Paul Robeson (80 page)

The most successful single stop on the tour, from both a political and a financial point of view, was at the Peace Arch itself—largely because of the response from the Canadian side of the border. Thanks to the efforts of the Mine, Mill trade-unionists, twenty-five to thirty thousand Canadians turned up on the Vancouver side for the concert; no more than five thousand mobilized on the American side (the American press estimated
total
attendance at five thousand; the Canadian press put the figure seven times higher). The FBI, predictably, was also there. While the Border Patrol took license-plate numbers, FBI agents filmed and photographed the event itself. Nonetheless, there were no incidents, and the sponsors laid plans for making the Peace Arch concert an annual event.
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Seattle, the next stop, proved an altogether more complicated affair. Robeson's experience in that city in mid-May 1952 illustrates, in microcosm, the specific difficulties he encountered throughout the tour, the sources of support and opposition generated by his presence, and the general state of his reputation at the time.

In Seattle, as everywhere else on the tour, the groundwork was done by the
Freedom
staff in New York—Louis Burnham; the newspaper's gen
eral manager, George B. Murphy, Jr.; and its business manager, Bert Alves—in combination with local sponsoring groups, pre-eminently left-wing unions and black churches. In Seattle, Terry Pettus, head of the Northwestern Bureau of
People's World
, the militant (the FBI said “Communist”) newspaper, was the key coordinating figure. A month before Robeson's scheduled arrival, Pettus reported glumly to the
Freedom
people in New York that the city authorities had abruptly canceled their agreement to lease the civic auditorium for Robeson's concert on the grounds that it would “tend to cause antagonism to the Negro race.” The
Freedom
staff responded with a double-pronged plan for counterattack: initiate court action and mobilize the local black community.
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The Seattle organizers did precisely that. They sent out special-delivery letters to leaders of black clubs, churches, and political organizations stressing the importance of giving the lie “to the white supremacy statement of the city officials” that Robeson's appearance would create racial antagonism; and, for shrewdly calculated extra effect, they enclosed a recent editorial on Robeson and Du Bois from the
Star of Zion
, official organ of the A.M.E. Zion Church, praising the struggle of the two men in behalf of black people. Simultaneously, Pettus and the other organizers filed for a court injunction to prevent the city from canceling the contract for the civic auditorium. In New York, the
Freedom
staff got busy on its own phones, enlisting support from Coleman Young and the National Negro Labor Council in Detroit, Reverend Charles Hill, and black newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass.
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The combined efforts paid off. Though attorneys for the city scoured the black community, they were able to persuade only one person—a black police officer—to testify that Robeson was held in low esteem. According to a newspaper account, the officer appeared “obviously embarrassed” on the stand and let it be known that he had been called out of bed to testify that morning by the white officer who headed the local “red squad.” A number of Seattle's black leaders—Vincent Davis, Lester Catlett, and James McDaniels—followed the officer on the stand and, contradicting his view, described Robeson as “recognized and loved by the overwhelming majority of the Negro people because of his consistent fight for full equality, political and economic, for his people.” When asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Catlett scornfully refused to answer: “We don't ask people their political affiliation. I don't know yours.…” In reference to the same issue, McDaniels responded, “I have heard more about that in this courtroom the past two days than I have heard among my people the past 20 years.” At the end of the three-day hearing, it was ruled that the city had failed to prove that Robeson's appearance would engender racial antagonism. The judge instructed that the civic auditorium be made available for the concert.
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The moral victory did not translate into a financial one. Seventeen
hundred people paid admission to the concert, and there was no disturbance of any kind, but the organizers had hoped for an attendance of twenty-five hundred. When expenses were paid, only $250 was left over for the Freedom Fund. Worse, there were local reprisals. Within three days of the concert, Jack Kinzell, one of its white organizers, was let go from his job as a popular radio announcer at station KIRO, and Vincent Davis, who had defended Robeson on the stand, was fired from his department-store job on direct order from management headquarters in New York.
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The events in Seattle set the tone for much of what followed on the rest of the tour. San Francisco, the next stop, was nearly an exact replay. Mayor Elmer E. Robinson had said he would refuse to let Robeson sing in the Opera House because he “has seen fit to vilify the United States of America at Communist sponsored gatherings at home and abroad.” The Oakland authorities simultaneously denied Robeson the use of Oak Auditorium—a facility opened to the fascist leader Gerald L. K. Smith that same month. Again, the local citizenry came to the rescue. Bill Chester, regional director of the longshoremen's union, led the fight, with the black leadership taking a strong stand in support of Robeson—Chester reported to New York that 98 percent of the black community stood behind him—while in Berkeley twelve hundred people turned out for a town meeting that voted by a margin of four to one in favor of Robeson's appearance. As a result, he gave two concerts in the area—one at the largest black-owned church hall—which together drew more than five thousand people.
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The rest of the tour—some fifteen cities in all—saw a repetition of official harassment, but not of aroused local support for Robeson's appearance. In St. Louis a black minister withdrew his Prince of Peace Baptist Church as the site for Robeson's concert after city officials warned him that “vandals” would be likely to wreck the church in reprisal. In Milwaukee the black churches stood firm, but their audiences did not, despite a house-to-house canvass for ticket sales. The tepid response perhaps accounted for the particular tone and emphasis of the speech Robeson gave that night: he pointed out that if he was indeed a Communist he would have been hauled before a congressional committee or a court long since, and he emphasized that, although he admired the Soviet Union for its support of minority rights, “the real core of my fight is not political but is based on … sympathy for my people and for all colored people of the world.… The only thing we must concern ourselves with is Negro liberation.” At the University of Minnesota the Young Progressives organization took up sponsorship of his concert and initially obtained approval from the authorities, but after the tickets were already printed President Morrill denounced Robeson as “an embittered anti-American, anti-democratic propagandist” and the university revoked its approval. In Pittsburgh the authorities outdid themselves in efforts to intimidate potential Robeson
supporters: they condemned the concert building as unsafe and then, for good measure, prohibited “mixed occupancy.” The local sponsors repaired an exit door and a fire escape, thus permitting the concert to take place, but two FBI agents took motion pictures of the arrivals from an adjoining apartment. Not surprisingly, only 350 people turned up. Even a public celebration of Robeson's fifty-fourth birthday had to be canceled after New York City's Manhattan Center broke an oral agreement to rent its hall.
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When receipts were tallied at the end of the tour, the United Freedom Fund had grossed a little under fifteen hundred dollars. The sum was so small that the four cooperating organizations voted to put it toward organizing a possible 1952–53 tour instead of dividing the proceeds, contenting themselves for the moment with the notion that “politically and culturally” the tour, in reaching some seventy-five thousand people, had been a success. Robeson himself had averaged a three-hundred-dollar fee per concert—as compared with the two thousand dollars he had once commanded—but even that money he tried to turn over to
Freedom
. The tough-minded Bob Rockmore placed himself squarely in the path of Robeson's magnanimity and for Robeson's own good. Though recording royalties and investments continued to bring in substantial sums—Robeson's income never fell to a level of serious hardship—he no longer had the extra cash to support his many generosities.
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CHAPTER 20

Confinement

(1952–1954)

Following the close of his tour, Robeson turned full attention to the 1952 Progressive Party campaign for the presidency, speaking widely in behalf of its national ticket. It was an unpropitious time for a left-wing campaign: “subversion” had become a national preoccupation. The Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate, and when Truman dismissed General MacArthur rather than yield to his call for escalating American military commitments, Senator McCarthy loudly blamed the “Communists” for having led a “smear campaign” against the general. In McCarthy's view—and the polls showed him strongly supported in the country—the continuing indictments of second-level Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act would not be sufficient to expose and contain the enormity of the Red Menace. His pursuit of the Asian expert Owen Lattimore as Alger Hiss's “boss,” though fantasy, proved an effective headline-grabber; and when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and charged with conspiracy to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets, the ensuing hysteria in the country finally seemed a match for McCarthy's own inflamed imagination. There were air-raid drills in the urban centers and calls in Congress for a preventive first strike against Russia (an option seriously considered for a time as realistic). Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, was thought by some to be quietly antagonistic to McCarthy's wilder tactics, but the force of public opinion seemed so strongly mobilized behind the Senator that Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate and a purported liberal, began moving to the right, announcing support for the Smith Act convictions, for loyalty programs, and for the firing of “Communist” teachers.
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Tweedledum and Tweedledee: in Robeson's view the two national candidates and their parties were near-carbon copies of reaction. He and Essie attended the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in July, she as a delegate from Connecticut and a member of the platform committee, he as one of the Party's national leaders and a member of the nominating committee which chose Vincent Hallinan for president and Charlotta Bass for vice-president. Both Essie and Paul went on to play active roles in the campaign, Paul going as far as California to participate in a Culver City Stadium rally that drew ten thousand. During one California stop, Charlotta Bass, who was lighter-skinned than Robeson, was asked by an audience member, “Why don't you look like Paul?” “Honey,” Mrs. Bass replied, “I should, but I've been tampered with.” Robeson's appearances rarely produced so lighthearted a note. Local opposition to him from veterans' groups surfaced frequently, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they attempted to get a court injunction to prevent him from speaking in public. Everywhere he went Robeson told audiences that 1952 “has been a fateful year” and, for black people particularly, “one of gathering crisis,” epitomized by the all-white jury in North Carolina that had tried the black tenant farmer Mack Ingram for “leering” at a white woman dressed in men's clothes and standing seventy-five feet away: “The United States,” Robeson commented, “is certainly making a unique contribution to the jurisprudence of the so-called ‘free' nations of the West.”
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In Cleveland, speaking to the National Negro Labor Council and deliberately echoing yet again the words ascribed to him at Paris in 1949, he asked whether black youths should “join with British soldiers in shooting down the brave peoples of Kenya” or in firing on the crowds in South Africa currently engaged in a civil-disobedience campaign. Of course not, Robeson replied: “I say again, the proper battlefield for our youth and for all fighters for a decent life is here … where the walls of Jim Crow still stand and need somebody to tear them down.” Despite his starkly spoken opposition to the reactionary drift in American life, Robeson was still occasionally able to strike a hopeful note: he told his audiences that, although the Republican and Democratic conventions had evaded civil-rights planks, the issue had at least moved toward the center of the nation's attention.
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But that hopefulness found scant confirmation in the election results. In a record-breaking turnout, Eisenhower won a landslide victory, while the Progressive ticket polled an abysmal nationwide total of under two hundred thousand votes—about a fifth of their minuscule count in 1948. Meeting for a postelection rehash, the Progressive Party national committee (of which Essie was a member) managed to find a ray of hope in the outcome of some state contests—in Corliss Lamont's receiving nearly a hundred thousand votes on the Progressive line in his New York run for the Senate, and in the trailing of McCarthy's vote in Wisconsin behind
Eisenhower's. But this was a desperate clutching at straws. The Progressives had suffered a crushing rejection at the polls, and the Party never again ran a national ticket (or many local ones).
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A month after the election, Moscow announced that Paul Robeson was one of seven recipients—and the only American—of the 1952 International Stalin Peace Prizes. Established three years earlier in honor of Stalin's seventieth birthday and carrying an award of a gold medal and a hundred thousand rubles (about twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars), the prizes had been established as a kind of counter-Nobel, to honor citizens of any country of the world for outstanding service in “the struggle against war”; Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pietro Nenni, and Jorge Amado had been among its distinguished previous recipients. The award carried the mark of great prestige among Communists—Stalin had not yet been revealed to them as a mass killer—and the mark of enduring infamy among anti-Communists. The reaction to Robeson's designation as a Stalin Prize medalist varied according to one's allegiance. Rockwell Kent telegraphed him, “In you, Paul, we greet a hero.” Oppositely, José Ferrer, who had had his own trouble with the “red” label, told the press that in accepting the award Robeson would do “irreparable harm” to his race. The right-wing columnist George Sokolsky applauded Ferrer for having “served his country well” by “pinpointing” Robeson's “unforgiveable sins against his native land.”
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