Paul Robeson (105 page)

At the Hansberry funeral, Malcolm X let it be known through an intermediary that he would like to meet Robeson. A little more than a year before, Malcolm had praised Robeson's “brilliant stand” in questioning as early as 1949 “the intelligence of colored people fighting to defend a country that treated them with such open contempt and bestial brutality.” Paul, Jr., talked to Malcolm at the back of the funeral parlor and then
relayed the invitation to his father. Robeson felt no affinity for the religious austerity of the mainstream Shiite Black Muslim movement and its leader, Elijah Muhammad, nor for their emphasis on separation from whites, the confinement of women, and the importance of black entrepreneurship. But toward Malcolm personally he felt high regard, especially after Malcolm had begun to sound an internationalist note following his seminal journey to Mecca. Still, it was decided to delay a meeting between the two men until a less stressful moment. A month later Malcolm was assassinated.
¹⁶

With the approach of Robeson's sixty-seventh birthday, the editors of
Freedomways
asked if they could use the occasion to stage a “salute” to him, which might simultaneously be a moneymaker for the magazine. Given Robeson's improved condition (he had been going regularly on extended visits to his sister Marian's in Philadelphia, sometimes on his own), he gave
Freedomways
the go-ahead. Not everyone invited responded with enthusiasm. Some of those who sent regrets, like Coleman Young and John Howard Lawson, clearly did lament their schedule conflicts. But Roy Wilkins's cold reply to the request that he serve as a sponsor of the event (he had “overextended” himself, he wrote, and NAACP projects now required his undivided attention) was matched only by David Susskind's outright hostility: “My only reaction is that you must be joking—and what a bad joke it is.”
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However, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Earl Dickerson, Dizzie Gillespie, John Coltrane, Paule Marshall, Linus Pauling, Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger, and I. F. Stone were among the sixty illustrious sponsors who did offer their names. More than two thousand people flocked to the ballroom of the Americana Hotel on the night of April 22, to be entertained during the four-hour celebration by Morris Carnovsky, Diana Sands, Roscoe Lee Browne, Howard da Silva, M. B. Olatunji, and Billy Taylor. The crowd was predominantly white and middle-aged, but made up in warmth what it lacked in diversity. John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, had been invited as a keynoter (the black activist lawyer Hope R. Stevens was the other) in the hope that he would serve as a symbolic bridge between Robeson and the new generation of black activists, but it turned out Lewis “knew so little” about Robeson that he turned to his fellow SNCC member Alan Rinzler, the editor who had been trying to coax Robeson into doing a memoir, to write his speech for him. Rinzler gave Lewis a “series of notes” and was “then appalled when Lewis read it word for word.” Still, the words rang out with comradely flair—“We of SNCC are Paul Robeson's spiritual children. We too have rejected gradualism and moderation. We are also being accused of radicalism, of communist infiltration”—and they gladdened Robeson's spirit. When Bob Moses, a legendary SNCC leader, also showed up for the event and personally paid his respects to Robeson, it was possible to believe that generational continuity—and a sense of indebtedness—was as much fact as reverie.
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When Robeson himself took the platform, the crowd, uncertain whether he would speak, greeted him with a near-pandemonium of cheers, waves, and tears. Deeply moved, he thanked the artists “who have taken time out from their busy lives to come here this evening.” Then, sticking closely to his prepared text, his voice firm and resonant, he sounded once again the themes that had been central to his life: art as the reflection of “a common Humanity”; the “great variety,” in combination with “the universality,” of human experience—its unity, “the one-ness of many of the people in our contemporary world”; the importance of letting people “decide for themselves” between the contending systems of social organization—and his personal pleasure that so many of the “newly emancipated nations of Asia and Africa” were moving in the direction of a socialist arrangement; the importance of the
FREEDOM NOW
struggle for the liberation of black people in the United States—
and
as an arena for finding and building “a living connection—deeper and stronger—between the Negro people and the great masses of white Americans, who are indeed our natural allies in the struggle for democracy.”
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“A lot of love went towards him”; “a memorable occasion”; an “inspiring” night—almost everyone at the event found it “thrilling.” The notable exception was the
Liberator
, one of the prominent organs of the new black militants. “Those who attended to welcome home a
leader
found themselves paying respects to a
legend
,” the
Liberator
's columnist impatiently reported. “Even Robeson's own speech at the end of the evening was a disappointment in this respect.” Yet the
Liberator
—apparently knowing nothing of Robeson's recent incapacity—did not entirely dismiss what it graciously acknowledged to be his leadership
potential
. In
Here I Stand
, the
Liberator
wrote, Robeson “foresaw and dealt with many of the problems which have come to a head since then”—the struggle for civil rights as a minimal necessity, not a maximum fulfillment; the moral right of the black community, threatened in life and property, to defend itself; the need for blacks to wrest control of their lives—and their movement—from white domination; the insistence that black leaders be single-mindedly dedicated to their own people's welfare. Yes, the
Liberator
solemnly concluded, the new generation of black activists had “the right and duty” to ask a man of Robeson's proven stature and insight to rejoin them “in battle.” Robeson probably never saw the
Liberator
's comments, but if he got wind of them he might have found solace for the impudence and forgetfulness of the young in remembering a letter Azikiwe of Nigeria had sent him nearly ten years earlier. Sensing that his own reign as national liberator and hero was coming to an end, Azikiwe had philosophically written, “Although we have spent a greater part of our fortune and our lives in the struggle, the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin are now in the vanguard to reap where they have not sown. The result is a conflict of interest between those we had stimulated all these years to look forward to a new day and those who
have arisen from among them to lead them to a Canaan of our dreams.”
²⁰

The
Freedomways
event had gone off so well that it was decided to proceed with plans for a trip to California, with Essie accompanying Paul and—so it seemed in the planning, anyway—with careful protective measures to safeguard his health. The decision was made over Paul, Jr.'s strenuous objection, for he was convinced that his father was not up to the trip. Alice Childress also begged Essie to cancel plans for California. Childress had attended the event at the Americana, had seen “the sweat just popping out” on Paul's face, the hands trembling. But Essie told her, “He can't stay out of sight. He's a public figure. People want to know, where is Paul Robeson. We have to do it.”
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The trip started out well enough. At Kennedy Airport in New York they got the red-carpet treatment because, as Essie wrote the Rosens, “the head Negro porter recognized Paul and went straight to the top guy and alerted him. He was having no nonsense about
HIS
idea of a
VIP
. And so the seats were cleared for us to have no immediate neighbors, and we were very comfortable.” At the Los Angeles airport they were met by Steve Fritchman as well as Chuck Moseley and Homer Sadler, two black left-wing activists assigned as bodyguards (“I have never seen such security,” Essie wrote home; “I at once was taught how to use a 15 repeater rifle, and found it easy and great fun”). Moseley and Sadler also kept guns hidden under the quilt on the car seat, but, unlike earlier years, there was no incident of any kind involving Paul's personal safety. The Robesons went directly to the home of their old friend Frankie Lee Sims of the National Negro Labor Council, with whom they were staying in the black community of Watts, and rested all the remainder of that day and the following day until time for a celebration in their honor at Fritchman's First Unitarian Church. Robeson was interviewed at the church by a friendly reporter from the Los Angeles
Times
whom Fritchman had okayed in advance (and, indeed, the sympathetic story was headlined “Robeson Cherishes His U.S. Heritage”), and then had dinner privately with Fritchman and church officials before joining the packed festivities. After Martha Schlamme performed a group of songs and a church choir sang, Paul himself was introduced to the gathering. He gave essentially the same speech he had at the Americana, but also sang without accompaniment a Hebridean song and “Jacob's Ladder,” and at the close recited in Yiddish two verses from the song of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. “This is the first time,” he told the adoring crowd, “I'm sort of playing around much with the singing, but I guess the voice is still around somewhere.” Essie thought it sounded better than that—“full, complete with overtones, and under very firm control.” He “seems to feel very experimental,” she wrote home to the family. “He wants to try things. I am keeping clear watch, so no one can push him, and that he gets rest.”
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Indeed, she guarded him so closely, screening out friends and strang
ers alike, that she aroused resentment at the time and suspicion since. According to Dorothy Healey, CP people “could not talk to him, see him, or have any kind of communication with him.… We were told that he was very sick.” Rose Perry confirms that she and Pettis got an unexpected call from Essie enlisting their help. “I don't want the Party coming near him,” she remembers Essie saying, and “If they call I'm going to tell them that you're arranging his meetings.” Yet local Party leader Bill Taylor did have access to him, and when the top Party leader Gus Hall came through California he, too, was allowed to drop by; that alone aroused factional jealousy. When some old friends who were not Party people also found themselves barred, the resentment escalated into a conspiratorial view of Essie's intentions. Geri Branton, active in the civil-rights struggle and instrumental in arranging Robeson's previous appearances in California in 1958, found herself stopped at the door by Essie and not even invited to participate in the event at Fritchman's church. It seemed logical to assume that Essie was lending herself—and, through her control over his schedule, Paul—to some partisan maneuver; rumors flew that she was taking orders from the Gus Hall wing of the Party or even (having “turned”) from the FBI. But logic, as is often the case, was not truth. A dying woman, always overzealous by temperament and especially when contending for undisputed control over Paul, had simply overstepped a few boundaries here, failed to flatter a few egos there.
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The frequency as well as the nature of Paul's appearances further fed antagonism toward Essie. Paul, Jr., for one, became irate when he discovered—belatedly—what he felt to be the irresponsibly hectic and overcrowded schedule Essie had subjected his father to. After Paul's appearance in Fritchman's church, it seemed to Paul, Jr., that one engagement was allowed to spill directly into the next. On one day, a morning breakfast in the black community was followed by a packed meeting at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, in turn followed by an evening gathering at the home of a black physician in the Compton area. At all three events Robeson spoke, albeit briefly, and at one he sang. The remaining week in Los Angeles was more leisurely, but at least one meeting and usually two were scheduled for every day—gatherings in black homes, a fund-raiser for
People's World
, a meeting with a group of black businessmen who were starting a credit union—and at nearly every stop Paul spoke and occasionally sang a song or two.
²⁴

Arriving in San Francisco on May 24, the Robesons were met by the left-wing figure Mary Helen Jones and whisked away for rest to the Marin County home of Ruby Silverstone, a white liberal. When Paul, Jr., later heard of the arrangements, he became furious at Essie, claiming that the sprawling “estate” in the wealthy, protected white enclave where Silver-stone lived was designed to remind his father of nothing so much as the grounds of the Priory sanatorium—and on top of that was devoid of the
welcoming warmth he would have found from old friends in the area like Lee and Revels Cayton, who had expected to be contacted but somehow never were. But in fact Ruby Silverstone was very much a known quantity to Robeson, and her purported “estate” was nothing more than a modest two-bedroom house. She had first met Robeson in the early forties; Robeson had stayed with her for a few nights during the
Othello
tour, and again when he had been out on the Coast in the late forties; they had many friends in common, including the Caytons, Louise Bransten, and Vivian and Vincent Hallinan.
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When Paul and Essie arrived to stay with Silverstone in 1965, she gave him her own bedroom and Essie slept in the dressing room just off it. Silverstone also made it clear that all casual callers would be barred from her house and that as far as she was concerned Paul should appear as much or as little as made him feel comfortable. But by that time trouble was already brewing. Paul “began to wake up, day after day,
TIRED
,” Essie reported home, and she herself came down with severe back pain, which a local doctor diagnosed as “either kidney or bladder”—at least that was all Essie was willing to tell; Paul showed alarm at her being incapacitated and she had to keep up a good front for him. Somehow they both managed to show up for a Du Bois Club fund-raising dinner organized by the Hallinans, their associates from Progressive Party days, and two days later they let their old friend John Pittman, foreign affairs editor of
People's World
, collect them for lunch at his house.
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