Paul Robeson (51 page)

The only “ramification” Cornelia Pinchot mentioned in the telegram she sent Robeson—signed also by Mrs. Roosevelt, and simultaneously released to the press—to account for their withdrawal was the refusal of the Uline management to give a pledge against future discrimination. She
alluded in the telegram to “a number of other reasons which it is unnecessary to burden you with,” explaining their resignations wholly on the grounds that they were unwilling “to ask a great Negro artist to appear in any place which is believed to discriminate against members of his race.” But the telegram was at the least disingenuous. The condition that Uline agree not to discriminate had, after all, been set by John P. Davis, not Cornelia Pinchot, so it alone could hardly account for the sum of her discontent. More likely, that hinged instead on nervousness at being publicly associated with the Communist-leaning National Negro Congress. The nervousness may have been compounded by the fact that both Walter White of the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph had broken with the NNC in 1940, and those two men (unlike John P. Davis) had the ear of the administration; because of Randolph's January 1941 call for a March on Washington to protest federal job discrimination, he had its decided attention as well.
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Robeson, sympathetic to the NNC, was not swayed against performing by Mrs. Pinchot's solicitous refusal to ask a “great Negro artist” to appear under such clouded circumstances. Not only did he appear, but he sold out the house. The National Negro Congress remained on the program as cosponsor, and John P. Davis spoke words of welcome from the platform. An estimated crowd of six thousand gave Robeson an ovation that one reporter likened to “the Willkie gallery at Philadelphia,” and the organizers later wrote to thank Robeson for his “magnificent” contribution to the event's success.
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Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet pact that followed soon after, created an international realignment that abruptly brought Robeson's views into greater consonance with mainstream patriotism. The Soviet Union was now hailed among the Western democracies—as Robeson had hailed it all along—as the front line of defense in the struggle against fascism. The image of the bullying Russian bear bent on aggression quickly gave way in the West to the image of a heroic homeland battling to preserve the integrity of its borders against fascist incursion. The Communists and their pro-Soviet allies in the NNC and the left-wing CIO unions were no slower in repainting their political canvases. A year before the Nazi invasion, CP leader William Z. Foster had branded the British Empire “the main enemy of everything progressive,” but after the invasion the main enemy rapidly became Hitler's Germany—so much so that, out of its concern for a unified war effort, the Party would support a “no-strike” pledge by labor and dilute its protest against racism in the armed forces, thereby partly compromising the vanguard position in the civil-rights struggle that it had earlier staked out for itself.
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Robeson, too, shifted his advocacy from nonintervention to massive aid for the Soviet Union. He urged the Roosevelt administration to help
arm the now combined forces of antifacism—to support the Allies against the Axis (as the struggle soon came to be called, once the Japanese completed the diametric symmetry by bombing Pearl Harbor at the end of the year). He freely lent his voice in concerts and his presence at rallies in support of an all-out effort to assist the Soviets, Britain, and China, alternately joining fellow artists like Benny Goodman in presenting an evening of Soviet music, or cosigning a letter that deplored the “strikingly inadequate” information available in America about the Soviet Union and offering to make up the deficiency with free copies of
The Soviet Power
, a book by Reverend Hewlett Johnson (the “Red” Dean of Canterbury). At a time when Soviet military fortunes were at a low ebb and predictions of the U.S.S.R.'s collapse widespread, Robeson insisted in statements to the press that the Russian masses, convinced they had a government that offered them hope, would never succumb to the Nazis.
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With the Soviet Union now a wartime ally, the cause of Russian War Relief became so entirely respectable by 1942 that, in a rally at Madison Square Garden on June 22, Robeson was joined on the podium by a full panoply of American life—Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, Mayor La Guardia of New York, William Green (president of the AFL), Harry Hopkins, U.S.S.R. Ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish leader Dr. Stephen S. Wise, Jan Peerce, and Artur Rubinstein. The shift in public opinion from antagonism to approval of the “heroic” Russian ally became dramatically complete over the next few years, with the mass-circulation magazines illustrating—and fostering—the changing image.
Collier's
in December 1943 concluded that Russia was neither Socialist nor Communist but, rather, represented a “modified capitalist set-up” moving “toward something resembling our own and Great Britain's democracy,” while a 1943 issue of
Life
was entirely devoted to a paean to Soviet-American cooperation. Wendell Willkie's enormously popular
One World
contained glowing praise of Soviet Russia—and Walter Lippmann, in turn, praised the astuteness of Willkie's analysis. A nationwide poll in September 1944 asking whether the Russian people had “as good” a government “as she could have for her people” found only 28 percent replying in the negative. By 1945 no less a figure than General Eisenhower told a House committee that “nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.”
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None of this diluted the suspicion of Bolshevik intentions harbored by the right wing—and notably by its chief champion in the federal bureaucracy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—or its rising conviction that Robeson was playing a sinister role in Soviet councils. As early as January 1941, special agents were reporting to FBI headquarters in Washington that Robeson was “reputedly a member of the Communist Party” (which he was not, and never would be). Three months later a zealous agent in Los
Angeles sent a brown notebook to Hoover, “apparently belonging” to Robeson, that “contains Chinese characters”; the Bureau's translation section examined the notebook and concluded it was “clearly of significance to no one other than its owner.” In the summer of 1942 an agent was present when Robeson visited Wo-Chi-Ca, the interracial camp for workers' children, and portentously reported that Robeson had signed “Fraternally” to a message of greeting and that “tears had rolled down his cheeks” when a young camper presented him with a scroll.
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As Robeson stepped up his activities in behalf of the Allied war effort, Hoover stepped up surveillance of him. By the end of 1942, the Bureau had taken to describing Robeson as a Communist functionary: “It would be difficult to establish membership in his case but his activities in behalf of the Communist Party are too numerous to be recorded.” The FBI began to tap his phone conversations and to bug apartments where he was known to visit. Special agents were assigned to trail him and to file regular reports on his activities. By January 1943 Hoover was recommending that Robeson be considered for custodial detention (that is, subject to immediate arrest in case of national emergency); such a card was issued on him on April 30, 1943—the same month that he was being hailed in the press for a triumphal concert tour and just before he starred in a giant Labor for Victory rally in Yankee Stadium. By August 1943 “reputedly” was being dropped in special-agent reports to Hoover, with Robeson now being straightforwardly labeled “a leading figure in the Communist Party … actively attempting to influence the Negroes of America to Communism.” From this point on, the FBI fattened Robeson's file with “evidence” to support its view that he was in fact a dangerous subversive. During the war years, Robeson's secret dossier and his national popularity grew apace—their collision was still half a dozen years off.
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For the time being, national and personal priorities coalesced. President Roosevelt's reaffirmation of democratic values on the home front, in tandem with the country's joining hands internationally with a Russian ally Robeson believed free of racial and colonialist bias, meant that national purpose coincided with his own special vision more fully than he had ever imagined would be possible in his lifetime. The juncture galvanized him, releasing in him a torrent of energy and resolve. Over the next three years—until the death of Franklin Roosevelt, in April 1945—Robeson operated at the summit of his powers, in an escalating spiral of activity and acclaim, and in the glow of a political optimism that would be as brutally shattered as it had been, briefly, unexpectedly plausible.

Even at its height, Robeson's optimism was not unblinkered. Roosevelt might now speak kindly of his “heroic” Russian ally, but Robeson hardly took that to mean the President had converted to socialism. In the same way, he did not regard New Deal domestic policies, promising though he found them, as signifying the imminent attainment of social
justice. The Roosevelt administration did much to excite the hopes of black Americans: it opened itself to the counsels of such notable black figures as Mary McLeod Bethune, Robert Weaver, William H. Hastie, and Walter White; it issued the President's 1941 Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) order; it included blacks in the AAA-sponsored voting on cotton-control referendums. Yet, as Robeson well knew, the Democratic Party remained tied to its racially unreconstructed Southern wing, and the actual execution of policy had produced only marginal changes in the oppressive pattern of daily life for the black masses. In the mid-forties Robeson told a friend that he thought Roosevelt's reformism would have as its chief result the guarantee that capitalism would exist for another fifty years.
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As Robeson crisscrossed the country in a whirlwind of rallies, concert appearances, meetings, dinners, and testimonials, he tempered his enthusiasm for the nation's wartime mission to defeat fascism with reminders about its obligation to combat oppression at home. The CP opted for primary attention to the war overseas, downplaying the black struggle at home; Robeson did not. He encouraged blacks to support the war effort, warning that the victory of fascism would “make slaves of us all”—but he simultaneously called on the administration to make the war effort worth supporting for blacks by destroying discriminatory practices in defense industries and the armed forces. “Racial and religious prejudices continue to cast an ugly shadow on the principles for which we are fighting,” he told a commencement audience at Morehouse College in 1943. At the prestigious and widely broadcast annual
Herald Tribune
Forum that same year, he devoted most of his speech to warning that continuing economic insecurity, poll-tax discrimination, and armed-forces segregation were arousing “the bitterest resentment among black Americans”; they recognized that under Roosevelt some progress was being made but rightly felt that the gains thus far had been “pitifully small” and that their own struggle for improved conditions was intimately bound up with “the struggle against anti-Semitism and against injustices to all minority groups.”
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Robeson insisted that “The disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism [appear] to the Negro and
are
, in fact, first cousins if not brothers of the Nazis. They speak the same language of the ‘master race' and practice, or attempt to practice, the same tyranny over minority peoples.” He called on the Western democracies to match the Soviet Union in the explicitness of their stated war aims: “abolition of racial exclusiveness; equality of nations and integrity of their territories; the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes.” He gave the same two-pronged message to trade-unionists, applauding the breakthrough efforts during the war of left-wing CIO unions to lower racial barriers, but reminding his audiences of how many barriers still remained
before any biracial trade-union movement worthy of the name could come into being. Robeson raised his eloquent voice everywhere in praise of the national purpose, singing for the troops, appearing at war-bond rallies. But he also sought to universalize the struggle against oppression, linking the cause of black Americans with that of Spanish Americans, Asians, Africans, and underprivileged white Americans: “this is one of the great ends of this war—that the very concept of lower classes, colonial or backward peoples, disappear[s] from our minds and actions. For Fascism means degradation and inferior status. A people's war is fought for dignity and equality.” And everywhere he went Robeson kept his incomparably sharp ears and eyes open for continuing signs of racial bigotry.
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In Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942, those eyes scanned the concert audience gathered to hear him sing and saw that blacks had been seated in the top balcony. When he reappeared on the platform after the intermission, Robeson abruptly announced to the startled audience that he was continuing with the second half of the program under protest. “I have made a lifelong habit,” he told them, “of refusing to sing in southern states or anywhere that audiences are segregated,” and had accepted the Kansas City engagement on the assurance there would be no segregation in the auditorium. He agreed to finish the concert, but only because “many local leaders of my own race have urged me to.” Robeson then proceeded to sing a group of Russian songs, followed by the “Jim Crow” song, delivering it, as a local critic reported, “with stronger feeling that he had put into any other number.” At that point several whites in the audience left; a hundred more trickled out before the close of the concert.
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The very next day, a hotel in Santa Fa canceled Robeson's advance reservation. When the chairman of the Santa Fe concert series at which he had been due to appear justified the hotel's policy by citing “New Mexico's proximity to the southern states,” Robeson promptly refused to fulfill his upcoming concert date. The Kansas City and Santa Fe incidents were widely reported in the national press. Lucile Bluford, news editor on the black Kansas City paper, the
Call
, wrote to thank Robeson “for the stand you took against segregation in the Municipal Auditorium here. I think that your protest has spurred the Negro citizens here to wage a campaign against discrimination in our tax-supported buildings. You have given us a good start.” The black columnist Joseph D. Bibb wrote in the Pittsburgh
Courier
that by his action Robeson had “held himself out in bold relief to the majority of ‘shoot crap, shortening bread Sambos' of radio, screen and stage.”
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