Paul Robeson (5 page)

His father had passed on to Paul an intricate strategy for survival. He had taught him to reject the automatic assumption that all whites are malignant, to react to individuals, not to a hostile white mass. At the same time, Reverend Robeson knew the extent of white hostility—he had, after all, been born a slave—and he counseled his son to adopt a gracious, amenable exterior while awaiting the measure of an individual white person's trustworthiness. But William Drew was no Uncle Tom; Paul was constantly reminded of his “obligation to the race,” constantly reminded of its plight. Taught to be firm in his dedication to freeing his people, Paul was also taught to avoid gratuitous grandstanding. His job was to protest
and
to stay alive; outright rebellion against a slave system was as suicidal as subservient capitulation to it.

The moral precepts of Reverend Robeson coincided with the facts of Paul's youthful experience. His father preached that it was right and necessary to try to get along with whites; Paul's daily life in Somerville had proved that such a strategy was feasible. The lesson was ingrained for life—though in adulthood severe provocation would test and cast doubt on its reliable limit. By talent and upbringing, Robeson had been ideally equipped to bridge both racial worlds, if both would have him, and if bridging was what he wanted to do.

CHAPTER 2

Rutgers College

(1915–1918)

Founded in 1766, Rutgers was one of the country's oldest colleges; yet in 1915, when Robeson entered, it was still a private school with fewer than five hundred students, bearing scant resemblance to the academic colossus it subsequently became. Prior to the Civil War, Rutgers had denied admittance to Afro-Americans (Princeton continued to refuse them admission until World War II), and only two had officially attended the school before Robeson—though rumor had it that an additional few had in another sense “passed” through its portals. The year after Robeson entered, a second black student, Robert Davenport, enrolled, and “Davvy” and “Robey” (as they were known during their undergraduate years) became good friends, joining a scattering of other black collegians from the Philadelphia-Trenton-New York corridor to form a social circle. They would need each other.
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Robeson's path at Rutgers was centrally defined by his race, though not—thanks to his own magnetism and talent—centrally circumscribed by it. The simple fact of his dark skin was sufficient to bring down on him a predictable number of indignities, but his own settled self-respect kept them from turning into disabling wounds. He further learned at Rutgers what had become almost instinctual knowledge: achievement could win from whites respect and applause, sometimes friendship, but almost never intimacy.

When freshman Robeson walked onto the practice field to try out for Rutgers football, the team had no blacks on it—indeed, like almost every other top-ranked college, Rutgers had never in its history had a black player. In a day when football players typically lacked the mammoth height
and girth they have today (five members of the 1917 Rutgers team were five feet, nine inches or shorter), Paul, at six feet, two inches, and 190 pounds, stood some three to four inches taller and weighed some 20 pounds more than most others on the field.
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The “giant's” reputation had preceded him. Rutgers coach G. Foster Sanford had seen him play for Somerville and had been duly impressed. The Rutgers first-stringers had also heard about Robey's athletic prowess—and skin color. Several of them set out to prevent him from making the team. On the first day of scrimmage, they piled on, leaving Robeson with a broken nose (which troubled him ever after as a singer), a sprained right shoulder, and assorted cuts and bruises. He could hardly limp off the field. That night (as Robeson described the incident thirty years later) “a very very sorry boy” had to take to bed, and stay there for ten days to repair his wounds. “It was tough going” for a seventeen-year-old and “I didn't know whether I could take any more.” But his father had impressed upon him that “when I was out on a football field, or in a classroom, or anywhere else, I was not there just on my own. I was the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football, and wanted to go to college, and, as their representative, I had to show I could take whatever was handed out.… Our father wouldn't like to think that our family had a quitter in it.”
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After a visit and pep talk from brother Ben, Robeson went back out for another scrimmage. This time a varsity player brutally stomped on his hand. The bones held, but Robeson's temper did not. On the next play, as the first-string backfield came toward him, Robeson, enraged with pain, swept out his massive arms, brought down three men, grabbed the ball carrier, and raised him over his head—“I was going to smash him so hard to the ground that I'd break him right in two”—and was stopped by a nick-in-time yell from Coach Sanford. Robeson was never again roughed up—that is, by his
own
teammates. Sanford, a white New Englander committed to racial equality as well as to football prowess, issued a double-barreled communiqué: Robey had made the team, and any player who tried to injure him would be dropped from it.
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Several of his teammates have subsequently downplayed the amount of racial antipathy Robeson faced on the Rutgers squad—just as whites who knew him in Somerville later minimized town prejudice. One Rutgers teammate, “Thug” Rendall, insisted sixty years later that there had been
no
opposition to Robey's joining the team, and Steve White, a senior when Robeson was a freshman, flatly declared, “There was never any discrimination.” Earl Reed Silvers, who graduated two years ahead of Robeson and was later a Rutgers faculty member, claimed to have “attended every football practice” during Robeson's freshman year and did not remember “any untoward incident on the field.” Silvers further claimed to have checked his memory with four members of the varsity squad of that season
and reported that not one of them could recall a deliberate attempt to injure Robeson. In any case, Silvers felt sure, “Paul would not … wish to question the integrity of his college or the sportsmanship of his friends.”
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A comparable view is held by Coach Sanford's son. He, too, was regularly present at team practices and insists that “a minor incident” has subsequently been blown out of all proportion. Had resentment against Robeson “been that deepseated,” Sanford, Jr., argues, it would never have subsided—yet in fact “it never showed its ugly head again.” As for Robeson's own reported rage at being mauled, Sanford, Jr., discounts it as not believable because not in character—as “everyone knew,” Robeson was “a nice, placid, kind guy” who had “great control of himself; he never blew his top, he didn't have a short fuse.”
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True enough. Ordinarily, Robeson as a young man did sit on his rage—though even back in Somerville he had been known once or twice to “blow his top,” showing, had anyone wished to see, that choosing to muzzle his feelings was not the equivalent of not having feelings, or any guarantee that under special provocation they would not surface. Later in life Robeson told a friend that, although he had never used his hands illegally while playing college football, he did practice breaking up orange crates with his forearm. As for the amount of provocation he actually faced, the bland minimizations of Sanford, Jr., and others are overmatched by countertestimony. Robert Nash, another member of the varsity squad, flatly states that Robeson “took a terrific beating.… We gave him a tough time during the practices; it was like initiation. He took it well, though.” And Mayne S. Mason, an instructor of physics and one of Robeson's teachers, remembers him coming into his lab one day with his hand bandaged; when Mason asked him what had happened, Paul simply said, “I got hurt.” Later, after everyone else had left the lab, he elaborated a bit: someone on the team had spiked his hand that day. He would say no more, but Mason later learned from another student that Robeson had picked the man up over his head as if to throw him to the ground.
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The intervention of Coach Sanford prevented
overt
racism from surfacing again on the Rutgers squad, and over time the initial racist reaction to Robeson was gradually replaced by admiration, and in some cases affection (end James Burke even credited him with saving his life: chasing a pass, Burke fell fifty feet over an embankment into the Raritan Canal, and Robeson raced into the water in full football gear to haul him out). Sanford himself developed great respect for Robeson's athletic talent and great liking for him personally, a mutual regard that lasted until Sanford's death. An unusually gifted coach, Sanford took Robeson under his wing and taught him much that honed his game—how to protect himself, how to put his arms chest-high and come up across the body with a forceful elbow (in those days the use of arms in football was restricted), how to employ (no platoon system then existed and members played for sixty minutes) his
multiple skills in both offensive and defensive positions, developing particular strength as a pass receiver and a tackler.
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By the end of his freshman year, Robeson was in the starting lineup; by his junior year, he had become the star of an exceptionally talented Rutgers team and had gained national prominence—a “football genius,” raved one sportswriter, echoing many others, “the best all-round player on the gridiron this season,” “a dusky marvel.” Twice, in 1917 and 1918, Walter Camp, the legendary Yale coach, put Robeson on his All-American football teams—the first Rutgers player ever named—calling him “a veritable superman.” The phrase scarcely seemed overheated; by then, in a superfluity of skill, Robeson had also distinguished himself as center on the basketball team, catcher on the baseball team, and a competent javelin and discus thrower on the track team. By the time of his graduation, he had won fifteen varsity letters in four different sports. On the side, he played club basketball for St. Christopher, a Harlem group that was one of the best in the nation, boasting among its other players the two Jenkins brothers, Harold “Legs” and Clarence “Little Fat,” later to become legendary figures in the sport.
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All of which suggests, in bald outline, a triumphal procession, inexorable and uninterrupted. The reality was a good deal bumpier. If Coach Sanford had never been bigoted, and if the Rutgers football team was taught not to be, that still left the outside world. One classmate remembers the shouts of “nigger” that would sometimes come from the stands, and Coach Sanford's son recalls that Robeson “was treated very badly by the opponents, not necessarily the Northern opponents but the Southern opponents.… Everybody went after him, and they did it in many ways. You could gouge, you could punch, you could kick. The officials were Southern, and he took one hell of a beating, but he was never hurt. He was never out of a game for injuries. He never got thrown off the field; when somebody punched him, he didn't punch back. He was just tough. He was big. He had a massive, strong body, among other things. He felt the resentment but he managed to keep it under wraps.” The restraining influence
was
Paul himself, not Coach Sanford. One team member, Donald Storck, remembers that Sanford would sometimes encourage his players to do physical damage to the opposing team; and at least once Storck and Robeson appealed that policy directly to Sanford.
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Among Rutgers's Southern opponents in football, William and Mary and Georgia Tech simply refused to play against a black man. A game with Washington and Lee came off only after the Rutgers administration, bowing to pressure from its alumni, ordered Sanford to bench Robeson (Rutgers in 1916 was celebrating its 150th anniversary, and the administration hoped for an outpouring of alumni gifts). Some of the Rutgers players initially protested the decision not to use Robeson against Washington and Lee, but Sanford gathered the squad together outside Kilpatrick Chapel
and “explained” that it had been a matter of “courtesy” to accede to a request from the opposing team's coach—courtesy and common sense, he said, for there was a real possibility the Washington and Lee players might gang up on Paul and injure him. Paul gave thought to quitting, but his father told him “he hadn't sent me to college to play football, and vetoed my plan to switch colleges.…”
¹¹

When the news got out that Robeson had been benched, James D. Carr, Rutgers's first (1892) black graduate—a Phi Beta Kappa honor student who had gone on to Columbia Law School and was currently an attorney for the city of New York—angrily protested in a letter to Rutgers President William H. S. Demarest: “Shall men, whose progenitors tried to destroy this Union, be permitted to make a mockery of our democratic ideals by robbing a youth, whose progenitors helped to save the Union, of that equality of opportunity and privilege that should be the crowning glory of our institution of learning?”
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The answer was yes. But on a second occasion Coach Sanford held his ground. When “Greasy” Neale, coach of the West Virginia team, also insisted Robeson be dropped from the roster, Sanford adamantly refused to comply. “When we lined up for the first play,” Robeson told a friend a decade later, “the man playing opposite me leaned forward and said, ‘Don't you so much as touch me, you black dog, or I'll cut your heart out.' Can you imagine? I'm playing opposite him in a football game and he says I'm not to touch him. When the whistle blew I dove in and he didn't see me coming. I clipped him sidewise and nearly busted him in two and as we were lying under the pile I leaned forward and whispered, ‘I touched you that time. How did you like it?'” Rutgers held West Virginia, the pregame favorite, to a tie; “the giant Negro” (alternately called by the papers “the big darky”) was spotted and held down by the visitors until the final period, when he saved the game with a crucial tackle on the Rutgers two-yard line. After the game Coach Neale purportedly said, “Guts! He had nothing else but! Why that colored boy's legs were so gashed and bruised that his skin peeled off when he removed his stockings.” “Every man in the enemy pack,” Robeson later told an interviewer, “filed in front of me and shook my black hand!”
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