Paul Robeson (138 page)

55.
The original members of the Council of twelve people included seven black Americans, among them Hubert T. Delany, Channing Tobias, Ralph Bunche, and Mordecai Johnson, but the latter two soon resigned because (according to the FBI) “the organization was ‘too left.'” The FBI also reported that black CP leader James Ford had been active in helping to form the Council and that the “Communist leaders” became “increasingly active in controlling the organization” (FBI Report of SA, Oct. 20, 1950, 100-19377-545). At the time when E. Franklin Frazier was invited to join the Council late in 1941, it had only fourteen members, including officers; along with Frazier, eleven others were issued invitations in 1941, of whom five accepted (including Earl Dickerson and Dr. R. T. Bokwe of the Union of South Africa). By 1945 membership had grown to twentyseven,
and in 1946 was augmented to seventy-two, 20 percent white, mostly politically radical Jewish intellectuals (Yergan to Frazier, Oct. 3, 1941, Jan. 29, 1946, MSRC: Frazier). Additional details on the early years of CAA, its membership, financing, and goals, is in Hollis R. Lynch,
Black American Radicals and the Liberation of Africa: The Council on African Affairs 1937–1955
(Cornell University Press, 1978), especially pp. 17–28. For the background discussion of Pan-Africanism (along with the definition quoted), I have relied centrally on Mark Solomon's fine “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in T. G. Paterson, ed.,
Cold War Critics
(Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 205–11, and on Wilson Jeremiah Moses,
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925
(Archon Books, 1978), especially ch. 10. My interview with Doxey Wilkerson on May 7, 1984 (PR, Jr., participating) was also helpful. Hunton's quote is from an appendix he wrote to PR's
Stand
, pp. 117–19 (“A Note on the Council on African Affairs”).

56.
FBI 100-28627-70, p. 22.

57.
The previous year, Walter White had tried to get Robeson to give a concert at the First Congregational Church (White's family church) in Atlanta. Because “Paul has told me at various times about his unwillingness to go South,” White enlisted Essie in the project, but she wrote back, “No, no south so far” (Eugene Martin to White, April 7, May 1941; White to Martin, May 6, 1941; White to ER, April 16, 1941; ER to White [appended to a letter from ER to Martin], April 29, 1941—all in LC: NAACP). Later that year, Robeson did venture to the all-black North Carolina College for Negroes where he sang “Ballad for Americans” and had “a grand time” (PR to ER, Oct. 7, 1941, RA).

58.
Interview with Howard “Stretch” Johnson, March 5, 1985; interview with Junius Scales, March 10, 1986. The quote is from the ms. of Scales's autobiography, which he kindly showed me (since published as Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson,
Cause at Heart
(University of Georgia Press, 1987], pp. 164, 166).

59.
Klehr,
Heyday
, pp. 276–78 (SCHW);
National Negro Congress News
, April 24, 1942; “The Reminiscences of Harry L. Mitchell,” interview by Donald F. Shaughnessy, 1956–57, Oral History Project, Columbia University; Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,”
New York World-Telegram
, April 22, 1942; Virginia Foster Durr,
Outside the Magic Circle
(University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 154–55, also has a brief account of PR's appearance at SCHW. H. L. Mitchell sent me the list of a dinner committee “from the late 1930s” for the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, which includes among its sponsors both Robeson and Ronald Reagan (Mitchell to me, July 13, 1985). The year following SCHW, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote Robeson, “It gives me a thrill to know you and to know that you are a part of us” (Bethune to PR, Nov. 10, 1943, RA). In 1944 Robeson lunched with Mrs. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, along with Judge Delany, Mrs. Pratt, and the Laskers, to discuss the Wiltwyck School for Boys, which Mrs. Roosevelt had founded (Claude Brown, author of
Manchild in the Promised Land
, was among its graduates). Subsequent to the luncheon, Robeson spent a day at Wiltwyck and offered to give a benefit concert for the school (Eleanor Roosevelt to PR, June 2, Sept. 23, 1944; PR to Roosevelt, June 30, 1944, RA).

60.
Pittsburgh
Courier
interview, Sept. 26, 1942 (rural poor);
The Worker
, Sept. 24, 1942; Deseret
News
, Sept. 23, 1942.

61.
Dan Burley's review in the New York
Amsterdam Star News
, Oct. 3, 1942, hailed the film as “the most powerful indictment of the absentee landlord and sharecropping system in the South I have ever seen on the screen”—though it was that same paper, two months earlier (Aug. 15, 1942), that had headlined the negative review;
PM
, Sept. 25, 1942;
Amsterdam Star News
, Aug. 29, 1942 (Anderson meeting); Pittsburgh
Courier
, Sept. 5, 12, 1942 (Muse). “Many persons,” Walter White later wrote, “wondered why he had not been perceptive enough to understand what he was doing while the picture was being filmed” (Walter White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,”
Ebony
, Feb. 1951).

62.
Associated Negro Press, Oct. 1, 1942;
PM
, Sept. 22, 1942; Pittsburgh
Courier
, Sept. 26, 1942;
People's World
, Sept. 22, 1942. The film's opening grosses were the highest recorded that week—topping
Mrs. Miniver (Variety
, Aug. 12, 1942). To some extent PR's script suggestions
were
heeded (Boris Morros to Larry Brown, Nov. 22, 1941, NYPL/Schm: Brown). Boris Morros, producer of
Tales of Manhattan
, later became a counterspy for the FBI (
My Ten Years as a Counterspy
[Dell, 1959]). PR's stage prospects could not have appeared any more appealing than filmic ones for a while: Vincent Burns (author of
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
) professed excitement about a play he was writing for PR that “begins in a chain gang and ends in heaven, with a chorus singing on the balcony of heaven” (Burns to ER, Jan. 25, 1943, RA.

63.
Phone interview with Sidney Poitier, Oct. 20, 1986; Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity,” p. 484. The New York
Daily News
(Oct. 13, 1942) outright called Robeson “a Communist or anyway a fellow traveller.” In 1945 Robeson was again tempted to make a film, this time on the life of Félix Eboué (the Guyanese-born Governor General of French Equatorial Africa during W.W. II), but the project never took off (ER to Larry Brown, Aug. 14, 1945, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

In assessing PR's abilities as an actor, Poitier characterized him as “a very strong presence and a capable actor. I would go so far as to say he was a good actor.” Agreeing that Robeson was not in a class with those few extraordinary performers who can both transcend the particular acting style of their own day and subordinate their own personality to the demands of a role, Poitier added, “But Robeson's character was bigger than any he would have to create” (interview, Oct. 20, 1986). Donald Bogle has offered a much less generous estimate of PR's film career in
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks
(Viking, 1973). He credits PR with conveying a view of black males far removed from the usual servile caricature, but further (and inexplicably) describes PR's image as lacking “gentleness, an overriding interest and sympathy in all of mankind. No matter how much producers tried to make Robeson a symbol of black humanity, he always came across as a man more interested in himself than anyone else” (p. 70). I find this characterization far off the mark.

64.
A thorough account of Frontier Films and the making of
Native Land
is in Russell Campbell,
Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930–1942
(UMI Research Press, 1982). See also William Alexander,
Film on the Left
(Princeton University Press, 1981), ch. 6. At the time of its release, a number of reviewers hailed the film as pioneering and powerful (e.g., Bosley Crowther in
The New York Times
, May 13, 1942, and Joy Davidman in
New Masses
, May 19, 1942); the
Daily News
(May 13, 1942) was among those expressing doubt over timing. Sterner interview with Leo Hurwitz for the information about Robeson's fee. In the interview Hurwitz also spoke of what an “absolute joy” it was to work with Robeson—he was free of vanity, a hard worker, and a man of “tremendous gentleness.” Later on Hurwitz and PR planned to make a film based on Howard Fast's
Freedom Road
, but the onset of the Cold War made it impossible to raise money (interview with Howard Fast, Nov. 21, 1986). The FBI report (Main 100-12304-7) also labeled Frontier Films “a Communist instrumentality.”

65.
Stretch Johnson, whose sister married “Stepin Fetchit” (Lincoln Perry) in 1937, has urged the point that even Perry was not widely resented for playing stereotypical roles. “The black community understood that that was the only way to succeed, and most black performers had to make that adaptation in order to function on the American stage or in American movies.… Robeson was regarded, despite the pro-British imperialist character of
Sanders of the River
, as a successful black artist who had much more dignity from the point of view of the roles that he played, even in imperialist films, than Stepin Fetchit. And even Stepin Fetchit was not regarded as a bad guy” (interview, March 5, 1985).

CHAPTER
13
THE BROADWAY
Othello (1942–1943)

1.
MW and PR discuss
Othello
on a tape, n.d., in RA; Webster, “Paul Robeson and Othello,”
Our Time
, June 1944. Even before Webster's proposal, Lillian Baylis, manager of the Old Vic, had sounded Robeson out about the possibility of playing Othello to Laurence Olivier's Iago—but there is no known follow-up to the suggestion (Baylis to PR, Nov. 13, 1936, RA).

2.
Margaret Webster,
Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage
(Knopf, 1972), pp. 107–8.

3.
Born in 1905, Margaret Webster was an actress as her first career. In the 1920s she played the gentlewoman in John Barrymore's
Hamlet
, and performed at the Old Vic in London in the early thirties under Harcourt Williams's direction. His influence on her, and that of Harley Granville-Barker, is detailed in Margaret Webster,
Shakespeare Without Tears
(McGraw-Hill, 1942; rev. ed., World, 1955), and Ely Silverman, “Margaret Webster's Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States (1937–1953),” New York University, Ph.D. thesis, 1969. Webster's successes as a director had included
Richard II
(1937),
Hamlet
(1938), and
Macbeth
(1941), all with Maurice Evans, and a 1940 production of
Twelfth Night
with Helen Hayes as Viola. Interviews with Uta Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984. See also Susan Spector, “Uta Hagen, the Early Years: 1919–1952,” Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1982.

4.
Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984; Webster,
Daughter
, pp. 109–11; the fantasy about Ben Davis was told to me by PR, Jr.

5.
Interviews with Hagen, June 22–23, 1982, Sept. 28, 1984.

6.
Boston
Post
, Aug. 11, 16, 1942;
Christian Science Monitor
, Aug. 11, 28, 1942; Boston
Herald
, Boston
Daily Globe
, Boston
Evening American
, Boston
Traveler
—all Aug. 11, 1942;
Harvard Crimson
, Aug. 12, 14, 1942;
Variety
, Aug. 12, 1942;
The New York Times
, June 12, Aug. 16, 1942; Flora Robson to Webster and Whitty, Aug. 15, 1942, LC: Margaret Webster. Flora Robson confirmed her view in our interview of Sept. 1982 (PR, Jr., participating).

7.
Boston
American, Post, Globe, Herald
—all Aug. 11, 1941;
The New York Times
, Aug. 16, 1942;
Variety
, Aug. 12, 1942. The
Times
review praising PR's performance was signed “E.N.”—almost certainly Elliot Norton of the Boston
Post. Time
magazine's review (Aug. 24, 1942) voiced misgivings over Robeson's “overacting”—he sometimes “throbbed awkwardly”—but on balance thought he gave a performance “that even at its worst was vivid and that at its best was shattering.”

8.
PM
, Aug. 13, 1942;
Variety
, Aug. 12, 1942; see also Boston
Post, Traveler, Globe
—all Aug. 11, 1942.

9.
Webster, “PR and Othello”; Webster,
Daughter
, p. 113; Langner,
Magic Curtain
; Sterner interview: Marshall.

The program for the McCarter engagement at Princeton of Aug. 17–22, 1942, is in ARC: Fredi Washington Papers. For that production, the black press was represented by the Pittsburgh
Courier
. Its correspondent reported (Sept. 5, 1942), “We sat in McCarter's theater … and watched this whole scene bewildered … a Negro artist who courts, kisses, marries and kills a white woman.… A short time ago the whites would have advanced a thousand objections.… But today the audience and press applauded.… We were buoyant when we left the theater … the day of our redemption had not yet dawned, [but] the darkest part of the night has passed!”

A black man recalled years later (“Discussion at Old People's Meeting in Princeton,” Sterner) that his mother, who “worked in several of the homes in the university,” would overhear at parties after the tryout performances “much discussion about the fact that in the McCarter Theater Paul Robeson kissed a white woman.… It was a play but they could not accept that and they showed their Southern upbringing and their Southern attitudes.…” Also on the
Princeton production: Jean Muir to PR, Dec. 31, 1942, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Aug. 18, 1942, Yale: Van Vechten.

10.
A description of the India rally is in the
Daily Worker
, Aug. 29, 1942, and
The Chronicle
, Sept. 12, 1942; the transcript of PR's speech is in RA. Apparently his speech was recorded in a somewhat sketchy fashion (Diane Sommers, Yergan's secretary at the CAA, to ER, Nov. 23, 1942, RA).
New Masses
, Oct. 20, 1942; Lin Liang-mo, Pittsburgh
Courier
, Sept. 19, Nov. 7, 1942; FBI 100-25857-1875, Referral Doc #16.