Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  22. The People’s Voice, March 30, 1946; New Africa, Jan. 1946 (famine); Yergan to Du Bois, Jan. 17, 1946, reports on the success of the famine campaign (U.Mass.: Du Bois); program on the April Win the Peace Conference and typed ms. of Temple Israel speech, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-158 (telephone log of PR phoning his Win the Peace speech).

  23. The Win the Peace program is in RA. A “Big Three Unity for Colonial Freedom” rally held on June 6, 1946, in Madison Square Garden is a further example of the wide variety of prominent Americans in attendance: among others, Mary McLeod Bethune, Norman Corwin, Judy Holliday, Lena Home (Louise Hopkins to PR, April 25, 1946, RA). Nehru was among those who sent cables in support of the meeting (Nehru to PR, May 16, 1946, RA). Stettinius to PR, May 24, 1946, RA.

  During 1946 Robeson made dozens of political appearances in addition to those cited above. He contributed to half a dozen Win the Peace rallies from coast to coast. He lent his presence both to organizational conferences and to mass meetings sponsored by the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs. And he put in single appearances in behalf of such causes and commemorative celebrations as the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the New Masses magazine, the 3rd American Slav Congress, the Oust Bilbo Dinner (at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York) and the Southern Youth Legislature (at Columbia, South Carolina). Because the sentiments he expressed on these occasions are already summarized in the detailed account above of several of his appearances in 1946, I have refrained from unnecessary duplication. One additional appearance, however, is worth special mention. On Dec. 29, 1946, PR spoke to the Convention of Alpha Phi Alpha, the leading black fraternity, which was not known as outspokenly political, and did not trim his sentiments to his audience. He deplored the role of the U.S. government “in extending loans and credits and even guns to the powers which are trying to maintain their empires,” hailed the role India and the U.S.S.R. had played in the United Nations in thwarting the attempt by General Smuts of the Union of South Africa to annex South-West Africa, applauded “the new democratic states which have been born in Central Europe since the end of the war: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia.…” In regard to domestic policy, he called for a determined effort to get the new Congress to pass antilynching legislation, create a permanent FEPC, and end poll-tax discrimination. “If the Democratic party and the Republican party cannot do this job,” he said, prefiguring the role he was soon to play in the Progressive Party campaign, “then it will be necessary for the people to form a new party of their own” (ms. of the talk is in RA).

  24. Several versions of PR’s Sept. 12, 1946, speech at the Garden are in RA; a summarizing Associated Negro Press release is in CHS: Barnett. In the speech, Robeson singled out Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York for excoriation because of his whitewash of a Long Island policeman who had killed two black veterans. The black political cartoonist Ollie Harrington helped make Isaac Woodward’s blinding into a major NAACP case. Harrington invited only foreign correspondents to a press conference and presented Woodward, along with his doctors, to them. At a second press conference, Harrington recalls Robeson and Yergan looking reproachfully at him from the audience, as if to say, “This case belongs to us.” Harrington deeply admired Robeson but thought this attitude unworthy of him—“It was the saddest moment in my relation with Robeson” (interview with Harrington, July 29, 1986). Walter White asked Harrington to become public-relations director for the NAACP, but as red-baiting pressures mounted, he decided to live in Europe.

  25. Robeson’s telegram to Du Bois asking him to join the call, dated Aug. 30, 1946, is in U.Mass.: Du Bois.

  26. White to PR, Sept. 10, 1946; Gloucester B. Current (NAACP director of branches) to Edward M. Swan (executive secretary, Detroit branch of NAACP), special delivery, Sept. 20, 1946; memo from Franklin H. Williams to White, Sept. 17, 1946, denouncing the American Crusade as “irresponsible”; White to Du Bois, Sept. 19, Oct. 2, 1946; Du Bois to White, Sept. 23, 1946—all in LC: NAACP. The Rev. Charles A. Hill, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, like Du Bois denied that he had ever been told of the “broadly representative” National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence; now that he had belatedly been informed, he wrote White, he was nonetheless going to attend the Robeson gathering—“I will go representing my church.… If there is not a good showing … the reflection will be on all of the liberal forces” (Hill to White, Sept. 18, 1946, LC: NAACP). Revels Cayton, in line with the policy of the National Negro Congress to challenge the NAACP for leadership of black workers, urged attendance at the American Crusade gathering (Cayton to Jack Bjoze, executive secretary, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Aug. 30, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

  In June 1946 the NNC had presented a petition to the UN calling for action in behalf of the oppressed black citizens of the United States. The list of the United Nations Campaign Committee is in NYPL/Schm: NNC and does not include a single member of the NAACP hierarchy (or that of any other mainstream black organization). It does include the names of many leading CP and left-wing figures, black and white, among them Robeson, Ben Davis, Jr., Du Bois, Frederick Field, Doxey Wilkerson, Albert Kahn, Ben Gold, Michael Quill, Irwin Potash, Lawrence Reddick, Ferdinand Smith, Henry Winston, and, among the “publicists,” Langston Hughes. In response to Yergan’s appeal for support of the petition drive, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote him, “… there is a question in our minds as to whether the approach to the existing conditions here in our own United States should come through the United Nations, whose problems for consideration are international rather than national” (Bethune to Yergan, Nov. 20, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

  27. The People’s Voice, Sept. 28, 1946. Robeson also spoke on MBS radio on Sept. 83, 1946, denouncing lynching (the text of the talk is in RA; there was a lengthy excerpt in The People’s Voice, Jan. 11, 1947). The limited success of the Crusade meetings is described in the papers of the NNC (letter from Nellie Zakin to participants, NYPL/Schm), along with letters of thanks to the contributors, who included, among others, Roger de Koven, Mercedes McCambridge, and Jan Minor; memo from Gloucester Current to Walter White, Sept. 24, 1946, LC: NAACP.

  28. The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1946; Philadelphia Tribune, Sept. 24, 1946; New York World-Telegram, Sept. 23, 1946; Chicago Sun, Sept. 24, 1946; The People’s Voice, Sept. 28, 1946 (which listed the delegates as [besides Robeson] Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Memorial Institute, Sedalia, N.C.; Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the Council of Church Women; Rev. W. H. Jernagin, National Baptist Convention; Dr. Joseph L. Johnson, dean of the Howard University School of Medicine; Dr. Max Yergan; and Aubrey Williams, editor of the Southern Farmer). Additionally, the Chicago Defender (Sept. 28, 1946) lists Metz T. P. Lorchard, editor-in-chief of the Defender; Rabbi Irving Miller, American Jewish Congress; and an “H. Murphy of Chicago” as being part of the delegation. The several FBI reports (New York 100-25857-188, 196) headed “Re: American Crusade to End Lynching,” have nearly their entire contents inked out. Apparently the decision to go from the meeting to the White House was spur-of-the-moment. Later recounting the event, George B. Murphy, Jr. (the left-wing scion of the family that owned the Afro-American), wrote, “… on the platform … the question came up about going down to the White House to picket.… Dr. Jernagin began to caution ‘restraint’: ‘Why Dr. Jernagin,’ [Paul said,] ‘it looks to me like these folks want us to lead them down to the White House and I think that is what we should do.’ Presto, Dr. Jernagin got his hat and went right along with Paul to do just that” (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U.Mass.: Du Bois).

  29. The complete transcript of Robeson’s testimony before the Tenney Committee was printed in a California newspaper, the Westwood Hills Press, Oct. 18, 1946; unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the following paragraphs come from that source. Additional detail on the committee can be found in Edward L. Barrett, Jr., The Tenney Committee (Cornell University Press, 1951).

  30. Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC.

  31. As early as 1941, Robeson
wrote of having been with “my friend Revels Cayton” (PR to Freda Diamond, Aug. 1941, courtesy of Diamond). Yergan to William Schneiderman, Aug. 23, 1945; Yergan to Jeanne Pastor, Dec. 12, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton (PR, Jr., participating), April 27–28, 1982; separate interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Cayton, 1987–88. There is an additional and revealing group of letters in NYPL/Schm: NNC concerning Cayton’s arrival at NNC and the need to reorient the Congress’s purpose (e.g., Thelma M. Dale to William L. Patterson, Sept. 26, 1945; Patterson to Cayton and Matt Crawford, July 2, 1945; Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945; Cayton to Crawford, Jan. 3, 14, Feb. 1, 1946; Cayton to James Hunter [CIO], Jan. 10, 1946). In explaining his attraction to the Party, Cayton sounded a note close to Robeson’s own: “I found a new world … a kind of equality with whites, within the Party, that I’d never known before. And it was attractive” (interview, April 29, 1982). Similar sentiments can be found in two other books by or about black Communists: Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson (Harvard University Press, 1979); Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Liberator Press, 1978). As an example of the personal closeness between the two men, Robeson talked to Cayton (and to few others) about his relationship with Lena Horne, telling Cayton that she broke up with him when he refused to marry her. Home’s own (platonic) version of the friendship is in In Person: Lena Home, pp. 181–87. She reiterated her denial of a love affair in our phone interview of Sept. 8, 1987: “It would never have occurred to me to be physical with him—he was too mythic.”

  32. Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC (reorientation of NNC). Cayton correspondence, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Revels Cayton, 1987–88.

  33. Interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982. Addie Wyatt, who worked with the Packinghouse Union in the early 1950s, also emphasized to me Robeson’s concern about unity among black and white workers in the trade-union movement (interview with Wyatt, Jan. 7, 1986). According to Annette Rubinstein, who worked closely with Vito Marcantonio in the American Labor Party, “Marc very much distrusted and disliked Ben Davis.” Marcantonio and Doxey Wilkerson were both “horrified” to learn that during the war Davis knew and kept quiet about the Party’s sanctioning segregated meetings in the South (interview with Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983). Angus Cameron recalls once asking Ben Davis directly what he thought about the question of whether American blacks constituted a nation. Davis’s reply was (according to Cameron): “The Party was wrong when it held that blacks in America were a nation, and also when it held they were not a nation” (Cameron to me, April 25, 1987).

  34. Interviews with Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews 1987–88; Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC. Another description of Cayton and Robeson in action together, this time at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the NNC on May 31, 1946, in Detroit, is in New Masses, June 18, 1946, written by Abner W. Berry, the black Communist. For a negative view of the NNC, strongly “anti-Communist” in bias, see Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism (Cornell University Press, 1964).

  Speaking to the delegates to the Longshore and Shipsclerks’ caucus at their convention in San Francisco in August 1943, Robeson had saluted Harry Bridges as a “courageous leader” (The Dispatcher, Sept. 3, 1943). And when Bridges, who was foreign-born, was being threatened with deportation in 1945, Robeson had written in his defense directly to President Roosevelt, stating that “Bridges has stood steadfastly against discrimination.” Bridges’s record was better than that of Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union, but privately Robeson would argue with him about the need to wage a stronger fight against racial discrimination in the ILWU. Bridges later came to resent the movement for black caucuses, insisting the effort would split his union (The Dispatcher, March 9, 1945; The Pilot [NMU], March 16, 1945). On the other hand, Bridges’s reputation as a champion of black rights remained high enough for the National Negro Labor Council to pass a special resolution in support of his fight against deportation at its second annual convention, in 1952 (The Dispatcher, Dec. 5, 1952).

  35. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982. Sept. 28, 1984. Unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the account that follows are from these interviews.

  36. Perhaps adding to PR’s concern, the following exchange took place at just this time during the House Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry:

  Richard Nixon: “Have you any other tests which you would apply which would indicate to you that people acted like Communists?”

  Adolphe Menjou: “Well, I think attending any meetings at which Mr. Paul Robeson appeared and applauding or listening to his Communist songs in America, I would be ashamed to be seen in an audience doing a thing of that kind” (Hearings, Oct. 1946, p. 104).

  PR, Jr., is the source for the information about the relationship between Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and his father (see also note 17, p. 695). For more on Bumpy Johnson, see Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party (Random House, 1972), ch. 9. Tension in the CP over relationships between black men and white women went back at least to the thirties (see Naison, Heyday, pp. 136–37; George Charney, A Long Journey [Quadrangle, 1968], p. 102). Freda Diamond has told me (multiple interviews) that, at one point in the mid-forties, Ben Davis, Jr., came to her on behalf of the CP and asked that she pointedly let Paul know that his relationship with Uta was causing a lot of talk. She refused.

  37. “The Midnight Raid of José Ferrer,” Confidential, Sept. 1955.

  38. Several members of Robeson’s inner circle share a version of one aspect of the breakup at odds with Hagen’s (and which they say Paul himself told them). According to this version, Hagen was so distraught at Paul’s attempt to disentangle himself that she swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills. Sensing something was wrong, this version continues, Robeson hastened to her apartment, found her comatose, walked her around, got her medical treatment, “saved her life.” Hagen hooted with derision when I ran that version by her. “I’ve never been in a coma. I took eight sleeping pills when my mother died in 1939, about five years before I met Paul, and I was walked around a room in St. James Hotel in Philadelphia by my brother and Joe Ferrer.… It sounds like a combination of two stories.… I’m sure I told Paul about what I did in Philadelphia when my mother died.” (A not-incidental reason for taking the pills in 1939, she added, was to get out of going on tour with the Lunts.) What a shame, she said—“The relationship was so phenomenal all by itself, there’s nothing to lie about.” I should add that I believe Hagen’s version, on the grounds that in all other ways I found her candid and forthcoming. Hagen last saw Robeson sometime in the fifties; he was coming out of the Astor Theater surrounded by bodyguards, and she had the impulse to run and embrace him but resisted it (interviews with Hagen).

  39. RA contains itineraries for Essie’s extensive lecture tours plus a number of letters extolling her abilities on the platform (e.g., A. Ritchie Low to PR, April 11, 1947: “I heard Mrs. Robeson give a wonderfully fine lecture in San Francisco”). She applied to the Carnegie Corporation for funding on yet a third book—“a comprehensive SURVEY OF BLACK AFRICA”—but was turned down with the explanation that Carnegie was already funding Lord Hailey “to look at the scene with European eyes” (ER to Devereux C. Josephs, Nov. 22, 1946; Whitney H. Shepardson to ER, Dec. 23, 1946, RA). Essie wrote a pamphlet that the Council on African Affairs published in 1946 in which she was critical of U.S. policy on Africa, and predicted that the continent would soon be in the forefront of international politics. For further discussion of ER’s views on Africa, see Barbara Ransby, “Eslanda Goode Robeson, Pan-Africanist,” Sage, 3:2 (Fall 1986). Essie described her African trip to the Van Vechtens as “fabulous” (ER to CVV and FM, postcard, Sept. 12, 1946, Yale: Van Vechten). The background on Paul, Jr.’s finances is in ER to PR, Jr., Nov. 30, 1946, RA.

  Essie’s
lecture dates are partly detailed in a brief diary she kept for Feb. 1946, which also records some interesting encounters she had. In St. Louis, her “old beau from Indiana U,” Elmer Mosee, came to see her. In 1946 Mosee was the superintendent of the People’s Hospital in St. Louis (in Jan. 1947 Robeson sang in St. Louis under the hospital’s sponsorship), and Essie described him as the “closest Negro to Truman”; as such he gave her “all the low down,” describing Truman as “loyal, stubborn, devoted to his mother, honest, conservative, grass roots, cautious, firm. Says he removed a secretary on Elmer’s complaint” (ER Diary, Feb. 4, 1946, RA). In Pennsylvania she had a talk with Congressman Francis E. Walter, a “wonderful man, liberal, interesting, friendly, sound. Tells me Rankin is really mental case. Bilbo just a career politician with one item to sell—discrimination” (ER Diary, Feb. 15, 1946, RA). This same Francis Walter was later co-author of the infamous McCarran-Walter Act and a tormentor of Robeson—see pp. 440–42. In Philadelphia Essie saw the play Jeb and disliked it but thought Ossie Davis “gave a beautiful performance” (ER Diary, Feb. 16, 1946, RA). Back in New York, between lectures, she saw Bess Eitingon for dinner (the two had decided to write a play together on the atom bomb), along with Clifford Odets and his wife and Marc Blitzstein. She found Odets “insufferable. We got into a terrific row over [the play] Deep Are the Roots. I was so furious at his pompous stupid criticism I could have killed him. Marc is nice” (ER Diary, Feb. 19, 1946, RA). In the dining car of a train outside of Columbus, Ohio, she talked “with a white passenger at table who is opposite me in the sleeper. After he left I told the waiter—Negro of course—It’s some job educating these white folks. He said dont waste your time. You cant educate them. Why a guy came in the diner for breakfast this morning—white man—and asked one of the boys—Say why dont you smile? The waiter said—dead pan—Did you come in here to eat or to see me smile. He was so angry. The white man was furious. All the waiters froze up on him and he didn’t know what to do. Said he’d report the waiter. So all the waiters gave him bad service. White folks!! It never occurs to them we do double shift, long hours, what have we got to smile about?” (ER Diary, Feb. 25, 1946, RA.)