Paul Robeson (7 page)

When Gerry Neale was a young girl, her teacher in the small segregated school she attended in her hometown of Freehold had taught her “pride in African history as well as the history of the Negro in America”—taught her so well that, when she later spoke out time and again in class in Teachers Normal “about the Negro who made this or that contribution,” her white history teacher, “with genuine kindly amusement,” commented, “Miss Neale will make us all regret we are not Negro.” Gerry also insisted, as a young girl, in seating herself on the main floor of the segregated movie theater in Freehold—while her friends went to the balcony as directed. Even so, Gerry felt Paul was ahead of her—and of those few others in their crowd who were concerned with social issues. “His voice got earnest, vigorous (not loud) when speaking about the subject of race discrimination.” She adds that she is not implying that Paul's ideas at the time were well formed or that he was a “radical activist” in the subsequent sense of that term: his tone was not militant and his tactics were not confrontational. He cared deeply about the plight of black people, yet as a young man “believed fully that the promises of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights could be realized if people worked hard at it,” if they relied on the efficacy of a conciliatory appeal to the nation's conscience. Some fifteen years later Robeson told an English friend that during his adolescence
there was “still no questioning of accepted values,” and during his college years—a “period of comparative harmony”—his “creative impulses [were] driven underground and interest centered in athletics”; he added, significantly, that it was “a period of apparent triumph, yet not really satisfying.”
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Robeson's confidence in the essential beneficence of the American system, even when he was a young man, had its limits. Passive reliance on the “inevitability” of progress was, he felt, a chimera and a trap; neither time, patience, nor even reliance on the tender mercies of the Divinity could guarantee desirable social change. That would come about only “if people worked hard at it.” When Gerry and her classmate Bessie Moore (Robeson had been close to the Moore family of Princeton since childhood) decided to take some action against segregation in the women's dormitory at Teachers Normal, Paul joined them for planning sessions, encouraging their purpose. After a “very polite but earnest” letter to the college president, Gerry and Bessie pressed their case in a personal interview with him. The president expressed sympathy. He thought he had “the right answer”: the school owned an unoccupied house whose basement it used for storing coal. It was a lovely house, he said. He would let the female black students use it for their very own dormitory. Gerry expressed “appreciation for the color scheme he had in mind: black coal, black women students,” but said the offer was unacceptable. She and Bessie held out for a change in college policy that would allow any black woman who wanted to live in the regular dormitory to do so. Somewhat to their own surprise, that permission was granted—perhaps in part because it was felt that the black women currently on campus were already settled in private homes and therefore unlikely to avail themselves of the offer. That turned out to be the case; Gerry, who
was
tempted, couldn't afford to move. Still, they had worked hard for a victory, and won it. “Paul was pleased.”
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But Gerry and Paul did not see eye to eye on all matters. He was more interested in marriage than she: “I was not sure I loved him enough.” Her friends were astonished—“Who would ever raise such a question if they could marry Paul Robeson?!” She explained that she did not think her feelings were strong enough to survive the difficulties of marriage to a man who “would be called upon around the world to be Everyman.” Gerry, like most middle-class young women of the day, believed that “a good marriage” took precedence over other priorities. Though Paul had been able to persuade her that she was the center of his universe (a charismatic quality that men and women responded to and remarked on all through his life), Gerry was shrewd enough to realize that, as a “man of destiny,” he would in time inevitably move on to someone else. So when Paul did actually propose marriage, Gerry turned him down. He refused, however, to accept her decision and for some time longer would continue to try to change it.
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In June 1919 they both graduated. The undergraduate “class prophecy” for 1919 confirmed Gerry's instincts by predicting that Paul, by 1940, would be governor of New Jersey, would have “dimmed the fame of Booker T. Washington,” and would be “the leader of the colored race in America.” That summer Gerry enrolled at Rutgers, to study Shakespeare for her own enjoyment and to take craft courses in preparation for teaching mentally retarded boys in Atlantic City that coming fall. Paul moved to Harlem to prepare for his entrance into Columbia University Law School. Reverend Robeson had wanted him to become a minister, and for a time Paul had felt the inclination himself. From boyhood he had actively worked in his father's church and when Reverend Robeson was indisposed had occasionally deputized for him, “reading and talking a little to keep things going in his absence.” But during college Paul decided that he lacked zeal for the ministry and that a career in law better suited his combined wish to make a name for himself and to serve his people. If Reverend Robeson had been disappointed, he never said so—“He made no attempt to upbraid me, or to persuade me to change my resolution.” The fact that another son, Ben, was due to become a minister had undoubtedly softened his father's disappointment.
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Paul returned to New Brunswick often that summer to see Gerry, but, as she had sensed, his “destiny” was about to unfold, precipitately, taking him off in a variety of new directions.

CHAPTER 3

Courtship and Marriage

(1919–1921)

In 1910 more than 90 percent of the Afro-American population still lived in the South, mostly in rural areas; the chief characteristics of daily life were grinding poverty, social segregation, racial violence, and political impotence. The era of Progressivism, heralded then and since as the rebirth of a humane political vision, was not designed to include blacks; white reformers considered the disfranchisement of blacks a necessary corollary of “good government,” their degraded status the inescapable consequence of biological inferiority. In 1914 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the rightness of “separate but equal,” and President Woodrow Wilson, busy fighting to make the world “safe for democracy,” refused to speak out publicly against lynching. He did, however, speak out against what he called “a social blunder of the worst kind”—namely, the effort to appoint black officials in the South, a region without a single black policeman, in a country that could count exactly one black judge, two black legislators, and a total of two thousand black college students.
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In search of a better life, blacks for generations had drifted toward Northern urban centers. After 1910 the drift became a tide. The “Great Migration” of the next two decades saw nearly two million blacks leave the rural South, with the black population in cities rising from 22 percent in 1900 to 40 percent in 1930. No promised land awaited the new migrants to the North, yet amid the endemic squalor and discrimination they did manage to make some improvement in their daily lot: decreased death, illiteracy, and infant-mortality rates, a rise in school enrollment and political participation (blacks could vote in the North). Fierce white resistance to residential integration—including bombings and beatings—forced
blacks into ghettos, where the development of community institutions like churches and fraternal orders provided some sense of refuge, a potential political base, and a focus for cultural cohesion.

Nowhere were these developments more pronounced than in Harlem. When Paul Robeson arrived in “the Negro capital of the world” in the summer of 1919, it was in transition from an upwardly mobile white enclave to an all-black one, from an outpost of gentility to slumming headquarters for liberated flappers, from a cultural backwater to the cultural center for the self-conscious proclamation of a New Negro—newly militant, newly conscious, newly assertive—and the literary and artistic Renaissance that his emergence brought in train.

Robeson's reputation preceded him. Before he set foot on 135th Street, he had become one of “Harlem's darlings,” the personification of the richly talented, unapologetically ambitious New Negro. As an undergraduate football star, he had played at the Polo Grounds, and had become a more conspicuous figure still from his stint on the St. Christopher basketball team; the excitement of those games at Manhattan Centre (later Rockland Palace) had spilled over into nights on the town, the last stop always being Streeter's Chinese Restaurant on 136th Street. Within a few months of moving to Harlem, Robeson had become a familiar figure, strolling down Seventh Avenue on a summer day “with a pretty girl on his arm, greeting friends and admirers all along the way,” something of a prince in his kingdom—but an approachable prince, his good-natured modesty deflecting envy, making it possible to think of him, despite all his accomplishments, as “one of us.”
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It was a heady summer in Harlem, that year of 1919, a summer of dramatic counterpoint. On the one hand, returning black veterans of the much-decorated 369th Regiment, led by Lieutenant James Europe's famed jazz band, were given a high-spirited reception as they wound in triumphal procession up Lenox Avenue. On the other hand, there were daily bulletins about rampaging white mobs shooting, burning, torturing, and lynching black victims—as if to announce that New Negroes would be treated in the same ruthless spirit as had the old. The violence during that “Red Summer” included a two-day riot in the nation's capital that left a hundred people injured and was only aborted when Secretary of War Baker called out the infantry. Paul's older brother William, who had become a doctor and was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, told him vivid stories of how blacks had armed themselves and successfully fought back against their attackers.
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Harlem was feistily alive that summer, filled with demobilized officers and men, smart in Sam Browne belts and khaki, and with black students from nearly every state in the Union attending Columbia University's summer session. Very much a part of the scene were Paul Robeson and his
two buddies, Jimmy Lightfoot, a young musician with whom he shared an apartment on 135th Street, and Rudolph (“Bud”) Fisher, Paul's closest friend at the time, a 1919 Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Brown who was to study medicine at Howard. (Fisher would become a prominent psychiatrist and a major literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance—his two novels,
The Walls of Jericho
and
The Conjure Man Dies
, are still widely admired—before his early death in 1934.) “The pretty girl on Robeson's arm” in those days was often Frances (“Frankie”) Quiett, while Fisher's steady date was May Chinn. Frankie had come to New York from Virginia in 1918, worked in a milliner's shop, attended the church of Reverend John Haynes Holmes (the progressive white minister who was one of the interracial founders of the NAACP), and roomed for a time with May Chinn, who introduced her to Robeson. May had probably gotten to know him at Columbia, where she became the first black woman graduate of Bellevue and the first black woman intern at Harlem Hospital—having earlier been discouraged by a racist teacher from going on with her first love, music.
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The four spent a lot of time together, and often May would play the piano while Paul sang. As Frankie recalled sixty-five years later, he “had a beautiful, wondrous voice,” though in May's opinion an “undisciplined” one, and they pressed him to seek training and to find more opportunities for singing in public. May's struggling mother had somehow managed to buy her a piano, and Paul would practice at her apartment, with May accompanying him—“the lyric type of song, something between opera and the spirituals, the popular song ‘Oh Danny Boy' and things of that sort.” May's mother let her travel locally with Paul to play for him at the small recitals he began to give in churches, schools, and the private homes of wealthy whites. Occasionally the guest list was racially mixed, but even then, spirituals were not in demand; as Chinn later put it, “The cultured, well-educated Negro in many incidents asked us not to sing the spirituals in audiences in which there would be white people,” because they “brought us down” to the level of “the slave people” among whom the songs had originated, and confirmed whites in their assumption that the spirituals “were the only thing in music we could do.”
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On one of their trips outside of the city, Paul spent all his money buying the two of them dinner on the train; fortunately, May's mother had given her emergency carfare, and their New Jersey hostess loaned Paul his—an episode, in May's opinion, typical of Paul, of his generosity, his “very gentle, very gracious” nature, his “vagueness about time and money: the material things didn't mean anything to him.” Spontaneity was part of Paul's good nature. Accidentally running into Frankie on the street one day, he talked her into going up to New Haven with him that same afternoon to see the Yale-Harvard football game. Though afraid she might lose her job (she didn't), Frankie let his enthusiasm catch her up, and the two
spent an “exciting” day—she was astonished at how many people in the stadium recognized and greeted Paul.
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Robeson's Rutgers coach, Foster Sanford, helped to pay his law-school tuition in return for Paul's traveling to New Jersey every Saturday morning to tutor Sanford, Jr., in Latin. To augment his income further—and in part for love of the sport—Paul continued his football career after graduating. He helped coach at Lincoln University with Fritz Pollard, the black All-American halfback from Brown; he joined the Columbia scrub-team practice against its varsity; and he played professional football for Frank Nied's Akron Pros and for the Milwaukee Badgers. The Pros, with Pollard and Robeson on the 1920–21 teams, had an unbeaten streak of eighteen games, and while on “Bo” McMillan's Badgers squad in 1922 Robeson scored both touchdowns before seventy-five hundred fans in the famed 13–0 duel with Jim Thorpe's Oorang Indians. Akron, a factory town employing many white Southern migrants, was known for its overt, unapologetic racism. Fritz Pollard later remembered the raucous boos of the fans, the inability to get a hotel room or a meal in a restaurant, and the need to dress for games in Frank Nied's cigar factory. According to another legendary black player, James Milo (“Ink”) Williams, who “had the pleasure of playing with Robeson and the displeasure of playing against him,” their relationship with white players was “very poor in some instances.” Sitting in a hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Williams and Pollard were “paged out of the dining room,” then taken to the office and told, “We don't allow colored people to eat in our hotel.” In Canton, Ohio, seated with some white players, Williams was allowed to go on eating—the management simply put a screen around the table. If nothing else, the money was good—as much as a thousand dollars a game, which was top dollar in professional football in the 1920s.
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