe he would be able to make script changes; when they were rejected, he could not afford to buy his way out of the contract. This was a familiar enough result—indeed, with a few changes in detail, it could stand as a paradigm for most of Robeson’s career in films.62

  This time around, Robeson drew the line. Calling a press conference, he announced that he was quitting Hollywood for good. A New York Daily News reporter ascribed Robeson’s discontent to “a way of feeling” Communists have “about any play, book or movie that was not engineered by a Communist.” He had, in truth, tried the only options available to a black performer and had found all of them wanting. He had acted in a “race movie” (Micheaux’s Body and Soul), had tried making an experimental film (Borderline), and had used his limited leverage to change the roles and the scripts available from the major studios. None of these routes had proved satisfying; none had offered him the chance to play parts commensurate with his sense of political responsibility. Reflecting on Robeson’s film career, Sidney Poitier, a leading figure in the subsequent generation of black performers, speaks sympathetically of the mix of “uneasiness” and admiration he feels when seeing Robeson on the screen: “None of that generation of black actors—Robeson, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters, Hat-tie McDaniel, Rochester, Frank Wilson—was given anything to play that did not characterize ‘minority roles.’ They were appendages to the other actors, the white actors. They were there almost as scenery. To have them as full-blooded individuals with the ability to think through their own problems and to chart their own course—American films were not into that. Difficult as it is today, it is nowhere near as impossible as it was for Robeson.”63