Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  25. Interview with Sadie Goode Davenport Shelton and her son Robert Davenport, March 26, 1985 (PR, Jr., participating); interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983. Sadie Goode only met PR and the “Trenton crowd” a few times; her husband was closer to them. After graduation, Davenport went to teach at Slater (Winston-Salem) and then in Texas, but kept in occasional touch with PR. Though he died young (1939), before PR became a controversial figure, Davenport was, according to his widow, always quick to defend him against slurs of any kind. When Davenport died, PR was unable to attend the funeral, but was moved enough to ask his brother Rev. Ben Robeson to represent him. As late as 1952, when in the New Jersey area, PR stopped by to say hello to Sadie Davenport’s father, a Montclair chauffeur on whose porch PR had sometimes slept as an undergraduate if he missed connections back to New Brunswick (he slept on the porch, not inside, because “it was late and he didn’t want to disturb anyone in the house”). In PR’s “College Scrapbook” (RA), Davvy wrote, “‘In you I see more and more the qualities of my ideal’—Selected. Oh! Boy!”

  26. The Neale quotations which follow to the end of this chapter are taken from some eight to ten letters from her to me, three of which (July 17, Aug. 6, 1983, April 14, 1985) are lengthy memoirs totaling about fifty pages. She also kindly sent me six unpublished speeches that she delivered over the years about PR, which I also quote from in this and subsequent paragraphs. Since this batch of materials is privately held, I will not attempt precise citations here; suffice it to say that all quotations in this section are drawn from the private collection—unless otherwise noted. In PR’s fragmentary “College Scrapbook” and “Memory and Fellowship Book” (RA), there is one definite mention of “Gerry” and three other probable references to her.

  27. “Wish my family in Freehold had not discarded mine,” Gerry Neale Bledsoe wrote me (July 7, 1983) in regard to their exchange of letters. Neither side of the correspondence exists in RA, either. The 1919 baseball game had also marked the very last time PR would play in any athletic event for Rutgers. As the newspaper accounts in RA make clear, he played “in wonderful style,” and Rutgers won the game 5–1. A jubilant PR told Gerry, who attended the game, that he was “thrilled” to have beaten “Proud Princeton,” which “up to that time had never played a team with a black player on it” (unpublished Bledsoe speech).

  28. The “English friend” is Leonora (“Pat”) Gregory (now Stitt). She co-wrote several of PR’s articles (including the well-known “Primitives”) in the thirties. She has described the composition and ramifications of the articles in a series of letters to me (for more, see note 43, p. 625). PR was so pleased with the articles that he and Gregory began discussing the possibility of doing a book together, a project interrupted by PR’s 1939 return to the States. The book did reach the stage of a written “draft plan,” which Stitt kindly shared with me. The quotations about adolescence and college are taken from this “draft plan.”

  29. This account is taken from two of the dozen letters previously cited from Gerry Neale Bledsoe to me, those of Aug. 6, 1983, and April 14, 1985. PR and Gerry Neale possibly met through the well-to-do Moore family; the two daughters, Bessie and Christine, had become Gerry’s closest friends, and Bessie was a classmate at Teachers Normal. There are letters from Christine Moore to Paul’s sister, Marian, right up to CM’s death in 1972 (letters courtesy of Paulina Forsythe).

  30. Bledsoe’s version of these events, as described in letters to me, has been confirmed by Sadie Davenport Shelton (interview, March 26, 1985—“Gerry turned him down”).

  31. The “class prophecy” is in the Rutgers Targum, June 1919, which in an accompanying editorial expressed the hope, “May Rutgers never forget this noble son.…” Evidence of Paul’s “deputizing” for his father is in the Somerset Messenger, Nov. 1, 1916, where he is recorded as delivering the “response” after welcoming addresses at a district missionary convention held at St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion. PR’s flirtation with the ministry is described in an article and an interview from the twenties: PR, “My Father’s Parsonage …,” Sunday Sun (London), Jan. 13, 1929; interview with Rev. Robertson Ballard, Methodist Times, Jan. 3, 1929; Charlotte Himber, Famous in Their Twenties (YMCA, 1942), p. 98 for “zeal” (as told to Himber by Ben Robeson).

  CHAPTER 3 COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE (1919–1921)

  1. For these and other details on the condition of the black masses, see the convenient summary in ch. 1 of Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, vol. I, The Depression Decade (Oxford, 1978).

  2. Ms. of PR’s column for the first (Dec. 1950) issue of Freedom, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm. (Streeter’s). The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from an unpublished autobiographical account, of roughly thirty-five thousand words, by Eslanda Goode Robeson in RA. The ms. was meant to be part of her 1930 book, Paul Robeson, Negro, but only a segment of the section dealing with 1922–28 ever appeared in print (hereafter Ms. Auto.)

  3. Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (D.C. riot).

  4. Interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with May Chinn. Chinn may have first met Robeson when they performed together; a program from July 1919 in the RA lists Chinn, Robeson, and Rudolph Fisher as appearing on a “public presentation of music and speeches featuring outstanding young Negro collegians”; Robeson repeated his speech on the “New Idealism,” May Chinn accompanied on some songs, and Fisher spoke on “The Emancipation of Science.”

  Details of Fisher’s life are in The Negro History Bulletin, vol. II (Dec. 1938), p. 19. For current, highly favorable assessments of his work, see jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 210, and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Knopf, 1981), p. 229. Additional information on May Chinn is in George Davis, “A Healing Hand in Harlem,” New York Times Magazine, April 22, 1979.

  5. Interview with Frances Quiett Challenger, Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with Chinn.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983 (tuition). Gene Sumner, a cousin of ER’s friend Minnie Sumner and in 1917 manager of Lincoln University’s football team, apparently was responsible for first inviting Robeson to Lincoln: “Hard pressed for a coach (World War I had drained off so much) Paul came down on my invitation and spent two days from Rutgers, where he was a star, teaching the boys ‘big league’ football.” In 1919, Paul came “for a concert at a church … and he spent his two nights with me” (handwritten reminiscences by Gene Sumner are in the collections of the DuSable Museum for Black History and Culture, hereafter DSMC). The James Mayo (“Ink”) Williams quotes are from an interview with him by Studs Terkel in 1969 done as part of a roundtable discussion of Robeson with prominent blacks in the Chicago area (Margaret Burroughs, Judge Sidney Jones, Etta Moten Barnett, Earl Dickerson, “Ink” Williams, Charles V. Hamilton), recorded as a seventy-second birthday tribute to him. It was first played on WFMT Chicago on May 8, 1970, then later rebroadcast. I’m grateful to Terkel for letting me copy the tape. A friend of Frank Nied’s quotes him as saying, “Robeson is a gentleman—than which there isn’t … Also that Paul was amazingly game, refusing to quit when he was hurt, and that no amount of the terrific ganging naturally administered by the white (Nordic?) professionals could make him lose his head” (quoted in Nat Lewers to Alexander Woollcott, Nov. 29, 1933, RA). The account of Robeson’s professional football career is compiled from newspaper clippings in RA. In her Ms. Auto., ER refers to the “big money” he was paid in pro ball. For more on PR and Thorpe, see note 11, p. 584. Robeson stayed in peripheral contact with Fritz Pollard through the years. As late as 1933, ER recorded in her diary, “Saw Fritz Pollard, of all people, and we talked old times over” (ER Diary, Feb. 22, 1933, RA). Pollard’s quote about Akron is from an interview The New York Times did with him in 1978, as quoted in his obituary (Times, May 31, 1986).

  8. Interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. Because of the overall accuracy of the rest of his testimon
y and the specific detail (usually a sign of veracity) with which he described this episode, I’ve accepted Murray’s account, although he was ninety-three years old at the time of our interview (yet entirely lucid as well as witty, I should add)—and although ER has left variant versions of her initial meeting with her future husband. In one newspaper interview (New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 6, 1938), she recalled first seeing him one day as she was going into DeVann’s popular restaurant; in another (Birmingham Post, May 7, 1959), she recalled first meeting him “at a party in Harlem.” In her Ms. Auto, in RA, she recalls being first introduced to him—casually—when both were strolling with friends down Seventh Avenue in the summer of 1919. “Her alert mind,” she writes, “marked him, and stored him away. She saw him frequently that summer at parties, dances, tennis matches, and in the dining room of the Y.W.C.A., where all the young people congregated for meals; but she did not do more than to idly note that she must inquire about this young man. He seemed so universally popular.…” Possibly ER asked Dr. Murray to introduce her to his patient, having already “marked him out.” (One such combined version of their meeting, though with almost all the significant details askew, can be found in Shirley Graham, Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World [Julian Wenner, 1946], pp. 119–20.) Among the other claimants to having introduced the couple, Judge Raymond Pace Alexander insists he did so when the two were guests of his at a picnic on a Hudson River Line steamer (Alexander to SALUTE committee, March 14, 1973, RA). Murray and the Robesons stayed marginally in touch over the years. ER wrote in her diary on Jan. 17, 1926 (RA), “Went to a party at Harry Murray’s … and had a beautiful time.… Harry Murray and his wife are as sweet as ever.” As late as 1957, they sent him an affectionately inscribed Christmas card (the card courtesy of Eugene Taylor, archivist to H. A. Murray; also Murray to PR, 1925?, ER to Murray, Aug. 12, 1942, RA).

  9. In reconstructing the history of the Cardozo family, I’ve relied chiefly on two ms. sources: a twenty-page handwritten account (apparently set down for her daughter’s edification) by Eslanda Cardozo Goode (“Ma” Goode, mother to Eslanda Goode Robeson); and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s lengthy Ms. Auto. Both documents are in RA and are in general accord (but some of the variances are an illuminating index of their respective personalities), with Eslanda Goode Robeson’s account the fuller one, combining her mother’s version with additional source material. Unless otherwise cited, the family background described in the following pages is taken from these two mss. (with a few details filled in from printed sources, especially Euline W. Brock, “Thomas W. Cardozo: Fallible Black Reconstruction Leader,” The Journal of Southern History, May 1981).

  10. All the quotes continue to be from the two mss. previously cited (Ma Goode’s twenty-page account and ER’s lengthy Ms. Auto.), but the swimming anecdote is from ER Diary, Nov. 23, 1941, RA.

  11. Interview with Aminda Badeau (Mrs. Roy) Wilkins, March 12, 1985; “girl scientist” is from ER, Ms. Auto.; the analysis of her job derives from my interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. I haven’t been able to verify Essie’s claim to have been the first black of either gender on staff. By her own account (ER Diary, Nov. 4, 1931, RA) she once referred to “all the colored girls I had known at P and S [Physicians and Surgeons: Presbyterian] … and colored men”—though she didn’t specify in what capacity they’d been there. Whether she was first or fifth, of course, her accomplishments remain considerable—the only point at issue is the extent to which she felt it necessary to embroider on an already considerable achievement. Near the end of her life, Essie herself referred to having worked at Presbyterian “at its most progressive stage” (ER to Helen Rosen, Oct. 15, 1963, courtesy Rosen).

  12. Interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe (the well-known psychoanalyst who edited the Psychoanalytic Review, was on the Presbyterian staff, and had a number of theatrical and literary patients including at various times Robert Edward Jones and Eugene O’Neill) thought well enough of Essie to remain her personal friend (ER Diary, Feb. 16, 1933, RA). She listed Jelliffe as one of her six referees when applying for a Guggenheim in 1931 (the application form is in RA).

  13. ER, Ms. Auto., RA.

  14. ER, Ms. Auto., RA. Before meeting Paul, Essie had seriously dated Oscar Brown, Sr., who had worked with Paul at Narragansett Pier (interview with Oscar Brown, Sr., July 2, 1986); see pp. 11–12.

  15. When Essie finally did become pregnant, she had to undergo corrective surgery in order to conceive. This by itself, however, proves nothing about what Essie did or did not tell Paul in 1921. Even if she had told him that she was pregnant, she herself may have been legitimately mistaken or misinformed.

  In one letter (undated, July 1922, RA) Paul does say, “How happy I am that in choosing, I chose right. My Sweet helped me to choose and I’ll be grateful to her always”—implying that Essie had to some extent forced his hand. But not, it would seem, to any significant extent, for in another letter (Aug. 10, 1922, RA) he harks back to “a year ago. I was in heaven. Just a-wooing my Dolly [his nickname for ER] and saying ‘She must be mine for life’”—a year ago meaning just prior to their marriage. A third reference, moreover (PR to ER, Aug. 23, 1922, RA), bears directly and importantly on the suggestion that Essie forced him into marriage by falsely claiming to be pregnant: “Yes, sweet, I do hope we may be able to have a child. For your sake most of all—you do love them so. But you remember, sweet—when we married—I knew that perhaps it might not be our lot—no child can ever mean as much as my Dolly—And if there is any danger to be undergone beyond the normal—never.” This suggests Essie told him at the time of their marriage either that she might not be able to get pregnant—or that she was pregnant and had to abort for health reasons. One piece of evidence suggesting the latter interpretation comes from Essie’s diary for March 4, 1931 (RA). In it she wrote: “I am off for New York today, on the Olympic. I’ve got to do a ‘job’ and I think Dr. West, who did my other one more than 10 years ago, is the best bet. And also Presbyterian will be close to hand if anything goes wrong.” The “job” does sound like an abortion (or a curettage—see p. 150) and “10 years ago” would be 1921, the year Paul and Essie married. Further evidence of a pre-marital pregnancy comes from Freda Diamond (in multiple interviews). In later years Paul told Freda that Essie had come to him in 1921 with the claim that she had become pregnant but had aborted after a doctor warned her that she would be at high risk in giving birth (and had produced some sort of “proof” that she had actually had the abortion); according to this version, Paul remained skeptical but, out of his sense of “honor” at having made Essie pregnant, decided to marry her. Moreover, the possibility of deception on Essie’s part can’t be discounted because, by her own account, she was determined to marry Paul and by almost all other accounts was in active pursuit of what she wanted. Finally, the specific question of an actual versus a faked pregnancy may be insignificant, since it comes down to trying to prove or disprove a matter of degree: Essie was willing to deceive to get her way; the particular strategy she hit upon for that purpose becomes a secondary issue.

  16. Frankie did not see Paul again for more than twenty years, until she went backstage at Othello on Broadway. “He kissed me, he hugged me, and he was very glad to see me.” That was the last time they met (interview with Frances Quiett Challenger, Dec. 7, 1983).

  17. This account (including the quotations) is taken from letters from Gerry Neale Bledsoe to me, July 7, 1983; April 14, 1985. Commenting on Essie’s protectiveness, Langston Hughes recalled that “Harlem wits have a story about a great public ball after one of Paul’s concerts, where she went around the hall closing all the windows so ‘her baby’ wouldn’t catch cold! Then she took him home—on time!” (Hughes in New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1930.)

  18. The quotations in this and subsequent paragraphs describing the marriage are from ER, Ms. Auto., RA. However, the quote from Essie’s relative on p. 42 is from the transcript of an interview with Margaret Cardozo Holmes in the
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe. Hattie Boiling remained a loyal friend of Essie’s, once writing her appreciatively, “… your promises are as true as gold” (HB to ER, Oct. 6, 1934, RA). Hattie’s husband, William (“Buddy”), had apparently known Paul since 1912—so at least, he stated on a June 27, 1922, passport affidavit (FBI NY 100-25857).

  19. ER, Ms. Auto., RA; William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide (International Publishers, 1971), pp. 53–58. A description of living arrangements in Striver’s Row is in Patterson, but in Essie’s account she lists her address as 225 Seventh Avenue, which is not Striver’s Row. Minnie’s sister Sadie also remained a lifelong friend of Essie’s. Patterson spells Minnie’s last name “Summer,” Essie as “Sumner,” which is correct. Patterson (p. 53) describes Essie at the time as having “lively and searching” eyes and being, unlike Minnie, “deeply concerned with social problems,” “acutely aware of the racial issue”; judging from other evidence, Patterson’s judgment was ex post facto, a description of Essie’s political awareness as a middle-aged woman. One of the “fourths” for cards was Gene Sumner, Minnie’s cousin (handwritten recollections, DSMC).

  20. According to later FBI sources, Essie “attempted unsuccessfully in 1918 to enter Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons” (FBI Main 100-12304-11). May Chinn claims that she left her job at the Presbyterian lab in Sept. 1920 to study medicine at Columbia but “had several small illnesses during the first year and stayed away one day longer than they allow you.” They “gave her the chance of repeating the year,” but she decided not to, having by then met Paul (Sterner interview with Chinn). Essie’s salary at Presbyterian is listed on her Guggenheim Fellowship application of 1931 (RA). The announcement card and the marriage license are in RA. According to Ben Robeson’s daughter, Marian Liggins, Paul wrote to his older brother asking for permission to marry Essie, “and Daddy wrote back giving him all the reasons why he thought he should not marry her” (interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982). Robeson’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded at Cornell in 1906. Its members have included Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Andrew Young.