Paul Robeson (6 page)

In 1917, in Paul's junior year, Rutgers took on the Newport Naval Reserve, an undefeated team headed by Cupe (“Cupid”) Black and made up of eleven All-Americans. In a memorable game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (with Walter Camp watching from the stands), Rutgers spectacularly outplayed Newport. The Rutgers
Targum
reported that Robeson had seemed to be all over the field, so much so that “the Newport team began to believe that there were, at least, eleven Robesons, and their entire horizon was obscured by him.…” More than fifty years later, his performance was still vividly remembered as “brilliant.… He led the defense as a linebacker to such success that Newport made only one first down. He
also caught a pass on the five-yard line and fought his way over the goal line with three defenders trying to bring him down.” And the New York
Tribune
said, “It was Robeson, a veritable Othello of battle, who led the dashing little Rutgers eleven to a 14–0 victory over the widely heralded Newport Naval Reserves.”
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Because the feats of “the giant Negro” extended beyond football, they could not easily be dismissed as the mere by-products of “animal vitality.” Robeson dominated not only the playing fields but the classroom—and the debating hall and the glee club and the honor societies—as well. And he did so with a modesty that further disarmed would-be detractors. “A gentle soul,” a man of “great gentleness,” is how two undergraduates who knew Robey later described him, and Coach Sanford—who was not given to hyperbole—told a newspaper reporter that Robeson “does not know the meaning of conceit” and is “one of the most likeable fellows I ever met.”
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Robeson maintained such a consistently high grade average in his course work that he was one of four undergraduates (in a class of eighty) admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. A speaker of exceptional force, he was a member of the varsity debating team and won the class oratorical prize four years in succession. His bass-baritone was the chief adornment of the glee club—but only at its home concerts; he was not invited to be a “traveling” member, and at Rutgers sang only with the stipulation that he not attend social functions after the performances.
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One reason Robeson tolerated that humiliation was his need for money. Along with doing a variety of odd jobs (including working as a porter in Grand Central Station), he used his glee-club appearances as an advertisement for the private concerts he sometimes gave to augment his scholarship. Ten years later he told a reporter, “I used to hustle around, fix up a concert, and bill myself as a star attraction. It is probable … that I attracted my audiences in the first place partly by the fact that my name was already fairly well known as a Rugger man.… I would go on the stage, sing a group of songs, orate and flourish for 20 minutes, and then sing again. Usually this procedure brought me in about ten pounds [fifty dollars], and apparently everybody was satisfied.… These early ventures were practically the whole of my stage training.”
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In the same way that Robeson was only partly accepted as a member of the glee club, so, too, was he elected to the Literary Society, Philoclean, without being allowed fully to share in its festivities. On the night the new Philoclean members were inducted, Paul was prevented from participating in the traditional ritual of “standing for a treat” at Bruns (the local ice-cream-and-candy shop) because Bruns would not serve a black man. Paul gave his financial share for the treat to his friend Charlie Bloodgood, but when Charlie said he and some of the others would protest Bruns's policy, Paul discouraged them. He “wanted no trouble,” he said, and went home.
“There was a clear line,” Robeson later wrote, “beyond which one did not pass”; college life was “on the surface marvellous, but it was a thing apart.”
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In that same spirit, Paul once let his teammate Donald Storck persuade him to go to a college dance—but positioned himself on the balcony, where, to wild applause, he serenaded the dancers below with “Roses of Picardy.” Storck marveled at his friend's calm exterior but recognized that he was “roiling” inside. By others, however, Paul's prudent self-possession was often mistaken for nonchalance. An undergraduate two years behind him sent him myopic congratulations later in life on the attitude he had shown: “I will never forget how much you seemed to enjoy watching, though never participating in any of the social affairs of your contemporaries.… This was but one of your most typical, admirable qualities that endeared you to all who knew you. It was in keeping with your modesty.…”
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Now and then during his undergraduate years, when under unusual pressure, Robeson let whites glimpse a less placid side. One such moment came at the close of his junior year. In May his father suddenly and unexpectedly died at age seventy-three. While lying gravely ill, Reverend Robeson had extracted his son's promise to go ahead with his commitment to compete in—and win—an oratorical contest scheduled for a few days hence. Three days after his father's death, a distraught Paul reluctantly kept his promise and mounted the lecture platform, surrounded by supportive friends. “Paul stood there on the stage,” one of them recalls, “gaunt, sombre, obviously steeped in grief as he talked in that beautiful, moving voice.” Defenses down, Paul spoke in less measured, benign terms than was his usual style. He pointedly remonstrated with the largely white audience for the inadequate educational opportunities offered blacks—and emphasized, by way of contrast, the distinction with which they continued to fight in the country's wars. In later life, as it became ever clearer to him that white America was unlikely to extend its paper principles of equality (and certainly not without a persistent, militant demand that it do so), Robeson would return often to the paradox of black Americans, denied first-class citizenship, fighting and dying in the nation's armed forces—and he would ultimately counsel them not to.
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The following year, his last at Rutgers, Robeson used another public occasion to reiterate his determination to make of his own life a fitting memorial to his father's, a vehicle for helping “the race to a higher life.” When it came time to write his senior thesis, he chose for his topic “The Fourteenth Amendment, the Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution”—and proceeded to interpret it in a way that prefigured the eventual use of that amendment as a civil-rights weapon. In his trademark public tone of measured courtesy, and encased in legalistic citation, Robeson entered a plea “for utilizing the potential force of the proviso to ensure
equality before the law”; let the amendment “be duly observed,” he wrote, and “the American people shall develop a higher sense of constitutional morality.” The gist of Robeson's argument was unequivocally a call to work within the system, and its rhetoric was glowingly—some would say, from the vantage point of seventy years later, naïvely—optimistic about white intentions. Yet, once again, beneath the conventional packaging lay some potentially unconventional views. And his white professor spotted them: he penciled across Robeson's thesis “
Extravagant
”—though conceivably he was referring to Robeson's optimism.
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In his senior year Robeson was inducted into the Cap and Skull honor society as one of four men who best represented the ideals of Rutgers, and was also selected as valedictorian of the graduating class. President Demarest of Rutgers asked Paul to give the Commencement Oration on six days' notice, after the scheduled student became ill. Demarest called Paul into his office and asked if “he had an old speech” he could give, since six days was scant time for writing and memorizing a new one. Paul said he did, but added that he would prefer to try a new effort that (as Demarest later remembered his words) would “touch upon the racial question” and would “show the dawn of a renaissance for the Negro.” Paul explained that this idea was “burning in his soul for expression.” Demarest told him to go ahead.
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As Paul made his way down the aisle to the speaker's stand on Commencement Day, the board of trustees, the faculty, the many distinguished guests and recipients of honorary degrees all rose, in a rare and perhaps unprecedented tribute, and remained standing until he had reached the platform. He proceeded to deliver a stirring speech, “The New Idealism,” in which he carefully alternated patriotic cadences with temperate (yet unmistakable) challenge. In theme and tone the young Robeson sounded far closer to Booker T. Washington than to “upstart” militants like W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter. Dutifully praising the nation for having “proved true to her trust,” and her soldiers for having successfully preserved her “liberties” in the recently concluded war, Robeson went on to restate Booker T. Washington's familiar doctrines of racial progress through self-help. “We of this less favored race realize,” he told the Commencement Day audience, “that our future lies chiefly in our own hands. On ourselves alone will depend the preservation of our liberties and the transmission of them in their integrity to those who will come after us. And we are struggling on attempting to show that knowledge can be obtained under difficulties; that poverty may give place to affluence; that obscurity is not an absolute bar to distinction, and that a way is open to welfare and happiness to all who will follow the way with resolution and wisdom; that neither the old-time slavery, nor continued prejudice need extinguish self-respect, crush manly ambition or paralyze effort; that no power outside
of himself can prevent a man from sustaining an honorable character and a useful relation to his day and generation.”
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But of course it could and did, as Robeson well knew, and as he gently asserted in his concluding remarks. While calling on his own race to practice the “virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, industry, perseverance and economy,” he added that “in order for us to successfully do all these things it is necessary that you of the favored race catch a new vision,” act according to a new spirit of “compassion” in relieving “the manifest distress of your fellows.” It remained true, he emphasized, that “neither institutions nor friends can make a race stand unless it has strength in its own foundation; that races like individuals must stand or fall by their own merit,” and he was careful to assure his almost entirely white audience that the new “fraternal spirit” he wished to evoke “does not necessarily mean intimacy, or personal friendship.” It implied only “courtesy and fair-mindedness,” a willingness to fight for the great principle that “there will be equal opportunities for all.” Robeson closed his oration with words closer in spirit to those Du Bois might have chosen, though the tone remained conciliatory rather than militant: “… may I not appeal to you … to fight for” an “ideal government” whereby “character shall be the standard of excellence … where an injury to the meanest citizen is an insult to the whole constitution,” and where “black and white shall clasp friendly hands in the consciousness of the fact that we are brethren and that God is the father of us all.” The Commencement Day crowd roared its approval.
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Robeson's cautious yet challenging valedictory words were as far as he ever went, as a young man, in expressing in front of whites something of the range of his feelings. He talked less guardedly only among his circle of black friends, that small group of collegians, male and female, drawn from the Philadelphia-New York area and (as one of them has put it) from “well-to-do middle class homes.… We met regularly for dances, forums, picnics, athletic games, and the usual events that engage college students. There were also profound discussions about the Negro in our society.” Sadie Goode, who dated (and later married) Robert Davenport, the black student a year behind Robeson at Rutgers, recalls Paul as distinctly “aware and disturbed” about racial questions. Another young black woman, Frances Quiett, who met Robeson soon after he graduated from Rutgers and dated him seriously for a year, remembers his talking about the prejudice he had encountered growing up in Princeton: “He was race-conscious at an early stage,” and “it showed when we met in groups together.” Robeson would often draw the others (who were “not as aware”) into a serious discussion of racial prejudice, and would describe the hopes he had of someday being able “to do something about it”—though “he wasn't clear at that early age about what he might be able to do.”
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Of his contemporaries, Robeson was probably closest in these years
to Geraldine Maimie Neale, the young black woman with whom he had an intense undergraduate romance. They met when he was a sophomore and Gerry was completing high school in a nearby town; his last two years at Rutgers paralleled her two years at Teachers Normal School in Trenton, where she trained as a kindergarten teacher and also took newly introduced special-education courses for teaching mentally retarded children.
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She and Paul did not see each other, according to Gerry Neale, “frequently, as students do today. There were no automobiles among us. We were both serious students.” Paul would call on Gerry at the boarding-house in Trenton where she roomed with other students; they wrote letters to each other between visits, and with other friends had song fests in parents' living rooms (Paul never had to be coaxed: “If he was asked to sing, he made no excuse, set no limitations,” and sang everything from the Sorrow Songs to love songs. “I Love You Truly” was
their
song, “sending out a shy, tender message”). When together with friends, Paul and Gerry would manage to find “a special grassy spot—a little away from the rest—where we talked, dreamed, created a world of the future where love, romance, happiness would be forever.” He gave her “the football he cherished most and the gold baseball which he prized most among his athletic awards”—the one that recorded the savored victory of the Rutgers baseball team over Princeton (savored because it was the first time in fifty years that Rutgers had defeated Princeton in an athletic contest—and because “Proud Princeton” had turned down his brilliant brother William's application for admission out-of-hand).
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