Paul Robeson (112 page)

10.
Records of the New Brunswick Presbytery, Oct. 17, Nov. 12, PHS; Princeton
Press
, Nov. 10, 1900 (Seminary meeting).

11.
Princeton
Press
, Feb. 2, 1901. The six-hundred-dollar salary is an estimate based on a report in the Princeton
Press
, June 30, 1906, that the salary of the pastor of Witherspoon Church had, after a recent increase, reached seven hundred dollars. The statement issued by the Church Session of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian (printed in the Princeton
Press
, Feb. 16, 1901) makes no reference at all to a dispute, merely commending Rev. Robeson for his eloquence as a speaker and for his continuing efforts for “social and moral reform and Christian union.” The records of the Witherspoon Street Church might contain additional information about the reasons for Rev. Robeson's departure, but in response to my inquiry the church archivists reported that they could not locate the records for the period in question. One hopes those records are only temporarily mislaid.

12.
Interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982. The fullest account of Louisa Robeson's death is in ER,
PR, Negro
, pp. 23–24, but additional information about her is in PR,
Stand
, pp. 14–17, 21–22, and Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA, subsequently reprinted as “My Brother—Paul Robeson—An Appraisal,” with a “Comment” by Bishop W. J. Walls, in
The Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes
, Oct. 1954, and as appendix A to PR,
Stand
.

13.
The “intimates” quoted are Helen Rosen and Clara Rockmore, in multiple interviews with each. The recollection of his mother's funeral is in PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA. John H. Johnson, whose mother, Harriet Howard, was a good friend of Louisa Bustill Robeson, described her, in one of the few accounts that are even secondhand, as “a beautiful woman … in all ways a most admirable person.” (Johnson to PR, June 5, 1975, courtesy Paulina Forsythe). The
Sunday Times
(New Brunswick), June 8, 1930, referred to her as a “poetess.” Emma Epps (interview Aug. 11, 1987) described her as “very brilliant,” “a beautiful person—most of us never got over it.”

14.
Epps interview, Aug. 11, 1987 (preaching); Princeton
Packet
, Jan. 2, 30, 1904; Sergeant, “A Portrait of Paul Robeson,”
The New Republic
, March 3, 1926 (dignity); PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956 (ashes). In the latter source, PR also wrote that his brothers Reed and Bill would help their father out as coachmen, driving the Princeton students “to earn a few quarters”; but the work, PR added, was “often hazardous—Many of the students being from the deep south and imbued with Platonic ideas of the ‘Elite' and the superiority of Anglo-Saxon over African—and especially if the wine had flowed in abundance.” The original ms. version of Marie Seton's
Paul Robeson
(Dennis Dobson, 1958) contains PR's handwritten comments and deletions in the margins (ms. courtesy Seton—hereafter “Seton Ms.”). In the ms. Seton made two separate references to the Bustills' doing “nothing to aid Maria Louisa's dark children” after her death, seeking Paul out “only after he became a famous
man”—“he was too black to be accepted as one of them.…” Seton based her book primarily on talks with Robeson himself, but when he went over her ms. he cut out the references cited above, and they do not appear in the printed version. Further evidence of the Bustill attitude is in an FBI report which quotes Robeson as saying that “his mother's family looked down on his father's people” (FBI Main 100-12304-7), and in a
World Telegram
interview with him (Oct. 5, 1935). Paul's identification with his father's family was so strong that at times he may have exaggerated the extent of his actual contact with them. In a 1948 speech, for example (the tape is in RA), he mentions in passing that “I was in the South a lot as a boy.” In point of fact, he was not. Apparently his mother did take him on a visit to North Carolina when he was an infant (PR, “Here's My Story,”
Freedom
, April 1952), but that was the only time he spent there. Yet his 1948 claim may well represent, in a symbolic sense, how deeply he felt attached in spirit to his North Carolina roots (and may also reflect the Southern “feel” of Princeton).

15.
Rev. Robeson was formally “dismissed” by the Presbytery of New Brunswick to the A.M.E. Zion New Jersey Conference in April 1906 and appointed two months later by the bishop to A.M.E. Zion in Westfield (Princeton
Press
, April 28, June 1906). PR later wrote that his father “reluctantly moved on from Calvinism to the Church of John Wesley” (PR, ms. notes, written May 2, 1956, RA—also the source for laying first bricks). Somerville
Courier-News
, April 20, 1973 (Sam Woldin, Arthur Van Fleet, and Donald M. Pearsall's recollections of PR, including the years in Westfield); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge (a Somerville classmate), Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Hoggard and Brown, plus her tape marked “Discussion at Old People's Meeting in Princeton”; PR,
Stand
, pp. 12–15; New York
Herald Tribune
, Oct. 17, 1926 (overnights); Seton Ms. (church sisters; most of this section does not appear in Seton's printed version);
The New Yorker
profile of PR, “King of Harlem,” Sept. 24, 1928 (sewing buttons, etc.). The comment about “a nice, open-hearted boy” is from Langston Hughes, New York
Herald Tribune
, June 29, 1930, in which he reviews ER,
PR, Negro
, and recounts his own talks about PR with his neighbors in Westfield (where Hughes was living in 1930). PR's comment on qualified white acceptance in Westfield is from the ms. of his column in the first (Dec. 1950) issue of
Freedom
, PR Coll., New York Public Library, Schomburg Collection (hereafter NYPL/Schm). In the same ms. he recalls sometimes taking meals in “one of the few colored restaurants” in town, “rushing from school to get my favorite dish and my nickname, a ‘thousand on a plate.'”

16.
Scattered information on Reverend Robeson's activities as pastor in Somerville are in the
Unionist-Gazette
(Somerville) for Jan. 23, Feb. 20, April 17, May 1, 1913, April 30, 1914, Jan. 7, April 29, May 13, 20, June 24, July 1, 1915; they include references to his hosting and attending church conferences, welcoming the Colored Boy Scouts for a concert held at St. Thomas, and a successful carnival to raise money for church expenses; two of the news items (Jan. 23, 1913 and April 1, 1915) refer to two week-long revivals and “religious awakening” at St. Thomas during which “many were reclaimed.” The obituary in the local paper when Rev. Robeson died reported that, “During the first three years of his pastorate a debt of $1,600 on the parsonage was liquidated” (the Somerset Messenger, May 22, 1918). Condolence letter from “Lawrence” to PR, May 20, 1918 (devoted), RA; PR,
Stand
, p. 9. Ben Robeson was appointed to his first pastorate in the A.M.E. Zion Church, Bayonne, N.J., in 1914. His thirteen months of overseas service as a chaplain in World War I left him, in his daughter's opinion, with jangled nerves thereafter, despite a calm exterior. He was appointed to Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in 1936 and remained its pastor until his death in 1963. He married Frances Cline in 1915 and they had three daughters, Marian Liggins, Vivian Reynolds, and Bennie Ryan (program for Memorial Service, Dec. 5, 1963; Philadelphia
Tribune
, Sept. 22, 1962; interview with Marian Liggins, Nov. 21, 1982). The version
quoted in the text about Rev. Robeson's fall is from Seton,
Robeson
, p. 18—a variant of the anecdote is published in PR,
Stand
, p. 9; yet a third version is in an undated thirteen-page ms. speech by Geraldine (Maimie) Neale Bledsoe, PR's girlfriend during his undergraduate years, recounting the story as she had heard it from Paul (ms. courtesy Bledsoe). H. A. Murray was one friend who heard PR's imitation of his father in the twenties; Murray thought it “too good for words” and prevailed on PR to give a repeat performance at the bedside of ailing playwright Ned Sheldon (interview with Murray, Feb. 6, 1985).

17.
PR, “From My Father's Parsonage,”
Sunday Sun
(London), Jan. 13, 1929 (inflexion). In
Stand
, p. 13, PR wrote that his father “never” talked about his years as a slave. I have substituted “rarely” for “never” on the basis of PR's own testimony at other points in his life—for example, in interviews he gave to the
Messenger
, Oct. 1924, and to the
Methodist Times
(London), Jan. 3, 1929. The
Methodist Times
interview and
Stand
, pp. 11–13, along with Jerome Beatty, “America's No. 1 Negro,”
The American
, May 1944, are the sources for the quotations, except for the one about “trek for Freedom,” which is from Maimie Bledsoe to me (April 4, 1985) and as repeated by her in a twenty-one-page speech (the ms. of which she sent me) that she delivered in the 1970s about Robeson. The Woldins gave Rev. Robeson a plot of ground in their backyard on which to grow vegetables, since his own soil was not suitable (Sam Woldin, ms. reminiscences, RA).

18.
PR,
Stand
, p. 9.

19.
Interview with Oscar Brown, Sr., July 2, 1986; Joseph H. Nelson to me, Dec. 14, 1982, with his ms. enclosure, “Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World,” dated Feb. 1981 (“beautiful voice”). Brown emphasized to me that on the whole he and the rest of the black staff were well treated at the hotel. In his autobiography,
By a Thread
(Vantage Press, 1983), p. 25, Brown writes, “Most of the boys were able to get a suit out of their summer work.” Fritz Pollard is mentioned in PR's “Memory Book” for “Summer 1916,” RA. In her diary for Dec. 30, 1924, ER mentions seeing “dear old Oscar Brown” (RA).

20.
Somerset
Messenger
, June 29, 1911 (Jamison graduation).

21.
PR,
Stand
, pp. 17–18. Unlike Paul, his wife, Essie Robeson, later seems to have equated the town's surface acceptance with equality. In her 1930 book on her husband,
Paul Robeson, Negro
, she exaggerates community acceptance, painting a near-cloudless picture of race relations in Somerville (e.g., “He played with the sons and daughters of the most cultured white people in the town.… Apparently no one thought about the mixing, and certainly no one resented it.… He himself never thought about it” (ER,
PR, Negro
, pp. 30–31). Paul deeply disliked ER's book (see pp. 139–40).

22.
Interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Frank Barnes and Leslie Kershaw, 1977. Barnes told Sterner that Winston Douglas later became principal of a school—“to me a more satisfying life than Paul.… He [Robeson] could have done more had he remained in maybe the teaching profession.” See also the interview with Kershaw in the
Democrat
(Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976.

23.
Interviews with Ericson, Barnes, Kershaw; “refined, clean-minded, wholesome” is a phrase from ER,
PR, Negro
, p. 31; J. Douglas Brown, three-page typed reminiscence of PR at Somerville High, dated April 4, 1976 (hereafter Brown, “Somerville”), in the Special Collections of the Rutgers University Library (hereafter RUA). When PR returned to Somerville in 1926 to give a concert, ER wrote in her diary, “So many people, colored and white, came backstage afterwards to welcome Paul back. Paul remembered all about their sons and daughters, and what they were doing, etc., and tickling the people to death” (ER Diary, Jan. 14, 1926, RA).

24.
PR,
Stand
, p. 17; Brown, “Somerville” (Caesar), RUA;
Unionist-Gazette
, Feb. 19, 26, 1914 (“coarse … censure”).

25.
Unionist-Gazette
, Feb. 11, March 4, April 1, 1915 (“Water Cure”); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; Sterner interviews with Kershaw, Barnes, Brown; Brown, “Somerville,”
RUA; Mina Higgins, “Paul Robeson, Bright Star …” in
Sunday Times
(New Brunswick), June 27, 1924, for which PR supplied the basic data (Jennings to PR, Feb. 27, 1924). The
Sunday Times
, June 15, 1924, and the Somerset
Messenger Gazette
, April 19, 1972 (reminiscences of five PR contemporaries) also have references to the “Water Cure,” but the fullest account, one that draws on the recollections of Anna Miller, is in the
Sunday Times
, April 1, 1934. The
Unionist-Gazette
, April 18, 1915,
does
list PR as part of the senior class trip to Washington; perhaps, finally, he did not go (as his classmates' accounts listed above attest), but this contradiction in the evidence remains unresolved.

26.
PR,
Stand
, p. 19; Kershaw interview in the
Democrat
(Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976 (Vosseller); Rev. B. C. Robeson, ms. “My Brother Paul,” RA.

27.
In an interview with Kershaw in the
Democrat
(Flemington, N.J.), Feb. 5, 1976, he claimed (with what I would guess is only marginal plausibility, given PR's restraint) not only that the High Bridge principal called PR “big nigger” but also that it caused Paul “to vent his anger for the only time” Kershaw could remember: “He grabbed the principal by the back of the coat and pants and marched him out in front of the stands,” finally restrained from doing him further injury by three or four of his fellow players. In
Stand
, pp. 20–21, PR recounts the racial bigotry of the supervising principal of the Somerville system, Dr. Ackerman. It's possible Kershaw, keen to defend Somerville's reputation, transposed that hostility to the neighboring principal in High Bridge.

28.
Sunday Times
(New Brunswick), June 15, 1924 (teacher), April 1, 1934 (place); interview with Hazel Ericson Dodge, Nov. 7, 1983; PR,
Stand
, pp. 19–20. Several of his male contemporaries, however, recalled that their families had “entertained and dined” him in their homes (as interviewed in the Somerset
Messenger Gazette
, April 19, 1973).