Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The dwindling base of support for the Robeson-Du Bois position was further highlighted in September, when the NAACP board voted to sack Du Bois from his position as director of special research. The action was widely deplored in the black community, and Robeson devoted nearly his entire speech at a Progressive Party rally in Chicago on September 14 to denouncing the summary dismissal of “this patriarch of the Negro people,” this man who had refused to permit the NAACP “to be utilized as a tool for the Truman Administration in the prosecution of a foreign policy that would enslave Negro peoples throughout the world while paying lip service to democracy at home.” But the dismissal stuck. And so did the red label to the Progressives. By late summer the lesser-of-two-evils theory had come to hold sway with many liberals; they preferred to believe in the authenticity of Truman’s newly acquired Rooseveltian rhetoric, because the prospect of the election of Republican Thomas E. Dewey was abhorrent. The persistent charge that the Progressives were “reds,” in combination with the fear that Dewey would waltz through any division in liberal ranks, drove off large numbers of Progressive Party adherents. The only remaining question was just how severe its electoral defeat would be.45

  Robeson maintained an optimistic stance, at least for public consumption, up to the end of the campaign. In a radio broadcast with Henry Wallace on October 29, he described himself as full of “tremendous hope,” and in strong language denounced Truman’s civil-rights program as “a program on paper—of words—it has nothing to do with the background of terror, the atmosphere of horror in which most Negroes live.… No, Truman is with Dewey—words, only words: empty lies, vicious lies. Truman is with the Dixiecrats in deeds.”46

  On election night Robeson sang to the hundreds of campaign workers and supporters who gathered at Progressive Party headquarters in New York to await the returns. They proved even more disheartening than expected. Wallace’s popular vote was only slightly over one million—less than the total given to J. Strom Thurmond, presidential candidate of those Dixiecrats who had bolted the Democratic Party in protest over its promise to extend civil rights to blacks. In electing Harry Truman, the nation seemed to be giving sanction to his “get-tough” policy with Communists abroad and at home—and their “sympathizers” as well. Truman was to waste no time in exercising that mandate.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Paris Speech and After

  (1949)

  “I do not fear the next four years,” Robeson told a reporter ten days after the election. Talking to the National Guardian (the new non-Communist left-wing paper, which Un-American Activities instantly labeled “notoriously Stalinist”), he elaborated, “I do not foresee the success of American reaction. I see only its attempt and its failure. By 1950 there will be no fascist threat in our land.” Exuding public confidence, he immediately set off on a concert tour through Jamaica and Trinidad. The FBI set off with him, its agents alerted to watch for any evidence of “non-musical function.” They found none. Robeson himself found his “first breath of fresh air in many years.” Although Jamaica and Trinidad were still under British rule, “for the first time I could see what it will be like when Negroes are free in their own land. I felt something like what a Jew must feel when first he goes to Israel, what a Chinese must feel entering areas of his country that are now free.” Robeson’s gratis, open-air concert at the Kingston race course was so jammed (estimates range from fifty thousand to eighty thousand) that a small building crowded with spectators collapsed. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, he laid the cornerstone for Beryl McBurnie’s Little Carib Theater, an attempt to use “the music and dance of the people to arouse a national consciousness and pride of heritage.” His concert in Port of Spain was greeted with “a spontaneous demonstration of hero worship [that] has never been equalled in this community.” As Robeson told the National Guardian, “If I never hear another kind word again, what I received from my people in the West Indies will be enough for me.”1

  He would need the remembered solace. By December, when he returned to the States, the forces of reaction, whose ultimate success Robeson doubted, were moving into high gear. A threatened Dixiecrat filibuster in the Senate seemed likely to block any action on civil rights. The Mundt-Nixon Bill, with strengthened provisions, was reintroduced in Congress. The Truman “loyalty-oath” program for civil-service employees was fully operative. In Trenton, New Jersey, an all-white jury, on transparently trumped-up charges, condemned six blacks (the “Trenton Six”) to death for murder. And in New York, the Smith Act trial of the twelve Communist Party leaders began its initial skirmishing. Life magazine took the occasion to applaud the Yale football squad’s election of a black captain, Levi Jackson, as proof that the American Way “worked” and that the “extremist” tactics of a Paul Robeson were as unnecessary as they were misguided. On January 17, 1949, J. Edgar Hoover specifically requested that the New York FBI Office update its files on Robeson: “… it is felt that in view of the tense international situation at the present time, a new report should be submitted setting forth the extent of the subject’s present activities in connection with the Communist Party and related groups.…”2

  Robeson maintained his political activity on all fronts. At the end of January 1949 he joined six hundred eighty delegates to the legislative conference of the Civil Rights Congress (his old friend William Patterson was now its national executive secretary) in Washington, D.C. The night before the gathering, Walter Winchell warned the American people in a national broadcast that the delegates were coming armed with baseball bats. Government officials needed no inducement to bar the doors. President Truman refused to see a group of CRC delegates that included Bessie Mitchell (whose brother and two relatives sat in Trenton’s death house) and the widow of Isaiah Nixon, who had been killed when he tried to vote in Georgia. Vice-President Barkley, cornered in a corridor by another group of CRC delegates, expressed the view that nothing could be done about Jim Crow in the capital, and, when asked what measures the government would take to prevent further lynchings, turned his back and returned to the Senate chamber. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee, told the delegation that came to see him, “The only reason Negroes are segregated is because the army’s so big.” Representative McCormick of Massachusetts remarked to the group of delegates who visited his office to protest the Smith Act trials that “Communists are not Americans—they’re outside the law.”3

  Returning to New York, Robeson put in an appearance at the Foley Square courthouse in New York, where the trial of the Communist leadership was about to begin. He shook hands with each of the defendants, announced, “I, too, am on trial,” explained that he was there not only as a private citizen but as cochairman of the Progressive Party, as a leader of the Civil Rights Congress, and as chairman of the Council on African Affairs, and stated that Communists had risked their lives for his people as early as the Scottsboro case.4

  Attempting to get a postponement of the trial on the assumption (incorrect, it turned out) that with sufficient time a mass movement could be mobilized to protest the indictments, the CPUSA leaders launched a challenge to the court’s system of jury selection. Robeson joined the challenge. Along with forty others (including Dashiell Hammett, William Patterson, Vito Marcantonio, Muriel Draper, Fur Workers union President Ben Gold, and Howard Fast), he called an emergency conference to demand reform of a nonrepresentative jury system that precluded the prospects of a fair trial. The protest succeeded in demonstrating that handpicked juries overrepresenting white male professionals and under-representing minorities, the poor and women, did not afford—as the Constitution guaranteed—a jury trial by one’s peers. But Harold Medina, the judge sitting on the case—a brilliant jurist who on the Communist issue tended to be alternately flippant and abrasive—ruled that they had not demonstrated the deliberate exclusion of the underrepresented, and after six months of skirmishing turned down all further defense motions for postponement. Medina ordered the trial to begin on March 7, 1949, at Foley Square. T
he symbolic judicial battle of the Cold War was about to begin. Robeson, by then, was in Europe on an extended concert tour, but he publicly announced that he would return to testify at the trial whenever needed.5

  The overseas tour was a replacement for eighty-five concert dates within the United States that had been canceled. Robeson’s agents, Columbia Artists Management, had had no initial trouble in booking the engagements at top fees after Robeson decided, in the fall of 1948, to return to the professional concert stage. But following the presidential election, and in the wake of the furor surrounding the indictment of left-wing filmmakers subsequently known as the “Hollywood Ten,” the entertainment industry took a quick dive to the right; local agents caved in and canceled Robeson’s bookings. The symptoms of reaction were growing ominous, but the unexpected offer of an extended European concert tour temporarily took Robeson away from the heat.6

  Starting in the British Isles late in February 1949, he and Larry Brown began a four-month tour that demonstrated that in Europe, at least, Robeson’s popularity had not diminished. It had been nearly a decade since his last appearance in Britain, but he had not been forgotten—the tour was “something like a triumphal procession,” Desmond Buckle (a black member of the British CP) reported to William Patterson. The concerts were sellouts, and, as Larry wrote Essie, “the English public seems as fond if not fonder of Paul than ever.” (“Felt almost like Frank Sinatra,” Robeson later said.)7

  Despite his reception, Robeson felt disquieted, for the first time in his memory “homesick.” It had “never even occurred” to him before that “such a thing was possible—but I really am. This will remain for me the outstanding fact of this tour. A truly qualitative dialectical change. I think it has much to do with the Struggle—my being so much a part of it—it is the most important in the world today—I’m sure of that—But it also has something to do with people who have become very dear to me.”8

  Robeson wrote those sentiments to Helen Rosen, a woman he had first met when playing Othello on Broadway. She had been doing volunteer work for the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions (a forerunner of the Progressive Party), and Paul used to drop in to ASP headquarters, which were just around the corner from the theater. Helen invited him home to dinner one night, and the Rosens ultimately became close friends. She was a fifth-generation New Yorker of the Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish van Dernoot family (Paul used to call her teasingly “Miss van Der Snoot”). Both her parents were lawyers, and she herself had been educated at the Ethical Culture School and Wellesley College. In 1928 she married Sam Rosen, who became a well-known ear specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Sam was warm, perceptive, and outgoing; Helen, the driving force behind the couple’s political commitment, was dynamic, beautiful, immensely shrewd about people, and indomitable, a woman whose integrity, emotional and political, could not be breached (Sam once said she “had a whim of steel”). In every way she was the kind of woman to whom Robeson was drawn. The Rosens would both be devoted to Paul for the rest of his life. Helen would become one of his few intimates.9

  But Robeson was not writing to Helen Rosen of his “homesickness” merely to signal his growing attachment to her. In several letters written to Freda Diamond at the same time, he confided to her, too, that “for the first time, I can’t transfer and function.” He “had been going every moment,” and he was eager to come home. “This time,” he wrote her, “I’ve no desire to see anyone here in general or particular. Have many friends but it’s so hard to get started. I just want to get concerts done (these are very important) and return.… About the first time that this has happened. I evidently—whatever the difficulties—pressures, etc.—like my life back there—and I’m afraid I like the whole pattern—whole mosaic—so to say.…” He also acknowledged to Freda in a subsequent letter that “somewhere, at most unexpected times, I do something to destroy much of your security. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. But I know that I love you very deeply and know that you are certainly one of [the] people dearest to me in this world.…” Indeed, Robeson would never lose his deep affection for Freda Diamond, but increasingly, after his return to the States, his emotional life would come to be centered more and more on Helen Rosen.10

  During the four-month tour in Britain, Peter Blackman, a left-wing West Indian writer living in London, helped Desmond Buckle look after Paul’s arrangements, serving as general aide to him. Blackman was appalled at the “creative chaos” of Paul’s habits—a suitcase full of unanswered mail, an obliviousness to the mechanics of daily living—and wrote Ben Davis, Jr., to complain that the Party, in not helping Paul to organize himself better, was showing insufficient appreciation for his unique importance. Davis wrote back genially, reminding Blackman that the entire leadership of the Party was currently fighting for its life in court and reassuring him that Paul was recognized as “one of the brightest jewels of the international working class movement,” though “the magnitude of the man is so overwhelming that it is difficult to contain him.”11

  Robeson made several political appearances while in Britain, most notably at a conference called in London by the India League to protest Premier Malan’s apartheid “revolution” of 1948 in South Africa. The Coordinating Committee of Colonial Peoples sponsored the event, and Krishna Menon, later India’s controversial delegate to the United Nations, and Dr. Yussef M. Dadoo, the Communist Indian leader of the African National Congress in South Africa, organized it. An East African student in the audience described Robeson’s oratory as “thrilling … the great voice was low and soft but with the suggestion of enormous power behind it.… The audience sat intent and still.… This was no trickster.… There was emotion in his voice all right … but all that he said was carefully reasoned.… There was forcefulness indeed but no arrogance. Instead, there was humility, combined with a deep pride in his race.… [But] he did not confine himself to the struggle of his own race for freedom. He is evidently a man who has got beyond mere racialism. He told us about the Chinese. He described white people of English descent he had seen living in appalling conditions in America. In many parts of the world there were black spots of Fascism, whatever name it might be called by locally and [he said] it was his business and the business of freedom-loving people everywhere to combat it.…” Following the meeting, the South African government—about to become a loyal U.S. ally in the Cold War, in return for Washington’s working to postpone any direct UN action on South-West Africa—announced that henceforth the playing of Paul Robeson’s records on the radio would be banned. Robeson told the Manchester Guardian that the only parallel he could think of was when the Nazi gauleiter of Norway banned his records during the war—“But the Norwegian underground still played them right through the occupation.”12

  Robeson was not deflected from giving outspoken support to the liberation movements in South Africa and Kenya. In the fifties, mostly through the auspices of the Council on African Affairs, he would keep his unintimidated voice raised in behalf of his “African brothers and sisters … jailed by the Malan Government for peacefully resisting segregation and discrimination” and tried and imprisoned in Kenya “for insisting upon the return of their land.” Invited by Oliver Tambo in 1954 to send a message to the African National Congress at its annual conference, Robeson forcefully linked arms with its struggle:

  I know that I am ever by your side, that I am deeply proud that you are my brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces—that I sprang from your forebears. We come from a mighty, courageous people, creators of great civilizations in the past, creators of new ways of life in our own time and in the future. We shall win our freedoms together. Our folk will have their place in the ranks of those shaping human destiny.13

  In April 1949 Robeson went to Paris to attend the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace. Tensions and suspicion were running high on both sides of the Cold War. The Chinese Communists had captured Nanking and were advancing to the outskirts of Shanghai, the symbol of We
stern influence in East Asia. The New York Times termed the Communist advance “a cataclysmic development” which “doomed the first buds of a Chinese democracy that sprouted under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule.” The imminent Communist victory in China, the Times warned, had resulted from the “fatal miscalculation” of trying to negotiate with Communists; “all Asia” was now threatened “with a similar fate” unless “more effective steps” were taken “to insulate” the Chinese Communists. Simultaneously, hearings were in progress before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on passage of the North Atlantic Treaty, a mutual-defense pact among the Western powers that the Soviets denounced as yet another harbinger of (in the words of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the French Communist atomic scientist) “a new war they are preparing.”14

  In this heated international atmosphere, two thousand delegates from fifty nations gathered in Paris for the World Peace Congress. Du Bois headed the American delegation; Picasso, Louis Aragon, and J. D. Bernal were among the celebrated figures in attendance; and Robeson and Joliot-Curie were the most prominently featured speakers. The State Department denounced the gathering in advance as “part of the current Cominform effort to make people think … that all of the Western powers are governed by warmongers.” By the time Robeson stepped up for his turn at the podium, Du Bois, Joliet-Curie, Pietro Nenni of Italy, and the British left-wing leader Konni Zilliacus had already ignited the delegates, Zilliacus saying, “workers of Britain will not fight or be dragged into fighting against the Soviet Union.” Robeson sang to the gathering and then made some brief remarks, most of them unexceptional echoes from a dozen previous and more elaborate speeches in which he had spoken out for colonial peoples still denied their rights. But then he tacked on a less familiar refrain. The wealth of America, he said, had been built “on the backs of the white workers from Europe … and on the backs of millions of blacks.… And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. (Applause.) We shall not make war on anyone. (Shouts.) We shall not make war on the Soviet Union. (New shouts.)” Though Robeson could not know it at the time, those comparatively innocuous words (scarcely different from those Zilliacus had just used) were to reverberate around the world, marking a fateful divide in his life.15