Paul Robeson (147 page)

13.
CAA News Release, April 13, 1953 (“brothers and sisters”), LC; Tambo to PR, Nov. 1954, PR to African National Congress, Dec. 4, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR. Additional PR activities in behalf of South Africa are in
Daily Worker
, April 7, 1952;
Spotlight on Africa
(CAA newsletter), April 14, 1952; PR telegram to
Advance
(Cape Town newspaper), April 15, 1943, NYPL/Schm.

14.
New York
Herald Tribune
, April 24, 1949;
New Africa
, vol. 8, no. 5, (May 1949);
The New York Times
, April 26, 1949.

15.
The quotes in the text are taken from Alphaeus Hunton's translation from the French (transcript in RA). Because there is controversy on this point, Ivor Montagu (a British delegate to the Congress) sent me the printed transcript in French (source uncited), in which the relevant phrases are: “
Et nous ne voulons pas de ces imbécillités hystériques parlant de nous faire partir en guerre contre qui que ce soîl. Nous avons, nous, la ferme volonté de combattre pour la paix. (Applaudissements) Nous ne voulons pas partir en guerre pour n'importe qui et contre n'importe qui. (Acclamations) Nous ne voulons pas partir en guerre contre L'Union
Soviétique. (Nouvelles acclamations)
” The only full and unimpeachable record of what Robeson said in Paris is on a film of the event that is known to exist but has so far resisted all efforts at recovery; unless it can be found, Robeson's actual words cannot be verified.

16.
The full transcript of the AP dispatch is in RA. In his testimony on the Mundt-Nixon Bill on May 31, 1948, Robeson had openly expressed sentiments close to those falsely ascribed to him in Paris a year later—but with the important difference that he claimed to be speaking only for himself: “Question: Would you fight for America if we were at war with Russia? Answer: That would depend on the conditions of war with Russia, how the war came up and who is in power at the time, etc.… That's just too hypothetical.… I would like to say that I would be on the American side to have peace. I would struggle for peace at all points.… If the American government would be a Fascist government, then I would not support it.… I am an anti-Fascist, and I would fight Fascism whether it happens to be the German, the French or American species.… I would do it under the banner of being an American and protecting the Democratic rights of the American people.”

17.
In an interview with me (Sept. 7, 1982 [PR, Jr., participating]), Ivor Montagu, who heard Robeson's speech, said he recalled nothing untoward or unexpected in it—nothing like the inflammatory words the AP dispatch ascribed to him. Randolph is quoted in Patrick S. Washburn,
A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press During World War II
(Oxford University Press, 1986).

18.
INS memos, April 25–May 6, 1949, FBI 56275-730.

19.
Marilyn Smith (State Department) to Walter White, April 21, 1949, LC: NAACP, enclosing a copy of the story she wrote for release to the news media following their phone conversation of that morning, along with a copy of the statement Mary McLeod Bethune had given to her over the phone (“Mr. Robeson's remarks … chilled my blood. I just cannot understand it”). White's comments were widely dispersed by the State Department—Voice of America, European Regional File, Middle East File, Wireless Bulletin, Mission Services, Far East File—and in various forms appeared in the press (e.g., New York
Herald Tribune
, May 1, 1949). For confirmation that the State Department had initiated White's statement, see “Secretary to Mr. White” (not otherwise identified) to Mark Stanley Matthews, May 20, 1949, LC: NAACP: “Immediately upon receiving word of Mr. Robeson's statement, the State Department called on Mr. White for a statement.” Earl Brown, “Once Over Lightly,” New York
Amsterdam News
, April 29, 30, 1949.

20.
Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983.

21.
Ibid.

22.
Columbia, South Carolina,
Record
, April 26, 1949;
The New York Times
, April 24, 25, 26, Nov. 7 (Randolph), 1949; New York
Amsterdam News
, April 29, 30, 1949; Detroit
Tribune
, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh
Courier
, April 30, 1949; Chicago
Defender
, April 30, 1949 (editorial headlined “Nuts to Mr. Robeson,” attacking him for having gotten “so far away from the race” that he had lost his “moorings”); New York
Age
, April 30, May 7, 1949;
Christian Science Monitor
, May 3, 1949 (summary); Du Bois,
Negro Digest
, March 1950 (Morgan). Bethune also devoted a full column (Chicago
Defender
, April 30, 1949) to attacking Robeson's “presumption” and to declaring that she “thoroughly disagreed with such an expression of disloyalty.…” Predictably, the conservative black columnist George S. Schuyler roasted Robeson for “brushing aside … the well-known brutalities, injustices and calculated fiendishness of Red concentration camps which have been filled largely with minority groups of the Soviet Union and the satellite countries” (Pittsburgh
Courier
, May 7, 1949). Less predictably, Fritz Pollard, Robeson's old football buddy, offered a more-in-sorrow comment: “Paul's at it again, playing Emperor Jones.… Sometimes he thinks he's the Negro island liberator, Henri Christophe. Despite his spectacular popoffs, he's no Commie, in his heart” (New York
Age
, April 30,
1949). There are in LC: NAACP a half-dozen letters congratulating Walter White on his remarks, in language more intemperate than any White himself had used (e.g., Robeson “has not ever bothered to take the pulse of a race he presumes to represent”: Capt. Leonard L. Bruce, April 22, 1949).

23.
Interviews with Bayard Rustin, March 25, April 20, 1983. William Pickens III corroborates Rustin's view that (in Pickens's words) “Down deep the black leadership had a warm spot for Paul Robeson”—they had no intention of falling behind him as “the leader,” but were nonetheless pleased that “somebody was raising the issues of fundamental racism in American life” (interview with Pickens, Oct. 3, 1983).

24.
Mark Solomon, “Black Critics of the Cold War”; Modjeska (Mrs. Andrew W.) Simkins (executive committeewoman of the Republican Party of South Carolina and prominent in the S.C. NAACP; she was to take part in the Welcome Home rally for PR on June 19, 1949, at Rockland Palace) to the Columbia
Record
, May 2, 1949; Durham, N.C.,
Times
, April 30, 1949; Pittsburgh
Courier
, June 25, 1949.

25.
Max Yergan's letter is in the New York
Herald Tribune
, April 23, 1949.

26.
Abner Berry, New York Age, May 21, 1949. “As We See It,”
Daily Worker
, May 2, 1949; Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.,
Daily Worker
, May 8, 1949; Du Bois's letter is in the Norfolk
Journal and Guide
, May 28, 1949, and the New York
Amsterdam News
, May 21, 1949.

27.
The typescript of ER's speech is in RA.

28.
Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. (PR's anger); Patterson to PR, May 17, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC; Charles P. Howard to ER, May 10, 1949, RA; Vito Marcantonio to ER, April 29, 1949, NYPL: Marcantonio;
Congressional Record
, April 28, 1949.

29.
The Crisis
, May 1949, p. 137. The black California
Eagle
editorially protested the
Crisis
article (June 2, 1949). In his autobiography,
Standing Fast
, Wilkins backhandedly admits to having written the editorial (pp. 205–6). Yet, when Robeson died, in 1976, Wilkins wrote, “Anything to spread black culture and manhood was his lifelong doctrine.… Any Negro who protested the treatment of the black citizens was called a communist or worse.” Unless Wilkins was merely paying perfunctory homage to the recently dead, this statement amounts to a complete retraction of his 1949
Crisis
editorial.

30.
Ben Davis, Jr., to ER, May 25, 1949, RA; Davis to White, May 28, 1949, LC: NAACP. In an article Davis wrote before the
Crisis
editorial appeared, he had already set Walter White apart from the “political street-walker Max Yergan,” the “foxy old reformist Channing Tobias,” and “Rep. Adam Powell with his double-talk,” as “more nearly reflect[ing] the feelings of the Negro people” (
Daily Worker
, May 8, 1949).

31.
Howard to Wilkins, May 26, 1949, CHS: Barnett. Howard not only sent Barnett (the head of the Associated Negro Press) a copy but also sent one to Alphaeus Hunton and another to Dr. Louis Wright (Howard to Wright, May 27, 1949, LC: NAACP); and he sent a form letter to key members of the Progressive Party soliciting letters of protest to Wilkins (Howard to Barnett, May 27, 1949, CHS: Barnett; Howard to “Dear Friend,” May 27, 1949; Howard to Hunton, May 26, 1949; Ben Davis, Jr., to Hunton, May 28, 1949, RA). C. B. (“Beanie”) Baldwin, executive secretary of the Progressive Party, was among those who wrote in: “I regard [Robeson] as one of the world's great human beings”; he “happens to believe that the struggle for democratic rights for the Negro people cannot be separated from the struggle for peace” (Baldwin to Wilkins, June 2, 1949, RA). Larkin Marshall, cochairman of the Progressive Party in Georgia, was another who responded (Marshall to Hunton, May 28, 1949, enclosing a copy of a pro-Robeson editorial Marshall wrote for the Macon
World
, RA).

32.
Memo from White to Wilkins, June 3, 1949; memo from Wilkins to White, June 6, 1949, LC: NAACP.

33.
Wilkins,
Standing Fast
, pp. 205–6; AP dispatch, July 13, 1949 (NAACP convention), RA.(Mary Church Terrell to Hunton, June 6, 1949, RA).

34.
The New York Times
, April 25, 1949;
Christian Science Monitor
, May 2, 1949 (Stockholm); PR to Diamond, May 1, 1949, RA. FBI Main 100-12304-126 reports that during the Stockholm concert the trouble started when Robeson “sang a Russian anthem. The first verse, sung in Russian, was greeted quietly; however, when he sang the second verse in English, which most of the audience understood, a demonstration started, which for a time drowned out the singer. Anti-Communists answered with loud cheers and frantic applause. Following the an them, Robeson stepped to the microphone and told the audience he could no longer draw the line between his art and his political convictions. He said he wanted universal peace, but above all peace with the Soviet Union.” FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2 (“beyond control”) also reports PR as saying, “I can assure you they [blacks] will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the Peoples Democracies.” An indication of how PR addressed criticism of his pro-Soviet stance before a predominantly
black
audience is in a speech he gave at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem on Aug. 30, 1949: “What did Soviet Russia ever do for me? (Laughter) I said, Just a minute now. One thing they did for you—in destroying fascism; you remember, you better remember this Hitler again. He destroyed six million Jewish people—burned six million Jewish people up. He was just hoping to get hold of ten or fifteen million Negroes to burn up. Well, the reason he couldn't get hold of them happened to be because ten to twenty million Russians took him” (tape recording of speech, RA).

35.
National Guardian
, May 2, 1949; Chicago
Defender
, May 21, 1949; Norfolk
Journal and Guide
, May 2, 1949; press release from the CAA, May 11, 1949, RA (second denial). The full text of the Copenhagen interview with Robeson is in RA.

36.
The Times
(London), April 23, 1949 (Copenhagen); Ulf Christensen, “Paul Robeson's Visit to Oslo,” June 6, 1949, RA. Apparently somewhat apprehensive, Rockmore wrote Larry Brown, “Thanks for your two notes from Oslo immediately before and after the concert. I breathed a sigh of relief with you” (Rockmore to Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

37.
John Payne to Larry Brown, May 6, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown; PR, Jr., interview with Bruno Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr.

38.
National Guardian
, June 13, 1949 (Prague reception); Pittsburgh
Courier
, June 4, 1949; Baltimore
Afro-American
, June 7, 1949; Josef Å kvorecký, “Red Music,” in
The Bass Saxophone
(Knopf, 1977), p. 19. Škvorecký was speaking generally; he didn't mean, he later explained, that PR was in Prague at the exact time of Horáková's execution (Škvoreckyý to Barbara Bristol, Sept. 9, 1987, courtesy of Bristol). In fact, Horáková was executed on June 27, 1950.
The New York Times
(Dec. 7, 1949) and
Time
(Dec. 19, 1949) reported that in Prague, Harry James's music was much preferred to Robeson's.

39.
PR, Jr., interviews with Raikin (Sept. 8, 1982) and Blackman (Sept. 9, 1982), transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.; Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 201–02.

40.
Richard Yaffe, in
The Jewish Week-American Examiner
, Feb. 1–7, 1976, recalls Robeson singing “Zog Nit Kaynmal,” the song of the Warsaw ghetto fighters, during his 1949 Warsaw concert, but Yaffe's article contains a number of inaccuracies and it is probable, nearly thirty years after the event, that he confused Robeson's Warsaw performance with the concert that followed in Moscow. PR, Jr., interview with Peter Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In an article for the Polish newspaper
Trybuna Ludu
, June 2, 1949, Robeson expressed his be lief that “the strength of the progressive camp in America is greater than during the elections in 1948” and his conviction that “the reign of capitalism and imperialism will end.” The optimism may have been for the consumption of a particular audience, may have marked yet another resurgence of hopefulness—or may have been manufactured or misquoted by whoever ghost-wrote the article.