Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Wilkins also had at hand Ben Davis’s letter to Walter White, which White had passed on to him with a notation: “This letter … will make your ears singe if they haven’t been singed already by some of the other comrades.” He suggested to Wilkins that “it would be a good idea for it to be placed before the Board, if it meets with your approval, and then let the Board go on record as backing your position.” But that did not meet with Wilkins’s approval. “I do not favor bringing it to the Board,” he wrote back to White. “I have a few letters hitting the Robeson editorial and just as many praising it. The Davis letter is all in the day’s work of running a magazine.”32

  But although the issue did not come before the NAACP board, Roy Wilkins did agree to meet with what he called “the leading members of the Robeson front.” He told them he had received a total of fourteen letters of protest about the editorial, thirteen of them from miscellaneous “left-leaners.” (Mary Church Terrell, the distinguished community leader and reformer, may have been the fourteenth; she had already written Alphaeus Hunton to say she held Robeson “in the highest esteem” and to denounce the attempt to “belittle” his sacrifice and contribution.) Wilkins did not, he said, consider leftist displeasure to be “a very representative sample of support” for Robeson, and if his friends wanted to make an issue of the editorial, he “would simply cite the letters” as additional proof that Robeson was the spokesman for a tiny clique, not for all black people. “The Robeson matter died right there,” Wilkins later claimed. For good measure, he took an indirect swipe at Robeson in his speech at the fortieth annual convention of the NAACP that July: “We do not cry out bitterly that we love another land better than our own, or another people better than our own.”33

  But of course the controversy did not end there. The New York Times, probably echoing a widely held view among whites, commented in an editorial that Robeson was “mistaken and misled” in deciding to “devote his life to making speeches” and suggested that he return to using “his great gifts” as a concert artist: “We want him to sing, and to go on being Paul Robeson.” He did remain abroad for two months after his Paris speech, completing his concert tour. But additional developments in Europe further fed the dispute. Robeson had flown to Stockholm on the evening of April 20, immediately following his speech in Paris, and performed there the next day before an overflow crowd, part of which booed when he sang a Soviet song (irritating Robeson, according to an FBI report, “beyond control” and launching him into a speech “extremely critical of the treatment of the American Negro in America”). At a hostile press conference following the Stockholm concert—and not yet having heard about the instantaneous uproar his Paris speech had set off—he asked should blacks “ever fight against the only nation in the world [the U.S.S.R.] where racial discrimination is prohibited and where the people live freely? Never!” he answered, and then, using words he had avoided in his Paris speech (though they had been ascribed to him), he sounded as if he was claiming to speak on behalf of all black Americans: “I can assure you they will never fight against the Soviet Union or the People’s Democracies.” A few days later, Alphaeus Hunton, by telegraph and telephone, brought Robeson up to date on the outcry he had produced. On May 1 Paul wrote Freda Diamond (in his usual shorthand style), “This has been such a long, long ache that I’m numb.… I have read much of stuff from home. Distorted—but let it rest. There is just one thing I will stress: I said: ‘Negroes would fight for peace, would become Partisans of peace rather than be dragged into a war against the Soviet Union and East where there is no prejudice.’ I said: ‘Take a questionnaire and give Negro sharecropper an honest appraisal—peace with nations who are raising their former minorities, or war in interest of those who just refused him his civil rights.’” Then he added, “I can understand their using Walter, but Max!!! I’m ready enough.”34

  Hunton translated verbatim a French newspaper account of Robeson’s actual words in Paris, and as early as May 2 part of that text was printed in the National Guardian (and subsequently by limited portions of the black press—but not by establishment newspapers). Arriving in Copenhagen, Robeson gave an interview in which he issued a second denial, telling the reporter, “what I said has been distorted out of all recognition.” When he referred to “Negroes,” he had been thinking, besides Afro-Americans, of the 40 million West Indians and 115 million Africans, who obviously had no stake in a war against the Soviet Union—or any other designed to foster imperialist interests. In an accurate summary of the actual words he had used, he declared, “The emphasis in what I said in Paris was on the struggle for peace, not on anybody going to war against anybody.” Again no one seemed to be listening: his corrective remarks were not widely reprinted.35

  Robeson’s two concerts in Copenhagen had been arranged by the Liberal paper Politiken. When he learned that the paper advocated Denmark’s joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he asked to be released from his contract. Politiken complied, and Robeson sang under the auspices of Land og Folk, the Danish Communist paper. In Oslo, his next tour stop, Friheten, the chief organ of the Norwegian Communist Party, arranged a mass meeting at Youngstorget that drew a huge crowd and was climaxed by a singing of the “Internationale.” In addition to his regular concert, Robeson spoke five times while in Oslo—including talks to the Norwegian-Russian Society and the World Federation of Women for Peace. From Oslo he returned for another round of concerts in England, then embarked on the final leg of the tour, which called for stops in Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow.36

  Larry Brown decided against participating in the East European part of the trip, so Robeson brought along Bruno Raikin as his accompanist. Only recently arrived in England, Raikin was a white South African who had been involved in left-wing politics and been a personal friend of Dr. Yussef Dadoo, the South African Communist leader of Indian descent. Dadoo had introduced Raikin to Robeson, and the two men had quickly taken to each other. Fortunately Raikin could transpose music at sight, so he wasn’t unnerved by Robeson’s periodic request, sometimes five minutes before a performance, to “put it down, put it down”—to transpose to a lower key (Robeson was trying to save his voice, as he grew older, by shifting to a key closer to an extension of his speaking voice). Raikin still considers the trip with Robeson a high spot in his life—“He was a man of enormous generosity … a big man, not in size but in character. There was nothing puffed up about him.”37

  The hospitality that greeted them in Prague was lavish—luxurious suites of rooms, adoring crowds for the concerts, extravagant receptions hosted by the country’s highest dignitaries (including Czechoslovak President Gottwald). Arriving at the National Theater one night to hear Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Robeson entered just behind a British Communist leader who mistook the enormous applause as meant for him and—to general amusement—smilingly acknowledged the crowd. But not every segment of Czech opinion welcomed Robeson or thought well either of his musical tastes or his political friends. Josef Škvorecký, a young writer, jazz aficionado, and anti-Stalinist, later wrote bitterly of Robeson’s image among his circle:

  In place of [Stan] Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us, and how we hated that black apostle who sang, of his own free will, at open-air concerts in Prague at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horáková to the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in Czechoslovakia by Czechs, and at a time when great Czech poets (some ten years later to be “rehabilitated” without exception) were pining away in jails. Well, maybe it was wrong to hold it against Paul Robeson. No doubt he was acting in good faith, convinced that he was fighting for a good cause. But they kept holding him up to us as an exemplary “progressive jazzman,” and we hated him. May God rest his—one hopes—innocent soul.38

  Desmond Buckle, on the other hand, told Peter Blackman that Prague Party circles were full of rumors that Robeson was a U.S. spy, an agent, and that he had no political judgment. Robeson never hinted to Blackman that he was aware of
such a rumor—or aware that some young Czechs like Škvorecký resented his presence. Robeson spent his last evening in Prague talking with a group of blacks who had sought him out—perhaps having heard that earlier in his visit he had told a political rally that “ninety-five percent of United States Negro leadership is corrupt” (a remark reprinted in several black newspapers in the States). After the group left, Robeson went on talking to his old friend Marie Seton, whom he had unexpectedly met in the city, into the early morning hours:

  “‘You know, I have no illusion,’ he said, ‘I know how hard it’s going to be in America. I don’t know if I’ll live to see the end of the struggle.… I’ve overcome my fear of death, I never think about death now. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to Warsaw and then to Moscow. I’m going to the people I love. It’s my great wish to live among the Russians for a time before I die, but can you understand it? Even at this moment I’m homesick. Even this very night I’d rather be in America than any place on earth. I’ll go back. I’ll never leave America as long as there is something I can do.’”39

  Peter Blackman joined Robeson and Raikin in Warsaw. The city was unseasonably hot and (along with two factory concerts) Robeson sang in an outdoor stadium before a huge gathering. Though warned not to risk Polish resentment by singing in Russian, he did sing the Soviet “Fatherland Song”—after explaining to the crowd that he regretted not knowing enough Polish to communicate fluently with them in their native language. At the close, the audience gave him a standing ovation. After a moving tour of the field of brick once known as the Warsaw Ghetto, Robeson flew to Wroclaw, where he sang first in a factory and then, in the evening, in Liubdova Hall—to the same warm welcome: deputations of townspeople with flowers followed in a seemingly unending procession.40

  On June 4 Robeson arrived in Moscow in time for the celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s birth, accompanied by Blackman but not Raikin. The anti-“Zionist” campaign was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and Raikin—perhaps because he was Jewish—had been denied a visa. Raikin was not only surprised but “also a little bit shocked” that the Soviets would refuse to admit Robeson’s official accompanist (and at the last minute, to boot). But if Robeson took that as an insult, or a portent, he never showed it: he shrugged and told Raikin how sorry he was that the visa had failed to come through. Peter Blackman was at least as shocked—and angry—when the customs officials thoroughly searched Robeson at the Moscow airport. Again he shrugged the incident off, saying he was no more entitled than anyone else to preferential treatment. However, The New York Times was soon reporting that Robeson was being received in Russia with “greater acclaim than had been given in recent years to any United States visitor” (and reporting, too, that during a concert he had dedicated the song “Scandalize My Name” to “the international bourgeois press”). The Moscow press brimmed with laudatory interviews, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, journal of the Communist youth movement, published a series of articles by and about him. Addressing a concert crowd in Gorky Park, Robeson said he found it difficult to express “how deeply touched and moved” he was to be “on Soviet soil again” and declared in ringing tones, “I was, I am, always will be a friend of the Soviet people.”41

  But at the same time, Robeson himself felt some uneasiness over his inability to locate Jewish friends from previous visits to Moscow. Eisenstein had died in 1948. Solomon Mikhoels, the actor-director Robeson had known, admired, and played host to when he, along with the Jewish writer Itzik Feffer, had visited New York in 1943, had been found brutally murdered on January 13, 1948 (on Stalin’s personal order, it later turned out), his body smashed and mutilated. At the time, Mikhoels’s “mysterious” death had been widely mourned in the Jewish community, and the following month Robeson had participated in a memorial meeting for him in New York. But where was Itzik Feffer? Finally, on the eve of Robeson’s departure, his persistent inquiries produced Feffer (who, unbeknownst to Robeson, had been arrested on December 24, 1948). Feffer was brought, unaccompanied, to Robeson’s hotel. Paul later told his son—pledging him to silence during his lifetime—that Feffer, through mute gestures, had let him know that the room was bugged. The two kept their talk on the level of superficial pleasantries, while communicating essential facts through gestures and a few written notes. Mikhoels, Robeson learned, had been murdered by the secret police; other prominent Jewish cultural figures were under arrest; there had been a massive purge of the Leningrad Communist Party and of many in the Moscow Party, and Feffer’s own likely fate (here he drew a hand across his throat) would be execution (three years later he was shot). According to Peter Blackman, in the days that followed, Robeson never once verbalized any distress but—in perhaps an indirect signal—he did ask Blackman to “stick around” during the rest of their stay in Moscow, saying he wanted someone he knew with him. Blackman also recalls Robeson’s cautioning him to “watch what you say because they”—the Soviet Party—“think you are a nationalist.” “Nationalism,” like “Cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism,” had become a term of slander.42

  Robeson decided to conclude his last Moscow concert program with a direct reference to Feffer. Asking the audience for quiet, he announced that he would sing only one encore. Then he expressed with emotion the sense he had of the deep cultural ties between the Jewish peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union, and of how that tradition was being continued by the present generation of Russian-Jewish writers and actors. He then referred to his own friendship with Mikhoels and Feffer, and spoke of his great joy in having just come from meeting with Feffer again. Robeson then sang in Yiddish, to a hushed hall, “Zog Nit Kaynmal,” the Warsaw Ghetto resistance song, first reciting the words in Russian:

  … Never say that you have reached the very end,

  When leaden skies a bitter future may portend,

  For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive,

  And our marching steps will thunder: we survive! …

  After a moment’s silence, the stunned audience, Great Russians and Jews alike, responded with a burst of emotion, people with tears in their eyes coming up to the stage, calling out “Pavel Vasilyevich,” reaching out to touch him.43

  Having made that public gesture in Moscow in behalf of Feffer and other victims of Stalin’s policies—all that he could have done without directly threatening Feffer’s life—Robeson clammed up on returning to the United States. He told a reporter from Soviet Russia Today that the charges of anti-Semitism being laid against Russia in the Western press failed to square with what he had himself observed: “I met Jewish people all over the place.… I heard no word about it.” He reiterated his belief that the Soviets “had done everything” for their national minorities and recalled that while in Moscow he had attended the Kazakh Art Festival and had thought it “a tremendous thing that these people could be there with their literature, music, theater—not after a thousand years, but in hardly one generation.” To those who would say the Soviets had no black problem because they had no blacks, Robeson answered, “There are of course tens of millions of dark peoples there who would be vigorously Jim Crowed in the United States. Take the peoples of Georgia. The people you see in Tiflis; they are very dark, like the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans; and there are millions of yellow people—I have seen how the Chinese are treated in San Francisco.”44

  Robeson had come to believe so passionately that U.S. racism and imperialism were the gravest threats to mankind, including the real possibility in 1949 that the United States would launch a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union, that he felt public criticism of anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. would only serve to play into the hands of America’s dangerous right wing. If his judgment on that point ever wavered, he never revealed it. To the end of his life he would refuse to criticize the Soviets openly, never going further than to make the barest suggestion in private, to a few intimates, that injustice to some individuals must always be expected, however much to be regretted, in an attempt to creat
e a new world dedicated to bettering the lot of the many. He continued to believe that the best chance for reaching his primary goal—improving the condition of oppressed peoples—lay with the egalitarian impulses originally unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Convinced in the thirties of the Soviets’ unique freedom from racial prejudice, and seeing no major Western power in the ensuing years developing a comparable commitment to the welfare of its minorities, he resisted every pressure to convert any private disappointment he may have felt in the Soviet experiment into public censure.45

  Robeson touched down at La Guardia Airport on June 16. Some sixty friends (including Rockmore, Patterson, and Hunton) waited on the one side, two dozen police on the other. According to The New York Times, “twenty uniformed policemen [was] a routine number for the arrival of prominent personages at La Guardia,” but Robeson didn’t think so, and laconically contrasted leaving Eastern Europe surrounded by well-wishers with being greeted in New York by a grim police squad. FBI agents were present during the careful search made at customs of his luggage—the officials reporting that “no documents or papers were found that would indicate subversive activities.” Paul, Jr., having arrived home the week before with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Cornell, greeted his father first. (Essie had planned to meet the plane, too, but Paul’s last-minute shift in arrival dates had meant she was addressing the National Conference of Social Workers in Cleveland.) Robeson then turned to the waiting array of reporters and photographers.46