Paul Robeson (85 page)

The closest thing he could manage was a change of address. Following the sale of the house in Enfield in 1953, Essie had moved into the Hotel Dauphin in New York City—after staying with Paul, Jr., and Marilyn. Paul had continued on at the McGhees' on East 89th Street, sometimes staying around the corner with Helen and Sam Rosen or with the Caytons, or with his brother Ben at the parsonage. But by the end of 1954, with FBI agents holding him under constant surveillance, Paul decided he would find more privacy and security in Harlem—a move also dictated by his fear of having become, through residing in the heart of white Manhattan, too isolated from the black community. The concern was not new. As early as 1947, leaders from the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America had called a private meeting with him in Washington, D.C., to express, “deferentially,” “how all of us feel about you, and how we love you. Well, we think you're a great artist and a great man and all that, and while it may be true that you are a ‘Citizen of the World,' we'd like you to let our folks know a little more strongly, that you are
first
a part of us and then ‘
Citizen of the World
.'” According to George Murphy, Jr., who attended the meeting and recorded the vets' words, “Paul listened very carefully, told the vets he thought they were eminently correct, especially in thinking enough of him to come to him and say what they thought.” By 1949 columnist Dan Burley in the New York
Age
, a black newspaper, was remarking that Robeson “has been away from Harlem so long that people only know him by what they have read or heard.…” His close friend Revels Cayton urged him to do something about the continuing criticism, and that same year of 1949 he took over the St. Nicholas Avenue apartment of the black singer Aubrey Pankey and his wife, Kay (the couple had by now settled in Europe). But, according to Kay Pankey, Robeson moved back downtown within the year, “pestered too much” by the constant invasion of his privacy.
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By 1954 the security and warmth of a Harlem haven had become more important than solitude, and when his brother Ben and his wife, Frankie, suggested he move into the parsonage of the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church at 155 West 136th Street, where Ben was pastor, Paul accepted. He would
never have asked Ben to take him in, unwilling to subject his brother's family to possible obloquy, but when Ben volunteered the invitation, Paul gratefully took him up on it. Ben and Paul had not seen much of each other during the forties, and Ben's family thought Essie—with whom they did not get along—might have deliberately kept Paul away from the parsonage. But in fact Paul's long absences were a characteristic pattern in all his relationships, and did not necessarily reflect how important those relationships were to him. Paul always moved in and out of personal commitments, the pattern perhaps in part reflecting the childhood trauma he'd suffered at his mother's sudden death, forever imprinting on him the lesson not to become overly attached. But the pattern also reflected the expansiveness of a nature that could never be content for long interacting exclusively with one other individual. Robeson's middle-class white friends had particular trouble dealing with his in-and-out-again commitment to them. They tended to interpret the long stretches of time between visits, and his failure to stay in touch through letters and phone calls, as somehow a judgment on the quality of the friendship, a sign of its insignificance to him.

Ben, sharing the same family culture as Paul, had the same view as he of the etiquette of relationships. Like Paul, he didn't need the reassurance of constant declarations of concern in order to believe in its reality. The dutiful little attentions crucial to middle-class definitions of the proper contours of friendship and family were not given the same weight of importance—closeness was not measured by how often one saw someone or how much one revealed to him. Between Ben and Paul, as with Paul and his sister Marian, a profound sense of assurance that their ties were lasting and deep precluded any need for constant verification. Though Marian's house in Philadelphia was always a haven for Paul—and he often retreated there—between visits he rarely communicated. What might be called a secure passivity—“I don't need to
make
it happen”—best characterizes his attitude. The ties were there—or were not—and no amount of verbal reassurance or attentiveness would change that essential fact. Robeson's belief in the ebb-and-flow of friendship, combined with his ingrained respect for the privacy of others, meant that he rarely commented on and never tracked the lives of his friends. The quality of intrusiveness—the need to keep talking about a bond in order to establish its validity—was foreign to Robeson's sense of the natural history of relationships. He felt no need to analyze intimacy in order to reassure himself of its presence.
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The level of trust between Paul and Ben Robeson, despite the long periods of absence, had never wavered. The two men were entirely comfortable with each other. When Paul moved into the parsonage in the winter of 1954 (where he would remain for about a year), he felt in a real sense that he was coming home—back into the bosom of his immediate family and back into the larger family of the black community. Robeson always enjoyed sitting around—black people only—and talking “colored
talk.” Howard Fast remembers his astonishment once when he tried to find Robeson at a party they had gone to in the late forties in a fashionable black suburb of Detroit. Directed to the basement, Fast opened the door to find half a dozen prosperous, middle-aged black men smoking good cigars, jackets off, all attention on Robeson, who was holding forth in a “raw, black, Deep-Southern language,” telling “rich, earthy stories with no restraint, no polite talk like upstairs.” It was the only time, Fast felt, that he ever saw Robeson “with his wall down.” Helen Rosen remembers coming upon the same sort of earthy talk at the parsonage, with brother Ben—despite his staid outward appearance—joining in with equal gusto.
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Among much else that the two brothers shared was a profound concern for the welfare of black people. Ben—a registered Republican (he was a friend and an admirer of Nelson Rockefeller), sedate and traditional in manner—worked out his commitment through the church. Paul's was expressed through art and politics, but in Paul, too, the family “preacher” temperament was ingrained. His “calling” seemed so obvious to Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood of A.M.E. Zion, after he heard Paul's passionate platform delivery once in a black church, that he wrote and begged him “to give the remaining years of your life to the work of the ministry,” reporting that Bishop Walls of Chicago was also “enamoured of the idea.”
⁵¹

Comfortable though Paul felt at the parsonage, it was not the tranquil environment it outwardly appeared to be. There was a lot of drinking, and at times—when Ben and Frankie's daughters periodically returned home, in retreat from their difficult marriages—considerable family friction. Paul was fond of all three of his nieces, but eventually the increasingly frequent storms at the parsonage proved too much for him. He needed a respite from the turbulence he encountered in the outer world, not a recapitulation of it. Throughout his life, he could never stay for long in an unquiet home. His domestic requirements, ultimately, were for solitude, stability, and protection.

CHAPTER 21

Breakdown

(1955–1956)

On the national scene, scattered signs were emerging to indicate a thaw in the conservative deep-freeze. The army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954 precipitated a Senate censure vote against McCarthy on December 2. Cold War tensions, too, began to dissipate by 1955: the long-standing Russian-American deadlock over a treaty with Austria was finally broken, a United Nations Conference on Disarmament produced some positive results, and an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting eased relations so notably that “the Geneva spirit” became a tag reference for every intimation of international cooperation. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court pendulum took a swing toward the liberal side; the Justices modified a host of loyalty-security laws, reasserted concern with protecting the rights of political dissenters, and, in the landmark
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision, struck down segregation in the nation's public schools. Such developments, of course, were auguries only, not automatic guarantors of a new day.

Robeson hailed these “tokens of sanity,” these “hopeful signs that the commonsense of rank-and-file America will yet prevail,” but he was not ready to discount the power of the “atom-maniacs in Washington.” He noted that one of the immediate effects of the Supreme Court's shift to the left was to produce a countervailing shift to the right, uniting Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans behind a defense of segregation and militant anti-Communism. He was therefore not surprised when the black Communist Claude Lightfoot in Chicago, and Ben Gold, the Communist leader of the Fur and Leather Union, drew jail sentences, when William Patterson was remanded for contempt, and when Ben Davis, after
serving nearly four years in the penitentiary, was rearrested. Robeson spoke out at public rallies in their defense and in the 1954 fall elections supported the American Labour Party in New York State, which ran John T. McManus, general manager of the
National Guardian
, for governor. Robeson did not know it at the time, but the Justice Department was giving thought to indicting him as well. Despite its best efforts, however, the FBI was still unable to come up with any “specific information from any source” directly linking him to the Communist Party.
¹

Early in 1955, however, Robeson was subpoenaed to testify before a joint state legislative committee. It had been empowered to investigate alleged misappropriations in philanthropic fund-raising charged against three “Communist-front” organizations with which he was closely affiliated: the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and the Civil Rights Congress. The prosecution claimed that “millions of dollars given by public-spirited citizens for a variety of causes” had been “diverted to subversive uses.” Dorothy Parker, the economist George Marshall, and Dashiell Hammett (who had headed the New York State Civil Rights Congress from 1946 to 1951, when he went to prison for six months for contempt of court) were among the witnesses called during the three-day hearing; Hammett testified that “Communist to me is not a dirty word. When you're working for the advancement of mankind it never occurs to you if a guy's a Communist or not.” Robeson's turn on the stand proved stormy. He said he was “very proud” to be a national director of the Civil Rights Congress and, when asked for specifics about how the CRC raised and dispensed funds, replied, “I sing for Hadassah and the Sons of Israel and any number of worthwhile causes and no one asks me how much money they raise.”
The New York Times
pronounced his answer evasive, and an editorial in the
Herald Tribune
fulminated against “Red-fronters” whose “refusal to give accounting” of their “dangerous … double-dealing … charity rackets … cannot be tolerated.” No, Robeson decided, the Cold War had not yet evaporated, any more than the national climate had been miraculously purged of unbalanced suspicion.
²

He remained wary. Delighted though he was with the Supreme Court's desegregation decision—he characterized it as “a magnificent stride forward in the long battle of colored Americans for full equality”—he noted the white South's negative reaction and warned of the need for black vigilance and firmness in equal measure. “As might be expected,” he wrote in
Freedom
, “the Dixiecrats have responded with howls of anguish and threats of retaliation.… The planters have organized a new Ku Klux Klan. They have laundered it a bit, given it a face-lifting, and called it White Citizens Councils. But no Negro in Mississippi will be fooled. He knows the Klan when he sees it, by whatever name it's called.” Robeson hailed Mississippi's “heroic” black people for the “stirring chapter” they were
writing in the history of resistance and, four months after the Supreme Court decision, called on blacks everywhere to “fight to see that it is enforced”; he warned, in the face of spreading white opposition, that the decision could turn out to be merely “a token gesture,” yet another paper promise falling far short of the “full freedom” he continued to demand. Robeson's health might be weakening, his outlets for singing and speaking all but gone, but his tenacity, his galvanizing sorrow held.
³

He used the occasion of a concert booking in California early in 1955—his earlier hope for a full-scale tour of the state had been dashed by a lack of response—to express enthusiasm about the unity movement developing between black organizations to break Jim Crow barriers in television and radio, and about the recent election of the radical Norman Manley to head the government in the British West Indies (“a powerful voice for dignity and equality of colored peoples everywhere”). While Robeson was in Los Angeles, the front wheel twice came off the car in which he was being driven by Frank Whitley. There had been a similar incident in St. Louis in 1947, and there would be two more in 1958. Whitley's conclusion was that the wheel had been tampered with, but if so, the uncertain evidence makes it impossible to say by whom—whether racists, red-baiters, or even, conceivably, federal agents (who had both Robeson and Whitley under close surveillance in L.A.), acting either under orders or on their own.
⁴

When the conference of Asian and African nations—denounced in advance by Secretary of State Dulles as a misguided form of self-segregation—assembled in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 Robeson sent a message hailing the gathering as a certain sign of “the power and the determination of the peoples of these two great continents to decide their own destiny.” Prior to the Bandung gathering, William Patterson wrote directly to Prime Minister U Nu of Burma appealing for a statement from Asian and African leaders deploring the continuing “persecution” of Robeson by his own government. Instead, at Bandung, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., took it upon himself to rebuke Robeson and to dismiss “Communist propaganda” that no progress was being made in the United States toward equality for its black citizens. Essie sent an angry response to
The Afro-American
in which she accused Powell of exaggerating the amount of progress made, but Robeson himself continued to sound a positive note. Invited to sing and speak at the City College of New York (having been barred four years earlier) and also at Swarthmore, he expressed delight at the overflow crowds, at “the stirrings of new life” among students, at the “fresh breeze of free expression beginning to filter into the stale atmosphere of the cold-war classrooms.”
⁵