Paul Robeson (111 page)

Finally, additional documentation about Robeson was secured under the Freedom of Information Act. Some time ago, when access under the FOIA remained comparatively open, Paul Robeson, Jr., got considerable material from the Main Office files of the FBI (as well as some CIA and State Department documentation). Some of that material, however, consisted of condensations sent from the FBI's New York Field Office, the
originating branch for surveillance of Robeson. I felt it was urgent to secure the New York files themselves—especially after I discovered that surveillance had been so continuous and intense that the field office file had generated its own internal index (a so-called Correlation Summary, developed only for the very largest FBI collections). Unfortunately, by the time I began this biography in 1981, open access under the FOIA was a policy of the past. When I applied for Robeson's New York file, I did get some material from the early forties, but for the later period I received little more than page after page of inked-out reports. In denying me access, the Bureau cited the now catchall justification of “national security.”

Given the persistent rumors that the FBI (as well as other government agencies) had had a direct hand in causing the deterioration in Robeson's health during the fifties, I felt it was essential to try to extract additional materials from the recalcitrant Bureau. To that end, I initiated a formal lawsuit against the FBI through Edward Greer, the Boston lawyer with special expertise in FOIA files. Litigation dragged on for nearly three years. Ultimately, running out of money and nearing completion of the book, I had to agree to an out-of-court settlement that did secure for me some additional documentation, but not enough either definitively to corroborate or to disprove the rumored involvement of the FBI in Robeson's physical and emotional collapse. None of the limited amount of material I received as a result of the court case contains any suggestion of FBI (or other governmental) complicity. Still, the issue must be considered unresolved. The mere existence (apparently unique, according to Ed Greer) of an FBI “Status of Health” file on Robeson remains unexplained, and there are enough other loose ends in the available evidence to make it impossible at this point in time either wholly to absolve or clearly to indict U.S. government agencies for playing a role in Robeson's decline. Final judgment must await the release of
all
pertinent material. Unfortunately, that day may never come: during the course of litigation, the FBI lawyers told Greer—their tone sardonic—that some 56 volumes (out of a probable 103) in the Robeson file of the New York Field Office had “unaccountably disappeared.”

Notes

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOR MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS IN LIBRARIES

CHAPTER 1
BOYHOOD
(1898–1914)

1.
It would serve no useful purpose to list the voluminous literature on race for this period—expecially since August Meier and Elliott Rudwick's excellent
From Plantation to Ghetto
(Hill and Wang, 1970) summarizes the pertinent evidence and sources. For an updating, see Louis R. Harlan,
Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915
(Oxford, 1983).

2.
WDR obituary in the Somerset
Messenger
, May 22, 1918 (year of degrees). The classmate (and subsequent relative by marriage) was Nathan F. Mossell. His comment on Lincoln University is in his ms. autobiography (which also includes part of his correspondence), generously loaned to me by a descendant, Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham. She also gave me a number of other documents of special value in reconstructing the history of the Robeson family; these are too scattered and numerous to list in full. Besides the Cunningham documents, I have found of special value, despite its distortions, Eslanda Robeson,
Paul Robeson, Negro
(Gollancz, 1930), hereafter ER,
PR, Negro
; Robeson's own autobiography,
Here I Stand
(Beacon Press, 1970), hereafter PR,
Stand
; the Jacob C. White and Bustill-Bowser-Asbury ms. collections at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, hereafter MSRC; Anna Bustill Smith, “The Bustill Family,”
Journal of Negro History
, Oct. 1925; and the collection of ms. letters given me by Paulina Forsythe, daughter of Marian Robeson Forsythe (Paul's sister).

3.
Gertrude Bustill edited the Women's Department of the New York
Age
and the Indianapolis
World
, worked for Philadelphia's most influential newspapers, the
Inquirer
, the
Press
, and the
Times
, and was active in a wide variety of women's and public service organizations in the black community (they are detailed in
Twenty 19th Century Black Women
, a publication of the National Archives for Black Women's History and the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum). Her book,
The Afro-American Woman
(George S. Ferguson Co., 1894) surveys the accomplishments of black women, giving due attention to the social conditions that limited their options; it contains as well some “advanced” views on the plight of women in general.

Anna Bustill Smith (cited in note 2) was yet another noteworthy member of the Bustill clan. Cousin to Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, Paul's mother, she published “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey” in 1913, recently rescued from oblivion by the Princeton History Project (see Fred Ferretti, “Black History in Princeton,”
The New York Times
, March 5, 1978), which reprinted it in
Princeton Recolleclor
, vol. III, no. 5 (Winter 1977), with a biographical sketch of Anna Bustill Smith by Gledhill Cameron. Anna Smith's father, Joseph Cassey Bustill, the grandson of Cyrus Bustill, is credited by Cameron with being the youngest member of the Underground Railroad, and her mother, Sarah Humphrew, a Chippewa Indian, with being the first black graduate of the Girls' Normal School in Philadelphia. Paul Robeson personally knew both Gertrude Bustill Mossell and Anna Bustill Smith; all three of them gave speeches at the Eighth Annual Re-Union of the descendants of the Bustill family, June 21, 1918 (the invitation and program are in the Robeson Archives—henceforth RA).

The ms. autobiography (courtesy of Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham) of Gertrude Bustill's husband, Nathan F. Mossell, gives a detailed account of his own noteworthy career. Having surmounted the color bar to medical training, in 1895 he founded with other black doctors what became the famed Mercy-Douglass Hospital in Philadelphia (its history is recounted in Elliott M. Rudwick, “A Brief History of Mercy-Douglass,”
Journal of Negro Education
, vol. 20 [1951], and also in the hospital's
Annual Reports
, given to me by Mrs. Gertrude Cunningham). Mossell remained active in the protest against racial injustice throughout his long life.
His ms. papers contain a large number of speeches, letters, and petitions that attest to his activism, including correspondence with William Jennings Bryan about racial “amalgamation” and protests about racial issues to both the Presidents Roosevelt.

4.
Gertrude Cunningham documents; PR, ms. notes (written May 2, 1956), RA (rocks; militancy; Laddie); PR,
Stand
, pp. 12–13, 21–22; interview with Marian Liggins (Ben's daughter), Nov. 21, 1982; interview with Rada and Mirel Bercovici, July 7, 1985 (Reeve); multiple interviews with Helen Rosen (recalls PR saying Reeve had ended on Skid Row). Since blacks were not permitted in the Princeton high school, William had to travel to Trenton to get an education (PR,
Stand
, p. 10; Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987). Alexander (“Ting”) Taylor is the source for William's being called “schoolboy”; Taylor (b. 1891), and his family lived opposite the Robesons on Greene Street (interview with Taylor, Aug. 11, 1987). Emma Epps (b. 1900), also a neighbor, believes Reeve became a mortician in Washington, D.C., before going to Detroit (interview with Epps, Aug. 11, 1987). Both Taylor and Epps confirm that Reeve always stood up for his rights (“Wouldn't take nothing from nobody,” in Taylor's words). Paul Robeson, Jr. (henceforth PR, Jr.), is the source for Reeve's being part owner of a hotel, but denies that there is any truth to the rumor that he died on Skid Row (PR, Jr., ms. comments). In a heated speech in 1949, PR referred to Reeve's answering “each insult with blows that sent would-be slave masters crashing to the stone sidewalks, even though jail was his constant reward” (press release, Council on African Affairs [hereafter CAA], June 19, 1949).

5.
Princeton Press
, March 26, 1906 (size of black population). Both Taylor and Epps stressed to me (interviews, Aug. 11, 1987) the cohesiveness that existed in Princeton's black community in the early decades of the century, and also the “large number” of black-owned businesses and property. PR,
Stand
, pp. 10–11; Pearl Bradley, “Robeson Questionnaire” (twelve-page interview for Bradley's M.A. thesis), RA (NC contingent); Anita Sterner interviews with Bishop Clinton Hoggard and J. Douglas Brown (PR contemporaries) for 1978 BBC program on PR, tapes courtesy of Sterner (hereafter “Sterner interviews”). PR's later remarks on Princeton are from a June 19, 1949, CAA press release summarizing a speech he had given, and also a handwritten ms. reminiscing about his youth (in ER's hand), RA. In later life PR often referred with special fondness to his Aunt Huldah (e.g.,
Freedom
, April 1952); according to Epps (interview, Aug. 11, 1987), Huldah Robeson was married to Rev. Robeson's brother Ben (a second brother, John, apparently also lived in Princeton). PR's childhood playmates included Bessie and Christine Moore, whose mother was white and whose father made considerable money running a cleaning establishment for Princeton students and also a boardinghouse; Christine Moore (later Howell, who lived until 1972) remained close friends with Marian Robeson Forsythe through the years. (I'm grateful to her daughter, Paulina Forsythe, for sharing with me Christine Moore Howell's letters).

6.
Rev. Robeson had had a brief pastorate in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., before being called to Witherspoon (obituary, Somerset
Messenger
, May 22, 1918). Anna Bustill Smith, “Reminiscences of Colored People of Princeton, New Jersey”; Sterner interview with Hoggard; Somerset
Messenger
, May 22, 1918. Blacks had originally been listed in the rolls of the First Presbyterian Church and had successfully resisted efforts to set them apart until 1846, when the First Presbyterian Church of Color was organized; its name was changed in 1848 to Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church (Arthur Link,
First Presbyterian Church of Princeton
[Princeton University Press, 1967], pp. 32–36; V. Lansing Collins,
Princeton, Past and Present
[Princeton University Press, 1945]; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker,
Princeton 1746–1896
[Princeton University Press, 1946]).

7.
Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Jan. 30, June 26, Sept. 19, 1900, The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS); Trenton
Times
, June 28, Sept.
20 (“eloquent”), 1900; Princeton
Press
, Sept. 22, 1900 (“misfit”).

8.
Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Sept. 24, 1900, PHS;
Daily State Gazette
(Trenton), Sept. 25, 1900; Princeton
Press
, Sept. 29, 1900.

9.
Sterner interview with Hoggard; Grace Doman Willis to Marian Robeson Forsythe, Feb. 21, 1976 (“did it to his father”), courtesy Paulina Forsythe. One false rumor that circulated about Rev. Robeson's forced departure centered on “mischief with one of the girls in his congregation.” Alexander Woollcott printed that rumor in his New York
World
column for May 20, 1928, adding, “Years later, they tell me, a divinity student, who had helped to bring the accusation, confessed that it had been an invention fabricated by someone who wanted to occupy that pulpit himself.” In a second article, Woollcott referred to “some skulduggery on the part of two scheming divinity students” as being responsible for Rev. Robeson's ouster (
Hearst's International Cosmopolitan
, July 1933; conceivably Woollcott's source was Paul, since the two were friendly at the time).