Paul Robeson (81 page)

In accepting the prize, Robeson told the press he did so “not merely as an individual, but as a part of the growing peace movement in the United States, a peace movement that has been honored by the leadership of the great scholar, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois.” As Robeson had already said during a speech at Reverend Charles Hill's Hartford Avenue Baptist Church in Detroit, “I'm very proud that somewhere people understood that I'm struggling for peace, and that I shall continue to do [so].” He announced that he would again apply for a passport in order to be able to receive the prize in person. The State Department, in turn, announced—within a week—that Robeson's application was denied. “We see nothing to indicate,” a spokesman said, that Robeson's “attitude has changed.” The Passport Division also notified him, with no hint of irony, that its reluctance to sanction American citizens' visits to the Soviet Union was based on an inability “to assure them in that country the degree of protection which it likes to afford to American citizens traveling abroad.”
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The State Department was accurate in one particular: Robeson's “attitude” had not changed. His whole point was that the right to a passport did not and should not hinge on a citizen's politics. Under the Constitution, “attitudes” were not actionable; they were instead at the core of the country's protected heritage of free speech. The government's case rested on dubious interpretations of the President's war powers, the Secretary of State's discretionary power in issuing passports, and the actual state of the
current “national emergency.” Not only were the State Department's justifying arguments cloudy, but its underlying racist animus was revealed with startling clarity in a footnote to one of the briefs it used when arguing the Robeson case before the Court of Appeals in March 1952: “…he has been for years extremely active politically in behalf of independence of the colonial peoples of Africa. Though this may be a highly laudable aim, the diplomatic embarrassment that could arise from the presence abroad of such a political meddler, traveling under the protection of an American passport, is easily imaginable.” The State Department was apparently admitting, however inadvertently, that advocating the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa was not in the best interests of the United States—a revelation reported in the
Daily Worker
and in
Freedom
, but ignored by the national press.
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Two months later, Joseph Stalin was dead. The new leaders in the Kremlin soon began speaking openly of détente with the West, a possibility heightened by Eisenhower's nomination of Chip Bohlen, a known proponent of “peaceful coexistence,” to the ambassadorial post in Moscow—a nomination fought fiercely by Senator McCarthy. When an armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953 officially ended hostilities there, another element for the easing of Cold War tensions fell into place. But an actual thaw was still in the future, as the execution of the Rosenbergs in June 1953 pointedly illustrated. Robeson had worked hard for the commutation of the Rosenbergs' sentence, telling one rally, “My people are not strangers to frameups—they know what to expect from the courts of this land.” He called upon those present to work for “the possibility of restoring to the American people their social sanity, their democratic bearings, their dedication to justice and due process.”
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Thwarted politically and circumscribed artistically, Robeson relied more and more during the fifties on his restorative relationship with Sam and Helen Rosen. At their apartment in New York City, and more especially at their house in Katonah, he found with the Rosens a needed family atmosphere of deep bonds of affection and congeniality, a respite from political tensions, a chance to relax. He talked sports for hours with Sam, taught the Rosens' son John football plays on the rug, and sang while their daughter Judy accompanied him on the living-room piano. He would curl up for hours reading or studying Chinese calligraphy, taking time out to consume mammoth portions of chocolate ice cream and peanut brittle. Mornings—which for Paul usually started at noon—he would beguile Odessa, the housekeeper, into making him pancakes, plus biscuits with honey, while she was trying to plan lunch. He was an astonishing eater. He and Sam would have “corn races,” demolishing two dozen ears of Wallace Hybrid (developed by the former Progressive Party candidate) during its August glory; Paul invariably won, and Sam invariably accused him of cheating by not finishing each ear. At 2:00 a.m., or 4:00 a.m., Paul would
coax Helen into cooking him a hamburger or fried eggs over lightly—“You know,” he'd say, laughing, “not hardly.”
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Paul disliked cold weather, and in wintertime Helen would manage to find him a size 12½ snow boot and an extra-large lumber jacket; he would then tramp happily through the clean country snow, tossing snowballs at family members who mockingly protested his “professional” throwing arm. Summers, Helen would try to teach him to swim in the pond. He was always a bit frightened of the water, even after she bought him a size 50 life jacket and a pair of water wings besides—“we used to launch him,” Helen remembers. She remembers, too, that he preferred to walk with her in the secluded stand of large fir trees right near the house. They were always careful, but when they were alone in the woods he would put his head on her lap and drowsily sing her favorite, “The Riddle Song.” During their quiet talks, the political issues that concerned them both often came up, as they conjured images of a world without bigotry and war, and Paul would say—“It will be, it must be.” When they were sitting among the sweet pines, everything still seemed possible.
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His own son, Paul, Jr., had been having a difficult time professionally. Though he had graduated in engineering from Cornell in the top 10 percent of his class, he had found himself blocked from employment opportunities in his field. A number of firms, including GE and Westing-house, gave him interviews, but none followed through. He finally landed a job with a physics lab in Long Island City, but the next day the FBI was on the phone to the prospective employer, warning that the firm would lose defense contracts if it hired him. For several years, he taught electronics at private technical schools, and then became a free-lance translator of Russian scientific journals. Despite Paul, Jr.'s restricted opportunities, he does not describe himself as “suffering greatly” in those years: he was a happily married family man, with his second child, Susan, born in 1953, and was deeply engaged with his CP organizing activities in Harlem.
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For two of those years, 1953–55, Paul, Jr., ran Othello Recording Company, which he and Lloyd Brown set up to provide an artistic outlet for his father after professional recording studios closed their doors to him. For want of any other available space, one of the recording sessions was held in the Rosens' New York apartment, with their daughter Judy accompanying on the piano (alternating with a professional accompanist, Alan Booth). The walls were hung with rugs to muffle outside noise, and the “boy genius” in the apartment next door—who invariably began practicing his piano every time they got ready to record—was eventually silenced after Helen made a diplomatic appeal to his parents.
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The first of the three albums Robeson made with the Othello Recording Company,
Robeson Sings
, was the only one recorded in a commercial studio. Performed with orchestra and chorus, based on arrangements by Don Redmond, it had a slick sound throughout which made it musically
undistinguished. Still, the album sold well. Released in December 1952 and publicized through small ads in the left-wing press, the record within four months sold some five thousand copies at five dollars each. That brought Robeson a net royalty (computed at 15 percent) of about four thousand dollars, hardly a munificent sum for a man who at the height of his fame had earned that amount of money in two nights of singing. Fortunately, Bob Rockmore's shrewd investments continued to provide Robeson with a comfortable if diminished income. Without Rockmore's loyal services Robeson would have suffered severe financial stringency, since by 1953 new opportunities for him to earn money from singing or acting had evaporated.
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In June 1953 he set off on a second tour to benefit Freedom Associates, but overall it failed to meet even the moderate expectations of the previous year. It was decided this time to aim his appearances more than previously at the black community (“not artificially excluding the white community, but the balance must be on
our
side rather than the other way around,” wrote one
Freedom
staff member). But resources in the black community were limited, and the reservoir of good will toward Robeson, while profound, was neither inexhaustible nor uncontested. The central Washington office of the NAACP threatened its Oberlin chapter with the removal of its charter if it sponsored Robeson in a concert (when he heard about that decision six years later, Robeson said with a grim smile, “Yes, those were the people who did the final hatchet job on me”). “The Negro masses love him,” Bert Alves of
Freedom
wrote to John Gray, another staff member. “The Negro middle class admire him but are fearful of his hold on the masses,” and frightened that “the disapproval of white leaders will injure the special position of leadership and privilege these middle class folk enjoy.” The black paper the San Francisco
Sun
agreed: “The working class Negro feels that Robeson says the things which they would like to say.” He had, Stretch Johnson adds, “a Teflon coating in the black community.”
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The coating was thinnest, though, among the black bourgeoisie. Aaron Wells (who became Robeson's doctor in 1955) remembers an evening in 1950 when he invited a few of his Harlem neighbors in the Riverton Apartments to meet Paul: “One happened to have been a banker; the other was a prominent lawyer. I'll never forget how they rode me the next day—‘How dare you invite us to your home when Paul Robeson is there?'” (Many whites, of course, including some who called themselves political radicals, were afraid to be in Robeson's company. Helen Rosen recalls that Lillian Hellman upbraided her fiercely for having Paul as a fellow dinner guest, insisting his presence put them all in danger since the FBI was known to be following his movements.) A few years later Wells went with Robeson to a meeting on St. Nicholas Avenue of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity of which they were both members. Several of those present
reproved Robeson to his face for “not having been with us when you were at the height of your career,” and one lawyer (later a federal judge) openly attacked him on the issue of Communism. Robeson simply responded (as Wells recalls his words), “You know, brothers, you are really hitting at the wrong enemy. I am not your enemy. You're hitting in the wrong direction.”
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The churchgoing black masses were not automatically put off—as so many white churchgoers were—by accusations that Robeson was a “godless” Communist. He didn't
sound
godless. He personified the spirituals in his music, and nothing about his presence when he sang them suggested an antireligious man. Nobody who didn't “have God in him” could sing “Deep River” the way Robeson sang it; even if he himself didn't know it, or consciously denied it, he “had God in him.” But in fact he didn't deny it. His own family—with both his father and his brother Ben pastors of A.M.E. Zion—gave him impeccable credentials in the black church, and Robeson himself had turned to it in times of trouble. If he never showed any particular devotion to the institutional church or the literal pronouncements of Scripture, he never expressed even the remotest allegiance to “materialistic atheism.” If he was not a religious man in any formalistic sense, he was nonetheless an intensely spiritual one, convinced that some “higher force” watched over him, and drew fundamental strength from a deep cultural identification with his people and their religion.

Even if Robeson was a “communist” with a small “c,” believing in a society where a larger number of people could share in its opportunities and rewards, he was no “subversive.” Blacks were well aware that if there had been any proof he was a “Communist” with a capital “C”—a registered member of the Party—J. Edgar Hoover would have long since had him hauled into court under the Smith Act. To the average black churchgoer, working for civil rights was an integral and proper part of the church's business. The black church had been in the forefront of the freedom struggle from its inception, and it was assumed that the church was a natural recruiting ground and fount of strength for
that
kind of political work in the world. Robeson was seen primarily as a champion of black rights—not as the agent of a foreign power—and to that large extent it was not doubted that he was a proper church person. “We are convinced,” the black Methodist minister Reverend Edward D. McGowan said in a 1953 speech before the National Fraternal Council of Churches, “that we must come to the defense of all Negro leaders who are attacked. We will not succumb to the enemies of the Negro people who would divide us by name calling and smear tactics. For we know that a better life for our people will not be achieved by a divided people. And so … I will come to my own conclusions about Paul Robeson—no one else can tell me what I must think or believe about this great leader of the Negro people.”
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This is not to say that every black church automatically opened its
doors to Robeson; those dominated by the black bourgeoisie, or its values, were not receptive; nor were those closely identified with a politically ambitious and self-protective minister—Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., for example, never invited Robeson to his influential Harlem church. Yet the basic contrast holds. When Robeson appeared in the black churches of Detroit in 1953, the enthusiastic response suggested a revival meeting rather than the stiff atmosphere of a concert. But when he appeared for the second annual Peace Arch concert in Blaine, Washington, an essentially “white” event, he drew only half the crowd he had the preceding year—and almost all of that from the Canadian side of the border. Yet his defiance was not dampened: “I want everybody in the range of my voice to hear, official or otherwise, that there is no force on earth that will make me go backward one-thousandth part [of] one little inch.”
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