Paul Robeson
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24. PR, Stand, p. 17; Brown, “Somerville” (Caesar), RUA; Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 19, 26, 1914 (“coarse … censure”).
25. Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 11, March 4, April 1, 1915 (“Water Cure”); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Kershaw, Barnes, Brown; Brown, “Somerville,” RUA; Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …” in Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 27, 1924, for which PR supplied the basic data (Jennings to PR, Feb. 27, 1924). The Sunday Times, June 15, 1924, and the Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1972 (reminiscences of five PR contemporaries) also have references to the “Water Cure,” but the fullest account, one that draws on the recollections of Anna Miller, is in the Sunday Times, April 1, 1934. The Unionist-Gazette, April 18, 1915, does list PR as part of the senior class trip to Washington; perhaps, finally, he did not go (as his classmates’ accounts listed above attest), but this contradiction in the evidence remains unresolved.
26. PR, Stand, p. 19; Kershaw interview in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976 (Vosseller); Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA.
27. In an interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976, he claimed (with what I would guess is only marginal plausibility, given PR’s restraint) not only that the High Bridge principal called PR “big nigger” but also that it caused Paul “to vent his anger for the only time” Kershaw could remember: “He grabbed the principal by the back of the coat and pants and marched him out in front of the stands,” finally restrained from doing him further injury by three or four of his fellow players. In Stand, pp. 20–21, PR recounts the racial bigotry of the supervising principal of the Somerville system, Dr. Ackerman. It’s possible Kershaw, keen to defend Somerville’s reputation, transposed that hostility to the neighboring principal in High Bridge.
28. Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 15, 1924 (teacher), April 1, 1934 (place); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; PR, Stand, pp. 19–20. Several of his male contemporaries, however, recalled that their families had “entertained and dined” him in their homes (as interviewed in the Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1973).
29. PR, Stand, p. 20. The 1924 article on PR (Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …,” Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 15, 1924) contains some interviews and reminiscences by PR’s contemporaries at Somerville High, which provide additional confirmation both of the “subtle” racism to which he was subjected and of the “affable” way he reacted to it. One woman quoted in the article, for example, compared him favorably with the other black student, Winston Douglas, who was characterized as “bossy”: “Paul isn’t a bit. He’s not nearly so good looking … but Paul is so exceptionally nice. I never really think of him as black—do you?” Paul is also referred to in the article as “appreciative”—“he can understand the white point of view as well as he can the black. He belongs to the human race first of all.”
30. Pearson’s Weekly (London), Oct. 20, 1934 (“manner of man”); “awful rough” is from public remarks PR made in Australia in 1960, tape courtesy of Lloyd Davies. The quotes about “in comparison to most Negroes” and “intense fury” are from the ms. of Seton’s Robeson; they were cut from the printed version at PR’s own insistence. According to Seton, he asked her to delete “additional examples of hurtful acts of discrimination” because “he suffered less than virtually all black people” (Seton to Geoffrey Baines, Nov. 30, 1978, courtesy Seton).
31. As pieced together from the following five interviews, the first four conducted by Sterner: Barnes, Brown, Hoggard, Kershaw, Ericson (with me, Nov. 7, 1983); and also from the reminiscences by Woldin, Van Fleet, and Pearsall in the Somerville Courier-News, April 20, 1973, and from the interview with Kershaw in the Democrat (Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976 (books home).
32. The largest amount of material on Robeson’s high-school athletic career is in the Unionist-Gazette (Somerville); for baseball, the issues of May 12, 1913, April 16, May 28, 1914, May 13, 20, 1915; for track, May 28, 1914; for football, Oct. 23 (Phillipsburg), Nov. 6 (Bound Brook) 1913. Somerset Messenger Gazette, April 19, 1973 (“rough bunch”); Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930 (Rev. Robeson). Brown writes about the Phillipsburg game, “The local toughs urged their players to get Paul. The rest of us protected him on every play” (“Somerville,” RUA). Donald M. Pearsall, who knew PR in Westfield, recalls that he played on the high-school baseball team while he was still in the seventh grade (as interviewed in the Courier-News [Bridgewater, N.J.], April 20, 1973). PR was also “athletic editor” of the Valkyrie, the student paper (Unionist-Gazette, June 17. 1915).
33. Phone interview with Frederick K. Shield, Nov. 8, 1983.
34. PR, Stand, pp. 25–26; Brown, “Somerville,” RUA; Shield interview, Nov. 8, 1983. Shield’s retrospective enthusiasm for PR’s performance led him, in our interview, to remember that PR had been awarded first prize. That memory is contradicted not only by PR’s own account in Stand, but also in the contemporary newspaper account (Unionist-Gazette, April 29, 1915). Shield may have been remembering the preliminary round to choose Somerville’s contestant—which PR did win—but for that contest Shield is not listed in the paper as having been a judge (Unionist-Gazette, April 22, 1915). Additional information on debating events in which PR took part is in the Unionist-Gazette, Feb. 4, 11, (literacy test), 18, March 11, 1915.
35. PR, Stand, pp. 24–25; Sunday Times, New Brunswick, April 1, 1934 (Anna Miller). The Class of 1915 closing ceremonials—Banquet, Class Day Exercises, and Commencement—are described in the Unionist-Gazette, May 13, June 17, 24, July 15, 1915. PR played the role of a gypsy in the Exercises and at commencement recited “a splendid oratorical analysis” of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the abolitionist martyr.
36. Profile of PR, “King of Harlem”; PR, “Notes: 1936,” RA (“idealist”). He had been brought up “more like an English schoolboy than an American one,” he once remarked (Seton Ms., courtesy Seton).
CHAPTER 2 RUTGERS COLLEGE (1915–1918)
1. Interview with Davenport’s widow and son, Sadie Davenport Shelton and Robert Davenport, March 26, 1985 (PR, Jr., participating).
2. The team measurements are recorded on a piece of paper in RA.
3. PR interview with Robert Van Gelder, “Robeson Remembers,” The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1944.
4. Van Gelder interview, The New York Times, Jan. 16, 1944; New Yorker profile, Sept. 24, 1928; Sterner interview with Kershaw.
5. Sterner interview with Rendall. White’s comments are in “‘Robey’ at Rutgers,” Rutgers Daily Targum, April 10, 1973), an article by Ronald Dean Brown containing interviews with PR’s classmates. Earl Reed Silvers, Rutgers Alumni Monthly, Nov. 1930, p. 44. Silvers also wrote to James M. Nelson, associate editor of The American Magazine (April 3, 1944), protesting the accuracy of “the recurring appearance in newspapers and magazines of the story to the effect that Paul’s teammates attempted deliberately to injure him during his first weeks as a member of the squad.”
6. Interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983.
7. Interview with Angus Cameron, July 15, 1986 (orange crates); Mason’s version was told to me by his daughter Jan Mason in a phone interview, March 5, 1985; Nash’s comment is in the Rutgers Daily Targum, April 10, 1973. Additional confirmation has come to me from William E. Mutch, Rutgers 1920 (interview Feb. 25, 1987), and from Bernard Forer, who later taught with Alfred Neuschafer, a guard on the Rutgers team, and reports that Neuschafer told stories about the varsity’s “conspiring” to pound Robeson “unmercifully” (Forer to me, Aug. 12, 1982). See also Forer’s account in the Rutgers Alumni News, Spring 1988, p. 21.
8. New Brunswick Sunday Home News, Oct. 16, 1965 (Burke); this episode is also recounted in Larry Pitt, Football at Rutgers, 1869–1969 (Rutgers, 1972). Five years after graduating, Paul and Essie had dinner with Sanford (ER Diary, Feb. 7, 1924, RA), and when a special memorial meeting was held honoring Sanford’s induction into the football Hall of Fame, Ro
beson sent his greetings (the message is in RA). Sanford, Jr., also recounted (interview, April 12, 1983) how his father championed PR to the extent of physically threatening train conductors and hotel managers who refused accommodations to PR when the team was traveling, but I’ve found no outside confirmation of those events. According to Sanford, Jr., Robeson was “very conscious of his social strata,” as demonstrated by the fact that, when he found himself on the same ship with the Sanfords on returning from Europe once in the twenties, he chose to eat in his stateroom rather than “embarrass” the Sanfords by coming into the dining room and possibly being seated at their table (interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983).
9. According to the account based on interviews with contemporaries in the Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, PR got his first break as a freshman as a result of Budge Garrett’s being hurt in one of the early games of the season. A large collection of newspaper clippings, ranging from the Rutgers Targum to the national press, chronicling PR’s athletic career in detail, is in RA; they are too numerous to cite. George Daley of the New York World (Nov. 28, 1917) is the sportswriter quoted above; Walter Camp’s comment is in Collier’s Weekly, Jan. 4, 1919. PR’s compiled athletic record is in J. C. Hilliard to PR, April 25, 1923, RA. PR’s “Memory Book” (RA) contains the references to St. Christopher. PR later reminisced warmly about “St. C,” which he referred to as “the boy’s club of St. Philips Parish” in Freedom, Nov. 1951. Seven years after graduating from Rutgers, PR is quoted as saying that, after the first two years of playing football, “the games lost much of their pleasure for me. It became too much a case of thinking that winning the game was its only object.… Instead of playing for the love of it you then were playing only to win” (Boston Evening Globe, March 13, 1926). William E. Mutch was on the baseball team with PR and remembers that the coach, “General” Frank Cox, always took the room with Robeson when the team had to sleep away from the campus on an overnight (interview with Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987).
10. Interviews with Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983, and Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987 (“nigger”). Storck’s comments are as reported to me by his daughter, Dorothy D. Storck (phone interview, May 5, 1987). Storck entered Rutgers in 1916 and was later an All-American from West Point.
11. Interview with Mutch, Feb. 25, 1987 (Kilpatrick); Boston Traveler, Aug. 14, 1942 (quitting).
12. The Carr letter, June 6, 1919, is in RUA. It has been reprinted by George Fishman in Freedomways, Summer 1969, and by Peter Mazzei, “James Dickson Carr: First Black Graduate of Rutgers College,” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, vol. XLVII, no. 2, Dec. 1985. The Mazzei article contains additional details of Carr’s career at Rutgers and also reprints Pres. Demarest’s brief and evasive reply to Carr’s letter of protest.
13. Boston Traveler, Aug. 14, 1942; New York Tribune, Nov. 4, 1917; Cincinnati Post, Oct. 25, 1929; undated [1944?] clipping from a Westfield, N.J., paper, RA.
14. Targum, Dec. 19, 1917, Rutgers Athletic News, Oct. 4, 1969 (p.12), L. L. Arms writing in the New York Tribune (as quoted in the Scarlet Letter, 1919, p. 165 (“Othello”), The Sun, Nov. 25, 1917.
15. The comments on PR’s gentleness are by Rudolph Illey (Rutgers ’20), who also described PR as “a loner,” and Robert E. Galbraith (Rutgers ’24); they are part of a collection of reminiscences about PR in RUA.
16. A list of PR’s course grades is in RA. His worst grade, a D in Physics Lab, was given him by Prof. Mayne Mason, who nonetheless referred to him as “extremely bright” (interview with Jan Mason, March 5, 1985). Among his teachers, PR had particularly fondness for Dr. Charles H. Whitman, a professor of English who took him to New York to see his first Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice (Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire,” 1944, RA). In a later newspaper interview (Sunday Times [New Brunswick], June 8, 1930), Whitman said he encouraged PR to become an educator “among the people of his own race.” After graduation, Robeson returned to speak at Whitman’s contemporary drama class.
The ms. of Seton’s Robeson (courtesy Seton) contains several sentences about the glee club that were subsequently cut from the printed version; one of them reads, “These rules were that no Negro student would be welcome because there were white girls present,” but Robeson crossed out the words following “welcome” and wrote in instead “to social events. Not social equality. Please.”
The same pattern of social discrimination is apparent in PR’s room assignments. The Rutgers College Catalogues (RUA) list him as living alone in Winants Hall during both his freshman and sophomore years—though only a few single rooms are available in Winants, and upperclassmen traditionally have preference on them. In his junior year PR was assigned a room with Robert Davenport, the only other black student at Rutgers, and Leon Harold Smith, a white freshman described in these words in his yearbook: “… even he claims he’s really stupid.” In his senior year PR was put in a room with another white freshman, Herbert Lewis Miskend from Brooklyn. There is no certain evidence that PR accepted these room assignments; several fragmented references suggest that he lived at least part of the time with black families off-campus. According to J. Douglas Brown and Clinton Hoggard, PR did at first live in a campus dormitory, but then stayed with the Cummings family in New Brunswick (Sterner interviews with Brown, Hoggard). Confirmation that PR did live in Winants is in a set of ms. reminiscences by undergraduates who knew him at Rutgers (in RUA), one of whom (Charles T. Dieffenbach, ’22) recalls living in the room just below Paul’s—“will always remember his booming ‘Pipe down, freshmen!’ aimed at the three of us more than a few times.” William E. Mutch, a year behind PR at Rutgers, remembers Robeson’s room in Winants as being on the ground floor and essentially bare except for desk, bed, and chair. Mutch distinctly recalls Davenport as Robeson’s roommate, but doesn’t remember any white student living with them. Additionally, Mutch remembers that PR would participate in “sings” on the steps of Winants or outside of the Beta Theta Phi fraternity house—though no fraternity at Rutgers would admit a black to membership inside the house. According to Mutch, PR’s performance of “Gopher Dust” at the “sings” became so popular that whenever he appeared the shout “Gopher Dust!” would go up (interview, Feb. 25, 1987). In the Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, an unidentified man who played varsity football with PR is quoted as saying that, during the steak suppers the team would be treated to after a game, PR “used to sing his own little Negro songs” between courses, and also “college songs and the popular tunes of the day,” and before the games he “came over to the fraternity house often … and sang.”
17. Rev. Robeson “stinted and got help from influential people” (Seton Ms.). Among the latter, apparently, was Lena Home’s grandmother Cora Home (as told in 1983 to the Washington Post drama critic David Richards, who kindly passed the information on to me). Audreen Buffalo’s interview with Lena Home (Essence, May 1985) repeats that same story. Lena Home’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, claims that Cora Home “helped Paul apply for the scholarship he won at Rutgers” (The Homes: An American Family [Knopf, 1986], p. 50). According to Sanford, Jr. (interview, April 12, 1983), PR may also have gotten some money from a group of “gentlemen underwriters,” a syndicate of Rutgers alumni formed to ensure that their alma mater “became a major football power”; the practice of paying college players was then legal and commonplace, and Sanford, Jr., feels certain that PR received some assistance; one fifty-dollar letter of credit for PR, signed by a John P. Wall of New Brunswick, is described in Faulk to Wall, June 24, 1919, RUA.
18. The Philoclean episode is in Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of Paulina Forsythe. “A thing apart” is from ms. of PR’s column in Freedom, Dec. 1950 (PR Coll., New York Public Library, Manuscript Division, henceforth NYPL/Ms. Div.).
19. Storck’s recollections are as reported to me by his daughter Dorothy D. Storck (phone interview, May 5, 1987); Charles N. Prickett to PR, Dec. 8, 1969, RA (“watching”).
21. New Brunswick Daily Home News, June 5, 1919; Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Paul Robeson, All-American (New Republic, 1976), p. 20. PR’s thesis is printed in Philip S. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks (Citadel, 1978), pp. 53–62.
22. Sunday Times (New Brunswick), June 8, 1930 (Demarest).
23. PR’s valedictory speech is in RA and was also printed in full in the Rutgers Targum, June 1919; Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of Paulina Forsythe (audience standing).
24. In my reading of PR’s valedictory speech, I find Sterling Stuckey’s characterization of it as showing “an essentially nationalist stand” off the mark. (Stuckey, “‘I Want To Be African’: Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice,” The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1976). At the other extreme, Harold Cruse has argued that Robeson never developed a nationalist perspective (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [Morrow, 1967]). Stuckey and Cruse have tangled extensively over this question in print, but since the controversy focuses on the 1930s, the bulk of my discussion of the issues will be found in the chapters on those years. Suffice it to say here that in my view both men, though coming at the question from opposite perspectives, adopt a static analysis, failing to detect the developmental aspect of Robeson’s thought, and failing also to make a crucially needed distinction between the public words Robeson spoke as a young man to white or mixed audiences and the private words he spoke (and the inner emotions he felt) with black friends—a distinction I have tried to draw in this chapter. For the Stuckey-Cruse controversy, see also Stuckey, “The Cultural Philosophy of Paul Robeson,” Freedomways, First Quarter 1971; Cruse, “A Review of the Paul Robeson Controversy,” First World, vol.2, no.3, 1979; and Stuckey, “On Cultural Nihilism,” ms. copy, RA.