Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Even some of the leaders of the CPUSA thought he ought to tone down his rhetoric. They had no trouble with the content, but did worry about the timing. On trial as “subversives,” a segment of the Party leadership feared that Robeson’s “refusal-to-fight-the-Soviets” line had inadvertently painted them as disloyal. Paul Robeson, Jr., recalls that one evening late in December 1949 his father asked that he accompany him to a West Side apartment. On entering, Paul, Jr., recognized several leaders of the Party, including the then chairman, Henry Winston. After some cordial talk, Winston suggested to Robeson that perhaps for the time being he might consider confining himself to singing—which to Paul, Jr., implied that Winston was urging his father to accept a rumored State Department “deal” to call off its surveillance if he returned to “art.” Paul, Jr., “felt” his father’s body stiffen; “I instinctively started to raise my right hand to block a blow which I thought he might direct at Winston’s head.” Robeson gripped the arms of his chair and, eyes narrowed, simply stared at Winston. “There was this dead silence, with everybody frozen. And he said, ‘No, Winnie, I don’t think that would be too good an idea.’ He sounded like a lion growling.” Then he rose and, his son following, went out the door. In Paul, Jr.’s view, Henry Winston and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn actually led a movement within the Party to issue some kind of disclaimer of Robeson’s Paris statement, but Ben Davis succeeded in derailing it. Paul, Jr., believes his father disliked Winston but was fond of Gurley Flynn. Politically, he felt close to neither; his own sympathies lay more with the Ben Davis-William Z. Foster “left-wing” faction in the Party, and sometimes with the centrist Eugene Dennis, whom he liked greatly. But finally, in the words of Doxey Wilkerson, Robeson “was bigger than the Party. He was an institution, if you will. He managed to deflect the kinds of jealousies that would ordinarily be leveled against a person of great magnitude. Everybody knew he was straight, honest, and what he wanted to do. He was universally respected.”4

  That same week of December 1949, Robeson joined Du Bois, Patterson, Alphaeus Hunton, Ben Davis, Doxey Wilkerson, and others in cabling greetings to Joseph Stalin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The New York Amsterdam News commented that “when these ‘left wing Negro leaders’ go on record with expressions of love for the arch enemy of America, then we can expect the boys who run this country to suspect their motives … plac[ing] them even further on Uncle Sam’s black list.” Indeed, Army Intelligence reported to the FBI that “the Communists plan to shuttle Paul Robeson to rallies throughout the United States with the express intention of provoking riots and spreading propaganda to the effect that the Communist Party is ‘shedding blood’ in the interest of racial equality.” FBI surveillance became so constant that Robeson got to the point where he recognized plainclothesmen—though he did not let on, to avoid alarming his friends.5

  Robeson did continue to travel and speak out, but his outlets were narrowing. He gave his first major address of the new year, 1950, at the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in February. At meetings just prior to the convention, the Progressive Party leaders agreed to disagree about the Tito-Stalin split (Robeson sided with Moscow), to unite behind a call for pardons for the eleven Communist leaders prosecuted under the Smith Act, and to emphasize commitment to the black struggle for civil rights. In his own remarks to the convention, Henry Wallace gave a speech that bordered on being anti-Communist (a few months later he would break with the Progressives over the issue of the Korean War, offering his support to the Truman administration). When Robeson’s turn came to address the delegates, he confined himself almost entirely to the issue of civil rights, barely alluding to the Soviet Union. He excoriated the two major parties for keeping blacks in a condition of second-class citizenship and praised the “magnificent role” of the Progressive Party in battling for civil rights, in having “proven to the Negro people that we mean what we say.” The delegates elected him cochairman.6

  The country was in no mood for an appeal to tolerance. “Bad news” had begun to arrive with regularity, fraying nerves, souring the national disposition. Judith Coplon, a Justice Department employee, was arrested by FBI agents during an alleged rendezvous with a Soviet official and charged with espionage. Russia exploded an atomic device. The British scientist Klaus Fuchs was arrested and charged with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The State Department released its White Paper on China, conceding “the unfortunate” victory of the Communists. (When the news of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat came over the radio in October 1949, Paul and Helen and Sam Rosen headed out into the street on their way to an appointment and then, in a burst of high spirits, linked arms and sang “Cheelai,” the Chinese Communist song, at the top of their lungs—to the general astonishment of passers-by.) Late in January 1950, a New York jury found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury. Richard Nixon charged the administration with suppressing evidence of Hiss’s Communist connections. The right-wing press came close to labeling Secretary of State Dean Acheson a traitor. Senator Joe McCarthy journeyed to Wheeling, West Virginia, to deplore American impotence in the world and to hint darkly about the infiltration of the “enemy” into the highest echelons of the State Department.7

  In the midst of this crescendo of alarm, Eleanor Roosevelt’s son Elliot announced that Paul Robeson would appear on his mother’s Sunday afternoon television show, “Today with Mrs. Roosevelt,” to debate with Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the black Mississippi Republican committeeman Perry Howard on “the role of the Negro in American political life.” He might just as well have announced the imminent appearance of the devil. NBC at once received hundreds of hostile phone calls; the state commander of the American Legion told the press that Robeson’s purpose would be to incite “hatred and bigotry”; the Catholic War Veterans demanded that the networks protect “decent Americans” from exposure to anti-American propaganda; and the Hearst paper the New York Journal-American put its front page anti-Robeson story right next to an article hailing Senator McCarthy for having “named” two “pro-Communist” State Department employees.8

  Less than twenty-four hours after Robeson’s appearance had been announced, it was canceled. An NBC spokesman told the press that Mrs. Roosevelt had been “premature” and Paul Robeson would not appear on her program—indeed, would never appear on NBC as long as the network could help it—thereby making him the first American to be officially banned from television. Robeson told reporters that he hoped “Mrs. Roosevelt and Elliot Roosevelt will struggle, as I am sure they will, for the civil rights of everyone to be heard.… I cannot and will not accept the notion that because someone is accused of being a Communist or a ‘Communist sympathizer’ that he has no right to speak.” (This was precisely the right he had argued against extending to Trotskyists eight months earlier.) Howard Fast challenged Mrs. Roosevelt to speak out against censorship at a Robeson concert scheduled for the following week, but Mrs. Roosevelt declined any comment except for the non sequitur—after reporters pressed her—that the television discussion was to have been a “general” one and Robeson would not have had “unlimited time to express his point of view.” When a private citizen wrote to ask her why she had not publicly objected to cancellation of the program, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “… because I was away and in any case, the National Broadcasting Company has the final say on these programs. I can, of course, think of several other negro Americans who are better qualified to speak than Mr. Robeson because they are more objective. However, I would not be afraid of anything Mr. Robeson might say.”9

  Refraining from any attack on the Roosevelts, Robeson aimed his fire at NBC. The banning was “a sad commentary on our professions of democracy,” he said, but he was not surprised that the network had balked at a candid discussion of “the Negro in politics”—it had always balked at any but stereotyped presentations of blacks (while freely opening its airways to white supremacists) and had consistently refused to hire any skilled blacks in its army of technicians. Support for Robeso
n came from limited quarters only. The Afro-American printed an editorial censorious of the NBC action—and soon after named Robeson to its 1950 National Honor Roll—but most of the black press remained silent. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., registered a protest, but it was lukewarm, leading the CP trade-unionist Ferdinand Smith to denounce Powell as “pussy-footing.” Roy Wilkins, speaking for the NAACP, delayed so long in issuing a statement that his lieutenant Henry Lee Moon sent him a memo expressing anxiety that the NAACP had failed to speak out expeditiously. The Progressive Party and the American Civil Liberties Union did back Robeson’s right to appear, and a few members of the left-wing Harlem Trade Union Council did picket NBC. But dominant opinion was represented by an editorial in the New York Telegram-Sun: Paul Robeson had been “publicly and rightly censured.”10

  From abroad came a small flood of invitations asking Robeson to appear at peace gatherings. The peace movement (anti-Communists charged that it was sponsored by pro-Communists) had been gathering international momentum, and activists from around the world requested Robeson’s presence at their various meetings. He sent greetings to all—and recorded statements to several—but he had a raft of promises to fulfill at home. His bicoastal appearances within just a few months included benefit concerts for the Progressive Party, anniversary celebrations for the Morning Freiheit and the Jewish Peoples’ Fraternal Order, a fund-raiser for the California Eagle, speeches at the New York May Day parade and the National Non-Partisan Committee to defend the Communist leaders, an FEPC vigil in front of the White House, conferences with black trade-unionists in Chicago and California, and half a dozen testimonial dinners.11

  Essie, meanwhile, was carrying out a full agenda of her own. Her politics had by now moved closer to Paul’s—though he rarely trusted her to speak in his behalf. Her style of public debate was less combative than his, her commitment less instinctive, but she was nonetheless an effective speaker. Returning in January 1950 from a three-month trip to China, she embarked on a well-received national speaking tour. The FBI agent who monitored her speech in St. Louis reported that she had denied the existence of slave camps or of anti-Jewish discrimination in the Soviet Union; when asked from the audience what the difference was between Western colonialism and the Russian satellite system, she purportedly replied, “colonialism meant controlling and exploiting while a satellite was just influenced.” By temperament an ingrained pragmatist, impatient with doctrinal dispute in any form, Essie devoted the central portion of her standard stump speech on “Communism” to redefining it under the blandly accessible rubric of “land reform.” Further expounding her loose approach to doctrine, she won over a group of conservative black ministers and their wives in Detroit by stressing their theological duty to take up issues of social justice. Her audiences were apparently less persuaded by her increasingly explicit—and in 1950 decidedly “premature”—feminism; in her speech “Women and Progressive America,” for example, she declared, “I think it is high time that women had some say in the running of their governments, and in the running of the world.” The FBI decided in August 1950 that Essie was, after all, a “concealed Communist” and once again issued a Security Index Card for her.12

  In May, Paul made a quick trip to London to attend a meeting of the World Peace Council, of which he was a member. More than twenty thousand Londoners packed Lincoln’s Inn Fields to hear the leaders of the international peace movement, but saved their greatest applause for Robeson, who sang Chinese, Soviet, and American songs and told the crowd—once more calling on his reserves of optimism—that the working class in America was awakening to the realization that it (and not just those who were avowed Communists) was in danger of losing civil liberties; this awakening meant that fascism “will never be” revived in America. George Bernard Shaw, who had met Robeson two decades earlier, dropped him a humorous note demurring to a request for support of Progressive Party candidates: “If you connect my name and reputation with your campaign … you will gain perhaps two thousand votes, ten of them negro, and lose two million.… Keep me out of it; and do not waste your time courting the handful of people whose votes you are sure of already. Play for Republican votes and episcopal support all the time; and when you get a big meeting of all sorts, don’t talk politics but sing Old Man River.” Sympathetic though he was to Robeson, Shaw was not above a bit of well-meant patronization.13

  Back in the States by June, Robeson went to Chicago to address a thousand delegates to the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights, many of whom were black packinghouse workers. To Marie Seton, who attended the meeting, “Robeson was never so much himself” as that night, “in the midst of his own to whom he spoke of all the world.” He exhorted black trade-unionists to “exert their influence in every aspect of the life of the Negro community” and “to accept the fact that the Negro workers have become a part of the vanguard of the whole American working class. To fail the Negro people is to fail the whole American people.” He spoke movingly of the need to end the persecution not only of black Americans, but of Jews and of the foreign-born as well, and asked the audience not to be deflected from that goal by divisive calls from press and politicians to save the world from the “menace” of Communism. “Ask the Negro ministers in Birmingham whose homes were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan what is the greatest menace in their lives.… Ask Willie McGee, languishing in a Mississippi prison.… Ask Haywood Patterson, somewhere in America, a fugitive from Alabama barbarism for a crime he, nor any of the Scottsboro boys, ever committed. Ask the growing numbers of Negro unemployed in Chicago and Detroit. Ask the fearsome lines of relief clients in Harlem.… Ask any Negro worker receiving unequal pay for equal work, denied promotion despite his skill and because of his skin, still the last hired and the first fired. Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, ‘What is the greatest menace in your life?’ and they will answer in a thunderous voice, ‘Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!’—in short White Supremacy and all its vile works. Our enemies,” Robeson concluded, “are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give FEPC the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers,” those who sustain injustice at home while shipping arms—here Robeson was surely prescient—to “French imperialists to use against brave Vietnamese patriots.” His black audience gave him a prolonged ovation.14

  Two weeks later the daily press blazoned in screaming headlines that “COMMUNIST IMPERIALISTS FROM NORTH KOREA” had invaded their “PEACE-LOVING BROTHERS” to the south. The victors of World War II had put an end to Japan’s colonial rule in Korea and split that country into two, the North, under Kim II Sung, claiming to build socialism, the South, under Washington’s puppet Syngman Rhee, proceeding to bolster capitalism. From the first there had been constant sniping across the border, each side threatening to “liberate” the other, but when Sung’s well-equipped army finally crossed into the South, Rhee’s troops were unprepared and ill-equipped. Though Truman had in the past shown contempt for Rhee, he felt he couldn’t risk—not so soon after the Communist victory in China and the sensational publicity surrounding the fall of Hiss and the rise of McCarthy—having the Republicans charge that he was soft on Communism. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, secured a resolution condemning North Korea, and a week later Truman dispatched ground troops. Americans of almost all persuasions—including Henry Wallace—rallied around the President. Congress opened debate on passage of a new Internal Security Act, the infamous McCarran Act, which equated dissent with treason and established concentration camps to detain subversives in time of national emergency. When it passed in September, Truman vetoed it, at some political risk, but the House overrode him. The days when Robeson could count on at least minimal sufferance had passed.15

  Yet he refused to trim his sails to any degree. Speaking out at a Civil Rights Congress rally at Madison Square Garden at the end of June 1950 to protest Truman’s action in sending troops to Korea, Robeson excoriated the President for tying the welfare of
the American people “to the fate of a corrupt clique of politicians south of the 38th parallel in Korea.” The meaning of Truman’s order, Robeson predicted, would not be lost on black Americans: “They will know that if we don’t stop our armed adventure in Korea today—tomorrow it will be Africa.… I have said it before and say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home.…” When Robeson had “said it before,” in Paris in 1949, he had brought on a national debate; those same words, repeated in 1950, marked its foreclosure. The climate had changed. The government decided to muzzle him.16

  He had planned to return to Europe at the end of the summer, but the State Department planned otherwise. It issued a “stop notice” at all ports to prevent Robeson from departing, and J. Edgar Hoover sent out an “urgent” teletype ordering FBI agents to locate Robeson’s whereabouts. Going first to Bert and Gig McGhee’s apartment, where Robeson had recently been staying—as a result of which the FBI had taken out a Security Index Card on Gig—they were told he was not at home. The agents waited outside the building through the night and, when Robeson failed to appear, contacted the Council on African Affairs. Through Louise Patterson, Robeson made arrangements to meet with the Internal Security agents sent out to confiscate his passport. When they arrived, he had an attorney with him, Nathan Witt of Witt & Cammer. Witt checked the agents’ credentials, and Robeson said he would have the passport for them in the morning. But when the agents called the next day, Witt informed them that on his advice Robeson had decided not to surrender the passport after all. The State Department immediately notified immigration and customs officials that Robeson’s passport was void and that they were “to endeavor to prevent his departure from the U.S.” should he make an attempt to leave.17