Paul Robeson (77 page)

From abroad came a small flood of invitations asking Robeson to appear at peace gatherings. The peace movement (anti-Communists charged that it was sponsored by pro-Communists) had been gathering international momentum, and activists from around the world requested Robeson's presence at their various meetings. He sent greetings to all—and recorded statements to several—but he had a raft of promises to fulfill at home. His bicoastal appearances within just a few months included benefit concerts for the Progressive Party, anniversary celebrations for the
Morning Freiheit
and the Jewish Peoples' Fraternal Order, a fund-raiser for the California
Eagle
, speeches at the New York May Day parade and the National Non-Partisan Committee to defend the Communist leaders, an FEPC vigil in front of the White House, conferences with black trade-unionists in Chicago and California, and half a dozen testimonial dinners.
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Essie, meanwhile, was carrying out a full agenda of her own. Her politics had by now moved closer to Paul's—though he rarely trusted her to speak in his behalf. Her style of public debate was less combative than his, her commitment less instinctive, but she was nonetheless an effective speaker. Returning in January 1950 from a three-month trip to China, she embarked on a well-received national speaking tour. The FBI agent who monitored her speech in St. Louis reported that she had denied the existence of slave camps or of anti-Jewish discrimination in the Soviet Union; when asked from the audience what the difference was between Western colonialism and the Russian satellite system, she purportedly replied, “colonialism meant controlling and exploiting while a satellite was just influenced.” By temperament an ingrained pragmatist, impatient with doctrinal dispute in any form, Essie devoted the central portion of her standard stump speech on “Communism” to redefining it under the blandly accessible rubric of “land reform.” Further expounding her loose approach to doctrine, she won over a group of conservative black ministers and their wives in Detroit by stressing their
theological
duty to take up issues of social justice. Her audiences were apparently less persuaded by her increasingly explicit—and in 1950 decidedly “premature”—feminism; in her speech “Women and Progressive America,” for example, she declared, “I think it is high time that women had some say in the running of their governments, and in the running of the world.” The FBI decided in August 1950 that Essie was, after all, a “concealed Communist” and once again issued a Security Index Card for her.
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In May, Paul made a quick trip to London to attend a meeting of the World Peace Council, of which he was a member. More than twenty thousand Londoners packed Lincoln's Inn Fields to hear the leaders of the international peace movement, but saved their greatest applause for Robeson, who sang Chinese, Soviet, and American songs and told the crowd—once more calling on his reserves of optimism—that the working class in America was awakening to the realization that
it
(and not just those who were avowed Communists) was in danger of losing civil liberties; this awakening meant that fascism “will never be” revived in America. George Bernard Shaw, who had met Robeson two decades earlier, dropped him a humorous note demurring to a request for support of Progressive Party candidates: “If you connect my name and reputation with your campaign … you will gain perhaps two thousand votes, ten of them negro, and lose two million.… Keep me out of it; and do not waste your time courting the handful of people whose votes you are sure of already. Play for Republican votes and episcopal support all the time; and when you get a big meeting of all sorts, don't talk politics but sing Old Man River.” Sympathetic though he was to Robeson, Shaw was not above a bit of well-meant patronization.
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Back in the States by June, Robeson went to Chicago to address a
thousand delegates to the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights, many of whom were black packinghouse workers. To Marie Seton, who attended the meeting, “Robeson was never so much himself” as that night, “in the midst of his own to whom he spoke of all the world.” He exhorted black trade-unionists to “exert their influence in every aspect of the life of the Negro community” and “to accept the fact that the Negro workers have become a part of the vanguard of the whole American working class. To fail the Negro people is to fail the whole American people.” He spoke movingly of the need to end the persecution not only of black Americans, but of Jews and of the foreign-born as well, and asked the audience not to be deflected from that goal by divisive calls from press and politicians to save the world from the “menace” of Communism. “Ask the Negro ministers in Birmingham whose homes were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan what is the greatest menace in their lives.… Ask Willie McGee, languishing in a Mississippi prison.… Ask Haywood Patterson, somewhere in America, a fugitive from Alabama barbarism for a crime he, nor any of the Scottsboro boys, ever committed. Ask the growing numbers of Negro unemployed in Chicago and Detroit. Ask the fearsome lines of relief clients in Harlem.… Ask any Negro worker receiving unequal pay for equal work, denied promotion despite his skill and because of his skin, still the last hired and the first fired. Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, ‘What is the greatest menace in your life?' and they will answer in a thunderous voice, ‘Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!'—in short White Supremacy and all its vile works. Our enemies,” Robeson concluded, “are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give FEPC the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers,” those who sustain injustice at home while shipping arms—here Robeson was surely prescient—to “French imperialists to use against brave Vietnamese patriots.” His black audience gave him a prolonged ovation.
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Two weeks later the daily press blazoned in screaming headlines that “
COMMUNIST IMPERIALISTS FROM NORTH KOREA
” had invaded their “
PEACE-LOVING BROTHERS
” to the south. The victors of World War II had put an end to Japan's colonial rule in Korea and split that country into two, the North, under Kim II Sung, claiming to build socialism, the South, under Washington's puppet Syngman Rhee, proceeding to bolster capitalism. From the first there had been constant sniping across the border, each side threatening to “liberate” the other, but when Sung's well-equipped army finally crossed into the South, Rhee's troops were unprepared and ill-equipped. Though Truman had in the past shown contempt for Rhee, he felt he couldn't risk—not so soon after the Communist victory in China and the sensational publicity surrounding the fall of Hiss and the rise of McCarthy—having the Republicans charge that he was soft on Communism. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, secured a resolu
tion condemning North Korea, and a week later Truman dispatched ground troops. Americans of almost all persuasions—including Henry Wallace—rallied around the President. Congress opened debate on passage of a new Internal Security Act, the infamous McCarran Act, which equated dissent with treason and established concentration camps to detain subversives in time of national emergency. When it passed in September, Truman vetoed it, at some political risk, but the House overrode him. The days when Robeson could count on at least minimal sufferance had passed.
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Yet he refused to trim his sails to any degree. Speaking out at a Civil Rights Congress rally at Madison Square Garden at the end of June 1950 to protest Truman's action in sending troops to Korea, Robeson excoriated the President for tying the welfare of the American people “to the fate of a corrupt clique of politicians south of the 38th parallel in Korea.” The meaning of Truman's order, Robeson predicted, would not be lost on black Americans: “They will know that if we don't stop our armed adventure in Korea today—tomorrow it will be Africa.… I have said it before and say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home.…” When Robeson had “said it before,” in Paris in 1949, he had brought on a national debate; those same words, repeated in 1950, marked its foreclosure. The climate had changed. The government decided to muzzle him.
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He had planned to return to Europe at the end of the summer, but the State Department planned otherwise. It issued a “stop notice” at all ports to prevent Robeson from departing, and J. Edgar Hoover sent out an “urgent” teletype ordering FBI agents to locate Robeson's whereabouts. Going first to Bert and Gig McGhee's apartment, where Robeson had recently been staying—as a result of which the FBI had taken out a Security Index Card on Gig—they were told he was not at home. The agents waited outside the building through the night and, when Robeson failed to appear, contacted the Council on African Affairs. Through Louise Patterson, Robeson made arrangements to meet with the Internal Security agents sent out to confiscate his passport. When they arrived, he had an attorney with him, Nathan Witt of Witt & Cammer. Witt checked the agents' credentials, and Robeson said he would have the passport for them in the morning. But when the agents called the next day, Witt informed them that on his advice Robeson had decided not to surrender the passport after all. The State Department immediately notified immigration and customs officials that Robeson's passport was void and that they were “to endeavor to prevent his departure from the U.S.” should he make an attempt to leave.
¹⁷

Robeson now joined other radicals whose right to travel had been or was soon to be restricted—Rockwell Kent, Charlotta Bass, Corliss Lamont, the writers Howard Fast and Albert Kahn, and Reverend Richard Morford
(head of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship). Historically, the State Department, when denying passports, had given concrete reasons, chiefly citing lack of citizenship, the need to protect applicants from going to danger spots abroad, and the need to intercept criminal elements attempting to flee the country or to engage in drug trafficking. But increasingly in the early 1950s, the State Department gave no reason for lifting a passport other than the vague catchall explanation that travel abroad by a given individual would be “contrary to the best interests of the United States,” a cover for monitoring left-wing political dissent. The passport weapon had occasionally been used against dissenters in the past—anarchists and socialists in particular—but now it became widely employed, and directed pre-eminently at “Communists” (even though the U.S. government had previously protested the refusal of totalitarian governments to let their citizens travel freely as the denial of a fundamental human right).
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Witt wrote directly to Secretary of State Acheson requesting an explanation. A reply came from the chief of the passport division: “the Department considers that Robeson's travel abroad at this time would be contrary to the best interests of the United States.” That, Witt responded, is not “a sufficient answer”; it presented “a conclusion” but gave no justification for it. He requested a meeting either with Acheson or his representatives. Word came back that passport officials would meet with Robeson and Witt on August 23, though “the Department feels that no purpose would be served.”
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The department was as good as its prediction: the August 23 meeting accomplished nothing. Along with Nathan Witt, Robeson was attended by four black attorneys, including William Patterson (who two weeks before had been called a “black son of a bitch” by Representative Henderson Lanham of Georgia during a hearing before the House Lobbying Committee; Essie, in a letter of protest, cleverly denounced the name-calling as “an all too typical incident illustrating UnAmerican behavior today”). When Robeson and his attorneys requested clarification as to why it would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States Government” for him to travel abroad, they were told that his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries—it was a “family affair.” Unless he would give a signed statement guaranteeing not to make any speeches while abroad, there could be no reconsideration of his passport application. When his attorneys protested that this amounted to an unconstitutional violation of the right of free speech, they were told that they were at liberty to take the matter up in court. Robeson's lawyers prepared to do just that.
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There was no national outcry against the State Department's lifting of Robeson's passport. The minuscule left-wing press (led by the
Daily People's World
, the
Daily Worker
, and the
National Guardian
) wrote editorials against
the action; a number of European peace organizations telegraphed their indignation to Acheson; and scattered left-wing groups like the Progressives and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts registered their anger. But no important black leader joined the protest; as Bayard Rustin puts it, “I don't know whether the leadership was sufficiently anti-Robeson or sufficiently intimidated.…” Robeson himself denounced the passport action as one more attempt by the Truman administration “to silence the protests of the Negro people”—but his statement was not widely carried in the press. He was being effectively isolated, which became clear early in September when, on the first anniversary of Peekskill, Madison Square Garden refused to rent its space to the Council on African Affairs for a planned concert rally in protest of the passport ban. The
Daily Worker
announced a demonstration outside the Garden, but only fifty people showed up.
²¹

There was a much larger turnout in Harlem—the
Daily Worker
estimated the crowd at six thousand—on September 9, when Robeson supporters held an outdoor rally in Dewey Square, under the auspices of the Harlem Trade Union Council. Joined by Patterson, Ben Davis, Leon Strauss, and half a dozen other speakers, Robeson told the assembled crowd that he had definitely decided to bring suit against the State Department, denounced the action of the Madison Square Garden corporation as “an arbitrary edict in violation of the right of free assembly,” and described the various “security” proposals under discussion in the Congress—the Wood, McCarran, and Mundt-Nixon-Ferguson bills—as “police state” proposals. “There has not been a single bit of federal legislation passed to guarantee the economic, civil and political rights of the Negro people; but … we see such Congressmen as Rankin of Mississippi spearheading the hysterical drive to jail and muzzle Negro and other Americans who engage in … criticism of government policy.”
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