Paul Robeson (148 page)

41.
FBI NY 100-25857-646A Referral Document #2; PR.Jr., interviews with Blackman, Sept. 9, 1982, and Raikin,
Sept. 8, 1982 (transcripts courtesy of PR, Jr.);
The New York Times
, June 8 (Scandalize), 15, 1949. The FBI had begun to entertain the possibility that Robeson had taken out Soviet citizenship (FBI New York 100-23857-557, report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service).

42.
Daily Worker
, July 4, 8, 1943;
Morning Freiheit
, Feb. 19, 1948 (memorial); PR, Jr., “How My Father Last Met Itzik Feffer, 1949,”
Jewish Currents
, Nov. 1981; Lloyd Brown, “Setting the Record Straight,”
Daily World
, Dec. 24, 1981; “Paul Robeson Jr. Refutes Lloyd Brown,
”Jewish Currents
, Feb. 1982; Lloyd L. Brown to Morris U. Schappes (editor,
Jewish Currents
), Dec. 14, 1981; PR, Jr., to Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981, RA; Blackman interview with PR, Jr., Sept. 9, 1982, transcript courtesy of PR, Jr. In their 1943 visit to the States, Mikhoels and Feffer had been representing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. For additional background on the two men, as well as on the fate of other Jewish writers and cultural functionaries, see Benjamin Pinkus,
The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967
(Cambridge University Press, 1984).

There are several variant versions of the meeting between Robeson and Feffer. Mikhoels's daughter published an account very close to PR, Jr.'s version, except that she places the meeting in 1951, which is clearly inaccurate, since Robeson's passport had by then been lifted (Natalya Mikhoels-Vovsi,
Vremya imwi
, no. 3 [Tel-Aviv, 1976], p. 190). Esther Markish, in her book
The Long Journey
(Ballantine paperback, 1978), pp. 171–72, asserts that Feffer dutifully performed the role demanded of him by the Soviet secret police and said nothing to Robeson about the purges. Yet a third version is in Dmitri Shostakovich,
Testimony
(Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 188–89), who places the meeting in a restaurant, with Feffer accompanied by police agents. Shostakovich angrily denounces Robeson for maintaining silence after returning to New York: “Why don't these famous humanists give a damn about us, our lives, honour, and dignity?”

43.
Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. Partial documentation—confirming the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song—is in the Polish newspaper
Kurjer Codzienny
, June 10, 1949: “He was given an unusually cordial reception.… The song about the Warsaw Ghetto was enthusiastically received by the audience.”
The New York Times
(June 15, 1949) and
New Times
(June 22, 1949) alike refer to the outpouring of acclaim for Robeson during his Moscow visit, without specific reference to the reception of the Warsaw Ghetto song. For another example of Robeson's publicly protesting Soviet anti-Semitism, see note 44, p. 736.

44.
“Paul Robeson's Soviet Journey,” an interview by Amy Schechter,
Soviet Russia Today
, Aug. 1949. At exactly this same time, the conservative black columnist Willard Townsend was arguing in the Chicago
Defender
(June 16, 1949) that “the open revival of anti-semitism in new forms is proceeding today at a rapid pace behind the formidable Iron Curtain.”

45.
The serious consideration in U.S. government circles of a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.S.R. is documented in Gregg Herken,
The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950
(Knopf, 1980). Robeson went from Moscow to Stalingrad, where he sang at a tractor factory and where a survivor of the battle of “Mamaev's Hill” took off the ring that only survivors of that battle were entitled to wear and put it on Robeson's finger. The ring was inscribed “To Paul Robeson, the American Stalingrader.” Robeson responded by referring to Stalingrad as “the very spot where our civilization was saved” (PR's handwritten notes, RA).

46.
The New York Times
, June 17, 1949; FBI New York 100-25857-575, 616 (report from U.S. Customs Service); news release from the Council on African Affairs, June 16, 1949, RA; ER to Larry Brown, June 9, 14, 1949, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

47.
Hunton to ER, n.d. (June 1949), RA; New York
Amsterdam News
, June 18, 1949;
The New York Times
, June 17, 1949;
Daily Compass
, June 17, 1949. On leaving the airport, a banner-decked cavalcade of five cars carried Robeson to Harlem; the FBI reported that the motorcade
“received no ovation or recognition from Harlemites” (FBI Main 100-12304-? [illegible]). Testifying in opposition to the North Atlantic Treaty at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 13, 1949, Hunton had given a rather fiery accounting of his own, not only strongly condemning the treaty but referring to Great Britain as “a prison-house of colored peoples” (his testimony is in RA).

48.
Interviews with Marilyn Robeson, Dec. 18, 1983, Jan. 4, 1984, Jan. 7, 15, 1985; New York
Herald Tribune
, June 20, 1949. Rather than making a scene, which was not his style, Marilyn's father had withdrawn into silent opposition. Neither Paul, Sr., nor Essie, to Marilyn's knowledge, showed any sense of insult or grievance. The accounts in the
Daily Compass
(June 20, 1949) and the New York
Amsterdam News
(June 25, 1949) do not contain any reference to Robeson's supposed remark about the Soviet Union; the
Compass
did report that he “shook his fist at one photographer and moved a pace toward him, but was blocked by the crowd.” Essie's comment is in an undated handwritten note (possibly for a future speech), RA; she also wrote, “I felt like strangling them.… I was so angry I was calm.” Although the black press was generally friendly, the headline in
The Afro-American
(June 25, 1949) referred to “Junior's Socialite Bride.”

49.
CVV to ER, July 6, 1949; ER to CVV, July 10, 1949, Yale: Van Vechten. Essie's gracious letter included an extended thank-you to Carlo for having helped them get started back in the 1920s. “The fight then,” she explained, “was intellectual, artistic, and social. We Negroes were trying to be heard, to get started, to participate.… Now, I think this fight today is another phase of that same fight.… Now it is political. At least Paul and I think it is political.”

Marilyn Robeson, in our interview of Dec. 18, 1983, described Essie as having been “very firm and very determined and very incensed also” during the wedding-party fracas; several newspaper accounts confirm this, with both the
Daily Compass
(June 20, 1949) and the
Amsterdam News
(June 25, 1949) referring to Essie's efforts to ward off the news media. As well, Essie wrote an article, “Loyalty—Lost and Found,” in which she described her anger with the press (the article was enclosed for distribution in carbon letters to Hunton, George Murphy, and Charles Howard, June 22, 1949, RA). Soon after, Essie enlisted the help of Murphy and Howard in circulating a packet of her articles, including “Loyalty,” to the 108 chapters of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta: “I think Deltas are reasonably influential in their communities.… Sort of slow infiltration, what?” (ER to Murphy and Howard, July 12, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC.) Essie's five-page covering letter to her sorority sisters (dated Aug. 4, 1949) is in NYPL/Schm: PR. In it she said point-blank, “… for the record, I am
NOT A COMMUNIST
,” but added that what needed questioning at the moment was not the loyalty of blacks to the country, but “
THIS COUNTRY
'
S LOYALTY TO THE NEGRO
.” Widely reprinted (e.g.,
Daily Compass
, July 14, 1949; even
Time
printed excerpts, July 25, 1949), the “Loyalty” article prompted a warm letter of support from William Patterson to Essie, praising her for her “uncompromising” stand. Because of the underlying—but acknowledged—antipathy between them (see p. 187), Patterson sent his letter with some trepidation, lest Essie take “offense”; but he reminded her that he was well aware that they were both “on the same side of … the barricades” (Patterson to ER, July 7, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC). In her lengthy reply, Essie wrote, “It most definitely occasioned no offense. How on earth could it? … I consider praise from the Old Guard is praise indeed.” She went on to describe herself in general terms as someone who, when disagreeing, “open[s] up my big mouth and say[s] so—often far too vehemently I admit”; then, in specific terms, she referred to her past disagreements with Pat: “… I am unduly biased and sensitive on the matter of Big Paul, because I do think that everybody is very prone to exploit him. Me, I'm against exploitation,—not only of the masses, but also of individuals, especially of friends.” Polite though the tone, ER's letter amounts to a considerable indictment of
how the CP (the “Old Guard”) in her view “used” her husband. “As a peace token” ER sent Pat a copy of
American Argument
, the book she had co-authored with Pearl Buck (ER to Patterson, July 9, 1949, NYPL/Schm: CRC).

50.
Pearl Buck to ER, June 26, 1949, RA; Springfield
Union
, June 28, 1949 (Roosevelt); New York
Amsterdam News
, June 25, 1949; the dozens of hate letters are in RA. Ma Goode's frequent letters to Essie during this period (e.g., June 27, 28, 30, July 7, 9, 11, 13, Aug. 7, Sept. 4, 30, Oct. 2, 17, 1949, RA) are full of demands and directives; she may have been partly senile. Late in Oct. 1949 Ma Goode had to be shifted for ten days from Rest-haven to the Boston State Hospital for observation. At that point Essie described her as “rambling and wholly inattentive when I was there” (circular letter, n.d., apparently to family members, RA). Essie summed up her mother's recent behavior, over a period of many years: “The moment I go away … she has made the most terrific scenes, stretched out in violent temper when she could not have her way instantly, and threatened suicide” (Dorothy Livingston of the Resthaven home to ER, June 24, 1949; ER to Mr. Benjamin, Nov. 1, 1949, RA).

51.
The Du Bois and Howard speeches, excerpted in news releases from the CAA, are in RA, along with a full listing of speakers (others included Hunton, Ben Davis, Jr., Vito Marcantonio, and Louis Burnham, former executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and currently Southern director of the Progressive Party, who would be centrally involved with Robeson politically in the future). Among those sending welcoming messages were Clifford Odets, the cast of
Detective Story
(Lee Grant, Alex Scourby, Joan Copeland, Lou Gilbert), and Henry Wallace (all are in RA).

52.
The transcript of PR's speech is in RA.

53.
Interview with Kay Pankey, July 26, 1986. For more on Robeson and the Pankeys, see pp. 426, 518–19. For the wedding party, the married couple drew up the small guest-list, which consisted mostly of their own friends plus such family standbys as Minnie Sumner, Buddy and Hattie Boiling, Bert and Gig McGhee, Ben Davis, Jr., and Paul, Sr.'s sister, Marian Robeson Forsythe, who came up from Philadelphia with her husband, Dr. James Forsythe.

54.
The New York Times
, June 20, 1949; Boston
Advertiser
, June 26, 1949;
Congressional Record
, June 27, 1949; Pitts burgh
Courier
, June 25, 1949.

55.
New York
Herald Tribune
, June 20, July 15, 1949 (Truman);
The Afro-American
, June 25, 1949; New York
Amsterdam News
, June 25 (“richest artist”), June 25 (Granger), 1949; The California
Eagle
defended him (July 7, 1949). In his column in the Chicago
Defender
for July 2, 1949, A. N. Fields quoted Richard Wright (who had left the CP some five years previously) as disapproving of Robeson's political activities and taking “sharp issue” with his statement in Paris. Dozens of letters suggesting Robeson leave the country are in RA (e.g., this telegram from the American Legion Post in Sayre, Oklahoma: “Our attitude toward you is the same as yours toward this country. Why stay?”). In an article in the
National Guardian
(June 27, 1949), reporter Yvonne Gregory decided to sample opinion in “the poorest parts” of Harlem and found that with few exceptions people were “reluctant to talk,” fearful of “getting mixed up in any politics”—“I've got enough trouble already”; “I don't know nothing about these Communists.” But one woman told her, “My sons wouldn't talk much when they came home from the war.… They were jealous and mad when they found we colored people still didn't have our freedom.” The day after the Rockland Palace rally, the black conductor Dean Dixon and the graphic artist Raphael Soyer, on behalf of the CAA, hosted a private reception for Paul, Sr., to welcome him home (the invitation is in RA).

56.
Madison S. Jones, Jr. (NAACP administrative assistant) to Wood, July 12, 1949; Wood to Jones, July 12, 1949, LC: NAACP.

57.
Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups
, July 13–18, 1949 (U.S. Govt. Printing Office, D.C.);
The New York Times
, July 15, 1949; New
York
Herald Tribune
, July 15, 1949; Boston
Post
, July 14, 1949;
New Age
, July 23, 1949; Chicago
Defender
, June 23, 1949; Pittsburgh
Courier
, Sept. 17, 1949 (PR on Stalin). On Manning Johnson, see Victor Navasky,
Naming Names
(Viking, 1980), pp. 14–15, 39, 68, 191. During the thirties, Johnson had been a trade union official of the Restaurant Workers and a district organizer from Buffalo for the CPUSA (Naison,
Depression
, pp. 135, 261, 294). The New York
Amsterdam News
reported (July 30, 1949) that Robeson “is alleged to have expressed his desire to be heard in the Nation's capital” to “refute the charges made against him by Manning Johnson,” but the committee “has refused to permit Robeson to appear, because one member said, ‘Robeson only wants to use the Committee as a sounding board.'” I haven't found any confirmation of Robeson's alleged attempt to appear before HUAC.