Paul Robeson (154 page)

19
. RA contains a multisided correspondence—between Essie and Rockmore, Rockmore and Julius Meltzer (the real-estate agent), and Bert McGhee and Rockmore (about rent)—relating to the Enfield sale in particular and PR's finances in general; it is too bulky to cite in detail. It should be noted, though, that Rockmore occasionally wrote directly to Robeson admonishing him about his continuing indifference to his financial affairs (e.g., Rockmore to PR, Sept. 5, 1951, June 24, 1953, RA). The asking price on Enfield is in
The New York Times
, July 21,
1953. For a time Robeson himself seems to have agreed to Essie's purchase of a building lot in the progressive residential area of Norwalk called Village Creek Colony (PR to Judy Rosen Ruben, July 28, 1953, courtesy of Rosen). In regard to PR's finances, the black actress-activist Frances Williams has recorded a touching anecdote. Hearing that he was in bad straits, she told him, “‘Paul, I don't want you to worry about that because, damn it, if we all have to stand on corners with cups, we'll get enough money so you can keep going.' He sat there and cried. I can see the tears coming down his face. He said, ‘Oh, baby you don't have to worry about me and money.…' This great man crying. Can you see me standing on the corner with a cup? I loved him. He was a great, great man” (Williams interview, 1981, with Kim Fellner and Janet Mac-Lachlan, transcript courtesy of Fellner). At this same time, the early fifties, Rock-more sold a small apartment PR had kept at 188 West 135th Street. The union activist Ted Rolfs (in an interview conducted for me by Eric Garber, Feb. 4, 1983, and my follow-up phone interview with him on Feb. 17, 1987) described the apartment as having a gigantic bed and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, along with iron protective guards on special windows and an iron floor-bolt on the front door. PR allowed Rolfs, who had been named a security risk, to stay in the apartment, but Rolfs described how difficult PR's black neighbors in the building made it for him until they were finally persuaded he was not there to do Paul any harm. (For more on Rolfs, see note 47, p. 646, and note 17, p. 701.) PR sometimes stayed in this period at Ben Davis's apartment and also at the Pettis Perry family's apartment. A little later (around 1955) he used William Patterson's apartment at 409 Edgecomb Avenue when Patterson was away.

20
. The quotations in this and the following paragraphs come from the stenographic transcript of the hearing in RA, which also has the handwritten notes Essie made after the hearings to set down her second thoughts—all those “brilliant things” she wished she had said at the time; among them was this imaginary question to the Senator: “Are you or are you not married? Why not?”

21
. Stenographic transcript, RA; ER to Seton.July 14,. 1953, RA. In her typed statement to the press, July 9, 1953, RA, Essie referred to McCarthy's insistence that all Americans were equal in their citizenship as “that old American Party Line.”

22
. PR to Judy Rosen Ruben, July 28, 1953, PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

23
. The many letters of invitation from overseas are in RA. The offer to do
Othello
was from Leslie Linder. Robeson telegraphed his acceptance, pending receipt of a passport (Linder to PR, June 15, 1953; PR to Linder, n.d., RA). NYPL/Schm: PR contains considerable correspondence on both the ASP and Hartford incidents; some newspapers accounts have also been useful in reconstructing those events, particularly the Hartford
Times
, Nov. 17, 1952 (PR's reaction to reporters);
The Afro-American
, Nov. 29, 1952; and
The New York Times
, Nov. 11, 12, 18, 1952.

24
. The plight of the CAA can be traced in two memos it issued (Oct. 23, Dec. 17, 1953), copies in LC: NAACP.
Freedom
fell four months behind in its publication schedule and when it finally reappeared, in Feb. 1954, ran a front-page appeal for support: “The existence of the paper is at stake.” Interviews with Alice Childress, Sept. 19, 1983, Oct. 9, 1984 (money problems at
Freedom
);
Amsterdam News
, Feb. 19, 1954. The FBI report on PR's “heart trouble” has no legible serial number but is dated (from L.A.) Dec. 1, 1953. PR to Helen Rosen, Dec. 14, 1953, courtesy of Rosen.

25
. The two FBI memos dated Jan. 13, 1953, and April 27, 1954, do not have legible file numbers; a third (FBI New York 100-25857-1976) also refers to his “changing his views.” The
Jet
article appeared Jan. 28, 1954. When Cliff W. Mackay printed a story in his Jan. 23, 1954, column for
The Afro-American
—the black paper that had most consistently supported Robeson—that PR had taken out an ad in
Pravda
to extend New Year's greetings to the Soviet people, Robeson wrote Mackay that
Pravda
did not accept
ads and that the greetings in question had been in response to the paper's request for “a message about the attitudes of the American people toward peace” (PR to Mackay, Feb. 9, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). An exchange of letters between Rev. J. Spencer Kennard, Jr., and PR contains a firm denial by PR of the Drew Pearson report (Kennard to PR, May 3, 1954; John Gray to Kennard, May 19, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). George B. Murphy, Jr., general manager of
Freedom
Associates, who had been an editor of the Washington
Afro-American
(and was a member of the family that owned the paper), had arranged a meeting in Baltimore a few years previously between Robeson and Carl Murphy, president of the
Afro-American
newspaper chain. (The chain had the largest circulation among blacks of any weekly in the country, reaching, on the basis of three or four persons reading one copy, some six hundred thousand each issue. The Pittsburgh
Courier
chain, about equal in influence to
The Afro-American
, had taken a more staunchly anti-Communist line in its editorial policy, and was therefore less sympathetic to Robeson's plight.) His four-hour meeting with Carl Murphy went splendidly, and
The Afro-American
stopped taking snide potshots at PR and published a half-dozen favorable articles on him (Murphy to Du Bois, Aug. 31, 1956, U. Mass.: Du Bois). As one sign of
The Afro-American's
esteem, its assistant managing editor, Josephus Simpson, asked PR (along with other prominent figures) to reflect for
The Afro's
readers on the events of 1953 and to forecast what lay ahead in 1954—and also to nominate “the outstanding American.” In his response, PR rejoiced that the issue of segregation in education had reached the Supreme Court, but warned that “the whole civil rights program” had been “scuttled by the Eisenhower administration in the President's successful bid for Southern support.” Further, he characterized the administration as “largely a political vehicle for the giant corporations and entrenched greed” and pilloried it for embracing McCarthyism. As the two most significant achievements of 1953 he listed “the ending of the bloodshed in Korea” and “the further awakening of the colonial peoples, particularly our brothers in Africa, and now in the West Indies and Latin America.” He nominated two “outstanding Americans”—W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Mary Church Terrell, who at age ninety had been leading picket lines to desegregate the capital's lunchrooms and had gone to Georgia to plead for clemency for Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper accused of killing a white man (Simpson to PR, Dec. 14, 1953; PR to Simpson, Dec. 19, 1953, NYPL/Schm: PR). When Mary Church Terrell died, seven months later, PR hailed her as one of America's “great daughters” (handwritten draft, July 27, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR).

26
. The ms. of PR's lengthy reply is in NYPL/Schm: PR. His formal statement through
Freedom
Associates, dated May 3, 1954, is in RA.

27
. Interview with Stretch Johnson, March 5, 1985; PR, “Their Victories for Peace Are Also Ours,”
New World Review
, Nov. 1955;
The New Statesman and Nation
, Sept. 24, 1955.

28
. ER to Seton, Aug. 11, 1952, RA. When the president of the Yale chapter of the NAACP invited Robeson to participate in a debate on “Is American fit to be the leader of the world?” or “Is the American Government moving toward equality and civil rights?” he wrote on the invitation, “This question not debateable—willing to come, speak & answer questions—no debate” (NYPL/Schm: PR).

29
. Conversations with PR, Jr. (20th Congress); but PR does seem to have discussed Khrushchev's revelations later with Harry Francis (see pp. 505–06). On the need to distinguish between the visionary Bolshevism of the twenties and the authoritarian Stalinism that replaced it—a distinction few American Sovietologists have been willing to make—see Stephen F. Cohen's illuminating discussion in
Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917
(Oxford University Press, 1985). According to PR, Jr., his father “had deep concern about the 1952 frame-up trial and execution of the leading Jewish cultural figures in the U.S.S.R.,” but when Paul Novick of
Freiheit
approached him in 1957 to sign a public statement on the matter, Robeson declined. Novick spoke to him again in Moscow in 1958 “about what was going on in the Soviet Union and the Jewish question and whatnot, and Dad was under no illusions about what had happened, and what was happening then, as a matter of fact” (multiple conversations with PR, Jr.; PR, Jr., to Morris U. Schappes, Dec. 30, 1981; PR, Jr., ms. comments).

30
. Interview with Sam Parks, Dec. 27, 1986. (For more on Parks and PR, see p. 457)

31
. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 27, 1982; letter from Dorothy Healey to me, June 22, 1982; multiple conversations with Helen Rosen. A California friend, Geri Branton, offered the same caution against making the CPUSA “all that important” in Robeson's life (interview, April 2, 1982). One gauge of Robeson's
un
involvement in CP organizational affairs is that he goes wholly unmentioned by Party memoirists of the period as having participated in factional struggles or daily routine. My analysis of Robeson's relationship with the CPUSA and the Soviet Union is drawn from many sources, but has been especially enriched by personal interviews—with Peggy Dennis (April 27, 1982), John Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982), Dorothy Healey (May 1, 1982), Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Junius Scales (March 10, 1986), Carl Marzani (March 11, 1986), Ollie Harrington (July 29, 1986), and Sam Parks (December 27, 1986).

32
. Interviews with Healey (April 1982), Gates (June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984). Echoing Gates's formulation, PR was reported in the undergraduate newspaper at Swarthmore as telling the students during a visit to that campus in 1955 that he “did not accept the opinion of the U.S. press about the degree of freedom within the USSR. For working class people,” he stated, “there is a great deal of freedom”; the reported slave-labor camps in the U.S.S.R., he supposedly went on to say, “were used for no other purpose than for the improvement [sic] in our sense of the word,” a necessity given the “historical background of the present State” and “the fact that the Western powers have been trying to destroy the USSR since its inception” (Swarthmore
Phoenix
, May 3, 1955).

33
. For more details on these aspects of Soviet and CPUSA policy, see Isserman,
Side
, especially pp. 137–41, 215–16, 246–47. As Isserman points out (pp. 141–43), the CPUSA did continue to fight hard within CIO unions like the NMU and the TWU for better employment opportunities and high union posts for blacks.

34
. Interviews with Stretch Johnson (March 5, 1985), Rose Perry (April 27, 1982). The Pettis Perry papers, consisting of some 250 letters to his wife Rose as well as various notes and speeches, have recently (1987) been acquired by NYPL/Schm, and I am grateful to the staff for allowing me access before the materials were fully catalogued. Perry (b. Jan. 4, 1897) was an almost exact contemporary of PR and was somewhat close to him during the fifties. Perry had been born in poverty on a tenant farm near Marion, Alabama, had learned the trade of moulding at a pipe foundry in Tuscaloosa and during the Scottsboro trial had joined the International Labor Defense, serving as its Executive Secretary from 1934–36. He became a CP Section Organizer in 1936 and was ultimately elected to the National Committee. Indicted among the New York Smith Act defendants, he was jailed from 1955–57.

35
. Interviews with John Gates, June 8, 1982, Feb. 13, 1984.

36
. Interview with Peggy Dennis, April 1982; Peggy Dennis to me, March 24, 1984, Feb. 16, 1987.

37
. Ibid. PR admired Foster as a theoretician, though he did not feel especially close to him as a man; in notes dated April 30, 1956 (RA), he referred to Foster as “that master of Marxist theory and practice.…” The sympathy and depth of Foster's views on black issues is best sampled in Foster's own book,
The Negro People in American History
(International Publishers, 1954), especially chs. 42, 43, 48; Foster admiringly refers to PR several times in the book.

38
.
Multiple conversations with PR, Jr. PR turned down Patterson's request that he appear at the eighth-anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Congress (Patterson to PR, March 16, 1954; John Gray to Patterson, March 25, 1954, NYPL/Schm: PR). From prison, Ben Davis, Jr., wrote Patterson a guarded but decipherable complaint about the Party's racial obtuseness: “… There were missteps on our side that never should have occurred.… One cannot be satisfied that the groundwork for an assault on my 60 day contempt was not laid ahead of time.… I would be less than candid if I did not point out that the absence of certain counteractive measures left a deep and painful impression on me. Nor will I go into this; but I want you to think about it. And I want that this shall not be repeated with Pete [Pettis Perry] and above all with the great and horribly brutalized Claudia [Claudia Jones]”—Perry and Jones being black Communist leaders who had been arrested under the Smith Act (Davis to Patterson, n.d. [1954–56?], NYPL/Schm: PR). Robeson shared Davis's concern and admiration for Claudia Jones, supporting the move in behalf of her parole after a year in prison, her health compromised (James W. Ford to PR, May 4, 1955, RA; FBI New York 100-25857-2397); and when she was deported in late 1955, he sent “heartfelt greetings” to a gathering in her honor (dated Dec. 7, 1955, RA).