Paul Robeson (66 page)

After returning from Hawaii in late March, Robeson spent April campaigning in Iowa with Charles P. Howard, the Des Moines black attorney and NAACP leader. On arriving in Sioux City, they learned that the superintendent of schools would agree to let Robeson use a high-school auditorium only if he signed an affidavit promising not to make any “un-American statements.” He “politely refused,” Howard wrote in his diary, adding, “It was interesting to observe the dignity with which Robeson handled this situation. He stated simply that he had no objection to signing anything that other speakers were required to sign, but refused to subscribe to any treatment that other American citizens under similar circumstances were not required to subscribe to.” Robeson and Howard took their campaign to a local union hall, but one of its top officers managed to bar its use, and they were likewise frustrated in their efforts to arrange alternate facilities with city officials. Finally, as often before, a black minister came through, offering the use of his church; neither the source of the rescue nor the routine nature of the prejudice that necessitated it came as any particular surprise to Robeson.
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Late in May 1948, he took time out from the campaign to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was holding hearings on a pending bill (Mundt-Nixon) that would require all Communist and “Communist-front” organizations to register (the bill's significant features would subsequently be incorporated into the McCarran Act of 1950, providing the government with its official rationale for proceeding against “subversives”). Henry Wallace and the Progressives had taken the lead in denouncing the Mundt-Nixon Bill, Wallace characterizing it as an effort “to frighten all the American people into conformity or silence,” and insisting that “our present laws against treason and sabotage are adequate for a democracy, but they aren't adequate to establish a smoothly functioning police state.” The House passed the bill by a lopsided vote on May 20, and the Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on it the following week. Wallace appeared before the committee two days before Robeson and in a blistering statement called the bill “the most subversive legislation ever to be seriously sponsored in the United States Congress.” Referring to Hitler's campaign against the Communists, Wallace warned that “the suppression of the constitutional rights of Communists is but the prelude to an attack upon the liberties of all the people.”
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Taking the stand on May 31, Robeson reiterated Wallace's warnings and added some pungent remarks of his own. He testified for an hour and a half; Republican Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan did most of the questioning, with occasional assistance from Chairman Wiley of Wisconsin and periodic jabs from Republican Senator Moore from Oklahoma. Robeson
was asked to define what the American Communists “stood for.” “For complete equality of the Negro people,” he shot back—emphasizing his own paramount reason for supporting the Party's position. He went on to deny that American Communism “is an offshoot of Russian Communism”—other than in the sense that Russian Communism itself could be called an outgrowth of and reaction to the desperate social conditions prevalent in nineteenth-century Europe. And “Are you an American Communist?” Senator Ferguson asked. “That question,” Robeson responded, “has become the very basis of the struggle for American civil liberties,” representing an invasion, among other things, of the constitutional right to a secret ballot—since the CPUSA was a legal entity. Robeson therefore refused to answer the question, though he volunteered the information that he had “many dear friends who are Communists” and he thought “they have done a magnificent job.”
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The Senators were neither pleased nor persuaded. Moving along to the next item in what had become a familiar litany of accusations, they asked Robeson if it wasn't true that American Communists owed primary allegiance to the Soviet Union. Robeson parried with an end run: “I don't think they do have as much allegiance to Russia as certain Americans seem to have today, say, to fascist Greece or to Turkey.” And what did he mean by “fascist”? Two things, Robeson replied: a belief in racial superiority and a monopoly of resources in the hands of the few. At the heart of Communism, he said, was an interest in representing the interests and alleviating the suffering of the have-nots.

Would he comply with the Mundt-Nixon Bill, if it were passed? Robeson replied with a question of his own: during World War II, was a Frenchman faced with a law passed by the Vichy government curtailing civil liberties obligated to observe it? No, was his implied answer—he would be obligated to join the Resistance. “I would violate the law,” was Robeson's spoken response. The Senators preferred their own analogy: surely the American people were better protected in their rights than the Russian people, who faced “liquidation” if they dissented from official policy. Well, said Robeson, “I have been threatened with death two or three times,” and “my sharecropping relatives” in North Carolina faced the daily threat of lynching if they dared assert even their minimal rights.

Did he believe he could “best carry out” his ideals by backing the third party? “I certainly do,” he answered. Did that mean he was “disloyal to the United States”? No, it made him feel “infinitely more loyal to the United States,” since the starting point of the Progressives was “the suffering and the needs of millions.” But “the Communist Party is supporting Wallace,” one of the indignant Senators interjected. “I think they should,” Robeson replied, “because he represents the struggles of the people in this country, as they do. That doesn't make Mr. Wallace a Communist, though.” Did Robeson think “Communism a better system of government than our own
system”? “There are many ways to enlighten the world,” Robeson said, “Socialist systems, Communist systems, our so-called private enterprise systems. Well let's see which can work better.… We should be able not to think that we have got to wipe something else off the face of the earth.” He believed the Mundt-Nixon Bill was “part of that hysteria”; it would encourage the American people—who today “are extremely confused”—to sacrifice their own civil liberties in the name of a needless holy crusade against Communism.

When the session ended, the gathered reporters questioned the Senators on the committee. Senator Moore told them that “Robeson seems to want to be made a martyr. Maybe we ought to make him one.” Wiley made the comment, “I'm not interested in whether Robeson is a Communist or not. I am interested in the dignity of the committee.” Ferguson added that, since a quorum of the committee was not present, a contempt citation might run into legal problems. Robeson stayed in the capital long enough to join five thousand pickets at the White House protesting the Mundt-Nixon Bill. He told the press that Truman could not justifiably “pass the buck” on civil-rights legislation to Congress and brought the protest to a close by singing “Ol' Man River” at the foot of the Washington Monument. The Pittsburgh
Courier
called the racially integrated demonstration “the most impressive ‘march-on-Washington' since the Bonus March,” but
Time
insisted it had “so riled some Senators that they angrily trumpeted their determination to push the Mundt-Nixon bill through—although it had been headed for the shelf. That was O.K. with the Communists,”
Time
asserted. “If the bill became law they would be martyrs. If it didn't, they could chortle triumphantly that they had killed it.” Robeson returned to the campaign trail.
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Serious divisions opened within the black community over the continuing accusations of “communism” being leveled at the Progressive Party. In September, Lester Granger, head of the Urban League, declared that “Communist decision established the Wallace party, Communist support has given the campaign such impetus as it maintained and Communist strategy determines Progressive party policy.” The division was further accelerated by a momentous rupture in the Council on African Affairs.
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As anti-Communist fervor had mounted nationwide, Doxey Wilkerson, third in command at the Council, noticed that Max Yergan, its executive director, “began to sort of shift with the winds.” Wilkerson also helped to edit
The People's Voice
, the militant Harlem weekly Yergan part-owned and published (Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had been its editor-in-chief until 1946, when he severed connection with it as “Communist-dominated”). After Attorney General Tom Clark released his list of subversive “Communist-front” organizations in November 1947 (which included the Council), Wilkerson and Yergan got into a mounting number of disputes over policy pronouncements on both the paper and the Council, and
Wilkerson finally went to Ben Davis, Jr., and Henry Winston, two other black members of the Party in leadership positions, to warn them of Yergan's growing disaffection. As Wilkerson remembers it thirty-five years later, “they sort of discounted” his assessment—“it was almost unthinkable that Max Yergan would be turning.”
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Yet he was. At a meeting of the Council members on February 2, 1948, Yergan argued that the organization should publicly declare its “nonpartisan character,” should openly avow that it was not “identified with any partisan ideology.” Robeson and others insisted that such a statement would play into the hands of “reactionary red-baiters and would not help the Council.” After prolonged debate, Yergan's suggestion was tabled by the close vote, including proxies, of thirty-four to twenty-nine. The matter was referred to a policy committee, headed by Du Bois, to report its recommendations to the full Council.
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As the policy committee began its deliberations, Yergan first denied its authority and then, that failing, tried to circumvent it. He so obstructed its working that Du Bois finally resigned the chairmanship in protest. Yergan, on his own authority, called a meeting of the full Council for March 12, prompting Alphaeus Hunton, the educational director, to warn the other members that Yergan was planning a “coup” at the meeting and urging them to be present. Robeson telegraphed Yergan asking for a postponement of the meeting until March 25, when he could fly in from the campaign trail to attend.
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The March 25 meeting marked a decisive defeat for Yergan. When a report from the finance committee containing censure of some of his financial transactions was adopted, Yergan and his supporters stalked out of the meeting, claiming that no quorum existed. It did, but barely: twenty-one of the sixty-nine members attended, with sixteen proxies having been sent in—fourteen of them assigned to Robeson—for a bare majority of thirty-seven. William Jay Schieffelin, a white member of the Council, accused Robeson of being “absolutely unfair” in disqualifying Yergan's proxies—and walked out. The next day Yergan fired Hunton, and on April 5, deciding to go public with his case, called a press conference. That act sealed his fate with the Council's membership. Yergan told the reporters—and the story was widely printed—that a struggle had broken out “between Communist and anti-Communist factions,” that the Communist faction, led by Robeson, Hunton, and Wilkerson, had become determined to capture the organization as a lever “to swing the Negro vote to the support of Henry A. Wallace,” and that he intended to fight back against their unlawful seizure of power at a meeting of the Council he was calling for April 21.
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Under Robeson's name, a counterstatement immediately went out to the press, denying (accurately) that the Wallace issue had ever come up at a Council meeting, describing Yergan's bolt from the previous meeting,
rejecting his authority to call a new one, and expressing surprise that “for reasons of his own, and quite in contrast to his former position, Dr. Yergan is now unwilling to challenge the imperialist policy of the U.S. State Department.”
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The schism was now in the open, the skirmishing intense. Yergan persisted in his call for another meeting, Robeson hotly protested the date (fixed for when Yergan knew Robeson would be out of town), and Essie joined the fray by circulating a letter to fellow Council members in which she stressed that “Max Yergan has not—until now—ever challenged the political opinions of Paul Robeson.” She did not, she wrote, know whether any or all of her fellow members were, as Yergan charged, Communists, nor did she consider it any of her business: “I find it surprising that it is now suddenly of such grave concern to Max Yergan, because as a matter of fact, it was in his home on Hamilton Terrace that I first met Earl Browder; this very well known Communist was the guest of honor there.” It seemed to her that the sudden eruption of charges of Communism was “a recognizable part of the frightening and very un-American pattern,” currently abroad in the land, of trying to discredit dissenters. “When we bring up the normal relevant questions of American intervention abroad, high prices, lack of housing, discrimination, political corruption at home, we are met with the irrelevant answer, Communism.” Yergan's comment to the press that he was “determined to restore” the Council's “true function” of working to improve conditions in Africa wrongly implied that it had ever been diverted from that function. “If the Council has ever been used for any other purpose, Max Yergan himself has so used it, for he has kept the political, financial and social direction of the Council's affairs exclusively in his own hands, and we have not been able to say as much as we would like about them.”
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On April 21 the Council members met again in what proved a near-rerun of the March 25 meeting. When Robeson and nine other members arrived at Yergan's office at the appointed hour, his secretary told them that Yergan was not in and that the meeting would be held downstairs in the library. Yergan never appeared in the library, and so the assembled members proceeded to hold an informal meeting, which was interrupted when Yergan was spotted leaving the building. Robeson and two other members went after him, stopped him on the sidewalk, and demanded an explanation. He told them he had been waiting for them in his office, and since they had failed to appear, the meeting was canceled. In fact, they later learned, Yergan had conducted his own rump gathering with two of his supporters, “elected” a new set of officers to replace everyone except himself, and “dropped” twenty-three Council members from the organization.
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