Paul Robeson (89 page)

But no one much was listening. Only one black paper,
The Afro-American
, printed his statement in full—and his call for a national conference was ignored. Not only was Robeson's name no longer instantly recognized, but, to the extent that he was still known among the new activists, his pro-Soviet stance was regarded as something of an irrelevance, even a hindrance. Anne Braden, who with her husband, Carl, was active in the civil-rights struggle in Kentucky, remembers that most of the
young
black activists “really knew nothing about Paul Robeson,” and those who had heard of him “would have been scared to death if he'd shown up at one of their meetings.” That would change somewhat by the early sixties; by then young blacks would be more militant, would have learned more about their own history and learned, too, that their white “friends and protectors” in Washington, who had been advising them against associating with “Communists,” might not after all have their best interests at heart.
³

When Paul, along with Essie and Paul, Jr., went to Washington in May 1957 to take part in the Prayer Pilgrimage, he was largely ignored: the organizers asked Robeson antagonists Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (who had bolted to Ike in 1956), to speak, but not Robeson. (A month before the Pilgrimage, struck by how little organizing had been done, Essie speculated that Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph were actually trying to sabotage the event, and she wrote George Murphy, Jr., “The
more I think of the NAACP the more dangerous I think it is. They always calm the waters when something concrete and really good is cooking.”) At about this same time, ironically, the head of the FBI's New York Office was confidentially advising J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson's recent California trip “had been conducted for the purpose of determining whether he had enough of a following to attempt to take over the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on a national scale.” A few weeks later that allegation had been transmuted into a CPUSA takeover of the NAACP, and Hoover directed the New York Office to “follow Robeson's activities.” Robeson and Roy Wilkins would have been equally astonished at the news of a pending coup. Though the FBI apparently did not realize it, the government and the media had, over nearly a decade, done its work better than it knew in making Robeson invisible to a new generation of black youth, in moving him to the margins of the black struggle.
⁴

During the first half of the fifties, Robeson could take some solace from the fact that his isolation had been imposed by white authorities in response to his militant stand in behalf of the rights of the world's colored peoples. During the second half of the fifties, as a mainstream black protest movement emerged within his own country and seemed uninterested in his presence, his sense of isolation became more acute and painful. In contrast to his former wide-ranging public life, he now spent his time engaging in pentatonic musical studies and pursuing his passport fight. They did not absorb his energies. He read over Marie Seton's manuscript for a book about him and worked with Lloyd L. Brown on an autobiographical volume, but these were retrospective activities; he was, for the time being, not living fully in the present. Nor could continuing recognition from the peace movement overseas and periodic visits from Ben Davis, Jr., or William Z. Foster compensate for the deafening lack of interest in his services at the Prayer Pilgrimage and the failure of any call for consultation from the Montgomery boycotters or from Martin Luther King, Jr. As if to assuage his own hurt, to compensate for being bypassed, Robeson's public statements occasionally became boastful and overweening, traits in jarring contrast to his once characteristic modesty. The dissonant strain of braggadocio—and an occasional penchant for the imagery of martyrdom—marked a poignant bid for the attention and affirmation that he had never before had any need to summon up.
⁵

A reporter picked up the false new note during Robeson's six-week trip to California in the summer of 1957 (he traveled with Revels Cayton) to perform several concerts that left-wing friends had finally managed to arrange—the only series he gave that year. Understandably expansive in the glow of a rare chance to sing in public, and delighted at his well-attended and well-reviewed concerts in the black community (“a welcome far beyond anything I could have expected,” he told a reporter), Robeson held a two-hour press conference in Los Angeles, which left the black
journalist Almena Lomax of the
Tribune
with an overall impression of “total self-absorption.” Even while declaring admiration for Robeson's “gifts and the richness of personality of the man,” Lomax expressed disquiet at his nearly nonstop discourse about his own accomplishments—“a sort of antic quality, overall.” Possibly Robeson, basking in the now unaccustomed light of publicity, was having nothing more than a cheerful and perfectly human burst of vanity. Possibly it had been triggered by a mild clinical recurrence of mania. Whatever the cause and combination of circumstances, his personality seemed to have lost its once-characteristic emotional centeredness, the solidity and surety of purpose that had long given him such easy, magnanimous grace.
⁶

Some sustenance came from overseas. His many friends in England, mobilized as the National Paul Robeson Committee, accelerated their campaign for the return of his passport. By the spring of 1957 the list of notables in support had grown to include twenty-seven members of Parliament and such distinguished—and in many cases nonpolitical—figures as the classicist Gilbert Murray, Leonard Woolf, the economist Barbara Wootton, Augustus John, Julian Huxley, Benjamin Britten, Pamela Hansford Johnson, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, the Shakespearean scholar J. Dover Wilson, and Robeson's old acting partner Flora Robson. (Clearly, Tom Driberg wrote in his regular column for
Reynolds News
, this movement in Robeson's behalf “is not, as some Washington bureaucrats pretend, a mere political stunt.”) In late April 1957 British Actors Equity in its annual meeting—after some heated exchanges, during which the actress Helena Gloag suggested that the resolution had originated from “an international subversive movement, Communism”—voted a resolution in support of efforts currently being made to enable Robeson to perform in Britain.
⁷

To cap off the campaign, Cedric Belfrage, editor-in-exile of the
National Guardian
, organized a concert which Robeson sang via transatlantic phone circuit to an audience assembled in a London theater—in ringing symbolic defiance of the passport ban. It came off wonderfully. At an all-day Robeson celebration before the concert, actress Marie Burke shared her recollections of Robeson in
Show Boat
, followed by speeches from Gerald Gardiner, QC, the miners' leader Arthur Horner, black Labour parliamentary candidate David Pitt, and the Kenyan Joseph Murumbi of the Movement for Colonial Freedom. That same evening, with one thousand people crowded into St. Pancras Town Hall to hear the “live” Robeson concert, the actor Alfie Bass took the stage to entertain while everyone excitedly awaited the hookup. After a few false starts (“We all thought Somebody was starting to sabotage the show,” Belfrage later wrote Essie), they succeeded in making connection with New York just five minutes before the event was scheduled to begin.
⁸

The stage now empty except for an enormous blowup photo of Robe
son on the back wall, the Union Jack on one side, Old Glory on the other, his resonant bass suddenly flooded the hall. He sang six songs in all, with the audience “jumping out of their seats” to shout approval. The reception—over the new high-fidelity transatlantic telephone cable—was superb, and the audience (according to Belfrage) went home “spiritually ‘high.'” Press coverage, though, was minimal: Belfrage had invited all U.S. papers with representatives and agencies in London, but none came. Except for an unexpected article in the Manchester
Guardian
—which said the concert had succeeded in making “the United States Department of State look rather silly”—only a few small items appeared in British papers. Still, Robeson was profoundly grateful to his British friends. He was “so deeply moved,” Essie reported to Belfrage, that by the end of the concert “he was close to tears,” thrilled at the prospect of “a new means for communication from the jailhouse.”
⁹

Three months later, and perhaps to some unmeasurable degree influenced by the mounting Robeson campaign abroad, the State Department finally made a partial concession on his right to travel. For the better part of a year, Leonard Boudin had sought in vain to get a hearing from the Passport Division, which had alternately delayed any response to his letters and then, when it did reply, stipulated still more procedural requirements not asked of other passport applicants. But just as Boudin had become convinced that they would have to go back into court in order to get any action, the State Department granted Robeson an administrative hearing.
¹⁰

Boudin and Essie accompanied him to Washington on May 29 for what turned into a six-hour marathon session. As Robert D. Johnson for the Passport Division relentlessly posed loaded questions and presented hearsay evidence about Robeson's purported CP membership, Boudin consistently refused to allow his client to respond, on the grounds that personal and political associations were irrelevant to the issue of the right to travel. When the lengthy charade was over, Johnson declared that Robeson's refusal to “make a full disclosure” automatically halted the administrative processing of his passport application (Johnson reported to the FBI that, although he had “thrown the book” at Robeson, the hearing had been a “‘wash out' inasmuch as Robeson did not admit any Communist connections or activities”). Allowed to make a statement at the end, Robeson repeated his view that the real reason his passport was being withheld concerned his outspoken protests over the condition of black people at home and abroad. “My Negro friends,” he said, “tell me I am a little too excited about it. I don't see how you can get too excited about it—not so much whether one has even bread to eat at a certain point, but the essential human dignity, the essential human dignity of being a person.”
¹¹

The passport stalemate seemed unbroken. The government refused to reconsider unless Robeson first signed a “non-Communist” affidavit,
and Robeson refused to yield on a point he considered central to his constitutional rights (fearing, too, that if he did say he had never been a CP member, the Justice Department could then call out its stable of informers to swear, falsely, that he
had
been—thereby allowing an indictment against him for perjury). But then—the jockeying completed, the mutually contradictory positions laid out—in August 1957 the State Department unexpectedly made its first concession to Robeson in seven years: though still refusing him a passport, State announced that henceforth he would be allowed to travel to Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa—places in the Western Hemisphere where a passport was not required of U.S. citizens. It had become an embarrassment, at a time of easing Cold War tensions and mounting black protest, to have Robeson remain the
one
citizen of the United States (excepting only Dave Beck, indicted president of the Teamsters Union, who had been placed on travel restriction at the specific request of the Senate's McClellan Investigating Committee) against whom an interdiction to nonpassport areas of the Western Hemisphere remained—restraints that had already been removed by national committee members of the CPUSA. When rumors immediately began to circulate that Robeson would shortly visit the West Indies, U.S. Naval Intelligence in Trinidad telegraphed Washington that it doubted the British would allow him to enter—though doubtless the “Communist” husband-and-wife team, Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan and his American-born wife, Janet, would “welcome him with open arms” to British Guiana.
¹²

Robeson's sights, however, were leveled not on the West Indies or on South America but on England. Hard on the heels of the State Department's refusal to lift the passport ban came an alluring invitation from Glen Byam Shaw, general manager of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon: would Robeson be available during the 1958 season to star as Gower in
Pericles
, the production conceived by Tony Richardson, a young director who had recently won acclaim in both London and New York for his staging of John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger?
(Shaw sent the additional word that Peggy Ashcroft—Robeson's Desdemona in the 1930
Othello
—had been “overjoyed” when told of the invitation to him.) With rehearsals due to begin in June 1958, and citing this “very great opportunity,” Boudin immediately asked the State Department to reconsider its recent refusal and issue Robeson a passport of limited duration and purpose so he could accept the engagement in England.
¹³

Flattering though the offer was, and potentially serviceable in his passport fight, Robeson in fact viewed it with some trepidation. He accepted the role immediately—pending, of course, State Department acquiescence—but after reading the play began to have doubts (as Essie wrote Shaw) whether he had “the traditional classic Shakespearean background and experience and style and accent, to play this role in the midst of an
experienced and beautifully trained English cast in the shrine of the Shakespeare tradition.” Othello was the only Shakespearean role he had ever undertaken, and that more than a decade ago; Othello, moreover, had called for (in Essie's words) “a foreigner, dark, different from the rest of the cast, and it was a foreignness which he thoroughly understood and actually
was
.” Tony Richardson was in New York to stage
The Entertainer
, and met with Robeson to encourage him. Shaw, moreover, sent a long letter “begging” him to have no doubts that he would do the part of Gower superlatively well: “Gower is, as it were, detached from the rest of the play.… He is the great storyteller.… It doesn't matter what nationality he is provided the actor has a compelling power of personality, the feeling of deep understanding of humanity and, of course, a wonderful voice with which to tell his story. All these qualities you possess in a degree that no other actor does.” Robeson thanked Shaw for the kind words, and said he felt reassured.
¹⁴