Paul Robeson (71 page)

Robeson had come to believe so passionately that U.S. racism and imperialism were the gravest threats to mankind, including the real possibility in 1949 that the United States would launch a pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union, that he felt public criticism of anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. would only serve to play into the hands of America's dangerous right wing. If his judgment on that point ever wavered, he never revealed it. To the end of his life he would refuse to criticize the Soviets openly, never going further than to make the barest suggestion in private, to a few intimates, that injustice to some individuals must always be expected, however much to be regretted, in an attempt to create a new world dedicated to bettering the lot of the many. He continued to believe that the best chance for reaching his primary goal—improving the condition of oppressed peoples—lay with the egalitarian impulses originally unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Convinced in the thirties of the Soviets' unique freedom from racial prejudice, and seeing no major Western power in the ensuing years developing a comparable commitment to the welfare of its minorities, he resisted every pressure to convert any private disappointment he may have felt in the Soviet experiment into public censure.
⁴⁵

Robeson touched down at La Guardia Airport on June 16. Some sixty friends (including Rockmore, Patterson, and Hunton) waited on the one side, two dozen police on the other. According to
The New York Times
, “twenty uniformed policemen [was] a routine number for the arrival of prominent personages at La Guardia,” but Robeson didn't think so, and laconically contrasted leaving Eastern Europe surrounded by well-wishers with being greeted in New York by a grim police squad. FBI agents were present during the careful search made at customs of his luggage—the officials reporting that “no documents or papers were found that would indicate subversive activities.” Paul, Jr., having arrived home the week before with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Cornell, greeted his father first. (Essie had planned to meet the plane, too, but Paul's last-minute shift in arrival dates had meant she was addressing the National
Conference of Social Workers in Cleveland.) Robeson then turned to the waiting array of reporters and photographers.
⁴⁶

Hunton had suggested to Robeson that he say nothing more at the press conference than that he was glad to be back, had had a marvelous tour, and would save further comments for the Welcome Home rally planned in his honor three days hence. Robeson turned in an altogether more sizzling performance, blasting the American press for having distorted his overseas statements. When a reporter objected that no conspiratorial “higher-ups” had given them instructions to “distort,” Robeson shot back, “You don't need them.” When another reporter asked whether a story that quoted him as loving the Soviet Union “more than any other country” was accurate or not, Robeson replied, “I happen to love America very much—not Wall Street and not your press. I love the working classes of Britain and France and the people of the Soviet Union. I love them for their struggles for the freedom of my people and the working white people.” Asked if he planned to testify in defense of the Communist leaders on trial in Foley Square, he gave an unequivocal yes: “I consider the trial a complete test of American civil liberties.” Then, contrasting the scene at home with what he had found in Europe, he said, “No one is hysterical except in America.” Robeson, clearly, had not arrived home in a compromising mood.
⁴⁷

His mood had not softened three days later. June 19 began with a major personal event and concluded with a major political one. Paul, Jr., and Marilyn Paula Greenberg, who had been a fellow student at Cornell, both aged twenty-one, had decided to marry. Marilyn Greenberg came from a lower-middle-class Jewish family; her mother (but not her father) had been involved with the politically active left-wing community of Sunnyside. Paul and Essie were both entirely supportive of the marriage—Essie told the press, “our new daughter-in-law is a darling, and we are awfully glad to get a daughter”—but Marilyn's father would not attend the wedding; he was (in her words) “very resistant to the idea of my marrying a black man.” The young couple made all plans for the wedding themselves, choosing the progressive minister Reverend John Whittier Darr, Jr., to officiate at an ecumenical ceremony in his own apartment, with only immediate family present. If they had also hoped thereby to avoid any public hullabaloo, that hope was thwarted. Turning the corner into Reverend Darr's block, they saw (in Marilyn Robeson's words) “the street filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, standing there and screaming all kinds of hostile things at us as we got out of the cab. We had to push our way through people to get into the house, and as we went up the stairs, photographers kept running up and down, getting ahead of us and sticking their cameras in our faces …just swarming all over us.” Paul, Sr., according to the
Herald Tribune
, told the newsmen that he “resented their presence,
as the wedding was private. This would cause no particular excitement in the Soviet Union,” he supposedly commented. According to Essie, he “nearly punched an impertinent reporter.”
⁴⁸

Coming back downstairs after the brief ceremony, the wedding party faced a rerun of the earlier scene—reporters crowding around for a statement, onlookers taunting bride and groom, photographers poking cameras in their faces. When they tried to pull away in cabs, one photographer stuck his head into the taxi carrying Marilyn's mother and Paul, Sr. When Robeson lifted his hand toward the man, the photographer bumped his head against the window frame and dropped his camera on the sidewalk as he tried to extract himself—an incident the press delighted in playing up as an “assault.” Carl Van Vechten, long disaffected from Paul's politics, wrote Essie: “I have observed that anyone who quarrels with the press usually gets the worst of it. Would you quarrel with Pravda, which certainly misrepresents people by the wholesale?” He also wanted to know, “Why werent we asked to [the] wedding?” Essie answered him on both counts: “I wouldnt quarrel with
PRAVDA
because Russia is not my country and I dont know all the ins and outs of their situation.… But this IS my country … and I insist upon sounding off … when I reach boiling point. That's what keeps me from bursting.… You weren't asked to the wedding party, My Dears, because it wasnt
OUR
party, it was Marilyn's and Pauli's.” “Our friends,” she reminded him, “are our friends.… If you are not political, that's alright too.… We are still friends, and have faith in and affection for each other. That's the way I feel about it, anyway, and I hope you do too.” But in fact the Robeson-Van Vechten friendship, already attenuated, from this point effectively ceased.
⁴⁹

“What a disgrace to us all,” Pearl Buck wrote Essie a few days after the wedding, having read accounts of the crowd's behavior. “How such stupidities and crassness drag the honor of [our] country down, before other peoples!” She added: “I like to see these good marriages between superior people. They blaze a trail.…” Eleanor Roosevelt, asked to comment on the wedding at a press conference, refused: it was, she said, “a marriage of two Americans and completely personal.” The arriving hate mail struck a quite different note. “Congratulations on marrying your son to a white girl (tho she is only a kike),” read one representative letter. “Now you have achieved the ambition of all niggers, to mix with white blood. Enjoy your future black and tan grandchildren.” As if all this was not difficult enough, Essie's mother, Ma Goode, unhappily ensconced in a Boston nursing home, wrote her daughter a string of querulous letters advising them all to leave the country for Russia (where she, Ma Goode, would open an orphan home for black children and then send them around the world as “missionaries” to demonstrate “the mentality of those who [are given] the opportunity”).
⁵⁰

The “go-back-to-Russia” theme was soon sounded by parties who saw in that prospect not (as did Ma Goode) a refuge from cowardly racists but, rather, a deserved perdition. The chorus went into full cry as a result of the words Robeson spoke that same day, June 19, at a Welcome Home rally staged for him by the Council on African Affairs at the Rockland Palace in Harlem. The wedding party, with only a few hours' respite, went directly from the hostile mob scene at Reverend Darr's to the cordial frenzy of forty-five hundred political fans, roughly half of them white, gathered at the Rockland Palace.

The rally ran for four and a half hours, replete with a dozen speeches and again as many announced messages of greeting. Du Bois gave a lengthy, formal address, declaring, “American Negroes have lost their world leadership of the darker people,” and Charles P. Howard gave a brief and impassioned personal defense of Robeson in which he denounced the attacks on him as “the basest kind of character assassination” and lamented the “shameful” truth that “some of the lowest, meanest attacks upon Paul have come from our own press, the Negro press.” But it was Robeson himself who provided the real fireworks. His anger already aroused by the shenanigans at the wedding ceremony, he threw the full weight of his enormous emotional gravity into one of the most powerful polemics of his career, the passionate eloquence of his voice washing over the occasional patches of rhetoric.
⁵¹

“I defy any part of an insolent, dominating America, however powerful,” he said, “I defy any errand boys, Uncle Toms of the Negro people, to challenge my Americanism because by word and deed I challenge this vicious system to the death. I'm looking for freedom—full freedom, not an inferior brand.” He insisted that most black Americans, unlike some of their leaders, were “not afraid of their radicals who point out the awful, indefensible truth of our degradation and exploitation.… What a travesty is this supposed leadership of a great people! And in this historic time, when their people need them most. How Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass must be turning in their graves at this spectacle of a craven, fawning, despicable leadership.… You stooges try to do the work of your white bourbon masters, work they have not the courage to do. Try it, but the Negro people will … drive you from public life!” Defending his personal record, Robeson recounted how he had had to go to Europe to renew a singing career after his scheduled concerts in this country had been canceled because of his political activities in behalf of civil rights. In thunderous tones he denounced the “vicious” Atlantic Pact (“American big business tells all of Western Europe what to do”), the continuing enslavement of colonial peoples, the betrayal of the American worker by labor leaders like Reuther, Murray, Carey, and Townsend. He hailed those progressives he had met in Europe—“in great part Commu
nists”—who had been “the first to die for our freedom.” Just as they had defended his people, black people, he would continue to defend the CPUSA leaders on trial in Foley Square.
⁵²

“I am born and bred in this America of ours,” he said. “I want to love it. I love a part of it. But it's up to the rest of America when I shall love it with the same intensity that I love the Negro people from whom I spring, in the way that I love progressives in the Caribbean, the black and Indian peoples of South and Central America, the peoples of China and Southeast Asia. Yes, suffering people the world over—in the way that I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union. That burden of proof rests upon America.” Black Americans, he insisted, “must have the courage to shout at the top of our voices about our injustices and we must lay the blame where it belongs and where it has belonged for over three hundred years of slavery and misery—right here on our own doorstep, not in any faraway place.”

Then, deliberately employing a subtle modification of the words which had been falsely ascribed to him in Paris (but actually said by him in Stockholm), Robeson converted the earlier version—a prediction that black Americans
would
not fight their friends—into urging that they
should
not fight: “We do not want to die in vain any more on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia. Let it be wherever we are lynched and deprived of our rights as human beings. Let this be a final answer to the warmongers. Let them know that we will not help to enslave our brothers and sisters, and eventually ourselves.” Kay and Aubrey Pankey (the black singer who later expatriated himself to Europe) drove Paul and Essie home after the rally. He was “strung out,” Kay Pankey remembers nearly forty years later, “and soaked right through his suit. And he was irritable. Essie was being overprotective—and it was the last straw, Essie being so nice.” In spite of the tensions, the difficult day ended with a large and happy wedding party for Paul, Jr., and Marilyn at Freda and Barry's home.
⁵³

“Loves Soviet Best, Robeson Declares,” blared the headline on
The New York Times
story the following morning. “An Undesirable Citizen,” ran the heading on a front-page editorial carried by Hearst newspapers all over the country—the editorial going on to declare, “It was an accident unfortunate for America that Robeson was born here.” (That statement so impressed Representative Thomas J. Lane that he had it read next day into the
Congressional Record
.) In answering the Hearst editorial, and the dozens of other vitriolic anti-Robeson articles that poured out, the Pittsburgh
Courier
, though not often sympathetic to Robeson, defended his “right to become angry.… He is joined by millions of other real American citizens of every racial, religious and economic group, who have felt the sting of segregation and discrimination.”
⁵⁴