Paul Robeson: The Renaissance Man Vanishes

January 23rd was the 50th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s death. As historian Gerald Horne noted in his 2016 biography of Robeson, Time magazine declared him “probably the most famous living negro” in 1943, while in 1964, an “admiring reporter…upping the ante,” referred to Robeson as the “best known American in the world.” Sports journalist Howard Bryant, was interviewed on 1/23 by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about his new book on baseball player Jackie Robinson’s pressured 1949 testimony before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) intended to discredit Robeson. Goodman told Howard that when she asked a group of students, invited to the studio to watch the show who Jackie Robinson was, almost all of them raised their hands. But when she asked them if they knew who Robeson was, almost none did. How is it that someone who was at one time so famous has been made into a virtual non-person and why?

Horne tells us:

“Born in 1998, Paul Leroy Robeson, a descendent of enslaved Africans in the U.S., was globally renowned – not just as a singer but as an actor, athlete and political activist. As a singer and actor, he was as celebrated as Michael Jackson and Denzel Washington would be; as an athlete, he was as illustrious as [black Italian soccer player] Mario Balotelli; as an activist, he carried the moral weight of Nelson Mandela…

[I]t was left to Robeson’s comrade – the Father of Pan Africanism, W.E.B. Du Bois – who in the 1950s called Robeson “without doubt” the “best known American on Earth” in that “his voice is know in Europe, Asia and Africa, in the West Indies and South America and in the islands of the seas. Children on the street of Peking and Moscow, Calcutta and Jakarta greet him and send their love.” Yet with all this, there was a reigning anomaly: “only in his native land is he without honor or rights.”

As Horne explains, the reason was simple. After U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated after World War II, Robeson refused to join the anti-Soviet consensus. Like former Roosevelt administration agriculture secretary and vice-president Henry A. Wallace, Robeson favored “peaceful coexistence” and cooperation with the U.S.S.R., rather than Cold War confrontation. Robeson was a major supporter of Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, serving as a co-chairman of the National Wallace-for-President Committee. Robeson actively campaigned for Wallace, advocating for his platform of peace and desegregation, even traveling to the South despite death threats from the KKK.

As Horne tells us, “The intersection of U.S. ‘Jim Crow laws – or apartheid – with Robeson’s globetrotting,” introduced him to “sharply diverging realities.” Robeson found little color prejudice in Spain or Scandinavia and none in the Soviet Union. Robeson found this freedom from U.S. color consciousness attractive. But as Horne notes, “this attraction infuriated many in his homeland where finding anything positive to say about Moscow was seen as not only being improper and immoral but, perhaps, a sign of mental derangement.”

Moreover, during the era of McCarthyism and the Blacklist, Robeson refused to tailor his views to fit the prevailing mood. “I’m a Marxist,” he told a New Zealand journalist in 1960, while he told an Australian interviewer, “I’m a convinced socialist.” But Robeson didn’t stop there. Horne tells us he had earlier said, “I’m a radical, and I’m going to stay one until my people get free to walk the Earth.” His “close comrade,” Communist Party USA leader William Patterson declared, “Paul Robeson was a revolutionary.”

But as Horne notes, “The problem for Robeson was that his homeland was the tip of the spear during the Cold War and felt compelled to repress vigorously those like Robeson who refused to accede.” Horne quotes British novelist, sometime leftist activist and Nobel Laureate, Doris Lessing as stating, correctly, that “even the worst time of the Cold War” in Britain was “mild compared to the United States…no British Communist was ever treated with the harshness the government used towards Robeson and some other American Communists.” [Robeson was never a formal member of the CP-USA] One-time party member, folk singer/musician Peter Seeger told Robeson, “You have been the most blacklisted performer in America.”

On April 20, 1949, Robeson spoke at a Soviet backed, anti-NATO “Paris Peace Congress” saying:

We in America do not forget that it was on the backs of the white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of Blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union. We oppose those who wish to build up imperialist Germany and to establish fascism in Greece. We wish peace with Franco’s Spain despite her fascism. We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the people’s Republics.

The Associated Press published a false transcript of Robeson’s speech which gave the impression that he had equated America with a Fascist state.

Robeson was a giant of a man, physically and mentally but like all of us, he had his faults. His desire for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and Communist world was laudable. But like many on the left, his desire for a better, socialist world, may have blinded him to the ugly realities of Stalinism. Robeson traveled to Moscow in June 1949 and tried to find the Jewish Russian poet Itzik Feffer whom he had met during World War II and befriended. Feffer, who had enlisted in the Red Army as a reporter, attaining the rank of colonel, was also vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and, with actor Solomon Mikhoels, toured the United States, Mexico, Canada, and the United Kingdom in 1943 to win popular support and raise money for the Soviet Union, broadcasting the message that antisemitism no longer existed in there. It was then the Robeson met Feffer.

When Mikhoels was assassinated in 1948, Feffer, who had also been an NKVD informant on the activities of the JAC, was arrested along with other JAC members and accused of treason. Robeson requested a meeting with Feffer and the latter was brought from prison to meet him. According to one-time New Leftist, turned right-wing Islamophobe, David Horowitz but also Paul Robeson, Jr., the two met in a room that was under surveillance and Feffer knew he could not speak freely. They exchanged pleasantries, then shook hands and parted their ways or if Horowitz is to be believed, when Robeson asked how he was, Feffer drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips, “They’re going to kill us, he said. When you return to America you must speak out and save us.” This is certainly plausible.

During a concert at Tchaikovsky Hall on 14 June – which was broadcast across the entire Soviet Union – Robeson publicly paid tribute to Feffer and the late Mikhoels, singing the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization, a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto in German-occupied Lithuania) song “Zog nit keyn mol” (Partisan Song) in both Russian and Yiddish. It was met with a standing ovation from the hall. Upon returning to the U.S., Robeson organized a letter in defense of Feffer, which was signed by writer Howard Fast and the then-chairman of the World Peace Council (which had held the Paris Congress), French Communist physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, among others. According to observers, Robeson’s letter may have delayed Feffer’s execution by three years.

To isolate Robeson politically, the House Un-American Activities Committee *(HUAC) subpoenaed black baseball star Jackie Robinson to comment on Robeson’s Paris speech. Robinson testified that Robeson’s statements, “if accurately reported, were silly.” Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “Mr. Robeson does his people great harm in trying to line them up on the Communist side of the political picture. Jackie Robinson helps them greatly by his forthright statements.” Days later, the announcement of a concert headlined by Robeson in Peekskill, New York provoked the local press to decry the use of their community to support “subversives”. The Peekskill riots ensued in which violent anti-Robeson protests shut down a concert scheduled for August 27, 1949, and marred the aftermath of the replacement concert held eight days later.

Robeson opposed U.S. involvement in the Korean War and condemned America’s nuclear threats against China. In his opinion, the U.S. had manipulated the United Nations for imperialist purposes, and China’s intervention in the Korean War was necessary to defend the security of millions of people in Asia. Robeson credited “American peace sentiment” as a crucial factor in President Truman not using nuclear weapons and in recalling General Douglas MacArthur.

A month after Robeson began criticizing his country’s role in the Korean War, the State Department demanded that he turn in his passport. Robeson refused. At the FBI’s request, the State Department then voided the passport and instructed customs officials to prevent any attempt by Robeson to leave the country. It is estimated that the revocation of Robeson’s travel privileges, and the resulting inability to earn fees overseas, caused his yearly income to drop from $150,000 to less than $3,000. When Robeson met with State Department officials and asked why he was denied a passport, he was told that “his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries.”

But Robeson was still not cowed. In 1950, he co-founded, with W. E. B. Du Bois, a monthly newspaper, Freedom, focused on issues effecting African Americans. In December 1951, Robeson, in New York City, and William L. Patterson, in Paris, presented the United Nations with a Civil Rights Congress petition titled We Charge Genocide^. The document asserted that the United States federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention. The petition was not officially acknowledged by the UN, and, though receiving some favorable reception in Europe and in America’s Black press, was largely either ignored or criticized for its association with Communism in America’s mainstream press.

In 1952, Robeson was awarded the International Stalin Prize by the Soviet Union. Unable to travel to Moscow, he accepted the award in New York. In April 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, Robeson penned “To You My Beloved Comrade”, praising Stalin as dedicated to peace and a guide to the world: “Through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage.” Robeson’s opinions about the Soviet Union kept his passport out of reach and stopped his return to the entertainment industry and the civil rights movement. But in his opinion, the Soviet Union was the guarantor of political balance in the world, a bulwark against fascism and example of an alternative to capitalism. When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism at the 1956 Party Congress, Robeson ceased praising Stalin, although he continued to praise the Soviet Union. That year Robeson, along with W.E.B. Du Bois, compared the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary to the “same sort of people who overthrew the Spanish Republican Government” and supported the Soviet invasion and suppression of the revolt.

In a symbolic act of defiance against the travel ban, in May 1952, labor unions in the United States and Canada organized a concert at the International Peace Arch on the border between Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Robeson returned to perform a second concert at the Peace Arch in 1953, and over the next two years, two further concerts took place. In this period, with the encouragement of his friend the Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan, Robeson recorded several radio concerts for supporters in Wales.

On June 12, 1956, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee after he refused to sign an affidavit affirming, he was not a Communist. He attempted to read his prepared statement into the Congressional Record, but the Committee denied him that opportunity. During questioning, he invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to reveal his political affiliations. When asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union, given his affinity with its political ideology, he replied, “because my father was a slave and my people died to build [the United States and], I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you and no fascist-minded people will drive me from it!”

While still confined in the U.S., Robeson finished his defiant “manifesto-autobiography” Here I Stand, published on February 14, 1958. John Vernon noted in Negro History Bulletin that “few publications dared or cared to review it—as if he had no longer existed.” Robeson’s passport was finally returned in June 1958 as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in Kent v. Dulles where the majority ruled that the denial of a passport without due process amounted to a violation of constitutionally protected liberty under the Fifth Amendment and he immediately left the U.S. for Europe. He embarked on a world tour using London as his base. Robeson gave 28 performances in towns and cities around Great Britain. In April 1959, he starred in Tony Richardson’s production of Othello at Stratford-upon-Avon. In Moscow in August 1959, he received a tumultuous reception at the Luzhniki Stadium where he sang classic Russian songs along with American standards^. Robeson and his wife Essie then flew to Yalta to rest and spend time with Nikita Khrushchev.

During an uncharacteristically wild party in his Moscow hotel room, Robeson locked himself in his bedroom and attempted suicide by cutting his wrists. Three days later, under Soviet medical care, he told his son, who had received news about his condition and traveled to Moscow, that he felt extreme paranoia. He said he thought the walls of the room were moving and, overcome by a powerful sense of emptiness and depression, tried to take his own life.

Robeson’s son believed that his father’s health problems stemmed from the CIA’s and MI5‘s attempts to “neutralize” his father, claiming his doctors in New York were CIA contractors involved in MK-ULTRA. American historian, playwright, and gay rights activist Martin Duberman, who wrote a 1989 biography of Robeson, believed his health breakdown was probably brought on by a combination of factors including, extreme emotional and physical stress, bipolar depression, exhaustion, and the beginning of circulatory and heart problems. “[E]ven without an organic predisposition and accumulated pressures of government harassment he might have been susceptible to a breakdown.”

After an unsuccessful attempt at treatment in East Germany, Robeson returned to the United States in December 1963, living the remainder of his life mainly in seclusion. He briefly assumed a role in the Civil Rights Movement, making a few major public appearances before falling seriously ill during a tour. In 1965, he was hospitalized with double pneumonia and a kidney blockage which nearly killed him. On January 23, 1976, Robeson died in Philadelphia at the age of 77, following complications of a stroke. He lay in state in Harlem and his funeral was held at his brother Ben’s former parish, Mother Zion AME Zion Church. Bishop J. Clinton Hoggard performed the eulogy. Robeson’s 12 pall bearers included Harry Belafonte and Fritz Pollard. He was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

 

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