Paul Robeson (64 page)

Interviewed by the local press, Robeson declared, “I have been all over the world and the only time I have seen hysteria reach these heights was in Spain under Franco and Germany under Hitler.” (Mayor Triebel responded that he and the City Council were only trying “to prevent bloodshed.”) Asked by the reporters for the fiftieth time that week whether or not he was a Communist, Robeson responded with the same formula he had used when testifying before the Tenney Committee: “There are only two groups in the world today—fascists and anti-fascists. The Communists belong to the anti-fascist group and I label myself an anti-fascist. The Communist Party is a legal one like the Republican or Democratic Party and I could belong to either. I could just as well think of joining the Communist Party as any other. That's as far as you'll get in any definition from me.” Robeson put it more succinctly still to a reporter from Marshall Field's liberal paper, the Chicago
Sun:
“If Communism means pointing out to the people that their lives are being dominated by a handful, I guess I'm a Communist.” He vowed that he would return to Peoria, and swore to “fight this violation of civil liberties.”
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The repercussions within Peoria itself centrally involved Clifford
Hazelwood, commander of the black Roy B. Tisdell American Legion Post in the city, and also local vice-president of the NAACP. Hazelwood had spoken out against the anti-Robeson campaign, and the executive board of Tisdell had then accused him of “communistic activities and ideologies.” It did so without first consulting the membership, and a fight within the Tisdell post ensued; the membership voted against the executive board's denunciation of Hazelwood, which in turn led the Legion's state commander to revoke the post's charter, to padlock its meeting house, and to confiscate its material assets. The word was spread that the entire Tisdell post was “communistic.” Hazelwood had in the meantime appealed to his friend Senator Everett M. Dirksen for FBI information about the validity of the accusations against Robeson, and Dirksen sent the letter on to J. Edgar Hoover. Simultaneously Hazelwood appealed to the national offices of the NAACP for help in clearing his name, and Roy Wilkins supported his request for an FBI investigation, emphasizing in a letter to Hoover the need to refute “the misguided (or deliberate) attempt to use Hazelwood's connection with the NAACP to imply in some manner that this Association is engaged in spreading communistic ideology”; Wilkins made no protest or appeal in Robeson's behalf. J. Edgar Hoover turned over the entire Dirksen-Hazelwood-Wilkins correspondence to the Attorney General's office for further action, and eventually all parties were notified that neither the FBI nor the Justice Department felt empowered—in the absence of any “violation of federal law”—to proceed with an investigation.
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“The Peoria affair,” Robeson told the Chicago
Sun
, “is a problem bigger than just me.” He characterized “the situation in America” as “much more serious than people realize” and predicted that the incident would be a signal to other localities to proceed against him. Within weeks, the Albany, New York, Board of Education announced that it was canceling permission for him to give a scheduled concert at Livingston High School. Albany's Mayor Erastus Corning II proudly took credit for being the moving spirit behind the cancellation. But this time around, local protest proved substantial, and the black sponsors of the recital (an affiliate of the Israel A.M.E. Church) brought legal action to restrain the Board of Education from barring Robeson.
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In the ensuing hearing, Albany's corporation counsel argued before the court that neither the Board nor the city “will subsidize Communism or anything having to do with Communism. The color of Paul Robeson's skin has nothing to do with this case, but the color of his ideologies has.” But Supreme Court Justice Isidore Bookstein ruled that Albany could not bar Robeson from singing because of his alleged sympathies with Communism and issued an injunction restraining the Board of Education from interfering with the concert. Bookstein did stipulate, however, that Robeson confine himself to his musical program. According to the newspapers,
he did just that, “speaking only to describe some of the songs he was about to sing as encores.” But to the Army Intelligence agents covering the event, he “complied with the letter of the law” while defying its spirit; in singing encores relating to Republican Spain, the Soviet Union, and the Chinese antifascists, Robeson had, the intelligence agents insisted, “managed to further the CP line by means of his songs.”
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The following month, the police commissioners in Toronto also issued Robeson a permit to sing only on condition that he not talk at his concert. Angered by the escalating restrictions on him, Robeson spoke out at a Council on African Affairs rally in New York. “This could happen,” he said, “to any American who believes in democracy and says so fearlessly. This is the heart of the issue. Whether I am or am not a Communist or Communist sympathizer, is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights. If the government is sincerely concerned about saving America from subversive forces, let our officials … stop worrying about the Communists whom they
suspect
of subversive activities and start doing something about the fascists who are openly parading their disdain of civil rights and democratic procedures here in America today.” He concluded by saying, “I, however, am going to function exactly as I have tonight, at other times.… I come from the people, and from the side of the people.… I want nothing back but the kind of affection that comes to me tonight, the kind of feeling that you're there—that's what allows me to do what I do—because you are there! I want no political office of any kind, nor will I ever seek one.…”
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Two weeks later
Newsweek
published a sardonic article entitled “Paean From Pravda,” reporting that the Soviet Union had recently expressed “gratitude” for its American friends, listing among them Henry Wallace, Albert Einstein, Professor Ralph Barton Perry of Harvard, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Joseph E. Davies—and Paul Robeson. The nationally syndicated conservative columnist George E. Sokolsky followed through with an article holding Robeson himself responsible for the Peoria incident: “If Robeson chooses to be both singer and propagandist, that is his risk. Those who favor causes must risk the consequences of opposition. Better men than Paul Robeson have been thrown to the lions.” (J. Edgar Hoover liked Sokolsky's column so much he wrote on the bottom of it, “A good summary on Robeson so don't let it get lost.” It wasn't.)
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When Robeson made a brief trip to the Panama Canal Zone at the end of May, the FBI monitored his movements. The agent covering Robeson's concert in Panama City sounded crestfallen that “In spite of predictions the concert was free from any Communist or union propaganda.” But if Robeson held his tongue while in the Canal Zone, he immediately aired his views on returning to the States. Speaking in Miami under the sponsorship of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, he “stunned” the assembly
with the vehemence of his views on U.S. policy in the Zone. Blasting the U.S. government for “keeping the black masses in ignorance and pitiful poverty,” he excoriated as well the powerful clique of local politicians who cooperated with U.S. officials. He devoted the proceeds from several subsequent concerts to setting up a Canal Zone scholarship fund for the education of black teachers, and in 1948 he joined Du Bois, Charlotta Bass (publisher of the California
Eagle
), and Charles P. Howard (lawyer and publisher) in establishing a committee to fight Jim Crow social and economic discrimination in Panama.
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Despite the mounting harassment, Robeson remained a popular public figure during the summer and fall of 1947, and very much in demand. In a Gallup Poll released in June, he was one of forty-eight runners-up in a survey of the public's “ten favorite people.” That same month he sang to a capacity house at Symphony Hall in Boston “while scores outside vainly sought admission,” and in July he sold out Lewisohn Stadium in New York City. Dozens of left-wing organizations vied for his presence as guarantor of a large turnout; he gave preference to the Civil Rights Congress, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and, as the prospects of a Wallace campaign increased, to the Progressive Citizens of America. He agreed to become one of the PCA's host of notable vice-chairmen, and on September 11 shared the platform in Madison Square Garden to hear Wallace, on the first anniversary of his dismissal from Truman's Cabinet, tell the crowd of nineteen thousand that the country was suffering from a “psychosis about communism, which has been carefully nurtured by men whose great fear is not communism but democracy.”
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The battle lines for the coming presidential election were forming rapidly, and the jockeying for position becoming intense. In June 1947, heeding the advice of the liberal wing of his party, Truman vetoed the antilabor Taft-Hartley Bill—arguably his most important single move in cutting away the support of organized labor from Wallace and assuring his own re-election. In 1946 A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, had vowed to spend his union's entire treasury to defeat Truman after the President had threatened to draft railway strikers; following Truman's Taft-Hartley veto, Whitney declared that a third party was “out of the question.” At the same time, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the administration's commitment to underwriting the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe (the so-called Marshall Plan)—a move that proved popular in the nation but split the progressive ranks. Wallace and Robeson came out vigorously against it. They argued that, in combination with the Truman Doctrine of three months earlier—which had called for aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent those nations from going “communist”—the administration was making a deliberate attempt to circumvent the United Nations and to “hem Russia in.”
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Additionally, the progressives were divided over whether to accept
proffered support from the Communist Party. In the first half of 1947 the CPUSA still remained on the sidelines, but its reasons for supporting the new progressive organization were mounting. When Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Bill over Truman's veto, that bill's Section 9H, which required all labor unions wishing to use the collective-bargaining procedures of the National Labor Relations Board to file non-Communist affidavits, became the law of the land. Section 9H threatened, alternatively, to destroy the left-wing unions or to lead them to sever all connection—even all signs of friendship—with the CPUSA. Simultaneously, Wallace's cross-country tour in June 1947 revealed unexpectedly high enthusiasm for the progressive cause, further confirmed by favorable showings in the Gallup Polls. Meeting that same month, the CPUSA's national committee heard William Z. Foster hail the emerging divisions within the American ruling class, and Eugene Dennis, the Party's general secretary, warn against the Party's taking precipitous steps of any kind. That same mood of cautious commitment continued to characterize the Progressive movement itself throughout the summer and fall of 1947, with Wallace still resisting the formation of a third party and any overt declaration of his own candidacy, and with the CIO left wing still flirting with the strategy of trying to revitalize the Democratic Party (while a simultaneous trend was developing toward compliance with the required affidavits of Section 9H).
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In this clouded and volatile atmosphere, Robeson lent his name to a move to coordinate an agenda for outlawing lynching and the poll tax and for restoring the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Essie seems to have played a large role in the effort, possibly stimulated by her earlier attempt with Pearl Buck to come up with a set of propositions for federal action in behalf of blacks. The initial invitation to meet with Essie and Paul in October brought a sparse response; only Louis T. Wright, Dr. Marshall Shepard (the recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C.), and Alphaeus Hunton showed up. The meeting was brief and politic; it stressed that their effort to coordinate a black agenda “would not interfere or compete with the fine work which many organized groups had already accomplished.” The decision was made to invite an additional hundred or so black leaders to gather in November. Essie cast a wide net in trying to enlist support for that meeting, inviting, among others, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lester Granger, A. Philip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
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Walter White responded to her invitation with a lengthy private letter illustrative of the divisions within the black leadership—current and future. During the war years the NAACP, following the trend in the black community itself, had become militantly anticolonialist (Walter White's denunciation of Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech had been as uncompromising as Robeson's). The organization had shown a dramatic increase in membership from 1940 to 1946, its branches tripling in number and its rolls going
up nearly ten times over. After 1946 the pace of growth slowed, in tandem with the national shift toward Cold War confrontation and away from any willingness to grapple with domestic problems. With the NAACP's values and organizational fortunes in flux, Walter White was in no mood to broach opposition, to take kindly to a political project that might circumvent established lines of power in the black community—especially not if it emanated from Dr. Du Bois, a longtime personal antagonist of White's who, on returning to his association with the NAACP in 1944 in the role of director of special research, had already begun to threaten White's authority.
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