Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson

A Biography

Martin Duberman

for Eli Zal

and

for my friends in the rooms

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1
Boyhood
(1898–1914)

CHAPTER 2
Rutgers College
(1915–1918)

CHAPTER 3
Courtship and Marriage
(1919–1921)

CHAPTER 4
Provincetown Playhouse
(1922–1924)

CHAPTER 5
The Harlem Renaissance and the Spirituals
(1924–1925)

CHAPTER 6
The Launching of a Career
(1925–1927)

CHAPTER 7
Show Boat (1927–1929)

CHAPTER 8
Othello (1930–1931)

CHAPTER 9
The Discovery of Africa
(1932–1934)

CHAPTER 10
Berlin, Moscow, Films
(1934–1937)

CHAPTER 11
The Spanish Civil War and Emergent Politics
(1938–1939)

CHAPTER 12
The World at War
(1940–1942)

CHAPTER 13
The Broadway
Othello (1942–1943)

CHAPTER 14
The Apex of Fame
(1944–1945)

CHAPTER 15
Postwar Politics
(1945–1946)

CHAPTER 16
The Progressive Party
(1947–1948)

CHAPTER 17
The Paris Speech and After
(1949)

CHAPTER 18
Peekskill
(1949)

CHAPTER 19
The Right to Travel
(1950–1952)

CHAPTER 20
Confinement
(1952–1954)

CHAPTER 21
Breakdown
(1955–1956)

CHAPTER 22
Resurgence
(1957–1958)

CHAPTER 23
Return to Europe
(1958–1960)

CHAPTER 24
Broken Health
(1961–1964)

CHAPTER 25
Attempted Renewal
(1964–1965)

CHAPTER 26
Final Years
(1966–1976)

Acknowledgments

Note on Sources

Notes

Index

About the Author

I have done the state some service, and they know't.

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice.…

Othello
V. ii. 339–43

Preface

In 1919, when Paul Robeson graduated from Rutgers as valedictorian, the “class prophecy” suggested that by 1940 he would be governor of New Jersey and “the leader of the colored race in America.” When 1940 came around, that prophecy had not been entirely realized but—except for the governorship of New Jersey, for which Robeson had no ambition—continued to seem entirely plausible. By then he had added to his undergraduate laurels as scholar and All-American football player, international acclaim as concert artist, stage actor, recording and film star.

Although many white and almost all black Americans in 1940 shared a high estimate of Robeson's accomplishment, their views of what it meant failed to coincide in some important ways. To the white world in general, Robeson seemed a magnetic, civilized, and gifted man who had relied on talent rather than belligerence to “rise above his circumstances.” Whites vaguely recognized in 1940 that he was beginning to emerge as a passionate defender of the underclasses, yet the lack of stridency and self-pity in his manner allowed them to persist in the comfortable illusion that his career proved the way was indeed open to those with sufficient pluck and aptitude, regardless of race—that the “system” worked.

Those whites who knew Robeson personally (and he had many white friends) recognized, more than the white world at large did, that his charismatic charm, his grace and generosity, real enough, were hardly a complete accounting of his personality. They had experienced his stubborn reserve, had seen his carefully controlled anger erupt, knew the limits of his gregariousness. By 1940, they also had become aware of his deepening political passion. They had heard him talk with a gravity dramatically
different from the unemphatic ease of his usual public self-presentation about the importance of preserving African culture from the corrupting influence of the West. They knew of his deep dismay over the destruction of Republican Spain, his mounting commitment to what he viewed as the anticolonial and egalitarian impulses of the Soviet Union, his mounting anger at the blind ethnocentrism of Europe's privileged classes in their continuing exploitation of colonial peoples.

Black Americans had watched Robeson work his way through the white world with an ease that seemed remarkable—and in moments of optimism provided a ray of hope. Here he was in 1940, son of an ex-slave, risen to be a highly regarded interpreter not only of spirituals but also of the plays of America's foremost white playwright, Eugene O'Neill. He had already starred, as well, in a London production of
Othello
with Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike, had sold out concert halls throughout Europe, had been a leading box-office draw in half a dozen films, and had, most recently, been the man chosen to sing on a nationwide radio broadcast—to immense acclaim—the stirring, patriotic “Ballad for Americans.” With seemingly equal ease, Robeson had moved beyond artistic recognition to social acceptance—at least in sophisticated white circles in England, where he and his family had resided for much of the thirties.

True, the black actor Ira Aldridge had been hailed for his talent before Robeson, just as the singer Roland Hayes had also filled concert halls. But Robeson had combined both their gifts, had added an outstanding career in athletics, a degree in law, a scholar's ability to summon up wide-ranging points of reference, and a linguist's ability to communicate in several languages. And beyond all these accomplishments, and perhaps more inspiring than any of them to the “ordinary” black American, was Robeson's deepening commitment to improving the lot of people of color around the world. Here was an important black artist who viewed his gifts and his worldly success not as ends in themselves, but as instruments for helping the race.

Most blacks were too open-eyed to believe, as most whites did, that Robeson's success proved that the American system “worked,” that it even remotely offset the otherwise prevalent enormities of discrimination. Nor did most blacks interpret (as most whites did) the phenomenon of one exceptionally gifted black man's being allowed through the net as evidence that the net was porous—or even that Robeson's own acceptance was without very real boundaries and qualifications. Still, it was worth knowing, however much white America overemployed the information, that a few supremely gifted blacks did occasionally get the chance to demonstrate their gifts. It was worth even more to know that one such black had become determined to see that others—gifted or not—got their entitlement to a dignified life.

Had the class prophet resumed his duties in 1940 and tried to cast
ahead yet another twenty years, he might have justifiably been confident that Robeson's triumphs would multiply and his influence consolidate. This time he would have been woefully wrong. From 1940 to 1960 Robeson evolved fully from an artist with a conscience to an artist committed to political action. He moved from the view that his own accomplishments would open doors for others to the conviction that the doors remained so firmly secured that those who had somehow pushed through them had to see to their permanent dismantling as a
primary
obligation. During the years of Roosevelt's New Deal, Robeson remained reasonably hopeful that white America would itself recognize the worst aspects of institutionalized racism and work to expunge them. But as the democratic impulses of the New Deal drained off into the intolerance of postwar McCarthyism, his real hope fastened on the ultimate transforming power of international socialism. He never ceased being an American patriot—continuing to believe in the inspirational promise of the country's principles, if not her practice—but the more white America failed, in the post-World War II years, to stand up for the rights of people of color, the more Robeson grew into a militant spokesman for the world's oppressed. The country's failure to set its house in order, to ransom its own promise, brought out in him not—as in so many others—weary acquiescence but, rather, uncompromising anger, a dogged refusal to bow.

Robeson's stand endeared him still further to those who shared his politics and his principles, but cost him dearly with the multitude of mainstream Americans who had once been among his admirers. By 1960 his career and health had been broken, his name vilified, his honor—even his good sense—assailed, his image converted by a now hostile establishment from public hero to public enemy. Branded a Soviet apologist, kept under close surveillance by the FBI, his right to travel abroad denied by the State Department and his opportunities to perform at home severely curtailed, deserted by most of the beholden black leadership, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson.

This extraordinary turnabout in what had been one of the great twentieth-century careers is a singularly American story, emblematic of its times yet transcending them, encompassing not merely Cold War hysteria during one moment in our history but racial symbolism and racial consciousness throughout our history. That a man so deeply loved all over the world could evoke in his own country such an outpouring of fear and anger may be the central tragedy—America's tragedy—of Paul Robeson's story.

CHAPTER 1

Boyhood

(1898–1914)

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the century—and to some extent down to the present day—was known as the northernmost outpost of the Confederacy. Long before the Civil War, Southern aristocrats had enrolled their sons at Princeton University, considering it the only “safe” educational institution for those willing to venture north at all. Some Southern families even sent along—in one of those fits of inadvertent irony in which American history abounds—trusted black servants to insulate their scions from the potential hazards of an alien white culture. And thus from an early time the town of Princeton had a black population—and antiblack attitudes.

Even without the infusion of Southern aristocrats, Princeton had its own native tradition of hostility toward blacks, a hostility found in abundance everywhere in the country. By the early years of the twentieth century, that hostility was resurgent and the explicit Jim Crow principle in schooling, transportation, and restaurants had replaced even the marginal ambiguities of the post-Reconstruction period. Black teachers lost their jobs in integrated schools; black citizens were denied access to hotels; black workers were eliminated from trade unions. Social scientists in the universities (Franz Boas, the anthropologist, was among the notable exceptions) had begun bolstering the old doctrines of innate inferiority with their new “objective” expertise, uniting around the “scientific” doctrine that blacks were a separate species, one step above the ape on the evolutionary scale. Books appeared with such inflammatory, unapologetic titles as
The Negro a Beast
and
The Negro: A Menace to Civilization
. On the eve of World War I, the movie
Birth of a Nation
summarized the accumulated
ideology and practice of the preceding two decades by portraying noble-hearted whites reluctantly taking the law into their own hands in order to curb the excesses of savage blacks—and was a resounding popular success. Rural areas of the South added burning at the stake to lynch law's already potent arsenal of terror (there were more than eleven hundred lynchings of Southern blacks in the years 1900–14) and in the cities mob violence edged northward to explode with special ferocity in 1908 at Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln.
¹