Paul Robeson (160 page)

8
. David E. Mark, first secretary of Embassy, to State Department, Aug. 18, 1958, FBI Main 100-12304-(no file number), and distributed, as marked on the dispatch, to the CIA, the USIA, and intelligence units of the army, navy, and air force. The account of PR's TV show in the
National Guardian
(Sept. 8, 1958) also has him saying that “things are better for the Negroes in America.”

9
.
Pravda
(the only Moscow paper appearing on Monday morning) devoted a four-column spread with photographs to Robeson's Lenin Stadium appearance (Aug. 18, 1958, issue);
Daily Worker
, Aug. 18, 1958; Moscow
News
, Aug. 20, 1958; Washington
Post
, Aug. 18, 1958.
The New York Times
did report (Feb. 4, 1959) that the Soviets were making a film about PR, adding with a hint of derision that it would show him as an “unbending peace champion.”

10
. Typed ms. of ER's “Southern Hospitality (Soviet Style),” RA, published as the first of a two-part series by Essie in
The Afro-American
, Oct. 11, 18, 1958. Later, in Tashkent, the Robesons spent time with Bertha and Lillie Golden, wife and daughter of the deceased John Golden, the black American from the Tuskegee Institute who had helped the Russians with their fledgling cotton industry.

11
. Vasily Katanian's recollections (recorded about 1978) were made available to me by PR, Jr. All the quotes are from Katanian's memoir, except the one about Robeson's dancing, which is from ER's typed ms. “Paul Robeson Jitterbugs in Middle Asia,” dated August 20, 1958, RA. Katanian (in a letter to me, May 1987) has approved the accuracy of the quotations from his memoir.
Soviet Weekly
(October 2, 1958) reported PR's visit to the collective.

12
. ER's annotated schedule, RA; Katanian's memoir; ER, article on the boat trip, San Francisco
Sun Reporter
, Nov. 8, 1958; ER to family, completed Aug. 31, 1959, RA.

13
. Phone interview with Sally Kent Gorton, Sept. 28, 1986; Gorton to me, Oct. 1, 1986; Konstantin Kudrov, “Paul Robeson: A Russian Remembrance,”
Rutgers Alumni Magazine
, Winter 1974, pp. 26–27 (Yalta). Ivan S. Koslovski, ms. reminiscence of Robeson—including singing with him at Yalta—in the PR Archiv, GDR; Katanian's memoir; Moscow
News
, Sept. 17, 1958 (Chekhov). RA contains a film script by Paul Delmer,
Caravan in Russia
, which he sent along to the Robesons, asking for their help in promoting it.

14
. ER to family, completed Aug. 31, 1959, RA; ER's ms. “Kill The Umpire!!! U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” RA (Khrushchev joke). PR also recorded several songs especially for Katanian's film; when he couldn't remember the words, Essie
wrote them in chalk on a blackboard in large letters. On Aug. 31, 1958,
The New York Times
printed a captioned picture of the two men, “Khrushchev Receives Robeson,” but with no accompanying article. In the Aug. 31 letter home ER described Mrs. Khrushchev as “delightful, very motherly and warm.” PR told the
Soviet News Bulletin
(a publication of the press office of the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Canada), Sept. 18, 1958, that on meeting Khrushchev he had been “greatly impressed by his penetrating mind, a clear understanding of the affairs all over the world, and his concern and sincere striving for the further development and prosperity of the Soviet Union, for an all-round increase in the welfare of his people”; he commented, too, on Khrushchev's “cheerful disposition and optimism … his good-heartedness and hospitality, his subtle racy humor.…”

In a news conference in Moscow about his visit to the United States, First Deputy Premier Anastas J. Mikoyan charged that the Voice of America was “the chief spokesman of the cold war” and said its broadcasts were “not pleasing to our ears.” Paul Robeson, he added, was “also a voice of America and he is pleasing to our ears” (
The New York Times
international ed., Jan. 26, 1959). When Khrushchev was in the States in Sept. 1959, he made comments much like Mikoyan's at a dinner of the Economic Club of New York. Asked why the Russian people were not allowed to listen to American broadcasts, he replied that they were anti-Soviet in content, and inquired why the voice of Paul Robeson, which was
not
unfriendly, had been “jammed” by Robeson's government (
The Afro-American
, Sept. 26, 1959). Essie's friend from the UN, Ruth Gage Colby, went up to Khrushchev at the Togo reception for him at the UN and on behalf of the Robesons offered their greetings of welcome and affection. According to Colby, Khrushchev thanked her profusely (Colby to ER, Sept. 22, 1960, RA).

15
. RA contains a large collection of tour reviews; almost uniformly positive and nearly uniform in their descriptions, they would be redundant to cite individually. PR, Jr., interview with Raikin, Sept. 8, 1982. Halfway through the concert tour, PR again came down with a cold, and some of the dates had to be canceled (ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959, RA).

16
. Ernest Bradbury in
The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury
(Oct. 9, 1958) had this comment on Robeson's musical theories: “Robeson has discovered—afresh if not for the first time—the international language of folk songs, and he is caught up in the idea of universality in music … and demonstrated the mystery of the pentatonic scale with all that seriously boyish enthusiasm which is so much part of his charm.”
The New York Times
, Sept. 22, 1958; Essie's rebuttal is in
The Afro-American
(Nov. 22, 1958); Carl Murphy to ER, Nov. 20, 1958, RA. About the only political comment made on tour—at least as reported by the press—was to criticize U.S. policy on Formosa (
The Scotsman
, Sept. 23, 1958); he also described himself as “perhaps a little to the left of the British Labour party” (
Daily Telegraph
, Sept. 28, 1958) and expressed the view that recent race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill “do not typify the general feeling in this country” (Leicester
Evening Mail
, Sept. 25, 1958). The Boston
Evening News
(Sept. 22, 1958) reflected the minority reaction to PR's announcement about staying in London by commenting that, if he claims “the greatest measure of freedom” is to be found in the Soviet Union, “isn't it surprising” that he should have decided to seek refuge in Britain instead.

17
. London
Times, Daily Mirror, Daily Herald, News Chronicle
, Manchester
Guardian
—all Oct. 13, 1958; ER's ms. “Paul Robeson Sings in St. Paul's Cathedral,” RA (reprinted in the San Francisco
Sun Reporter
); Peggy Middleton typed ms. “Paul in St. Paul's,” Oct. 13, 1958, RA (reprinted in the
National Guardian
).

18
. The invitation to attend the Accra conference (which is in RA) had actually been to Paul, and he sent a message (also in RA) with “warmest greetings” expressing his deep disappointment at being held in England by tour commitments. Marie Seton's book,
Paul Robeson
(Denis Dobson, 1958), has been referred to and commented on at several points in this text, and I will not
undertake a repetitive assessment here. I would only add in general that the book, though valuable in places for its firsthand recollections, is sketchy overall and in details frequently inaccurate, suffering from a lack of archival sources. At the time it appeared, Robert Rockmore wrote Larry Brown regretting that it “was not more accurate and less ‘slanted'” (Sept. 8, 1958, NYPL/Schm: Brown).

Claude Barnett and his wife, Etta Moten, were also at Accra and seemed so impressed (so Essie described it) “with the respect and affection the Africans paid me—all of them—and also the way Nkrumah treated me,” that Barnett decided to syndicate her articles (ER to Freda Diamond, Dec. 12, 1958, Feb. 8, 1959; ER to Tamara, Feb. 3, 1959; Barnett to ER. Jan. 19, 1959, RA). The notes Essie took during the UN sessions and the Accra convention are in RA. She hailed the conference in her articles as opening “a new page of history for the African Continent,” chided Western press representatives for trying to pit Nasser against Nkrumah, and complained that “the women of Africa were not adequately represented” (only ten of the two hundred delegates were women, and only two addressed the plenary, Shirley Du Bois being one). One of ER's articles on Accra, in which she had written that Africans “are no longer passive (because the situation seemed hopeless) under foreign domination” and advising the white minority that “if they are sensible” they would find themselves “well treated,” was reprinted in the West Indian
Gazette
, a London monthly, and alarmed the American Embassy. In a confidential dispatch to the State Department, the Embassy characterized ER's piece as “a most devastatingly destructive article, calculated as it obviously is to stir Africans and Asians alike against Westerners” (Francis J. Galbraith, first secretary of Embassy, to State Department, Jan. 27, 1959, FBI Main 100-12304-566).

19
. Memo of Washington-Herter phone call, plus Skofield to Oulashin reporting it, Dec. 9, 1958, no file number, State Department. Consul General Turner in Bombay reported to Dulles that the same individuals who had organized PR's birthday celebration were behind his visit and that therefore “we may confidently predict strong anti-American propaganda along color lines.”

20
. Bunker to Dulles, Dec. 10, 1958, Jan. 8, 1959; memo Dec. 24, 1958, of State Department meeting involving Val Washington and Kenneth Bunce “to counteract communist exploitation of visit of Paul Robeson to India”; Dulles to Bunker, Jan. 12, 1959; Turner to Dulles, Jan. 20, 1959; CIA dispatch, Jan. 6, 1959—no file numbers listed.

21
. ER, ms., “Purely Personal,” dated Jan. 14, 1959, RA (also the source for the following paragraph).

22
.
Daily Worker
, Aug. 21, 1958; ER to Lloyd Brown, Aug. 6, 1958, RA. Du Bois sat for the sculptor Lawrence Bradshaw while staying in the Robeson apartment, and ER was later asked to present the finished head as a gift to the People's Republic of China (Shirley Graham to George Murphy, Jr., Oct. 20, 1959, MSRC: Murphy).

23
. Shirley Graham Du Bois, Pittsburgh
Courier
, June 20, 1959; Shirley Graham Du Bois, ms. reminiscences of PR, PR Archiv, GDR. While in Moscow, PR also saw the Stratford Company perform
Hamlet
and
Romeo and Juliet
; according to Essie, he thought Michael Redgrave “simply marvelous” (ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959, RA).

24
. ER to PR, Jr., Jan. 12, 1959; ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959; ER to Seton, March 12, 1959; ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959—all in RA.

25
. ER to Glen Byam Shaw, Jan. 13, 1959, RA (“duty idea”); ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 12, 16, 1959, RA.

26
. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 16, 1959, RA.

27
. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 14, 16, 18, 1959; ER to Freda Diamond, Feb. 8, 1959; ER to Rajni Patel, Jan. 29, 1959, RA. Nehru expressed his personal disappointment at the cancellation of PR's trip to India (Nehru to ER, Nov. 30, 1959, RA). In her letter to Patel, Essie refers to the doctors' diagnosing “a slight strain on the heart due to exhaustion.” She also mentioned, in a letter to Glen Byam Shaw (Jan. 20, 1959, RA), that the doctors were “not at all satisfied with his
heart condition.” PR himself later told a reporter, “The doctors thought I had heart trouble” (
News Chronicle
, March 10, 1959). Rumors that Paul had had a heart attack, or possibly even cancer, prompted his sister, Marian Forsythe, to telephone him for reassurance (
The Afro-American
, Feb. 14, 1959). Marian's husband, Dr. James Forsythe, had died in January 1959; Paul, from the hospital, wrote her one of his rare letters (PR and ER to Marian Forsythe, January 31, 1959, RA). In a phone conversation between two unidentified people (tapped by the FBI), a woman told her caller that she had recently received a letter from the Robesons and that they were “very upset and nervous.… She added that he had not been well since he had that business a couple of years ago” (FBI New York 100-25857-650, March 3, 1959).

28
. ER to Marilyn and PR, Jr., Jan. 16, Feb. 6, 1959, RA; ER to Shaw, Jan. 20, 1959; Shaw cable to PR, Feb. 4, 1959, RA.

29
. Alphaeus Hunton to George Murphy, Jr., April 9, 1959 (weight), MSRC: Murphy; ER to PR, Jr., Feb. 6, 1959; PR and ER cable to Shaw, Feb. 5, 1959; ER to Shaw, Feb. 6, 1959; Shaw to ER, Feb. 13, 1959; Shaw to PR, Feb. 13, 1959—all in RA. On Feb. 21 and March 3, PR felt strong enough to attend a meeting of the World Peace Council in Moscow (ER to family, Feb. 28, 1959, RA). He also consulted with the Russian film crew on the documentary. Katanian organized a special showing for Essie, of whom he was very fond, in the hospital (Katanian memoir). PR gave a speech to the World Peace Council on Feb. 21, 1959 (ms. in RA). It is notable for his repeated references to the “deep-seated will and desire of the American people” (as opposed to “a powerful minority”) for “lasting peace.” Even more significant, PR attended a special evening to honor Shalom Aleichem; according to ER, he “was pleased to make this gesture on the ticklish question of Jewish culture” (ER to family, March 4, 1959, RA).

30
. ER to Rosens, March 14, 1959 (courtesy of Rosen); ER to family, Feb. 28, March 4, 1959, ER to Rosens, March 1959, RA;
News Chronicle
, March 10, 1959;
Daily Herald
, March 10, 1959.
Time
magazine (March 24, 1959), predictably sardonic when discussing PR, commented that he had had “predictable praise” for the Kremlin Hospital. Essie was so enthusiastic about Soviet medicine that she wrote an article on it (“Robesons Participate (As Patients) in Soviet Medicine,” ms. in RA), taking special care to point out that medical care in Russia was free and that some of their doctors had been women.

31
. For more on Andy, see pp. 478, 496 and note 61, p. 617. Interview with Andrew Faulds, Sept. 7, 1982 (PR, Jr., participating); Faulds to me, Oct. 30, 1984. Faulds credits Robeson with having inspired his own subsequent career as a member of Parliament. Watching the Oct. 1959 election returns on television, Faulds bemoaned the return of the Conservatives to power. “Paul made a very simple observation in that very rich voice of his, saying something like ‘You have no right to complain about these things, because you are not politically involved!' And I thought, ‘My God, he's absolutely right.'” The very next day Faulds joined the Stratford-on-Avon Labour Party and was later elected to Parliament.