Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement available in Paperback
Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement
- ISBN-10:
- 1558495053
- ISBN-13:
- 9781558495050
- Pub. Date:
- 09/30/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Massachusetts Press
- ISBN-10:
- 1558495053
- ISBN-13:
- 9781558495050
- Pub. Date:
- 09/30/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Massachusetts Press
Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement
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Overview
Over twenty years in preparation, this massively researched biography takes Robeson from his humble beginnings in rural New Jersey to international fame on the eve of World War II. Drawing on a variety of new sources, the book presents a fully rounded picture—a portrait that corrects, supplements, and revises previous work on Robeson and his circle.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558495050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2005 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 568 |
| Product dimensions: | (w) x (h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Princeton
1898-1907
In the early summer of 1947 Paul Robeson's friend Miki Fisher and her husband, Saul, invited Robeson to their summer home in Westport, Connecticut, for an informal reception to follow a performance at a local benefit concert. "Westport was a small and quiet town," Miki Fisher remembered, "populated largely by artists and writers. Some lived there year round; others rented places to get away from the hot city. Saul and I and our two-month-old daughter, Rachel, spent the summer there in an old rack-and-ruin 200-year-old farmhouse located in a rural section of town. The friends we invited were all politically liberal, hardly the Madison Avenue set, and we hoped the evening would be a pleasant and relaxing interlude for Paul. As it turned out, he did not sing well (he had a hard time staying on pitch), and from the moment he arrived at the house he was out of sorts. Paul—usually so outgoing and warm—did little even to feign sociability at the party. Later that night, after we had all gone to sleep, we heard a loud crash from his room. His bed, something left over from colonial times, had collapsed—with Paul in it. Under ordinary circumstances Paul would have taken the mishap in stride and probably had a good laugh over it, but not that night. He was annoyed about the whole thing and let us know it. This was not the Paul I knew."
Professionally, Robeson was at his apex. His historic, record-breaking 1943 Broadway run of Othelloand the two-year nationwide tour of the play that followed had secured him a position rivaled by few white performers and unheard of among American blacks. Nor did the pace slacken over the next few years. Robeson's 1946 and 1947 concert tours were equally spectacular. Never had he been more enthusiastically received. Personally, however, Robeson was angry and unsettled. Lawrence Brown, Robeson's accompanist for over twenty years, was disturbed by the change. "It's ironic that at the peak of his career, the moment when I think he reached his zenith, he was more difficult to work with than during all the years before. He was in a terrible mood. He constantly felt he could not sing another concert."
The drift away from liberal politics that followed the end of World War II upset Robeson. He had expected peace to usher in a period of racial and economic justice at home and goodwill abroad. It did not. Black veterans were welcomed home by riots and racial violence. Labor unrest plagued the fledgling Truman administration. And hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union thickened by the day. The fear that reactionary forces would soon overtake the country preyed on Robeson. Causes that in the past concerned him now obsessed him, and concert-going audiences began to hear less of Robeson singing and more of Robeson crusading. In the beginning they listened patiently: it was a small price to pay to hear that magnificent voice. But, as the cold war intensified, Robeson's pro-Russian stance grew apace, and criticism of him mounted.
In early April 1947, the unthinkable happened. The City Council of Peoria, Illinois, banned Robeson from performing, canceling a concert scheduled six months earlier. Peoria's mayor, supporting the council, accused Robeson of "coming here for a fight" and denied him use of the city hall for a reception that was to have followed the concert. It was a staggering blow; Robeson found it difficult to believe that America would turn against him. But Peoria was just the beginning. At the Fishers' house, weeks later, he was still stunned and angry.
Robeson did not want to chat at the Fishers' gathering any more than he wanted to sing "pretty songs" for audiences unwilling to listen to his political message. The little conversing he did that evening was all about politics, and the more he talked the angrier he became. To one group he bitterly recalled his experiences entertaining for the USO in Germany. It was bad enough that the troops were segregated, but the talk he heard among white officers had appalled him. "We have the bomb," they boasted. "Let's go on to Russia and finish the job."
Moving away from the guests, Robeson sought out Saul Fisher, a psychiatrist, at the time working on Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward. Initially Fisher was puzzled as to why Paul would want to talk with him:
I didn't know him well and yet he sought mc out. It was not a matter of courtesy. He was deeply troubled about something. We talked for a long time, well after all the guests had left. My sense was that he was frightened about what he was feeling and thought that because of my work I would understand and could perhaps advise him.
He talked a great deal about Africa and told me a story about a West African chieftain who lost face in the community and was deeply humiliated. For three days the chieftain refused to eat or sleep. Finally, he collapsed and died. The story was very important to Paul, and he told it with great feeling. He talked psychology with me, told me about his own problems: anger he found difficult to control, rage over a lifetime of feeling and being treated as inferior. Paul was a very proud person and unable to tolerate humiliation. He would either react with rage or repress it and turn it inward. Again and again he returned to the story; it had a very personal meaning for him. It reminded him, I think, of a kind of pain he had experienced, a pain so intense he felt it could kill him.
For Robeson the African chieftain's story bespoke a terrifying truth. Respectability, status, and achievement could indeed come to nothing. Professionally, Robeson was at his height. But he had already glimpsed the abyss; he had already experienced the first shudders of the earth slipping out from under him. The story conjured up not only disturbing premonitions but also a feeling of déjà vu. Robeson had himself tasted humiliation and, growing up, had seen it ravage the person he cared most about in the world: his father, William Drew Robeson. Watching his father, literally breathing in William Drew Robeson's shame over losing a position he had worked a lifetime to earn, Paul learned lessons he would remember all his life.
William Drew Robeson was born a slave in 1845 in Martin County, North Carolina. As is true for most slaves, there are no records of his birth; presumably he and his siblings took as their own the name of their slave master. Like so many others who lived through slavery, William Robeson almost never talked about the experience. Whether his silence was due to shame, an unwillingness to bring up a painful past, or natural reticence is not known, but as a result we know little about this crucial and formative period in Paul's father's life.
William's parents, Benjamin and Sabra, were born and died slaves in Martin County. A stained-glass window with the inscription "IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE OF SABRA ROBESON" in the Witherspoon Street Church in Princeton, New Jersey, where William Robeson would later serve as pastor attests to the strong bond between William and his mother. About William's father little is known except his first name, Benjamin. Quite possibly, William knew little more himself, as the slave system tended to make Negro families matriarchal: the slave cabin was usually described as the mother's house; children were considered as belonging to the mother and referred to as such in conversation and on plantation records; owners would often go to great lengths to keep children and their mothers together but thought little of separating a man from his wife and children. William's father may have lived on another plantation; he may have died or been sold into the cotton kingdom as many were during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s; or he may have gone from wife to wife, a not uncommon practice because slaves married only with the consent of their masters and their marriages were not recognized legally.
It is likely that William spent his youth working the tobacco fields of one of North Carolina's many small farms. Historically, North Carolina never developed the large plantation systems of neighboring states, primarily because its rugged coastline, lack of good harbors, and poor roads left it dependent on Virginia's and South Carolina's overland trade and ports to move both its slaves and other "commodities." Martin County, where William grew up, had only one large slave owner (Henry Williams of Williamstown, who owned ninety-four slaves); most slaveholders in the area kept only a small number of slaves each.
Whether William learned to read as a slave is not known. Before 1830, slave codes in North Carolina, as well as in many other southern states, were remarkably liberal, but by 1845, the year William Robeson was born, the pre-1830 abolitionist liberality in the state had ended. Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, in particular, left North Carolina's numerically small but politically powerful slave owners jittery, even those who believed they treated their slaves well. North Carolina's legislature, like that of neighboring states, responded to slave owners' fears by tightening its slave codes, and in 1835 the state took back the right to vote from its free black population (30,463 in 1860, a number exceeded in the South only by Virginia). Even with these added restrictions, however, William may have learned to read, perhaps as part of mastering a trade or through the efforts of local church groups who, to the extent they were able, aided in the education of slaves.
According to family lore, in 1860 at the age of fifteen, William escaped and made his way north. William may have feared that his master was about to sell him "down the river" and into the cotton kingdom in the Deep South. He was, after all, a valuable commodity: young and healthy, with years of productivity potentially ahead of him. He may have sensed the coming conflagration (John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, an event that terrified the South and captivated the abolitionist imagination of the North, had occurred only a year before on October 16, 1859) and decided it was time to move. Or, like so many others who attempted escape, William may simply have chosen to shoulder the risk of capture and punishment rather than endure life as a slave any longer.
Whatever his motivation, escape—a venture that required intelligence, courage, resourcefulness, and no small amount of good luck—was not a decision made lightly. Charles Blockson, an authority on the Underground Railroad whose own family had escaped slavery, reasoned that William did not take the overland route north into the Dismal Swamp area of North Carolina and Virginia. Others had fled to the Dismal Swamp, but because the roads were so bad, few of these escaped slaves ever made their way farther north. Given Martin County's location in northeastern North Carolina and on the banks of the Roanoke River, Blockson conjectured that William took the water route down the Roanoke River, perhaps from Martinsville, out to the bay, then northward to Virginia and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Aided by black and white agents along the way, with stopovers in the Underground Railroad system, William then made his way up the coast to Philadelphia. If he had been able to forge the proper documents, he may have tried to pass himself off as a free black. It is unlikely, however, that he received assistance from southern free blacks in the area because they seldom took an active role in the Underground Railroad from fear of the severe reprisals that awaited them should they be caught.
Family lore maintains that Harriet Tubman assisted William, and this may well have been the case. Born in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman knew the Chesapeake Bay area near Cambridge on the Eastern Shore well. She herself had escaped in 1849 and made her way to Philadelphia. In 1850 she returned to Baltimore and guided her sister and two children to freedom, in 1851 her brother and his family, and a year later another brother. She was known to have made some nineteen trips into Maryland, bringing out from thirty to sixty slaves each trip, working with antislavery persons as she journeyed through Maryland into Delaware, through the towns of Camden, Dover, Odessa, and into Wilmington where her close friend Thomas Garrett would be waiting for her with food and funds, and then to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and into Philadelphia where she was assisted by the Negro leader, William Still.
After managing a successful escape, William Robeson reportedly returned to Martin County at least twice via the Underground Railroad to see his mother. Although Robeson said in interviews that his father served in the Union army, this is unlikely because blacks were not allowed to enlist until 1863. If William served in any capacity, it was probably as a laborer digging trenches. With Emancipation William found himself again just north of the Mason-Dixon line in the pastoral farm area of Chester, Pennsylvania, a locale heavily populated by Quakers and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and one of the great centers of the prewar Underground Railroad.
William Robeson wanted an education, but newly freed slaves faced two formidable obstacles on this road to self-improvement: most had limited or no previous schooling, and virtually all white educational institutions barred Negroes from admission. Nevertheless, William set his sights on the best of what was available to blacks at the time: Chester County's Lincoln University, the oldest institution of higher learning for blacks in America. In 1866 William began what would be ten years of education at Lincoln, years that would profoundly affect his life. Earning his fees by working on a nearby farm, he completed the three-year preparatory program (grammar, arithmetic, geography, and Latin—equivalent to a basic high school education) in 1869, earned his baccalaureate in 1873, and graduated from Lincoln Seminary an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1876.
Lincoln (originally named Ashmun Institute) was established in 1853 by a white Presbyterian minister and graduate of Princeton's Theological Seminary, lames Miller Dickey, to train the elect of black descent for missionary work in Africa. From its inception the college, nestled in the sultry southeastern tip of Pennsylvania and bordering the slave state of Delaware, was intended to be the work of white men for Negroes. Colloquially known through much of its early history as "black Princeton," Lincoln's philosophy reflected the period's most conservative Presbyterian thought. Founded by colonizationists, men who opposed both slavery and abolition and advocated African colonization as the best solution to the vexing problem, it could hardly be otherwise.
Lincoln's white faculty and administration—most, like Dickey, trained in Presbyterian doctrine at Princeton—saw themselves as instruments in a divine plan, called by God to share their gifts and learning with the "less-endowed" black race. Before the Civil War only a small number of students, mostly free blacks from the Philadelphia area, attended the school. Following the war, however, Lincoln was besieged by a vastly increased population of freedmen. Responding to the needs of this new student body, the school relaxed its curriculum, particularly in the preparatory school, but its basic philosophy regarding the education of blacks remained unchanged.
From the moment they arrived at Lincoln, new students were impressed with their special status as God's chosen. A white Presbyterian concept of election permeated virtually all aspects of life at the college. With the Bible the textbook throughout the entire course of study, students maintained a strict regimen of course work and religious observation seven days a week. Midmorning prayers, vespers, and evening services were interrupted only by study and, one of the few permissible forms of relaxation, walking. Lincoln's curriculum included courses in arithmetic, history, and the sciences but placed primary emphasis on theology—church history, moral philosophy, and homiletics—and the classics, with four years of Greek and Latin a requirement. School rules demanded formal attire, and although William, like others, procured his frock coat from barrels of cast-off garments donated by charitable organizations, it was a frock coat he wore nonetheless. Lincoln's "elect" did not sing black spirituals, perhaps because they had never been sung in the Princeton Seminary but more probably because this great black folk art was looked on as reminiscent of the illiterate slave and, as such, out of place at Lincoln. Educational establishments like Hampton and Tuskegee could train their students in practical skills—manual and industrial arts—but blacks attending Lincoln were to compose "an intellectual elite, a divinely ordained and select upper class, through whom would be exercised ... the saving grace of God's redemption."
No one more completely embodied the white Presbyterian spirit of the college than Isaac Norton Rendall, president of Lincoln University from 1865 to 1905. Like most of the school's faculty, Rendall had been trained in classical antiquity and Christian teachings at Princeton's Theological Seminary. Affectionately dubbed "Pap" this benevolent autocrat was indeed the school's white patriarch. Six feet tall and handsome, bedecked in his Prince Albert coat and occasionally a silk hat, Rendall carried himself regally and inspired his black protégés to do the same. He believed that every student should own three articles, a Bible, an English dictionary, and spectacles, and saw to it that each was provided them. Those who arrived with curious surnames he did not hesitate to rechristen with a new or altered name. His practice of addressing black students as "Sir" and "Mister" and insisting they enter the president's quarters from the front rather than the back door, confounded many a new arrival. Whatever they may have been before, at Lincoln they were men, chosen by God for a special mission.
Primarily it was paternalism, a Calvinist form of reparation made by "superior" white men to their "less-endowed" black students, that motivated and inspired Lincoln's faculty and administration. When, for example, in 1873, the year of William's graduation, a group of radical black students (most the sons of Philadelphia's black aristocracy) petitioned the school's administration to admit qualified blacks to Lincoln's all-white faculty, President Rendall adamantly opposed the idea, and Dickey, as president of the Board of Trustees, supported him. "It is no fault of yours that you are far back in education," Dickey told the petitioning delegation. "You have had no opportunity ... you desire the best in instructors. Those who are permeated through and through with 1000 years of advantages and whose very presence with you and daily intercourse ... will bring you up to their level." And, as Lincoln's administration spelled out in both word and deed, "the best instructors" were invariably white.
Philadelphia's longtime free black families—the Bustills, the Fortens, the Mossells—historically formed the black arm of the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia, and their sons were among Lincoln's earliest graduates. They had strong ties to the school and saw it as their duty to protest Lincoln's exclusionary staffing practices. In 1886 these radical blacks, many active and outspoken members of the school's newly organized alumni, again formally presented their case to the Board of Trustees. Yet another petition demanding the hiring of black faculty was sent in 1888, followed by a final effort in 1893. Lincoln's administration, however, refused to budge, thus forcing many of these families to withdraw their financial and moral support and fight for their ideals elsewhere.
There is no evidence that William Robeson was among those protesting. Like other newly freed blacks, most of whom had come to Lincoln and its imposing brick buildings from the slave cabins of the South, humble farmhouses, or the tents and barracks of the late Civil War, William was just beginning to fight for the respectability Philadelphia's elite black families had enjoyed for generations. In this context, he would hardly be inclined to question, let alone criticize, Lincoln's helping hand. Indeed, a decade later when the controversy was at its height, northern radicals would speak of the school's southern "loyalists" with undisguised disdain (those "weak-kneed dependent fellow[s]" who have "been so long under the fostering care of some strong arm" that they have "lost all powers of assertion"). Lincoln's administration sensed this gap in political sensibilities and in 1883 announced a new admissions policy that would favor candidates from the South and West over those from the Northeast, a measure adopted in part because the educational needs of southern blacks were so pronounced but equally because experience had proven southern-bred blacks more amenable to Lincoln's philosophy than their northern counterparts.
Lincoln commencement services, directed by the school's financial agent, the Reverend Eugene Webb, had over the years become elaborate and gala events designed to promote the school, showcase its accomplishments, and assure benefactors their money was being well spent. The ceremony in 1873, the year of William's graduation, drew as many as 2,500 people—"the best class of white people in the neighborhood"—white notables and political officials and Philadelphia's most prominent black families, as well as local blacks from miles around. From early in the morning until noon, trains from New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia brought dignitaries, benefactors, and relatives to Chester to join the Lincoln festivities. Following an opening procession headed by the colored band of Oxford, the formal ceremonies began. In a program that included a long line of orations (ten of the eighteen graduates spoke) and offered students ample opportunity to demonstrate their declamatory skills, former slaves represented themselves as eloquently as the sons of Philadelphia's finest black families.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paul Robeson by SHEILA TULLY BOYLE & ANDREW BUNIE. Copyright © 200l by Sheila Tully Boyle and Andrew Bunie. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
What People are Saying About This
The authors set Robeson's triumphs both against his personal failings and against pervasive racism... This is an excellent biography.
More than any other recent biography, this book helps us understand Robeson's fusion of art and scholarship, his feeling for languages, his search for an alternative to racism that eventually led him to the Soviet Union and to alignment with the Left generally. The work offers a moving portrayal of the racist indignities and insults to which he was subjected. This is likely to become the standard scholarly Robeson biography.
Boyle and Bunie paint a positive yet warts-all-and-all portrait, in particular exploring Robeson's convoluted public and private lives. His radical sensibilities did not form until the mid-1930s, when he supported the Spanish loyalists and particularly the Soviet Union. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Given the meticulous research that went into this excellent biography, one can only hope that Boyle and Bunie will devote another volume to the years of Robeson's demise.