Paul Robeson (52 page)

Max Yergan was one of several who reported to Robeson that everyone was “tremendously pleased and proud” of the stands he had taken. Yergan had resigned his YMCA post in South Africa in 1936 and returned
to the United States, gradually becoming an influential public figure as an officer in the National Negro Congress, a sympathetic adherent (though not a member) of the Communist Party, and the executive secretary of the Council on African Affairs. By 1942 Yergan had become Robeson's political liaison to the same pronounced degree that Rock-more had become his artistic one. Yergan filtered requests for political appearances, Rockmore for concert ones, the two comparing notes to avoid scheduling conflicts. As regarded the CPUSA, however, Robeson maintained an independent liaison through Ben Davis, Jr., who was in the Party's highest councils and whom Robeson trusted as fully as he did anyone—which is to say, with only minimal reservation. The only other direct channel to Robeson during most of the forties was Essie, though her centrality had been greatly reduced since their return to the States in 1939. She sometimes had to fall back on her close personal friendship with Yergan to exert influence (which she could not do with Rockmore; the two disliked each other, even while maintaining formal appearances of friendship).
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Yergan's own public prominence had come to hinge increasingly on his role in the Council on African Affairs (CAA). The Council had been founded in 1937, and by 1941 Robeson had become chairman and Yergan executive director; in 1943 Alphaeus Hunton (a Marxist who had taught at Howard University) became its educational director. The Council's central purpose was to “provide a sound basis of accurate information so that the American people might play their proper part in the struggle for African freedom.” Pan-Africanism—“the conviction that all persons of African descent are commonly oppressed by a common enemy”—can be traced in the United States to such early-nineteenth-century proponents as Martin R. Delany and Alexander Crummel, but in the twentieth century the view is centrally associated with W. E. B. Du Bois, who was arguing its tenets for two decades before World War II. By the end of the war, though, concern with the fate of black Africa—and the linkage of its fate to that of black America—had become a commonplace among Afro-American intellectuals and organizations. The Council on African Affairs was designed as a clearinghouse of accurate information on Africa and as a lobbying force for African interests, not as a mass organization. Although Hunton periodically argued for conversion into a mass-membership organization, in the early forties the Council had fewer than two dozen members and met only three times a year, with subcommittees convening somewhat more frequently and with Hunton and Yergan carrying out most of the daily administrative work. Robeson involved himself far more with the actual organizational mechanics of the Council—though rarely on a day-to-day basis—than with any of the other manifold groups that counted him as a supporter. The CAA—as Alphaeus Hunton later put it—“was the one
organizational interest among many with which he was identified that was closest to his heart.”
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In its fusion of anticolonial and pro-Soviet sentiments, the Council did accurately reflect Robeson's basic perspective. Because the United States was relatively unencumbered by a history of colonialist activity in Africa, Robeson and the CAA hoped that the United States might spearhead the drive among the Western democracies to apply the principle of self-determination to the African continent. Even before Roosevelt's death (which shattered that hope), the brilliant West Indian theorist George Pad-more, less sanguine than the CAA, had argued that the United States would emerge from the war not as a liberating force but as the dominant imperialist power, using dollar diplomacy rather than outright annexation to control the key commercial and strategic routes on the African continent. By 1942 the FBI had decided that the CAA was not just a Communist front organization, but first among those groups “presently active in creating considerable unrest among the negroes by stressing racial discrimination.…”
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Soon after the Kansas City and Santa Fe episodes, Robeson made his first trip into the Deep South to attend a convention of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was dominated by CP activists. The SNYC gathering at Tuskegee of over five hundred representatives from twenty Southern states, Mexico, and British Guiana heard a message from President Roosevelt calling for unity in the fight against fascism and declaring his conviction that out of victory “will come a peace built on universal freedom such as many men have not yet known.” The conference responded with a unanimous pledge of “the full and unswerving loyalty of Negro youth,” coupled with a letter of reply to the President expressing concern about the extent to which “discriminatory barriers remain against our fuller participation in our democratic way of life.”
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The SNYC conference marked Robeson's initial contact with a number of future Party activists, including Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Ed Strong, Louis Burnham, and James Jackson. Stretch Johnson recalls the vivid impression Robeson made on him: “He was awesome. He exuded magnetism and charm and charisma. And then he was so gentle and nonegocentric. He had the … common touch. You know, you felt you could communicate with him directly. There was no screen. He was available to you.” Five years later, at another SNYC convention, another rising young figure in the Party, Junius Scales, had much the same initial reaction to Robeson: “He strode onto the crowded stage with a combination of dignity, grace and responsive enthusiasm.… When the gentle thunder of his greeting broke over them, it was as though each person there had been struck by the lightning of that smile, the grandeur of that presence. There were no formal phrases; he spoke straight to the hearts of all present.
…
Robeson was as genuine and magnetic socially as he had been on the stage. He managed to listen to every word spoken to him and to reply graciously. When I was introduced to him he made me feel like the guest of honor.”
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Leaving the Southern Negro Youth Conference in Tuskegee, Robeson went directly to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare at Nashville. The short-lived SCHW, concerned with both economic and civil rights in the South, was denounced by conservatives as a Communist front, but in fact, like so many liberal organizations of the period, it was conceived and controlled by progressives of varying affiliations. Mrs. Roosevelt joined Robeson on the SCHW platform, presenting awards for “service to the South in 1942” to Mary McLeod Bethune (the black director of the National Youth Administration and president of Bethune-Cookman College in Florida) and to Dr. Frank P. Graham (president of the University of North Carolina and a leading white advocate of black rights); in her remarks, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the need to accept responsibility for the “miniature world of all races right here in America.” Robeson, in turn, repeated his call for “full integration” and again added an appeal for the release of Earl Browder. According to H. L. Mitchell, a founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who was in the audience when Robeson spoke, his appeal to free Browder “was enough to convince the southern liberals that they were being used to advance the cause of the Communist Party and they abandoned the Southern Conference for Human Welfare”—but it is at least as plausible to believe that they were driven out by Robeson's demand for “full integration.” In her “My Day” column the next morning, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote that hearing Robeson sing “Ballad for Americans” at the conference had been “a thrilling experience.… It always stirs me as a ballad, but last night there was something peculiarly significant about it.”
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Robeson's reputation as “hero of the race” was slightly dented in May 1942 when
Tales of Manhattan
, a film he had made in Hollywood the previous year, was released for public showing. The picture follows the trail of a dress coat as it passes from owner to owner, spinning a vignette about each in turn, until finally the coat, stuffed with money, drops from an airplane into the hands of a group of sharecroppers who divide it up and “praise de Lawd.” Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Eddie (“Rochester”) Anderson played the resident sharecroppers—and the film's vignettes were peopled with an array of stars that included Ginger Rogers, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth, Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, and Edward G. Robinson. This glittering gallery of co-workers may have been part of the film's attraction to Robeson, but the more potent appeal lay in a chance to depict the plight of the rural black poor, shown in the film, additionally, as investing the bulk of their windfall in communal land
and tools, and as believing in share-and-share-alike, with “no rich an' no mo' po'.”
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Some black reviewers, focusing on the film's depiction of sharecropping, came out in its favor. But the majority did not, with the New York
Amsterdam Star News
headlining its negative review “Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters Let Us Down,” and declaring, “It is difficult to reconcile the Paul Robeson, who has almost single-handedly waged the battle for recognition of the Negro as a true artist, with the ‘Luke' of this film … a simple-minded, docile sharecropper.” The left-wing white-run paper
PM
was no less brusque, denouncing the film's “utter failure to visualize Negroes in any realer terms than as a
Green Pastures
flock in a Thomas Hart Benton setting.” The black actor Clarence Muse spoke out in Robeson's defense, claiming that the “ideological” words spoken by Luke in the film gave the lie to dismissals of the character as a mere Uncle Tom; and from Hollywood came reports of a “secret meeting” at Eddie Anderson's home to deny that “the human interest sequence of rural Negro life” was in any sense “disgraceful.”
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Still, the outcry against the film was sharp, and when it opened in Los Angeles, the militant
Sentinel and Tribune
organized pickets to demonstrate. Robeson threw in his lot with the demonstrators, declaring he would join any picket line that might appear during the film's New York showing. In a widely publicized series of interviews, he explained how his initial hopes for the film had been dashed during production, the portrayal of a Negro sharecropper degenerating into just one more “plantation hallelujah shouter,” into a simple-minded, docile darky mistaking money dropped from an airplane for a gift from the Lord. Robeson denied that he'd made the picture for money—correcting his reported fifty-thousand-dollar salary to an accurate ten thousand, and pointing out that he had recently turned down more lucrative offers. He had been led to believe he would be able to make script changes; when they were rejected, he could not afford to buy his way out of the contract. This was a familiar enough result—indeed, with a few changes in detail, it could stand as a paradigm for most of Robeson's career in films.
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This time around, Robeson drew the line. Calling a press conference, he announced that he was quitting Hollywood for good. A New York
Daily News
reporter ascribed Robeson's discontent to “a way of feeling” Communists have “about any play, book or movie that was not engineered by a Communist.” He had, in truth, tried the only options available to a black performer and had found all of them wanting. He had acted in a “race movie” (Micheaux's
Body and Soul
), had tried making an experimental film (
Borderline
), and had used his limited leverage to change the roles and the scripts available from the major studios. None of these routes had proved satisfying; none had offered him the chance to play parts commensurate
with his sense of political responsibility. Reflecting on Robeson's film career, Sidney Poitier, a leading figure in the subsequent generation of black performers, speaks sympathetically of the mix of “uneasiness” and admiration he feels when seeing Robeson on the screen: “None of that generation of black actors—Robeson, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters, Hat-tie McDaniel, Rochester, Frank Wilson—was given anything to play that did not characterize ‘minority roles.' They were appendages to the other actors, the white actors. They were there almost as scenery. To have them as full-blooded individuals with the ability to think through their own problems and to chart their own course—American films were not into that. Difficult as it is today, it is nowhere near as impossible as it was for Robeson.”
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In announcing to the press his retirement from films, Robeson said the only solution to big-budget stereotyping was for the federal government to impose standards of “honest treatment”—and for filmmakers to turn to low-budget projects not reliant on a reactionary Southern market for profits.
Native Land
was exactly the sort of alternative cinema Robeson had in mind. Directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand, with a score by Marc Blitzstein and with Robeson narrating off-camera,
Native Land
was a feature-length documentary that re-enacted scenes of civil-liberties violations as actually revealed in testimony before the LaFollette Senate Committee during its investigation into infringements against the Bill of Rights. Robeson accepted the minimum fee AFTRA allowed—and then made a gift of the fee to the nonprofit, progressive producers, Frontier Films. Because of financial stringency, the film took nearly five years to complete (as early as 1939 Robeson had been one of several celebrities to join in sponsoring a benefit screening of rushes), and was finally released in New York in May 1942. The timing proved inauspicious. Frontier Films had by then disbanded, and in a wartime climate stressing the need for national unity, some viewed
Native Land
as impolitic, others as subversive. An FBI report labeled the film “obviously a Communist project,” and Texas Congressman Martin Dies, head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, included Robeson, along with Frontier Films, on the list he presented to Congress in September 1942 of people and organizations he considered “Communist.” In 1942 that accusation was aberrant; within a few years it would be commonplace.
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