Paul Robeson Read online

  Paul Robeson

  A Biography

  Martin Duberman

  for Eli Zal

  and

  for my friends in the rooms

  Contents

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1 Boyhood (1898–1914)

  CHAPTER 2 Rutgers College (1915–1918)

  CHAPTER 3 Courtship and Marriage (1919–1921)

  CHAPTER 4 Provincetown Playhouse (1922–1924)

  CHAPTER 5 The Harlem Renaissance and the Spirituals (1924–1925)

  CHAPTER 6 The Launching of a Career (1925–1927)

  CHAPTER 7 Show Boat (1927–1929)

  CHAPTER 8 Othello (1930–1931)

  CHAPTER 9 The Discovery of Africa (1932–1934)

  CHAPTER 10 Berlin, Moscow, Films (1934–1937)

  CHAPTER 11 The Spanish Civil War and Emergent Politics (1938–1939)

  CHAPTER 12 The World at War (1940–1942)

  CHAPTER 13 The Broadway Othello (1942–1943)

  CHAPTER 14 The Apex of Fame (1944–1945)

  CHAPTER 15 Postwar Politics (1945–1946)

  CHAPTER 16 The Progressive Party (1947–1948)

  CHAPTER 17 The Paris Speech and After (1949)

  CHAPTER 18 Peekskill (1949)

  CHAPTER 19 The Right to Travel (1950–1952)

  CHAPTER 20 Confinement (1952–1954)

  CHAPTER 21 Breakdown (1955–1956)

  CHAPTER 22 Resurgence (1957–1958)

  CHAPTER 23 Return to Europe (1958–1960)

  CHAPTER 24 Broken Health (1961–1964)

  CHAPTER 25 Attempted Renewal (1964–1965)

  CHAPTER 26 Final Years (1966–1976)

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

  Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate,

  Nor set down aught in malice.…

  Othello V. ii. 339–43

  Preface

  In 1919, when Paul Robeson graduated from Rutgers as valedictorian, the “class prophecy” suggested that by 1940 he would be governor of New Jersey and “the leader of the colored race in America.” When 1940 came around, that prophecy had not been entirely realized but—except for the governorship of New Jersey, for which Robeson had no ambition—continued to seem entirely plausible. By then he had added to his undergraduate laurels as scholar and All-American football player, international acclaim as concert artist, stage actor, recording and film star.

  Although many white and almost all black Americans in 1940 shared a high estimate of Robeson’s accomplishment, their views of what it meant failed to coincide in some important ways. To the white world in general, Robeson seemed a magnetic, civilized, and gifted man who had relied on talent rather than belligerence to “rise above his circumstances.” Whites vaguely recognized in 1940 that he was beginning to emerge as a passionate defender of the underclasses, yet the lack of stridency and self-pity in his manner allowed them to persist in the comfortable illusion that his career proved the way was indeed open to those with sufficient pluck and aptitude, regardless of race—that the “system” worked.

  Those whites who knew Robeson personally (and he had many white friends) recognized, more than the white world at large did, that his charismatic charm, his grace and generosity, real enough, were hardly a complete accounting of his personality. They had experienced his stubborn reserve, had seen his carefully controlled anger erupt, knew the limits of his gregariousness. By 1940, they also had become aware of his deepening political passion. They had heard him talk with a gravity dramatically different from the unemphatic ease of his usual public self-presentation about the importance of preserving African culture from the corrupting influence of the West. They knew of his deep dismay over the destruction of Republican Spain, his mounting commitment to what he viewed as the anticolonial and egalitarian impulses of the Soviet Union, his mounting anger at the blind ethnocentrism of Europe’s privileged classes in their continuing exploitation of colonial peoples.

  Black Americans had watched Robeson work his way through the white world with an ease that seemed remarkable—and in moments of optimism provided a ray of hope. Here he was in 1940, son of an ex-slave, risen to be a highly regarded interpreter not only of spirituals but also of the plays of America’s foremost white playwright, Eugene O’Neill. He had already starred, as well, in a London production of Othello with Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike, had sold out concert halls throughout Europe, had been a leading box-office draw in half a dozen films, and had, most recently, been the man chosen to sing on a nationwide radio broadcast—to immense acclaim—the stirring, patriotic “Ballad for Americans.” With seemingly equal ease, Robeson had moved beyond artistic recognition to social acceptance—at least in sophisticated white circles in England, where he and his family had resided for much of the thirties.

  True, the black actor Ira Aldridge had been hailed for his talent before Robeson, just as the singer Roland Hayes had also filled concert halls. But Robeson had combined both their gifts, had added an outstanding career in athletics, a degree in law, a scholar’s ability to summon up wide-ranging points of reference, and a linguist’s ability to communicate in several languages. And beyond all these accomplishments, and perhaps more inspiring than any of them to the “ordinary” black American, was Robeson’s deepening commitment to improving the lot of people of color around the world. Here was an important black artist who viewed his gifts and his worldly success not as ends in themselves, but as instruments for helping the race.

  Most blacks were too open-eyed to believe, as most whites did, that Robeson’s success proved that the American system “worked,” that it even remotely offset the otherwise prevalent enormities of discrimination. Nor did most blacks interpret (as most whites did) the phenomenon of one exceptionally gifted black man’s being allowed through the net as evidence that the net was porous—or even that Robeson’s own acceptance was without very real boundaries and qualifications. Still, it was worth knowing, however much white America overemployed the information, that a few supremely gifted blacks did occasionally get the chance to demonstrate their gifts. It was worth even more to know that one such black had become determined to see that others—gifted or not—got their entitlement to a dignified life.

  Had the class prophet resumed his duties in 1940 and tried to cast ahead yet another twenty years, he might have justifiably been confident that Robeson’s triumphs would multiply and his influence consolidate. This time he would have been woefully wrong. From 1940 to 1960 Robeson evolved fully from an artist with a conscience to an artist committed to political action. He moved from the view that his own accomplishments would open doors for others to the conviction that the doors remained so firmly secured that those who had somehow pushed through them had to see to their permanent dismantling as a primary obligation. During the years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Robeson remained reasonably hopeful that white America would itself recognize the worst aspects of institutionalized racism and work to expunge them. But as the democratic impulses of the New Deal drained off into the intolerance of postwar McCarthyism, his real hope fastened on the ultimate transforming power of international socialism. He never ceased being an American patriot—continuing to believe in the inspirational promise of the country’s principles, if not her practice—but the more white America failed, in the post-World War II years, to stand up for the rights of people of color, the more Robeson grew into a militant spokesman for the world’s oppressed. The country’s failure to set its house in order, to ransom its own promise, brought out i
n him not—as in so many others—weary acquiescence but, rather, uncompromising anger, a dogged refusal to bow.

  Robeson’s stand endeared him still further to those who shared his politics and his principles, but cost him dearly with the multitude of mainstream Americans who had once been among his admirers. By 1960 his career and health had been broken, his name vilified, his honor—even his good sense—assailed, his image converted by a now hostile establishment from public hero to public enemy. Branded a Soviet apologist, kept under close surveillance by the FBI, his right to travel abroad denied by the State Department and his opportunities to perform at home severely curtailed, deserted by most of the beholden black leadership, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson.

  This extraordinary turnabout in what had been one of the great twentieth-century careers is a singularly American story, emblematic of its times yet transcending them, encompassing not merely Cold War hysteria during one moment in our history but racial symbolism and racial consciousness throughout our history. That a man so deeply loved all over the world could evoke in his own country such an outpouring of fear and anger may be the central tragedy—America’s tragedy—of Paul Robeson’s story.

  CHAPTER 1

  Boyhood

  (1898–1914)

  Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the century—and to some extent down to the present day—was known as the northernmost outpost of the Confederacy. Long before the Civil War, Southern aristocrats had enrolled their sons at Princeton University, considering it the only “safe” educational institution for those willing to venture north at all. Some Southern families even sent along—in one of those fits of inadvertent irony in which American history abounds—trusted black servants to insulate their scions from the potential hazards of an alien white culture. And thus from an early time the town of Princeton had a black population—and antiblack attitudes.

  Even without the infusion of Southern aristocrats, Princeton had its own native tradition of hostility toward blacks, a hostility found in abundance everywhere in the country. By the early years of the twentieth century, that hostility was resurgent and the explicit Jim Crow principle in schooling, transportation, and restaurants had replaced even the marginal ambiguities of the post-Reconstruction period. Black teachers lost their jobs in integrated schools; black citizens were denied access to hotels; black workers were eliminated from trade unions. Social scientists in the universities (Franz Boas, the anthropologist, was among the notable exceptions) had begun bolstering the old doctrines of innate inferiority with their new “objective” expertise, uniting around the “scientific” doctrine that blacks were a separate species, one step above the ape on the evolutionary scale. Books appeared with such inflammatory, unapologetic titles as The Negro a Beast and The Negro: A Menace to Civilization. On the eve of World War I, the movie Birth of a Nation summarized the accumulated ideology and practice of the preceding two decades by portraying noble-hearted whites reluctantly taking the law into their own hands in order to curb the excesses of savage blacks—and was a resounding popular success. Rural areas of the South added burning at the stake to lynch law’s already potent arsenal of terror (there were more than eleven hundred lynchings of Southern blacks in the years 1900–14) and in the cities mob violence edged northward to explode with special ferocity in 1908 at Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln.1

  Physical intimidation was matched by political, social, and economic proscription. Between 1896 and 1915 every Southern state passed legislation decreeing white-only primaries, backed up by poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy and property requirements that, taken together, effectively disenfranchised blacks. The federal government added its weight to the campaign to hold blacks in their “place.” Both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, their policies differing in much else, combined in these years to sanction the prosecution and dismissal of black soldiers for responding to the violence directed against them by the townspeople of Brownsville, Texas. Woodrow Wilson, born in the South and elected to the presidency in 1912, continued the policies of his predecessors by extending segregation in federal office buildings and rebuffing black applicants for jobs.

  At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington was chief spokesman for his race, and blacks—at least in public and for white consumption—generally accepted his counsel for accommodation, conciliation, and deference. Washington defined economic rights for blacks as the right to be trained for low-paying jobs in factories and farms, cautioned patience in demanding political rights, and eschewed all interest in social intermingling. In the years immediately preceding World War I, both the militant “Niagara Movement,” spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would emerge to challenge Washington’s views, but in 1900 his philosophy held sway—and the escalation of white violence against blacks served notice that it could be overturned only at terrible cost.

  Paul Leroy Robeson was born in the town of Princeton on April 9, 1898. His father, William Drew Robeson, had himself been born a slave, the child of Benjamin and Sabra, on the Roberson plantation in Cross Roads Township, Martin County, North Carolina. In 1860, at age fifteen, William Drew had made his escape, found his way north over the Maryland border into Pennsylvania, and served as a laborer for the Union Army (making his way back to North Carolina at least twice to see his mother). At the close of the Civil War, he managed to obtain an elementary-school education and then, earning his fees through farm labor, went on for ministerial studies at the all-black Lincoln University, near Philadelphia (receiving an A.B. in 1873 and a Bachelor of Sacred Theology degree in 1876). A classmate later described “the ‘Uncle Tom’ tendencies” among many of the students at Lincoln—but singled William Drew out as “among the notable exceptions.”2

  While studying at Lincoln, William Drew met Maria Louisa Bustill, eight years his junior, a teacher at the Robert Vaux School. Her distinguished family traced its roots back to the African Bantu people (as William Drew did his to the Ibo of Nigeria), and in this country its members had intermarried with Delaware Indians and English Quakers. The many prominent descendants included Cyrus Bustill, who in 1787 helped to found the Free African Society, the first black self-help organization in America; Joseph Cassey Bustill, a prominent figure in the Underground Railroad; and Sarah Mapps Douglass, a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Louisa Bustill’s own sister, Gertrude, wrote for several Philadelphia newspapers and married Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell, the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (as well as a considerable activist for racial justice). When Louisa Bustill married William Drew Robeson in 1878, the impressive legacy of Bustill achievements, past and current, became part of their son Paul’s heritage. But it was not the part he emphasized. He always identified more with the humbler lives on his father’s side, often alluding affectionately as an adult to his simple, good North Carolina kin—while scarcely ever referring to his Bustill relatives.3

  At the time of Paul’s birth, his father was fifty-three years old and his mother forty-five. She had already given birth to seven children, five of whom had survived infancy. As the youngest, Paul was the doted-upon favorite, and in later life always spoke of his family with deep affection. The firstborn, William Drew, Jr., later became a physician in Washington, D.C., and died in 1925 at the youthful age of forty-four; Paul later credited him as the most “brilliant” member of the family and his own “principal source of learning how to study.” (William’s nickname among his contemporaries was “schoolboy.”) Marian, the one girl, became, like her mother, a teacher; Benjamin, like his father, went on to the ministry. The fiery Reeve (called Reed) rejected any traditional path or cautionary attitude; he was the family brawler, the boy who reacted to racial slurs with passionate defiance—and became something of an alter ego to his younger brother, Paul. “His example explains much of my militancy,” Paul wrote later in life. “He often told me, ‘Don’t
ever take it from them, Laddie—always be a man—never bend the knee.’” As an adult, Paul would look back lovingly on his “restless, rebellious” brother, “scoffing at convention, defiant of the white man’s law.” But after street fights (Reed carried a bag of small, jagged rocks for protection) and brushes with the police, Reed was packed off to Detroit, became part owner of a hotel, apparently got involved in bootlegging and gambling, and is rumored to have died on Skid Row.4

  The town of Princeton was a strictly Jim Crow place, with black adults held to menial jobs and black youngsters relegated to the segregated Witherspoon Elementary School (which ran only through the eighth grade; parents who wanted their children to have more education—like the Robesons—had to send them out of town). Emma Epps, a contemporary of Paul’s, remembers walking home with a pack of white kids at her heels yelling “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Later in life, Paul scornfully rejected Princeton as “spiritually located in Dixie,” and he referred angrily to blacks living there “for all intents and purposes on a Southern plantation. And with no more dignity than that suggests—all the bowing and scraping to the drunken rich, all the vile names, all the Uncle Tomming to earn enough to lead miserable lives.” Still, the black community in Princeton was large (15–20 percent of the population) and cohesive, with a sizable contingent from rural North Carolina that continued in its Southern speech and traditions, and with Reverend Robeson’s relatives, Huldah Robeson, Nettie Staton, and cousins Carraway and Chance all living nearby. As Paul himself later wrote, blacks “lived a much more communal life” in Princeton “than the white people around them,” a communality “expressed and preserved” in the church.5

  Within that church, Reverend Robeson was an admired figure. He had been pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton for nearly twenty years when his son Paul was born in 1898. Of the three black churches in Princeton at the turn of the century, Witherspoon was the largest, the possessor of an auditorium, a parish house, and several additional properties, together valued at more than thirty thousand dollars. As pastor of Witherspoon, Reverend Robeson would later be recalled as having initially “made many improvements in the church methods and church property.” He would also be recalled, by blacks, as “ever the defender of justice—standing firmly for the rights of our race.” A contemporary commented that “you could move the Rock of Gibraltar” more easily—William Drew Robeson was made of “flintstone, unwilling to compromise on moral principles, even if it meant economic harm.”6