Paul Robeson (78 page)

Two months earlier it had also been possible to gather an audience in Harlem for a Hands Off Korea rally; the “red menace” did not strike most Harlemites as notably more invidious than the white one. Even after the Cold War climate deepened, Harlemites could not be stampeded into an automatic anti-Soviet response. Annette Rubinstein, state vice-chairman of the American Labor Party, remembers using a sound truck all over New York to gather signatures against the execution of the Rosenbergs: “We were in every neighborhood, and people were terrified.… Even in the Jewish neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, people would say, ‘Well, where there's smoke, there's fire. There must be something to it.' … But in Harlem we didn't have to argue or prove that it was a frame-up.”
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But Harlem's mood was not the country's. No longer friendly with Robeson, Carl Van Vechten commented with some satisfaction in a private letter on Paul's fall from “the top of the heap” to “the dog house.” And
the nationally syndicated columnist Robert C. Ruark expressed his double pleasure that Robeson, “the Negro press agent for the Communist Party, has finally been hanged high as Haman,” and that Negro troops in Korea had been acquitting themselves so well—thereby giving the lie, Ruark believed, to Robeson's prior insistence that blacks would not fight against Communists. (Wasn't it interesting, the black sociologist Horace Cayton—brother of Revels—noted, to see press attention being given to the exploits of black troops in Korea: could it be, Cayton asked, that the United States was “embarrassed” that “there have been no [other] non-white people fighting on their side?”)
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It did nothing for Robeson's public image when it was announced that Moscow intended to present a play depicting scenes from his life. At the same time, his old friend Josh White—who had performed with him in
John Henry
in 1940—went before HUAC to express his “sadness” that Robeson was giving aid to people who “despise America” and to declare his own fervid willingness “to fight Russia or any enemy of America,” regretting that earlier he had allowed certain “subversive” organizations to “use” him. Robeson had in fact been forewarned—by Josh White himself. According to Revels Cayton, the two men talked it over in a bathroom in his house, turning on the tap water as a precaution against bugging. “They've got me in a vise,” White purportedly told Robeson. “I'm going to have to talk.” “Do what you have to but don't name names,” was Robeson's response—just as he generously warned others (like Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier) to avoid being seen or connected with him lest their own careers be damaged.
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Disparagement of Robeson at home began to alternate regularly with tributes to him from abroad. In October came word that Mayor Hynes of Boston had barred the display of Robeson's picture in a touring exhibition of portraits of famous blacks—and nearly simultaneously the Second World Peace Conference in Warsaw announced that Robeson had been chosen to share the $14,300 International Peace Prize with Pablo Picasso. (In defending his action, Hynes announced, “We are not glorifying any avowed Communists, whether white, Negro or yellow,” and the Boston
Post
backed the mayor's decision, declaring it unthinkable that, while “boys of every color and racial strain are today giving their life's blood in far-off Korea, in a war inspired by Mr. Robeson's friends in Moscow,” Boston could “in decency” honor such a man.) On November 6 the Associated Negro Press reported that in Alabama one James T. (“Popeye”) Bellanfont, a black school-bus driver, had begun a “crusade” to “stop Robeson from speaking for the Negro,” claiming to have already enrolled twelve hundred members in seventeen states—and on November 18 the ANP carried a bulletin that the town council in Lvov, Poland, had voted to name a street after Paul Robeson. That same week
Life
magazine published two pictures side by side: one of the black cadet Dave Campbell leading the
graduation parade at the navy's preflight school in Pensacola, the other of Robeson—“who has long been used by Reds to exploit the color line”—attending a party at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the thirty-third anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution; Robeson,
Life
reported, “came early, stayed late, seemed delighted to be there.”
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Robeson was now increasingly linked, in the press and in the public mind, with another black dissenter, W. E. B. Du Bois. The two had been working closely together since 1948, when Du Bois moved his office from the NAACP to the Council on African Affairs, and Du Bois had been elected along with Robeson to serve on the new World Peace Council. Now, in October 1950, Du Bois—as fit as he was venerable at age eighty-two—decided to run on the New York American Labor Party ticket for a seat in the United States Senate, opposing the popular incumbent, Herbert H. Lehman. Most of the black leadership came out for Lehman; A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, Channing Tobias, and the powerful Tammany Hall trio of New York black politicians, Hulan Jack, Joseph Ford, and J. Raymond Jones, all endorsed Lehman on the basis of his substantial civil-rights record. Those lining up for Du Bois were far less influential: the actress Fredi Washington, Ollie Harrington, Nina Evans (president of the Domestic Workers Union), and Bishop William J. Walls, head of the Second Episcopal District of the A.M.E. Zion Church. And, of course, Robeson.
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At a rally for Du Bois at Harlem's Golden Gate Auditorium, Robeson introduced him as “the elder statesman of our oppressed people,” a man who stood against the determination of monopoly big business “to run the world, to make it over in the American Jim-Crow, ‘free enterprise' image—or ruin it.” At a second rally just before election day, threats of violence led to the stationing of a 150-man police detail on rooftops and streets in the area. But there was no trouble, and in his speech to the gathering Robeson congratulated the American Labor Party for turning to Du Bois for leadership, “and not to the sycophants and flunkies of monopoly wealth and plantation power that clutter up the tickets of the twin parties of reaction.” (According to
The New York Times
, Robeson left the rally with seventeen bodyguards.) When the vote was in, Du Bois ran ahead of the rest of the American Labor Party ticket, tallying a respectable—indeed, in the deepening freeze of the Cold War climate, a remarkable—13 percent of the five million votes cast. Three months later the Justice Department indicted Du Bois as an “unregistered foreign agent.” His trial was scheduled for November 1951.
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In the interim, Du Bois and Robeson moved still closer together in cooperating on a new journal,
Freedom
. The publication was edited almost single-handedly in the beginning by Louis Burnham, former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Southern director of the Progressive Party—and an unusually able journalist. Burnham had
to cope not only with deficient financing and an intransigently conservative national climate, but also with the “special ways” of his star contributor, Dr. Du Bois. The actress-writer Alice Childress, who worked on
Freedom
, recalls that, when Burnham requested an article from Du Bois, telling him frankly that they had no money to pay him, the Doctor reared up. He could not, he indignantly explained, work for nothing. Childress put in a placating phone call to say, “Somehow we'll get you some money. What do you want?” Fifteen dollars, Du Bois replied, explaining to a relieved Childress that he had been offended merely by the notion that he was somehow “on call” to do the magazine's bidding.
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With
an article by Du Bois, the first issue of
Freedom
appeared in December 1950. It also carried a column, meant to inaugurate a regular feature, by Robeson. He worked out the columns with Lloyd L. Brown, a left-wing black writer (who would later collaborate with him on his autobiography); Brown wrote up the columns, and Robeson checked them over. “The people of America,” the first column read, “can save their land if they will. But this means the saving of every precious life.… I am not making great sacrifices which need fanciful explanation. I am simply fulfilling my obligation—my responsibility, as best as I can and know, to the human family to which I proudly belong.” Inadequately financed,
Freedom
struggled along for a few years, relying heavily for support on a national “Freedom Fund” established at the same time as the magazine—and was promptly labeled “a Communist Party front organization” by the FBI. To aid the fund, which never raised money commensurate with the need, Robeson lent his name and presence to a publicity campaign that included mailings and benefit appearances. He (and Essie, too) worked hard for the success of
Freedom
, which managed to hold on—barely—through 1955.
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The same month that
Freedom
began publication, December 1950, Robeson's lawyers instituted in the United States District Court a civil action for the return of his passport, against Secretary of State Acheson “in his representative capacity” as head of the State Department. The complaint described Robeson as “a loyal, native-born American citizen” and insisted that the cancellation of his passport had not only deprived him of his constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech, thought, assembly, petition, association, and travel, but would also prevent him from practicing his profession and earning a living. The State Department's lawyers responded by filing a motion to dismiss the suit, contending that historically the Secretary of State had always exercised the discretionary power to issue or refuse a passport and emphasizing that the United States was technically still at war (the state of national emergency proclaimed at the start of World War II had never been officially terminated). The Robeson passport case had begun its tortuous way through the courts. “In the modern emergency,” Robert C. Ruark wrote in his syndicated column, “Mr. Robeson is as worthy of internment as any Jap who got penned away
in the last, since … he is an enemy of his own country and a passionate espouser of those people who are now declared enemies.… He goes to the court to have his passport restored so that he may rend America further abroad.…” Across the FBI copy of Ruark's article, J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “certainly well said.” Panic momentarily seized the Passport Division when a U.S. customs agent reported that Robeson had booked passage on the Cunard ship S.S.
Media
for Liverpool. After much alarmed scurrying about, an embarrassed correction came through: the “Robeson” in question was a white member of the British equestrian team on his way home after competing in the international horse show in Madison Square Garden.
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The new year began with two more public assaults on Robeson from well-known black figures. Returning from a successful boxing tour of Europe, Sugar Ray Robinson told the
Herald Tribune
that “America provides opportunity for everyone, regardless of race, creed or color” and declared that assertions to the contrary were simply “Communist propaganda” put out by Paul Robeson. A more considered and substantial attack came from Walter White in his
Ebony
article, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson.” Utilizing private information gleaned from twenty-five years of friendship, and employing a tone of sympathetic puzzlement (“Robeson is a bewildered man who is more to be pitied than damned”), White, in urbane words, put a high gloss on a set of conventional Cold War accusations. He portrayed Robeson as having a penchant for luxury and a neurotic oversensitivity to discrimination, a man who for some “mysterious” reason had always harbored “deep resentment” over racial slights and therefore been particularly susceptible to the propaganda the Soviets put out about their bias-free society. “It has been inexplicable to Mr. Robeson's friends,” White claimed, that he could be “so generous” toward Russia and yet have done “so little toward helping movements to correct the flaws in American democracy.” White further embellished his suave indictment by referring to Robeson as having lived in “magnificent” style in London's “exclusive Mayfair section.” The Robesons had never lived in Mayfair, and Robeson's impressive record of involvement in movements designed to “correct the flaws in American democracy” had included the Progressive Party, the trade-union movement, and the Council on African Affairs—all unmentioned by Walter White.
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Just before White's article appeared, the American public-affairs officer in Accra, the Gold Coast, had sent a memo to the State Department suggesting that a piece be “specially written” about Robeson for use throughout Africa; it should be “told sympathetically, preferably by an American Negro devoted to his race, as the tragedy which in fact it is.… Much more with regret than rancor, it must detail Robeson's spiritual alienation from his country and from the bulk of his own people … his almost pitiful (for so robust and seemingly dignified a person) accommo
dation to the Communist line.…” There is no evidence that Walter White had written to specification, but his article did at least obviate the need for the State Department to plant one of its own. Perhaps unwittingly, Walter White had done his Cold War service.
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Furious at White's article, Essie dashed off an angry rebuttal to
Ebony
. She began by acknowledging that Paul “always went stubborn when anyone (including me)
told
him what to do; you could
ask
him, maybe
persuade
him, but you couldn't
tell
him.… He doesn't side-step the challenge, but goes right in, swinging.” But being stubborn in defense of one's rights was neither “oversensitive” nor “neurotic”—unless one wanted to argue that an uncompromising insistence on equality was in itself a symptom of “disturbance” (would one then include as “neurotic” Gandhi and Nehru because of their intransigent fight for Indian independence against the British?). Perhaps, Essie suggested, it was time for a hard look at the assumptions of the current crop of black leaders in America. None of them pretended that “Negroes are
satisfied
with their present situation in the U.S.A.… that they like being lynched, attacked, abused … that they like being unjustly treated in our courts … that they like being segregated and discriminated against.… What, then, do these Negro leaders say?” They don't dare claim, she went on, that Russia is responsible for the discrimination against blacks in the United States; instead they “go out of their way to insist that American democracy, with all its faults, is the best there is and therefore we must all fight if need be die for it. Since most of the
faults
and few of the
benefits
of this democracy apply directly to Negroes, these Leaders find themselves in the very strange position of insisting that Negroes fight and die for the faults of our democracy. Paul Robeson is far too clear-sighted … to be maneuvered … into such a position.
He
is
fighting the faults
of our democracy. That's what all the fuss is about.”
Ebony
declined to publish Essie's rebuttal; it finally appeared in the sympathetic black newspaper the California
Eagle
.
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