Paul Robeson Read online

  Robeson’s path at Rutgers was centrally defined by his race, though not—thanks to his own magnetism and talent—centrally circumscribed by it. The simple fact of his dark skin was sufficient to bring down on him a predictable number of indignities, but his own settled self-respect kept them from turning into disabling wounds. He further learned at Rutgers what had become almost instinctual knowledge: achievement could win from whites respect and applause, sometimes friendship, but almost never intimacy.

  When freshman Robeson walked onto the practice field to try out for Rutgers football, the team had no blacks on it—indeed, like almost every other top-ranked college, Rutgers had never in its history had a black player. In a day when football players typically lacked the mammoth height and girth they have today (five members of the 1917 Rutgers team were five feet, nine inches or shorter), Paul, at six feet, two inches, and 190 pounds, stood some three to four inches taller and weighed some 20 pounds more than most others on the field.2

  The “giant’s” reputation had preceded him. Rutgers coach G. Foster Sanford had seen him play for Somerville and had been duly impressed. The Rutgers first-stringers had also heard about Robey’s athletic prowess—and skin color. Several of them set out to prevent him from making the team. On the first day of scrimmage, they piled on, leaving Robeson with a broken nose (which troubled him ever after as a singer), a sprained right shoulder, and assorted cuts and bruises. He could hardly limp off the field. That night (as Robeson described the incident thirty years later) “a very very sorry boy” had to take to bed, and stay there for ten days to repair his wounds. “It was tough going” for a seventeen-year-old and “I didn’t know whether I could take any more.” But his father had impressed upon him that “when I was out on a football field, or in a classroom, or anywhere else, I was not there just on my own. I was the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football, and wanted to go to college, and, as their representative, I had to show I could take whatever was handed out.… Our father wouldn’t like to think that our family had a quitter in it.”3

  After a visit and pep talk from brother Ben, Robeson went back out for another scrimmage. This time a varsity player brutally stomped on his hand. The bones held, but Robeson’s temper did not. On the next play, as the first-string backfield came toward him, Robeson, enraged with pain, swept out his massive arms, brought down three men, grabbed the ball carrier, and raised him over his head—“I was going to smash him so hard to the ground that I’d break him right in two”—and was stopped by a nick-in-time yell from Coach Sanford. Robeson was never again roughed up—that is, by his own teammates. Sanford, a white New Englander committed to racial equality as well as to football prowess, issued a double-barreled communiqué: Robey had made the team, and any player who tried to injure him would be dropped from it.4

  Several of his teammates have subsequently downplayed the amount of racial antipathy Robeson faced on the Rutgers squad—just as whites who knew him in Somerville later minimized town prejudice. One Rutgers teammate, “Thug” Rendall, insisted sixty years later that there had been no opposition to Robey’s joining the team, and Steve White, a senior when Robeson was a freshman, flatly declared, “There was never any discrimination.” Earl Reed Silvers, who graduated two years ahead of Robeson and was later a Rutgers faculty member, claimed to have “attended every football practice” during Robeson’s freshman year and did not remember “any untoward incident on the field.” Silvers further claimed to have checked his memory with four members of the varsity squad of that season and reported that not one of them could recall a deliberate attempt to injure Robeson. In any case, Silvers felt sure, “Paul would not … wish to question the integrity of his college or the sportsmanship of his friends.”5

  A comparable view is held by Coach Sanford’s son. He, too, was regularly present at team practices and insists that “a minor incident” has subsequently been blown out of all proportion. Had resentment against Robeson “been that deepseated,” Sanford, Jr., argues, it would never have subsided—yet in fact “it never showed its ugly head again.” As for Robeson’s own reported rage at being mauled, Sanford, Jr., discounts it as not believable because not in character—as “everyone knew,” Robeson was “a nice, placid, kind guy” who had “great control of himself; he never blew his top, he didn’t have a short fuse.”6

  True enough. Ordinarily, Robeson as a young man did sit on his rage—though even back in Somerville he had been known once or twice to “blow his top,” showing, had anyone wished to see, that choosing to muzzle his feelings was not the equivalent of not having feelings, or any guarantee that under special provocation they would not surface. Later in life Robeson told a friend that, although he had never used his hands illegally while playing college football, he did practice breaking up orange crates with his forearm. As for the amount of provocation he actually faced, the bland minimizations of Sanford, Jr., and others are overmatched by countertestimony. Robert Nash, another member of the varsity squad, flatly states that Robeson “took a terrific beating.… We gave him a tough time during the practices; it was like initiation. He took it well, though.” And Mayne S. Mason, an instructor of physics and one of Robeson’s teachers, remembers him coming into his lab one day with his hand bandaged; when Mason asked him what had happened, Paul simply said, “I got hurt.” Later, after everyone else had left the lab, he elaborated a bit: someone on the team had spiked his hand that day. He would say no more, but Mason later learned from another student that Robeson had picked the man up over his head as if to throw him to the ground.7

  The intervention of Coach Sanford prevented overt racism from surfacing again on the Rutgers squad, and over time the initial racist reaction to Robeson was gradually replaced by admiration, and in some cases affection (end James Burke even credited him with saving his life: chasing a pass, Burke fell fifty feet over an embankment into the Raritan Canal, and Robeson raced into the water in full football gear to haul him out). Sanford himself developed great respect for Robeson’s athletic talent and great liking for him personally, a mutual regard that lasted until Sanford’s death. An unusually gifted coach, Sanford took Robeson under his wing and taught him much that honed his game—how to protect himself, how to put his arms chest-high and come up across the body with a forceful elbow (in those days the use of arms in football was restricted), how to employ (no platoon system then existed and members played for sixty minutes) his multiple skills in both offensive and defensive positions, developing particular strength as a pass receiver and a tackler.8

  By the end of his freshman year, Robeson was in the starting lineup; by his junior year, he had become the star of an exceptionally talented Rutgers team and had gained national prominence—a “football genius,” raved one sportswriter, echoing many others, “the best all-round player on the gridiron this season,” “a dusky marvel.” Twice, in 1917 and 1918, Walter Camp, the legendary Yale coach, put Robeson on his All-American football teams—the first Rutgers player ever named—calling him “a veritable superman.” The phrase scarcely seemed overheated; by then, in a superfluity of skill, Robeson had also distinguished himself as center on the basketball team, catcher on the baseball team, and a competent javelin and discus thrower on the track team. By the time of his graduation, he had won fifteen varsity letters in four different sports. On the side, he played club basketball for St. Christopher, a Harlem group that was one of the best in the nation, boasting among its other players the two Jenkins brothers, Harold “Legs” and Clarence “Little Fat,” later to become legendary figures in the sport.9

  All of which suggests, in bald outline, a triumphal procession, inexorable and uninterrupted. The reality was a good deal bumpier. If Coach Sanford had never been bigoted, and if the Rutgers football team was taught not to be, that still left the outside world. One classmate remembers the shouts of “nigger” that would sometimes come from the stands, and Coach Sanford’s son recalls that Robeson “was treated very badly by the opponents, not neces
sarily the Northern opponents but the Southern opponents.… Everybody went after him, and they did it in many ways. You could gouge, you could punch, you could kick. The officials were Southern, and he took one hell of a beating, but he was never hurt. He was never out of a game for injuries. He never got thrown off the field; when somebody punched him, he didn’t punch back. He was just tough. He was big. He had a massive, strong body, among other things. He felt the resentment but he managed to keep it under wraps.” The restraining influence was Paul himself, not Coach Sanford. One team member, Donald Storck, remembers that Sanford would sometimes encourage his players to do physical damage to the opposing team; and at least once Storck and Robeson appealed that policy directly to Sanford.10

  Among Rutgers’s Southern opponents in football, William and Mary and Georgia Tech simply refused to play against a black man. A game with Washington and Lee came off only after the Rutgers administration, bowing to pressure from its alumni, ordered Sanford to bench Robeson (Rutgers in 1916 was celebrating its 150th anniversary, and the administration hoped for an outpouring of alumni gifts). Some of the Rutgers players initially protested the decision not to use Robeson against Washington and Lee, but Sanford gathered the squad together outside Kilpatrick Chapel and “explained” that it had been a matter of “courtesy” to accede to a request from the opposing team’s coach—courtesy and common sense, he said, for there was a real possibility the Washington and Lee players might gang up on Paul and injure him. Paul gave thought to quitting, but his father told him “he hadn’t sent me to college to play football, and vetoed my plan to switch colleges.…”11

  When the news got out that Robeson had been benched, James D. Carr, Rutgers’s first (1892) black graduate—a Phi Beta Kappa honor student who had gone on to Columbia Law School and was currently an attorney for the city of New York—angrily protested in a letter to Rutgers President William H. S. Demarest: “Shall men, whose progenitors tried to destroy this Union, be permitted to make a mockery of our democratic ideals by robbing a youth, whose progenitors helped to save the Union, of that equality of opportunity and privilege that should be the crowning glory of our institution of learning?”12

  The answer was yes. But on a second occasion Coach Sanford held his ground. When “Greasy” Neale, coach of the West Virginia team, also insisted Robeson be dropped from the roster, Sanford adamantly refused to comply. “When we lined up for the first play,” Robeson told a friend a decade later, “the man playing opposite me leaned forward and said, ‘Don’t you so much as touch me, you black dog, or I’ll cut your heart out.’ Can you imagine? I’m playing opposite him in a football game and he says I’m not to touch him. When the whistle blew I dove in and he didn’t see me coming. I clipped him sidewise and nearly busted him in two and as we were lying under the pile I leaned forward and whispered, ‘I touched you that time. How did you like it?’” Rutgers held West Virginia, the pregame favorite, to a tie; “the giant Negro” (alternately called by the papers “the big darky”) was spotted and held down by the visitors until the final period, when he saved the game with a crucial tackle on the Rutgers two-yard line. After the game Coach Neale purportedly said, “Guts! He had nothing else but! Why that colored boy’s legs were so gashed and bruised that his skin peeled off when he removed his stockings.” “Every man in the enemy pack,” Robeson later told an interviewer, “filed in front of me and shook my black hand!”13

  In 1917, in Paul’s junior year, Rutgers took on the Newport Naval Reserve, an undefeated team headed by Cupe (“Cupid”) Black and made up of eleven All-Americans. In a memorable game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (with Walter Camp watching from the stands), Rutgers spectacularly outplayed Newport. The Rutgers Targum reported that Robeson had seemed to be all over the field, so much so that “the Newport team began to believe that there were, at least, eleven Robesons, and their entire horizon was obscured by him.…” More than fifty years later, his performance was still vividly remembered as “brilliant.… He led the defense as a linebacker to such success that Newport made only one first down. He also caught a pass on the five-yard line and fought his way over the goal line with three defenders trying to bring him down.” And the New York Tribune said, “It was Robeson, a veritable Othello of battle, who led the dashing little Rutgers eleven to a 14–0 victory over the widely heralded Newport Naval Reserves.”14

  Because the feats of “the giant Negro” extended beyond football, they could not easily be dismissed as the mere by-products of “animal vitality.” Robeson dominated not only the playing fields but the classroom—and the debating hall and the glee club and the honor societies—as well. And he did so with a modesty that further disarmed would-be detractors. “A gentle soul,” a man of “great gentleness,” is how two undergraduates who knew Robey later described him, and Coach Sanford—who was not given to hyperbole—told a newspaper reporter that Robeson “does not know the meaning of conceit” and is “one of the most likeable fellows I ever met.”15

  Robeson maintained such a consistently high grade average in his course work that he was one of four undergraduates (in a class of eighty) admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. A speaker of exceptional force, he was a member of the varsity debating team and won the class oratorical prize four years in succession. His bass-baritone was the chief adornment of the glee club—but only at its home concerts; he was not invited to be a “traveling” member, and at Rutgers sang only with the stipulation that he not attend social functions after the performances.16

  One reason Robeson tolerated that humiliation was his need for money. Along with doing a variety of odd jobs (including working as a porter in Grand Central Station), he used his glee-club appearances as an advertisement for the private concerts he sometimes gave to augment his scholarship. Ten years later he told a reporter, “I used to hustle around, fix up a concert, and bill myself as a star attraction. It is probable … that I attracted my audiences in the first place partly by the fact that my name was already fairly well known as a Rugger man.… I would go on the stage, sing a group of songs, orate and flourish for 20 minutes, and then sing again. Usually this procedure brought me in about ten pounds [fifty dollars], and apparently everybody was satisfied.… These early ventures were practically the whole of my stage training.”17

  In the same way that Robeson was only partly accepted as a member of the glee club, so, too, was he elected to the Literary Society, Philoclean, without being allowed fully to share in its festivities. On the night the new Philoclean members were inducted, Paul was prevented from participating in the traditional ritual of “standing for a treat” at Bruns (the local ice-cream-and-candy shop) because Bruns would not serve a black man. Paul gave his financial share for the treat to his friend Charlie Bloodgood, but when Charlie said he and some of the others would protest Bruns’s policy, Paul discouraged them. He “wanted no trouble,” he said, and went home. “There was a clear line,” Robeson later wrote, “beyond which one did not pass”; college life was “on the surface marvellous, but it was a thing apart.”18

  In that same spirit, Paul once let his teammate Donald Storck persuade him to go to a college dance—but positioned himself on the balcony, where, to wild applause, he serenaded the dancers below with “Roses of Picardy.” Storck marveled at his friend’s calm exterior but recognized that he was “roiling” inside. By others, however, Paul’s prudent self-possession was often mistaken for nonchalance. An undergraduate two years behind him sent him myopic congratulations later in life on the attitude he had shown: “I will never forget how much you seemed to enjoy watching, though never participating in any of the social affairs of your contemporaries.… This was but one of your most typical, admirable qualities that endeared you to all who knew you. It was in keeping with your modesty.…”19

  Now and then during his undergraduate years, when under unusual pressure, Robeson let whites glimpse a less placid side. One such moment came at the close of his junior year. In May his father suddenly and unexpectedly died at a
ge seventy-three. While lying gravely ill, Reverend Robeson had extracted his son’s promise to go ahead with his commitment to compete in—and win—an oratorical contest scheduled for a few days hence. Three days after his father’s death, a distraught Paul reluctantly kept his promise and mounted the lecture platform, surrounded by supportive friends. “Paul stood there on the stage,” one of them recalls, “gaunt, sombre, obviously steeped in grief as he talked in that beautiful, moving voice.” Defenses down, Paul spoke in less measured, benign terms than was his usual style. He pointedly remonstrated with the largely white audience for the inadequate educational opportunities offered blacks—and emphasized, by way of contrast, the distinction with which they continued to fight in the country’s wars. In later life, as it became ever clearer to him that white America was unlikely to extend its paper principles of equality (and certainly not without a persistent, militant demand that it do so), Robeson would return often to the paradox of black Americans, denied first-class citizenship, fighting and dying in the nation’s armed forces—and he would ultimately counsel them not to.20

  The following year, his last at Rutgers, Robeson used another public occasion to reiterate his determination to make of his own life a fitting memorial to his father’s, a vehicle for helping “the race to a higher life.” When it came time to write his senior thesis, he chose for his topic “The Fourteenth Amendment, the Sleeping Giant of the American Constitution”—and proceeded to interpret it in a way that prefigured the eventual use of that amendment as a civil-rights weapon. In his trademark public tone of measured courtesy, and encased in legalistic citation, Robeson entered a plea “for utilizing the potential force of the proviso to ensure equality before the law”; let the amendment “be duly observed,” he wrote, and “the American people shall develop a higher sense of constitutional morality.” The gist of Robeson’s argument was unequivocally a call to work within the system, and its rhetoric was glowingly—some would say, from the vantage point of seventy years later, naïvely—optimistic about white intentions. Yet, once again, beneath the conventional packaging lay some potentially unconventional views. And his white professor spotted them: he penciled across Robeson’s thesis “Extravagant”—though conceivably he was referring to Robeson’s optimism.21