The FBI’s special agent in Los Angeles even reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson might in fact be the “real leader” of the left-wing Foster-Davis faction of the CPUSA and may have designed his trip to California in 1958 as an effort to sway that “right-wing” CP stronghold to the left. The L.A. agent passed on his informants’ opinion that Robeson “is much more dangerous to the security of this country than those who have taken the position of extreme ‘right.’” Hoover did not doubt it. He advised the Bureau’s L.A. Office to explore fully and attempt to corroborate its information, noting that the FBI lacked “recent evidence” (actually it had never had evidence) that Robeson “has taken a direct part in the policy or other affairs of the CP.” The best that the L.A. agent could do was to report back that in California Robeson had seen “a great deal” of black CP leader Pettis Perry, and that subsequent to his visit to the state, the left-wing faction had succeeded in gaining new prominence. The recollections of Rose Perry, Pettis’s widow, are a good deal more mundane: Pettis and Paul spent most of their time talking about black issues, and she and her husband spent most of theirs “terribly afraid that something might happen to Paul physically.” According to Paul, Jr., their fear was justified: the left-front wheel came off of the car that Paul had been riding in. Although he was not a passenger at the time, and no one was hurt, it was a disturbing reminder of the incidents in St. Louis in 1947 and in Los Angeles in 1955.21
The California music critics gave Robeson’s 1958 comeback concerts enthusiastic notices. One of them remarked that “it would be too much to expect the velvety smoothness of that magnificent bass voice to continue as consistently as of old,” but the larger number expressed amazement that “the years have done virtually nothing to the greatest natural basso voice of the present generation”; and there was unanimous agreement that his dramatic, gracious personal presence remained singularly powerful. The audience response was also keen, with most of the concerts selling out in advance to enthusiastic crowds. More important to Robeson, off the concert stage he succeeded once again in drawing reinvigorated support from the black community. Attending the twentieth anniversary of the founding of People’s World (the FBI attended as well), he heard Pastor Livingston introduce him as “a champion fighter” for his race; in response Robeson reaffirmed his belief in socialism but did not mention Communism or the Soviet Union or the CPUSA. Even the FBI reports stressed that Robeson had been “increasingly effective … among the Negroes and especially among some of the Negro clergymen,” his appearances in their churches helping them to raise “a considerable amount of money.”22
In Pittsburgh two months later, his reception in the black community was again heartening. The management of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall canceled his announced concert, but two of the leading black churches, Central Baptist and Wesley Center A.M.E. Zion, opened their doors to him, and the packed assemblies gave him deafening receptions. After the concerts, the local chapter of his own powerful Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity entertained him, and P. L. Prattis of the Courier sent Essie a private report of the combined events:
Your “man” came, saw, conquered and knocked their eyeballs out—even mine.… But you would never have known he was proud, for as they applauded him, he applauded them. His pride was in them, not himself, for they had come to bring him comfort and he had lain himself on their bosom.… The Alpha boys tell me that he stormed their place for two hours, his eyes sparkling, never tiring. He defined himself, laid himself on the line, so to speak. And with all his greatness, he was modest.
A relative in Pittsburgh reported to Paul’s sister, Marian Forsythe, that “Paul acts rejuvenated once more. He had seemed so quiet for a while, but it all seems to be in the past now.”23
By the time Robeson reached Chicago in April, his spirits had soared, and the reception in that city further cheered him. Essie had written in advance to Margaret Burroughs (schoolteacher, political activist, and later founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History), “Paul wants you, if you will do so, to coordinate whatever he can do in the Negro community. He does NOT want any of this to go through the manager, Mr. [Paul] Endicott, who is white.… He would like the people to know that he wants to sit down with them.” Essie facilitated matters by herself sending letters accepting invitations for Paul to a local black minister and to the Chicago chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, which had offered to give him a smoker (introducing Robeson to the Alphas, Oscar Brown, Sr., told them, “Brothers, you are looking at immortality”).24
Margaret Burroughs, angry at the “black bourgeoisie” in Chicago for having earlier, in her opinion, turned its back on Paul, and sharing his commitment to a socialist vision, felt “it was an honor to open my home to him.” For her straightforward advocacy, she was called before the Board of Education and questioned about whether it was true that she was “sympathetic to that red, Paul Robeson.” Yes indeed, she responded, she was sympathetic, she was even downright proud of him—since, from everything she could gather, he was “a fine artist and a fine human being”; Burroughs kept her job, but by a hair. Julia and Metz Lorchard (he was editor of the Chicago Defender), who were also friendly with Robeson and had housed him on several visits to Chicago, were likewise threatened with reprisals. Julia Lorchard worked for the Cook County welfare office, and for a time her job was in serious jeopardy; one neighbor even denounced the Lorchards for playing Robeson records in their own home.25
On this trip to Chicago, Robeson spent the first night with Cathern and Ishmael Flory, the black Communist whom he had known from the forties, when Flory was the international representative for the Mine, Mill union. Robeson, Flory recalls, was “a very considerate man” who warned them that he was a late riser and “wasn’t much good” until after 2:00 p.m. But he was good for a late-night talk, and he and the Florys stayed up discussing the “change for the better” they all saw taking place in the country—“I think I’m on my way back among the people,” Robeson told the Florys. On the second night Robeson went to stay with Johnnie Mae and Sam Parks. Johnnie Mae was a master “downhome” cook, and Paul had gotten friendly with the earthy, outspoken Sam when he headed the predominantly black Packinghouse Workers local in the late forties and when the two worked together in the early fifties on the National Negro Labor Council. (Parks contrasts himself with Revels Cayton: “I was a worker who attained some intellectual understanding; he is an intellectual who became a worker.”)26
Sam Parks was exactly the kind of man in whom Robeson had come to invest high hopes, a man with strong ties both to the black church and to the black trade-union movement, and he showed Parks a side of himself that he did not reveal to Flory. Talking again late into the night, Robeson acknowledged to Parks that left-wing white trade-unionists had not proved, under the pressure of the conservative Cold War climate, as staunchly committed to the welfare of the black working class as he had anticipated. He acknowledged, too, that the “worldwide coalition” represented by Freedom magazine had not sufficiently addressed the specific needs of American blacks—that the “internationalist view” had too often bypassed rather than incorporated the black perspective. Robeson’s disappointment in the failure of the trade-union movement to remain a militant force at home was paralleled by his sense (as Parks recalls) “that the rose beds he’d seen in other countries weren’t rose beds but beds of thorns.” He expressed no word of disillusion with the Soviet Union but, rather, a generalized grief that the “world movement” for liberation seemed in disarray, and his eyes filled with tears when he talked about his “mistake” in having let “whites front me off to my own people,” keep him at a distance from his own grass roots. Still, he believed he had begun to repair that damage, had made significant strides in the past year in restoring his image as “a race man” and an artist.27
His stay in Chicago confirmed that estimate. Flory arranged a public meeting for Robeson at the Parkway Ballroom, and the turnout—five hundred people “from all over the county”—exceeded exp
ectations. So did the enthusiasm. People clamored to say hello, including some who, in Flory’s compassionate phrase, “had gotten scared and lost their way”—not so much people on the street, who had never gone as far as the black leadership in renouncing Robeson, but rather some recalcitrant members of the black bourgeoisie. One such member, a prominent black physician in Chicago and a fellow Alpha, on this visit described Robeson as “one of the heroes of our fraternity.” (The reception among whites in Chicago was far less favorable: when a local public-affairs television program announced that Robeson would be a guest, negative popular reaction forced cancellation of his appearance.) In April, Jet magazine reported that both Robeson and Du Bois “suddenly are enjoying popularity sprees,” and George Murphy, Jr., wrote Essie, “With the two biggest Negro papers in the country [The Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier] behind Paul … and with the Negro church, our most important political institution increasingly behind him, and, with Sister Essie Robeson in there methodically pitching every day … how can our Paul fail?”28
Nothing did more toward refurbishing Robeson’s image than the publication, early in 1958, of Here I Stand, the 111-page manifesto-autobiography he wrote with Lloyd L. Brown, who had collaborated with Robeson earlier on speeches and writings. The book amounted to a subtle yet clear declaration to black America that Robeson viewed his primary allegiance as being to his own community and not to international Communism. The very first line of the Author’s Foreword read, “I am a Negro.” On the second page he added, “I am an American.” In addition, he tried to demystify his continuing refusal, ever since his 1946 Tenney Committee statement, explicitly “to give testimony or to sign affidavits” as to whether or not he was a Communist: “I have made it a matter of principle, as many others have done, to refuse to comply with any demand of legislative committees or departmental officials that infringes upon the Constitutional rights of all Americans.” He made it clear that he would continue to refuse, but pointed out that “my views concerning the Soviet Union and my warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land … have been pictured as something … sinister by Washington officials.… It has been alleged that I am part of some kind of ‘international conspiracy.’ … I am not and never have been involved in any international conspiracy or any other kind, and do not know anyone who is.” He insisted that “my belief in the principles of scientific socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life—that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private profit … have nothing in common with silly notions about ‘plots’ and ‘conspiracies.’”29
Without making any apology for his own past actions, without acknowledging any “lapses” in the integrity of Soviet policy—like all proud-spirited people, he lacked the habit of berating himself in public—Robeson looked forward, not back. He did reaffirm his friendship for the Soviet Union and for individuals like Ben Davis, Jr. (who hold “nonconformist or radical views”), but his own primary allegiance, he made clear, was to the interests of black people. In the struggle for those interests, he cited black trade-unionists and the black church—not the Communist Party—as the vanguard institutions, and also as the wellspring of his own personal strength. He advised black leaders, moreover, that they “must rely upon and be responsive to no other control than the will of their people”; allies—“important allies among our white fellow-citizens”—were welcome, but “the Negro people’s movement must be led by Negroes.… Good advice is good no matter what the source and help is needed and appreciated from wherever it comes, but Negro action cannot be decisive if the advisors and helpers hold the guiding reins. For no matter how well meaning other groups may be, the fact is that our interests are secondary at best with them.”
In publicly declaring independence from the CP, Robeson was also distancing himself from accusations of white domination in general. He put his faith in “aroused and militant” black mass action, siding with what he perceived—long before most prominent blacks did—as “a rising resentment against control of our affairs by white people, regardless of whether that domination is expressed by the blunt orders of political bosses or more discreetly by the ‘advice’ of white liberals which must be heeded or else.” In contrast to well-intentioned white liberal and establishment black leaders alike, Robeson rejected the notion of “gradualism” in the struggle for civil rights as “but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are lawbreakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of law.” The insistence that progress must be slow was, he argued, “rooted in the idea that democratic rights, as far as Negroes are concerned, are not inalienable and self-evident as they are for white Americans.” How long? he asked rhetorically. “As long as we permit it.” Black people had the “power of numbers, the power of organization, and the power of spirit” to “end the terror”—now. Robeson’s concept of “mass militancy, of mass action,” was an appeal for coordination that he knew “full well … is not easy to do.…” But, “despite all of our differences,” he felt a “nonpartisan unity” among blacks was nonetheless possible, because there was “a growing impatience with petty ways of thinking and doing things.” Robeson was attempting to heal divisions within the black community by a transcending appeal to move beyond them—and somehow to transcend as well the powerful resistance to change within the dominant white culture. If he slighted practicalities, his clarion call for black unity in Here I Stand at once prefigured the language and vision soon to be taken up by militant young blacks, and served to announce his own primary commitment to the black struggle in the immediate present.30
Except for the minuscule left-wing press, white publications wholly ignored Here I Stand (The New York Times failed even to list it in its “Books Out Today” section, a courtesy extended to some of the most obscure publications). But the black press not only reviewed the book widely, but also got its message: “I Am Not a Communist Says Robeson,” blared a headline in The Afro-American (hailing it in an editorial as a “remarkable book”). “Paul Robeson States His Case,” ran the front-page article in the Pittsburgh Courier, its chief editor, P. L. Prattis, declaring in a separate column that he had been “deeply stirred” by Robeson’s words. The Chicago Crusader expressed delight that Robeson had finally answered those calling him a Communist and a traitor—his “refusal to defend himself has isolated him at a time when we sorely need the type of courageous leadership he represents”; the Crusader now hailed him as “one of the mightiest of all Negro voices raised against world oppression of people based on race, color, national origin and religion.” The only negative review in the black press came, predictably, from Roy Wilkins in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Wilkins repeated his decade-old assertion that blacks had “never regarded” Robeson as a leader, and dismissed him as a man who “imagines his misfortunes to stem, not from his own bungling, but from the persecution of ‘the white folks on top.’” With no help from Wilkins or from the general press, the first edition of Here I Stand was exhausted within six weeks, and by May 1959, without benefit of a commercial distributor, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. Robeson, after a decade in the wilderness, was re-emerging into prominence and favor.31
Just prior to Robeson’s successful California-Chicago trip, the mainstream black magazine Ebony had somewhat prefigured his re-emergence by publishing an interview with him by the respected journalist Carl T. Rowan. Entitled “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?,” Rowan’s article concluded that he had not: “even Negroes who consider Robeson politically naïve and tactically dumb find reasons to sympathize with him.…” The Rowan piece was not entirely laudatory (George Murphy, Jr., characterized it as “collaborationist”), describing Robeson at one point as looking like “a sad-voiced martyr,” and at another—when Rowan asked him directly about Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin as a murderer—as acting like �
��a singer who has forgotten his lyrics; he mumbles vaguely.…” Rowan subsequently amplified his reaction to Robeson on the popular “Tex and Jinx” radio program. Though complaining that Robeson had never answered his question about Stalin, and while disagreeing with him “greatly on a great many issues,” Rowan said, “when he’s talking about what’s happening to Negroes or when he’s crying out for freedom of Negroes or when he’s talking about a constitutional issue like the freedom to travel, I find it very difficult to disagree with him.”32
At the same time the Ebony piece appeared, Robeson began to be rediscovered by the recording industry. Thanks to the valiant efforts during the early fifties of Paul, Jr., and Lloyd Brown, Robeson’s voice had found a marginal outlet through their Othello Recording Company. But in the beginning of 1958 Vanguard put him back in a commercial studio for the first time in seven years. According to Essie, “Paul was nervous as a cat,” but everyone deemed the sessions a success—“Paul was never in better voice. The sound technicians were amazed, and the Vanguard folks were simply thrilled, and so was Paul, of course.” Then, in April 1958, another breakthrough came in the form of an Actors’ Equity resolution. Following the lead of their British counterparts, the quarterly membership meeting on March 28 voted 111–75 to urge the State Department to issue Robeson a passport (Equity President Ralph Bellamy was one of the negatives).33
It was a nice present, arriving just before Robeson’s sixtieth birthday, on April 9, 1958. That occasion provoked many additional tributes. Before the birthday rites were concluded, no fewer than twenty-seven countries had held celebratory events of one kind or another, with Peggy Middleton, the London County Council member from Greenwich and executive secretary of the London Paul Robeson Committee, coordinating the assorted arrangements as if from a command post. In Mexico City, twenty leading figures in the arts sponsored a concert; in South Africa, a group of students and faculty at Cape Town University arranged a recital of Robeson recordings; in East Berlin, a Robeson song-film made on direct commission to Earl Robinson especially for the occasion premiered in the city’s biggest hall; in Stockholm, the literary magazine Clarté put out a special Robeson issue; in Hungary, commemorative concerts were performed throughout the country; in Japan, Radio Tokyo broadcast Robeson songs and speeches; in Port-au-Prince, the celebrants gathered at the Société Nationale d’Art Dramatique; in Peking, a rally was staged in the new Capital Theatre that lasted over three hours, preceded by two days of Robeson songs on national radio; in Moscow, the celebration took place in the enormous Hall of Columns—and in New York the Soviet representative to the UN, A. Sobolev, hosted a dinner for Robeson.34
Paul Robeson Page 69