Paul Robeson Read online

  It did. After twenty years of service, Reverend Robeson was forced out of his Princeton pastorate. The initial charges against him focused on the inability of the Witherspoon Church to become financially self-sustaining. An investigating commission appointed by the Presbytery of New Brunswick reported in January 1900 that no misappropriation of funds had taken place but that there had been “great carelessness” in keeping business records. Finding insufficient improvement six months later, the commission recommended “the dissolution of the Pastoral Relation existing between Rev. William D. Robeson and said Church.” No reasons were given, and no charges, or even intimations, were made against Reverend Robeson’s character. Seventy-two members of the Witherspoon Church—including all three of its Elders and three of its four Trustees—promptly petitioned against his discharge. Reverend Robeson himself, in a lengthy speech before the Presbytery, “made an eloquent appeal” (according to the local press) in his own behalf. He “intimated that the Presbytery was inclined to be hard on him and his church because colored.” The chairman of the investigating commission replied that “if Mr. Robeson had been a white pastor, Presbytery would have dissolved the relation long before this,” and declared that “there is a misfit at the Witherspoon Street Church and that it is useless for Mr. Robeson longer to continue in that field.”7

  Further discussion before the full Presbytery “brought out the fact that Mr. Robeson had been kind to his people, administering to the wants of the most needy in times of their suffering out of his own substance, often thereby imperilling his own financial interests and bringing upon himself the very conditions which formed the basis of some complaints made against him.” With “neither pastor nor people” asking for a dissolution and with Reverend Robeson’s character having been shown to be “above reproach,” the Presbytery—for the moment—decided that the commission’s suggestion for separation was not “sustained by facts necessary to warrant a recommendation of such grave moment.” It voted to recommit the report and instructed the commission to provide concrete reasons for its view that Reverend Robeson’s pastoral relations with his church should be severed.8

  The commission’s animus was only momentarily deflected. According to the later testimony of two contemporaries, Reverend Robeson had gotten “on the wrong side of a church fight,” having apparently refused to bow to pressure from certain white “residents of Princeton” that he curtail his tendency to “speak out against social injustice” in the town. Many years later, after Reverend Robeson’s son Paul (still a toddler at the time of his father’s troubles) had himself become the target of public abuse, a family friend from the early days commented on how Paul’s “ideas, thoughts and effort were misinterpreted by the white man to keep his black brother in the dark and keep us from making progress,” adding, “They did it to his father.”9

  The commission went back into session and in October 1900 issued a “supplemental report” testy in tone and adamant in its recommendation that Reverend Robeson be separated from his pastorate. Forced this time to assign reasons, the commission mostly resorted to vague charges about a falling-off in membership at the Witherspoon Church and a “disrelish” for its services “as at present conducted.” In further alluding to “a general unrest and dissatisfaction on the part of others”—meaning white residents of Princeton—“who have been the Church’s friends and helpers,” the commission tipped its actual hand, for the “lack of sympathy” toward Reverend Robeson that it cited could not have referred to his own black congregation. On the contrary, its members, meeting several times under the independent auspices of a white faculty member from the Princeton Seminary, spoke out forcefully and voted nearly unanimously in favor of retaining Reverend Robeson as pastor.10

  That made no impression on the commission. The “welfare and prosperity” of the Witherspoon Church, it announced, would be “greatly enhanced” by Reverend Robeson’s departure. Bowing to the commission’s intransigence, William Drew Robeson resigned, effective February 1, 1901. His salary (about six hundred dollars a year) and his use of the pastor’s residence were continued until May 1. On January 27, 1901, the day of Reverend Robeson’s farewell sermon, chairs and benches had to be placed in the aisles to accommodate the overflow crowd, and many stood at the rear of the church. He began by acknowledging that “I have made some mistakes and committed some blunders, for I am human and faulty; but if I know my own heart, I have tried to do my work well.” Throughout his speech he made only one oblique reference to those who in the church’s “darkest need forsook it,” but otherwise advocated “forgetting the things that are behind.” With the largeness of spirit that his son Paul would always admire and emulate, Reverend Robeson eschewed any desire “to recriminate and rebuke.” “As I review the past,” he said, “and think upon many scenes, my heart is filled with love.” He closed by urging his congregation, “Do not be discouraged, do not think your past work is in vain.” The words would prove emblematic for his son Paul’s own life.11

  Within just a few years of losing his pastorate, Reverend Robeson had to face a second, more devastating tragedy. His wife, Louisa, had long been afflicted with impaired eyesight and ill health. When, on a wintry day in 1904, a coal from the stove fell on her long-skirted dress, she failed to detect it. Fatally burned, she lingered on for several days in great pain. Paul, not yet six years old, was away at the time of the accident, but his brother Ben was home. Throughout Ben’s life, according to his daughter, the mere sight of a flame was enough to upset him.12

  As an adult Paul claimed to have scant memory of his mother—perhaps a predictable effect of trauma. Yet he did several times confide to intimates, “I admired my father, but I loved my mother,” and he had a vivid recall of the day of her funeral: “He remembers his Aunt Gertrude taking him by the hand, and leading him to the modest coffin, in the little parlor at 13 Green St.—to take one last, but never forgotten look at his beautiful, sweet, generous-hearted Mother.” Otherwise, Louisa Bustill Robeson is barely present in the historical record; a scattered reference or two hint at a woman of considerable intellect and education (she wrote many of her husband’s sermons and is also recalled as a “poetess”), generous toward those in need, strong yet gentle—a temperament much as her son’s would be.13

  The Bustill clan showed disinterest in the “dark children” Louisa had left behind (she herself had been light-skinned and high-cheekboned, reflecting the mix of African with European and Delaware Indian heritage), which was perhaps another reason Paul identified deeply with his father’s uneducated relatives, who treated him with unfailing kindness. Reverend Robeson, bereft of his pastorate and his mate, struggled to regain his balance. He was occasionally called on to give a sermon in this church or that, but to piece out an income he became a coachman, driving Princeton students around town, and in addition got himself a horse and wagon to haul ashes for the townspeople (the ashes, Paul later recalled, “piled up in the back yard in such mass as if one were looking at a coal heap in the Rhonda [sic] Valley in Wales …”). “Never once,” Paul remembered, did Reverend Robeson “complain of the poverty and misfortune of those years.” He retained “his dignity and lack of bitterness.” But for a time he could barely sustain a livelihood. The Princeton Packet, wanting in all other news about blacks, printed a notice that William Drew Robeson owed $12.25 in unpaid taxes on his house.14

  At the time of their mother’s death in 1904, Ben and Paul were the only children still at home (Marian, next youngest to Paul, was staying with relatives in North Carolina and studying at the Scotia Seminary for young black women). It wasn’t until 1907 that Reverend Robeson managed to relocate himself and his two sons in the town of Westfield, but even then economic hardship continued. Reverend Robeson worked in a grocery store, slept with Paul and Ben in the attic under the roof of the store, cooked and washed in a lean-to attached to the back of the building. Shifting his denominational affiliation from Presbyterian to African Methodist Episcopal, he somehow managed to build a tiny
church, the Downer Street St. Luke A.M.E. Zion (Paul and Ben helped lay the first bricks “in this Pillar of Zion”), and to hold together its flock of rural blacks from the South. They, in turn, helped Reverend Robeson hold together his family. The woman who ran the grocery store downstairs, along with other church sisters and neighbors, brought food from time to time (supplemented by bags of cornmeal, greens, yams, and peanuts sent up by relatives from Robersonville, North Carolina); and if Reverend Robeson had to visit a parishioner or be away overnight, one of the sisters would take young Paul home, sewing on his buttons, darning his socks, making him rice pudding and chocolate cake. “There must have been moments,” Paul later wrote, “when I felt the sorrows of a motherless child, but what I most remember from my youngest days was an abiding sense of comfort and security.” The townspeople, in turn, remembered him as a “a nice, open-hearted kind of boy.… Made people want to help him, just being what he was.” Later the whole town of Westfield would claim him, yet he “was always aware of that subtle difference between my complete belonging to the Negro community and my qualified acceptance (however admiring) by the white community.”15

  In 1910 Reverend Robeson was finally able to re-establish himself in a parish, St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion, in the town of Somerville, New Jersey. By then Ben had gone off to Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith) in North Carolina, destined from there to enter the seminary and later to become the pastor of Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem. That left Paul and his father living alone together. Despite a fifty-three-year gap in their ages, the two were mutually devoted, Paul’s respect for his father bordering on awe. The one anecdote Robeson repeatedly recounted as an adult to illustrate his deep regard for his father, and his fear of displeasing him, centered on the consequences of disobeying:

  I remember once he told me to do something which I did not do and he said “come here.” I ran away. He ran after me. I darted across the road. He followed, stumbled and fell. I was horrified. I hurried back and helped “Pop” to his feet. He had knocked out one of his most needed teeth. I shall never forget my feeling. It has remained ever present, and I sometimes experience horror, shame, ingratitude, selfishness all over again, for I loved my “Pop” like no one in all the world.… Never in all my life afterwards, and this happened in 1908, when I was ten, did he have to admonish me again.

  The old man’s “rock-like strength and dignity” (in Paul’s words) took on added authority from his habit of dressing in the long black coat of the “old school,” square-cornered and worn down to the knees—and also by his remarkable speaking voice. Paul later called it “the greatest speaking voice I have ever heard … a deep, sonorous basso, richly melodic and refined, vibrant with the love and compassion which filled him.” In the mid-twenties in New York, Robeson would sometimes amuse friends with an affectionate imitation of his father, the “voice going down like an organ” as it delivered a soul-stirring sermon.16

  Reverend Robeson had a passion for oratory—those were the days of Gladstone and Parnell, prime declaimers of the spoken word—and in his youngest son the dream of passing on his vocal powers was realized. He gave Paul speech after speech to memorize, going through them with him line by line, “dwelling on the choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, or the potency of an inflexion.” Evenings, Paul would perform his prepared orations for his father’s judgment. That done, Reverend Robeson would then often play checkers with his son, and on rare occasions would talk to him about his own early years as a slave. If the tales were infrequent, they were also graphic; later in life Paul would recall how they had haunted his memory and infused his singing of the slave spirituals with a special knowledge and poignancy. He marveled at his father’s refusal to remain in bondage and, “in all the years of his manhood,” his refusal “to be an Uncle Tom.” Though he himself witnessed his father “taunted by the hideous injustices of the color ‘bar,’” he never once saw in him a “hint of servility”; Reverend Robeson taught his children that the black man “was in every way the equal of the white man.” Paul marveled, too, that his father always acted like “a perfect Christian,” rejecting bitterness or even unkindliness. He taught Paul that he had a special responsibility to his race—but also taught him to care “for all people who were unfavorably treated,” and never to assume that whites, by definition, were as a group incapable of caring, reminding him “that whites as well as blacks had given him aid and comfort in his trek for Freedom.” As if to illustrate his words, Reverend Robeson counted among his friends in Somerville the Woldins, a white family who lived almost directly across West Cliff Street. He and Sam Woldin, who had escaped from czarist persecution of the Jews, would often sit on the porch “puffing contentedly on pipes or little Recruits or sweet Caporals, sharing tales of their respective flights to freedom.” As an adult Paul would counsel others in the same theme: neither suffering nor compassion is confined to a single race.17

  As a parent, Reverend Robeson was loving but demanding, a strict disciplinarian whose perfectionist standards his son eventually internalized (“It was not like him to be demonstrative in his love, nor was he quick to praise,” he later wrote of his father). Paul was expected to play an active role in church life, to shoulder a full share of family chores, to turn in a superlative academic performance—and to work at odd jobs to help pay his school fees. He met all the expectations, and then some (beyond the requirements a perfectionist parent articulates usually lies the unarticulated final demand that the child surpass any goal he manages to meet—an insatiable process, once inaugurated, never allowing for surcease). At twelve Paul worked as a kitchen boy, at fourteen on a farm, at fifteen at a man’s job in brickyards and shipyards, and then, as an older teen-ager, he became a waiter during the summers at the small Imperial Hotel at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island.18

  The waiter’s job had its special indignities: the hotel guest list was entirely white, the staff entirely black, and there were no alternate social outlets, no chance to blow off steam in the town. Yet there were compensations. In his “Memory Book” Paul described Narragansett as “wonderful … plenty of bathing and summer pleasure,” and good “chaps” on the staff to hang around with. One of the chaps was Oscar C. Brown, later a Chicago real-estate developer and civil-rights activist. Brown worked in the hotel as a bellhop and part-time secretary, and recalls being pleased that he could take home sixty dollars for the summer’s work—“I didn’t have to be amused, I was in school.” The congenial black staff also included Fritz Pollard; he, like Robeson, would become a storied athlete (in 1916 at Brown, Pollard became the first black All-American football player, named the year before Robeson became the second). The ten or so young black men on the staff enjoyed one another’s company, threw a football around on the beach, now and then discussed “current questions,” and cheered Paul on when the hotel sponsored an oratorical contest. (He won.) “Paul didn’t know anything about waiting on tables,” Oscar Brown recalls, “but he did know everything else—the things we struggled to learn, he could get them just by rote almost.” He was a big hit with the rest of the staff. “Everyone loved Paul,” another friend from those days remembers, “and wherever we went there was a great demand to hear his beautiful voice.”19

  In school, too, Robeson seems from the beginning to have been the outstanding scholar and the most popular boy—a double palm only the most graceful can carry off. On first arriving in Somerville, in 1910, Paul attended James L. Jamison’s “Colored School” (Jamison had moved north after the Ku Klux Klan burned down the schoolhouse he had insisted on keeping open during cotton-picking season, when blacks were expected to be in the fields). Paul was one of three graduates from the Jamison School in June 1911, and at the closing exercises, after his father had given the invocation, he “quite captured the audience” (according to the local paper) “by the genuine ring of oratory displayed in his declamation of Patrick Henry’s ‘An Appeal to Arms.’” Following Paul, one speaker, in “a very practical address to the graduates,… urged them t
o do something.” And another (white) encouraged them to continue their education by expressing “his pleasure that a colored boy … [had] graduated from the high school this year and he thought others would get through.”20

  Following his graduation from the Jamison School, Paul shifted briefly to Westfield’s unsegregated Washington School, graduated at the head of his class, spent eighth grade in a segregated Somerville school, then entered Somerville High in 1912. The town of Somerville had neither Princeton’s entrenched racism nor its close-knit black community. By his own later testimony, Robeson “came to know more white people” and made more friendly connections with them than he had when growing up in Princeton. He realized, however, that his own “easy moving between the two racial communities” was “rather exceptional,” that “barriers between Negro and white existed,” and that his own partial exemption from them was neither typical nor indicative of full acceptance.21

  Somerville High, reflecting the racial composition of the town, had fewer than a dozen black students in a total enrollment of about two hundred. Robeson and a boy named Winston Douglas were the only blacks in their class of some forty. The “colored fellas,” one white classmate asserts, “fitted in very easily.” There was “no antiblack feeling in the town,” a second classmate insists. “It was a nice small town, very good, and the Robesons were highly respected, really.” “There was no prejudice at all,” claims a third classmate, “never any mention of any prejudice.”22