Paul Robeson (73 page)

The town of Peekskill, in New York's Westchester County, was a typically mainstream blue-collar place, set apart from ten thousand others by the pockets of left-wing sympathizers in surrounding areas, mostly Jewish and mostly summer residents. The year-round citizens had long felt distaste for these “rich, radical outsiders,” and a potentially volatile tension had long existed. Sam and Helen Rosen were part of this world, often journeying up from their apartment in Manhattan to their house in the estate area of Katonah, about fifteen miles from Peekskill. On Saturday, August 27, the day of the scheduled concert, Paul called Helen Rosen from Grand Central Station, where he was about to board a train for Peekskill, to say he'd heard rumors of possible trouble. Sam—confined at home with a broken leg—turned on the radio and, sure enough, reports came over that various groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and St. Joseph's, the Catholic high school, were mobilizing. Helen told Paul she'd meet his train. She then phoned a friend in Croton, Sydney Danis, and asked him for backup help. He agreed “to get two stalwart
fellows” and meet her at the Peekskill station. Helen set out with her fourteen-year-old son, John, who insisted on accompanying her. (“Nobody's going to hurt our Paul.” His eighteen-year-old sister, Judy, shared his sentiments; as soon as she heard the news of trouble, she flew home from California, where she had been vacationing, and arrived in Katonah the following day.)
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At the train station, as Helen recalls it, “it was just like any Saturday afternoon, with people coming up for the weekend” and cars lined up to greet them. While awaiting Paul's arrival, Helen heard on the radio that protesters were massing at the picnic grounds. Paul got off the train without incident, but it was decided that he should go in Danis's car, with Helen and John driving in front of them in their station wagon. As they neared the picnic grounds, it was immediately apparent that a brawl was in progress. A truck was deliberately parked in the middle of the road, effectively blocking it, forcing traffic to a crawl, allowing marauding groups of young men to check the occupants of each car, yanking some of the passengers out while a jeering crowd on the sidelines yelled “Dirty Commie” and “Dirty kike,” tossing rocks, mauling suspicious strays. Police were visible on the sidelines, some smiling, none making a move to interfere with the mob; although the identities of the townspeople were familiar—St. Joseph's School had proudly unfurled its banner—the police arrested no one. Helen saw a burning cross on the hill. She got John down on the floor of the station wagon and ran to the car behind her, where Paul was. He was enraged and, according to Helen, “We had a hard time keeping him from getting out of the car.” “Get him the hell out of here!” she yelled to Danis and his friends. “Get the hell out of here! Get him to New York!”
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Somehow Danis managed to back out of the line of cars and drove Robeson first to the Danis house in Croton and then to the Rockmores' summer place in Ossining, thirty minutes from Peekskill. Helen and John inched their way home while the anti-Robeson mob moved on to attack the concertgoers, smash the stage, torch the camp chairs set up around it—and put a dozen Robeson supporters in the hospital. Clara Rockmore remembers that when Paul arrived he was more agitated than angry, not quite able to believe the awful reality of what had happened. He put in a call to the Rosens to tell them he was safe; then he and the Rockmores sat up most of the night on the porch overlooking the lake. In the morning a car came to take him back to New York City. He went straight to a press conference at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he called for a Justice Department investigation, characterized the rioting as “an attack on the whole Negro people,” and suggested that a boycott of Peekskill merchants might prove an effective way to put pressure on those decent but indifferent souls who deplored violence but did nothing to prevent it.
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That same afternoon, the Rosens opened up their place in Katonah for a protest meeting. Already inundated with hate calls, Helen asked the
state police for protection. “They promised to be there, but nobody came.” John Rosen owned a .22 for target practice; after he strapped it on, he and a friend booby-trapped the driveway with wire fencing and then personally patrolled it. Fifteen hundred people showed up at the Rosens', formed the Westchester Committee for Law and Order, and invited Robeson to return to Peekskill. Representatives from several left-wing unions—the Fur and Leather Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the Longshoremen—pledged to mobilize their members to serve as a cordon of defense for a rescheduled concert—“come what may,” as a statement signed by union leaders put it. Ten union men bedded down right then and there on the Rosens' porch to guard the family.
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The following day—Monday, August 29—the first newspaper accounts of the riot hit the stands. “Robeson: He Asked for It,” headlined the
Daily Mirror
. The
Daily Worker
, in contrast, reported its story under the lead “Lynch Mob Runs Amuck at Robeson's Concert.” While the press furiously debated who had provoked whom to do what, the FBI's own agent, in a teletype message sent the night of the riot, acknowledged twice that it had been “started by vets.” That was to prove the outer limit of official candor. The FBI dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the Justice Department, but J. Edgar Hoover decided he would “conduct no investigation unless requested.”
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By now statements, charges, and protests flooded the media. The Joint Veterans Council of Peekskill disclaimed any involvement in a “riot,” describing its activities as a “protest parade … held without any disorder and … peacefully disbanded.” The national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars also denied any responsibility for the lawlessness, acknowledging only that the local post had engaged in “a spontaneous demonstration.” The Peekskill police chief said the picnic grounds had been outside his jurisdiction; a spokesman for the state police said he had never received a request for troopers. The commander of Peekskill Post 274 of the American Legion disdained excuse or apology: “Our objective was to prevent the Paul Robeson concert and I think our objective was reached.”
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On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement signed by John Haynes Holmes, Roger Baldwin, and Arthur Garfield Hays, declared it was “unfortunate and inexplicable that during the three hours of rioting which took place, a sufficient number of law enforcement officials … did not appear on the scene.” The music critic Olin Downes and the novelist Howard Fast led a protest meeting of the New York State Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Vito Marcantonio accused Westchester County officials of direct complicity. The state commander of the Jewish War Veterans, denouncing the riot as “a shameful blot,” denied that local officials could be relied on for an unbiased report and called for a special investigator. A large number of concerned individuals added their
voices—among them Henry A. Wallace, Lindsay H. White (president of the New York NAACP), and Rabbi Irving Miller (chairman of the American Jewish Congress). The FBI carefully noted the names of those speaking out in Robeson's behalf.
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Governor Thomas E. Dewey at first refused to comment on events at Peekskill, but as calls for an investigation mounted, he bowed to the pressure and ordered Westchester County District Attorney George M. Fanelli to make a report to him. Fanelli immediately announced that he had studied pictures of the mêlée and was subpoenaing prints of one “particularly revealing” photograph published in the New York
Daily News:
a black holding a knife in his hand. Fanelli also portentously announced that in the litter on the picnic ground a pamphlet entitled
Political Economy in the Soviet Union
had been retrieved, as well as a cardboard coin container bearing the label “1949 Lenin Memorial.”
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On Tuesday, August 30, an overflow crowd of three thousand gathered at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem in response to a call put out by the Emergency Committee to Protest the Peekskill Riot. The turnout was so large that speakers at the rally repeated their remarks to those who waited outside the hall. The New York
Amsterdam News
described the huge crowd as “composed of Robeson fans, Communist Party leaders … rank and file Harlemites and the curious representing all shades of political opinion.” Robeson handled the crowd masterfully, interjecting into his long speech singing, talking, and confidential asides. He began by emphasizing that “It's been a long struggle that I've waged, sometimes not very well understood,” and he reiterated, as so often in his public statements, that the struggle was not just by and for Communists and blacks but included an alliance of the oppressed everywhere. Then he launched into a political polemic as fierce and telling as he ever delivered: “I will be loyal to the America of the true traditions; to the America of the abolitionists, of Harriet Tubman, of Thaddeus Stevens, of those who fought for my people's freedom, not of those who tried to enslave them. And I will have no loyalty to the Forrestals, to the Harrimans, to the Wall-Streeters.…” Calling the Peekskill riot “a preview of American storm troopers in action,” he added, with perhaps calculated optimism, that it also meant “a real turn in the anti-Fascist struggle in America.” Peekskill had opened people's eyes. “We are a part of a very historic departure. This means that from now on out we take the offensive.
We
take it! We'll have our meetings and our concerts all over these United States. That's right. And we'll see that our women and our children are not harmed again! We will understand that … the surest way to get police protection is to have it very clear that we'll protect ourselves, and good! … I'll be back with my friends in Peekskill.…” As the crowd cheered, a special detail of more than a hundred police and detectives kept an eye out for trouble. None came. When the meeting ended, at midnight, the police escorted the
Robeson supporters in a torchlight parade down Lenox Avenue to 135th Street.
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According to Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a second-echelon CP leader who at the time was the Party's New York State educational director, “There was a big debate in the Party as to what kind of reaction we should have” to the Peekskill riot. A segment of the Party leadership was already annoyed at Robeson for his “nationalistic” speech in Paris (the rumor was that Ben Davis, Jr.'s vigorous defense of Robeson had imperiled his own position for a time), and so when Peekskill erupted, “the dominant white [New York State] leadership,” particularly Robert Thompson, wanted to “follow the path of least resistance” and confine protest to the Harlem rally. But Johnson and others successfully led the opposing group in arguing that they had to “beard the lion in his own den and go back to Peeks-kill.” Robeson agreed. He announced that he would give a rescheduled concert on September 4.
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When it was learned in Peekskill that Robeson would return, tension quickly mounted. The Associated Veterans' Group, representing fourteen posts, announced that it would stage a mammoth protest parade on the day of the concert. Flag salesmen appeared on the streets of the town, and most businessmen—for fourteen dollars—prudently bought one for display. Signs and car stickers began to appear everywhere with the slogan “Wake Up America—Peekskill Did!” To deal with the rash of threatening phone calls coming in to pro-Robeson supporters, the Peekskill telephone company had to hire extra operators. The New York
Compass
reported that, under the threat of the anonymous calls, vacationers were closing up their houses and returning to New York. Helen Rosen, determined to go to the market in order to feed the union men guarding her house, discovered that nobody in town would talk to her. (One neighbor did, though: he came over with an offer to buy the Rosen place. It's yours, Helen told him—for a million dollars, to be paid
now
. He declined.) The Fur and Leather Workers Union and several other left-wing groups organized a security force to protect the concertgoers (the FBI lumped all such activity together as “Communists … endeavoring to recruit delegations”). The Westchester Committee for Law and Order spent the forty-eight hours preceding the concert, largely without sleep, contacting state and local officials in an effort to ensure a peaceful outcome. Two effigies of Robeson were hanged on the night before the rescheduled concert.
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At 6:00 a.m. on September 4, the first union guards arrived to set up defense lines at the concert site at Hollow Brook Golf Course, three miles outside of Peekskill. The state police, under the direction of Superintendent John Gaffney, set up a command post in a nearby area. Overhead a police helicopter circled. Four ambulances stood by. As some twenty thousand concertgoers began to arrive at midday, a veterans' protest parade—only about eight thousand strong rather than the thirty thousand the
Associated Veterans' Group had called for—marched outside the grounds under the eyes of state and local police, yelling anti-Semitic and anti-black remarks and taunting the arrivals with shouted threats: “We'll kill you!,” “You'll get in but you won't get out!”
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Robeson, under the advice of the security men, remained in his car. Promptly at two o'clock the concert began. Union guards, Revels Cayton among them, ringed the platform. Pete Seeger sang. Pianists Ray Lev and Leonid Hambro played Bach and Chopin. There were no speeches, political or otherwise. At four, Robeson, accompanied by an admittedly terrified Larry Brown, performed, ringed around by fifteen or so union men; after opening the concert with “Let My People Go,” he brought the crowd to its feet with a rendition of “Ol' Man River” that emphasized his earlier change in lyrics: “I must keep fightin' until I'm dyin'.” Helen Rosen noticed several men with guns on the ridge surrounding the hollow; Paul, an easy target in full view, was clearly taking his life in his hands. (Cayton had predicted before the concert that, “With so many people watching, they wouldn't dare go for him,” that Robeson “was going to be like the safest man in New York.” For years afterward, when setting off on some chancy engagement, Robeson would laughingly say, “I guess I'll be the safest man in the country.”) The security force flushed two men with high-powered rifles out of a nest in a hill overlooking the hollow. The uneasy truce held throughout the concert. When it was over, Robeson was taken out in a convoy of cars whose windows were shaded with blankets; Robeson himself lay on the rear floor, while two of the trade-union bodyguards covered him with their bodies.
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