Paul Robeson (61 page)

Robeson was on tour in San Francisco when Churchill delivered his speech. He and Yergan immediately got on the phone to discuss a public response, their call monitored by the FBI. Yergan read Robeson a draft statement he had prepared over Robeson's signature, denouncing Churchill's speech “as both a slander upon the Soviet Union” and—because Truman's presence had seemed to give assent to the slander—“an affront to the American people,” and calling Churchill's characterization of Soviet policy a “warmongering” distortion designed “to sow dissension” between the wartime allies. The real contrast between British and Soviet policy, the statement went on, was between the Soviet attempt to build “a strong Federation of equal peoples advancing together toward a common goal” and the British determination, exemplified by Churchill's speech, to preserve “the Imperialist System and to secure America's help in order to do so.” It was Churchill's policy, not the Soviets', that pointed to “a path of war and disaster.” “The negro people in this country … will never consent” to an American commitment to such a policy.
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“That's all right,” Robeson said when Yergan finished reading the statement, “I feel like you … [though] I probably personally wouldn't sit down and say it, that's all.” Picking up on Robeson's hesitation, Yergan
assured him that he had “consulted a lot of our friends here and their view was … that a pretty sharp statement is required.” “Yeah, sure,” Robeson responded—he could become laconic when pushed—but “it ought to be I say a little more than a personal blast at him.” Perhaps the problem could be solved, he added, simply by appending “Chairman of the Council on African Affairs” after his signature—“I just always want to make it as modest as I [can].… I don't want to sort of obviously attack the President and get a lot of notice, you know and all that sort of thing.”
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Yergan got the message. The letter to Truman as sent went out from the Council on African Affairs, signed by Robeson as chairman and cosigned by Max Yergan as executive director. The wording, moreover, was somewhat softened. Churchill was still accused of aiming at “preserving the British imperialistic system with the help of the American troops and military power,” and Truman's presence on the platform was still characterized as an “affront” that “makes Americans question whether Mr. Churchill was speaking not only for himself and the British Government but the Administration of this country as well.” But the remaining language was modified to sound more tentative (“we are confident” that black Americans, “who know from bitter experience the oppression and suffering which Fascists and near-fascists can impose,” will refuse consent to a policy in support of imperialism). And while the letter called upon Truman to “keep faith” with the views of his “illustrious predecessor,” it also contained the compliment and reminder that he, Truman, had himself “made high commitments as to the rights of all peoples.”
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Even with its modifications, the letter was sharp enough, and Robeson further honed its edge in some of his public comments during the ensuing weeks. At a mass meeting in support of famine relief for South Africa, he declared that the basic cause of hunger was the withholding of freedom: “Let the colonial peoples … govern themselves and they will no longer suffer from landlessness and labor exploitation which are the reasons for their present starvation”—and he denounced Churchill's recent speech as exemplifying a scheme for “Anglo-Saxon world domination,” which would continue to deny the suffering of subject peoples. In April, Robeson was elected by the seven hundred delegates to a Win the Peace Conference to cochair the national organization, along with Colonel Evans Carlson, the Marine Corps hero who had led the famed Carlson's Raiders; in accepting, Robeson warned the convention that the world was facing the prospect of a continuance of colonial tyranny under a “more highly developed kind of benevolent Anglo-American imperialism.” In a speech at Temple Israel in May, he contrasted the “dither” over the presence of Soviet troops “in a country directly on the borders of the Soviet Union” with the “silence” over the “continued presence of British and American troops in country after country all around the world far removed from either Great Britain or the United States.”
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Robeson was by no means isolating himself on some narrow sectarian margin. On the contrary, his sentiments were still widely shared, and he was joined in his various public efforts by a broad range of American opinion. The sponsors of the Win the Peace Conference, for example, included three Senators and twenty Congressmen and was addressed, among others, by Congressman Adolph Sabath, dean of the House of Representatives; Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University; and Senator Claude Pepper, who reiterated the very theme Robeson himself stressed: “War is a danger that can be avoided only if that unity of the Big Three molded by Roosevelt is not lost.” In 1946 it was still acceptable, even popular, to decry the direction of Anglo-American policy and to insist on the benign, essentially defensive strategy of a Soviet Union exhausted from its devastating war toll. It therefore seemed perfectly appropriate, when Harry Hopkins died, for his widow to invite Paul Robeson to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at her husband's funeral. And when Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., U.S. representative to the UN, was laid up with an acute sinus infection and could not meet with representatives of Win the Peace, he troubled to write personally to Robeson to apologize for his absence.
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Nor did Robeson isolate himself by denouncing renewed outbreaks of racial violence at home. Between June 1945 and September 1946, fifty-six blacks were killed in a reinaugurated reign of terror highlighted by a particularly brutal lynching in Monroe, Georgia, and a white police riot against blacks in Columbia, Tennessee. In South Carolina, a man named Isaac Woodward, a black soldier who had served fifteen months in the South Pacific, was falsely arrested on disorderly conduct charges and blinded in a vicious beating at the hands of a South Carolinian police chief who was later tried and acquitted. The NAACP had, all through the thirties, battled against antiblack violence but had never managed to convince President Roosevelt to commit himself to a federal antilynching bill, though he had periodically leaned in that direction. The latest tide of violence seemed aimed at “uppity” black veterans who had returned from the “struggle for democracy” overseas determined to struggle for it at home as well. Robeson was indignant at the silence of the federal government in the face of the resurgent barbarity: “This swelling wave of lynch murders and mob assaults against Negro men and women,” he angrily told a Madison Square Garden rally on September 12, 1946, “represents the ultimate limit of bestial brutality to which the enemies of democracy, be they German-Nazis or American Ku Kluxers, are ready to go in imposing their will. Are we going to give our America over to the Eastlands, Rankins and Bilbos? If not, then
stop the lynchers!
What about it, President Truman? Why have you failed to speak out against this evil? When will the federal government take effective action to uphold our constitutional guarantees? … The leaders of this country can call out the Army and Navy to stop the
railroad workers, and to stop the maritime workers—why can't they stop the lynchers?”
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But instead of taking action, the United States waxed vocal in the UN about its determination to spread “the blessings of democracy” to the four corners of the globe, and Taft Republicans and Rankin Democrats in the Congress succeeded in filibustering the Federal Employment Practices Committee to death and in preventing any action from being taken against the poll tax. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois decided, along with the liberal white lawyer Bartley Crum, to issue a call for a gathering in Washington, D.C., on September 23, 1946—timed to coincide with the anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation—to launch “an American crusade against lynching,” to demand that killers be prosecuted and that the Congress enact a federal antilynching law.
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The NAACP leadership was angered by the Robeson-Du Bois call. Walter White wrote Robeson privately to say that he would not attend and—trusting that “our friendship is such as to permit me to speak very frankly”—to deplore what he characterized as a duplication of effort. The NAACP had already held a meeting of what White called a “broadly representative group” to discuss unified action against lynching, and to work “in cooperation with the NAACP” on antilynching legislation (a struggle which the NAACP had “pioneered for many years”). Robeson's call, a mere month later, would, in White's view, “create confusion in the public mind and would also give comfort to our enemies who would believe that there are rival groups fighting for anti-lynching legislation.” Not only did White personally refuse to cooperate, but the National Office of the NAACP also advised its branches, by special-delivery letter, not to participate. In a memo directly to Dr. Du Bois (who was still officially connected to the NAACP), White expressed his displeasure at the old warrior's having lent his name: “It would be most helpful on issues which are an integral part of the Association's work like the fight against lynching if inquiries could be made by you on such matters inasmuch as the calling of this conference has tremendously complicated and overburdened the office.” Du Bois sent back a sharp note claiming that White's memo was the first he had heard about “your new Anti-Lynching movement. My cooperation was evidently not needed. It was certainly not asked. If I had been notified, I would gladly have cooperated. On the other hand I have been fighting lynching for forty years, and I have a right to let the world know that I am still fighting. I therefore gladly endorsed the Robeson movement which asked my cooperation. This did not and could not interfere with the NAACP program. The fight against mob law is the monopoly of no one person, no one organization.” In reply White wrote, “The tone of your memorandum was distinctly surprising in its tartness.” There the matter rested for the moment between the two men—their dispute would reach a climax two years later in Du Bois's dismissal from the NAACP.
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Ultimately, Robeson's American Crusade proved only a partial success. On September 23, three thousand white and black delegates gathered in Washington, D.C., officially to launch the Crusade. Scheduled as a one-hundred-day intensive campaign for federal action, it drew the support of dozens of celebrities, headed by Albert Einstein—but it also drew the scorn of Gloucester Current, NAACP director of branches, who insisted Robeson had brought “extraneous issues” into the antilynching campaign, thereby confirming that “responsible organizations such as NAACP” had been wise not to affiliate with “groups which merely use the Negro issue as an opportunity to foist their opinions on other matters on the unsuspecting public.”
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Immediately following the gathering in the capital, Robeson led a seven-person delegation to the White House to petition Truman's support for antilynching legislation. Meeting with the President in the Oval Office, Robeson had barely finished reading aloud the first paragraph of the delegation's prepared statement when Truman irritably interrupted him. He was concerned about lynching, the President said, but the time was not propitious for passage of a federal bill; for an issue so fraught with potential political repercussions, timing was all-important. Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the United Council of Church Women and a member of the delegation, suggested that the principles currently being enunciated at the Nuremberg trials were inconsistent with the American government's refusal to punish lynchers. Truman retorted with a “reminder” to the delegation that the United States and Great Britain represented “the last refuge of freedom in the world.” With that Robeson took direct issue. The British Empire, he said, was in his view “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings,” and added that the temper of black people was changing. A snappish Truman asked him to elaborate. Robeson—who later told reporters he had felt it was important to be polite, but not “excessively polite”—said that if the federal government refused to defend its black citizens against murder, blacks would have to defend themselves. Truman declared the interview at an end.
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Within two weeks Robeson was called to testify before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California, chaired by Senator Jack B. Tenney (and informally known as the Tenney Committee). Robeson took the stand on October 7, 1946, and remained under questioning for several hours. Chairman Tenney and his committee counsel, Richard E. Combs, were polite, and at moments the hearing took on a tone of outright cordiality—a friendly disputation among rival philosophers. Robeson was not yet a pariah to be publicly whipped and displayed, not even by congressional investigators. That would come later.
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In the course of the unhurried discussion, a number of pointed questions did get posed—and answers made. Directly asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Robeson suggested that Tenney might just as well
have asked him if he was a registered Republican or Democrat—since the Communist Party was not less legal in the United States. But in fact, he continued, he was “not a Communist,” and if he had to characterize himself it would be as “an anti-Fascist and independent.” He added, though, with precision, “If I wanted to join any party I could just as conceivably join the Communist Party, more so today than I could join the Republican or Democratic Party”; after all, “the first people who understood the struggle against fascism and the first to die in it, were Communists”—so he had “no reason to be inferring communism is evil.”