Paul Robeson (152 page)

27
. A summary of Du Bois's Senate race can be found in Home,
Black and Red
, ch. 13. Bishop Walls wrote Ben Robeson that he regarded Paul as “a Christian and a race hero” (Walls to B. C. Robeson, March 8, 1950, RA).

28
.
Daily Worker
, Oct. 6, 1950; FBI New York 100-25857-1800; Referral Doc. #20 from Army Intelligence (G-2);
The New York Times
, Oct. 27, 1950; the typescripts of PR's two speeches, Oct. 5, 24, 1950, are in RA. Robeson attended a number of rallies protesting Du Bois's indictment (
Daily Worker
, Feb. 6, 1951; New York
World-Telegram and Sun
, Feb. 22, 1951; FBI Main 100-12304-255).

29
. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984. It was also in 1950 that Alice Childress and Clarice Taylor decided to start a theater in Harlem. They went to John Barone, owner of Club Baron, a bar and grill at 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue, and got free space from Mondays to Thursdays. When they asked Robeson for the use of his name, he readily agreed, but he warned the two women—as he did so many others—that association with him would not necessarily be an asset. For their first production, in 1950—Childress's
Just a Little Simple
, adapted from Langston Hughes's “Simple Speaks His Mind”—PR dropped by, brought in people, and even appeared at fund-raisers at Wells' Chicken Shack in Harlem. He also wrote a personal check for five hundred dollars, (interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984; interview with Ruth Jett, April 2, 1982; Sterner interview with Ellsworth Wright). The theater managed to struggle along for a few years (in 1952 it performed Childress's
Gold Through the Trees
, directed by Clarice Taylor), but, according to Ruth jett (interview, April 2, 1982), some of its own committee members “panicked” under McCarthyite pressure and padlocked the door.

30
. Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 3, 9, 1984; Alice Childress to me, Aug. 23, 1984;
Daily Worker
, Oct. 23, Nov. 20, 1950; Burnham to ER, Nov. 15, 1950; assorted Freedom Associates memos from Burnham, RA; FBI Main 100-12304-255 (“front”); PR's lengthy (twenty-seven handwritten pages) ms. for his first column, the early section containing valuable information on his youth, is in NYPL/Schm: PR, which also has a two-page outline of purpose of the Freedom Fund, and the minutes of the meeting of Freedom Associates, Feb. 12, 1952, which set up the Freedom Fund and organized a PR tour in its behalf.

31
. Copies of all the pertinent legal documents are in RA, as is Ruark's column with the Hoover comment; the panic over the “Robeson” sailing is summarized in FBI Main 100-12304-220.

32
. New York
Herald Tribune
, Jan. 3, 1951; Ernest Thompson wrote an answer to Sugar Ray Robinson in the Pittsburgh
Courier
, Jan. 20, 1951; “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in the Feb. 1951 issue of
Ebony
.

33
. Roger P. Ross, public-affairs officer, to State Department, Jan. 9, 1951 (the only legible file number on the document is from DC/R Central Files: 511.45K.21/1-951).

34
. The typescript of ER's “The Not So Strange Case of Paul Robeson” is in
RA (it was printed in the California
Eagle
, April 5, 1951); Ben Burns (executive editor,
Ebony
) to ER, Jan. 22, 1951; ER to John Johnson, Feb. 1, 1951. Seton, too, was furious at White's “snide utterly dishonest” article and wrote in protest to
Ebony
(Seton to ER, Jan. 5, 25, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck, on the other hand, replied coolly to Essie: “I suppose basically the trouble is that Walter thinks that Paul has given his major allegiance to a foreign power. I wish Paul could disprove this, publicly, for his own sake” (Buck to ER, Feb. 5, 1951, RA). Pearl Buck's husband, Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day publishing company, had earlier written in disagreement to ER about Korea: “I still can't take it when it is charged that anybody other than the North Koreans started the aggression” (Walsh to ER, Aug. 17, 1950, RA).

35
. William H. Brown to “Wilkinson” [sic], July 9, 1951; Wilkins to Brown, July 11, 1951, LC: NAACP; PR, Jr., ms. comments;
The Crisis
, Nov., Dec. 1951.

36
.
The Afro-American
, Jan. 26, 1952; San Francisco
Voice
, Feb. 15, 1952; ER to Hicks, Jan. 29, 1952, RA; Du Bois,
Negro Digest
, March 1950. When George Wood, Jr., the popular manager of the Red Rooster, died in 1955, PR sang at his funeral (
The Afro-American
, Sept. 24, 1955). Du Bois's comment was part of a debate he had with Walter White in the pages of the
Negro Digest
on the question “Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong?” The debate preceded the appearance of White's article in
Ebony
by nearly a year, and in this earlier article White took issue with PR in more measured tones, avoiding any insinuation about his supposed neuroticism or his inadequate prior contribution to the black struggle, and confining himself to questioning Robeson's “uncritical” acceptance of Soviet accomplishments. In reply, Du Bois denied that Russia was an aggressor nation and argued eloquently that Robeson in fact spoke more for blacks than the Walter Whites liked to believe, chastising those who attacked PR for being “deathly afraid to act or talk or even think in any way which is in opposition or can be interpreted as opposing the current hysteria.”

37
. FBI Main 100-12304-230;
The New York Times
, April 13, 1951 (Bastian).

38
. Patterson to Clyde O. Jackson, Jan. 31, 1951 (Martinsville), NYPL/Schm: CRC; Al Richmond,
A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary
(Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 295–99 (second-echelon); PR led a delegation to the UN to protest the Martinsville case (
Daily Worker
, Feb. 4, 8, 1951); Gaunzetta Mitchell to PR, Feb. 7, 1951, NYPL/Schm: PR (Martinsville);
Morning Freiheit
, Feb. 23, 1951 (Foster); New York
Amsterdam News
, March 24, May 26, 1951 (McGee);
Daily Worker
, Feb. 12, 1951 (McGee); FBI New York 100-25857-1321 (McGee);
Daily Worker
, April 12, 1951 (Hollywood Ten); ER to CVV and FM, May 24, 1951 (David Paul), Yale: Van Vechten;
Daily Worker
, May 7, 30, 1951 (HTUC), Aug. 21, 26 (Patterson);
Amsterdam News
, May 26, 1951 (HTUC). Though the National Maritime Union revoked Robeson's honorary membership (Neal Hanley to PR, Feb. 26, 1951, RA), he continued to believe in the trade-union movement as a source for progressive social action; in the June 1951 issue of
Freedom
, he devoted his entire column to describing a trip to California with Revels Cayton to talk with trade-unionists, and he placed particular faith in the black union leaders Joe Johnson, Charles Nichols, Al Thibodeaux, and Bill Chester, as well as in surviving progressive unions like the United Cafeteria and Restaurant Workers in D.C. (Oliver Palmer to PR, Nov. 10, 1951, RA) and the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (MCS), which was 40 percent black and had been expelled by the CIO in 1949.
Daily Worker
, Feb. 1, March 18, 1951;
The New York Times
, Feb. 1, 1951 (American Peace Crusade). The APC attracted many distinguished figures, including Robert Morss Lovett, Prof. Philip Morrison of Cornell, and Prof. Henry Pratt Fairchild. Acheson denounced the APC as a “Communist front organization” (
Herald Tribune
, Feb. 21, 1951). Alvah Bessie, another of the Hollywood Ten, still imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana, Texas, wrote a touching poem about Paul (Bessie to PR, June 21, 1951, RA). The above
events hardly cover the full spectrum of PR's activities during these months. To but mention several others, he helped launch the
New World Review
, he marched in the May Day parade, he joined the plea to Truman not to provide U.S. military aid to Franco, and he was active in the National Committee to Defend Du Bois (
Daily Worker
, May 2, 17, 1951; Alice Citron to PR, May 29, 1951; Vincent Sheean to PR, April 10, 1951, RA). Essie, too, remained active, writing frequently in
New World Review
(e.g., July 1951) and elsewhere (e.g.,
Freedom
, July 1951) about colonialism and the role of women, but in June 1951 she took seriously ill with a combination of spastic colitis and phlebitis and was hospitalized in Washington, D.C., for a month (her old friends Minnie and Sadie Sumner, along with Nan Pandit, then India's Ambassador to Washington, were particularly attentive: ER to Robert Rockmore, July 12, 1951, RA; ER to Vito Marcantonio, June 13, 1951, NYPL: Marcantonio).

39
.
Daily Worker
, June 28, July 2, 1951 (Chicago);
Masses and Mainstream
, Aug. 1951, and FBI New York 100-25857-1409 for Chicago remarks; interview with Chatman Wailes, July 1, 1986 (Wailes had gotten to know PR when he came through Gary, Indiana, in 1949, where Wailes was then living). The Chicago rally was a considerable event. The
National Guardian
(July 4, 1951) estimated that five thousand peace delegates attended. Among the sidelights, a poem, “Paul Robeson” by Beulah Richardson, recited at the convention, proved a minor sensation (Patterson to Richardson, Aug. 1, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC, which also contains the text of the poem).

40
. The typescripts of PR's statements in regard to Malik (June 26, 1951) and Austin (June 12, 1951) are in RA, along with surrounding letters and telegrams. (PR reprinted his letter to Austin in his column, “Here's My Story,” for the July 1951 issue of
Freedom.
) Additionally, NYPL/Schm: PR has memo drafts of the Robeson-Willard Uphaus report to U.S. members of the World Council for Peace of the meeting with Malik, and a letter from PR to Malik thanking him, in the name of the World Council of Peace (Burnham—“For Paul Robeson”—to Malik, June 29, 1951). CU: Minor has a letter to Dr. Henry A. Atkinson (Church Peace Union) dated June 23, 1951, and cosigned by PR and Willard Uphaus, asking him to be an observer for the June 26 presentation at the UN.

41
. Patterson,
Man Who Cried Genocide
, chs. 12, 13. NYPL/Schm: CRC contains considerable documentary material on the petition drive; of particular interest is Patterson's letter to
The New York Times
(Nov. 26, 1951) chastising the paper for prominently reporting a call to investigate genocide charges against the Soviet Union while ignoring the genocide charges against the United States. Essie was one of the signatories to the final petition. Patterson recounts his disappointment with the genocide campaign (“It neither got the support nor recognition which I believed it deserved”) in WP to George B. Murphy, Jr., March 7, 1957, MSRC: Murphy. The 1951 petition to the UN on behalf of black Americans was in fact the third such. The first, presented by the NAACP, asked for a redress of grievances for black people in the United States and was edited by Du Bois. The second, presented by Yergan for the NNC, was initially drafted by Patterson. Both failed to secure a hearing in the Commission of Human Rights (Patterson to Oakley C. Johnson, June 10, 1952, NYPL/Schm: CRC).

42
. Krishan Chandar to PR, June 11, 1951, RA (Bombay);
Daily Worker
, July 3, 1951 (Paris); Lynford Joel Concertato, telegram, August 28, 1951 (British tour); Peter Blackman to Patterson, Sept. 19, 1951 NYPL/Schm: CRC (London), which also sounds the frequent complaint among Robeson associates that “he must answer letters or otherwise nobody knows what he wants done”—for this same complaint see also Earl Robinson to Hunton, Nov. 18, 1949, RA; Michael Hamburger to PR, July 10, 1951 (Aberdeen); Warren Brody to PR, May 9, 1951 (Harvard), both in NYPL/Schm: PR; FBI Main 100-12304-233 (sample opposition to PR); Isidore M. Cohen to PR, June 11, 1951, NYPL/Schm: PR. An additional batch of foreign invitations are in RA for the first few months of 1952. By that time
Robeson's lawyers and friends were making something of a concerted effort to solicit such invitations as a vehicle for challenging the State Department's ban; as Essie wrote in response to one such invitation, “Thank you.… Every invitation is of great importance for us. For each one, we go again to the State Department for a passport” (ER to C. Bogdan, Rumanian legate, Feb. 15, 1952, RA; see also, D. N. Pritt to Patterson, Dec. 14, 1951, NYPL/Schm: CRC). PR to Lionel Kenner, Oct. 28, 1951, RA (common search). His brief Christmas message for 1950 had similarly stated, “Peace depends on the friendly, though competitive co-existence of different systems” (RA).

43
. The number of meraos, teletypes, and instructions relating to the Vancouver incident in RA are too numerous to cite individually. PR had attended a reception for Harry Bridges and had spoken out in his defense after the long-shoremen's leader was convicted of perjury in a federal district court in California for denying under oath at the time of his naturalization that he had ever been a CP member (FBI Main 100-12304-255), a conviction subsequently reversed by the Supreme Court.

44
. Bellingham
Herald
, Jan. 31, 1952;
Freedom
, March 1952 (PR's own account of Vancouver); Vancouver
Daily Province
, Jan. 29, Feb. 1,12, 1952; Vancouver
Sun
, Jan. 31, Feb. 8, 9, 1952.) Jerry Tyler, one of four union men who helped Robeson find accommodations in Seattle—he “wanted to get a room in the Negro community”—and to arrange a press conference, described the hours he spent with Robeson as a “thrill and inspiration.… How can you paint a word picture of the impact on yourself of a man so full of warmth and love that he stands like a giant, yet makes you feel, without stooping to you, that you too are a giant and hold the power of making history in your own hands as well?” (Tyler to Eddie Tangen, secretary-treasurer, National Union MCS, Feb. 3, 1952, NYPL/Schm: PR.)

45
.
Morning Freiheit
, Feb. 12, 1952 (miners' convention);
People's World
, Feb. 8, 1952 (PR's speech); FBI Main 100-12304-253; FBI New York 100-25857-1548.