Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  50. Pearl Buck to ER, June 26, 1949, RA; Springfield Union, June 28, 1949 (Roosevelt); New York Amsterdam News, June 25, 1949; the dozens of hate letters are in RA. Ma Goode’s frequent letters to Essie during this period (e.g., June 27, 28, 30, July 7, 9, 11, 13, Aug. 7, Sept. 4, 30, Oct. 2, 17, 1949, RA) are full of demands and directives; she may have been partly senile. Late in Oct. 1949 Ma Goode had to be shifted for ten days from Rest-haven to the Boston State Hospital for observation. At that point Essie described her as “rambling and wholly inattentive when I was there” (circular letter, n.d., apparently to family members, RA). Essie summed up her mother’s recent behavior, over a period of many years: “The moment I go away … she has made the most terrific scenes, stretched out in violent temper when she could not have her way instantly, and threatened suicide” (Dorothy Livingston of the Resthaven home to ER, June 24, 1949; ER to Mr. Benjamin, Nov. 1, 1949, RA).

  51. The Du Bois and Howard speeches, excerpted in news releases from the CAA, are in RA, along with a full listing of speakers (others included Hunton, Ben Davis, Jr., Vito Marcantonio, and Louis Burnham, former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and currently Southern director of the Progressive Party, who would be centrally involved with Robeson politically in the future). Among those sending welcoming messages were Clifford Odets, the cast of Detective Story (Lee Grant, Alex Scourby, Joan Copeland, Lou Gilbert), and Henry Wallace (all are in RA).

  52. The transcript of PR’s speech is in RA.

  53. Interview with Kay Pankey, July 26, 1986. For more on Robeson and the Pankeys, see pp. 426, 518–19. For the wedding party, the married couple drew up the small guest-list, which consisted mostly of their own friends plus such family standbys as Minnie Sumner, Buddy and Hattie Boiling, Bert and Gig McGhee, Ben Davis, Jr., and Paul, Sr.’s sister, Marian Robeson Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia with her husband, Dr. James Forsythe.

  54. The New York Times, June 20, 1949; Boston Advertiser, June 26, 1949; Congressional Record, June 27, 1949; Pitts burgh Courier, June 25, 1949.

  55. New York Herald Tribune, June 20, July 15, 1949 (Truman); The Afro-American, June 25, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, June 25 (“richest artist”), June 25 (Granger), 1949; The California Eagle defended him (July 7, 1949). In his column in the Chicago Defender for July 2, 1949, A. N. Fields quoted Richard Wright (who had left the CP some five years previously) as disapproving of Robeson’s political activities and taking “sharp issue” with his statement in Paris. Dozens of letters suggesting Robeson leave the country are in RA (e.g., this telegram from the American Legion Post in Sayre, Oklahoma: “Our attitude toward you is the same as yours toward this country. Why stay?”). In an article in the National Guardian (June 27, 1949), reporter Yvonne Gregory decided to sample opinion in “the poorest parts” of Harlem and found that with few exceptions people were “reluctant to talk,” fearful of “getting mixed up in any politics”—“I’ve got enough trouble already”; “I don’t know nothing about these Communists.” But one woman told her, “My sons wouldn’t talk much when they came home from the war.… They were jealous and mad when they found we colored people still didn’t have our freedom.” The day after the Rockland Palace rally, the black conductor Dean Dixon and the graphic artist Raphael Soyer, on behalf of the CAA, hosted a private reception for Paul, Sr., to welcome him home (the invitation is in RA).

  56. Madison S. Jones, Jr. (NAACP administrative assistant) to Wood, July 12, 1949; Wood to Jones, July 12, 1949, LC: NAACP.

  57. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.); The New York Times, July 15, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, July 15, 1949; Boston Post, July 14, 1949; New Age, July 23, 1949; Chicago Defender, June 23, 1949; Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 17, 1949 (PR on Stalin). On Manning Johnson, see Victor Navasky, Naming Names (Viking, 1980), pp. 14–15, 39, 68, 191. During the thirties, Johnson had been a trade union official of the Restaurant Workers and a district organizer from Buffalo for the CPUSA (Naison, Depression, pp. 135, 261, 294). The New York Amsterdam News reported (July 30, 1949) that Robeson “is alleged to have expressed his desire to be heard in the Nation’s capital” to “refute the charges made against him by Manning Johnson,” but the committee “has refused to permit Robeson to appear, because one member said, ‘Robeson only wants to use the Committee as a sounding board.’” I haven’t found any confirmation of Robeson’s alleged attempt to appear before HUAC.

  58. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.). Young insisted that “Negro publishers, almost to a paper, completely repudiated Robeson’s statement” and in addition recounted an Alpha Phi Alpha smoker in October 1947 in Norfolk, Virginia, at which Robeson had purportedly said, “If this country ever went to war against Russia and my son took up arms to fight against Russia, he would no longer be my son.” Chicago Defender, June 23, 1949. The full text of Lester Granger’s statement to HUAC (July 14, 1949) is in LC: NAACP. Sandy F. Ray, chairman of the Social Service Commission of the National Baptist Convention and himself a minister, made a strong statement—and without attacking Robeson—about American racism (July 14, 1949, full text in RA).

  59. Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.); PR to Robinson, July 11, 1949, RA, enclosing a copy of his Rockland Palace speech so he could “acquaint yourself with the true statements made by me”; New Age, July 23, 1949; Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 23, 1949 (VFW).

  60. The New York Times, July 19, 1949; Roosevelt, “My Day,” Nov. 2, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, July 23, 1949.

  61. CAA press release, July 13, 1949, RA; Carolina Times, July 23, 1949; The Afro-American, July 19, 1949. Robeson wrote Carl J. Murphy, president of the Afro-American Company, to thank him—a rare example of his commenting on a newspaper mention of himself, pro or con, and by that much perhaps a gauge of his concern about reaction in the black community; PR to Murphy, July 14, 1949, RA. The Afro-American followed up (Aug. 20, 1949) with an article entitled “What’s Wrong with Paul Robeson?” by Ralph Matthews, which concluded, “There is nothing really wrong with Paul Robeson. He is quite sane and purposeful.” He was not anti-American, but “pro-peace.” To him America was not “the small clique of financial despots, the small one per cent who control the wealth”; he was “loyal to that large portion of America which wants to remain at peace with the world.” Robeson, The Afro-American concluded, spoke “not for the insignificant 15 million [black] Americans struggling for crumbs in a predominantly white America where they will always be a minority, but … for the hundreds of millions of black people in Africa and other sections of the world with whom he feels a kinship.” J. A. Rogers, Pittsburgh Courier, July 30, Oct. 15, 1949; New Age, July 23, 1949; New York Age, July 23, 1949 (Bill of Rights conference). The statement by the black delegates is in NYPL/Schm: CRC. A tape recording of PR’s speech at the June 28, 1949, Civil Rights Congress is in RA. The Afro-American (July 30, 1949) reported, though, that Robeson met with a mixed reception, having to cross a picket line of forty white and black veterans to get into the Mosque Theatre; George Stevens, Essex County commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, had issued a call for members of all forty-six posts to meet in front of the theater (FBI Main 100-12304-184). Even Earl Brown, the conservative Amsterdam News columnist, called “the whole show before the Committee … ridiculous and unnecessary” (July 23, 1949).

  62. The Afro-American, July 30, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, July 23, 1949; text of statement issued to the AP from the CAA office by Robeson, dated July 20, 1949, RA; Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (Putnam’s Sons, 1972), p. 98. For more detail on Robinson’s later political views and activities, see Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment.

  63. The Knoxville incident was reported in the Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 20, 1949.

  CHAPTER 18 PEEKSKILL (1949)

  1. A tape recording of Robeson’s Peop
le’s Songs Conference speech is in RA.

  2. Daily Worker, July 24 (Davis), Aug. 6 (Bureau of Engraving), 7 (Clark), 8 (Winston), 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 5 (White House), 1949. A confidential informant of the FBI reported on two street meetings in Winston’s behalf (FBI Main 100-12304-184, Jan. 9, 1950). FBI Washington Smith Act Prosecution File 100-3-74-4351,4917 (income tax). Hoover had already sent for Robeson’s law-school, selective-service, and passport records (FBI Main 100-12304-135, 136, 137; New York 100-25857-673.

  3. The Peekskill Star items, plus reports of subsequent developments, are conveniently and chronologically summarized in the privately printed Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A., a documentary report prepared by the Westchester Committee for a Fair Inquiry into the Peekskill Violence.

  4. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen. I’m also grateful to her for contacting Sydney Danis in order to clarify certain details.

  5. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 1949. The burning cross Helen had seen (Paul had, too) was confirmed as real in the subsequent grand-jury report (copy in RA)—though the report ascribed it to “an unfortunate prank by a few teen-age boys” bearing “no relation to the Ku Klux Klan or any other anti-social or anti-religious organization.”

  6. Interviews with Ruth Jett (who introduced PR at the Hotel Theresa conference), April 2, 1982; Clara Rockmore, April 26, 1983, March 17, 1984, Dec. 13, 1985; New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Aug. 29, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 3, 1949 (press conference); press release of Civil Rights Congress, Aug. 28, 1949, RA.

  7. Multiple interviews with Helen Rosen; the FBI got a full report of the meeting at the Rosens’ (FBI New York 100-25857-747).

  8. Daily Mirror, Aug. 29, 1949; Daily Worker, Aug. 29, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-743-746.

  9. New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 31, 1949; The New York Times, Aug. 29, 30, 31, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.

  10. RA contain dozens of tapes of radio broadcasts and eyewitness accounts, as well as a large file of newspaper reports. It is impossible to cite this bulky material in any detail. Among the most useful accounts summarizing the various statements are: New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 29, 31, 1949; The New York Times, Aug. 31, 1949; New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1949. From my reading of the press accounts, I would say Time magazine (Sept. 5, 1949) is a representative example of national press response: the Peekskill riot, it wrote, was “an example of misguided patriotism and senseless hooliganism.” FBI New York 100-25857-753 for the pro-Robeson list.

  11. New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1949.

  12. New York Daily Compass, Aug. 31, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 3, 1949; Washington Star, Aug. 31, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-750. A tape recording of PR’s speech is in RA. The quotations are from that tape.

  13. Interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 5, 1985.

  14. New York Daily Compass, Aug. 30, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; interviews with Helen Rosen; FBI Main 100-12304-184; FBI New York 100-25857-754, 771 (which includes a Furriers’ Union circular), 760 (“Communists”). James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, “The Lessons of the Peekskill Riots,” Commentary, Oct. 1950, pp. 309–53, concluded that at Peekskill “the Communists unveiled … a strategical formula by which they hope to increase civil strife, to inflame the racial and religious passions and antagonisms that are already this country’s shame.…”

  15. The New York Times, Sept. 4, 5, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 5,6, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 5, 1949; Daily News, Daily Mirror, Sept. 5, 6, 1949.

  16. Interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982. The details of how Robeson was taken out after the concert are from PR, Jr., as told to him by his father. At the time of Peekskill, Essie and Freda Diamond were together at a Peace conference in Mexico City, while there, they visited with the resettled Fernando Castillo, who had been the Robesons’ escort in Spain, and his family (multiple interviews Diamond).

  17. The New York Times, Sept. 5, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 5, 6, 1949; Daily Worker, Sept. 5, 1949; The Afro-American, Sept. 10, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 5, 1949; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; Howard Fast, Peekskill USA (Civil Rights Congress, 1951); interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986; FBI 100-25857-764 (list of injured and arrests), 773 (Fanelli); Dean Albertson interview with Henry Wallace, 1950–51, for Oral History Project, CU: by the time he gave the interview, Wallace had come out in support of Truman’s intervention in Korea, and he characterized the decision to return to Peekskill as a “serious mistake”—though certain that many of those attending were not Communists and while holding the townspeople “completely” responsible for the violence. Pete Seeger had felt confident there would be no violence and had brought along his two babies, his wife, and his father-in-law to the concert. On the ride home two stones shattered his car windows, spraying glass into the children’s hair; Seeger cemented the stones into a chimney he was building (phone interview with Pete Seeger, July 4, 1986). According to PR, Jr., Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the “Black Mafia” leader, offered that night to take a group of armed men back up to Peekskill to rescue the guards temporarily trapped in the hollow; news came that they were safe and Bumpy wasn’t needed. The son of the Peekskill chief of police and the son of an American Legion official were briefly detained for “malicious mischief in throwing rocks, but were released. Among those injured was Eugene Bullard, a black aviator in World War I who had won the Croix de Guerre. Stephen Szego, owner of the grounds on which the concert had been held, subsequently had shots fired at his house; an attempt at arson was also made. Dozens of affidavits and statements by people who attended the Peekskill concert and experienced some form of injury to body or property are in the NYPL/Schm: CRC.

  18. New York Compass, Sept. 6, 15, 1949; New Age, Sept. 10, 1949; Washington Post, Sept. 6, 1949; People’s Voice, Sept. 15, 1949; The New York Times, Sept. 6 (tears), 15, 1949.

  19. National Guardian, Sept. 19, 1949; Daily Compass, Sept. 8, 15, 1949; New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 10, 1949; New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 11, 15, 1949; The Dispatcher (ILWU), Sept. 16, 1949; Daily Worker, Sept. 11, 14, 16, 1949; Newsweek, Sept. 12, 1949; People’s Voice, Sept. 15, 1949; FBI New York 100-25859-809; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; Life, Sept. 26, 1949; Newsweek, Sept. 12, 1949. The New York Times (Sept. 8, 1949) challenged the accuracy of the Fanelli report, saying it was sharply at variance with photographs, eyewitness accounts, and the arrest record. The Fur and Leather Workers Union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers CIO, the International Longshoremen’s Union, the American Jewish Labor Council, and the New York State CIO were among the labor groups calling for an investigation. ACLU Director Roger Baldwin called Peekskill “the most shocking of all incidents aroused by the current anti-Communist hysteria.” And among the many protests was one signed by sixty artists, including Bette Davis, Ruth Gordon, Lee J. Cobb, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Chaplin, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Dewey’s charge to the grand jury is printed in its twenty-six-page typed report (a copy is in RA).

  20. Rosen describes the problems he had with his medical practice after Peekskill in The Autobiography of Samuel Rosen, pp. 72–74. Interviews with Helen Rosen; Eyewitness: Peekskill, U.S.A.; New York Daily Compass, Oct. 18, 20, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-779A.

  Three years later, Peekskill D.A. Fanelli and two carloads of police knocked on the door of the Rosens’ Katonah kitchen on an early Sunday morning. “We’ve found the head and have been looking in the field all night for the body,” he announced to Helen portentously. Swallowing her surprise—and then her amusement—Helen let Fanelli into the kitchen, made herself some tea, and did not invite him to sit down. The “head” was “Jonesy”—as the Rosen family dubbed one of the half-dozen specimens Dr. Sam kept in formaldehyde jars in the root cellar. The gardener, it turned out, had told his policeman brother about “Jonesy,” and the brother had conveyed the news to D.A. Fanelli. After Sam explained his “scientific arrangement” with a New York morgue, a disappo
inted Fanelli finally realized he was not going to be able to nab the “Commies” after all. “You know, Doc,” he said as he left, “what you’ve done is illegal, and I could pull you in if I wanted to, even if it isn’t for murder” (multiple interviews with Helen Rosen). The Rosens did not finally sell their house in Katonah until 1971.