"Paul Robeson:

A Modern Crucifixion"

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, IL

David R. Weissbard

March 24, 1996

Children's Story

Today I am going to be talking with your parents about one of the greatest Americans who lived in this century - someone whom I bet hardly any of you have ever heard of. His name was Paul Robeson, and at one time he was probably the most famous American in the world. I want to tell you just a little about him so you'll ask your parents to tell you more.

Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898 - two years before the beginning of this century. His father, who was almost as old as I am when Paul was born, had escaped from slavery on a plantation in the South when he was 15, had come north and been educated, and was the minister of a Presbyterian Church. Rev. Robeson was a very intelligent and very courageous man who stood up for what he believed - he was no longer a slave and would not tolerate being treated like one.

Paul was also very intelligent and a very great athlete - he starred in almost every sport you could imagine. He went to Rutgers University, a famous college in New Jersey and was such a great football player that he was the second Black man named an All American. He graduated at the top of his class in college and went to Columbia Law School.

Paul ended up not becoming a lawyer because it was clear that, in those days, a Black man could not go very far in the law.

Paul had one of the greatest voices you could ever hear, and he became famous as a singer and actor. He went all around the world singing spirituals and then the folk music of many lands.

He was loved all over the world because people saw how much he respected them and cared for freedom for all people. Everywhere he went, he spoke for freedom and justice.

There were people in this country who believed that it was wrong for Black people to want equality, and Paul Robeson made them mad when he talked about how our country should change. Those people got together and tried to keep him from getting places to sing in this country, and they took away his right to travel to other countries to sing. Famous people all around the world kept asking our government to let Paul Robeson come to sing for them, but our government kept saying that his ideas were too dangerous.

Finally, after eight years, the government gave in - the Supreme Court said they had to, and he was allowed to travel. Even after all that time people remembered how great he had been and went to his concerts anywhere he went, and he kept on speaking about freedom and justice.

The awful ways he had been treated finally got to him and he was sick for the last fifteen years of his life and was not able to sing or speak in public. Paul Robeson died in 1976.

Some people have forgotten what a great person he was because so many people told such lies about him. But, long before the laws began to change, Paul Robeson was there using his fame to stand up and to speak for poor people all over the world, and he changed the lives of many people because of the way he made them know that they could change the world if they would get together and stand up and speak out for what was right.

The Sermon

I gave the children the salient details of the life of Paul Robeson, realizing that it might refresh your memories, or give you a framework for understanding him, if his was a new name to you, as I know it is for some.

As my title, "Paul Robeson: a Modern Crucifixion" conveys, I believe that Robeson stands in the tradition of Jesus, and Socrates, and Lincoln, and the Kennedys and Martin Luther King -- people whose messages of love and justice so threatened the status quo that they had to be removed. In the case of Robeson, the crucifixion was much more subtle and perhaps more effective because he was not made an obvious martyr - martyr though I believe he was. In the belief that there are lessons to be learned from his life, I want to fill in the outline that I gave to the kids put meat on the skeleton.

[Childhood]

Paul Robeson was born on April 9, 1898 - the eighth child to be born to William Drew Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson. His father was 53; his mother 45. His father had been a slave who escaped to the north; his mother was from a distinguished family of free blacks.

Paul's father was fired from his large church in 1900, after 20 years of service, because of "disrelish" for its services "as presently conducted." Paul remembered it as a split in the congregation. His biographer, Martin Duberman, found that the congregation had supported him almost 100%, but that he was removed by the Presbytery because of "a general unrest and dissatisfaction on the part of others," which meant the white community of Princeton which Rev. Robeson tended to confront for its racism.

Rev. Robeson bought a wagon and began to collect ashes, and then to drive students in a carriage. Four years later, Mrs. Robeson, who was nearly blind, received fatal burns when she did not notice a coal that fell on her dress from the fireplace.

In 1907, Rev. Robeson went to a small AME Church in Westfield, New Jersey. He had to support himself in part by working in a grocery store, and he, and the two sons remaining at home, lived in the attic of the store, and cooked and washed in a leanto. The members of the church gave them food and clothing. In 1910 he went to a larger AME Church in Somerville.

Paul's father was an orator, and worked incessantly with Paul to teach him how to use his voice, and how to read Greek and Latin. His father always expected excellence from him, and he delivered it. He also learned, early on, that he was at least the equal of any whites, but that it was important for him not to rub their noses in it because the last thing they would tolerate was an "uppity" black man. He always was laid back about his excellence. His father taught him, "do nothing to give them cause to fear you, for then the oppressing hand, which might at times ease up a little, will surely become a fist to knock you down again."

[College]

Paul, whose father wanted him to go the Black college from which he had graduated, took a statewide scholarship exam for Rutgers. Most of the White students had already taken a Part I which covered their first three years of high school and were only tested on their senior studies. Paul had to take the whole thing in the same time, but came out on top. He said that from that day on he knew he was not inferior.

Duberman says, "Robeson's path at Rutgers was centrally defined by his race, though not - thanks to his own magnetism and talent - centrally circumscribed by it. The simple fact of his dark skin was sufficient to bring down on him a predictable number of indignities, but his own settled self-respect kept them from turninginto disabling wounds."

Paul did, in fact become an All-American football player - only the second Black man to make it. He was also center on the basketball team, catcher on the baseball team, and a javelin and discus thrower. He earned 15 varsity letters in four sports.

At the same time, he was active in debating (he won the oratorical contest each of his four undergraduate years) and sang with the glee club - although he was not permitted to travel with the glee club or to attend its social functions.

He was one of four undergraduates admitted to Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year, was inducted into the Cap and Skull honor society, and was valedictorian of his class. He went on to study at Columbia University Law School.

[Harlem]

During college he had played basketball on the side for a Harlem team, and he was so striking physically and had such a charismatic personality that he was well known in Harlem before he moved there after graduation from Rutgers. It was the time of the Harlem Renaissance and he was virtually a prince.

He always had a beautiful woman on his arm when he walked down the street -- one of them was Frances Quiett, a Unitarian who was a member of the Community Church in New York.

To earn money, Paul played some professional football - he got $1000 a game. One day he was injured and taken to New York's Presbyterian Hospital for thigh surgery. It was a serious injury and he was there several weeks. His doctor introduced him to Eslanda Cardozo Goode, a pathology technician, not knowing that she had spotted Paul in Harlem parties and was looking for a way to know him better. She came from a distinguished family - her grandfather was a state official during reconstruction, and became a famous educator and civil rights advocate in Washington.

Essie and Paul married. It was never an easy marriage, but it was a good one, although certainly not typical: they spent a lot of time living apart over the years - perhaps more than they spent together.

While in Law School full time, Paul continued to play football and give concerts. He appeared in a play at the Harlem YMCA - the story of Simon the Cyrenian - the man who bore Jesus' cross - he played the lead. That led to a professional role in Taboo, a play about Voodoo. The play received poor reviews.and had only four performances, but Paul received positive notice. They decided to try the play in London with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the female lead, and Paul was persuaded to take time off from school to recreate his role there. During previews of the play in Glasgow and Edinborough, Paul got better reviews than Mrs. Campbell, so she decided to cancel out of the play and it never opened in London. He went back to New York.

Paul finished his law degree, in the same class as William O. Douglas and Thomas E. Dewey. His academic performance, giving everything else that was going on in his life, was mediocre. He did take a job in a big law firm, the only black employee in the place. One day a secretary stalked out saying, "I never take dictation from a nigger" Paul met with the senior partner who told him that there really wasn't any future for a black man in the law, unless he wanted to practice in Harlem. He decided not to pursue it.

[artistic career]

Paul was cast in Eugene O'Neill's new play All God's Chillun Got Wings. There were some delays in opening the play, and so, in the meantime he was cast to play the lead in a revival of O'Neill's Emperor Jones. The reviews were exceptional. One reviewer called him "as fine an actor as there is on the American stage today."

At the same time, Paul continued giving concerts as a singer, and signed recording contracts. He specialized in singing the old spirituals.

O'Neill decided to open Emperor Jones in London, and he wanted Paul in the role. Paul became a hit there. When he returned to the states he began a lengthy concert tour, and his first record was released.

His career continued to build. He was asked to go back to London to play Joe in Show Boat, and took the part, and made it his. Between performances, he went around England giving concerts to rave reviews, and when it closed, he went to the continent under the auspices of the promoter who also handled Paderewski, Chaliapin, and Kreisler. He sang to sold out houses, and second concerts kept being scheduled. Paul was cast as the lead in a so-so London production of Othello in 1930, for which he received more attention. He became a world class artist.

He started studying African languages at the London School of Economics and became really intrigued with his roots. Paul met future African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwane Nkrumah. In 1935 he agreed to play Joe in the film version of Show Boat, and returned to the United States.

[politics]

One of the important threads in his adult life was his sense of connection to Russia. He was committed to racial equality, and in spite of his growing fame, he continued to be treated like a "nigger" in America and he saw no commitment on the part of political leaders to changing the racism that was endemic to our system. He saw Russia as a great contrast. The principles of the Communist Revolution advocated putting into practice what the American Dream was supposed to have been about in terms of the equality of all people. The white people in America whom he found to be most committed to racial justice tended to be Communists. When he went to Russia, Paul was treated like a great hero - in fact, two of Essie's brothers had moved there to work for the cause. While he never joined the Communist Party, there is no question but that Paul supported some of what it was about. He saw it not as a world wide conspiracy, but as a political option, and it was an option that was working toward goals that he held dear. Paul felt that it was nobody's business what his politics were, and that he was guaranteed freedom under the US Constitution. When he was asked if he felt that Communists were "using" him, his response was that he wished other political parties wanted to "use" him that way.

Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 "abruptly brought Robeson's views into greater consonance with mainstream patriotism" as Duberman put it.

The cause of Russia became so respectable that a 1942 rally at Madison Square Garden included Robeson, a Supreme Court Justice, the Mayor of New York, the president of the AFL, Harry Hopkins, Dr. Stephen Wise, Jan Peerce, and Artur Rubenstein.

It was in 1941 that FBI agents began to report that Paul Robeson was "reputedly" a member of the Communist Party. By January of 1943, J. Edgar Hoover recommended that Robeson be put on a list for immediate arrest in case of a national emergency, and he was.

Robeson went around the country speaking. He said "The disseminators and supporters of racial discrimination and antagonism appear to the Negro and are, in fact, first cousins if not brothers of the Nazi's. They speak the same language of the 'master race' and practice, or attempt to practice, the same tyranny over minority peoples."

[his career peaks]

The peak of Robeson's career was in 1942 when he played Othello on Broadway to packed houses for 296 performances, and then went on a national tour for 36 weeks, coast to coast.

That year he received the Abraham Lincoln medal for notable services in human relations; he was elected to the editorial board of the American Scholar (the Phi Beta Kappa Magazine), a citationfrom the National Negro Museum "for courage and devotion to the ideal upon which American democracy was founded," the Page One award from the New York Newspaper Guild, and a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year he received the NAACP's Spingarn award for "the man or woman of African descent and American citizenship who shall have made the highest achievement during the preceding year or years in any honorable field of human endeavor."

[persecution]

Then the war ended, and anti-communism reared its ugly head. All of a sudden, the view Robeson expressed became viewed as "anti-American." The House UnAmerican Activities Committee - and its activities were truly Un-American, cited Robeson, in such good company as Henry Wallace, David Lilienthal and Harlow Shapley, as supporters of the Communist Party and its front Organizations. In those days, virtually anyone who expressed a belief in racial justice and in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, was likely to be judged a communist.

All of a sudden, wherever he went to perform concerts, there were groups trying to block his use of public facilities and picketing the performances.

One of the examples in Duberman's biography is a 1947 concert in Albany New York. The Board of Education announced that it was canceling permission for him to sing at Philip Livingston Junior High School, and the Mayor took credit for being the moving spirit behind the cancellation. New York State Supreme Court Justice Isidore Bookstein [the judge who married my parents] issued an injunction to let the concert proceed. My parents remember attending that concert!

Not only was Robeson denied major public facilities in which to give concerts in this country [he went on singing in Black churches], but the government took away his passport on the grounds that it "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States Government" for him to travel abroad since he was likely to criticize this country. His passport was not returned until 1958, in spite of the fact that there were massive campaigns in England and other countries to get permission for him to come to perform there.

[breakdown]

In this midst of this, not surprisingly, Robeson suffered a massive physical and emotional breakdown in 1955, and some friends say he was never the same afterwards. There was, however, a resurgence of his popularity as a performer in this country in 1957. In 1958 he published a book, Here I Stand, in which he spelled out his political beliefs. Not one White newspaper carried any mention of its existence, although it received positive reviews in the Black and European press. The New York Times did not even list it as a book that was published.  The UUA's Beacon Press did a reprint of it ten years later.

On his sixtieth birthday, April 9, 1958, there were birthday celebrations for Paul held in 27 countries. Prime Minister Nehru of India, in spite of American Government opposition, issued a proclamation in which he praised the celebrations "not only because Paul Robeson is one of the greatest artists of our generation, but because he had represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us - the cause of human dignity."

He did receive his passport back and went to England on a triumphal tour. He and Essie stayed there for a time and used London as a base while they visited other European countries, including the Soviet Union.

On a trip to Moscow, Paul attempted suicide. He was treated in a mental hospital there, and then went back to England where he was hospitalized. The doctor there ended up giving him 56 electro-shock treatments and kept him so drugged that he was almost a zombie. A psychiatric nurse from the states who was a friend of a friend, visited and when she saw his condition, pleaded with his wife to get him out of that hospital to save his life. They took him to a hospital in East Germany where his condition improved somewhat. In December of 1963 he returned to the United States in agreatly deteriorated condition. He made a few appearances over the next two years, but his emotional condition again deteriorated and he lived his last ten years in virtual isolation - in the depths of depression.

When he died, Duberman points out that:

The white press, after decades of harassing Robeson, now tipped its hat to a "great American," paid its gingerly respect in editorials that ascribed the vituperation leveled at Robeson in his lifetime to the Bad Old Days of the Cold War, implied that those days were forever gone, downplayed the racist component central to his persecution, ignored the continuing inability of white America to tolerate a black maverick who refused to bend.

[Crucifixion?]

As I said earlier, I believe it is fair to judge that Paul Robeson was the victim of a crucifixion, just as surely was Jesus of Nazareth - it was only of a more sophisticated variety. An article in the Register Star this week reported that "Living with racism inflicts biological stress that can hasten death in black Americans . . . long term studies show[ed] that black adults who report the most experiences of bigotry have the most doctor-verified health problems and disabilities."

I know of no American who was subjected to more bigoted torture, not only by ignorant people, but by the intentional acts of our government, than was Paul Robeson. I believe that his "medical" treatment could have been something more than incompetent, given the paranoia about Robeson at the FBI.

[Questions]

I share his story with you because I want to leave you with some questions that I hope you will ponder. There is no question but that today's America is somewhat different from the America of the 50's, but how different? How would a Paul Robeson be treated today? How much have we truly addressed the racism that he addressed? How different are the racist comments being made in Rockford today to the ones that were being made forty years ago? How much have we changed? How long are we willing to wait for racial justice to appear in our city? How long are WE willing to wait for racial justice to appear in our city? What are we willing to do to hasten that day?

[closing words]

Until his final depression, Paul Robeson was an incurable optimist. We close with his words:

Sorrow will one day turn to joy. All that breaks the heart and oppresses the soul will one day give place to peace and understanding, and everyone will be free.

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