Paul Robeson (114 page)

18.
The Philoclean episode is in Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of
Paulina Forsythe. “A thing apart” is from ms. of PR's column in
Freedom
, Dec. 1950 (PR Coll., New York Public Library, Manuscript Division, henceforth NYPL/Ms. Div.).

19.
Storck's recollections are as reported to me by his daughter Dorothy D. Storck (phone interview, May 5, 1987); Charles N. Prickett to PR, Dec. 8, 1969, RA (“watching”).

20.
Geraldine (Maimie) Neale Bledsoe, mss. of three unpublished talks about PR, undated (1970s), courtesy of Bledsoe. For more detail on these mss., see note 26.

21.
New Brunswick
Daily Home News
, June 5, 1919; Dorothy Butler Gilliam,
Paul Robeson, All-American
(New Republic, 1976), p. 20. PR's thesis is printed in Philip S. Foner, ed.,
Paul Robeson Speaks
(Citadel, 1978), pp. 53–62.

22.
Sunday Times
(New Brunswick), June 8, 1930 (Demarest).

23.
PR's valedictory speech is in RA and was also printed in full in the Rutgers
Targum
, June 1919; Charles E. Bloodgood to Hans Knight, Aug. 21, 1975, carbon courtesy of Paulina Forsythe (audience standing).

24.
In my reading of PR's valedictory speech, I find Sterling Stuckey's characterization of it as showing “an essentially nationalist stand” off the mark. (Stuckey, “‘I Want To Be African': Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice,”
The Massachusetts Review
, Spring 1976). At the other extreme, Harold Cruse has argued that Robeson never developed a nationalist perspective (
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
[Morrow, 1967]). Stuckey and Cruse have tangled extensively over this question in print, but since the controversy focuses on the 1930s, the bulk of my discussion of the issues will be found in the chapters on those years. Suffice it to say here that in my view both men, though coming at the question from opposite perspectives, adopt a static analysis, failing to detect the
developmental
aspect of Robeson's thought, and failing also to make a crucially needed distinction between the public words Robeson spoke as a young man to white or mixed audiences and the private words he spoke (and the inner emotions he felt) with black friends—a distinction I have tried to draw in this chapter. For the Stuckey-Cruse controversy, see also Stuckey, “The Cultural Philosophy of Paul Robeson,”
Freedomways
, First Quarter 1971; Cruse, “A Review of the Paul Robeson Controversy,”
First World
, vol.2, no.3, 1979; and Stuckey, “On Cultural Nihilism,” ms. copy, RA.

25.
Interview with Sadie Goode Davenport Shelton and her son Robert Davenport, March 26, 1985 (PR, Jr., participating); interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983. Sadie Goode only met PR and the “Trenton crowd” a few times; her husband was closer to them. After graduation, Davenport went to teach at Slater (Winston-Salem) and then in Texas, but kept in occasional touch with PR. Though he died young (1939), before PR became a controversial figure, Davenport was, according to his widow, always quick to defend him against slurs of any kind. When Davenport died, PR was unable to attend the funeral, but was moved enough to ask his brother Rev. Ben Robeson to represent him. As late as 1952, when in the New Jersey area, PR stopped by to say hello to Sadie Davenport's father, a Montclair chauffeur on whose porch PR had sometimes slept as an undergraduate if he missed connections back to New Brunswick (he slept on the porch, not inside, because “it was late and he didn't want to disturb anyone in the house”). In PR's “College Scrapbook” (RA), Davvy wrote, “‘In you I see more and more the qualities of my ideal'—Selected. Oh! Boy!”

26.
The Neale quotations which follow to the end of this chapter are taken from some eight to ten letters from her to me, three of which (July 17, Aug. 6, 1983, April 14, 1985) are lengthy memoirs totaling about fifty pages. She also kindly sent me six unpublished speeches that she delivered over the years about PR, which I also quote from in this and subsequent paragraphs. Since this batch of materials is privately held, I will not attempt precise citations here; suffice it to say that all quotations in this section are drawn from the private collection—unless
otherwise noted. In PR's fragmentary “College Scrapbook” and “Memory and Fellowship Book” (RA), there is one definite mention of “Gerry” and three other probable references to her.

27.
“Wish my family in Freehold had not discarded mine,” Gerry Neale Bledsoe wrote me (July 7, 1983) in regard to their exchange of letters. Neither side of the correspondence exists in RA, either. The 1919 baseball game had also marked the very last time PR would play in any athletic event for Rutgers. As the newspaper accounts in RA make clear, he played “in wonderful style,” and Rutgers won the game 5–1. A jubilant PR told Gerry, who attended the game, that he was “thrilled” to have beaten “Proud Princeton,” which “up to that time had never played a team with a black player on it” (unpublished Bledsoe speech).

28.
The “English friend” is Leonora (“Pat”) Gregory (now Stitt). She co-wrote several of PR's articles (including the well-known “Primitives”) in the thirties. She has described the composition and ramifications of the articles in a series of letters to me (for more, see note 43, p. 625). PR was so pleased with the articles that he and Gregory began discussing the possibility of doing a book together, a project interrupted by PR's 1939 return to the States. The book did reach the stage of a written “draft plan,” which Stitt kindly shared with me. The quotations about adolescence and college are taken from this “draft plan.”

29.
This account is taken from two of the dozen letters previously cited from Gerry Neale Bledsoe to me, those of Aug. 6, 1983, and April 14, 1985. PR and Gerry Neale possibly met through the well-to-do Moore family; the two daughters, Bessie and Christine, had become Gerry's closest friends, and Bessie was a classmate at Teachers Normal. There are letters from Christine Moore to Paul's sister, Marian, right up to CM's death in 1972 (letters courtesy of Paulina Forsythe).

30.
Bledsoe's version of these events, as described in letters to me, has been confirmed by Sadie Davenport Shelton (interview, March 26, 1985—“Gerry turned him down”).

31.
The “class prophecy” is in the Rutgers
Targum
, June 1919, which in an accompanying editorial expressed the hope, “May Rutgers never forget this noble son.…” Evidence of Paul's “deputizing” for his father is in the Somerset
Messenger
, Nov. 1, 1916, where he is recorded as delivering the “response” after welcoming addresses at a district missionary convention held at St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion. PR's flirtation with the ministry is described in an article and an interview from the twenties: PR, “My Father's Parsonage …,”
Sunday Sun
(London), Jan. 13, 1929; interview with Rev. Robertson Ballard,
Methodist Times
, Jan. 3, 1929; Charlotte Himber,
Famous in Their Twenties
(YMCA, 1942), p. 98 for “zeal” (as told to Himber by Ben Robeson).

CHAPTER
3
COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE
(1919–1921)

1.
For these and other details on the condition of the black masses, see the convenient summary in ch. 1 of Harvard Sitkoff,
A New Deal for Blacks
, vol. I,
The Depression Decade
(Oxford, 1978).

2.
Ms. of PR's column for the first (Dec. 1950) issue of
Freedom
, PR Coll., NYPL/Schm. (Streeter's). The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from an unpublished autobiographical account, of roughly thirty-five thousand words, by Eslanda Goode Robeson in RA. The ms. was meant to be part of her 1930 book,
Paul Robeson, Negro
, but only a segment of the section dealing with 1922–28 ever appeared in print (hereafter Ms. Auto.)

3.
Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (D.C. riot).

4.
Interview with Frances Quiett (Challenger), Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with May Chinn. Chinn may have first met Robeson when they performed together; a program from July 1919 in the RA lists Chinn, Robeson, and Rudolph Fisher as appearing on a “public presentation
of music and speeches featuring outstanding young Negro collegians”; Robeson repeated his speech on the “New Idealism,” May Chinn accompanied on some songs, and Fisher spoke on “The Emancipation of Science.”

Details of Fisher's life are in
The Negro History Bulletin
, vol. II (Dec. 1938), p. 19. For current, highly favorable assessments of his work, see jervis Anderson,
This Was Harlem
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p. 210, and David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
(Knopf, 1981), p. 229. Additional information on May Chinn is in George Davis, “A Healing Hand in Harlem,”
New York Times Magazine
, April 22, 1979.

5.
Interview with Frances Quiett Challenger, Dec. 7, 1983; Sterner interview with Chinn.

6.
Ibid.

7.
Interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983 (tuition). Gene Sumner, a cousin of ER's friend Minnie Sumner and in 1917 manager of Lincoln University's football team, apparently was responsible for first inviting Robeson to Lincoln: “Hard pressed for a coach (World War I had drained off so much) Paul came down on my invitation and spent two days from Rutgers, where he was a star, teaching the boys ‘big league' football.” In 1919, Paul came “for a concert at a church … and he spent his two nights with me” (handwritten reminiscences by Gene Sumner are in the collections of the DuSable Museum for Black History and Culture, hereafter DSMC). The James Mayo (“Ink”) Williams quotes are from an interview with him by Studs Terkel in 1969 done as part of a roundtable discussion of Robeson with prominent blacks in the Chicago area (Margaret Burroughs, Judge Sidney Jones, Etta Moten Barnett, Earl Dickerson, “Ink” Williams, Charles V. Hamilton), recorded as a seventy-second birthday tribute to him. It was first played on WFMT Chicago on May 8, 1970, then later rebroadcast. I'm grateful to Terkel for letting me copy the tape. A friend of Frank Nied's quotes him as saying, “Robeson is a gentleman—than which there isn't … Also that Paul was amazingly game, refusing to quit when he was hurt, and that no amount of the terrific ganging naturally administered by the white (Nordic?) professionals could make him lose his head” (quoted in Nat Lewers to Alexander Woollcott, Nov. 29, 1933, RA). The account of Robeson's professional football career is compiled from newspaper clippings in RA. In her Ms. Auto., ER refers to the “big money” he was paid in pro ball. For more on PR and Thorpe, see note 11, p. 584. Robeson stayed in peripheral contact with Fritz Pollard through the years. As late as 1933, ER recorded in her diary, “Saw Fritz Pollard, of all people, and we talked old times over” (ER Diary, Feb. 22, 1933, RA). Pollard's quote about Akron is from an interview
The New York Times
did with him in 1978, as quoted in his obituary (
Times
, May 31, 1986).

8.
Interview with Henry A. Murray, Feb. 6, 1985. Because of the overall accuracy of the rest of his testimony and the specific detail (usually a sign of veracity) with which he described this episode, I've accepted Murray's account, although he was ninety-three years old at the time of our interview (yet entirely lucid as well as witty, I should add)—and although ER has left variant versions of her initial meeting with her future husband. In one newspaper interview (New York
Amsterdam News
, Aug. 6, 1938), she recalled first seeing him one day as she was going into DeVann's popular restaurant; in another (Birmingham
Post
, May 7, 1959), she recalled first
meeting
him “at a party in Harlem.” In her Ms. Auto, in RA, she recalls being first introduced to him—casually—when both were strolling with friends down Seventh Avenue in the summer of 1919. “Her alert mind,” she writes, “marked him, and stored him away. She saw him frequently that summer at parties, dances, tennis matches, and in the dining room of the Y.W.C.A., where all the young people congregated for meals; but she did not do more than to idly note that she must inquire about this young man. He seemed so universally popular.…” Possibly ER
asked
Dr. Murray to introduce her to his patient, having already “marked him out.” (One such combined version of their meeting, though with almost all the significant details
askew, can be found in Shirley Graham,
Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World
[Julian Wenner, 1946], pp. 119–20.) Among the other claimants to having introduced the couple, Judge Raymond Pace Alexander insists he did so when the two were guests of his at a picnic on a Hudson River Line steamer (Alexander to SALUTE committee, March 14, 1973, RA). Murray and the Robesons stayed marginally in touch over the years. ER wrote in her diary on Jan. 17, 1926 (RA), “Went to a party at Harry Murray's … and had a beautiful time.… Harry Murray and his wife are as sweet as ever.” As late as 1957, they sent him an affectionately inscribed Christmas card (the card courtesy of Eugene Taylor, archivist to H. A. Murray; also Murray to PR, 1925?, ER to Murray, Aug. 12, 1942, RA).

9.
In reconstructing the history of the Cardozo family, I've relied chiefly on two ms. sources: a twenty-page handwritten account (apparently set down for her daughter's edification) by Eslanda Cardozo Goode (“Ma” Goode, mother to Eslanda Goode Robeson); and Eslanda Goode Robeson's lengthy Ms. Auto. Both documents are in RA and are in general accord (but some of the variances are an illuminating index of their respective personalities), with Eslanda Goode Robeson's account the fuller one, combining her mother's version with additional source material. Unless otherwise cited, the family background described in the following pages is taken from these two mss. (with a few details filled in from printed sources, especially Euline W. Brock, “Thomas W. Cardozo: Fallible Black Reconstruction Leader,”
The Journal of Southern History
, May 1981).