Paul Robeson, Part III: Freedom’s Price

August and September of 1945 found Paul Robeson and Larry Brown on an interracial USO tour of U.S. military bases in Europe. An 85-concert tour followed in 1945–46, which included Robeson’s political speeches promoting socialism and advocating for respectful U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. On another front, Black veterans returning to the South faced a resurgent reign of terror and lynching; there were 56 murders between June 1945 and September 1946. Robeson responded by leading the American Crusade against Lynching, headlining events at Madison Square Garden and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. On September 23, in a highly charged White House meeting, he confronted President Harry Truman over Truman’s failure to back a federal antilynching law—which prompted the outraged president to end the meeting. The nation would not have a federal antilynching law until 2022, in the wake of Ahmaud Abery’s 2020 murder—a lynching by customary definition—in Brunswick, Georgia, at the hands of three white supremacists.

In 1947, paralleling the FBI’s harassment campaign, the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) undertook its own investigation of Robeson as an alleged propagandist for anti-American causes. In the 1948 presidential race, Robeson eagerly campaigned for Henry Wallace, FDR’s third-term vice president and Truman’s secretary of commerce. Wallace headed the Progressive Party’s national ticket and agenda for world peace and human rights, which was supported by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Robeson spoke before the House Judiciary Committee (HJC) against a bill that would ultimately form part of the McCarran Act of 1950, which provided the government’s rationale to hunt down “subversives,” defined as either avowed or suspected Communists. Over the banging of a furious HJC chairman’s gavel, Robeson spoke without restraint, “I stand here struggling for the rights my people to be full citizens in this country. They are not—in Mississippi. They are not—in Montgomery. That is why I am here to today. . . . You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the rights of his people.”¹

Robeson subsequently found himself at loggerheads with the staunch anticommunist positions taken by leaders of the NAACP (including his former white ally Walter White) and the Urban League. Tthe Council on African Affairs split into pro-Communist and anti-Communist factions, the former led by Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Progressive Party’s electoral failures in 1948 were followed by cancellation of Robeson’s concert bookings by local entertainment agents who were skittish after the federal indictments of the “Hollywood Ten” on subversion charges. In the winter of 1949, he and Larry Brown embarked on a four-month concert tour in Europe, where he was still highly regarded. There he advocated for the liberation movements in South Africa and Kenya. What happened at the 1949 World Peace Conference in Paris, however, marked a downturn in his fortunes. In a brief speech Robeson predicted that neither the 15 million African Americans nor the white workers of Europe would participate in a war against the Soviet Union. His remarks were distorted and misquoted in an Associated Press dispatch that unconscionably reported, among other details, that he had compared the U.S. government to the Hitler regime. Robeson was to be henceforth branded a traitor by both the media and the federal government—and ultimately abandoned by the mainstream Civil Rights Movement.

Robeson maintained his advocacy for the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s postwar discriminatory policies against Jews. That is somewhat puzzling given that in 1943 he joined members of the American Jewish Anti-Fascism Committee—whose membership included, among others, the expatriate German physicist Albert Einstein, the Russian Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer, and the Russian Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels—on a tour to raise funds for the Soviet war effort. In the postwar era, witnessing the creation of Israel as an ally of the U.S. and Britain, Stalin grew paranoid believing that Soviet Jews were a “fifth column” in Russia conspiring to undermine his dictatorship. Stalin had Mikhoels murdered, and Feffer arrested. While in Moscow in 1949, Robeson met with the imprisoned Feffer and learned of the unfolding antisemitic purges. As the encore to his last Moscow concert, he honored the Jewish victims of Stalin’s policies by singing in Yiddish the Warsaw Ghetto resistance song. Yet upon his return to America, Robeson publicly denied any knowledge of the purges. On August 12-13, 1952, “Night of the Murdered Poets,” Feffer and others in his circle were executed.²

Robeson’s biographer Martin Duberman offers a plausible explanation for his public refusal to criticize Stalin:

Robeson had come to believe so passionately that U.S. racism and imperialism were the gravest threats to mankind, including the real possibility in 1949 that the United States would launch a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union, that he felt public criticism of anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R would play into the hands of America’s right wing. If his judgment on that point ever wavered, he never revealed it. To the end of his life he would refuse to criticize the Soviets openly, never going further than to make the barest suggestion in private, to a few intimates, that injustice to some individuals must always be expected, however much to be regretted, in an attempt to create a new world dedicated to bettering the lot of the many. He continued to believe that the best chance for reaching his primary goal—improving the condition of oppressed peoples—lay with the egalitarian impulses originally unleashed by the Russian Revolution. Convinced in the thirties of the Soviets’ unique freedom from racial prejudice, and seeing no major Western power in the ensuing years developing a comparable commitment to the welfare of its minorities, he resisted every pressure to convert any private disappointment he may have felt in the Soviet experiment into public censure.³

Robeson’s difficulties at home worsened when in a later speech he converted his earlier prediction that Black Americans would not fight against the Soviets into a “should-ism”—they should not engage in such a venture. Alarmed by Robeson’s militancy and his alleged Russophilia, HUAC subpoenaed prominent Black leaders to render their opinions of Robeson; critics called these hearings a platform for extracting loyalty oaths.

That Robeson’s life was in jeopardy was evident in the violent reception he and his supporters received in Peekskill, a town in northwest Westchester County, New York. The town is a summer playground for wealthy liberals, whose permanent residents were mainly white working-class people who apparently loathed militant Blacks and Jews and lumped them together as communists. Supported by the Fur and Leather Workers Union, Robeson’s concert on behalf of the Harlem Civil Rights Congress (an alleged communist-dominated organization) was scheduled for the evening of August 27, 1949 at the Lakeland Acres picnic grounds outside the town. At the entrance to the concert site, the cars in which Paul Robeson, Essie Robeson, and their entourage rode were attacked by a violent mob. A thousand enraged locals, including aggrieved members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, pelted their cars with rocks. The police offered no protection, so the Robeson entourage had no choice but to flee to safety. Paul and Essie Robeson took refuge with Jewish friends in nearby Ossining. That afternoon, the anti-Robeson mob bludgeoned the left-wing concertgoers, putting twelve of them into the hospital.

Undaunted, Robeson rescheduled his concert to September 4 at the Hollow Brook Golf Course, three miles from Peekskill, this time with support from a large contingent of trade unionists who were prepared to protect him. Ringed by union guards, Robeson gave a stirring rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” among other songs he performed with a jittery Larry Brown on piano. Trouble started after the concert as the crowd began to leave the hollow that served as the venue. A furious mob of thousands of locals attacked hundreds of volunteer union guards in the hollow; not only did Governor Thomas Dewey’s state troopers stand aside, many of them even joined in the mayhem. Roughly 150 people were seriously injured, and cars and buses were damaged and overturned. Robeson would no doubt have been lynched had the mob laid its hands on him. They only managed to hang him in effigy. Several investigations of the Peekskill riots yielded similar rigged results: the riots were justified on account of their anticommunist focus, the union guards were goon squads, the rioters’ intentions were neither antisemitic nor anti-Black, and the police showed laudable restraint.

In December 1949, Robeson further agitated government watchdogs by joining W.E.B. Du Bois and other leftists in cabling salutations to Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday. Outlets for airing Robeson’s views were rapidly diminishing, and world events in 1950 augured badly for someone so outspoken for the Soviet Union; as of 1949, for Maoist China; and in 1950, against the Korean War. And his uncompromising, sustained attack on Jim Crow and white supremacy put him in the crosshairs of southern Democrats, more than a few Republicans in Congress, and the State Department, which stripped Robeson of his passport. In 1951, Robeson co-authored and presented a petition to the U.N. boldly accusing the U.S. of genocidal racism, defining genocide as physical and/or cultural destruction. This incentivized the State Department to forbid him to travel even to Canada, the West Indies, or Mexico, none of which required a U.S. passport. He was, in the parlance of the time, “contained.” While restrictions on Robeson’s right to travel were of dubious constitutional legality, through the 1950s the federal district and appeals courts upheld the restrictions.

Anticommunist hysteria surged to high tide from 1950 to 1954, the waters roiled by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, his right-wing counselors, and his conservative abettors in Congress. McCarthy and HUAC equated communism with insanity, and they were convinced that Robeson was “batty” and “psychologically damaged.” To McCarthy and colleagues, “containment” (silencing) was the appropriate therapy for such a menace. Such was the trendy status of armchair psychiatry in the hallowed halls of the federal legislature.⁴

Paul and Essie Robeson’s hopes that the Progressive Party would stem this worrisome tide were dashed when the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won a landslide victory for the presidency in 1952 and the Progressive candidate tallied under 200,000 votes. A month after the election Moscow announced that Paul Robeson was one of seven recipients of the 1952 International Stalin Peace Prizes. Afraid that an unfettered Robeson would embarrass the government through political activities supporting decolonization in Africa and exposing racism at home, the State Department—showing its racist intention—denied his petition to travel to Europe to receive the prize in person. And Robeson’s African American critics argued that his association with the Soviet Union and communism, coupled with his uncompromising attitude and his high visibility, jeopardized the civil rights movement. His biographers agree that Robeson was a small “c” communist, not a party member—an action-oriented radical working tirelessly on many fronts for a more just society.

In July 1953 McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Committee compelled Essie Robeson to testify. When asked by McCarthy if she were not a member of the Communist Party, Essie, citing the First and Fifteenth amendments (but not the Fifth amendment, to the committee’s surprise) politely told McCarthy that her opinions were strictly a personal matter. When Senator Stuart Symington from Missouri asked her if the government did not have the right to know her views on an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. by violent means. Essie replied obliquely that the only violence of which she was aware were vicious attacks by enraged white-racist mobs on peacefully demonstrating Communist Party members. In 1946, Paul had testified under oath before a legislative committee in California that he was not a member of the Communist Party; thereafter, whenever subpoenaed to testify before a government committee, he would refuse, on constitutional grounds, to answer the question.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Paul Robeson continued his advocacy for the Soviet Union, believing that for all its flaws it rightfully stood among the world’s powers as the only formidable deterrent to anti-Black racism and colonialism. He remained publicly loyal to the CPUSA. Robeson was ageing and the passport fight and intensified FBI harassment drained his physical and mental health. Confined to his bed at home after debilitating prostate surgery, he was depressed, lethargic, and moody. Against his doctors’ advice, Paul appeared before HUAC with his attorney, Milton Friedman, in July 1956. When probed by the committee if he was a member of the Communist Party, Paul pleaded the Fifth Amendment even as he asserted that the CPUSA was a legal party. He lectured the committee on the foundational role of Black enslavement in building the U.S. and hinted that HUAC was neo-fascist. Robeson was never charged with any crime, and he was never arrested or put on trial.

Consistent with his deeply rooted animosity to colonialism, Robeson wrote about Vietnam a decade before U.S. President Lyndon Johnson sent ground troops into South Vietnam. Robeson’s article for the 1954 issue of Freedom was entitled “Ho Chi Minh Is the Toussaint L’Ouverture of Indo-China.” His professed admiration for the Haitian revolutionary dated to a New Jersey oratorical contest he won in 1915. In 1935, he performed at London’s Westminster Theatre as the eponymous hero in the play Toussaint L’Ouverture, which one contemporary critic has called “the most outstanding anti-imperialist play ever to make it onto London’s West End during the interwar period.”⁵ In his 1954 article, Robeson referenced U.S. logistical support for the French colonial regime’s jungle war with Vietnamese nationalists—nationalists first, communists second—led by Ho Chi Minh. He wrote, “Vast quantities of U.S. bombers, tanks and guns have been sent against Ho Chi Minh and his freedom fighters; and now we are told that soon it may be ‘advisable’ to send American GI’s into Indo-China [French-controlled Vietnam] in order that the tin, rubber and tungsten of Southeast Asia be kept by the ‘free world’—meaning White Imperialism.”⁶