Paul Robeson (90 page)

The London press played up Robeson's pending arrival as big news (contrarily, the development was entirely ignored by the major media in the United States). The
Daily Herald
carried an eight-column headline, “I'm-a-Comin', Says Robeson,” with a subheading that proclaimed “And Paul's Head Will Not Be Bendin' Low Here in Britain.” However, the British press was not unanimous in hailing him; Beaverbrook's
Daily Express
, predictably, announced that he “would be a most unwelcome visitor”; with an unforgiving memory, the
Express
recalled that “In the dark days of the war,” Robeson had said that Britain's reactionary influence had inspired Finland to attack the Russians, and later had called Britain “one of the greatest enslavers of human beings in the world.” Still, additional British offers quickly came in: to star in England's biggest television show, “Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and also to perform on a “Spectacular” for Associated Television. London's Royal Festival Hall offered him a concert, and Harold Davison, the theatrical agent, started making preliminary arrangements for a tour. “Excitement and anticipation,” Tony Richardson reported, were keen. Essie replied that “The spread in the British press … has had great effect here. The State Department is frantically defending itself.…”
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That was wishful thinking. The State Department refused to budge, coolly notifying Boudin that it continued to deem it necessary for Robeson to “answer the questions with respect to Communist Party membership before consideration can be given to his request for passport facilities.” Two other passport cases—those of Walter Briehl and Rockwell Kent—pending before the Supreme Court and involving the constitutional issue of the right to travel, held out the hope of establishing a precedent favorable to Robeson, but the court was unlikely to hand down a decision in those cases until June. While awaiting that verdict, the State Department remained obdurate; even had it wanted to, it could not have given Robeson
a limited passport without weakening its case against Briehl and Kent. By late February, with no hope of an immediate break in the situation, Robeson felt obliged (and perhaps relieved) to notify Glen Byam Shaw that he would have to withdraw from the role of Gower. “You can imagine how we hate to say this,” Essie wrote Shaw, “but fair is fair, and plans are plans, and we know we are not going to make it.” The news, Shaw wrote back, was “a bitter disappointment.… It would have not only been a great joy but also an honour for me if he could have appeared at this Theatre during the time of my directorship.”
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The offer was aborted, but not the impulse it represented. As if a signal had been given, some attractive invitations within the United States began to trickle in, themselves a reflection of a decline of McCarthyite influence on the national scene. In reaction to these first “mainstream” opportunities offered him in a decade, this prospective armistice, Robeson showed at least a bit more circumspection, a modicum of prudence when addressing the public—especially the black public. Still vigilant about his integrity, still loyal to past friends and his own past opinions, he nonetheless responded with a subtle new regard, around the edges, for the prospects of rehabilitation. He would to no degree compromise with the John Foster Dulleses—the white power structure, which he continued to regard as racist, militarist, and colonialist—but, to enhance his reputation with mainstream
black
America, he began to downplay his “Communist” image and revivify his black one. He would not leave the mountain, but he was willing to take a few sideways steps to avoid the direct path of the lava flow.

Early in 1958 he made a discernible shift away from
public
pro-Soviet activities. In the last two months of 1957 he had been as outspoken and conspicuous as ever in defense of the U.S.S.R., traveling to Washington in November to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution at the Soviet Embassy, speaking at American-Soviet Friendship's annual event at Carnegie Hall on November 10, 1957, wiring congratulations to the Soviets on the orbiting of Sputnik. The FBI reports from late 1957 even have him privately saying “that people who are losing courage should get out of the way,” and characterized him as “solid as a rock … with the ‘supers' (super left) all the way.” But in the opening months of 1958 Robeson fell
comparatively
silent, confining his public statements to a set of perfunctory “New Year's greetings” to the peoples of China, Eastern Europe, and the U.S.S.R. (not omitting the Albanians, whom he hailed for their “demonstration of what a Peoples Socialism can do to transform a whole land”).
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His retreat from a high level of
open
commitment to the Soviet Union was a reflection not of disillusion but, rather, of a conscious determination to restore his reputation as a spokesman for black people. When, for example, Tony Richardson sent him a script for consideration, he rejected the suggested role of an unsavory West Indian as unsuitable, as “not constructive at this time.” Black people, Essie wrote Richardson, “would
resent it” if Paul should appear in such a role, given their intense interest currently “in the coming independence of a Federated West Indies; he could not afford to consider only artistic angles.” In that same spirit of mending ties in the black community, Essie broadened her New Year's greetings list to include such one-time friends as Fritz Pollard and such new heroines as Daisy Bates, the NAACP organizer who had coordinated the effort to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. And when boxing champion Archie Moore sent Paul a fan letter (“I'm not a hero worshipper by a long shot but there are men I admire and you are one of the few”), Robeson telephoned to thank him.
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In a comparable spirit, he took care, when filling his first commercial concert dates in years in California, Portland, and Chicago early in 1958, to present a less belligerent public image. In Sacramento a critic commented on his “new gentleness.” In San Francisco he told a reporter, “I am sorry now that I quit the concert stage because of politics.… Any ‘politics' in the future will be in my singing,” leaving the surprised reporter—who apparently could not distinguish a tactic from a conviction—to conclude, prematurely, that Robeson was now “more interested in musicology than in politics.” In Portland, perhaps to avoid such simplicities, he told an interviewer, “I'm here as an artist”—but was also careful to add, “My political position is precisely the same now as it has always been.”
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The FBI understood this better than the press. Far from believing—as part of the press kept announcing—that Robeson was retiring from politics, the FBI theorized that he was bent on trying to restore his influence in the world of black politics. Its agents dutifully reported the occasional rumors adrift that Robeson was about to defect from Communism, but the Bureau recognized that no proof existed to support them. It preferred to believe in its own previously floated fantasy that Robeson's effort to present an image of himself more acceptable to mainstream blacks was in the name of capturing the NAACP for his own nefarious (i.e., Communistic) purposes.
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The FBI's special agent in Los Angeles even reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Robeson might in fact be the “real leader” of the left-wing Foster-Davis faction of the CPUSA and may have designed his trip to California in 1958 as an effort to sway that “right-wing” CP stronghold to the left. The L.A. agent passed on his informants' opinion that Robeson “is much more dangerous to the security of this country than those who have taken the position of extreme ‘right.'” Hoover did not doubt it. He advised the Bureau's L.A. Office to explore fully and attempt to corroborate its information, noting that the FBI lacked “recent evidence” (actually it had never had evidence) that Robeson “has taken a direct part in the policy or other affairs of the CP.” The best that the L.A. agent could do
was to report back that in California Robeson had seen “a great deal” of black CP leader Pettis Perry, and that subsequent to his visit to the state, the left-wing faction had succeeded in gaining new prominence. The recollections of Rose Perry, Pettis's widow, are a good deal more mundane: Pettis and Paul spent most of their time talking about black issues, and she and her husband spent most of theirs “terribly afraid that something might happen to Paul physically.” According to Paul, Jr., their fear was justified: the left-front wheel came off of the car that Paul had been riding in. Although he was not a passenger at the time, and no one was hurt, it was a disturbing reminder of the incidents in St. Louis in 1947 and in Los Angeles in 1955.
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The California music critics gave Robeson's 1958 comeback concerts enthusiastic notices. One of them remarked that “it would be too much to expect the velvety smoothness of that magnificent bass voice to continue as consistently as of old,” but the larger number expressed amazement that “the years have done virtually nothing to the greatest natural basso voice of the present generation”; and there was unanimous agreement that his dramatic, gracious personal presence remained singularly powerful. The audience response was also keen, with most of the concerts selling out in advance to enthusiastic crowds. More important to Robeson, off the concert stage he succeeded once again in drawing reinvigorated support from the black community. Attending the twentieth anniversary of the founding of
People's World
(the FBI attended as well), he heard Pastor Livingston introduce him as “a champion fighter” for his race; in response Robeson reaffirmed his belief in socialism but did not mention Communism or the Soviet Union or the CPUSA. Even the FBI reports stressed that Robeson had been “increasingly effective … among the Negroes and especially among some of the Negro clergymen,” his appearances in their churches helping them to raise “a considerable amount of money.”
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In Pittsburgh two months later, his reception in the black community was again heartening. The management of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall canceled his announced concert, but two of the leading black churches, Central Baptist and Wesley Center A.M.E. Zion, opened their doors to him, and the packed assemblies gave him deafening receptions. After the concerts, the local chapter of his own powerful Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity entertained him, and P. L. Prattis of the
Courier
sent Essie a private report of the combined events:

Your “man” came, saw, conquered and knocked their eyeballs out—even mine.… But you would never have known he was proud, for as they applauded him, he applauded them. His pride was in them, not himself, for they had come to bring him comfort and he had lain himself on their bosom.… The Alpha boys tell
me that he stormed their place for two hours, his eyes sparkling, never tiring. He defined himself, laid himself on the line, so to speak. And with all his greatness, he was modest.

A relative in Pittsburgh reported to Paul's sister, Marian Forsythe, that “Paul acts rejuvenated once more. He had seemed so quiet for a while, but it all seems to be in the past now.”
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By the time Robeson reached Chicago in April, his spirits had soared, and the reception in that city further cheered him. Essie had written in advance to Margaret Burroughs (schoolteacher, political activist, and later founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History), “Paul wants you, if you will do so, to coordinate whatever he can do in the Negro community. He does
NOT
want any of this to go through the manager, Mr. [Paul] Endicott, who is white.… He would like the people to know that he wants to sit down with them.” Essie facilitated matters by herself sending letters accepting invitations for Paul to a local black minister and to the Chicago chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, which had offered to give him a smoker (introducing Robeson to the Alphas, Oscar Brown, Sr., told them, “Brothers, you are looking at immortality”).
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Margaret Burroughs, angry at the “black bourgeoisie” in Chicago for having earlier, in her opinion, turned its back on Paul, and sharing his commitment to a socialist vision, felt “it was an honor to open my home to him.” For her straightforward advocacy, she was called before the Board of Education and questioned about whether it was true that she was “sympathetic to that red, Paul Robeson.” Yes indeed, she responded, she was sympathetic, she was even downright proud of him—since, from everything she could gather, he was “a fine artist and a fine human being”; Burroughs kept her job, but by a hair. Julia and Metz Lorchard (he was editor of the Chicago
Defender
), who were also friendly with Robeson and had housed him on several visits to Chicago, were likewise threatened with reprisals. Julia Lorchard worked for the Cook County welfare office, and for a time her job was in serious jeopardy; one neighbor even denounced the Lorchards for playing Robeson records in their own home.
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On this trip to Chicago, Robeson spent the first night with Cathern and Ishmael Flory, the black Communist whom he had known from the forties, when Flory was the international representative for the Mine, Mill union. Robeson, Flory recalls, was “a very considerate man” who warned them that he was a late riser and “wasn't much good” until after 2:00 p.m. But he was good for a late-night talk, and he and the Florys stayed up discussing the “change for the better” they all saw taking place in the country—“I think I'm on my way back among the people,” Robeson told the Florys. On the second night Robeson went to stay with Johnnie Mae and Sam Parks. Johnnie Mae was a master “downhome” cook, and Paul
had gotten friendly with the earthy, outspoken Sam when he headed the predominantly black Packinghouse Workers local in the late forties and when the two worked together in the early fifties on the National Negro Labor Council. (Parks contrasts himself with Revels Cayton: “I was a worker who attained some intellectual understanding; he is an intellectual who became a worker.”)
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