Paul Robeson (72 page)

On the whole, though, the black press was not kind to Robeson.
The
Afro-American
ran a story headlined, “‘I Love Above All, Russia,' Robeson Says,” and the New York
Amsterdam News
printed a feature (picked up from the
Sunday Express
in England and entitled “Why Doesn't Paul Robeson Give More to His Own Negroes Instead of Russian Reds?”) that described Robeson as the “world's richest artist,” who had changed his politics because his son had been denied admittance to a public school in England. Lester Granger, head of the National Urban League, published a column in the
Amsterdam News
lambasting Robeson's “predictably hackneyed statement” and adding: “He is probably the biggest personal asset the Communist Party possesses today.… The Communist leaders here in America, when they say their prayers at night and turn their faces toward the Moscow god whom they worship, must assuredly say a special prayer for the continued health and vitality of their current star attraction. They'd better, for he's the last bit of glamor their raggedy party can produce these days.” At a press conference, President Truman was quoted as using the word “gang” in denouncing Robeson, Wallace, and Clifford J. Durr, president of the National Lawyers Guild (the three had jointly called for an FBI investigation of the Klan). Did you say “gang”? an incredulous reporter asked. Yes, “gang,” the President replied, brusquely adding that he had taken care of them in the last election.
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Worse soon followed. The House Un-American Activities Committee decided it wanted to hear testimony—pledges of loyalty, the cynics said—from prominent Afro-Americans in response to Robeson's statement that American blacks would or should not fight in a war against the Soviet Union. The NAACP telegraphed Representative John S. Wood, chairman of HUAC, protesting the hearings on the ground that “There never has been any question of the loyalty of the Negro to the United States of America” and stating that the “NAACP fails to see the necessity of holding hearings to be assured of what is already known to be true by our government.” Wood replied that HUAC was not undertaking an investigation of the loyalty of the black citizenry but, rather, graciously responding to “requests [that] have been received by this committee from members of his [Robeson's] race that a forum be afforded for the expression of contrary views” to the “disloyal and unpatriotic statements” he had made. “This is a privilege which the Committee feels should be granted.”
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The hearings opened in mid-July. Alvin Stokes, a black investigator for HUAC, testified on the stand that the Communists planned to set up a Soviet republic in the Deep South and that “Robeson's voice was the voice of the Kremlin.” Manning Johnson, the black anti-Communist (and professional informer) who had previously testified in numerous loyalty cases, declared unequivocally and falsely that Robeson was a member of the Party, had “delusions of grandeur,” and was “desirous of becoming the Black Stalin.” (Asked by a reporter two months later whether he had such ambitions, Robeson dryly replied that he “was in no way trained for politi
cal leadership.”) And a disabled black veteran pledged his loyalty to the United States.
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Next to testify were some heavyweights. Charles S. Johnson, president of Fisk University and earlier a friend of Robeson's, limited himself to saying on the stand that he saw no evidence of Communists' trying “to impregnate Negro schools.” Thomas W. Young, president of the Guide Publishing Company in Norfolk, Virginia (publishers of the newspaper
Journal and Guide
), declared that Robeson had broken the bond he once had with black people and had “done a great disservice to his race—far greater than that done to his country.” Lester Granger of the Urban League, who had already published a column attacking Robeson, used his opportunity in front of HUAC to suggest that it investigate the activities of such organizations as the KKK, “to reassure Negro leadership that while it is fighting against one enemy of this country, Communism, our Government is helping to fight off the other, Racism.”
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Now came HUAC's final and star witness, Jackie Robinson, whose entry into major-league baseball Robeson had worked to facilitate. With movie and television cameras grinding away and the committee room packed, he read a prepared statement apparently written for him by Lester Granger. He had been urged, Robinson began—and “not all of this urging came from Communist sympathizers”—not to show up at the hearing. But he had, out of “a sense of responsibility,” decided to “stick my neck out.” He made it clear that he believed black Americans had real grievances, and “the fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn't change the truth of his charges”; racial discrimination in America was not “a creation of Communist imagination.” Robeson had written Robinson just before his HUAC appearance to warn him that the press had “badly distorted” his remarks in Paris, and Robinson commented that “if Mr. Robeson actually made” the statement ascribed to him about American blacks' refusing to fight in a war against Russia, it “sounds very silly to me.… He has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that is his business and not mine. He's still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.” As for himself, Robinson continued, as “a religious man” he cherished America as a place “where I am free to worship as I please”; “that doesn't mean that we're going to stop fighting race discrimination in this country until we've got it licked,” but it did mean “we can win our fight without the Communists and we don't want their help.” Three members of the committee joined in complimenting Robinson on his “splendid statement.” He left the capital immediately for New York, thereby escaping, as the black newspaper
New Age
pointed out, “being Jim Crowed by Washington's infamous lily-white hotels.” That same week, Republican Representative Kearney of New York, a former
national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, recommended that Robinson receive the VFW's medal for good citizenship.
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The New York Times
put Robinson's testimony on page one, printed his HUAC statement in full (claiming that at the completion of his testimony a voice had called out “Amen” from the audience), and for good measure ran an editorial the same day declaring, “Mr. Robeson has attached himself to the cause of a country in which all men are equal because they are equally enslaved.” Joining the denunciation of Robeson and the praise of Robinson in her nationally syndicated “My Day” column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Mr. Robeson does his people great harm in trying to line them up on the Communist side of the political picture. Jackie Robinson helped them greatly by his forthright statements.” The New York
Amsterdam News
was equally supportive of Robinson, reporting that in its survey of 239 Brooklynites “not one person disagreed” with his position—“Jackie Robinson apparently batted 1,000 percent in this game.”
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But black reaction, in fact, was far from unanimous. The Council on African Affairs predictably issued a statement that “The Un-American Committee is out to smear Robeson because he challenges and refuses to accept any brand of second-class Jim-Crow Americanism.” And the following week, at a Bill of Rights conference sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, the twelve hundred delegates gave Robeson a standing ovation at the conclusion of his militant address—“I am a radical. I am going to stay one until my people are free to walk the earth”—and three hundred and sixty black delegates passed a resolution declaring that Paul Robeson “does indeed speak for us not only in his fight for full Negro democratic rights, but also in his fight for peace.” But, discounting the views of such interested parties, some black establishment voices were also sounded in Robeson's behalf.
The Afro-American
ran a cartoon depicting a frightened little boy labeled Jackie Robinson with a huge gun in his hand, uncertainly tracking the giant footprints of Paul Robeson, with the caption “The leading player in the National Baseball League is only a tyro as a big-game hunter.” The respected black columnist J. A. Rogers expressed agreement with many of Robinson's sentiments but disapproved of the auspices under which he had delivered them; he was convinced, Rogers wrote, that Robeson was “as loyal an American as any other” and convinced, too, that “Negroes are responding to him.” And
New Age
reported that “Harlemites … split sharply on the issue of whether the popular ballplayer should have gone before the committee.… Opinion was both congratulatory and condemnatory.”
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Robeson's own reaction to Robinson's testimony was muted. He as sailed the HUAC proceedings in general terms as “an insult to the Negro people” and an incitement to a terrorist group like the Klan to step up its reign of mob violence; he also challenged the loyalty of HUAC to the ideals
of the republic, because it maintained an “ominous silence” in the face of the continued lynchings of black citizens. But he refused to “be drawn into any conflict dividing me from my brother victim of this terror,” insisting that he had only respect for Jackie Robinson, that Robinson was entitled to his opinion, and—realizing that, in the context of the day, Robinson's statement had actually been mild—that there was “no argument between Jackie and me.” When reporters tried to draw him out further, he refused the bait, saying only, “We could take our liberties tomorrow if we didn't fight among ourselves.” Though Jackie Robinson became more active in the civil-rights struggle after he retired from baseball in 1956, he campaigned actively for Richard Nixon in 1960 and stated in his 1972 autobiography that he had no regrets about the remarks he'd made before HUAC. But in fact he did. Disillusioned himself in his final years with the conservative leadership of the NAACP and the seeming impasse over improving the lot of the average black person, he also wrote in his autobiography:

… in those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today. I would reject such an invitation if offered now.… I have grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America's destructiveness. And I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson who, over a span of twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people.
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The cauldron, in any case, was aboil. When a black man in Knoxville, Tennessee, refused to move to the rear of a bus, a cop shouted at him, “You're just like Paul Robeson!”
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CHAPTER l8

Peekskill

(1949)

The deep animus against Robeson that the HUAC hearings disclosed did not serve to slow his activities. Opposition, typically, emboldened him; pressure brought out his intransigence. And he could be profoundly intransigent, surface geniality notwithstanding. His powerful will and his ardor for principle, combined with his ingrained optimism, allowed him all at once to proceed in the face of resistance, to close his mind to counterarguments, and to feel confident of ultimate results. In a talk at the left-wing People's Songs Conference on August 13, he told the crowd, “In Europe and since I've come back … I've thrown down the gauntlet, and it's going to stay.”
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Four days after Jackie Robinson's HUAC appearance, Robeson, as good as his word, publicly assailed the “machine politicians” who had entered an alternate candidate against Ben Davis, Jr., in his re-election bid for the New York City Council. The following week he joined a hundred people picketing the White House in protest against discriminatory hiring practices at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (the demonstration had been called by the United Public Workers of America, CIO—of which Robeson was an honorary member). The next day he denounced President Truman's appointment of Attorney General Tom Clark to the Supreme Court as a “gratuitous and outrageous insult to my people,” for Clark had listed multiple organizations fighting for civil rights as “subversive.” The day after that, from a loudspeaker truck in Harlem, Robeson addressed a rally demanding the freedom of Henry Winston, the black Communist leader, who had been jailed by Judge Medina for contempt of court in the ongoing trial of the Communist leaders at Foley Square. That same day,
J. Edgar Hoover received photostats of Robeson's federal income-tax returns for the years 1939–47, Part of the “documentary evidence” he had been soliciting from Bureau agents which would prove “suitable for cross-examination” should Robeson, as expected, testify at the trial of the Communist leaders.
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In that same week in mid-August 1949, People's Artists Inc., a left-wing New York theatrical agency, announced a Robeson concert at the Lakeland Acres picnic grounds, outside of Peekskill, for August 27, the proceeds to go to the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress. (It would be the fourth Robeson concert in the Peekskill area; the preceding three had all been successful.) The Peekskill
Evening Star
immediately ran a front-page story on Robeson's upcoming appearance with a three-column headline: “Robeson Concert Here Aids ‘Subversive' Unit—Is Sponsored by ‘People's Artists' Called Red Front in California.” The
Star
's editorial, on the inside page, insisted, “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” and it printed a letter from an American Legion officer (headlined “Says Robeson and His Followers Are Unwelcome”) that declared, “Some of the weaker minded are susceptible to their [the “Communists”] fallacious teachings unless something is done by the loyal Americans of this area”; “I am not intimating violence,” he added, “but I believe that we should give this matter serious consideration.…” The
Star
's coverage set off a rash of activity. The president of the Peekskill Chamber of Commerce issued a statement attacking the concert; the Junior Chamber of Commerce called it “un-American” and called for “group action” to “discourage” it; the town supervisor of Cortlandt, where the Lakeland picnic grounds were located, said he was “deeply opposed to such gatherings”; the Joint Veterans' Council urged its members to join the anti-Robeson demonstration.
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