Paul Robeson (129 page)

45.
Daily Mail
, Dec. 11, 1934 (“some day”);
The Spectator
, June 15, 1934 (“vocal genius”); Huddersfield
Examiner
, Dec. 4, 1934 (“Wagner”);
Film Pictorial
Feb. 27, 1934 (“Wagner”).

46.
Sheffield
Daily Telegraph
, March 14, 1930 (“High Water”); Yorkshire
Herald
, Feb. 14, 1930 (“spiritual significance”);
Evening News
(London), Feb. 13, 1930; Huddersfield
Examiner
, Dec. 4, 1934; Sheffield
Telegraph
, Feb. 21, 1935; Newcastle
Journal
, Feb. 25, 1935; Sheffield
Independent
, Feb. 21, 1935; Dundee
Courier and Advertiser
, March 27, 1935; Lewis,
Harlem in Vogue
, p. 173 (Harlem elite);
Melody Maker
, July 19, 1958 (“most important”); PR, Notes 1950s, RA (“Savoy”). In his Music Notes (n.d., 1960s?, RA), PR wrote, “The jazz scale is a new and significant development in the history of music in general and American music in particular … [there is] a unique immediacy, a direct communication here and now—from the living to the living—which jazz seems to provide.” In her diary entry for July 19, 1932, Essie wrote, “Went to Louis Armstrong's opening, at the Palladium, this afternoon, and was terribly disappointed. I thought he was awful. I saw him in his dressing room afterwards, and thought he was worse. He may be alright on records, but he's a mess on the stage and in person.” On the other hand, PR wrote in his Notes, 1934 (RA), “Ellington-Calloway have appeared and showed how shallow was all that went before, almost too late—for having received the synthetic, public hardly knows real—when it sees or hears it.” And when Cab Calloway came to London, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that she and Paul “lived at the Palladium, listening to his Hi-de-hi-de-ho, and pretending we were in Harlem. He was handled very badly here, which is a shame” (ER to CVV
and FM, April 5, 1934, Yale: Van Vechten).

47.
Sheffield
Telegraph
, Feb. 21, 1935 (“decadent”);
Star
, May 20, 1936 (“genuine”);
Daily Collegian
(Pennsylvania State University), Dec. 10, 1940 (“St. Louis Blues”); interview with John Hammond, Aug. 8, 1985 (joined by Basie's biographer, Albert Murray, who corroborated Hammond's version). The “Kingjoe” record had verses by Richard Wright. Robeson, Wright, and Basie gathered at Okeh for the recording session, along with a group of reporters, photographers, and friends (including Max Yergan and Walter White). Clearly the record was widely regarded as a major event. In evaluating the special qualities of PR's musical gifts, my interviews with John Hammond (Aug. 8, 1985), Pete Seeger (July 4, 1986), and Earl Robinson (Aug. 17, 1985) were especially helpful. Additionally, I found the insights in Levine's
Black Culture and Black Consciousness
and Richard Dyer's
Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
particularly useful.

48.
Perth
Advertiser
, Jan. 20, 1934 (Hebridean, etc.); Gambs to ER, April 18, 1934, RA (Russian); Glasgow
News
, March 18, 1934 (folk songs); Glasgow
Exhibitor
, Jan. 3, 1934 (Jews);
Jewish Transcript
, Nov. 22, 1935. Marie Seton describes Robeson as late as 1933 as innocent and uninformed on the Jewish question and at first reluctant (“I'm an artist, I don't understand politics”) to play a special matinee of
All God's Chillun
to benefit Jewish refugees. Seton claims he agreed after she helped clarify the parallels between the persecution of the Jews in Germany and the blacks in the United States, and further claims that “In later years he referred to this matinee as the beginning of his political awareness.” That event may have been contributory, but in my reading does not bear the heavy weight Seton puts on it (Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 66–69).

49.
Birmingham
Post
, April 20, 1934. Among the other notices that expressed doubts about his ability to carry off his new repertory were:
The Times
, April 18, 1934; Oxford
Mail
, May 5, 1934; Yorkshire
Telegraph
, Jan. 23, 1934; Liverpool
Post and Mercury
, Jan. 19, 1934; Eastbourne
Gazette
, Aug. 15, 1934;
Irish Times
, Dec. 18, 1934.

50.
The Observer
, July 29, 1934; F. C. Schang (Metropolitan Musician Bureau) to PR, Aug. 24, 1934, RA (Amonasro). Robeson was paid two thousand pounds for appearing in
Sanders
, plus 5 percent of the gross in excess of eighty thousand pounds. The contract, dated June 25, 1934, is in RA; also B. Bleck (Contracts Dept., London Film) to ER, July 3, 1934, RA.

51.
The Observer
, July 29, 1934.

52.
The Era
, Sept. 12, 1934 (“accurate”);
World-Telegram
, Oct. 5, 1935 (porttowns); ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten.

53.
New York
Amsterdam News
, Oct. 5, 1935; Freda Diamond ms. comments. The advertising for
Sanders
is in Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity,” p. 480.

54.
Jeremy Murray-Brown,
Kenyatta
(E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973; 2nd ed., 1979), p. 217;
Jewish Chronicle
, Nov. 4, 1938 (“Fascist”). Robeson and Kenyatta struck up a friendship on the set, which was to continue. During the filming Robeson told Leslie Banks, who played Sanders, that in the role of Bosambo he felt he had “accomplished a lifelong desire—to show negroes on the screen as human beings” (Banks,
Film Pictorial
, April 6, 1935). Flora Robson (Sterner interview) relayed an anecdote relating to
Sanders:
Robeson “wore a leopard-skin and he was ticked off by a prince of the Ashanti who was up at Oxford who said what do you wear a leopard-skin for, so he said well what do you wear in Africa, tweeds? And the prince said Yes, we do.”

55.
Daily News
, June 27, 1935;
Sunday Times
, April 7, 1935;
The Times
, April 3, 1935; New York
Herald Tribune
, June 27, 1935 (“melodrama”); New York
World-Telegram
, June 27, 1935 (“sacredness”);
The Sketch
, April 10, 1935 (“punctilious”).

56.
Yorkshire
Post
, April 3, 1935 (“sophisticated”);
Picturegoer
, April 20, 1935 (“
Vagabond
”); unidentified news clipping, 1935 (Beery);
New Theatre
, July 1935 (Stebbins). Melville J. Herskovits, specialist on Africa and an acquaintance of Robeson's (for more on their relationship
see p. 198 and note 36, pp. 634–35), wrote him that he “didn't like the ‘white man's burden' plot” in
Sanders
(MH to PR, Dec. 11, 1935, Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University (henceforth NUL: Herskovits).

57.
ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA.

58.
Frances Williams interview with Kim Fellner and Janet MacLachlan, June 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of Fellner (part of the interview has been printed in
Screen Actor
, Summer 1982); New York
Amsterdam News
, Oct. 5, 1935; PR interview with Ric Roberts, Pittsburgh
Courier
, Aug. 13, 1949 (“hate the picture”). Further evidence of Robeson's later regret at having made
Sanders
is in an exchange of letters with Anne Cohen, a librarian at the 136th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Cohen wrote him in 1944 to invite him to a screening of
Sanders
that she had arranged at the Harlem branch. Robeson wrote back to ask her to try to substitute
Desert Sands, Song of Freedom
, or
King Solomon's Mines
for
Sanders
—“I personally am sorry about doing
Sanders
” (Cohen to PR, Jan. 27, 1944; PR to Cohen, Jan. 31, 1944, RA). In her book
Robeson
, Marie Seton (p. 97) claims that he—“a tower of ice-bound fury”—walked out of the Leicester Square Theatre in protest on the first-night showing of the film. The evidence will not support this claim. Though the press covered the opening extensively, no mention was made in it of such a protest—as surely there would have been had it occurred. Robeson
may
have slipped out briefly, the result of nerves (as reported in
Daily Mirror
, April 5, 1935), but if so he definitely returned. Indeed, at the close of the premiere he made a speech to the audience, one that the publicity manager for London Films, producers of
Sanders
, thought “was quite the best speech that has been made on such occasions for years”—an opinion he would hardly have entertained had Robeson included in it any statement of protest (John B. Myers to ER, April 11, 1935, RA). Since Robeson cooperated with Seton on her book and went over the ms., it's possible he himself, in a retroactive fit of anger, fed her the tale of having walked out on opening night. Interestingly, though, the ms. (lent to me by Seton) has the sentence about his “ice-bound fury” crossed out—though by whom is not known, nor why the sentence reappeared in the printed version. Seton's ms. also has written on it, in Robeson's hand, this sentence: “All money earned from Sanders went to help Africa”; the business records in RA show that Robeson received royalties from
Sanders
through the early forties.

Another possible version of what happened at the Leicester Square Theatre on opening night is found in a
Daily Express
report (Oct. 18, 1937) and in an interview Ben Davis, Jr., did with Robeson in the
Sunday Worker
(May 10, 1936). Both items suggest that Robeson was sufficiently angry on opening night to refuse to perform when a piano was pushed onto the stage after the screening. As he told Davis, “… when it was shown at its premiere in London and I saw what it was, I was called to the stage and in protest refused to perform.” In other words, if Robeson's account to Davis is accurate, he
did
let his displeasure be known on opening night—but it took the form of refusing to perform, not (as tradition has it) leaving the theater.

59.
Eisenstein to PR, undated (1934), RA; Seton's undated letter (1934) to PR, introducing Eisenstein (“You both have a thousand interests beyond your immediate work”) is in RA. Seton had originally met Eisenstein in 1932, when she carried some books to him in Moscow from Maurice Dobb the Marxist economist (interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982). Eisenstein's letter was one, but not the only, triggering event that led to Robeson's first trip to Russia. On the ms. of Seton's
Robeson
, he wrote this comment in the margin next to the text describing how and why the trip came about: “I thought I told you … [at a political meeting filled with African and West Indian students] in the audience were many English ‘Liberals.' Suddenly a man got up in the back of the Room and told us all to stop our mouthing. ‘If we were honest' he said, ‘we would be interested in the African Peasants and Workers. And in the Soviet Union.' Why didn't
I go there. I accepted the challenge. His name was Ward.”

Subsequent to his trip to the U.S.S.R., Robeson several times referred to its having been triggered by a Dec. 12, 1934, meeting of Harold Moody's League of Coloured Peoples at which he spoke. Moody had founded the league in 1931 to provide social services for West Indian and African students resident in London. Its moderate Pan-Africanism contrasted with the more militant group surrounding George Padmore and C. L. R. James (Judith Stein,
The World of Marcus Carvey: Race and Class in Modern Society
[Louisiana State University Press, 1986], pp. 268–69). Since the Dec. 12 meeting of the league was a mere eight days before Robeson's departure for Moscow, it is impossible that it carried the importance in his decision that he subsequently assigned it. Indeed, at the meeting itself, he referred to the fact that he was about to visit the U.S.S.R. (
West Africa
, Dec. 22, 1934), and no contemporary account of the meeting refers to any interruption by questioning (e.g.,
Daily Telegraph
, Dec. 13, 1934). Marie Seton (interviews, Aug.-Sept. 1982) confirmed that Robeson “didn't go plunging in,” that his trip to Moscow was preceded by a good deal of study and planning. The black U.S./Soviet actor Wayland Rudd later reminisced in a letter to Robeson about an “all night conversation” prior to his first trip to the U.S.S.R. “when you told me that your knowledge of your duty before our People, and your love for the Soviet Union compelled you to postpone pending Contracts and make your long intended first visit to Moscow in the Spring following! I'll never forget the ring in your voice, Paul, when you said: ‘Way I'll come!' Man of your word, that you are, you came” (Rudd to PR, n.d. [1959?], RA). (And he had already attended a reception at Harrington House given by the Soviet Ambassador and Madame Maisky [
The Times
, April 3, 1934;
The Taller
, April 4, 1934].) Robeson was never, by temperament, a “plunger”—he made the important decisions in his life only after careful, deliberate reflection. Seton also thought she remembered—but wasn't sure—that William Patterson had been pushing the idea for some time that Robeson ought to visit the U.S.S.R.

Although Robeson's connection with the League of Coloured Peoples seems to have been minimal, the whole issue of his relationship with West Indian and African students and organizations in London is short on documentation. Future scholars pursuing more evidence on this question will want to note two possible leads from the RA. The first is a letter from W. A. Domingo (chairman of the Planning Committee of the West Indies National Emergency Committee) to PR, July 29, 1940, in which he refers to “… your magnificent assistance in the cause of West Indians two years ago in London.…” The second is a passage in a 1973 statement by Michael Manley (then Prime Minister of Jamaica) on the occasion of Robeson's seventy-fifth birthday: “I was once, as a young student in London, privileged to spend a quiet evening with Paul Robeson. Our host was Errol Barrow, now the Prime Minister of Barbados. I was warmed by his kindness, humbled by his simplicity, and inspired by his vision. It was a milestone in my life—such was the power of the man.”