Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  A reporter picked up the false new note during Robeson’s six-week trip to California in the summer of 1957 (he traveled with Revels Cayton) to perform several concerts that left-wing friends had finally managed to arrange—the only series he gave that year. Understandably expansive in the glow of a rare chance to sing in public, and delighted at his well-attended and well-reviewed concerts in the black community (“a welcome far beyond anything I could have expected,” he told a reporter), Robeson held a two-hour press conference in Los Angeles, which left the black journalist Almena Lomax of the Tribune with an overall impression of “total self-absorption.” Even while declaring admiration for Robeson’s “gifts and the richness of personality of the man,” Lomax expressed disquiet at his nearly nonstop discourse about his own accomplishments—“a sort of antic quality, overall.” Possibly Robeson, basking in the now unaccustomed light of publicity, was having nothing more than a cheerful and perfectly human burst of vanity. Possibly it had been triggered by a mild clinical recurrence of mania. Whatever the cause and combination of circumstances, his personality seemed to have lost its once-characteristic emotional centeredness, the solidity and surety of purpose that had long given him such easy, magnanimous grace.6

  Some sustenance came from overseas. His many friends in England, mobilized as the National Paul Robeson Committee, accelerated their campaign for the return of his passport. By the spring of 1957 the list of notables in support had grown to include twenty-seven members of Parliament and such distinguished—and in many cases nonpolitical—figures as the classicist Gilbert Murray, Leonard Woolf, the economist Barbara Wootton, Augustus John, Julian Huxley, Benjamin Britten, Pamela Hansford Johnson, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, the Shakespearean scholar J. Dover Wilson, and Robeson’s old acting partner Flora Robson. (Clearly, Tom Driberg wrote in his regular column for Reynolds News, this movement in Robeson’s behalf “is not, as some Washington bureaucrats pretend, a mere political stunt.”) In late April 1957 British Actors Equity in its annual meeting—after some heated exchanges, during which the actress Helena Gloag suggested that the resolution had originated from “an international subversive movement, Communism”—voted a resolution in support of efforts currently being made to enable Robeson to perform in Britain.7

  To cap off the campaign, Cedric Belfrage, editor-in-exile of the National Guardian, organized a concert which Robeson sang via transatlantic phone circuit to an audience assembled in a London theater—in ringing symbolic defiance of the passport ban. It came off wonderfully. At an all-day Robeson celebration before the concert, actress Marie Burke shared her recollections of Robeson in Show Boat, followed by speeches from Gerald Gardiner, QC, the miners’ leader Arthur Horner, black Labour parliamentary candidate David Pitt, and the Kenyan Joseph Murumbi of the Movement for Colonial Freedom. That same evening, with one thousand people crowded into St. Pancras Town Hall to hear the “live” Robeson concert, the actor Alfie Bass took the stage to entertain while everyone excitedly awaited the hookup. After a few false starts (“We all thought Somebody was starting to sabotage the show,” Belfrage later wrote Essie), they succeeded in making connection with New York just five minutes before the event was scheduled to begin.8

  The stage now empty except for an enormous blowup photo of Robeson on the back wall, the Union Jack on one side, Old Glory on the other, his resonant bass suddenly flooded the hall. He sang six songs in all, with the audience “jumping out of their seats” to shout approval. The reception—over the new high-fidelity transatlantic telephone cable—was superb, and the audience (according to Belfrage) went home “spiritually ‘high.’” Press coverage, though, was minimal: Belfrage had invited all U.S. papers with representatives and agencies in London, but none came. Except for an unexpected article in the Manchester Guardian—which said the concert had succeeded in making “the United States Department of State look rather silly”—only a few small items appeared in British papers. Still, Robeson was profoundly grateful to his British friends. He was “so deeply moved,” Essie reported to Belfrage, that by the end of the concert “he was close to tears,” thrilled at the prospect of “a new means for communication from the jailhouse.”9

  Three months later, and perhaps to some unmeasurable degree influenced by the mounting Robeson campaign abroad, the State Department finally made a partial concession on his right to travel. For the better part of a year, Leonard Boudin had sought in vain to get a hearing from the Passport Division, which had alternately delayed any response to his letters and then, when it did reply, stipulated still more procedural requirements not asked of other passport applicants. But just as Boudin had become convinced that they would have to go back into court in order to get any action, the State Department granted Robeson an administrative hearing.10

  Boudin and Essie accompanied him to Washington on May 29 for what turned into a six-hour marathon session. As Robert D. Johnson for the Passport Division relentlessly posed loaded questions and presented hearsay evidence about Robeson’s purported CP membership, Boudin consistently refused to allow his client to respond, on the grounds that personal and political associations were irrelevant to the issue of the right to travel. When the lengthy charade was over, Johnson declared that Robeson’s refusal to “make a full disclosure” automatically halted the administrative processing of his passport application (Johnson reported to the FBI that, although he had “thrown the book” at Robeson, the hearing had been a “‘wash out’ inasmuch as Robeson did not admit any Communist connections or activities”). Allowed to make a statement at the end, Robeson repeated his view that the real reason his passport was being withheld concerned his outspoken protests over the condition of black people at home and abroad. “My Negro friends,” he said, “tell me I am a little too excited about it. I don’t see how you can get too excited about it—not so much whether one has even bread to eat at a certain point, but the essential human dignity, the essential human dignity of being a person.”11

  The passport stalemate seemed unbroken. The government refused to reconsider unless Robeson first signed a “non-Communist” affidavit, and Robeson refused to yield on a point he considered central to his constitutional rights (fearing, too, that if he did say he had never been a CP member, the Justice Department could then call out its stable of informers to swear, falsely, that he had been—thereby allowing an indictment against him for perjury). But then—the jockeying completed, the mutually contradictory positions laid out—in August 1957 the State Department unexpectedly made its first concession to Robeson in seven years: though still refusing him a passport, State announced that henceforth he would be allowed to travel to Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa—places in the Western Hemisphere where a passport was not required of U.S. citizens. It had become an embarrassment, at a time of easing Cold War tensions and mounting black protest, to have Robeson remain the one citizen of the United States (excepting only Dave Beck, indicted president of the Teamsters Union, who had been placed on travel restriction at the specific request of the Senate’s McClellan Investigating Committee) against whom an interdiction to nonpassport areas of the Western Hemisphere remained—restraints that had already been removed by national committee members of the CPUSA. When rumors immediately began to circulate that Robeson would shortly visit the West Indies, U.S. Naval Intelligence in Trinidad telegraphed Washington that it doubted the British would allow him to enter—though doubtless the “Communist” husband-and-wife team, Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan and his American-born wife, Janet, would “welcome him with open arms” to British Guiana.12

  Robeson’s sights, however, were leveled not on the West Indies or on South America but on England. Hard on the heels of the State Department’s refusal to lift the passport ban came an alluring invitation from Glen Byam Shaw, general manager of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon: would Robeson be available during the 1958 season to star as Gower in Pericles, the
production conceived by Tony Richardson, a young director who had recently won acclaim in both London and New York for his staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger? (Shaw sent the additional word that Peggy Ashcroft—Robeson’s Desdemona in the 1930 Othello—had been “overjoyed” when told of the invitation to him.) With rehearsals due to begin in June 1958, and citing this “very great opportunity,” Boudin immediately asked the State Department to reconsider its recent refusal and issue Robeson a passport of limited duration and purpose so he could accept the engagement in England.13

  Flattering though the offer was, and potentially serviceable in his passport fight, Robeson in fact viewed it with some trepidation. He accepted the role immediately—pending, of course, State Department acquiescence—but after reading the play began to have doubts (as Essie wrote Shaw) whether he had “the traditional classic Shakespearean background and experience and style and accent, to play this role in the midst of an experienced and beautifully trained English cast in the shrine of the Shakespeare tradition.” Othello was the only Shakespearean role he had ever undertaken, and that more than a decade ago; Othello, moreover, had called for (in Essie’s words) “a foreigner, dark, different from the rest of the cast, and it was a foreignness which he thoroughly understood and actually was.” Tony Richardson was in New York to stage The Entertainer, and met with Robeson to encourage him. Shaw, moreover, sent a long letter “begging” him to have no doubts that he would do the part of Gower superlatively well: “Gower is, as it were, detached from the rest of the play.… He is the great storyteller.… It doesn’t matter what nationality he is provided the actor has a compelling power of personality, the feeling of deep understanding of humanity and, of course, a wonderful voice with which to tell his story. All these qualities you possess in a degree that no other actor does.” Robeson thanked Shaw for the kind words, and said he felt reassured.14

  The London press played up Robeson’s pending arrival as big news (contrarily, the development was entirely ignored by the major media in the United States). The Daily Herald carried an eight-column headline, “I’m-a-Comin’, Says Robeson,” with a subheading that proclaimed “And Paul’s Head Will Not Be Bendin’ Low Here in Britain.” However, the British press was not unanimous in hailing him; Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, predictably, announced that he “would be a most unwelcome visitor”; with an unforgiving memory, the Express recalled that “In the dark days of the war,” Robeson had said that Britain’s reactionary influence had inspired Finland to attack the Russians, and later had called Britain “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings in the world.” Still, additional British offers quickly came in: to star in England’s biggest television show, “Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and also to perform on a “Spectacular” for Associated Television. London’s Royal Festival Hall offered him a concert, and Harold Davison, the theatrical agent, started making preliminary arrangements for a tour. “Excitement and anticipation,” Tony Richardson reported, were keen. Essie replied that “The spread in the British press … has had great effect here. The State Department is frantically defending itself.…”15

  That was wishful thinking. The State Department refused to budge, coolly notifying Boudin that it continued to deem it necessary for Robeson to “answer the questions with respect to Communist Party membership before consideration can be given to his request for passport facilities.” Two other passport cases—those of Walter Briehl and Rockwell Kent—pending before the Supreme Court and involving the constitutional issue of the right to travel, held out the hope of establishing a precedent favorable to Robeson, but the court was unlikely to hand down a decision in those cases until June. While awaiting that verdict, the State Department remained obdurate; even had it wanted to, it could not have given Robeson a limited passport without weakening its case against Briehl and Kent. By late February, with no hope of an immediate break in the situation, Robeson felt obliged (and perhaps relieved) to notify Glen Byam Shaw that he would have to withdraw from the role of Gower. “You can imagine how we hate to say this,” Essie wrote Shaw, “but fair is fair, and plans are plans, and we know we are not going to make it.” The news, Shaw wrote back, was “a bitter disappointment.… It would have not only been a great joy but also an honour for me if he could have appeared at this Theatre during the time of my directorship.”16

  The offer was aborted, but not the impulse it represented. As if a signal had been given, some attractive invitations within the United States began to trickle in, themselves a reflection of a decline of McCarthyite influence on the national scene. In reaction to these first “mainstream” opportunities offered him in a decade, this prospective armistice, Robeson showed at least a bit more circumspection, a modicum of prudence when addressing the public—especially the black public. Still vigilant about his integrity, still loyal to past friends and his own past opinions, he nonetheless responded with a subtle new regard, around the edges, for the prospects of rehabilitation. He would to no degree compromise with the John Foster Dulleses—the white power structure, which he continued to regard as racist, militarist, and colonialist—but, to enhance his reputation with mainstream black America, he began to downplay his “Communist” image and revivify his black one. He would not leave the mountain, but he was willing to take a few sideways steps to avoid the direct path of the lava flow.

  Early in 1958 he made a discernible shift away from public pro-Soviet activities. In the last two months of 1957 he had been as outspoken and conspicuous as ever in defense of the U.S.S.R., traveling to Washington in November to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution at the Soviet Embassy, speaking at American-Soviet Friendship’s annual event at Carnegie Hall on November 10, 1957, wiring congratulations to the Soviets on the orbiting of Sputnik. The FBI reports from late 1957 even have him privately saying “that people who are losing courage should get out of the way,” and characterized him as “solid as a rock … with the ‘supers’ (super left) all the way.” But in the opening months of 1958 Robeson fell comparatively silent, confining his public statements to a set of perfunctory “New Year’s greetings” to the peoples of China, Eastern Europe, and the U.S.S.R. (not omitting the Albanians, whom he hailed for their “demonstration of what a Peoples Socialism can do to transform a whole land”).17

  His retreat from a high level of open commitment to the Soviet Union was a reflection not of disillusion but, rather, of a conscious determination to restore his reputation as a spokesman for black people. When, for example, Tony Richardson sent him a script for consideration, he rejected the suggested role of an unsavory West Indian as unsuitable, as “not constructive at this time.” Black people, Essie wrote Richardson, “would resent it” if Paul should appear in such a role, given their intense interest currently “in the coming independence of a Federated West Indies; he could not afford to consider only artistic angles.” In that same spirit of mending ties in the black community, Essie broadened her New Year’s greetings list to include such one-time friends as Fritz Pollard and such new heroines as Daisy Bates, the NAACP organizer who had coordinated the effort to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. And when boxing champion Archie Moore sent Paul a fan letter (“I’m not a hero worshipper by a long shot but there are men I admire and you are one of the few”), Robeson telephoned to thank him.18

  In a comparable spirit, he took care, when filling his first commercial concert dates in years in California, Portland, and Chicago early in 1958, to present a less belligerent public image. In Sacramento a critic commented on his “new gentleness.” In San Francisco he told a reporter, “I am sorry now that I quit the concert stage because of politics.… Any ‘politics’ in the future will be in my singing,” leaving the surprised reporter—who apparently could not distinguish a tactic from a conviction—to conclude, prematurely, that Robeson was now “more interested in musicology than in politics.” In Portland, perhaps to avoid such simplicities, he told an interviewer, “I’m here as an artist”—but wa
s also careful to add, “My political position is precisely the same now as it has always been.”19

  The FBI understood this better than the press. Far from believing—as part of the press kept announcing—that Robeson was retiring from politics, the FBI theorized that he was bent on trying to restore his influence in the world of black politics. Its agents dutifully reported the occasional rumors adrift that Robeson was about to defect from Communism, but the Bureau recognized that no proof existed to support them. It preferred to believe in its own previously floated fantasy that Robeson’s effort to present an image of himself more acceptable to mainstream blacks was in the name of capturing the NAACP for his own nefarious (i.e., Communistic) purposes.20