Paul Robeson (68 page)

Despite his reception, Robeson felt disquieted, for the first time in his memory “homesick.” It had “never even occurred” to him before that “such a thing was possible—but I really am. This will remain for me the outstanding fact of this tour. A truly qualitative dialectical change. I think it has much to do with the Struggle—my being so much a part of it—it is the most important in the world today—I'm sure of that—But it also has something to do with people who have become very dear to me.”
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Robeson wrote those sentiments to Helen Rosen, a woman he had first met when playing Othello on Broadway. She had been doing volunteer work for the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions (a forerunner of the Progressive Party), and Paul used to drop in to ASP headquarters, which were just around the corner from the theater. Helen invited him home to dinner one night, and the Rosens ultimately became close friends. She was a fifth-generation New Yorker of the Portuguese-Dutch-Jewish van Dernoot family (Paul used to call her teasingly “Miss van Der Snoot”). Both her parents were lawyers, and she herself had been educated at the Ethical Culture School and Wellesley College. In 1928 she married Sam Rosen, who became a well-known ear specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Sam was warm, perceptive, and outgoing; Helen, the driving force behind the couple's political commitment, was dynamic, beautiful, immensely shrewd about people, and indomitable, a woman whose integrity, emotional and political, could not be breached (Sam once said she “had a whim of steel”). In every way she was the kind of woman to whom Robeson was drawn. The Rosens would both be devoted to Paul for the rest of his life. Helen would become one of his few intimates.
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But Robeson was not writing to Helen Rosen of his “homesickness” merely to signal his growing attachment to her. In several letters written to Freda Diamond at the same time, he confided to her, too, that “for the first time, I can't transfer and function.” He “had been going every moment,” and he was eager to come home. “This time,” he wrote her, “I've no desire to see anyone here in general or particular. Have many friends but it's so hard to get started. I just want to get concerts done (these are very important) and return.… About the first time that this has happened. I evidently—whatever the difficulties—pressures, etc.—like my life back there—and I'm afraid I like the whole pattern—whole mosaic—so to say.…” He also acknowledged to Freda in a subsequent letter that “somewhere, at most unexpected times, I do something to destroy much of your security. I've stopped trying to figure it out. But I know that I love you very deeply and know that you are certainly one of [the] people dearest to me in this world.…” Indeed, Robeson would never lose his deep affection for Freda Diamond, but increasingly, after his return to the States, his emotional life would come to be centered more and more on Helen Rosen.
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During the four-month tour in Britain, Peter Blackman, a left-wing West Indian writer living in London, helped Desmond Buckle look after Paul's arrangements, serving as general aide to him. Blackman was appalled at the “creative chaos” of Paul's habits—a suitcase full of unanswered mail, an obliviousness to the mechanics of daily living—and wrote Ben Davis, Jr., to complain that the Party, in not helping Paul to organize himself better, was showing insufficient appreciation for his unique importance. Davis wrote back genially, reminding Blackman that the entire leadership of the Party was currently fighting for its life in court and reassuring him that Paul was recognized as “one of the brightest jewels of the international working class movement,” though “the magnitude of the man is so overwhelming that it is difficult to contain him.”
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Robeson made several political appearances while in Britain, most notably at a conference called in London by the India League to protest Premier Malan's apartheid “revolution” of 1948 in South Africa. The Coordinating Committee of Colonial Peoples sponsored the event, and Krishna Menon, later India's controversial delegate to the United Nations, and Dr. Yussef M. Dadoo, the Communist Indian leader of the African National Congress in South Africa, organized it. An East African student in the audience described Robeson's oratory as “thrilling … the great voice was low and soft but with the suggestion of enormous power behind it.… The audience sat intent and still.… This was no trickster.… There was emotion in his voice all right … but all that he said was carefully reasoned.… There was forcefulness indeed but no arrogance. Instead, there was humility, combined with a deep pride in his race.… [But] he did not confine himself to the struggle of his own race for freedom. He is evidently a man who has got beyond mere racialism. He told us about the Chinese. He described white people of English descent he had seen living in appalling conditions in America. In many parts of the world there were black spots of Fascism, whatever name it might be called by locally and [he said] it was his business and the business of freedom-loving people everywhere to combat it.…” Following the meeting, the South African government—about to become a loyal U.S. ally in the Cold War, in return for Washington's working to postpone any direct UN action on South-West Africa—announced that henceforth the playing of Paul Robeson's records on the radio would be banned. Robeson told the Manchester
Guardian
that the only parallel he could think of was when the Nazi gauleiter of Norway banned his records during the war—“But the Norwegian underground still played them right through the occupation.”
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Robeson was not deflected from giving outspoken support to the liberation movements in South Africa and Kenya. In the fifties, mostly through the auspices of the Council on African Affairs, he would keep his unintimidated voice raised in behalf of his “African brothers and sisters
… jailed by the Malan Government for peacefully resisting segregation and discrimination” and tried and imprisoned in Kenya “for insisting upon the return of their land.” Invited by Oliver Tambo in 1954 to send a message to the African National Congress at its annual conference, Robeson forcefully linked arms with its struggle:

I know that I am ever by your side, that I am deeply proud that you are my brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces—that I sprang from your forebears. We come from a mighty, courageous people, creators of great civilizations in the past, creators of new ways of life in our own time and in the future. We shall win our freedoms together. Our folk will have their place in the ranks of those shaping human destiny.
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In April 1949 Robeson went to Paris to attend the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace. Tensions and suspicion were running high on both sides of the Cold War. The Chinese Communists had captured Nanking and were advancing to the outskirts of Shanghai,
the
symbol of Western influence in East Asia.
The New York Times
termed the Communist advance “a cataclysmic development” which “doomed the first buds of a Chinese democracy that sprouted under Chiang Kai-shek's rule.” The imminent Communist victory in China, the
Times
warned, had resulted from the “fatal miscalculation” of trying to negotiate with Communists; “all Asia” was now threatened “with a similar fate” unless “more effective steps” were taken “to insulate” the Chinese Communists. Simultaneously, hearings were in progress before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on passage of the North Atlantic Treaty, a mutual-defense pact among the Western powers that the Soviets denounced as yet another harbinger of (in the words of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the French Communist atomic scientist) “a new war they are preparing.”
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In this heated international atmosphere, two thousand delegates from fifty nations gathered in Paris for the World Peace Congress. Du Bois headed the American delegation; Picasso, Louis Aragon, and J. D. Bernal were among the celebrated figures in attendance; and Robeson and Joliot-Curie were the most prominently featured speakers. The State Department denounced the gathering in advance as “part of the current Cominform effort to make people think … that all of the Western powers are governed by warmongers.” By the time Robeson stepped up for his turn at the podium, Du Bois, Joliet-Curie, Pietro Nenni of Italy, and the British left-wing leader Konni Zilliacus had already ignited the delegates, Zilliacus saying, “workers of Britain will not fight or be dragged into fighting against the Soviet Union.” Robeson sang to the gathering and then made some brief remarks, most of them unexceptional echoes from a dozen previous
and more elaborate speeches in which he had spoken out for colonial peoples still denied their rights. But then he tacked on a less familiar refrain. The wealth of America, he said, had been built “on the backs of the white workers from Europe … and on the backs of millions of blacks.… And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. (Applause.) We shall not make war on anyone. (Shouts.) We shall not make war on the Soviet Union. (New shouts.)” Though Robeson could not know it at the time, those comparatively innocuous words (scarcely different from those Zilliacus had just used) were to reverberate around the world, marking a fateful divide in his life.
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An Associated Press dispatch purporting to “quote” from Robeson's speech was picked up and reprinted across the United States:

We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels.… It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.…”
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Robeson had not spoken the words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. But almost no one paused to check its accuracy. And no one seems to have noticed that, even if Robeson
had
said the offending words, it would not have been the first time a prominent black figure had angrily asked whether blacks should fight in the country's foreign wars; during World War II, A. Philip Randolph's
Messenger
had thundered in an editorial, “No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it presently exists.” But Robeson's (alleged) words were treated as if they were the unprecedented, overwrought excesses of a single misguided “fanatic.”
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The outcry was immediate, the denunciation fierce. The white press rushed to inveigh against him as a traitor; the black leadership hurried to deny he spoke for anyone but himself; agencies of the U.S. government excitedly exchanged memos speculating about possible grounds for asserting that he had forfeited his citizenship. Robeson was perceived as having stridden across—not merely crossed—an impermissible line. For many years his success had served white America doubly well: as proof that a “deserving” black man could make it in the system; and as one who, during the New Deal years anyway, had talked with appropriate optimism and patriotism about the country's democratic promise. In the four years since Roosevelt's death, Robeson's increasingly disenchanted public pro
nouncements had steadily eroded his assigned image; the AP account from Paris suggested that he had now wholly discarded it. The showcase black American had turned out not to be suitably “representative” after all—and it became imperative to isolate and discredit him.
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Eager applicants for the job appeared on all sides. Anyone who could hold a pen—quite a few of whom had apparently learned to wield it like a machete—seemed impelled to comment. The gloating of the right-wing press (Robeson “may hereafter be dismissed and forgotten”) came as no surprise. Less predictable were the swiftness and severity with which the black establishment moved to distance itself. Black leaders, in the forties, were supposed to “act nice” and “not make a lot of noise,” not call militant attention to a militant set of goals, however much they might in fact be in sympathy with them. Most of the black leadership believed at the time that hope for accomplishing even a modest civil-rights program hinged on placating the white power structure, convincing it that blacks had benign and patriotic aims.

Walter White, responding to a request from the State Department, immediately issued a statement. He cautioned that white America “would be wise to abstain from denunciation of the Paul Robesons for extremist statements until it removes the causes of the lack of faith in the American system of government” that Robeson exemplified. White even acknowledged that “many Negroes will be glad he [Robeson] spoke as he did if it causes white Americans to wake up to the determination of Negroes to break the shackles which race prejudice fastens upon them.” But White then went on to reaffirm that “Negroes are Americans. We contend for full and equal rights and we accept full and equal responsibilities. In event of any conflict that our nation has with any other nation, we will regard ourselves as Americans and meet the responsibilities imposed on all Americans.” Walter White's voice turned out to be the
moderate
one in a nationwide assault on Robeson that became instantly vituperative (Robeson “is just plain screwy,” the black columnist Earl Brown wrote in the New York
Amsterdam News
).
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Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph's chief lieutenant, later remembered “very distinctly” Roy Wilkins's phoning Randolph and asking him to convene a meeting of black leaders. According to Rustin, Randolph himself “had no objections whatever to calling upon blacks not to participate in the military” (soon after, during the Korean War, he successfully threatened to call for a black boycott of the armed services if Truman failed to issue an executive order dismantling segregation, and Rustin acknowledged that Robeson “had sort of helped lay a radical approach to this matter”). But Randolph and other black leaders did object, according to Rustin, to Robeson's stressing “politics” (the Soviet theme) over “principle” (the issue of a segregated armed forces). “Paul was saying they shouldn't go into the army to fight against Communists”; Randolph was
saying they shouldn't go into a segregated army “to fight against anybody.” In Rustin's view, Robeson had further compounded the risk that blacks would be branded “black
and
red” by making his announcement on foreign soil—“There's a sort of unwritten law that if you want to criticize the United States you do it at home; it's a corollary of the business where you're just a nigger if you stand up and criticize colored folks in front of white folks—it's not done.… We have to prove that we're patriotic.” Besides, Rustin added, there was resentment against Robeson's assuming the posture of political leadership when in fact he “did not ever take any organizational responsibility for what was happening in the black community.… Here is a man who is making some other country better than ours, and we've got to sit here and take the gaff, while he is important enough to traipse all over the country, to be lionized by all these white people, saying things for which he will not take any responsibility.”
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