Paul Robeson (67 page)

Outraged at this attempt to “thwart a democratic resolution of the problems facing the Council,” the executive board suspended Yergan
from the office of executive director on May 26, 1948. Further maneuvers, including legal threats on both sides, continued throughout the summer, with the members of the Council unanimously resolving in its September meeting to discharge Yergan from office and expel him from membership. In his capacity as chairman, Robeson issued a press release expressing gratification that the disruption was at an end and the way clear for the Council “to go forward with its work” in behalf of colonial peoples.
⁴¹

But in fact the organization had sustained heavy damage. Several of its members, including Mary McLeod Bethune, simply stopped attending. Six formally resigned, including some of the most prestigious—Judge Hubert T. Delany, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Channing Tobias. Whether or not “Communist control” was chiefly responsible for the resignations, Yergan's charges to that effect, widely publicized as they were, seemed confirmation of the Attorney General's “subversive” listing for the Council, and under continuing government pressure it slid into decline, finally disbanding in 1955.
⁴²

Yergan himself emerged within a few years as an enthusiastic, fullblown Cold Warrior, moving far away from the principles espoused by the Council that he had helped to found. In 1953 he went on assignment to Africa for
U. S. News & World Report
and then wrote a lengthy article entitled “Africa: Next Goal of Communists” in which he argued that it was necessary to cultivate a “sympathetic and constructive” attitude toward the white government in South Africa, and characterized the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya as “a criminal, conspiratorial movement.” Robeson responded in print: “If one did not know that Yergan was a Negro (no insult intended to my folk—I'm just stating the hard fact of life!), [one] would have to assume that the article was written by a white State Department mouthpiece assigned to working out a formula for maintaining white rule throughout Africa.” In the early sixties, Yergan joined the conservative black columnist George Schuyler in forming a right-wing lobby called the Katanga Freedom Fighters in support of Moise Tshombe's separatist movement in the Congo, and then in 1966 served as cochair with William A. Rusher (publisher of
The National Review
) of the American-African Affairs Association, a group designed to “save” Africa from Communism by propping up the breakaway, segregationist regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia.
⁴³

The same charges of “Communism” that split the Council grew loud in the country at large as the Progressive Party campaign neared its conclusion. On July 20 the FBI raided the national headquarters of the CPUSA and, under the Smith Act, indicted a dozen of its leaders for “advocating forcible overthrow of the government and membership in organizations which did same.” The ensuing trial was to carry over into the next several years. Robeson, Du Bois, Charles P. Howard, and Roscoe C. Dungee (editor of
The Black Dispatch
of Oklahoma City) immediately sent out a
letter to black leaders warning that the “round-up” of national Communist leaders “reminds us all too much of the first step fascist governments always take before moving to destroy the democratic rights of all minority groups.” Unless an aroused public put a halt to the government's campaign, the letter warned, “we Negro Americans will lose even our right to fight for our rights.” They solicited signatures to an enclosed statement emphasizing that “we raise here no defense of the principles of the Communist Party”; the concern instead was to protect “the right of all minorities to fight for the kind of America they consider just and democratic. Unless this right is protected, the Negro people can never hope to attain full citizenship.” Eventually the statement got nearly four hundred signatures, but the “Negro leaders” listed as endorsing it were in fact a relatively obscure collection of Progressive Party congressional candidates, trade-unionists, clergymen, businessmen, artists, and miscellaneous others—with the actor Canada Lee perhaps the single name, other than the original four sponsors of the statement, that might have drawn national recognition.
⁴⁴

The dwindling base of support for the Robeson-Du Bois position was further highlighted in September, when the NAACP board voted to sack Du Bois from his position as director of special research. The action was widely deplored in the black community, and Robeson devoted nearly his entire speech at a Progressive Party rally in Chicago on September 14 to denouncing the summary dismissal of “this patriarch of the Negro people,” this man who had refused to permit the NAACP “to be utilized as a tool for the Truman Administration in the prosecution of a foreign policy that would enslave Negro peoples throughout the world while paying lip service to democracy at home.” But the dismissal stuck. And so did the red label to the Progressives. By late summer the lesser-of-two-evils theory had come to hold sway with many liberals; they preferred to believe in the authenticity of Truman's newly acquired Rooseveltian rhetoric, because the prospect of the election of Republican Thomas E. Dewey was abhorrent. The persistent charge that the Progressives were “reds,” in combination with the fear that Dewey would waltz through any division in liberal ranks, drove off large numbers of Progressive Party adherents. The only remaining question was just how severe its electoral defeat would be.
⁴⁵

Robeson maintained an optimistic stance, at least for public consumption, up to the end of the campaign. In a radio broadcast with Henry Wallace on October 29, he described himself as full of “tremendous hope,” and in strong language denounced Truman's civil-rights program as “a program on paper—of words—it has nothing to do with the background of terror, the atmosphere of horror in which most Negroes live.… No, Truman is with Dewey—words, only words: empty lies, vicious lies. Truman is with the Dixiecrats in deeds.”
⁴⁶

On election night Robeson sang to the hundreds of campaign workers
and supporters who gathered at Progressive Party headquarters in New York to await the returns. They proved even more disheartening than expected. Wallace's popular vote was only slightly over one million—less than the total given to J. Strom Thurmond, presidential candidate of those Dixiecrats who had bolted the Democratic Party in protest over its promise to extend civil rights to blacks. In electing Harry Truman, the nation seemed to be giving sanction to his “get-tough” policy with Communists abroad and at home—and their “sympathizers” as well. Truman was to waste no time in exercising that mandate.

CHAPTER 17

The Paris Speech and After

(1949)

“I do not fear the next four years,” Robeson told a reporter ten days after the election. Talking to the
National Guardian
(the new non-Communist left-wing paper, which Un-American Activities instantly labeled “notoriously Stalinist”), he elaborated, “I do not foresee the success of American reaction. I see only its attempt and its failure. By 1950 there will be no fascist threat in our land.” Exuding public confidence, he immediately set off on a concert tour through Jamaica and Trinidad. The FBI set off with him, its agents alerted to watch for any evidence of “non-musical function.” They found none. Robeson himself found his “first breath of fresh air in many years.” Although Jamaica and Trinidad were still under British rule, “for the first time I could see what it will be like when Negroes are free in their own land. I felt something like what a Jew must feel when first he goes to Israel, what a Chinese must feel entering areas of his country that are now free.” Robeson's gratis, open-air concert at the Kingston race course was so jammed (estimates range from fifty thousand to eighty thousand) that a small building crowded with spectators collapsed. In Port of Spain, Trinidad, he laid the cornerstone for Beryl McBurnie's Little Carib Theater, an attempt to use “the music and dance of the people to arouse a national consciousness and pride of heritage.” His concert in Port of Spain was greeted with “a spontaneous demonstration of hero worship [that] has never been equalled in this community.” As Robeson told the
National Guardian
, “If I never hear another kind word again, what I received from my people in the West Indies will be enough for me.”
¹

He would need the remembered solace. By December, when he re
turned to the States, the forces of reaction, whose ultimate success Robeson doubted, were moving into high gear. A threatened Dixiecrat filibuster in the Senate seemed likely to block any action on civil rights. The Mundt-Nixon Bill, with strengthened provisions, was reintroduced in Congress. The Truman “loyalty-oath” program for civil-service employees was fully operative. In Trenton, New Jersey, an all-white jury, on transparently trumped-up charges, condemned six blacks (the “Trenton Six”) to death for murder. And in New York, the Smith Act trial of the twelve Communist Party leaders began its initial skirmishing.
Life
magazine took the occasion to applaud the Yale football squad's election of a black captain, Levi Jackson, as proof that the American Way “worked” and that the “extremist” tactics of a Paul Robeson were as unnecessary as they were misguided. On January 17, 1949, J. Edgar Hoover specifically requested that the New York FBI Office update its files on Robeson: “… it is felt that in view of the tense international situation at the present time, a new report should be submitted setting forth the extent of the subject's present activities in connection with the Communist Party and related groups.…”
²

Robeson maintained his political activity on all fronts. At the end of January 1949 he joined six hundred eighty delegates to the legislative conference of the Civil Rights Congress (his old friend William Patterson was now its national executive secretary) in Washington, D.C. The night before the gathering, Walter Winchell warned the American people in a national broadcast that the delegates were coming armed with baseball bats. Government officials needed no inducement to bar the doors. President Truman refused to see a group of CRC delegates that included Bessie Mitchell (whose brother and two relatives sat in Trenton's death house) and the widow of Isaiah Nixon, who had been killed when he tried to vote in Georgia. Vice-President Barkley, cornered in a corridor by another group of CRC delegates, expressed the view that nothing could be done about Jim Crow in the capital, and, when asked what measures the government would take to prevent further lynchings, turned his back and returned to the Senate chamber. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Forces Committee, told the delegation that came to see him, “The only reason Negroes are segregated is because the army's so big.” Representative McCormick of Massachusetts remarked to the group of delegates who visited his office to protest the Smith Act trials that “Communists are not Americans—they're outside the law.”
³

Returning to New York, Robeson put in an appearance at the Foley Square courthouse in New York, where the trial of the Communist leadership was about to begin. He shook hands with each of the defendants, announced, “I, too, am on trial,” explained that he was there not only as a private citizen but as cochairman of the Progressive Party, as a leader of
the Civil Rights Congress, and as chairman of the Council on African Affairs, and stated that Communists had risked their lives for his people as early as the Scottsboro case.
⁴

Attempting to get a postponement of the trial on the assumption (incorrect, it turned out) that with sufficient time a mass movement could be mobilized to protest the indictments, the CPUSA leaders launched a challenge to the court's system of jury selection. Robeson joined the challenge. Along with forty others (including Dashiell Hammett, William Patterson, Vito Marcantonio, Muriel Draper, Fur Workers union President Ben Gold, and Howard Fast), he called an emergency conference to demand reform of a nonrepresentative jury system that precluded the prospects of a fair trial. The protest succeeded in demonstrating that handpicked juries overrepresenting white male professionals and under-representing minorities, the poor and women, did not afford—as the Constitution guaranteed—a jury trial by one's peers. But Harold Medina, the judge sitting on the case—a brilliant jurist who on the Communist issue tended to be alternately flippant and abrasive—ruled that they had not demonstrated the
deliberate
exclusion of the underrepresented, and after six months of skirmishing turned down all further defense motions for postponement. Medina ordered the trial to begin on March 7, 1949, at Foley Square.
The
symbolic judicial battle of the Cold War was about to begin. Robeson, by then, was in Europe on an extended concert tour, but he publicly announced that he would return to testify at the trial whenever needed.
⁵

The overseas tour was a replacement for eighty-five concert dates within the United States that had been canceled. Robeson's agents, Columbia Artists Management, had had no initial trouble in booking the engagements at top fees after Robeson decided, in the fall of 1948, to return to the professional concert stage. But following the presidential election, and in the wake of the furor surrounding the indictment of left-wing filmmakers subsequently known as the “Hollywood Ten,” the entertainment industry took a quick dive to the right; local agents caved in and canceled Robeson's bookings. The symptoms of reaction were growing ominous, but the unexpected offer of an extended European concert tour temporarily took Robeson away from the heat.
⁶

Starting in the British Isles late in February 1949, he and Larry Brown began a four-month tour that demonstrated that in Europe, at least, Robeson's popularity had not diminished. It had been nearly a decade since his last appearance in Britain, but he had not been forgotten—the tour was “something like a triumphal procession,” Desmond Buckle (a black member of the British CP) reported to William Patterson. The concerts were sellouts, and, as Larry wrote Essie, “the English public seems as fond if not fonder of Paul than ever.” (“Felt almost like Frank Sinatra,” Robeson later said.)
⁷