Paul Robeson (86 page)

Robeson's often reiterated public optimism was a function both of temperamental expansiveness and of a proud refusal to let the enemy know he had been hit, to concede the toll taken from a decade of being
followed by agents, of having his mail intercepted, his phone conversations bugged, his public appearances monitored and reported. Years of downplaying, perhaps even to himself, the wearing negative effects of his confinement and of refusing, as well, fully to acknowledge the profound psychic costs—in one so naturally affirmative—of having always to maintain a stance of opposition, contributed to building up a potentially explosive amount of anguish and rage. The crunch—the moment when anguish overwhelmed affirmation—finally came in late 1955, triggered by a particularly bruising round in the ongoing fight to regain his passport.
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The receipt of several unusually appealing offers from abroad became the occasion for going back once more into court. From Prague had come an invitation to appear in concert at the National Opera House, from the British Workers' Sports Association the prospect of doing a series of concerts in celebration of the association's silver jubilee, from the leading cultural agency in Tel Aviv an inquiry about coming to Israel, and from Mosfilm Studios in the Soviet Union the offer to star in a planned film version of
Othello
. Singly each invitation presented a notable opportunity; taken together they held out the real promise of a restoration of Robeson's international career. There was reason to believe, this time around, that the courts might finally rule favorably on his application. In February 1955 a U.S. district court had returned a passport to Otto Nathan (Albert Einstein's executor), and in subsequent legal actions passports had been given back to Clark Foreman, Joseph Clark (foreign editor of the
Daily Worker
), the atomic scientist Dr. Martin Kamen, and others previously refused on security grounds. On May 10, 1955, with Robeson's hopes higher than they had been for years, his attorneys, Leonard Boudin and James T. Wright, started up the judicial process again by making application to the Passport Division of the State Department. The application was immediately denied; Robeson was again told he had to sign a “non-Communist” affidavit before a passport for him could even be considered.
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Late in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Max Schachtman—whose organization, the Independent Socialist League, was on the Attorney General's “subversive” list—that “the right to travel is a national right” that could not be withheld except by due process of law. The ruling was widely hailed as historic and also as presenting an exact precedent for justifying the return of Robeson's passport. Following that logic, Robeson's attorneys reapplied in mid-July. “In view of recent court decisions,” his application read, “and the granting of passports to others whose passports were previously refused, I insist that my right to travel be granted at once.” He and his attorneys were called to Washington for a conference.

In the course of the seventy-five-minute meeting on July 18, the State Department officials promised “careful and prompt” attention to Robeson's passport request, and he left Washington feeling buoyed. His spirits
got a further boost a few days later, when official word arrived that he would henceforth be allowed to travel to Canada—though still not to other places where Americans normally went without a passport, like Hawaii, Jamaica, and British Guiana. Singing his fourth annual Peace Arch concert at the Canadian boundary line the following week, Robeson told the crowd that he was jubilant at the partial victory and predicted he would soon be granted the right to travel anywhere.
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He was wrong: the State Department quickly announced that it had decided not to issue Robeson a passport. His attorneys immediately took the matter before Judge Burnita S. Mathews in a hearing on August 16 at the district court in Washington. Judge Mathews had recently returned a passport to Clark Foreman (for whom Boudin had also been counsel), but in the Robeson case she decided that the plaintiff “had not exhausted his administrative remedies”—meaning he had not signed a “non-Communist” affidavit. Leo A. Rover, the federal district attorney representing the State Department, argued that the Robeson case was different, that “this man” (he was called “Mr. Robeson” only once during the hearing) was “one of the most dangerous men in the world.” In Leonard Boudin's recollection, Rover addressed the court in “stentorian tones,” passionate in his conviction that Robeson was a direct threat to the security of the United States. In accepting Rover's argument and denying Robeson his passport, Judge Mathews blasted his raised hopes. The effect on him, in Boudin's opinion, was “traumatic”—he keenly felt that he had been singled out for unjust treatment.
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So did the black press. “Why is the State Department more afraid of Robeson than of the whites to whom it is giving passports?” asked J. A. Rogers, the Pittsburgh
Courier
columnist. The obvious answer was echoed widely in black newspapers: racism. As Rogers put it, “it's getting to the point where to prove you're not a subversive you must be a Ku Kluxer, a McCarthyite, or some other ‘thousand percent American,' that is a Fascist at heart.” The conservative New York
Amsterdam News
stood apart from most of the black press in calling on Robeson to sign the affidavit: “We think he should level with all of the necessary facts in the case, if he is really in dead earnest.” In response, Robeson issued a public statement thanking the black news media for their support and taking issue with the
Amsterdam News
for ignoring two important facts: that the affidavit was not a standard requirement demanded of other Americans, and that he was not being charged with membership in the Communist Party or accused of any illegal act, such as espionage, for which he would be subject to indictment. An affidavit had been demanded of him, Robeson argued, because he had refused to keep silent about the treatment of blacks in America and of people of color throughout the colonial world. He suggested the State Department stop persecuting him for advocating better conditions for blacks and start prosecuting those in Mississippi “who have unleashed
against our people a reign of terror and bloodshed.” He was a “threat” (a security risk) because he told the truth.
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The State Department had openly acknowledged the accuracy of Robeson's interpretation as early as 1952 when, in a legal brief submitted to the Court of Appeals, it had argued that the revocation of his passport was justified because his activity in behalf of independence for the colonial peoples of Africa was potentially a “diplomatic embarrassment.” At the August 1955 hearing, U.S. Attorney Rover had reconfirmed that Robeson's interest in colonial liberation abroad and equality for blacks at home constituted the basis for the animus against him. In explaining to Judge Mathews why Robeson was peculiarly “dangerous,” Rover had pointed directly and solely to his speeches and writings: “During the concert tours of foreign countries he [Robeson] repeatedly criticized the conditions of Negroes in the United States,” and in his message to the Bandung conference he had asserted—as, indeed, he had—that “the time has come when the colored peoples of the world will no longer allow the great natural wealth of their countries to be exploited and expropriated by the Western world while they are beset by hunger, disease and poverty.”
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To deny black Americans the right to disclose their grievances abroad was tantamount to denying them one historic means they had always employed for winning their struggle at home. As early as 1830 the black abolitionist Reverend Nathaniel Paul had gone to England to promote the antislavery cause, later followed by Charles L. Remond, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, who in 1845 had said, “So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.” This historical point was forcefully made the following year in an
amicus curiae
brief that a group of black Americans submitted in support of Robeson's passport claim. The brief further pointed out that Robeson's views were in fact wholly in accord with
officially
declared U.S. opposition to colonialism and with its formal ratification of the Charter of the Organization of American States, which, among other things, supported the right to work and the right to free speech. Had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the brief went on) once raised his voice to denounce the persecution of black people in the South—for example, over the recent murder of Emmett Till—Afro-Americans would feel less need to look overseas for support. Instead Dulles had spoken out in support of the Portuguese claim to Goa and—exercising
his
constitutional right to utter unorthodox views—had issued his notorious “brink-of-war” statement, bringing down on his head the rebuke of Governor Harriman of New York, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and ex-President Harry Truman, who said Dulles had “brought dishonor to
our national reputation of truth and honesty.” No one, however, had suggested that Dulles's passport be revoked.
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The powerful voices and arguments raised in Robeson's behalf failed to budge the State Department. And so, after a brief period of high hopes, Robeson was flat up against the fact that he remained, in his words, “a prisoner in his native land.” Because his expectations had soared, his ensuing disappointment was proportionately great. Six weeks after Judge Mathews's decision returned him to square one in the passport fight, Robeson noticed that he was passing blood in his urine. He consulted the young black physician Aaron Wells, who was on the staff of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, had occasionally treated Essie, and was also physician to the Ben Robeson family. Paul confided to Wells that he thought the trouble might be the result of gonorrhea he had had as a younger man, but Wells told him the trouble was a degenerative condition of the prostate and recommended surgery with McKinley Wiles, a urologist at Sydenham. Nearing his fifty-eighth birthday, Robeson had only been in a hospital once (for a football injury) and, as both his son and Helen Rosen remember it, was “frightened stiff.” His nerves were already raw from the passport fight, and the accumulated strain of years of surveillance by the FBI fueled his fear of what might “be done” to him in the hospital, a fear given a certain plausibility by the government's demonstrably malignant attitude toward him. He decided that he had cancer and was going to die. The last few days before entering Sydenham, he kept telling Paul, Jr., “If something happens to me, please do this, and that,” and revising his will.
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He did have a difficult operation—some friends thought it had been “botched”—and suffered considerable pain in the postoperative period (both the white and the black press reported he had been operated on “for an abdominal obstruction”). His three-week stay in the hospital, with round-the-clock private nurses for most of that time, proved a grim experience. Released early in November, he decided not to return to Ben's parsonage but to take up life again with Essie. Since he and Essie had gone almost entirely separate ways after the sale of the Enfield house, his agreement to let her buy 16 Jumel Terrace in Harlem and his decision to take up his own residence there surprised many of his friends. Lee (Mrs. Revels) Cayton recalled in bemusement a joking remark Paul had made earlier: “I'll never be in
that
rocking chair.”
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But the decision had its own logic. Essie had herself been ill that summer, and the diagnosis had turned out to be cancer, leading to a radical mastectomy. She kept the news a tight secret, determined, with her usual grit, to live out her life at full steam and without the pity of others. In fact she made a good recovery and it would be several years before she would have a recurrence, but at the time the prognosis was chancy and Paul felt he owed it to Essie to go back and live with her again. Besides, he needed
her, needed the approval of black public opinion which a return to her side would create, and needed, too, beset by the debilitating effects of political repression and physical decline, her competent, efficient ministrations. It had been convenient in the forties, for a man bent on avoiding an exclusive commitment to any one woman, determined to lead several lives simultaneously, to be able to point to the existence of a formal marriage that actually made no difficult demands on him. Now, during the mid-fifties, older, unwell, and unnerved, less interested in romantic attachments and sexual adventures, he was tired of living in other people's homes, and his primary need was for comfort and stability. He knew Essie wanted—had always wanted—him back again, even if only in name. He knew she would manage and organize his life as no one else could, protecting him completely while being careful not to impose any requirements other than his formal presence in the same house. Paul needed to be taken care of again, and Essie was happy to work hard again at the job.

Besides, she was far more of a political creature than in her youth. Her views on the Soviet Union now closely coincided with Paul's, and over the years she had become powerfully engaged with the struggle for black freedom and against colonialism. She remained more elitist than Paul, less alienated from the white power structure, less profoundly identified with the working-class poor, white and black, less ideological and theoretical, less responsive to Party discipline, but was nonetheless, in her awareness and commitment, a more acceptable political mate than she had once been.
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In 1955 Essie was accredited to the UN as correspondent for
New World Review
, but in between her journalistic chores she delighted in having a new house to fix up. Resuming her role as world-beating shopper, she raced off to auctions looking for bargains, and her close friend Freda Diamond often came up to Jumel Terrace to give her professional help with decorating. At one point Essie saved money by buying up parachute material to use for draperies; at another, deciding they couldn't afford new carpeting on a much-reduced income, she located miles of thick used beige and taupe carpets, bought them for a song, and, after “scientifically” studying printed instructions, consulting a local Armenian tradesman, and purchasing the necessary tools, laid them herself. In her spare time she supervised Paul's diet and welcomed her grandchildren for occasional Saturday-night sleepovers.
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