Paul Robeson (76 page)

The news that Ben Davis was free on bail touched off a large rally in Harlem, and Robeson stood by Davis's side as he was welcomed back. Toward the close of the rally, a brief skirmish broke out between bystanders and police. The
Journal-American
, in a banner headline, tried to blow up the marginal event into “360 Extra Police Ordered to Harlem After Red Riot,” seconded by the
Daily News
(“6 Arrested as Pro-Reds Fight Cops”), but in fact the clash, such as it was, developed over the issue of police brutality in Harlem and (as the New York
Post
reported) was in no sense planned or abetted by “Communists.” Davis, despite his indictment, had been renominated to the City Council, and his opponent in that contest, the conservative black columnist Earl Brown, immediately accused the CP of having incited the skirmish, charging that the Party had imported its workers “from all over the country specifically to start trouble.” In the few days remaining before the election, Robeson worked hard for Davis's campaign but his bid was lost at the polls by a three-to-one majority. At a rally that night in Harlem, Davis's campaign manager, Ollie Harrington, couldn't figure out why Robeson hadn't shown up as promised. Calling “downtown” to CP headquarters, he told them a no-show on Robeson's part would be “a terrible mistake.” Within twenty minutes Robeson appeared at the rally and sang his heart out to the waiting crowd, but the incident upset Harrington; he saw it as a typical example of how the Party
sometimes misused Robeson “and compromised his image with the black masses.” Yes, Revels Cayton concurs, “they used Paul in a kind of way that made him unacceptable to the masses of Negroes. This giant—they had not the slightest idea of how to work with him.” But on the issue of being “used,” Robeson himself deserves the final word: “The Communists use the Negro,” he once said with a chuckle, “and we only wish more people would want to use us this way.”
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CHAPTER 19

The Right to Travel

(1950–1952)

In October 1949 Andrei Vyshinsky, Foreign Minister of the U.S.S.R., responded to charges at the United Nations that the “anti-fascist” trials in progress in Eastern Europe were in fact suppressions of civil liberties, by declaring that the United States had “no moral qualifications” for such a discussion; incidents like Peekskill, Vyshinsky retorted, suggested that “under the guise of freedom of expression” the United States allowed “pro-fascist” hooligans to break up peaceful assemblies. The following month Robeson appeared at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner in honor of Vyshinsky (and of the thirty-second anniversary of the Soviet state) sponsored by the Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a group that had been founded in the last years of the war with prominent mainstream Americans like Averill Harriman as participants but whose membership had narrowed with the onset of the Cold War.
¹

Welcoming Vyshinsky at the dinner, Robeson spoke of the peoples of Eastern Europe as “masters of their own lands,” of Tito—who had recently moved his country out of the Soviet sphere—as “disguising” himself as a revolutionary, and of Truman as an “imperialist wolf disguised as a benevolent watchdog.” He also denounced the “insolence” of those who questioned his love for his own country, asserting that
“ONLY
those who work for a policy of friendship with the Soviet Union are genuine American patriots.” This was not language designed for conciliation (or even entire accuracy). In his determination to avoid appearing cowed, in his anger at being caricatured, Robeson was taking on some of the polemically simplistic tones of his adversaries, trading in slogans. The brutality of the public attack on him had hardened his own rhetorical arteries, brought out the
obstinacy that was always one of the constants (though usually better concealed) in his personality. The danger was that the suppleness of his inner process would be permanently affected, that opinionated and oracular defiance would become a reflex mannerism, that he would imitate and come to resemble his own dogmatic persecutors.
²

A similar ideological-emotional constriction is apparent in the position Robeson took on the civil liberties of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. At a Bill of Rights Conference in New York City in late July 1949, a resolution was introduced calling for freedom for eighteen Trotskyists convicted in 1941 under the same provisions of the Smith Act currently being used against the leaders of the CPUSA. The chairman of the conference, Paul J. Kern, argued forcefully before the convention that free speech should never be denied because of a difference in political opinion—a view seconded by Professor Thomas Emerson of the Yale Law School. An impassioned Robeson took the platform to denounce the Kern-Emerson position. Like most pro-Soviets, Robeson had long blamed the followers of Trotsky for spreading exaggerated “slanders” about Stalin's “police state.” Adherents of the Socialist Workers Party, Robeson exclaimed, “are the allies of fascism who want to destroy the new democracies of the world. Let's not get confused. They are the enemies of the working class. Would you give civil rights to the Ku Klux Klan?”
NO
, the delegates roared back. They defeated the resolution and passed a substitute that simply called for the defense of “all anti-fascist victims of the Smith Act.” It was not Robeson's finest hour.
³

Even some of the leaders of the CPUSA thought he ought to tone down his rhetoric. They had no trouble with the content, but did worry about the timing. On trial as “subversives,” a segment of the Party leadership feared that Robeson's “refusal-to-fight-the-Soviets” line had inadvertently painted them as disloyal. Paul Robeson, Jr., recalls that one evening late in December 1949 his father asked that he accompany him to a West Side apartment. On entering, Paul, Jr., recognized several leaders of the Party, including the then chairman, Henry Winston. After some cordial talk, Winston suggested to Robeson that perhaps for the time being he might consider confining himself to singing—which to Paul, Jr., implied that Winston was urging his father to accept a rumored State Department “deal” to call off its surveillance if he returned to “art.” Paul, Jr., “felt” his father's body stiffen; “I instinctively started to raise my right hand to block a blow which I thought he might direct at Winston's head.” Robeson gripped the arms of his chair and, eyes narrowed, simply stared at Winston. “There was this dead silence, with everybody frozen. And he said, ‘No, Winnie, I don't think that would be too good an idea.' He sounded like a lion growling.” Then he rose and, his son following, went out the door. In Paul, Jr.'s view, Henry Winston and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn actually led a movement within the Party to issue some kind of disclaimer of Robeson's
Paris statement, but Ben Davis succeeded in derailing it. Paul, Jr., believes his father disliked Winston but was fond of Gurley Flynn. Politically, he felt close to neither; his own sympathies lay more with the Ben Davis-William Z. Foster “left-wing” faction in the Party, and sometimes with the centrist Eugene Dennis, whom he liked greatly. But finally, in the words of Doxey Wilkerson, Robeson “was bigger than the Party. He was an institution, if you will. He managed to deflect the kinds of jealousies that would ordinarily be leveled against a person of great magnitude. Everybody knew he was straight, honest, and what he wanted to do. He was universally respected.”
⁴

That same week of December 1949, Robeson joined Du Bois, Patterson, Alphaeus Hunton, Ben Davis, Doxey Wilkerson, and others in cabling greetings to Joseph Stalin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The New York
Amsterdam News
commented that “when these ‘left wing Negro leaders' go on record with expressions of love for the arch enemy of America, then we can expect the boys who run this country to suspect their motives … plac[ing] them even further on Uncle Sam's black list.” Indeed, Army Intelligence reported to the FBI that “the Communists plan to shuttle Paul Robeson to rallies throughout the United States with the express intention of provoking riots and spreading propaganda to the effect that the Communist Party is ‘shedding blood' in the interest of racial equality.” FBI surveillance became so constant that Robeson got to the point where he recognized plainclothesmen—though he did not let on, to avoid alarming his friends.
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Robeson did continue to travel and speak out, but his outlets were narrowing. He gave his first major address of the new year, 1950, at the Progressive Party national convention in Chicago in February. At meetings just prior to the convention, the Progressive Party leaders agreed to disagree about the Tito-Stalin split (Robeson sided with Moscow), to unite behind a call for pardons for the eleven Communist leaders prosecuted under the Smith Act, and to emphasize commitment to the black struggle for civil rights. In his own remarks to the convention, Henry Wallace gave a speech that bordered on being anti-Communist (a few months later he would break with the Progressives over the issue of the Korean War, offering his support to the Truman administration). When Robeson's turn came to address the delegates, he confined himself almost entirely to the issue of civil rights, barely alluding to the Soviet Union. He excoriated the two major parties for keeping blacks in a condition of second-class citizenship and praised the “magnificent role” of the Progressive Party in battling for civil rights, in having “proven to the Negro people that we mean what we say.” The delegates elected him cochairman.
⁶

The country was in no mood for an appeal to tolerance. “Bad news” had begun to arrive with regularity, fraying nerves, souring the national disposition. Judith Coplon, a Justice Department employee, was arrested
by FBI agents during an alleged rendezvous with a Soviet official and charged with espionage. Russia exploded an atomic device. The British scientist Klaus Fuchs was arrested and charged with passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The State Department released its White Paper on China, conceding “the unfortunate” victory of the Communists. (When the news of Chiang Kai-shek's defeat came over the radio in October 1949, Paul and Helen and Sam Rosen headed out into the street on their way to an appointment and then, in a burst of high spirits, linked arms and sang “Cheelai,” the Chinese Communist song, at the top of their lungs—to the general astonishment of passers-by.) Late in January 1950, a New York jury found Alger Hiss guilty of perjury. Richard Nixon charged the administration with suppressing evidence of Hiss's Communist connections. The right-wing press came close to labeling Secretary of State Dean Acheson a traitor. Senator Joe McCarthy journeyed to Wheeling, West Virginia, to deplore American impotence in the world and to hint darkly about the infiltration of the “enemy” into the highest echelons of the State Department.
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In the midst of this crescendo of alarm, Eleanor Roosevelt's son Elliot announced that Paul Robeson would appear on his mother's Sunday afternoon television show, “Today with Mrs. Roosevelt,” to debate with Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the black Mississippi Republican committeeman Perry Howard on “the role of the Negro in American political life.” He might just as well have announced the imminent appearance of the devil. NBC at once received hundreds of hostile phone calls; the state commander of the American Legion told the press that Robeson's purpose would be to incite “hatred and bigotry”; the Catholic War Veterans demanded that the networks protect “decent Americans” from exposure to anti-American propaganda; and the Hearst paper the New York
Journal-American
put its front page anti-Robeson story right next to an article hailing Senator McCarthy for having “named” two “pro-Communist” State Department employees.
⁸

Less than twenty-four hours after Robeson's appearance had been announced, it was canceled. An NBC spokesman told the press that Mrs. Roosevelt had been “premature” and Paul Robeson would not appear on her program—indeed, would
never
appear on NBC as long as the network could help it—thereby making him the first American to be officially banned from television. Robeson told reporters that he hoped “Mrs. Roosevelt and Elliot Roosevelt will struggle, as I am sure they will, for the civil rights of everyone to be heard.… I cannot and will not accept the notion that because someone is accused of being a Communist or a ‘Communist sympathizer' that he has no right to speak.” (This was precisely the right he had argued against extending to Trotskyists eight months earlier.) Howard Fast challenged Mrs. Roosevelt to speak out against censorship at a Robeson concert scheduled for the following week, but Mrs. Roosevelt
declined any comment except for the
non sequitur
—after reporters pressed her—that the television discussion was to have been a “general” one and Robeson would not have had “unlimited time to express his point of view.” When a private citizen wrote to ask her why she had not publicly objected to cancellation of the program, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “… because I was away and in any case, the National Broadcasting Company has the final say on these programs. I can, of course, think of several other negro Americans who are better qualified to speak than Mr. Robeson because they are more objective. However, I would not be afraid of anything Mr. Robeson might say.”
⁹

Refraining from any attack on the Roosevelts, Robeson aimed his fire at NBC. The banning was “a sad commentary on our professions of democracy,” he said, but he was not surprised that the network had balked at a candid discussion of “the Negro in politics”—it had always balked at any but stereotyped presentations of blacks (while freely opening its airways to white supremacists) and had consistently refused to hire any skilled blacks in its army of technicians. Support for Robeson came from limited quarters only.
The Afro-American
printed an editorial censorious of the NBC action—and soon after named Robeson to its 1950 National Honor Roll—but most of the black press remained silent. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., registered a protest, but it was lukewarm, leading the CP trade-unionist Ferdinand Smith to denounce Powell as “pussy-footing.” Roy Wilkins, speaking for the NAACP, delayed so long in issuing a statement that his lieutenant Henry Lee Moon sent him a memo expressing anxiety that the NAACP had failed to speak out expeditiously. The Progressive Party and the American Civil Liberties Union did back Robeson's right to appear, and a few members of the left-wing Harlem Trade Union Council did picket NBC. But dominant opinion was represented by an editorial in the New York
Telegram-Sun:
Paul Robeson had been “publicly and rightly censured.”
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