For two of those years, 1953–55, Paul, Jr., ran Othello Recording Company, which he and Lloyd Brown set up to provide an artistic outlet for his father after professional recording studios closed their doors to him. For want of any other available space, one of the recording sessions was held in the Rosens’ New York apartment, with their daughter Judy accompanying on the piano (alternating with a professional accompanist, Alan Booth). The walls were hung with rugs to muffle outside noise, and the “boy genius” in the apartment next door—who invariably began practicing his piano every time they got ready to record—was eventually silenced after Helen made a diplomatic appeal to his parents.12
The first of the three albums Robeson made with the Othello Recording Company, Robeson Sings, was the only one recorded in a commercial studio. Performed with orchestra and chorus, based on arrangements by Don Redmond, it had a slick sound throughout which made it musically undistinguished. Still, the album sold well. Released in December 1952 and publicized through small ads in the left-wing press, the record within four months sold some five thousand copies at five dollars each. That brought Robeson a net royalty (computed at 15 percent) of about four thousand dollars, hardly a munificent sum for a man who at the height of his fame had earned that amount of money in two nights of singing. Fortunately, Bob Rockmore’s shrewd investments continued to provide Robeson with a comfortable if diminished income. Without Rockmore’s loyal services Robeson would have suffered severe financial stringency, since by 1953 new opportunities for him to earn money from singing or acting had evaporated.13
In June 1953 he set off on a second tour to benefit Freedom Associates, but overall it failed to meet even the moderate expectations of the previous year. It was decided this time to aim his appearances more than previously at the black community (“not artificially excluding the white community, but the balance must be on our side rather than the other way around,” wrote one Freedom staff member). But resources in the black community were limited, and the reservoir of good will toward Robeson, while profound, was neither inexhaustible nor uncontested. The central Washington office of the NAACP threatened its Oberlin chapter with the removal of its charter if it sponsored Robeson in a concert (when he heard about that decision six years later, Robeson said with a grim smile, “Yes, those were the people who did the final hatchet job on me”). “The Negro masses love him,” Bert Alves of Freedom wrote to John Gray, another staff member. “The Negro middle class admire him but are fearful of his hold on the masses,” and frightened that “the disapproval of white leaders will injure the special position of leadership and privilege these middle class folk enjoy.” The black paper the San Francisco Sun agreed: “The working class Negro feels that Robeson says the things which they would like to say.” He had, Stretch Johnson adds, “a Teflon coating in the black community.”14
The coating was thinnest, though, among the black bourgeoisie. Aaron Wells (who became Robeson’s doctor in 1955) remembers an evening in 1950 when he invited a few of his Harlem neighbors in the Riverton Apartments to meet Paul: “One happened to have been a banker; the other was a prominent lawyer. I’ll never forget how they rode me the next day—‘How dare you invite us to your home when Paul Robeson is there?’” (Many whites, of course, including some who called themselves political radicals, were afraid to be in Robeson’s company. Helen Rosen recalls that Lillian Hellman upbraided her fiercely for having Paul as a fellow dinner guest, insisting his presence put them all in danger since the FBI was known to be following his movements.) A few years later Wells went with Robeson to a meeting on St. Nicholas Avenue of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity of which they were both members. Several of those present reproved Robeson to his face for “not having been with us when you were at the height of your career,” and one lawyer (later a federal judge) openly attacked him on the issue of Communism. Robeson simply responded (as Wells recalls his words), “You know, brothers, you are really hitting at the wrong enemy. I am not your enemy. You’re hitting in the wrong direction.”15
The churchgoing black masses were not automatically put off—as so many white churchgoers were—by accusations that Robeson was a “godless” Communist. He didn’t sound godless. He personified the spirituals in his music, and nothing about his presence when he sang them suggested an antireligious man. Nobody who didn’t “have God in him” could sing “Deep River” the way Robeson sang it; even if he himself didn’t know it, or consciously denied it, he “had God in him.” But in fact he didn’t deny it. His own family—with both his father and his brother Ben pastors of A.M.E. Zion—gave him impeccable credentials in the black church, and Robeson himself had turned to it in times of trouble. If he never showed any particular devotion to the institutional church or the literal pronouncements of Scripture, he never expressed even the remotest allegiance to “materialistic atheism.” If he was not a religious man in any formalistic sense, he was nonetheless an intensely spiritual one, convinced that some “higher force” watched over him, and drew fundamental strength from a deep cultural identification with his people and their religion.
Even if Robeson was a “communist” with a small “c,” believing in a society where a larger number of people could share in its opportunities and rewards, he was no “subversive.” Blacks were well aware that if there had been any proof he was a “Communist” with a capital “C”—a registered member of the Party—J. Edgar Hoover would have long since had him hauled into court under the Smith Act. To the average black churchgoer, working for civil rights was an integral and proper part of the church’s business. The black church had been in the forefront of the freedom struggle from its inception, and it was assumed that the church was a natural recruiting ground and fount of strength for that kind of political work in the world. Robeson was seen primarily as a champion of black rights—not as the agent of a foreign power—and to that large extent it was not doubted that he was a proper church person. “We are convinced,” the black Methodist minister Reverend Edward D. McGowan said in a 1953 speech before the National Fraternal Council of Churches, “that we must come to the defense of all Negro leaders who are attacked. We will not succumb to the enemies of the Negro people who would divide us by name calling and smear tactics. For we know that a better life for our people will not be achieved by a divided people. And so … I will come to my own conclusions about Paul Robeson—no one else can tell me what I must think or believe about this great leader of the Negro people.”16
This is not to say that every black church automatically opened its doors to Robeson; those dominated by the black bourgeoisie, or its values, were not receptive; nor were those closely identified with a politically ambitious and self-protective minister—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., for example, never invited Robeson to his influential Harlem church. Yet the basic contrast holds. When Robeson appeared in the black churches of Detroit in 1953, the enthusiastic response suggested a revival meeting rather than the stiff atmosphere of a concert. But when he appeared for the second annual Peace Arch concert in Blaine, Washington, an essentially “white” event, he drew only half the crowd he had the preceding year—and almost all of that from the Canadian side of the border. Yet his defiance was not dampened: “I want everybody in the range of my voice to hear, official or otherwise, that there is no force on earth that will make me go backward one-thousandth part [of] one little inch.”17
While in Seattle as part of his tour, Robeson took the occasion (duly noted by FBI agents) to put in a public appearance at the U.S. Federal Court. Six defendants—including Terry Pettus, the editor of People’s World, who had helped to arrange Robeson’s tour the previous year—were on trial under the Smith Act for conspiracy; during recess, Robeson made a point of talking with the defendants, and because one of them was under a contempt citation and not permitted to leave the courtroom, Robeson met with him in the U.S. marshal’s office. It was hardly the first time, of course, that Robeson had insisted on publicly identifying himself with those under federal indictment. From the fir
st round of Smith Act arrests back in 1949, he had played an active role on committees and at rallies to defend the victims and their families. At one point the FBI had even speculated that Essie and Paul had turned their house at Enfield into a secret hideout for CPUSA leaders who had gone underground. An over-zealous neighbor had excited the Justice Department with tales about an unfamiliar Dodge parked near the Robeson home; in the retrospective opinion of the Enfield chief of police, the mystery vehicle more likely belonged to FBI agents themselves; their presence around the Robeson house had become a commonplace.18
The Enfield property was put on the market. Bob Rockmore’s careful management had allowed Robeson to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, but as his income shrank and his legal fees mounted, some belt-tightening did become necessary. For two years Rockmore had been exerting pressure on Essie to put the house up for sale; as he saw the financial picture worsening, he wrote her that “something” had to be done “to get Enfield off Paul’s back.” She dragged her feet for a while: she had loved the house, and it had also served—even if rarely—as the one domestic meeting ground she still shared with Paul. But as his relationship with Helen Rosen deepened in the early fifties, any real domestic life he had was with the Rosens, and he had stopped coming to Enfield altogether. In New York City he based himself at the McGhees’ apartment (where he paid a regular monthly rent) and sometimes stayed at his brother Ben’s parsonage in Harlem. Even after Essie came around to the idea of selling Enfield, it became difficult to get a buyer. It wasn’t until the spring of 1953, after dropping the asking price from thirty-five to twenty-two thousand—with only six thousand down—that Rockmore was able to dispose of the property. Essie tried hard to persuade Paul that they should build a small house in Norwalk, but he gladly deferred to Rockmore’s insistence that such a project would be beyond his means. Just at this time, Ma Goode died, after many years in a Massachusetts rest home. Essie, bereaved and uprooted, reluctantly took up hotel life in New York, while Paul continued to stay with the McGhees and to spend much of his time at the Rosens’.19
Essie’s mind was temporarily taken off her displacement by a summons to appear before McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Committee on July 7, 1953. The Senator had recently “discovered” that the Voice of America and the Overseas Library Program were hotbeds of sedition, and while trampling through those vineyards a McCarthy staff member’s eyes lit upon this statement in Essie’s 1945 book, African Journey: “… the one hopeful light on the horizon … [is] the exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia, where for the first time in history our race problem has been squarely faced and solved.…” Eslanda Robeson was summoned to Washington to explain, if she could, her traitorous words. Short of bagging Robeson himself—and the lack of government evidence had thus far made that impossible—this seemed a delicious prospect for the redbaiters.
But Essie denied them the triumph. Accompanied by her lawyer, Milton H. Friedman, she gave a feisty account of herself, turning the session, if not into the rout she later claimed, nonetheless into an impressive draw. She set a tone of charming belligerence with her very first response on the stand: “You are Mrs. Paul Robeson, is that correct?” counselor Roy Cohn asked her. “Yes,” she answered, “and very proud of it, too.” She then surprised the committee by pleading the Fifteenth as well as the First Amendment in refusing to answer whether she was a member of the Communist Party. Witnesses had routinely been citing the First Amendment (and after 1950, the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination), but no one before Essie had called upon the Fifteenth. “The Fifteenth Amendment?” the surprised McCarthy asked. “This solely deals with your right to vote. You cannot refuse to answer questions about a conspiracy to destroy this nation because you have the right to vote.… Before this committee we do not have Negroes or whites.… We have American citizens. They all have the same rights.…” He repeated his standard warning that witnesses would be cited for contempt if they based their refusal to answer a question on any grounds other than selfincrimination.20
Essie was not intimidated. “I don’t quite understand your statement,” she said, “that we are all American citizens.… I am a second class citizen now, as a Negro. That is the reason I claim this fifteenth amendment. I would be very happy if we didn’t have to discuss race, and I hope we will at some point get to a place where we don’t have to. But in the meantime you are white and I am Negro and this is a very white committee and I feel I must protect myself. I am sorry it is necessary.” “The only person who has been discussing race today is yourself,” McCarthy shot back. Senator Symington tried to inject a conciliatory note: “Would you be more willing to answer questions with respect to Communism and the possibility of your being a Communist, if you were more satisfied with your position in this country as a Negro?” Essie did not bend: “The reason I refuse to answer the question is because I think that … my opinions are my private personal affair.…” But did not the government, Symington persisted, “have a right to ask you whether you are dedicated to an organization which in turn is dedicated to overthrowing the American government by force and violence?” Essie refused to bite: “I don’t know anybody that is dedicated to overthrowing the government by force and violence. The only force and violence I know is what I have experienced and seen in this country, and it has not been by Communists.”
McCarthy then defended his all-white committee on the grounds that the people had not chosen to elect any black senators, a sloppy argument that Essie punctured by pointing out that most blacks lived in the South, where they were commonly denied the right to vote. When he tried to trap her into telling whether she had ever attended Communist cell meetings, Essie insouciantly asked him to define what a cell was; when he shifted to the word “unit,” she professed not to know what a unit was either. McCarthy remained polite, perhaps even impressed. He pronounced Essie “very charming” and “intelligent.” “I am not going to order you to answer those questions and cite you for contempt.… You are getting special consideration today.… I do not propose to argue with a lady.” Essie thanked him, announced she was “a very, very loyal American,” and stepped down from the stand. It was “hilarious,” she wrote Marie Seton, “all sweetness and light, very clear, very respectful and reasonable.” “Paul is VERY pleased, the Children are very proud, and all our friends are simply delighted. So.”21
Paul’s pleasure in Essie’s performance was momentary. As the number of rebuffs continued to mount and as government surveillance intensified, the cracks in his public good spirits, and even in his health, became more discernible. It’s “tough sledding,” he wrote Helen Rosen’s daughter Judy from the road. “Whole weight is thrown against us—in every city, town & hamlet.” He added, though, that when in St. Louis he had gone to the last session of the NAACP convention “and the whole audience recognized me (I also was in the audience) and I was hour & half getting away—signing autographs etc.—Gave top brass (White & Co) a fit.…” To Helen Rosen he wrote, “I miss you terribly. Miss the quiet and sweet-warm response of chatting about this & that—of reading as a kind of lovely communion—of philosophizing—and the ever recurrent theme of life and being.… I have grown to love you ever so deeply.… I have almost no defenses where you are concerned.”22
By late 1953 rejections and disappointments were arriving in bunches. Invitations from England to perform Othello and from Wales to sing at the Eisteddfod festival—as well as a host of additional requests for overseas appearances at peace conferences and political events—had to be turned down for lack of a passport. At home, the governing board of the Brooklyn Academy of Music refused to honor its contract with ASP (National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions) for a cultural festival when it learned that Robeson would be participating—his presence would create a “danger of disorder.” At Hartford, Connecticut, he was belatedly allowed to appear onstage—protected by a police detachment of 250 men—only after the local Board of Education had successfully resisted the demand of the
City Council to bar the concert. Baited by reporters afterward for “hurting your cause by allying yourself with Communists,” Robeson lashed out in anger: “Is this what you want?” he asked them, pretending to bend at the waist. “For me to bend and bow and shuffle along and be a nice, kindly colored man and say please when I ask for better treatment for my people?—Well, it doesn’t work.”23
The government was determined to scotch the notion that militancy would work, either. The Attorney General put the Council on African Affairs on its list of “Communist-front” organizations and ordered it to appear for a hearing before the Subversive Activities Control Board in Washington. The CAA categorically denied the allegation that it was Communist-controlled but acknowledged that in the current climate, where parallelism of ideas was considered a sufficient basis for establishing guilt, it was powerless to exonerate itself: “the only defense we have is to get rid of McCarthyism and the McCarran Act!” That, the Council stressed, was “the prime task of the hour.” But the hour was not at hand. Freedom magazine also began to feel the heat. With subscriptions and revenues declining, Robeson had to extend a personal loan—which his straitened finances could ill afford—to keep the publication going. (For the first three months of 1954, Robeson took only three hundred dollars in artist’s fees from Freedom Associates, even as the Amsterdam News was reporting, “Don’t go feeling sorry for Paul Robeson, he still makes $600 at each left-wing rally he appears at.”) The prolonged, accumulated stress on him began to show. FBI headquarters in Washington received a report from a field agent that Robeson was “suffering from heart trouble.” That specific rumor was unfounded, but Robeson did have to enter a strictly supervised diet program for several weeks in Washington, D.C., to control his ballooning weight. “It’s been really restful,” he wrote Helen Rosen. “I’ve taken off some 18–20 lbs.… I was around 278 when I arrived here. I had no idea.”24
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