Paul Robeson (91 page)

Sam Parks was exactly the kind of man in whom Robeson had come to invest high hopes, a man with strong ties both to the black church and to the black trade-union movement, and he showed Parks a side of himself that he did not reveal to Flory. Talking again late into the night, Robeson acknowledged to Parks that left-wing white trade-unionists had not proved, under the pressure of the conservative Cold War climate, as staunchly committed to the welfare of the black working class as he had anticipated. He acknowledged, too, that the “worldwide coalition” represented by
Freedom
magazine had not sufficiently addressed the specific needs of American blacks—that the “internationalist view” had too often bypassed rather than incorporated the black perspective. Robeson's disappointment in the failure of the trade-union movement to remain a militant force at home was paralleled by his sense (as Parks recalls) “that the rose beds he'd seen in other countries weren't rose beds but beds of thorns.” He expressed no word of disillusion with the Soviet Union but, rather, a generalized grief that the “world movement” for liberation seemed in disarray, and his eyes filled with tears when he talked about his “mistake” in having let “whites front me off to my own people,” keep him at a distance from his own grass roots. Still, he believed he had begun to repair that damage, had made significant strides in the past year in restoring his image as “a race man”
and
an artist.
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His stay in Chicago confirmed that estimate. Flory arranged a public meeting for Robeson at the Parkway Ballroom, and the turnout—five hundred people “from all over the county”—exceeded expectations. So did the enthusiasm. People clamored to say hello, including some who, in Flory's compassionate phrase, “had gotten scared and lost their way”—not so much people on the street, who had never gone as far as the black leadership in renouncing Robeson, but rather some recalcitrant members of the black bourgeoisie. One such member, a prominent black physician in Chicago and a fellow Alpha, on this visit described Robeson as “one of the heroes of our fraternity.” (The reception among whites in Chicago was far less favorable: when a local public-affairs television program announced that Robeson would be a guest, negative popular reaction forced cancellation of his appearance.) In April,
Jet
magazine reported that both Robeson and Du Bois “suddenly are enjoying popularity sprees,” and George Murphy, Jr., wrote Essie, “With the two biggest Negro papers in the country [
The Afro-American
and Pittsburgh
Courier
] behind Paul … and
with the Negro church, our most important political institution increasingly behind him, and, with Sister Essie Robeson in there methodically pitching every day … how can our Paul fail?”
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Nothing did more toward refurbishing Robeson's image than the publication, early in 1958, of
Here I Stand
, the 111-page manifesto-autobiography he wrote with Lloyd L. Brown, who had collaborated with Robeson earlier on speeches and writings. The book amounted to a subtle yet clear declaration to black America that Robeson viewed his primary allegiance as being to his own community and not to international Communism. The very first line of the Author's Foreword read, “I am a Negro.” On the second page he added, “I am an American.” In addition, he tried to demystify his continuing refusal, ever since his 1946 Tenney Committee statement, explicitly “to give testimony or to sign affidavits” as to whether or not he was a Communist: “I have made it a matter of principle, as many others have done, to refuse to comply with any demand of legislative committees or departmental officials that infringes upon the Constitutional rights of all Americans.” He made it clear that he would continue to refuse, but pointed out that “my views concerning the Soviet Union and my warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land … have been pictured as something … sinister by Washington officials.… It has been alleged that I am part of some kind of ‘international conspiracy.'
… I am not and never have been involved in any international conspiracy or any other kind, and do not know anyone who is.
” He insisted that “my belief in the principles of scientific socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life—that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private profit … have nothing in common with silly notions about ‘plots' and ‘conspiracies.'”
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Without making any apology for his own past actions, without acknowledging any “lapses” in the integrity of Soviet policy—like all proud-spirited people, he lacked the habit of berating himself in public—Robeson looked forward, not back. He did reaffirm his friendship for the Soviet Union and for individuals like Ben Davis, Jr. (who hold “nonconformist or radical views”), but his own primary allegiance, he made clear, was to the interests of black people. In the struggle for those interests, he cited black trade-unionists and the black church—not the Communist Party—as the vanguard institutions, and also as the wellspring of his own personal strength. He advised black leaders, moreover, that they “must rely upon and be responsive to no other control than the will of their people”; allies—“important allies among our white fellow-citizens”—were welcome, but “the Negro people's movement must be led by
Negroes
.… Good advice is good no matter what the source and help is needed and appreciated from wherever it comes, but Negro action cannot be decisive if the advisors and helpers hold the guiding reins. For no matter how well
meaning other groups may be, the fact is that our interests are secondary at best with them.”

In publicly declaring independence from the CP, Robeson was also distancing himself from accusations of white domination in general. He put his faith in “aroused and militant” black mass action, siding with what he perceived—long before most prominent blacks did—as “a rising resentment against control of our affairs by white people, regardless of whether that domination is expressed by the blunt orders of political bosses or more discreetly by the ‘advice' of white liberals which must be heeded or else.” In contrast to well-intentioned white liberal and establishment black leaders alike, Robeson rejected the notion of “gradualism” in the struggle for civil rights as “but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are lawbreakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of law.” The insistence that progress must be slow was, he argued, “rooted in the idea that democratic rights, as far as Negroes are concerned, are not inalienable and self-evident as they are for white Americans.” How long? he asked rhetorically. “
As long as we permit it
.” Black people had the “power of numbers, the power of organization, and the power of spirit” to “end the terror”—
now
. Robeson's concept of “mass militancy, of mass action,” was an appeal for coordination that he knew “full well … is not easy to do.…” But, “despite all of our differences,” he felt a “nonpartisan unity” among blacks was nonetheless possible, because there was “a growing impatience with petty ways of thinking and doing things.” Robeson was attempting to heal divisions within the black community by a transcending appeal to move beyond them—and somehow to transcend as well the powerful resistance to change within the dominant white culture. If he slighted practicalities, his clarion call for black unity in
Here I Stand
at once prefigured the language and vision soon to be taken up by militant young blacks, and served to announce his own primary commitment to the black struggle in the immediate present.
³⁰

Except for the minuscule left-wing press, white publications wholly ignored
Here I Stand
(
The New York Times
failed even to list it in its “Books Out Today” section, a courtesy extended to some of the most obscure publications). But the black press not only reviewed the book widely, but also got its message: “I Am Not a Communist Says Robeson,” blared a headline in
The Afro-American
(hailing it in an editorial as a “remarkable book”). “Paul Robeson States His Case,” ran the front-page article in the Pittsburgh
Courier
, its chief editor, P. L. Prattis, declaring in a separate column that he had been “deeply stirred” by Robeson's words. The Chicago
Crusader
expressed delight that Robeson had finally answered those calling him a Communist and a traitor—his “refusal to defend himself has isolated him at a time when we sorely need the type of courageous leadership he represents”; the
Crusader
now hailed him as “one of the mightiest of all Negro voices raised against world oppression of people based on
race, color, national origin and religion.” The only negative review in the black press came, predictably, from Roy Wilkins in the NAACP's magazine,
The Crisis
. Wilkins repeated his decade-old assertion that blacks had “never regarded” Robeson as a leader, and dismissed him as a man who “imagines his misfortunes to stem, not from his own bungling, but from the persecution of ‘the white folks on top.'” With no help from Wilkins or from the general press, the first edition of
Here I Stand
was exhausted within six weeks, and by May 1959, without benefit of a commercial distributor, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. Robeson, after a decade in the wilderness, was re-emerging into prominence and favor.
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Just prior to Robeson's successful California-Chicago trip, the mainstream black magazine
Ebony
had somewhat prefigured his re-emergence by publishing an interview with him by the respected journalist Carl T. Rowan. Entitled “Has Paul Robeson Betrayed the Negro?,” Rowan's article concluded that he had not: “even Negroes who consider Robeson politically naïve and tactically dumb find reasons to sympathize with him.…” The Rowan piece was not entirely laudatory (George Murphy, Jr., characterized it as “collaborationist”), describing Robeson at one point as looking like “a sad-voiced martyr,” and at another—when Rowan asked him directly about Khrushchev's denunciations of Stalin as a murderer—as acting like “a singer who has forgotten his lyrics; he mumbles vaguely.…” Rowan subsequently amplified his reaction to Robeson on the popular “Tex and Jinx” radio program. Though complaining that Robeson had never answered his question about Stalin, and while disagreeing with him “greatly on a great many issues,” Rowan said, “when he's talking about what's happening to Negroes or when he's crying out for freedom of Negroes or when he's talking about a constitutional issue like the freedom to travel, I find it very difficult to disagree with him.”
³²

At the same time the
Ebony
piece appeared, Robeson began to be rediscovered by the recording industry. Thanks to the valiant efforts during the early fifties of Paul, Jr., and Lloyd Brown, Robeson's voice had found a marginal outlet through their Othello Recording Company. But in the beginning of 1958 Vanguard put him back in a commercial studio for the first time in seven years. According to Essie, “Paul was nervous as a cat,” but everyone deemed the sessions a success—“Paul was never in better voice. The sound technicians were amazed, and the Vanguard folks were simply thrilled, and so was Paul, of course.” Then, in April 1958, another breakthrough came in the form of an Actors' Equity resolution. Following the lead of their British counterparts, the quarterly membership meeting on March 28 voted 111–75 to urge the State Department to issue Robeson a passport (Equity President Ralph Bellamy was one of the negatives).
³³

It was a nice present, arriving just before Robeson's sixtieth birthday, on April 9, 1958. That occasion provoked many additional tributes. Before
the birthday rites were concluded, no fewer than twenty-seven countries had held celebratory events of one kind or another, with Peggy Middleton, the London County Council member from Greenwich and executive secretary of the London Paul Robeson Committee, coordinating the assorted arrangements as if from a command post. In Mexico City, twenty leading figures in the arts sponsored a concert; in South Africa, a group of students and faculty at Cape Town University arranged a recital of Robeson recordings; in East Berlin, a Robeson song-film made on direct commission to Earl Robinson especially for the occasion premiered in the city's biggest hall; in Stockholm, the literary magazine
Clarté
put out a special Robeson issue; in Hungary, commemorative concerts were performed throughout the country; in Japan, Radio Tokyo broadcast Robeson songs and speeches; in Port-au-Prince, the celebrants gathered at the Société Nationale d'Art Dramatique; in Peking, a rally was staged in the new Capital Theatre that lasted over three hours, preceded by two days of Robeson songs on national radio; in Moscow, the celebration took place in the enormous Hall of Columns—and in New York the Soviet representative to the UN, A. Sobolev, hosted a dinner for Robeson.
³⁴

The festivities in India threatened for a time to produce serious political repercussions. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself issued a proclamation hailing the planned celebration of Robeson's sixtieth birthday as a fitting tribute, “not only because Paul Robeson is one of the greatest artists of our generation, but also because he has represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us—the cause of human dignity.” The American press, which ignored all other birthday tributes to Robeson, did publicize Nehru's comment—disturbing U.S. Embassy officials in New Delhi, especially Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and briefly threatening to damage diplomatic relations between the two countries.
³⁵

Attempting to exert pressure on the Indian government to cancel plans for the celebration, Ambassador Bunker found a sympathetic ear in Secretary General Pillai, who purportedly told him that he, too, was “very concerned” about the Robeson affair: he was himself “continually having difficulty with ‘woolly headed Nationalists' who were easy dupes of Communists.” American Chargé d'Affaires Turner in Bombay called on M. C. Chagla, Chief Justice of the High Court, to express “puzzlement” at the decision to honor an American “who is currently engaged [in a] lawsuit with [the] U.S. government, who is critical of his own country and has compared it unfavorably with [the] USSR.” Turner warned that “Americans would certainly interpret [the] celebration as Communist-inspired and even anti-American and that many would regard” it “as evidence that India was going Communist.” Unintimidated, Chagla “stoutly defended” the purpose of the celebration, and added with dignity that his own presence on the committee “was guarantee against political flavor or Communist inspiration.” In Washington, India's Ambassador Mehta stood up just
as strongly. Called in by the State Department, he pointed out that Robeson was not a “convicted Communist” and that Prime Minister Nehru, Judge Chagla, and others involved in the birthday event were not Communists—“he didn't understand why anyone was concerned about this celebration in India.”
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