Paul Robeson
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3. Gertrude Bustill edited the Women’s Department of the New York Age and the Indianapolis World, worked for Philadelphia’s most influential newspapers, the Inquirer, the Press, and the Times, and was active in a wide variety of women’s and public service organizations in the black community (they are detailed in Twenty 19th Century Black Women, a publication of the National Archives for Black Women’s History and the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum). Her book, The Afro-American Woman (George S. Ferguson Co., 1894) surveys the accomplishments of black women, giving due attention to the social conditions that limited their options; it contains as well some “advanced” views on the plight of women in general.
Anna Bustill Smith (cited in note 2) was yet another noteworthy member of the Bustill clan. Cousin to Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, Paul’s mother, she published “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey” in 1913, recently rescued from oblivion by the Princeton History Project (see Fred Ferretti, “Black History in Princeton,” The New York Times, March 5, 1978), which reprinted it in Princeton Recolleclor, vol. III, no. 5 (Winter 1977), with a biographical sketch of Anna Bustill Smith by Gledhill Cameron. Anna Smith’s father, Joseph Cassey Bustill, the grandson of Cyrus Bustill, is credited by Cameron with being the youngest member of the Underground Railroad, and her mother, Sarah Humphrew, a Chippewa Indian, with being the first black graduate of the Girls’ Normal School in Philadelphia. Paul Robeson personally knew both Gertrude Bustill Mossell and Anna Bustill Smith; all three of them gave speeches at the Eighth Annual Re-Union of the descendants of the Bustill family, June 21, 1918 (the invitation and program are in the Robeson Archives—henceforth RA).
The ms. autobiography (courtesy of Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham) of Gertrude Bustill’s husband, Nathan F. Mossell, gives a detailed account of his own noteworthy career. Having surmounted the color bar to medical training, in 1895 he founded with other black doctors what became the famed Mercy-Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia (its history is recounted in Elliott M. Rudwick, “A Brief History of Mercy-Douglass,” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 20 [1951], and also in the hospital’s Annual Reports, given to me by Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham). Mossell remained active in the protest against racial injustice throughout his long life. His ms. papers contain a large number of speeches, letters, and petitions that attest to his activism, including correspondence with William Jennings Bryan about racial “amalgamation” and protests about racial issues to both the Presidents Roosevelt.
4. Gertrude Cunningham documents; PR, ms. notes (written May 2, 1956), RA (rocks; militancy; Laddie); PR, Stand, pp. 12–13, 21–22; interview with Marian Liggins (Ben’s daughter), Nov. 21, 1982; interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985 (Reeve); multiple interviews with Helen Rosen (recalls PR saying Reeve had ended on Skid Row). Since blacks were not permitted in the Princeton high school, William had to travel to Trenton to get an education (PR, Stand, p. 10; Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987). Alexander (“Ting”) Taylor is the source for William’s being called “schoolboy”; Taylor (b. 1891), and his family lived opposite the Robesons on Greene Street (interview with Taylor, Aug. 11, 1987). Emma Epps (b. 1900), also a neighbor, believes Reeve became a mortician in Washington, D.C., before going to Detroit (interview with Epps, Aug. 11, 1987). Both Taylor and Epps confirm that Reeve always stood up for his rights (“Wouldn’t take nothing from nobody,” in Taylor’s words). Paul Robeson, Jr. (henceforth PR, Jr.), is the source for Reeve’s being part owner of a hotel, but denies that there is any truth to the rumor that he died on Skid Row (PR, Jr., ms. comments). In a heated speech in 1949, PR referred to Reeve’s answering “each insult with blows that sent would-be slave masters crashing to the stone sidewalks, even though jail was his constant reward” (press release, Council on African Affairs [hereafter CAA], June 19, 1949).
5. Princeton Press, March 26, 1906 (size of black population). Both Taylor and Epps stressed to me (interviews, Aug. 11, 1987) the cohesiveness that existed in Princeton’s black community in the early decades of the century, and also the “large number” of black-owned businesses and property. PR, Stand, pp. 10–11; Pearl Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire” (twelve-page interview for Bradley’s M.A. thesis), RA (NC contingent); Anita Sterner interviews with Bishop Clinton Hoggard and J. Douglas Brown (PR contemporaries) for 1978 BBC program on PR, tapes courtesy of Sterner (hereafter “Sterner interviews”). PR’s later remarks on Princeton are from a June 19, 1949, CAA press release summarizing a speech he had given, and also a handwritten ms. reminiscing about his youth (in ER’s hand), RA. In later life PR often referred with special fondness to his Aunt Huldah (e.g., Freedom, April 1952); according to Epps (interview, Aug. 11, 1987), Huldah Robeson was married to Rev. Robeson’s brother Ben (a second brother, John, apparently also lived in Princeton). PR’s childhood playmates included Bessie and Christine Moore, whose mother was white and whose father made considerable money running a cleaning establishment for Princeton students and also a boardinghouse; Christine Moore (later Howell, who lived until 1972) remained close friends with Marian Robeson Forsythe through the years. (I’m grateful to her daughter, Paulina Forsythe, for sharing with me Christine Moore Howell’s letters).
6. Rev. Robeson had had a brief pastorate in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., before being called to Witherspoon (obituary, Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918). Anna Bustill Smith, “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey”; Sterner interview with Hoggard; Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918. Blacks had originally been listed in the rolls of the First Presbyterian Church and had successfully resisted efforts to set them apart until 1846, when the First Presbyterian Church of Color was organized; its name was changed in 1848 to Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church (Arthur Link, First Presbyterian Church of Princeton [Princeton University Press, 1967], pp. 32–36; V. Lansing Collins, Princeton, Past and Present [Princeton University Press, 1945]; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton 1746–1896 [Princeton University Press, 1946]).
7. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Jan. 30, June 26, Sept. 19, 1900, The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS); Trenton Times, June 28, Sept. 20 (“eloquent”), 1900; Princeton Press, Sept. 22, 1900 (“misfit”).
8. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Sept. 24, 1900, PHS; Daily State Gazette (Trenton), Sept. 25, 1900; Princeton Press, Sept. 29, 1900.
9. Sterner interview with Hoggard; Grace Doman Willis to Marian Robeson Forsythe, Feb. 21, 1976 (“did it to his father”), courtesy Paulina Forsythe. One false rumor that circulated about Rev. Robeson’s forced departure centered on “mischief with one of the girls in his congregation.” Alexander Woollcott printed that rumor in his New York World column for May 20, 1928, adding, “Years later, they tell me, a divinity student, who had helped to bring the accusation, confessed that it had been an invention fabricated by someone who wanted to occupy that pulpit himself.” In a second article, Woollcott referred to “some skulduggery on the part of two scheming divinity students” as being responsible for Rev. Robeson’s ouster (Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, July 1933; conceivably Woollcott’s source was Paul, since the two were friendly at the time).
10. Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Oct. 17, Nov. 12, PHS; Princeton Press, Nov. 10, 1900 (Seminary meeting).
11. Princeton Press, Feb. 2, 1901. The six-hundred-dollar salary is an estimate based on a report in the Princeton Press, June 30, 1906, that the salary of the pastor of Witherspoon Church had, after a recent increase, reached seven hundred dollars. The statement issued by the Church Session of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian (printed in the Princeton Press, Feb. 16, 1901) makes no reference at all to a dispute, merely commending Rev. Robeson for his eloquence as a speaker and for his continuing efforts for “social and moral reform and Christian union.” The records of the Witherspoon Street Church might contain additional information about the reasons for Rev. Robeson’s departure, but in response to my inquiry the church archivists reported that they could not locate the records for the period in question. One ho
pes those records are only temporarily mislaid.
12. Interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982. The fullest account of Louisa Robeson’s death is in ER, PR, Negro, pp. 23–24, but additional information about her is in PR, Stand, pp. 14–17, 21–22, and Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA, subsequently reprinted as “My Brother—Paul Robeson—An Appraisal,” with a “Comment” by Bishop W. J. Walls, in The Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes, Oct. 1954, and as appendix A to PR, Stand.
13. The “intimates” quoted are Helen Rosen and Clara Rockmore, in multiple interviews with each. The recollection of his mother’s funeral is in PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA. John H. Johnson, whose mother, Harriet Howard, was a good friend of Louisa Bustill Robeson, described her, in one of the few accounts that are even secondhand, as “a beautiful woman … in all ways a most admirable person.” (Johnson to PR, June 5, 1975, courtesy Paulina Forsythe). The Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, referred to her as a “poetess.” Emma Epps (interview Aug. 11, 1987) described her as “very brilliant,” “a beautiful person—most of us never got over it.”
14. Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987 (preaching); Princeton Packet, Jan. 2, 30, 1904; Sergeant, “A Portrait of Paul Robeson,” The New Republic, March 3, 1926 (dignity); PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956 (ashes). In the latter source, PR also wrote that his brothers Reed and Bill would help their father out as coachmen, driving the Princeton students “to earn a few quarters”; but the work, PR added, was “often hazardous—Many of the students being from the deep south and imbued with Platonic ideas of the ‘Elite’ and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon over African—and especially if the wine had flowed in abundance.” The original ms. version of Marie Seton’s Paul Robeson (Dennis Dobson, 1958) contains PR’s handwritten comments and deletions in the margins (ms. courtesy Seton—hereafter “Seton Ms.”). In the ms. Seton made two separate references to the Bustills’ doing “nothing to aid Maria Louisa’s dark children” after her death, seeking Paul out “only after he became a famous man”—“he was too black to be accepted as one of them.…” Seton based her book primarily on talks with Robeson himself, but when he went over her ms. he cut out the references cited above, and they do not appear in the printed version. Further evidence of the Bustill attitude is in an FBI report which quotes Robeson as saying that “his mother’s family looked down on his father’s people” (FBI Main 100-12304-7), and in a World Telegram interview with him (Oct. 5, 1935). Paul’s identification with his father’s family was so strong that at times he may have exaggerated the extent of his actual contact with them. In a 1948 speech, for example (the tape is in RA), he mentions in passing that “I was in the South a lot as a boy.” In point of fact, he was not. Apparently his mother did take him on a visit to North Carolina when he was an infant (PR, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom, April 1952), but that was the only time he spent there. Yet his 1948 claim may well represent, in a symbolic sense, how deeply he felt attached in spirit to his North Carolina roots (and may also reflect the Southern “feel” of Princeton).
15. Rev. Robeson was formally “dismissed” by the Presbytery of New Brunswick to the A.M.E. Zion New Jersey Conference in April 1906 and appointed two months later by the bishop to A.M.E. Zion in Westfield (Princeton Press, April 28, June 1906). PR later wrote that his father “reluctantly moved on from Calvinism to the Church of John Wesley” (PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA—also the source for laying first bricks). Somerville Courier-News, April 20, 1973 (Sam Woldin, Arthur Van Fleet, and Donald M. Pearsall’s recollections of PR, including the years in Westfield); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge (a Somerville classmate), Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Hoggard and Brown, plus her tape marked “Discussion at Old People’s Meeting in Princeton”; PR, Stand, pp. 12–15; New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 17, 1926 (overnights); Seton Ms. (church sisters; most of this section does not appear in Seton’s printed version); The New Yorker profile of PR, “King of Harlem,” Sept. 24, 1928 (sewing buttons, etc.). The comment about “a nice, open-hearted boy” is from Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1930, in which he reviews ER, PR, Negro, and recounts his own talks about PR with his neighbors in Westfield (where Hughes was living in 1930). PR’s comment on qualified white acceptance in Westfield is from the ms. of his column in the first (Dec. 1950) issue of Freedom, PR Coll., New York Public Library, Schomburg Collection (hereafter NYPL/Schm). In the same ms. he recalls sometimes taking meals in “one of the few colored restaurants” in town, “rushing from school to get my favorite dish and my nickname, a ‘thousand on a plate.’”
16. Scattered information on Reverend Robeson’s activities as pastor in Somerville are in the Unionist-Gazette (Somerville) for Jan. 23, Feb. 20, April 17, May 1, 1913, April 30, 1914, Jan. 7, April 29, May 13, 20, June 24, July 1, 1915; they include references to his hosting and attending church conferences, welcoming the Colored Boy Scouts for a concert held at St. Thomas, and a successful carnival to raise money for church expenses; two of the news items (Jan. 23, 1913 and April 1, 1915) refer to two week-long revivals and “religious awakening” at St. Thomas during which “many were reclaimed.” The obituary in the local paper when Rev. Robeson died reported that, “During the first three years of his pastorate a debt of $1,600 on the parsonage was liquidated” (the Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918). Condolence letter from “Lawrence” to PR, May 20, 1918 (devoted), RA; PR, Stand, p. 9. Ben Robeson was appointed to his first pastorate in the A.M.E. Zion Church, Bayonne, N.J., in 1914. His thirteen months of overseas service as a chaplain in World War I left him, in his daughter’s opinion, with jangled nerves thereafter, despite a calm exterior. He was appointed to Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in 1936 and remained its pastor until his death in 1963. He married Frances Cline in 1915 and they had three daughters, Marian Liggins, Vivian Reynolds, and Bennie Ryan (program for Memorial Service, Dec. 5, 1963; Philadelphia Tribune, Sept. 22, 1962; interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982). The version quoted in the text about Rev. Robeson’s fall is from Seton, Robeson, p. 18—a variant of the anecdote is published in PR, Stand, p. 9; yet a third version is in an undated thirteen-page ms. speech by Geraldine (Maimie) Neale Bledsoe, PR’s girlfriend during his undergraduate years, recounting the story as she had heard it from Paul (ms. courtesy Bledsoe). H. A. Murray was one friend who heard PR’s imitation of his father in the twenties; Murray thought it “too good for words” and prevailed on PR to give a repeat performance at the bedside of ailing playwright Ned Sheldon (interview with Murray, Feb. 6, 1985).
17. PR, “From My Father’s Parsonage,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929 (inflexion). In Stand, p. 13, PR wrote that his father “never” talked about his years as a slave. I have substituted “rarely” for “never” on the basis of PR’s own testimony at other points in his life—for example, in interviews he gave to the Messenger, Oct. 1924, and to the Methodist Times (London), Jan. 3, 1929. The Methodist Times interview and Stand, pp. 11–13, along with Jerome Beatty, “America’s No. 1 Negro,” The American, May 1944, are the sources for the quotations, except for the one about “trek for Freedom,” which is from Maimie Bledsoe to me (April 4, 1985) and as repeated by her in a twenty-one-page speech (the ms. of which she sent me) that she delivered in the 1970s about Robeson. The Woldins gave Rev. Robeson a plot of ground in their backyard on which to grow vegetables, since his own soil was not suitable (Sam Woldin, ms. reminiscences, RA).
18. PR, Stand, p. 9.
19. Interview with Oscar Brown, Sr., July 2, 1986; Joseph H. Nelson to me, Dec. 14, 1982, with his ms. enclosure, “Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World,” dated Feb. 1981 (“beautiful voice”). Brown emphasized to me that on the whole he and the rest of the black staff were well treated at the hotel. In his autobiography, By a Thread (Vantage Press, 1983), p. 25, Brown writes, “Most of the boys were able to get a suit out of their summer work.” Fritz Pollard is mentioned in PR’s “Memory Book” for “Summer 1916,” RA. In her diary for Dec. 30, 1924, ER mentio
ns seeing “dear old Oscar Brown” (RA).
20. Somerset Messenger, June 29, 1911 (Jamison graduation).
21. PR, Stand, pp. 17–18. Unlike Paul, his wife, Essie Robeson, later seems to have equated the town’s surface acceptance with equality. In her 1930 book on her husband, Paul Robeson, Negro, she exaggerates community acceptance, painting a near-cloudless picture of race relations in Somerville (e.g., “He played with the sons and daughters of the most cultured white people in the town.… Apparently no one thought about the mixing, and certainly no one resented it.… He himself never thought about it” (ER, PR, Negro, pp. 30–31). Paul deeply disliked ER’s book (see pp. 139–40).
22. Interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Frank Barnes and Leslie Kershaw, 1977. Barnes told Sterner that Winston Douglas later became principal of a school—“to me a more satisfying life than Paul.… He [Robeson] could have done more had he remained in maybe the teaching profession.” See also the interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976.
23. Interviews with Ericson, Barnes, Kershaw; “refined, clean-minded, wholesome” is a phrase from ER, PR, Negro, p. 31; J. Douglas Brown, three-page typed reminiscence of PR at Somerville High, dated April 4, 1976 (hereafter Brown, “Somerville”), in the Special Collections of the Rutgers University Library (hereafter RUA). When PR returned to Somerville in 1926 to give a concert, ER wrote in her diary, “So many people, colored and white, came backstage afterwards to welcome Paul back. Paul remembered all about their sons and daughters, and what they were doing, etc., and tickling the people to death” (ER Diary, Jan. 14, 1926, RA).