Paul Robeson
Page 67
When Robeson asked to read from other black publications and to quote from other black leaders about his reputation, he was denied permission; Representative Kearney (Republican, New York) suggested that instead he read “from some of the citations you have received from Stalin.” He had been cited, Robeson retorted, for his efforts for peace, and he asked, “Are you for war, Mr. Walter?” Then he repeated a new variation of his own 1949 Paris statement that “it was unthinkable to me that any people would take up arms in the name of an Eastland [Senator James Eastland, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a rabid segregationist], to go against anybody.” That, in turn, induced various committee members to scoff at his notion that blacks would not fight against the Soviet Union, to which Robeson in turn retorted that in 1956 it was still “perfectly clear” that, taken as a whole, the nine hundred million colored peoples of the world would not go to war in defense of Western imperialism.27
From there, what remained of civility gave way. Scherer asked Robeson why he had not remained in Russia. “Because my father was a slave,” he responded, “and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” Why had he sent his son to school in the Soviet Union? To spare him from racial prejudice, Robeson answered. “What prejudice are you talking about?” Walter asked. “You were graduated from Rutgers.” Robeson tried to explain that “the success of a few Negroes including myself or Jackie Robinson” did not atone for the fact that thousands of black families in the South had a yearly income of seven hundred dollars, living still in a kind of semislavery. “I’m glad you called our attention to [the] slave problem,” Arens quipped. “While you were in Soviet Russia, did you ask them there to show you the slave labor camps?”28
That was as close as the committee came to landing a body blow, but Robeson refused it. This deeply stubborn, angry man would neither denounce nor defend Stalin’s crimes, choosing instead to place them in the context of the United States’ crimes against black people. The Soviet Union’s problems were its own problems, he thundered: “I’m interested in the place I am in, the country where I can do something about it.” He pounded so hard on the table, Milton Friedman feared his fist might go through it. As far as he knew, Robeson insisted, the Soviet slave camps were occupied by “fascist prisoners who had murdered millions of the Jewish people and who would have wiped out millions of the Negro people could they have gotten hold of them. That is all I know about that.” He would not discuss the camps further, he added, “with the people who have murdered 60 million of my people”; back “among the Russian people some day singing for them, I will discuss it there. It is their problem.” After a few more exchanges of insults and Robeson’s shouted insistence that the committee members were the true “un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” a furious Chairman Walter banged down the gavel and adjourned the hearing. Robeson got in the last word: “you should adjourn this forever, that is what I say.”29
The indignant committee members immediately retired behind closed doors, and within minutes voted unanimously to recommend that Robeson be cited for contempt. “There was no contempt,” Robeson told a reporter outside the building. “I answered every question. I was just standing my ground.” His counsel, Milton Friedman, noted that only the House of Representatives had the power to vote an actual contempt citation and predicted that Congress would not act on the committee’s recommendation. Robeson had indeed shown contempt, blistering contempt for the committee. But the legal grounds for a contempt citation were narrow: failure to appear or failure to answer questions. Trying to get around that limitation, Chairman Walter argued that Robeson’s “entire conduct” at the hearing, his “personal attacks on the Committee,” and in particular his “smear” of Senator Eastland were sufficient grounds for a citation. The House disagreed, refusing, finally, to take any action against him.30
Back in New York that same day, Robeson got on the phone with Ben Davis (the FBI got on the phone, too) and told him he thought that it had gone “fine.” Davis had received an eye-witness report from William Patterson and agreed that Robeson had done “a grand job.” So did a host of political fans and supporters. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham, sent their “congratulations,” and Mary Helen Jones reported from California that her phone “rang all night” with “people expressing their admiration for you.… You made such fools out of them.… The Negro Community is strictly in your corner.” James Aronson, executive editor of the National Guardian, wrote Robeson that he had “cheered the reports of your exchanges.… Keep yourself whole; you are sorely needed,” and Aubrey Williams of Southern Farmer congratulated him “on one of your finest performances, and God knows you have given some great performances in your life time.” The black press was also warmly supportive. “Mr. Robeson Is Right,” headlined the editorial in The Afro-American, agreeing with him that House members “could more profitably spend their time passing civil rights measures and bringing in for questioning” white supremacists. Thomas Flemming in the San Francisco Sun Reporter wrote that Robeson “says the things which all [blacks] wish to say about color relations,” while Horace Cayton in the Pittsburgh Courier challenged the government either to prosecute Robeson if it actually had any evidence he was engaged in a “Communist conspiracy” or, if not, to restore his right to travel.31
The confrontation did wonders for Robeson’s spirits. A month later he was able to make a three-day visit to New Jersey, where Ernest Thompson, a black officer in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, arranged a successful series of get-togethers with black groups, deliberately keeping interested whites and CP functionaries at a distance—Thompson, among others, felt the CP had misused Robeson in the past by keeping him too distant from blacks. A few weeks later Essie was writing Rockmore that Paul was “well and happy.” (By the early fall, he was even back to the point where he once again had a concert canceled for political reasons, this time in Newark.)32
In November, with the U.S.S.R.’s occupation of Hungary in process, Paul and Essie attended the Soviet Embassy party in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the thirty-ninth anniversary of the October Revolution; except for the surprise appearance of Justice and Mrs. William O. Douglas, official Washington boycotted the affair. One week later Robeson again thumbed his nose at prescribed behavior—and this time was directly attacked for it. Arriving to attend a peace rally sponsored by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, he was greeted by a furious crowd of two hundred egg-and-tomato-hurling hecklers, mostly of Hungarian descent; carrying placards denouncing “Communist Barbarians,” they shouted their anger at the “murderers” arriving to attend the meeting. A large detail of police kept the demonstrators in check and escorted Robeson into the building. Somebody in the crowd tossed a bottle of ammonia at him, but it splattered harmlessly on the ground close by.33
Inside the hall, a small crowd of about five hundred heard Dr. Harry F. Ward, professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary, counsel against gearing up hysterically for the “inevitability” of a third world war. It then listened in surprise (and silence) as Reverend William Howard Melish of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Brooklyn deplored the Soviet “error in judgment in resorting to armed coercion” in Hungary; Melish softened his reproof by pointing out that “all of us have compromised with our ideals”—as witnessed by the U.S. imperialist venture in Guatemala and the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. When Robeson’s turn came to speak, he left out the reproof—subsequently he suggested that “somebody” had fomented trouble in Hungary, probably the same somebody who had been at work in Egypt. According to the New York Post, Robeson told a reporter on leaving the hall that “The Hungarian revolution was brought about by the same sort of people who overthrew the Spanish Republican Government.” William Z. Foster wrote to congratulate him on his “militant stand”: “In view of the wobbling and co
nfusion to be found in our ranks, it is good to see someone showing clarity of understanding and fighting spirit.… This is a moment when steadiness is especially necessary in Left ranks. Undoubtedly there has been much confusion and vacillation caused by this Stalin affair, especially the tragedy in Hungary. It is one of those great obstacles that the movement has to overcome in its historic march ahead. It is a crisis of growth.”34
Robeson’s negative view of the Hungarian “freedom fighters” found considerable echo in the black press. “The cynicism of America’s Negro citizens in respect for the Hungarians’ ‘fight for freedom’ is thick enough to be slashed with a knife,” the Pittsburgh Courier editorialized, “and solid enough to be weighed on scales.…” Where, the Courier wondered, was any comparable expression of concern for the victims of the savage bombings of Port Said and Cairo? And where was the comparable outrage at the mob violence against the young black student Autherine Lucy as she tried to attend classes at the lily-white University of Alabama? “How can America, in good faith,” chimed in the San Francisco Sun Reporter, “blow such loud horns about the freedom of the Hungarians, when such a large portion of her own population is deprived of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States?”35
A few days after the American-Soviet Friendship rally, Robeson elaborated his views on current affairs in an interview with The Afro-American. Commenting on the results of the recent presidential election, in which Eisenhower had again swamped Adlai Stevenson, Robeson said he found them both “pretty lax” on civil rights and expressed the hope that Eisenhower would use his mandate “to be much firmer on the question of carrying out the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision.” He also took the occasion to deplore the invasion of Egypt (though not of Hungary) as proof of Western reluctance to accept a changed status for third-world people. He saw the action as a particular affront to the Bandung Pact nations of Asia and Africa, crediting the Soviet Union’s defense of their rights to independent nationhood as the chief counterweight on the international scene to Western efforts at maintaining the old colonial system.36
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, announced its refusal to hear arguments appealing the Appellate Court decision on Robeson’s passport—even though it granted, on the very same day, a new trial in Pittsburgh to five defendants convicted under the Smith Act. The decision further isolated Robeson, seeming to confirm his status (in William Patterson’s indignant words) as “the only living American against whom an order has been issued directing immigration authorities not to permit him to leave the continental confines of the United States,” not even to go to Mexico, the West Indies, Hawaii, or other areas that “demand only proof of American citizenship as a means of entry.” In public, Robeson tried to put the best face on it. He told The Afro-American that since the Supreme Court claimed he had not exhausted all “administrative remedies” available, his lawyers would once again request an administrative hearing from the State Department—though he would continue to refuse, he emphasized, to sign the kind of “non-Communist” affidavit the State Department had previously insisted would be necessary before they would consider any such hearing. If the government stuck by that policy, Robeson said, he would then ask for a rehearing in the Court of Appeals on the grounds that he had “exhausted all administrative remedies” currently open to him. Since a rehearing on those grounds was unlikely, Robeson was in fact acknowledging a stalemate. His personal Cold War had not eased.37
CHAPTER 22
Resurgence
(1957–1958)
The enforced inactivity in Robeson’s life coincided, ironically, with an upsurge of movement for black Americans in general. The beaching of a man who had spoken out for two decades against the paralyzing oppression of black life now stood in stark contrast to the quickened hope that swept black communities across the nation. Not that the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision had in itself marked the swift demise of Jim Crow. Far from it. The court’s own implementing decision rejected the notion of rapid desegregation in favor of a “go-slow” approach, which itself proved too radical a notion for President Eisenhower; initially he refused to endorse the Brown ruling, remarking, “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,” and calling his own appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”1
The caution of official Washington was matched on the state level by fierce white resistance. On March 12, 1956, 101 Southern members of Congress issued a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which called on their states to refuse implementation of the desegregation order. Defiance became the watchword in the white South, massive resistance the proof of regional loyalty. Every item in the white-supremacist bag of tricks—from “pupil-placement” laws to outright violence—was utilized to forestall integration of the schools. The Ku Klux Klan donned its masks and hoods; the respectable middle class enrolled in White Citizens’ Councils; the press and pulpit resounded with calls to protect the safety of the white race. A tide of hatred and vigilantism swept over the South. Some blacks knuckled under in fear; many more dug in, prepared once again to endure—and this time overcome. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress, stubbornly refused to give up her bus seat to a white man—thereby launching the Montgomery bus boycott, energizing black resistance, catapulting Martin Luther King, Jr., and his strategy of nonviolent direct action to the forefront of the movement. An epoch of black insurgency had been ushered in.
Robeson, of course, applauded it—but from the sidelines, where he had been shunted. Confined by the white ruling elite, ostracized by the black establishment, he and his influence had been effectively neutralized. His limited access to the media, in combination with his disinclination to write, meant that he had few public opportunities to express his support for the burgeoning civil-rights movement. When one did present itself in July 1957, during a rare series of engagements in California, he told the press that he “urged the Negro people to support Reverend Martin Luther King—the strength of the Negro people lies within their organizations and churches, as demonstrated by the magnificent Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott and other activities conducted by the Negro people in the South.” And in September 1957, when the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas, under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, prevented nine black students from enrolling in Central High, Robeson issued a statement calling for a national conference to challenge “every expression of white supremacy.”2
But no one much was listening. Only one black paper, The Afro-American, printed his statement in full—and his call for a national conference was ignored. Not only was Robeson’s name no longer instantly recognized, but, to the extent that he was still known among the new activists, his pro-Soviet stance was regarded as something of an irrelevance, even a hindrance. Anne Braden, who with her husband, Carl, was active in the civil-rights struggle in Kentucky, remembers that most of the young black activists “really knew nothing about Paul Robeson,” and those who had heard of him “would have been scared to death if he’d shown up at one of their meetings.” That would change somewhat by the early sixties; by then young blacks would be more militant, would have learned more about their own history and learned, too, that their white “friends and protectors” in Washington, who had been advising them against associating with “Communists,” might not after all have their best interests at heart.3
When Paul, along with Essie and Paul, Jr., went to Washington in May 1957 to take part in the Prayer Pilgrimage, he was largely ignored: the organizers asked Robeson antagonists Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (who had bolted to Ike in 1956), to speak, but not Robeson. (A month before the Pilgrimage, struck by how little organizing had been done, Essie speculated that Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph were actually trying to sabotage the event, and she wrote George Murphy, Jr., “The more I think of the NAACP the more dangerous I think it is. They always calm the waters when something concret
e and really good is cooking.”) At about this same time, ironically, the head of the FBI’s New York Office was confidentially advising J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson’s recent California trip “had been conducted for the purpose of determining whether he had enough of a following to attempt to take over the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on a national scale.” A few weeks later that allegation had been transmuted into a CPUSA takeover of the NAACP, and Hoover directed the New York Office to “follow Robeson’s activities.” Robeson and Roy Wilkins would have been equally astonished at the news of a pending coup. Though the FBI apparently did not realize it, the government and the media had, over nearly a decade, done its work better than it knew in making Robeson invisible to a new generation of black youth, in moving him to the margins of the black struggle.4
During the first half of the fifties, Robeson could take some solace from the fact that his isolation had been imposed by white authorities in response to his militant stand in behalf of the rights of the world’s colored peoples. During the second half of the fifties, as a mainstream black protest movement emerged within his own country and seemed uninterested in his presence, his sense of isolation became more acute and painful. In contrast to his former wide-ranging public life, he now spent his time engaging in pentatonic musical studies and pursuing his passport fight. They did not absorb his energies. He read over Marie Seton’s manuscript for a book about him and worked with Lloyd L. Brown on an autobiographical volume, but these were retrospective activities; he was, for the time being, not living fully in the present. Nor could continuing recognition from the peace movement overseas and periodic visits from Ben Davis, Jr., or William Z. Foster compensate for the deafening lack of interest in his services at the Prayer Pilgrimage and the failure of any call for consultation from the Montgomery boycotters or from Martin Luther King, Jr. As if to assuage his own hurt, to compensate for being bypassed, Robeson’s public statements occasionally became boastful and overweening, traits in jarring contrast to his once characteristic modesty. The dissonant strain of braggadocio—and an occasional penchant for the imagery of martyrdom—marked a poignant bid for the attention and affirmation that he had never before had any need to summon up.5