Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  48. George B. Murphy, Jr., to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U. Mass.: Du Bois; New York Age, July 30, 1949; interview with Kay Pankey, July 26, 1986. Essie’s two-hundred-dollar monthly allowance was apparently provided in addition to her hotel bills and other standing expenses, leading Rockmore once again to warn Paul about “the monthly drain that goes on ceaselessly” (Rockmore to PR, May, 1954, RA). A confidential FBI informant reported that another reason propelling PR’s move was that McGhee was “at present, very ill and under doctor’s care” (FBI Main 100-25857-2273). The informant also claimed that until the move PR had visited his brother Ben only infrequently because the two “do not get along too well.” In fact it was Essie who did not get along with either Ben or his wife, Frankie.

  49. My view of Robeson’s family culture and also the particular environment of the parsonage is especially indebted to insights from multiple conversations with Marilyn Robeson, and from my interview with Marian Liggins, Ben and Frankie Robeson’s daughter (Nov. 21, 1982).

  50. Interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986; multiple interviews with Helen Rosen.

  51. Spottswood to PR, Feb. 16, 1955, RA. When Frances (“Frankie”) Robeson died, in 1957, Paul attended the services along with A.M.E. Zion Bishops Rt. Rev. William J. Walls, Spottswood, and Brown (Chicago Defender, Dec. 21, 1957; Pitts burgh Courier, Dec. 28, 1957).

  CHAPTER 21 BREAKDOWN (1955–1956)

  1. Ms. of PR article for Liberation (Paris), dated June 19, 1954, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2063 (Ben Gold), 2108 (ALP), 2142 (Lightfoot); FBI Main 100-12304-316 (Patterson and Davis); Muriel Symington to John Gray, Nov. 20, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR (Patterson). A handwritten speech by Robeson in Patterson’s behalf is in MSRC: Patterson (n.d. [c. August 1954]); in it, Robeson reiterated his view that “When the Americans know the truth—the simple truth—they’ll put a fast end to many of these present fascist-like absurdities, an end to the blatant destruction of our Constitutional rights.” When the London Daily Herald asked Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to write a thousand-word profile on PR, he protested directly to the Herald on the basis of Powell’s support of “the aggressive war policy of the Republican government” and the “cold-war policy of the preceding Democratic administration. Though his ‘bipartisan’ political conformity qualifies Rep. Powell for a passport, I cannot see that it qualifies him in any way to present an objective report on me to your readers” (Powell to PR, July 16, 1954; PR to Herald, Sept. 11, 1954, RA). FBI New York 100-25857-2284 (“specific information”).

  2. The New York Times, Feb. 24 (Hammett), 25, 26 (Robeson testimony); New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 24 (Hammett), 26 (editorial). For a particularly smooth bit of savagery against Robeson that appeared at this very time, see the ch. entitled “George” in Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time (Simon and Schuster, 1955). Among other claims, Kempton insists that the character of Sebastien Cholmondley (a fatuous, pretentious, self-deceived black man) in Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel Decline and Fall was meant as a portrait of Robeson.

  3. PR to Josephus Simpson (assistant managing editor, The Afro-American), Dec. 19, 1953 (“magnificent”); Freedom, Feb. 1955; Swarthmore Phoenix, May 3, 1955. Robeson also used his involuntary idleness to further his musical studies and to return to the study of languages and cultures which had so preoccupied him twenty years earlier. In a short article in Spotlight on Africa (February 1955), he reiterated the familiar themes of his 1934–36 notes, i.e., the similarities between many African languages and other cultures such as Chinese, especially in their structures and in the “thinking” be hind the language.

  4. There is considerable correspondence in NYPL/Schm: PR, especially between John Gray and Lynne Childs, Mary Helen Jones, Matt Crawford, Rev. Stephen H. Fritchman, and Horace Alexander, detailing the plans and difficulties of arranging a California tour for Robeson in 1955 (“We’re going to keep banging away,” Mary Helen Jones wrote Gray in a letter of Oct. 19, 1954, “because if we do give up the concert idea then Mr. Charlie will really know he’s got us down”). Robeson’s comments while in L.A. are from the Daily People’s World, March 17, 1955. Whether the car episodes represent a deliberate attempt to harm Robeson cannot be conclusively decided from the evidence, but both Paul Robeson, Jr., and Lloyd L. Brown believe that they did (Daily World, Oct. 25, 1979 [PR, Jr., interview]; Lloyd L. Brown, “Did They Try to Kill Paul Robeson?,” ms. in RA). In a similar vein, PR, Jr., asserts that he has “credible evidence that in the middle 1950’s and early 1960’s the CIA considered the possibility of assassinating Robeson” (ms. comments), but if so he has not shared it with me. Having carefully studied all the currently available evidence, I do not find PR, Jr.’s assertion persuasive.

  5. Patterson to U Nu, Oct. 21, 1955, MSRC: Patterson; The Afro-American, May 21, 1955; The New York Times, April 23, 1955; New York Amsterdam News, May 14, 1955. Powell did, however, speak out several months later for the return of PR’s passport (London Daily Worker, Sept. 22, 1955). Two years later Essie wrote another blast at Powell, in relation to the violence against school integration at Little Rock High, Arkansas. When Louis Armstrong reacted to Little Rock by saying, “The Government can go to Hell; it’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” most of black America rejoiced (not least over the fact that Armstrong, who had long continued to play before segregated audiences, had at last spoken out). But Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., appearing on the TV program “Youth Wants to Know” on Sept. 19, 1957, said that Armstrong didn’t understand international affairs, that he was just a musician. Soon after that, in a sermon on Little Rock to his congregation at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Powell said the President could not send federal troops to Little Rock without making “a confession of our moral decadence,” precipitating “a second civil war and sending democracy down the drain for at least a generation and maybe forever.” On all these counts, ER excoriated Powell (“Daniel Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, Spokesman,” International Life, Oct. 1957). PR’s remarks at Swarthmore are from Freedom, May-June 1955. The earlier move to bar him from CCNY is reported in the Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 1, 1951, and Campus, Dec. 6, 1951. A confidential memo to Walter White (dated Nov. 28, 1951) in LC: NAACP reports a conversation with Dr. Kenneth Clark, then chairman of the committee in charge of the use of the Great Hall at CCNY, in which Clark said he “would like to be in a position to recommend that if the Hall is opened to Robeson it should be in a forum type of affair with a representative of our Association, preferably you, so that both sides of the question would be presented.” Walter White appended to the memo, “As there is a possibility that I shall be out of the country on January 10 [the suggested date for the forum] it is impossible for me to attend.”

  6. The surveillance, monitoring, and phone taps have already been documented many times over in these pages; for evidence of PR’s mail’s being opened, see FBI New York 100-25857-3118, 3147. Among the informants cooperating with the FBI in this period was Noble Sissle, the partner of Eubie Blake, and a man who had known Robeson at least since the days of “Shuffle Along” in the early twenties (FBI Main 100-12304-405, 62–65252).

  7. Dave Curtis to PR, March 3, 1955; PR to Curtis, March 7, 1955 (Workers’ Sports Association); Jacob Ori to PR, Jan. 26, 1955 (Tel Aviv); Sergei Yutkevich to PR, March 15, 1955 (Mosfilm). Once again, the documentation with regard to the passport case is too bulky to cite with any completeness. Suffice it to say that in this and the following paragraphs I have relied on the press releases of the Provisional Committee to Restore Paul Robeson’s Passport in RA; the complete files of the case Leonard Boudin turned over to me; detailed reports of the battle in the Daily Worker (especially Jan. 24, May 30, June 2, 3, 8, 1955) and The New York Times (especially Jan. 14, June 2, 3, 4, 7, 15, July 15, 1955); and private correspondence in both RA and NYPL/Schm: PR. A good summary of the issues in the case is in Boudin, “The Constitutional Right to Travel,” Columbia Law Review, Jan. 1956. For a historical overview arriving at a pro-State Department position see Louis L. Jaffe, “The Right
to Travel: The Passport Problem,” Foreign Affairs, Oct. 1956.

  8. PR, Jr., to Dave Curtis, Ferdinand C. Smith, Will Sahnow—all July 28, 1955, RA; Atlanta Daily World, July 28, 1955; The Afro-American, July 3, 30, 1955; Daily Worker, July 24, Aug. 14, 1955. The officials present at the meeting were Under secretary of State Loy W. Henderson (who as U.S. Ambassador to Iran had helped to engineer the overthrow of the democratic Mossadegh government two years earlier), Frances G. Knight (director of the Passport Division), Security Chief Scott McLeod, and Raymond Yingling, assistant legal adviser to the State Department. Just two weeks before PR’s passport conference in Washington, The New York Times had run an editorial recommending more cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In welcoming the Times’s suggestion, Pravda cited the “humiliating procedures” prescribed for Soviet visitors to the States and also protested the refusal of the U.S. government to allow Robeson to travel. Shortly before that exchange, the Times reported that the Soviets, having earlier named a mountain after Robeson, had now named the main street in a new state farm settlement after him as well (Times, April 3, 1955). Since the Times in this period reported no news of PR other than his passport case and his assorted Soviet ties, the paper directly contributed to the already firm public image of him as “a dangerous subversive.” Mount Paul Robeson is the highest peak in the AlaTau range in the Kirghiz Republic. A bronze bust of Robeson by Olga Manuilova is placed on top of the mountain. (See Thelma Dale Perkins, “A Letter to Paul Robeson on Our Visit to Mt. Robeson,” New World Review, 4th quarter 1973)

  9. The New York Times, Aug. 17, 1955; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 17, 1955; PR, Jr.’s handwritten notes on the Aug. 16 meeting (“this man”), at which he had been present, are in RA; U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 1955 (an excerpted transcript of the proceedings); interview with Leonard Boudin, July 14, 1982.

  10. Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 17, 1955; the New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 10, 1955; PR’s press release (Oct. 1955) is in RA.

  11. See p. 407 for the State Department’s 1952 assertion; Rover’s testimony is reprinted in U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 1955; PR’s statement is reprinted in the Philadelphia Tribune, Oct. 18, 1955.

  12. The powerful historical argument in the amicus curiae brief was prepared by Milton Friedman, William Patterson, and Ralph Powe and then circularized (mostly among black Americans) for signatures. Essie took an active role in writing to potential signers. Du Bois, Alphaeus Hunton, and Rev. Charles Hill were among those who signed. Ben jamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College, was among those who refused (“… it would have been better to have argued the case for Mr. Robeson,” he wrote Patterson, “without indicting Mr. Dulles” [Mays to Patterson, March 1, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR]). In explaining the reluctance of Judge W. C. Huston to sign, George B. Murphy, Jr., wrote Essie (March 6, 1956, NYPL/Schm: PR) that he “apparently never … recovered from the effect of his having signed a statement which he wrote himself, on the basis of his convictions in the Rosenberg case, which caused him some difficulties in the State of Michigan with the Elks State Association there.… [He] asked me to say to you and Paul that if there is something else he can do he will be happy to help” (see also March 5, 1956).

  At the time of Emmett Till’s murder, PR sent a telegram to A. Philip Randolph (Sept. 24, 1954, RA) calling for black unity “in militant resistance to terror and oppression.” It was one of several gestures PR made in 1954–55 to reach out in common cause with the established black leadership. (He also telegraphed “greetings to the officers and delegates of the NAACP convention,” June 24, 1955, RA.)

  13. Interviews with Dr. Aaron Wells, Jan. 8, April 23, 1983; multiple conversations with PR, Jr., and Helen Rosen; interview with Annette Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983 (making out a will); PR’s reference to himself as a “prisoner” is from the London Daily Herald, Oct. 21, 1955.

  14. Interview with Lee Cayton, April 28, 1982. Helen Rosen recalls that her husband, Sam, had tried to persuade Robeson to go to a surgeon at Mt. Sinai, where Sam was on staff, but other friends persuaded him that “he must have a black doctor do it, and it has to be done uptown.” She also recalls that Sam was “absolutely furious” that the operation was done in two steps, an older surgical technique, thereby exposing Paul to a double dose of pain and anxiety (multiple conversations with Helen Rosen). According to PR, Jr., his father told him he didn’t want a downtown white doctor or a CP doctor and went on his own to Wells and Wiles—though agreeing to let Ed Barsky, the physician for several CP leaders, watch the operation at Sydenham. The FBI had a report on Robeson’s hospitalization from an unnamed source at Sydenham (FBI New York 100-25857-2518). Among the many get-well letters in RA is one from Eugene Dennis (Oct. 12, 1955) and one from Mike Gold (Oct. 18, 1955), who wrote, “We need you as we need sunlight!” PR’s hospital bills, revealing his private nursing care, are in RA. His medical expenses, totaling over two thousand dollars, put another dent in an income that (according to the official estimate on his 1955 tax returns in RA) for the year 1955 amounted to a gross of $12,751.90. Essie’s income for that year totaled a mere three hundred dollars, for three articles in New World Review (ER to Rockmore, Feb. 13, 1956, RA). PR’s finances got a boost the following year when he received a check for ten thousand dollars “as a fee for your records sold in the Soviet Union” (Yuri I. Gouk [cultural attaché, U.S.S.R. Washington Embassy] to PR, undated [enclosed check is dated June 7, 1956], RA).

  15. For an understanding of why Paul returned to Essie, I’m especially grateful for the insights Marilyn Robeson provided in our several talks. The historians Judith Mara and Herbert Gutman got to know the Robesons fairly well during the 1950s (because of their close friendship with Paul, Jr., and Marilyn) and stressed to me, during an informal conversation on June 7, 1985, that they had found ER an unusually well-informed, astute political observer. In regard to Essie and the CPUSA, Rose Perry recalls that Essie “was always at loggerheads with some of the people in the Party,” and PR, Jr., adds, “She was very critical of Foster and Ben” (interview with Perry, April 27, 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]). The FBI, in 1955, was citing Essie as “active on behalf of numerous Communist fronts” (FBI Main 100-12304-317, 318). The FBI received information that Ben Davis, Jr., after completing a conditional-release sentence on Feb. 24, 1956, “possibly will live with” Robeson, having asked a friend to get him a larger apartment for that purpose (FBI Main 100-12304-360).

  16. Interview with Thelma Dale Perkins, Nov. 11, 1986 (parachute); ER to “Nana,” Jan. 11, 1956, RA; talks with Marilyn Robeson. When the United Nations Department of Public Information gave Essie temporary accreditation, USUN Warren M. Chase suggested to the Justice Department in a confidential memo that “steps be taken” to have her credentials canceled. Since the department had a policy of not objecting to the accreditation of U.S. correspondents to the UN, Chase suggested that she be watched to see if she introduced herself in a status other than as a correspondent for a “Communist monthly,” and that if she did the department “might be asked to make an investigation directed at this specific point” (FBI Main 100-12304-336). The special agent in New York reported soon after that “no info has come to the attention of the NYC indicating that subject has misused her accreditation to the UN” (FBI Main 100-12304-353). Samples of ER’s political writings for New World Review are in the issues of June and Aug. 1956 (respectively, favorable reactions to Sukarno of Indonesia and Krishna Menon of India), May 1957 (“The Changing Face of the UN”), and June 1957 (“China and the UN”). ER suggested to Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that from time to time she send along from her UN post stories of special interest to black readers, for syndication by Barnett. But he replied that the material “really does not suit our needs” (ER to Barnett, Oct. 18, 1957; Barnett to ER, Nov. 15, 1957, CHS: Barnett). In a notebook in RA marked “1957 some notes and appointments,” Essie wrote regarding her UN job: “Be very careful, during debate, not to laugh or sneer or make any expression.”
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br />   17. Interview with Dr. Morris Perlmutter, March 7, 1983. Mine-Mill Herald, Feb. 1956; The Telegram (Canada), Feb. 13, 1956; Canadian Tribune, Feb. 20, 1956; Toronto Daily Star, Feb. 13, 1956; ER to Lloyd L. Brown, Jan. 29, 1959, RA. The ms. of PR’s Sudbury speech is in RA. In his Toronto speech PR also congratulated the city on having banned Little Black Sambo from the public schools; his support of the ban reflected both the limits of his civil-libertarian stand and the campaign against “white chauvinism” that had been gathering strength—and wreaking havoc—within the Communist Party. Six months before, PR had gotten a letter from Neruda, telling him, “I am speaking about you and your case in a great meeting for public freedom, here in Santiago in 15th August.… I send you my best regards, and the love and admiration of all my people” (Neruda to PR, July 2, 1955, RA).

  18. For additional discussion of PR’s reaction to the Khrushchev revelations, see pp. 416–17; also, interviews already cited with Peggy Dennis, Dorothy Healey, John Gates, Stretch Johnson. The fate of the March 1956 passport appeal is traced in newspaper accounts (The New York Times, Jan. 1, 21, Feb. 12, March 9, 1956; Daily Worker, March 9, 1956; The Afro-American, March 10, 1956) and in correspondence from Robeson’s lawyers, Boudin and Wright, in NYPL/Schm: PR. Warren E. Burger, then Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, for the Justice Department, was one of the lawyers arguing the case against Robeson.

  19. Interviews with Dr. Morris Perlmutter (March 7, 1983), Freda Diamond (liturgy), PR, Jr.; my interviews with Pete Seeger (July 4, 1986, phone) and Earl Robinson (Aug. 17, 1986) were especially useful in regard to the pentatonic scale. RA contains voluminous Music Notes in PR’s hand, written from 1955–57. In them, he sometimes speculates on the two pentatonic scales of the piano (e.g., Notes of Jan. 15, 1957) and far from claiming absolute originality for his theories, cites a large number of scholarly sources for them, including Béla Bartók, Hugo Leichtentritt. J. Rosamond Johnson, Marshall Stearns, F. M. Hornbostel, Marion Bauer, and Harold Courlander.