Paul Robeson (143 page)

19.
FBI New York 100-25857-156 (March 21, 1946); California
Eagle
, March 14, 1946;
Daily People's World
, March 26, 1946.

20.
FBI New York 100-25857-156 (March 21, 1946).

21.
Ibid. The FBI believed PR had “apparently increasingly come under the control of Max Yergan,” himself described as “a leader in Communist front activities,” and accurately characterized Robeson as being “reticent in giving his approval to send the [original] letter over signature” (Main 100-12304-40, April 5, 1946). Other prominent blacks, along with significant portions of the black press, protested Churchill's speech (Mark Solomon, “Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,” in T. G. Paterson,
Cold War Critics
(Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 217–19.

22.
The People's Voice
, March 30, 1946;
New Africa
, Jan. 1946 (famine); Yergan to Du Bois, Jan. 17, 1946, reports on the success of the famine campaign (U.Mass.: Du Bois); program on the April Win the
Peace Conference and typed ms. of Temple Israel speech, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-158 (telephone log of PR phoning his Win the Peace speech).

23.
The Win the Peace program is in RA. A “Big Three Unity for Colonial Freedom” rally held on June 6, 1946, in Madison Square Garden is a further example of the wide variety of prominent Americans in attendance: among others, Mary McLeod Bethune, Norman Corwin, Judy Holliday, Lena Home (Louise Hopkins to PR, April 25, 1946, RA). Nehru was among those who sent cables in support of the meeting (Nehru to PR, May 16, 1946, RA). Stettinius to PR, May 24, 1946, RA.

During 1946 Robeson made dozens of political appearances in addition to those cited above. He contributed to half a dozen Win the Peace rallies from coast to coast. He lent his presence both to organizational conferences and to mass meetings sponsored by the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs. And he put in single appearances in behalf of such causes and commemorative celebrations as the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the
New Masses
magazine, the 3rd American Slav Congress, the Oust Bilbo Dinner (at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York) and the Southern Youth Legislature (at Columbia, South Carolina). Because the sentiments he expressed on these occasions are already summarized in the detailed account above of several of his appearances in 1946, I have refrained from unnecessary duplication. One additional appearance, however, is worth special mention. On Dec. 29, 1946, PR spoke to the Convention of Alpha Phi Alpha, the leading black fraternity, which was
not
known as outspokenly political, and did not trim his sentiments to his audience. He deplored the role of the U.S. government “in extending loans and credits and even guns to the powers which are trying to maintain their empires,” hailed the role India and the U.S.S.R. had played in the United Nations in thwarting the attempt by General Smuts of the Union of South Africa to annex South-West Africa, applauded “the new democratic states which have been born in Central Europe since the end of the war: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia.…” In regard to domestic policy, he called for a determined effort to get the new Congress to pass antilynching legislation, create a permanent FEPC, and end poll-tax discrimination. “If the Democratic party and the Republican party cannot do this job,” he said, prefiguring the role he was soon to play in the Progressive Party campaign, “then it will be necessary for the people to form a new party of their own” (ms. of the talk is in RA).

24.
Several versions of PR's Sept. 12, 1946, speech at the Garden are in RA; a summarizing Associated Negro Press release is in CHS: Barnett. In the speech, Robeson singled out Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York for excoriation because of his whitewash of a Long Island policeman who had killed two black veterans. The black political cartoonist Ollie Harrington helped make Isaac Woodward's blinding into a major NAACP case. Harrington invited only foreign correspondents to a press conference and presented Woodward, along with his doctors, to them. At a second press conference, Harrington recalls Robeson and Yergan looking reproachfully at him from the audience, as if to say, “This case belongs to
us
.” Harrington deeply admired Robeson but thought this attitude unworthy of him—“It was the saddest moment in my relation with Robeson” (interview with Harrington, July 29, 1986). Walter White asked Harrington to become public-relations director for the NAACP, but as red-baiting pressures mounted, he decided to live in Europe.

25.
Robeson's telegram to Du Bois asking him to join the call, dated Aug. 30, 1946, is in U.Mass.: Du Bois.

26.
White to PR, Sept. 10, 1946; Gloucester B. Current (NAACP director of branches) to Edward M. Swan (executive secretary, Detroit branch of NAACP), special delivery, Sept. 20, 1946; memo from Franklin H. Williams to White, Sept. 17, 1946, denouncing the American Crusade as “irresponsible”; White to Du Bois, Sept. 19, Oct. 2, 1946; Du Bois to White, Sept. 23, 1946—all in LC: NAACP. The Rev. Charles A. Hill, president of the Detroit branch of the
NAACP, like Du Bois denied that he had ever been told of the “broadly representative” National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence; now that he had belatedly been informed, he wrote White, he was nonetheless going to attend the Robeson gathering—“I will go representing my church.… If there is not a good showing … the reflection will be on all of the liberal forces” (Hill to White, Sept. 18, 1946, LC: NAACP). Revels Cayton, in line with the policy of the National Negro Congress to challenge the NAACP for leadership of black workers, urged attendance at the American Crusade gathering (Cayton to Jack Bjoze, executive secretary, Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Aug. 30, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

In June 1946 the NNC had presented a petition to the UN calling for action in behalf of the oppressed black citizens of the United States. The list of the United Nations Campaign Committee is in NYPL/Schm: NNC and does not include a single member of the NAACP hierarchy (or that of any other mainstream black organization). It does include the names of many leading CP and left-wing figures, black and white, among them Robeson, Ben Davis, Jr., Du Bois, Frederick Field, Doxey Wilkerson, Albert Kahn, Ben Gold, Michael Quill, Irwin Potash, Lawrence Reddick, Ferdinand Smith, Henry Winston, and, among the “publicists,” Langston Hughes. In response to Yergan's appeal for support of the petition drive, Mary McLeod Bethune wrote him, “… there is a question in our minds as to whether the approach to the existing conditions here in our own United States should come through the United Nations, whose problems for consideration are international rather than national” (Bethune to Yergan, Nov. 20, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC).

27.
The People's Voice
, Sept. 28, 1946. Robeson also spoke on MBS radio on Sept. 83, 1946, denouncing lynching (the text of the talk is in RA; there was a lengthy excerpt in
The People's Voice
, Jan. 11, 1947). The limited success of the Crusade meetings is described in the papers of the NNC (letter from Nellie Zakin to participants, NYPL/Schm), along with letters of thanks to the contributors, who included, among others, Roger de Koven, Mercedes McCambridge, and Jan Minor; memo from Gloucester Current to Walter White, Sept. 24, 1946, LC: NAACP.

28.
The New York Times
, Sept. 24, 1946; Philadelphia
Tribune
, Sept. 24, 1946; New York
World-Telegram
, Sept. 23, 1946; Chicago
Sun
, Sept. 24, 1946;
The People's Voice
, Sept. 28, 1946 (which listed the delegates as [besides Robeson] Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Palmer Memorial Institute, Sedalia, N.C.; Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the Council of Church Women; Rev. W. H. Jernagin, National Baptist Convention; Dr. Joseph L. Johnson, dean of the Howard University School of Medicine; Dr. Max Yergan; and Aubrey Williams, editor of the
Southern Farmer
). Additionally, the Chicago
Defender
(Sept. 28, 1946) lists Metz T. P. Lorchard, editor-in-chief of the
Defender;
Rabbi Irving Miller, American Jewish Congress; and an “H. Murphy of Chicago” as being part of the delegation. The several FBI reports (New York 100-25857-188, 196) headed “Re: American Crusade to End Lynching,” have nearly their entire contents inked out. Apparently the decision to go from the meeting to the White House was spur-of-the-moment. Later recounting the event, George B. Murphy, Jr. (the left-wing scion of the family that owned the
Afro-American
), wrote, “… on the platform … the question came up about going down to the White House to picket.… Dr. Jernagin began to caution ‘restraint': ‘Why Dr. Jernagin,' [Paul said,] ‘it looks to me like these folks want us to lead them down to the White House and I think that is what we should do.' Presto, Dr. Jernagin got his hat and went right along with Paul to do just that” (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U.Mass.: Du Bois).

29.
The complete transcript of Robeson's testimony before the Tenney Committee was printed in a California newspaper, the Westwood Hills
Press
, Oct. 18, 1946; unless otherwise cited, the quotations in the following paragraphs come from that source. Additional detail on the committee can be found in Edward
L. Barrett, Jr.,
The Tenney Committee
(Cornell University Press, 1951).

30.
Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC.

31.
As early as 1941, Robeson wrote of having been with “my friend Revels Cayton” (PR to Freda Diamond, Aug. 1941, courtesy of Diamond). Yergan to William Schneiderman, Aug. 23, 1945; Yergan to Jeanne Pastor, Dec. 12, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton (PR, Jr., participating), April 27–28, 1982; separate interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Cayton, 1987–88. There is an additional and revealing group of letters in NYPL/Schm: NNC concerning Cayton's arrival at NNC and the need to reorient the Congress's purpose (e.g., Thelma M. Dale to William L. Patterson, Sept. 26, 1945; Patterson to Cayton and Matt Crawford, July 2, 1945; Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945; Cayton to Crawford, Jan. 3, 14, Feb. 1, 1946; Cayton to James Hunter [CIO], Jan. 10, 1946). In explaining his attraction to the Party, Cayton sounded a note close to Robeson's own: “I found a new world … a kind of equality with whites, within the Party, that I'd never known before. And it was attractive” (interview, April 29, 1982). Similar sentiments can be found in two other books by or about black Communists: Nell Irvin Painter,
The Narrative of Hosea Hudson
(Harvard University Press, 1979); Harry Haywood,
Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
(Liberator Press, 1978). As an example of the personal closeness between the two men, Robeson talked to Cayton (and to few others) about his relationship with Lena Horne, telling Cayton that she broke up with him when he refused to marry her. Home's own (platonic) version of the friendship is in
In Person: Lena Home
, pp. 181–87. She reiterated her denial of a love affair in our phone interview of Sept. 8, 1987: “It would never have occurred to me to be physical with him—he was too mythic.”

32.
Yergan to Cayton, Aug. 23, 1945, NYPL/Schm: NNC (reorientation of NNC). Cayton correspondence, NYPL/Schm: NNC; interviews with Revels and Lee Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews with Revels Cayton, 1987–88.

33.
Interview with Revels Cayton, April 29, 1982. Addie Wyatt, who worked with the Packinghouse Union in the early 1950s, also emphasized to me Robeson's concern about unity among black and white workers in the trade-union movement (interview with Wyatt, Jan. 7, 1986). According to Annette Rubinstein, who worked closely with Vito Marcantonio in the American Labor Party, “Marc very much distrusted and disliked Ben Davis.” Marcantonio and Doxey Wilkerson were both “horrified” to learn that during the war Davis knew and kept quiet about the Party's sanctioning segregated meetings in the South (interview with Rubinstein, Dec. 5, 1983). Angus Cameron recalls once asking Ben Davis directly what he thought about the question of whether American blacks constituted a nation. Davis's reply was (according to Cameron): “The Party was wrong when it held that blacks in America were a nation, and also when it held they were not a nation” (Cameron to me, April 25, 1987).

34.
Interviews with Cayton, April 1982; follow-up phone interviews 1987–88; Cayton to Yergan, Oct. 11, 1946, NYPL/Schm: NNC. Another description of Cayton and Robeson in action together, this time at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the NNC on May 31, 1946, in Detroit, is in
New Masses
, June 18, 1946, written by Abner W. Berry, the black Communist. For a negative view of the NNC, strongly “anti-Communist” in bias, see Wilson Record,
Race and Radicalism
(Cornell University Press, 1964).

Speaking to the delegates to the Longshore and Shipsclerks' caucus at their convention in San Francisco in August 1943, Robeson had saluted Harry Bridges as a “courageous leader” (
The Dispatcher
, Sept. 3, 1943). And when Bridges, who was foreign-born, was being threatened with deportation in 1945, Robeson had written in his defense directly to President Roosevelt, stating that “Bridges has stood steadfastly against discrimination.” Bridges's record was better than that of Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union, but privately Robeson would argue with him about the
need to wage a stronger fight against racial discrimination in the ILWU. Bridges later came to resent the movement for black caucuses, insisting the effort would split his union (
The Dispatcher
, March 9, 1945;
The Pilot
[NMU], March 16, 1945). On the other hand, Bridges's reputation as a champion of black rights remained high enough for the National Negro Labor Council to pass a special resolution in support of his fight against deportation at its second annual convention, in 1952 (
The Dispatcher
, Dec. 5, 1952).