Paul Robeson
Page 52
An Associated Press dispatch purporting to “quote” from Robeson’s speech was picked up and reprinted across the United States:
We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels.… It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.…”16
Robeson had not spoken the words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. But almost no one paused to check its accuracy. And no one seems to have noticed that, even if Robeson had said the offending words, it would not have been the first time a prominent black figure had angrily asked whether blacks should fight in the country’s foreign wars; during World War II, A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger had thundered in an editorial, “No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it presently exists.” But Robeson’s (alleged) words were treated as if they were the unprecedented, overwrought excesses of a single misguided “fanatic.”17
The outcry was immediate, the denunciation fierce. The white press rushed to inveigh against him as a traitor; the black leadership hurried to deny he spoke for anyone but himself; agencies of the U.S. government excitedly exchanged memos speculating about possible grounds for asserting that he had forfeited his citizenship. Robeson was perceived as having stridden across—not merely crossed—an impermissible line. For many years his success had served white America doubly well: as proof that a “deserving” black man could make it in the system; and as one who, during the New Deal years anyway, had talked with appropriate optimism and patriotism about the country’s democratic promise. In the four years since Roosevelt’s death, Robeson’s increasingly disenchanted public pronouncements had steadily eroded his assigned image; the AP account from Paris suggested that he had now wholly discarded it. The showcase black American had turned out not to be suitably “representative” after all—and it became imperative to isolate and discredit him.18
Eager applicants for the job appeared on all sides. Anyone who could hold a pen—quite a few of whom had apparently learned to wield it like a machete—seemed impelled to comment. The gloating of the right-wing press (Robeson “may hereafter be dismissed and forgotten”) came as no surprise. Less predictable were the swiftness and severity with which the black establishment moved to distance itself. Black leaders, in the forties, were supposed to “act nice” and “not make a lot of noise,” not call militant attention to a militant set of goals, however much they might in fact be in sympathy with them. Most of the black leadership believed at the time that hope for accomplishing even a modest civil-rights program hinged on placating the white power structure, convincing it that blacks had benign and patriotic aims.
Walter White, responding to a request from the State Department, immediately issued a statement. He cautioned that white America “would be wise to abstain from denunciation of the Paul Robesons for extremist statements until it removes the causes of the lack of faith in the American system of government” that Robeson exemplified. White even acknowledged that “many Negroes will be glad he [Robeson] spoke as he did if it causes white Americans to wake up to the determination of Negroes to break the shackles which race prejudice fastens upon them.” But White then went on to reaffirm that “Negroes are Americans. We contend for full and equal rights and we accept full and equal responsibilities. In event of any conflict that our nation has with any other nation, we will regard ourselves as Americans and meet the responsibilities imposed on all Americans.” Walter White’s voice turned out to be the moderate one in a nationwide assault on Robeson that became instantly vituperative (Robeson “is just plain screwy,” the black columnist Earl Brown wrote in the New York Amsterdam News).19
Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph’s chief lieutenant, later remembered “very distinctly” Roy Wilkins’s phoning Randolph and asking him to convene a meeting of black leaders. According to Rustin, Randolph himself “had no objections whatever to calling upon blacks not to participate in the military” (soon after, during the Korean War, he successfully threatened to call for a black boycott of the armed services if Truman failed to issue an executive order dismantling segregation, and Rustin acknowledged that Robeson “had sort of helped lay a radical approach to this matter”). But Randolph and other black leaders did object, according to Rustin, to Robeson’s stressing “politics” (the Soviet theme) over “principle” (the issue of a segregated armed forces). “Paul was saying they shouldn’t go into the army to fight against Communists”; Randolph was saying they shouldn’t go into a segregated army “to fight against anybody.” In Rustin’s view, Robeson had further compounded the risk that blacks would be branded “black and red” by making his announcement on foreign soil—“There’s a sort of unwritten law that if you want to criticize the United States you do it at home; it’s a corollary of the business where you’re just a nigger if you stand up and criticize colored folks in front of white folks—it’s not done.… We have to prove that we’re patriotic.” Besides, Rustin added, there was resentment against Robeson’s assuming the posture of political leadership when in fact he “did not ever take any organizational responsibility for what was happening in the black community.… Here is a man who is making some other country better than ours, and we’ve got to sit here and take the gaff, while he is important enough to traipse all over the country, to be lionized by all these white people, saying things for which he will not take any responsibility.”20
Rustin himself made arrangements for the “meeting of black leaders,” and according to him “most” of the civil-rights establishment showed up, a total of about twenty people, including both Randolph and Roy Wilkins. The meeting was designed to create “a united front to make sure that America understood that the current black leadership totally disagreed with Robeson.” There was no thought of approaching Robeson himself: “The general theory was that he was being used, and anybody who had to barter with him on these issues was going to end up being used, too, if not by the Soviets, by Robeson himself.” The meeting decided that the most effective strategy would be not to issue a joint statement—“That’s the habit in the black community,” Rustin explained, “not to look as if there’s been an organized effort” but, rather, to have a group of similar statements emanate from what would appear to be a variety of quarters.21
In a statement read at all services of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, of which he was pastor, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., proclaimed, “By no stretch of the imagination can Robeson speak for all Negro people.” Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women, told the press, “American Negroes have always been loyal to America, they always will be”; Robeson “does not speak for the National Council, and I am not aware that any other national Negro organization has appointed or designated him to speak for them in Paris.” Charles H. Houston, the prominent Washington attorney and chairman of the NAACP legal staff, said, “We would fight any enemy of this country,” Robeson’s view to the contrary. Edgar G. Brown, director of the National Negro Council, characterized Robeson’s speech as “pure Communist propaganda.” Channing Tobias, who had recently become head of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, declared that Robeson’s statement marked him “not only an ingrate but a striking example of disloyalty.” And Bishop William Jacob Walls of the A.M.E. Zion Church insisted that, in defense of “religious liberty in the greatest adventure in self government in the world—the American nation,” the “colored race” would move “at the command of the American republic.” Du Bois, scheduled to give the June commencement address at Morgan College, received word from the college president begging him “frantically not to come” because he had “‘been present’ when Robeson spoke in Paris.”22
And so it went, with the designated leaders of every major black organizati
on stepping forward—without waiting to learn whether Robeson had been quoted accurately in Paris—to declare their loyalty to the nation and to cast out the reprobate son. But what the black establishment felt it had to do publicly did not represent the full range of its reaction to Robeson. “It is very difficult to know what black leaders and others think from what they say,” Rustin cautions. It was important, he feels, for “the public to see that Robeson was completely isolated,” but in fact it was recognized that the radically outspoken position he had taken “was ultimately a positive thing to have done.” His “wild” statement helped to make their demands, by comparison, appear reasonable and even modest; his implied threats of future disorder made the passage of their “responsible, middle-of-the-road” program seem more urgently necessary. As blacks would analogously say in the sixties, “First we had to have the riots; then we got the Great Society.”23
In denying Robeson’s “fantastic and presumptuous” claim (which in fact he had never made) to speak for blacks, the black leadership in turn never hesitated to assert its own summary of “the general feeling of the Negro masses” (in Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s phrase). Yet it is not at all clear that their representations were either more legitimate or more accurate than Robeson’s. Indeed, the popular reaction in the black community to his alleged remarks in Paris did not fully coincide with the black leadership’s presentation of it.
“Ordinary” black citizens had long known that allies are always imperfect and that conservatives are always fond of linking the black struggle with Communist subversion—and accordingly had been far more indifferent than whites to the official description of the Cold War as a Manichaean contest between good and evil. As one editorial letter put it, “a person does not have to be a Communist, a fellow-traveler, or ‘to echo the Communist line’ in order to be conscious of the thousands of indignities suffered daily by Negroes.” “There is hardly a Negro living in the South,” a black newspaper in North Carolina editorialized, “who, at some time or another, has not felt as Robeson expressed himself as being unwilling to lay down his life for a country that insults, lynches and restricts him to a second-class citizenship, whether it be in a war against Russia, Germany or Great Britain.” And in the Pittsburgh Courier the columnist Marjorie McKenzie wrote, “Paul’s remark that Negroes in the U.S. will refuse to fight an imperialistic war against Russia burns along the edges of the American conscious [sic] like sagebrush in a forest fire.… I think the vitality of Paul’s remark lives on because it suggests, though it does not articulate, a deeper question.… He must see the present political and economic context as an impossible vehicle for Negro aspirations. Else he would not advocate that Negroes should, not predict that they will, react in so drastic a fashion. If our situation is truly hopeless at the hands of a Truman administration and its successors, [the] revolt against selective service for a war makes sense.… The Government ought to regard the exaggerated response to Paul’s statement as a storm signal.”24
Such views were directly at variance with the contentions of Max Yergan. In a lengthy letter he fired off to the Herald Tribune (which was printed in full), he denounced Robeson’s statements as having had “as their purpose the vicious and cynical effort which Communists in America have for a long time been putting forth to drive a wedge between American Negroes and their fellow American citizens.…” He also denounced Robeson’s actions on the Council on African Affairs as “disgracefully unfair and undemocratic” and condemned him for his “slavish following of the Communist instructions with regard to the organization.…” In his own view, Yergan added, “this country is moving forward on all fronts and in all of its geographical areas in bringing about social well being, democracy and a realization of constitutional guarantees for all of its citizens.”25
The black columnist (and Communist) Abner Berry angrily disputed the right of “the cold-war boys” like Yergan to repudiate Robeson in the name of fifteen million blacks, doubting whether their “breast-beating declarations” of patriotism could succeed in tying most Afro-Americans to a “my country right or wrong” stand. A black technical sergeant wrote to the New York Age, “As a vet who put in nearly five years in our Jim Crow Army, I say Paul Robeson speaks more for the real colored people than the Walter Whites and Adam Powells.… I saw the U.S. bring democracy to Italy, while white officers kept informing the Italians that the [black] 92nd Infantry men were rapists and apes.” Ben Davis, Jr., believed that blacks had “gotten pretty sick and tired of Truman’s empty talk and Republican lies about civil rights, and are not in any mood to die in a jimcrow war,” particularly not to fight against the colonial peoples of Africa, Asia, and the West Indies to safeguard the profits of a minority of whites. But Du Bois probably struck the bottom-line note in declaring, “I agree with Paul Robeson absolutely that Negroes should never willingly fight in an unjust war. I do not share his honest hope that all will not. A certain sheep-like disposition, inevitably born of slavery, will, I am afraid, lead many of them to join America in any enterprise, provided the whites will grant them equal rights to do wrong.”26
With Paul still in Europe, Essie decided to join the debate. At a Progressive Party dinner at the Hotel Commodore in New York, she directly took on “the professional Negro leaders” who had “rushed into print” to deny the mere suggestion that black Americans might not enthusiastically take up arms in defense of the republic. Even if the black establishment did speak for the “theoretical 2 million” of their followers, who, she asked, spoke for “the other 12 million unorganized Negroes—the vast majority of the Negro people?” She believed the large majority of blacks would rally to the defense of the country if it were invaded, but that was not the same as going off “to fight a war in Greece for a King the Greeks don’t want, to fight a war in China for Chiang Kai-shek whom the Chinese people don’t want.” She claimed that “every sensible Negro in this country—professional leaders notwithstanding—feels that if he must fight any future war for Democracy, the proper place to begin such a fight is RIGHT HERE.” Why? Because “our country keeps telling us, time after time, in heartbreaking ways, that we have no rights and privileges as American citizens—except those it chooses to grant us when it feels indulgent.”27
Paul was angry at Essie for not having consulted with Alphaeus Hunton before presuming to quote “exactly” words he in fact had not said at Paris. But William Patterson, still believing, apparently, that the quote was accurate, wrote Paul that Essie had dealt skillfully and effectively with those—among their own people—who were “crawling on their bellies trying to prove worthy” of the esteem of the very people who were assailing their constitutional rights. Congressman Vito Marcantonio was so impressed with Essie’s speech that he read it into the Congressional Record, and the Progressive Party stalwart Charles P. Howard wrote her that he thought it was “tremendous”—“the finest answer I have ever heard to the question of the Negro’s loyalty.” Howard himself was among the few nationally prominent blacks to defend Robeson publicly. He took the lead, along with Ben Davis Jr., when a venomous editorial in the May 1949 issue of The Crisis, official organ of the NAACP, pushed the debate to a still more strident level.28
The unsigned editorialist (Roy Wilkins) was not content to insist that in his Paris speech Robeson “was speaking for himself.” The column went on to imply that “his record of service to his race” hardly entitled him to even a personal opinion. The sum total of Robeson’s contribution, Wilkins asserted, was to have “inspired them by his singing and given them a ‘great one’ to cite in their briefs for better treatment.” As for the rest, Robeson had simply concentrated on making money and keeping his fellow blacks at “a safe distance.… While Negroes in Dixie were struggling to do something about conditions here and now, Mr. Robeson was lavishing his attention on an outfit called the Council on African Affairs, long ago labeled a Communist front by the Department of Justice.” In truth, the Crisis editorial concluded, “Robeson has none except sentimental roots among
American Negroes. He is one of them, but not with them.”29
The editorial is “one of the dirtiest, gutter attacks upon Paul that I’ve ever seen,” Ben Davis Jr. wrote Essie, and “from a source that considers itself progressive and decent.” He correctly guessed that it had been the work of Roy Wilkins, not Walter White. Ben Davis believed that other members of the NAACP board—like Louis Wright, the chairman, and an old friend of the Robesons’—agreed with “the mild liberal tendencies of Walter” and, unlike Roy Wilkins, “would not stoop to such a malicious slander.” He therefore advised against attacking the whole NAACP, though he himself did write directly to Walter White, denouncing Wilkins’s editorial as “one of the most shocking personal attacks upon a great American leader I have ever seen.”30
But Charles P. Howard felt otherwise. He had toured the country, sometimes with Robeson, for the Progressive Party, and was smarting at the NAACP for having extolled the virtues of Truman in the recent election—even while claiming to be a nonpartisan organization. Writing directly to Wilkins, Howard exploded with anger at the Crisis editorial in particular and the NAACP in general: “The NAACP is no longer best serving the people whom it was organized to serve, but has been sidetracked into serving the very interests it was organized to fight.” “It is inexcusable,” he continued, for a publication like The Crisis to assault Robeson: “Nobody may have ever heard it around NAACP Headquarters, but Paul Robeson is recognized by the great masses of the Negro people as more nearly their ideal leader than all of the Walter Whites and Roy Wilkinses in the country and he doesn’t get a dime for doing it, only the kicks of Negroes who ought to be appreciating him.” How dare The Crisis defame the man as having only “sentimental roots” among black people—a man who had given up his concert, radio, and stage career for a year “to go out and sing and fight for the common people”? “Even school children know that fact.”31