Speaker On personal background, how you how you got to meet people, what you were doing when you when you met.
Speaker I met Paul after I got out of the Army in 19 at the end of 45, early 46, I became managing editor of. The weekly New Masses left wing magazine at that time, Paul was a contributing editor, as was Dubois’ Howard, fast for a number of people. And so it was in connection with that that I got to know personally Paul Robeson, there was a 10 year old I had heard about him. I mean, that was five. I think probably when I was 10, I could name 20 different makes of cars, but I could have cut five five of the stuff OK, to make my fortune in 1929.
Speaker Well, you know what happened in October? Right. Everything, fellow. And and the Depression basically gave you the political sense. Oh, yes. You know, a lot of it did, a lot of people, I guess, unemployment.
Speaker Putting furniture back in. Evictions. I was a specialist in that speaking at.
Speaker People don’t.
Speaker Some have thought we were supposed to bring the furniture back and said, oh, no, we’re only we’ll break the locks, you bring the furniture and we’re not furniture movers. This is this is an action movie. You’re you’re involved. I said we’re not going to carry your stuff.
Speaker And sometimes maybe 10 families in one street in Youngstown or in Cleveland where I was that all this stuff outside Marshalls go away, padlock it. We come by and put it in. What could the law do? Nothing.
Speaker I’m so, so. So what about the first time you met Paul in 1946, as I said could.
Speaker And then the first action I was involved with him was a mini march on Washington called The American Crusade to End Lynching. Paul and Einstein were co-chairman of it, and about 3000 people went to Washington train buses and. A select delegation went in to see the president to present Einstein didn’t know he wasn’t feeling well enough. Paul was the leader of the delegation and so they went in to meet Truman, came out, reported to us what had happened.
Speaker What did you think of when you you knew of them, but what did you think of them? I mean, why not me personally?
Speaker Because I had known him as a kid as by three words, Rabson of Rutgers. I didn’t know his first name. I didn’t know that Rutgers was a university, was just a phrase robe’s greatest football player in America. That’s what I knew about him as a kid.
Speaker But when I met him, I’ve I found that there was nobody easier to meet than Paul Robeson. You had no sense and he gave you no feeling that he he was some kind of a big shot or great man or anything. He was he dealt with everybody, just one to one simply. And he made you feel the minute you met him, you felt you maybe you’ve known him a long time. He was friendly. It wasn’t a big guy. It was big. That’s right. Big and and yet surprisingly gentle. And he were he was physically big and strong, but in his approach was extremely soft, extremely gentle. And sometimes I just couldn’t quite picture him as a football player. Well, and then he played pro football, too. Really rough stuff. But his personality was nothing at all like that. There was nothing like a tough guy, which would it could make him, for example, be a singer of lullabies. Quite a few lullabies that he sang different languages or his relationship to little kids. He would sit down, he talk to a little kid as if they were the same. He was he listened to what they had to say. I wasn’t interrupt him when he was doing. This is important. Whatever this kid is say, Paul is taking it in. So it was extremely approachable person that way.
Speaker So. So how did you hook up for the biography?
Speaker Oh, who approach to. Oh, after I had written first of all, I had done some publicity work for the committee to restore Paul Robeson’s passport, which was taken away in 1950. I started writing press releases. I wrote a little pamphlet, lift every voice for Paul Robeson and so on. And then when he started his little newspaper in Harlem Freedom, somebody, Louis Barnum, who was the editor, asked me to help Paul. Paul was so busy he could write. But what I help him do a column in the paper called This is My Story. So I says, OK, I connect with my own job. I was pleased to help Paul write his column and freedom. But then what? Then there was pressure on Paul to write autobiography by all of his friends. And so, uh, after my novel Night Iron City was published in 1951, Paul liked it very much, gave a wonderful rave review of its book You Got to Read.
Speaker And so, needless to say, it helped me a lot. And so then he but he felt that somehow that I had a sense of Afro-American life and that I would be able, let’s say, to work with him.
Speaker They wanted him to write an autobiography, Louis Burnham, Althea’s Houghton and others, because those are in Afro-American history.
Speaker The autobiographies have been the important books Douglass, Booker T. Washington up from slavery. So they felt that an autobiography by Paul would be an important book.
Speaker So but Paul didn’t want to write an autobiography. And so I was drafted to write an autobiography with a man who didn’t want to write an autobiography. And but he also said the following. He said, you know, if you’re whatever you’re going to write, he always called. He said your book. And I said, no, Paul, your book. So then we finally compromise on the book. So he says not to write the book.
Speaker You won’t get anywhere. Just sitting down, talking to me, asking me questions. What about this? The only way you can really do it is to. Learn how I am and the only way you can learn how I am as to travel around with me, watch how I deal with people, watch me in action, you just just observe me. And that way, the only way you’ll know what I’m really like, it’s because it’s not what I say. It’s it’s what I do that you will get an idea of what I’m like. So so with that, with that wonderful. Oh, he was probably right on that. But at the same time it allowed for every kind of diversion in my life, I had taken a year’s leave of absence from my job to write a book with Paul. Well, I never went back because Paul always had something else that was more important than writing this book. For example, people wanted records. The record companies wouldn’t issue, we couldn’t even order. We even tried to to make an order, say, of 10000 albums, cash in front, no good. They wouldn’t sell them, they wouldn’t rip that wouldn’t produce them. So the only way to get no records was to form our own recording company, which we did, called a fellow recording corporation. So friends helped us get the budget in, you know, setting up the thing. And so here I find myself against my well being a director of a fellow recording company. So after one album called Ropes and Sing Ice, I got at that time Paul Robeson Jr. I had gotten him his first job after he graduated from college. I got him a job as a teacher and an electronics school run GI Bill thing run by a friend of mine. So after about two years, that job expired. And so Paul Jr. Pawlick, we called him then I figured that’s a great idea. I’ll ask Paulie to come in and be a part of the company. And take it over, leave it with him. So from then on, he would be in charge of it and then two more albums were issued after our first one. So then came the question. OK, Paul, let’s get how about getting, you know, back to the book? Well, we, uh, there were always something else that he wanted to have done and were people from abroad wanted statements from him. Greetings on all different occasions. Every wants to hear from him. So I was writing sometimes in his name, sometimes I wrote as his secretary dealing with all these things so that so then I become like an assistant to him and communicating with the world because he couldn’t travel and there was great demands upon him.
Speaker So then after that, finally, of course, in time that pressure was up. We got to get out some kind of a book. And so so we worked on this book. Here I stand. And then hardly the first title we had for that was I take my stand. That’s what I take my step then, uh.
Speaker Ben Davis, who had been.
Speaker He was a leader, black leader of the Communist Party lawyer, former city councilman, and in New York also, he had been sent to prison under the Smith Act. So when he came out, he resumed his friendship with Paul Robeson. And so one time we were sitting around talking about the book and Ben suggested a better title. He said, why not? Here I stand.
Speaker So I said that that is better and also that other has sort of a, uh, so Dixy comes in there and Dixieland, I’ll take my stand, said, well, no, let’s keep on these crackers. I love this book. I take my stand anyway. So that’s so now we have the book here I stand and so we published it and great difficulties.
Speaker OK. OK, tell me why. I mean we got to go back. A lot of things in the book. Yeah. All right. But but but but to explain to the audience say to me. Yeah. Why you all found it necessary to put out I mean explain the boycott. That’s what people OK, they don’t people that have no idea that there was a real boycott, you know, about. I mean, so maybe when are we talking about.
Speaker Well, let’s start beginning in 1949 after Paul Robeson was accused of making a statement in Paris, which he did make a statement, was that he’s alleged to have said that in a case of a war with the Soviet Union, black Americans will refuse to fight against the Soviet Union because we love the Soviet Union. So much so, needless to say. And he went he never said that, never would have said that. Anybody who said that would be stupid. And Paul was certainly not stupid. But when he came back then, all the trouble really started for him. Then there was the Peekskill riot where an attempt was really made to lynch him in there. That was that incident. Then all is there’s a concert bureau canceled all his concerts. Halls we could rent, halls Carnegie Hall wouldn’t rent to us, even we tried to stake him in on one program where people’s artists and other groups would come in and but they ask me civically, is Paul Robeson going to be included?
Speaker They suspected it. We said yes. They said they wouldn’t rent it to any group. That would also include Paul Robeson. That’s how total the blacklist was on Robertson. And that went to the press that. Oh, and when we when we tried to make records, we ran in all kinds of problems because the key is pressing a record. You can make a record easy, but there are too many places that will press a record. And we found out that the companies that we ask to press records.
Speaker After they accept it, they signed a contract, they call us back. Can’t do it. Where do you think the pressure came that came for the government? This came directly from the government. Through all of these ways. The agents followed Paul Robeson everywhere. If when he gave concerts in churches, which he did, black community or in union halls, the FBI would come along and start ostentatiously taking down license number. They wanted you to say they wanted the audience to see that they’re taking down your license number. So this was, needless to say, very intimidating. They also did things right. Right. For instance, here in Harlem, one of the leading churches was going to present him in a concert and was advertised. Find out what happened to the insurance company, called them up and they said their insurance will be canceled and all the insurance companies canceled. They tried to get other insurance companies to agree. Nothing doing. Then if you going to have a concert by Paul Robeson, you’re you will be barred from having insurance anymore. So this was another intimidating thing. Even it even work with me. In 1955, for the first time driving Paul around, I had a nineteen fifty four. They were a little card, but I wanted to have a really a better a good car. I could depend upon driving Paul around, so I bought a 1955 Chevy. OK, well now in New York you have to have an schertz by. At about a week, my insurance canceled. I know that’s easy, call up another one sameway, just that the simple name, my name given a no insurance, I had to go through some real trickery in order to be able to get the insurance. It for me to be able to drive, I did finally manage it, but it was it was really like a special deal, but they wanted to keep me because they knew this would help put him out of business. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to transport him in my car. So the state actively just went, after all, with with every kind of device for just, for example, this this happened and I think it was 1954 or 55. Paul Robeson was living, staying on E 59 Street with a couple of early friends of his from the Provincetown Theater, Harold McGee and his wife. She was called Bert Berdella. They was living there. Now, the harassment of them, FBI knocking on everybody’s door in the building. You see who’s coming in here. Would you report to us who now? Paul did not want his friends to be subjected to that kind of harassment. So Paul moved out of there and he moved right here into his brother’s parsonage. And so he stayed there for a while. And I would come over to the right to work with Paul on different writings and things like that. So it was he took refuge finally here at at his brother’s church from this because any other place, he did not want other people to be suffering from his him. He was always aware and he would warn people, you know, an actor, don’t don’t have your picture taken with me. It’ll ruin your career. I’ve seen him do that. He would tell people who wanted you know, somebody comes up, want to take a picture of Paul with somebody. Don’t you do it. He would say, please don’t take his picture because you know what’s going to happen. So this this the object was to utterly isolate him. What what did he tell you about how he felt? I mean, how well, he he did not feel he did not take this personally. He took he knew that he was a primary target, but he also knew a lot of a lot of people are targets. So he wasn’t alone. There had been the Hollywood writers, the Hollywood actors, all kinds of people had been blacklisted. There was something called red channels. They put your name and and people’s names were put in there just by enemies of theirs. And so suddenly no work and no explanation, you know, if you had a job somewhere. So this so Paul was aware that he was while he was singled out, he was one of a large number. So it wasn’t him personally. Secondly, it was a consequence of his own doing. In other words, in his book, Here I Stand.
Speaker I’m sorry. OK, OK. So you got to get to sleep well, you’ll need it. And that tape, which we roll. OK. OK, so secondly, first it was.
Speaker He knew it wasn’t personal, he knew it wasn’t personal, and as he he also was defiant, for instance, in his book, Here I Stand, I happen to be working, walking. We were leaving Washington. We’d gone to some federal court or maybe it was the State Department in connection with his passport. And while we were leaving, we’re standing on the railroad platform and. I was facing toward Paul, Paul was facing another direction. Evidently, there was a couple of guys giving him some bad looks. Obviously, everybody would know him who he was. He was very recognizable. So I see suddenly Paul has a big smile on his face and he leans forward to them and he says, that’s quite all right. I don’t like you either.
Speaker So that so I said so I made a little note of that when we write the book that’s in the book. But that was his attitude. They did not like him. They had no use for him. What he was doing, they were against. But he doesn’t like them either. So that was a certain strength that he got for just just let me give you a couple of examples of where they FBI made reports. In nineteen forty three, they reported that Paul Robeson denounced alleged anti-Semitic outbreak around Boston in a speech that he made. This was a report and I did. Paul was playing in Othello, went to Boston, and there were some anti-Semitic outbreaks there by a local reactionary groups. Paul came there. They asked him to come. He spoke. FBI made a little note. He denounced. He called for a. An investigation of alleged anti-Semitism in Boston, another one in nineteen forty six in San Francisco, I saw another report from the FBI. They have a letter. Unnamed informant gave them a letter, and in this letter, Paul Robeson is saying he is appealing for donations to the Council on African Affairs in order to assist, says the FBI. The alleged persecution of Negroes in South Africa under the government of General Smuts. So now this was another entry into Paul’s dossier. So in other words, whatever Paul was doing, particularly, I would say, his work for the Council on African Affairs, he knew that this was bringing him in direct conflict with the purposes of the State Department, for example. The Saturday Evening Post put it this way, that that Paul Robeson is the Kremlin’s is the main weapon of the Kremlin for the red capture of Africa. This had to do Paul did have an influence in Africa, for instance. And Koroma was, as a young man, had met Paul, looked up the Paul, you know, and so naturally and Croma, as a leader of the National Movement Liberation Movement in Ghana, frequently spoke about Paul Robeson. And Paul Robeson was a hero to these people. So the State Department was undertook to cut Paul out from that to so he was aware of there. And so naturally, they they they declared the Council on African Affairs chairman was Web Dubois as a. An American organization and put it out of business by nineteen fifty five virtually. So Paul was and then there was the question of the Cold War. Paul is against a war. He’s against war with the Soviet Union. That was the other power. It was friendly to the people in the Soviet Union. He thought that the Soviet Union was a force helping the colonial liberation movements in different worlds. So they’re so that. So he was aware of what he was doing then.
Speaker And so was, of course, the State Department. They looked upon him as a as an op. He was in opposition to what their position was.
Speaker And I’m interested in the kind of support and betrayal that he had. I mean. First of all, was he a fish, just for the record? Was he in the Communist Party?
Speaker No power upset in 1946, incidentally, shortly after we made that delegation where he spoke to Truman and he Truman didn’t like what I know. But what happened was that Paul Robeson was the spokesman of the delegation to Truman, as it was in 1946, August, I believe it was, and the lynching. Now, there had been atrocities against returning black soldiers in the south, in Georgia, in South Carolina. There was a number of prominent cases where black soldiers going back into the south coming. They’re going to be put in their place once again. And some of them were lynched. So now there was a demand. Let’s have some anti lynching legislation. Paul, speaking to Truman, points out these facts and wants Truman to issue a statement in favor of an anti lynching legislation and to support it in Congress. Truman refuses. It’s not timely. The South, the southern senators would never go for it.
Speaker They’re against it. It’s politically unfeasible. And then so, Paul, that people who are there told me that when that Paul thereupon said, well. If the government is going to defend us, then we’re going to have to defend ourselves.
Speaker Do we have to defend ourselves so Truman says all of us are upset. Let’s not have any of that talk. Here is concept, you know what I mean? Of violence, maybe to defend yourself. You know, you you’re going to do it. That’s got to that’s bad. So this was but this was Paul’s attitude. And so he did it gently, politely, but he made it very clear where determined, you know, to defend ourselves. We’re not going to allow ourselves to. Shortly after that, he went to San Francisco and in San Francisco was perhaps the earliest of these.
Speaker Committees on un-American activity, they had one, I believe, in the state Senate of California was called the the to any E commission after the legislator Paul was called before that. And he was asked, are you a member of the Communist Party? Paul said, no, I am not. But he said, I am associated with communists. I find them to be very active supporters of everything that I’m involved in.
Speaker Some of the best people that I know are communists, and I’m against persecution of them because it’s a legal party and they’ve got rights. I have a right to be, but I happened that he wasn’t. Now, as he explained in his book Here I stand after that, he would he would never back that denial again. Even he said it was as a matter of principle because people are being persecuted because of that.
Speaker And later on, he could even have gotten his passport. All he had to do was take a non communist oath. He says that’s unconstitutional. It’s on principle. Other people are being kept back. I’m not going to take that way out. So he refused to comply with it. But the fact was he he was not a member, of course. Obviously, he was associate one of his best friends was Benjamin J. Davis and others. So so that in that respect, he was guilty by association. But he was not he was not a member. That’s a fact. No, because.
Speaker Yes, because of that statement. OK, I’m just curious, there were what was called a lot of black mainstream leaders backed off from him. Talk about that. I mean, why did they do that and why didn’t they? I mean, he was popular, so why would they back off of it?
Speaker Well, in nineteen forty five, he was. The most popular black American in the country, there’s no question about that, in 1945 and in 1945, he had been given the the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP, which lauded him not only as being a great artist, but for his courage. That was 1945. In other words, he was a hero to everyone and to whites, to the white establishment, to blacks. He was a hero in 1945. This changed quickly now when it changed, of course, although she’s now 45, he was cool.
Speaker So what? Tops, tops. But then he became the most vilified black American in American history, I would say, Dubois said at the occasion of Paul’s sixtieth birthday, we had an affair. And Doughboy said that the persecution of Paul Robeson is one of the the greatest crimes that has been committed. And in this century, Dubois saw him because Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America then or ever. I would say there was and has never been a time when any black American was demonized to the extent that Paul Robeson was in the 50s. Now, how did.
Speaker Hit his organization’s leadership. How did the black community leaders react to that? Well, so far as the NAACP, they they reversed themselves completely on it. They denounced him. Others just kept quiet and wouldn’t say something one way or the other about that. Of course, the Urban League was more conservative, always was more conservative than the NAACP. And the NAACP actually, uh, conspired to work with the State Department in terms of Paul Robeson. They published an article in the crisis. Which the State Department man in Ghana had asked the State Department to get some Negro in America to write it, and he told how it should be written. Exactly. And the document that I have a copy of it from the State Department was in November that year, the Crisis magazine published that article so that, in other words, it’s documented that the NAACP leadership. Did agree with the State Department to publish an article, the object being to help the State Department in Ghana.
Speaker Copies were going to be distributed and gone. So that was one characteristic. Other people were say for us. There’s another important figure at that time, like A.. Philip Randolph.
Speaker Philip Randolph was not supportive, but at the same time, he was not denunciatory in between other other people, though Paul did get some very, very good support from the black press, the Pittsburgh Courier, for example, the executive editor, Paul Paradis, of course, they had one columnists who was ultra right winger, George Skylake.
Speaker He was he was to the right of I don’t know who would talk about Buckley maybe today anyway.
Speaker But then the editor of The Courier was Prada’s, and he was actually an admirer at a supporter of Paul Robeson and Dubois.
Speaker What about people and what about the working people just working like people? Were they supportive or did they know? What do you think?
Speaker To the extent that they like trade union members and working class blacks were tended to be very supportive of Paul Robeson, for one thing, because he identified himself with them, he he he supported their unions, the automobile workers, for instance, they looked upon Paul Robeson as a hero. The black automobile workers, the Ford local 600 was it was you could almost have called it the Paul Robeson Local because the whole leadership were backing him. And people like Coleman Young, who were in a they were all supporters of Paul Robeson in Detroit at that time. So there was this labor in a marine. Cooks and stewards made him an honorary member of the union. The Maritime Union did. He was honorary member. And so these people. But later on, he could go to union halls and sing concert that he did do.
Speaker What about black churches and black fraternities and those kind of people?
Speaker Well, I can’t say I can’t say that any of the black fraternities distinguished themselves. And in fact, I think that in the case of Dr. Dubois, when Dr. Dubois, you know, was indicted as an agent of a foreign power, imagine that he was a little hurt that his own fraternity did not come to to his defense or, of course, the NAACP or other places. He was definitely hurt by that. But these. OK, that’s what I’m saying. Yeah.
Speaker Why do you think that normal ordinary black organizations says while they might have the support for I mean, that’s not the union. Right. But I mean, the grassroots black, many of them.
Speaker Many of them did. And as a matter of fact, if you could I. Yeah, ok. OK. Yeah. All right. At that time. Paul Robeson did have what you would call grassroots support in the black communities, and this was shown, for example, by the fact just so I could give you a wonderful example. His book, Here I Stand. It was sold by one person that I know sold nine hundred copies of his book on newsstands and candy stores and whatnot in Harlem. So even though the book was published, we put ads in Amsterdam News. Believe it or not, The New York Times refused to print an ad paid ad that the Amsterdam News had carried. They told me advertising acceptability that doesn’t want they wouldn’t put it in writing, but they refused. They refused to print it. But the support that Paul felt among ordinary people as he walked around the streets, they would see him and they would gather around him. And one time, even this strange habit outside the hotel, Theresa was walking by with Paul one day and here was Sugar Ray Robinson with his big Cadillac. What was it? Sort of violet, violet colored, I think, with his license plate, you know, on his name, on it. And he was surrounded with a group of people outside the Theresa, you know, hero worship or not. He had been to Europe as a State Department spokesman against Paul Robeson. He had done that while he was abroad. They used a number of prominent blacks that way as ambassadors of goodwill. And they were to be asked, what about Paul Robeson said, we don’t have any use for him. So Sugar Ray Robinson had played that particular role. So we’re walking by. Sugar Ray Robinson sees Paul Robeson runs over him, throws his arms around him and says, Paul, my man and everybody around Kernow, they all come around. Paul, they’re shaking his hand. He’s Wilko also in this gathering.
Speaker And I thought to myself, you see what what Sugar Ray Robinson was doing there that represented a whole lot of other people doing. They would go along with it nominally, oh, he’s a bad guy. We do whatever it takes to do with Paul Robeson. But actually, they were sympathetic to him.
Speaker And when the opportunity came as Sugar Ray, he he just there had been an editorial and I think it was in the Herald Tribune praising Sugar Ray for his Americanism and going abroad. And here he is saying, my man was awful.
Speaker I heard this Neukom Dodger pitcher. Yes, there was an incident at the Red Rooster.
Speaker Their share was I was there and I’ve heard a great many versions I’ve heard has been it seems that everybody was there. I wasn’t there. But people do that, you know, an incident. I was there and I’ll tell you what happened. But what the best story that I think is an accurate story was that Paul Robeson did go in the Red Rooster, whose owner was a big supporter of Paul Robeson.
Speaker And Don Newcombe was in there.
Speaker And somebody said to Don Newcombe, here’s Paul Robeson here and wanted Newcome to come and shake hands with Paul. Everybody was welcoming Paul into it. And so Don Newcome said something very negative.
Speaker I don’t want to shake hands. You know what that comment is? So and so. That’s how he expressed himself, at which point he was ushered out quickly by the everybody who could grab hold of him. And I know Cobos was put out. And then, of course, the conversation then turned to the fact that did he know did Newcome know that Paul Robeson had been instrumental early on and getting blacks into he might not have known it. Who? I don’t know if he’d do it. Jackie Robinson know it, but Duko might not have known it.
Speaker So he just but it it wouldn’t have bet he would have been in big trouble in on account of that if he had, if he had gone any further than just a negative remark.
Speaker Yeah, that’s right. That’s your question. Yes. Why why do you think. Those prominent black people. So that put put ropes in down, didn’t disappoint them and the same way with, you know, White and Wilkins and why I mean, why do you think they didn’t support.
Speaker They didn’t like. Who had something to lose? Let’s put it that way, if they had to depend upon, let’s say, the goodwill of whites, if they were dependent on the good whites, then they were in trouble. They really weren’t in a position where they could come out and openly express support for Paul. That safe in the entertainment field, you would be immediately blacklisted. If you are so that people who had been friendly to Paul before this period now just avoided him are kept kept quiet about him because their livelihood depended. Paul didn’t blame them. He understood that that they were under the gun. They couldn’t possibly identify with them. So that’s a whole category of people. That same goes for organizations that are dependent upon white philanthropy or aid, including black colleges that.
Speaker Banned him just as much as white college, is that fact some even more so, particularly those in the south, some colleges like Swarthmore, the students there organized a wonderful reception for Paul there at Swarthmore.
Speaker That was, well, college, Chicago the same way. But the black colleges, this could not possibly have a Paul Robeson there to be cut off. So that was that economic pressure that kept so many people seemingly hostile to to Paul Robeson.
Speaker I want to ask one other thing. I want to go. OK, all right. You really good, man. You’re really good. Well, I just have OK, this is a projection. But later on in his life, he had a series of breakdowns. He was sick. Yes. Yes.
Speaker Why do you think I mean.
Speaker I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but he was really strong. Yes, right in the thick of the battle. Right. And then later, he basically had the battles. Right. What do you think about the why do you think that happened?
Speaker OK, Paul Robeson was.
Speaker Suffered from. Uh. The basic problem was.
Speaker Arthrosclerosis, that is like a hardening of the arteries and a general, I think that a big, big guys like that tend not to age as well as little shrimp guys, do you you very seldom will see a 90 year old or 80 even an 85 year old giant. Somehow that’s one of the at least something that I’ve observed. And so that’s that’s SAPOL. Now, in when he went abroad in 1958, he was in reasonably good condition, he went abroad, he played Othello again in England, he made a concert tour in Europe, and he made a very exhaustive, two exhaustive tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1960, came back, had a breakdown and was hospitalized. And when he returned here in 1963, when I resumed my connection with him, then he was. Unable, felt himself unable to. I didn’t want to participate in anything, he didn’t feel that it was up to doing it. I could tell. I learned this very early about Paul. One time I went to visit Dr. Dubois at his home in Brooklyn. And Dubois was 82 years old and he had just returned from his honeymoon with Shirley Graham. And so was kidding around about that, you know, and I said to Shirley, I said, well, you’re back from how is your honeymoon? She says, Lloyd, it was a real honeymoon. So I said, Oh, Shirley, I didn’t ask you to think about.
Speaker She said, no, but she says, I know what you were thinking. It was a real honeymoon and which I thought was a little cool.
Speaker Now, in this conversation, Dubois is explaining to us, I told her to he had told me once, tell Paul about your longevity.
Speaker Scheme Dubois had joined when he was about 50 years old, a longevity club. The object was. All of his friends, he discovered by about age 50, they’re all dead, so what? Because that was the that, you know, when people died in those days, Dubois’ had a kidney removed. And so he thinks, oh, boy, he’s going to. What’s the use of getting all this knowledge in your head if your body goes so preserve the body. And so he he lived he joined this longevity club. They had rules where when you go to bed, what do you drink? All regulation. Of how you live, and he was still doing at 82 is setting up exercises. So when we left Dubois’, I says to Paul, what about why don’t we get on this longevity kit with Dr. Dubois’? Paul says, Oh, no. I said, What do you mean you just you don’t like to exercise. Which was true. He did. But he says, no, not that he says. What would an old Paul Robeson do? How could I be old and be Paul Robeson? Well, I said all right. He says, you know, I could sing and I’m never going to go out there, mentioned some distinguished singer who was doing that and just come out and croak because he says, I’ll never do that. It’s just if I can’t really be sing as Paul Robeson, I’m not going to go out anywhere.
Speaker And if I can’t be Paul Robeson. I’m not I don’t want to I will retire, so I said, but Paul, you could do other things besides saying he says, Do boy now he’s a scholar. He can go on being a scholar forever. That’s perfectly all right. But he says, I’m Paul Robeson.
Speaker I’m Paul Robeson. Now, people are expecting me to be Paul Robeson. I’ve got to come out and I got to be big. I have to be strong. I have to be militant, positive and not on that, but take part in everything.
Speaker Answer all calls people want is a committee for yet Paul Robeson has a picket line. Get Paul Robeson now. He says, I can’t see myself doing that as an old man. So early on, I had an intimation, but it wasn’t just that. It was that feeling of his combined with illness. He really wasn’t strong enough. Now, in nineteen sixty five, he did appear once in New York at a welcome home party that freedom was had.
Speaker And it was an exhausting affair too, because they kept Paul must have been four or five hours since the program started.
Speaker Everybody had to speak, everybody had to say, everybody had to say something.
Speaker So by the time Paul came along, it was too late. I knew he was tired, but he spoke and he sang a little bit and he undertook, OK, this is Paul Robeson. I’m glad to be back. And so on. But after that, that was in sixty five. His wife died that year and he said he will now go to Philadelphia and live with his sister, Marion, a wonderful woman. She had a nice big house. And it was just the perfect thing for Paul because he had there the peace and quiet that he wanted, a loving relative. Reminding him of his childhood and of his father, the whole thing, so it was just perfect for Paul there and the through the years that he was there till he died in 76. My wife and I were frequent visitors, maybe twice a month. We would we would go to see him now. What was he like? Well, that now. At that time, Paul is not issuing any statements, he doesn’t want to be bothered, don’t come to see him and not going to give any interviews, don’t ask him to join any committees. He’s not going to do anything. In other words, he’s out of it. Word spread. He’s a vegetable. His ah is just a just a complete in a vegetative state. So when his partner, Lawrence Brown, died in 1972, I arranged a memorial meeting concert for Lawrence Brown and I asked Paul to send a message to that Woody tape, a message, Lawrence Brown. Now, this was in 1972. So he did. He taped a wonderful message crediting Lawrence Brown for his. Guidance to Paul to be a singer of Afro-American music, which Laurence Brown was his principal musical influence. Paul said that so at the church. And this message come from Paul, there was a big gasp, he’s not a vegetable, George Murphy of the Murphys who owned and ran the Afro Paul Divide for America, came up to me. He said, look, that was that was Paul. I said, I told you that. I said, I haven’t been going down to Philadelphia to visit a vegetable. I said, I told you that. So it sounded pretty good. So that was one. And the next time he sent out a message again, I taped it in Philadelphia was for his seventy fifth birthday. That was in 1973. This was, what, a couple of years, three years before he died, less than three years. So so now he he sent a message there again. And what he’s saying, he makes the point of the same Paul.
Speaker He wants everybody to know that he hasn’t changed is his idea is the same. He’s this he’s just can’t be with you because ill health prevents him. But he is the same one that he’s always he’s as bad as he ever was. Put it that way.
Speaker What about what about the, uh, the mental breakdown? Do you think that was a result of the. Stressed that he didn’t allow it to come out.
Speaker Well, that that I wouldn’t know. I do know that in the period that I, let’s say, visited him and knew him in Philadelphia, he I didn’t I did not notice. I did notice that he was he had lost weight. It no longer had the massive bill that he had before. But in conversations that we would have, he was perfectly coherent. So then I, I told him, I says, Paul, people are saying they want to hear from you. You won’t give any interviews. Why don’t you let me write an interview, settle this question once and for all. Why don’t you speak? What’s happening to you?
Speaker How do you feel about what’s going on? So Paul says, OK, I got in touch with the Associated Press and they said, well, they wanted to interview. I said, I’m sorry, isn’t going to see you. If you want to interview, I’ll do it for you. So I did. Right? I told Paul Paul a great let’s do an interview. So I in my interview, which I published in my book as an appendix called The Last Interview, in that interview, he I described how Paul lives, what he’s doing, what activities he takes part in.
Speaker He watches our cars, he reads still, he reads a lot. He’s always a big reader and he’s continued to be a big reader. He watches television public television stations with that type of program. He did watch sports, football games, stuff like that. And he didn’t he he rarely went out. Sometimes he would go out with his sister to a play or to her church. But generally he preferred not to go out. He didn’t want to be bothered with any fans or being having to meet people and so on. But then he but he did make it clear in that statement that. He doesn’t he feels that now he has said what he wanted to say, he has done what he wanted to say, it’s all in a matter of record. So let’s leave it that way. Don’t he’s not going to change anything. And he says that he the ideas that he expressed in his book Here I Stand, that is where he is. So that was his last. So. Shortly after before that could be published, he had a stroke and then he went to the hospital, he died in January, twenty third nineteen seventy six. So that interview was never published.
Speaker I, I what I, I thought I would include it in my book and I happened to write, I said, oh, I remember the editor of the Associated Press, Louis Uchitelle. I’d seen his byline in The New York Times.
Speaker So I, I wrote him a letter and I told him at last, the interview has been published twenty, twenty years later. So.
Speaker So anyway, so that was the last interview that that Paul Robeson ever gave, Eddie. So my my feeling is if. Somebody wants to really know what what he thought about anything. I always prefer to say. Go to what Paul Robeson himself said, not what somebody else says that he said. A lot of people are quick, you know, to say what so-and-so said.
Speaker I don’t do that with Paul Robeson. There’s a big record of his speeches, of his interviews, his own book, statements of his.
Speaker That really needs to be no confusion as to where what Paul Robeson’s ideas were, because he expressed them clearly, forcefully, and he didn’t care whether it was popular or unpopular. He said it at some of the things that he said. I’d like to point out one of I think one of the most important things that Paul Robeson did on record, that was a column that he did in freedom called Ho Chi Minh as the Toussant Louverture of today, that the Vietnamese were then fighting the French. We hadn’t gotten into it yet. But Paul warns that America must not. He says in that will, he says, shall a black sharecropper from Mississippi go over to fight a brown skinned peasant in Vietnam? For whose benefit, Paul? So this was in nineteen fifty four that Paul warned against that had he had his vision prevailed, right. 50 million Americans wouldn’t have been killed in Vietnam. A million Vietnamese wouldn’t have been killed. The whole thing. If his vision, his idea of what’s right or wrong now.
Speaker He was a forerunner because this was 54 now already in the 60s and 70s, a whole generation of Americans, particularly young, black and white, are saying, hell no, we won’t go, which was even a stronger statement than Paul Robeson ever made. He would have said should we should not. But he would not have said we won’t because he couldn’t speak. But by that by that time, this feeling that this is wrong to go to a war against people who have not injured us for no benefit to our south just because they say it’s to fight communism. So. A whole generation said, hell, no, we won’t call this country second.
Speaker After Paul returned from.
Speaker Abroad in 1963, he was away for five years.
Speaker And he was under medication for his physical condition and sometimes medication can. Cause disorientation. So one night. They walked out of this house and I got a call from his son, Paul Jr.. It is father’s missing, gone out and didn’t come back. So I had a car living where I live now over on Riverside Drive West.
Speaker I come over and Pauly and I scour the neighborhood, we go down to the waterfront near us, the Riverside Park, where all around actually, as it turned out, we were very close to him because it was in that park across from Edgecomb.
Speaker Have I forget that whatever the name of that park is that he had gone out and had. Collapsed there. And was there was found early the next morning by somebody walking a dog or this or that. So he was rushed to a hospital and he did, but he recovered happily. He did get pneumonia, which he could have under those circumstances. So that was a very frightening experience. Nothing like that ever, ever happened to to him again. But that was a consequence, the doctor said of the medication. So would you say that just to summarize, as you say that.
Speaker The the medical, the medical and. Uh, personal, that personal, but the medical and maybe psychological problems that he had.
Speaker With a basically medical or the psychological two, I think his problems were medical because just an example, I went with Paul for the first time when he had permission to leave this country to Canada, originally was denied the right to go to Canada where you don’t need a passport, had been barred.
Speaker But in 1956, we went to Canada and he sang a concert at their Carnegie Hall, Massey Hall, it’s called. And he was he had lost considerable weight because he had had an operation which. Somehow the family decided to say abdominal obstruction. That sounds pretty to me, that sounds pretty ominous. And everybody thought, sure, it’s cancer or something like that. Actually, it was something that happens. A whole lot of people. It was a prostate operation. But that’s all there was, and it really I think it should have been just said it probably anyway. So he but he did lose a lot of weight and he was a weakened condition. He came back after a couple of appearances that he made in Canada at that time. He came back and then was quite ill, weakened for a while. And so when the.
Speaker Subpoena came for him to go before the House un-American Activities Committee. We were wondering, you know, is Paul up to it? Is he strong enough to do it and so on? Paul said, should we apply for a postponement? Paul says, no, he wants to go. So when we went to the hearing of the un-American Activities Committee, you would never have known that Paul had ever had any any trouble at all because he was strong. He was defiant.
Speaker They said, why don’t you go back to Russia if you like it so much?
Speaker He says, because this is my country. My father was a slave here. My people worked to build this country. And he says are no fascist minded man like you is going to drive me out of it. So he was strong and he was defiant of his stand. And the committee, you know, suggested ask Congress to act to impeach him, charge him with contempt of Congress because he had contempt of Congress, but not legally.
Speaker You know, legally he didn’t. So but his advice of his lawyers, if you how you answer a question, he couldn’t even for instance, he couldn’t even answer the question are. Are you this man who’s listed as the chairman of the Council on African Affairs power ups that had to take the Fifth Amendment or something like that? Because if you answer that question, that they’re going to ask other questions and then if you don’t, then they’ve got you for contempt.
Speaker So the best thing is, other than almost your name, very little else answering questions, you say so that Paul, there was we thought, you know, he wasn’t wouldn’t be strong enough to do it. But the record of that hearing showed very veigar. In other words, he rose to the occasion. So it was not psychological. His weaknesses were physical. That that that’s just not and in other words, not of the spirit. Of the heart, in one sense, the physical heart, because, oh, I would think maybe a year or two before his death, he had a pacemaker.
Speaker Put in so that maybe for the last year or two, he was he had a pacemaker in sight, but so that was.
Speaker But then again, he had not had a heart attack. This was to prevent a heart attack.
Speaker OK, now he had this spirit. So let’s go back to his early years. I mean.
Speaker What was the effect, do you think? You know, so many of the death of his mother when he was like, what, four years old?
Speaker He was six. He was six when his mother died. And as he says, some how many kids would remember a mother before they were six? But with Paul, probably that as he felt the traumatic event of her death and the terrible way that she died, she was burnt to death in a house, but a stove tipped over. And so she was burnt to death. And Paul’s a cousin. Vergès, when I interviewed her about that, she she came she came home from school at that time. And she says the house smelled had the smell of burnt meat in it, you know, that hanged, even hung on for some days before. So this experience with Paul blocked out all knowledge of his mother. But the consequence of that, though, was not. As he said, he never felt like a motherless child like his song, because he was like adopted by the whole community, first of all, he had his father, Reverend Robeson, had two brothers there. So Paul had two uncles and they had wives and they had cousins. So there was a rather large Rabson immediate Robeson family there. Other people had come from Martin County following Reverend Robeson to Princeton so that there were an extended family plus them. The fact that Reverend Robertson, big as he had been for over 20 years, the leader of the black community in Princeton, that people looked up to him, a man of great dignity and character. So the whole when Reverend Robertson went away, there was no problem to having a baby sitter. Paul was taken into every everybody’s house. Paul said he just anyhow said he went into was like home. The people treated him. So he he was raised in by a community. And he and not only was a community, but somehow early people. When I interviewed, they had a special feeling for Paul. They thought that this child was or was remarkable, aside from the fact that his mother’s died and his father is a wonderful man, they really thought that this this kid, they must have seen something in Paul indicating some special quality because they did feel that way. And they said they they they they sense that Paul was going to be something special. They did have that feeling. And Paul, early on, he told me I think he might have mentioned it in here. I stand that they had a feeling for him that they expected things from him, that they thought he was something special now. When I was started work on my biography, I came one day and I said, Paul, I got your first press release. I found it at a Somerville newspaper.
Speaker Paul is graduating from elementary school. And the local is is a colored school in Summerville High School, which makes the elementary school was for colored.
Speaker So Paul goes to the colored school and there’s a graduation of the colored school that lists the graduates. I interviewed one of them later, I’d imagine I found one.
Speaker And Paul, that the the newspaper said describes that Paul Robeson. Moved the audience to tears by some recitation that he made. So when I passed, I says, Paul, do you what were you reciting at that time? He said. I said, well, maybe it was one of the women that I met, a woman who was a one of those graduates. She her name was listed, told me she thinks it was Patrick Henry speech. Give me liberty or death. So I said whatever it was. Paul, the paper says that you moved the audience to tears. So you were doing something. At graduating from grade school that had an influence on an audience, I joked about it being as press, but it was the first such report of an audience response to Paul Robeson. So this was very early in his life.
Speaker What what would you say were his primary influences? I mean, aside from his.
Speaker Oh, well, Paul Robeson with Paul Robeson, I would say he was the product of his father. Straight through all his whole life, he he credited his father for his ability to study Paul Robeson had a great brain, but. His father was a teacher to him, and they the relationship to Paul, to his father was not like father and son, but more like grandfather, because the age gap was quite big between the two. So that here you had a grandfather at a very bright child, a wonderful child, a relationship between the two. So Paul was given by his father who? Illiterate at 16 when he ran away from slavery.
Speaker So, OK.
Speaker Paul Robeson’s father, who was illiterate when he was 16, right away, became a truly educated man by what the courses that he took at Lincoln University, which were.
Speaker OK, so you were talking I just you were talking about his father, his father, father, as if there were any defining moments between them and any kind of something that symbolized.
Speaker I think that the well, the fact that. Paul Robeson, his father, was highly educated and in particular, the fact that he was gifted and in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, now this early on, Paul became a. A student of languages and had a great facility for languages and he says that this came from his early training by his father in law school when Paul went to high school. He had Latin for four years. So his father was a big help to him in that way. So as a student, he was helped by his father. But I think perhaps. The most important, there was two things about Paul’s father, Paul frequently would say my father was a slave and I’d heard him say that so many times and it it really didn’t hit me. What did that mean? And then I just suddenly one day it it lit up into my head. What does that mean? Here you have somebody, the person you look up to the most, the person that you honor and love and who loved you. And you think that at one time this person was a chattel slave, was a piece of property who could be bought and sold? You see that thought to Paul was always in his life, in other words, that his father.
Speaker Was a property.
Speaker His that he looked up to the God of his life, so to speak, was at one time had been a piece of property until he ran away. This I didn’t realize. What this really would mean, but then I thought, of course, that’s that’s something like that is outside of our experience, we know of slavery as something way back then. We don’t connect it with our immediate family, as Paul did. So that was one fact. The other fact was his father was removed from his pastorate where he’d been for over 20 years because the white establishment of Princeton decided to get rid of him. And he had done a number of things. He went to Philadelphia to to speak at a protest against lynchings that were going on in North Carolina in the 90s. There was a big outbreak of terror in the south in the 90s. And Reverend Robertson went to Philadelphia to protest against what was happening right in his own home county, Martin County. So that was that didn’t set too good. What the people who ran Princeton when he was removed. Now he’s the leader of the community, the most important black man in Princeton, and he’s reduced to wear when Paul first knew him, he was a town ash man. He was hauling ashes because those days all the houses had coal stoves. You got to have to man has to come around with a wagon horse and remove the ashes. So this was what Paul’s father was when he first knew him. All right, Reverend Robertson, without bitterness, Paul always made the point. He was never bitter. He never bewailed what had happened to him. He was stoic. OK, now Paul sees that and then he sees something else, his father at an advanced age for those days in his upper 50s, he resolves to start over again. He takes the boy to Westfield. He gets together with the small black community. He changes his denomination from Presbyterian to amnesia. He goes to Westfield, he found a new church, becomes a pastor all over again, and then goes to Summerville, a bigger community, and then he’s the pastor there. So Paul Robeson had the example of how do you face adversity? He nobody and Paul never told me that. He never described to me that way. But in in reconstructing it, in my mind, I can see that Paul Robeson saw. How do you conduct yourself in the case of adversity? How do you bear up that way? And as a matter of fact. In his college scrapbook, I found he says he had favorite popular kids to favorite this favorite play, so he had his favorite prom was if by Rudyard Kipling. So I told him that I had found this. He says now he says, Lord, you’re not going to make me out to be some kind of a British imperialists.
Speaker Of course, Kipling was the poet laureate of British imperialism. Right.
Speaker So I said no. But I says I once had to memorize that when I was in school. And I went and looked it up. And I says, Paulette’s, that’s that’s a very good choice. Because in this poem, Kipling says that if you can walk with kings and keep the common touch, are I. And then. And then and if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat them both as imposters, I says, Paul, that’s that’s good stuff.
Speaker And I says, that is. And then when Kipling finishes the poem, he says, If you can do all that, we’ll all like that. Then you will be a man, my son. And I said, So, Paul, really, you had a reason why you picked out this poem. These were what you felt was what you wanted to be. And in fact, this was what you got from your father that you’re supposed to be like that. And also from Paul, from Paul’s father. Paul also got the idea. It’s not what you have doesn’t mean anything, what you get doesn’t mean what you give is the important thing. Possessions never meant anything to Paul. He was the most unconscious of of goods are things that what people think makes them important to Paul. It was it was success depended upon what you achieve. How you live your life, not what you gain or what you think of you. So, you know, if somebody today is looked up to as a very important person because he makes 30 million dollars a year in something to pull that, that would mean absolutely. That’s nothing. What what what is the man doing? You know, and and in fact, there was a time when the black community expected that when people rose up a little, they were going to help everybody else. This was an idea that Reverend Robertson had always Paul always believed that this idea that if those blacks who can make it up a little ways have got a responsibility to help others get up. I think a lot of that has been lost today because I see people being cheered up as heroes for only one reason, that they make a lot of money. If they make a lot of money, they’re really good people. And and actually it’s not true at all. And certainly Paul Robeson never had that. So from his father, these values of. Adherence to principle, regardless of consequence. You stick by your principle. And you don’t become bitter, you don’t become defeated, you don’t let yourself down, you do the best you can, you achieve as best you can try for the highest. They always told a story about one time, I guess he was in high school and he came home and he’s got all A’s, as you know, there’s a B and there is A his father says there.
Speaker What happened to you?
Speaker If you could, you could get in a right. How come you didn’t get in there? If you could you didn’t get in a you should have.
Speaker So to poor old boy, he really goofed up this time. He he he gets up. And this feeling, I should say, this this feeling about Paul and his father. He said in one of his columns that every once in a while, he says, he lifts up his hands and he says, How am I doing, Pop? His father died in nineteen eighty in the year before Paul graduated from Rutgers. But in 1973, I saw three years before Paul dies. He’s seventy five years old and Ebony Principlist 10, greatest black man in America in their August issue.
Speaker I took this down to Paul. So far, look at this down here, look where you are, what are the greatest Blackbeard and Omarion says the sister, she says. Well, I guess now those people have been saying all those bad things about Paul are going to feel ashamed of themselves.
Speaker So then I said to Paul, Paul, what do you think? I hear you are these historians. It’s a panel of history and they’re listing you as one of the ten greatest black men in American history.
Speaker He thought about it for a while and then he said, well. Pop would have been proud.
Speaker I was so amazed after all these years, he’s still the child bringing home a report card, Pops is going to be proud. Not that he wasn’t proud. Imagine that some who all those years from 1989 were. This is many years later. That he had that consciousness, that now he’s like reporting to his father would have been proud, not that he was so this this extraordinary relationship of a father and a son and in fact, Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson read all of my book except the foreword and the afterword, because it was all written in his time. And he told me he said life. If you don’t print anything else, you print in that chapter about my father, I think I call it a star. William Rub a star to follow. He says that’s the most important thing, what you should print, because this hasn’t been printed before. He says there’s been a lot of stuff written about me, but this shows where I came from. This shows the man who is responsible. So if you don’t print anything else, you’ll be sure to print this. Well, after all these years, it took me. I guess 20 years before I finally did get it into print and come out with it, so I felt pretty good. OK, I’ve kept this promise to Paul, his father.
Speaker It’s an important story.
Speaker Amazing. Amazing.
Speaker OK, yeah, yeah. I want to get with OK, all right, OK. Yeah. I mean, you ever read her book, by the way? No, I have. No, I didn’t. The one that I had brought up to have to catch up. OK, but, um.
Speaker It’s Paul Robeson, the man, it’s called Paul Robeson, Negro, Negro, Paul Robeson.
Speaker Now, incidentally, I’m a closet Negro myself, closet in the closet. That is, uh, absolute eggroll and the name Cat. OK, wait, wait. When I was young, the militant, once the proud race, people call ourselves Negroes.
Speaker We’re the new Negro. Yeah, well, that was the whole period. Right. So then later on, all the changes and whatnot.
Speaker And, uh, was Malcolm X really he killed the so-called Negroes. He called everyone that if you’re a Negro, your Uncle Tom will against the blacks.
Speaker But but the funny thing is Marcus Garvey was he was Negro and he said Africans were Negroes every black world.
Speaker So the big nationalist. So, you know, these things go around.
Speaker It’s true. What did you what did you feel about, um. As these women slept on the floor, Governor.
Speaker For have to start with you about the early hookup, I mean. Yeah, I mean, what do you think it was like, love, or do you think you said it was a good catch? I mean, what do you think about that? Well, I mean, when, when, when, when.
Speaker Paul was in Columbia Law School, he met Essy, who was working at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Speaker Then and yes, she.
Speaker When she saw him first, she said and many times that she decided.
Speaker This man, for me, she would she would say that publicly, I’ve heard her say that at various meetings, that women were always sort of pleased that this assertion, you know, of feminine determination, that she decided and.
Speaker So she made no bones about that, it was her idea Paul had thought he was going to marry and another girl, but but the other girl was in Washington.
Speaker That was New York now.
Speaker So they were when they they got married and Paul did feel that she was a wonderful person, very sophisticated, he was sort of country boy from New Jersey, small town. She was more big town, more sophisticated than he was. And so I would say, from what I’ve known, that was on his part, a genuine love for her.
Speaker You know, an essay from the very outset was she was really stage struck crazy. She would like to have been an actress, but she didn’t have the ability to do it. But Paul with Paul, she did everything she could to promote his career as an actor and as a singer. She made contacts for him. Paul then and later was, as he said, he was lazy. In her book, she describes him as a typical Negro. And and laziness is one of the childlike, she says this is in her book, Photographs of his childlike and his lazy, charming, but now the lazy came in tiny. He was a totally different type than she was. She was a go getter. She was after the. She’s going to get there and she’s going to achieve what she wants to get. She’s going to make the connection. She’s going to try to arrange something for Paul. And Paul was much more laid back. He would rather sit around and talk with the fellows wiser and not not be. In other words, he lacked that drive for success. It felt that things would come to him. He early on had the idea that things would come to him and that somehow he felt that along the way fate was like on his side and at various times, like he told me, he went to London. And a very horrible play that had been on Broadway and somebody in England bought it and Mrs. Patrick capnography.
Speaker When when Paul’s early association with S.E. When they got married, Paul was still in law school and he thought he was going to be a lawyer, but he really wasn’t interested in being a lawyer. He once told me he said had he stuck with the law, he would want wanted he would like to be a professor of law, a teacher of law, rather than going down and participating in court fights and all that sort of thing. He did not like that adversarial activity of because it was really contrary to his nature. He wouldn’t want to be involved in cases like that. But the law as a as an idea or as a subject, he he respected this professor, I forget his name, who became a member of the Supreme Court. Stone Right.
Speaker I think it’s St.. Think of this, huh?
Speaker I think so anyway, if he admired him. Knowledge of the law and Paul felt if he was anything in law, he had to bet he would prefer to be a teacher of the law rather than a practice, sir. But and then the story was that the law firm, prestigious law firm that had hired him, that he he based the story is that he quit because some clerk or something refused to take dictation from him, but that that story just does not hold true of Paul Robeson. Had Paul Robeson wanted to be there, the fact that he was snubbed are not welcomed by some Emploi wouldn’t have bothered him because look at the way he had to make the football team at Rutgers. I mean, if he wanted to, he would have been there. The fact is the employer actually was a friend of his coach at Rutgers and was really interested. And then later on, he did even suggest that he might open up a branch in Harlem and put Paul in charge of it. But but Paul didn’t really wasn’t interested by this time. He had been.
Speaker Through his participation in the amateur show in Harlem and then being seen by scouts from the Provincetown Theater, Eugene O’Neill and others and then Eugene O’Neill feeling, oh, this is a man that we can get now for Emperor Jones had had a great black actor, Charles Gilpin, as it. But Cupid was what they had a drinking problem. He also had a personality conflict about the play. He said that that Irishman, he says, thinks that that play is his emperor Jones.
Speaker He says it’s mine, not that Irishman’s anyway, so and so.
Speaker The SC now says he wants Paul wants to be connected with the theater. She has stage drunk. She takes Paul.
Speaker They go to see all the plays on Broadway. And SC is oriented toward the stage performing. And so what the fact that Paul was invited to appear at these plays at the Provincetown Theatre to say, now this is really it, he’s on his way, and so she encourages him to support him in. To be an actor, that’s what she liked, and then, of course, accidentally it happened that Lawrence Brown was here and the Provincetown people do that, Paul could sing. So they thought of a good idea to raise money for the theater, have a concert with Paul and Lawrence Brown singing. And so that made an instantaneous hit. And now suddenly a much bigger opportunity is open to Paul. He now has a chance to be a concert singer whose idea was to put Lawrence Brown and Paul together. I know now Paul had met Lawrence Brown in London and and Lawrence Brown was then studying. He first of all, he went to England to learn to composition and to become a real musician, a musicologist, and he had done that in London and he had served as the accompanist. For now, you say, where’s my memory? The famous tenor, Roland Hayes. I got it. OK, quick, Roland Hayes, he played for Roland Hayes. Now, Roland Hayes would sing the typical art songs and put in a couple of spirituals at the end. Marian Anderson did the same thing later on. The concert has to be concert material. And what is concert material? Always European art songs. Then you also include a couple of spirituals to Lawrence Brown’s idea was that Afro American music is classical music. Our songs are classical and has to be recognized as such. And he made arrangements. He had some of his spirituals arranged in England. I have copies of them before he ever met Paul. So Laurence Brown, he is what we later on would call a race man. He’s got pride and he wants to take his music. He wants to take our people’s music and present it as.
Speaker Classic as good as any other, and so. He sees that Paul can sing, and so he convinces Paul that Paul should be a singer of this kind of music as a youngster. Paul was singing just whatever the popular songs were of the day. Lawrence Brown gave him this particular Afro-American attention so that for the first five years of there, they sang nothing else except spirituals and secular songs. So. So, so so you see, Lawrence Brown was the one who really influenced Paul as to what he should sing, and Paul went seemed perfectly right to Paul. And now as a concert singer, there was a much how many how many Eugene O’Neill were there, first of all? And where was this theater was off Broadway, Greenwich Village. What what roles could Paul have played in the American theater?
Speaker None. He couldn’t have played Othello, which he went to England and did in 1930, because how can you have a black man on the stage with a white woman in America? They always had to be white men or black and or.
Speaker Make up one way, so what roles were there and movies? I mean, the same thing, nothing so but Paul did have an opportunity to become an important performer as a singer. And so what? Just Lawrence Brown as a sometimes Lawrence Brown singing duets with Paul every time I feel the spare they used to do and Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, all of those arrangements of Lawrence Brown so they could now they become.
Speaker And at the beginning, Essie was the manager. Paul and Lawrence Brown got equal billing. It was Robeson and Brown. And then for the first year, I think s.A. Was the manager. They each got 40 percent, 40 percent she got. So that was the deal there first.
Speaker So she was initially there. Paul’s manager later on, of course, a professional concert. People took it over and so she wasn’t. But she was always out looking for connections.
Speaker For Paul, for instance, there was a a banker, a philanthropist who was a patron of the arts, Otakon. So as a oh, she knows Oricon. You know, he’s a guy who could promote something. So she gets in touch, arranges Paul, wants to go out to sing to Otakon at his house somewhere to his guests. And so there’s another connection.
Speaker So why did she do that, though?
Speaker She because she wanted to make Paul a star. She felt that he had the he had the making of a star and he could become what she wanted to do. How did this affect their relationship? Well.
Speaker At the beginning, she was very helpful in the sense of being his manager. He didn’t have any other manager. Laurence Brown was not going to be a manager. So she was very useful in being his manager at that time.
Speaker And by later on their. Their life together became a very unhappy one by 1930, it was all of the newspapers that they were going to get a divorce and.
Speaker So it was understood their marriage was on the rocks early on, however, s.A was satisfied she wanted to be that they could be. It’s OK if the marriage is in name only. She was going to be Mrs. Paul Robeson. That’s what she wanted. And the fact the emotional the fact that the that that from early from early on that their life was they were married in name only, so so hence his relationship with other women were outside of marriage. And this was not a particular concern again, Paula. Life relations with women were of not of a concern to say she is Mrs. Paul Robeson and when when they go somewhere, some event, I went to quite a few events where they were like at the U.N., they would be invited to embassy parties and so on.
Speaker Always it was Paul and Essy so that that satisfied her to be publicly and in that way. And Mrs. Paul Robeson, that’s what she wanted. And the the personal relationship had gone bad a long time ago. And it was really of no regret, not regret to her if she was satisfied just to be Mrs. Paul, Mrs. Paul Robeson.
Speaker I mean, she didn’t get pissed off at all. I mean, she did.
Speaker Well, initially she did.
Speaker Oh, there’s no question when and as a matter of fact, in her diaries, there’s some extremely nasty remarks, which I always I felt if I had diaries of my brother, I wouldn’t give this to a biographer where she is use a certain name calling somebody a Jewish bitch.
Speaker You say, I wouldn’t have wanted that to be put in a biography.
Speaker You could deal with it in some other way. You could say she’s angry, she’s distressed, she’s displeased at relations that he’s having with somebody else, but not not in the way that that was done. And I was appalled when I read the review in the New York Review of Books by Murray Kempton. And the first thing you come out with one of the best quotes from an essay about about Paul. So, yes, initially she obviously she she did react negatively to the fact that Paul.
Speaker Was interested or involved with other women? Although the truth of the matter is, uh, Paul once told me that had he married this Jerry, who was his first girlfriend.
Speaker He said that he really thought now that he would have been. I had he would have been a family man, and so I said, Paul, I doubt it.
Speaker I just can’t see you in that role at all. And I almost. I I understood the tremendous pressure that come that came to him. From women, women admirers, if he was an attractive person to everybody, he was especially attractive to women. And I would see them. After a concert. And then they swarm around him and these are the is like these are not teenagers bobbysoxers with a Frank Sinatra, these were mature women of all ages and conditions.
Speaker They’re all grouped around people almost pulling at him. So, in fact, some would arrange a signal, you know, you wouldn’t want to be rescued.
Speaker I’d be standing around a little bored with all this, but he would give me a signal and then I would rush it with my watch. And I said, Paul, we’re late.
Speaker We’ve got to go. So he’d say, everybody, OK, excuse me to get out.
Speaker But I mean, if you the adulation that women had for Paul, I don’t know how anybody would really he certainly never was going out after any women. Women came after Paul.
Speaker And the how did people feel about, you know, married family life? And did that conflict with his professional and political activities?
Speaker He didn’t feel that married life was for him, he he didn’t feel that family life was for him. He told me that he would he was not like the way I was. I was married and I was a family man. And he knew that I was that I had a wife for 59 years. He liked her very much. He saw our family visit us often. But he says that’s not for him. He he never was like that. He did not feel he always like maybe this came from his early childhood going into everybody’s house, his home, because he did not have any sense that this is where I am going to live. He lived in all kinds of places. So in that respect, he was sort of rootless that way. He he didn’t feel this is his home could be anywhere. So that was one thing. And secondly, he. He he the I the idea of, let’s say, of being a father. He was his father had been a real father to him, but he certainly was not a real father to his son.
Speaker The fact is his son was raised separately, was raised by his grandmother and by Essie, separately from Paul for almost all of his life. So that, well, this frequently happens, you know, that sons are the fathers raised one way. And so so this way, Paul never was a.
Speaker A home loving man he was that he he loved children, they grew were remarkable relationship with children, but that was just like in a class. It wasn’t as if, let’s say he wanted one of his own or some of his own. He didn’t feel that way. So he was impersonal from that point of view. Not a family man. He he would he would agree with me, say that he’d say definitely that he was not meant to be a family man now.
Speaker And I guess right after and in terms of. Yes, she sort of turned I guess maybe in the forties, she sort of became more of a companion to Paul, didn’t she? Well, I mean, in a certain kind of way, when he was become active.
Speaker Yes. Yes. As she did participate in many political activities that. Paul was involved in and she frets, it’s like in the 1950s, she did a lot of she got herself accredited to the U.N. as a correspondent. So she met a lot of the people of the new African countries that were coming in. She had a genuine interest in Africa. She made a trip to Africa and wrote a book about it. She went to South Africa and around in Africa so that she had certain parallel interests with those that Paul Robeson had this personal relationship get any better? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. That they did go. Now, what did happen in nineteen fifty five?
Speaker Paul.
Speaker We did, as friends did decide we have to. Paul needs to have a location, a place, a home, and so a house was bought. The first house in New York, 16 old terrace, a brownstone was bought. And there he lived with Paul. And who decided that? Who decided that they should? Well, Paul wanted to have. In other words, this was a question of convenience. Now he would have they would have a home as he had been living in hotels before then. Paul was living it for either his brother’s place or with the McGees as he was after they sold this house in the country, which Paul never considered his home. I hear now that it’s considered a Paul Robeson landmark or something, but Paul says it’s a huge. Imagine I went there.
Speaker And. Yeah, oh, it’s so ridiculous.
Speaker Yeah, right off right on the border of Massachusetts and Phil.
Speaker OK, well, yeah, so, uh, OK, so my question was, um.
Speaker How did this house get together, as I said, that the house and NFL had been sold and Paul never considered it his home, and he said to me, like, what would I be doing out there? If you go out of the house in Enfield, you’re out. You’re nowhere. There’s not a you’re not even on a street. It’s not like he here he walks out. He’s in Harlem. He goes into this place. What would he do in Enfield? He’d be there by himself. He says he says, you know, that did not as he wanted it. And she I guess she felt, you know, this is the way to live, have this big country house. But but not for Paul. Didn’t fit for Paul’s style at all. So he was never really there. But in pictures, pictures that we used to see of him there. Yeah, well, that was staged. Those those those pictures were staged just by the well, look magazine did a series on him and then his concert. People put out these pictures to people wanting to see a man and his family, you know, the whole thing. So. So this was a Potemkin village sort of a deal.
Speaker Oh, it’s good. It’s fake. But, you know, it’s OK.
Speaker That’s what you want. Fine. He goes a long way. But if you asked him something about, you know, what about this home, you think, oh, he just says, you’re crazy.
Speaker We live anywhere on 7th Avenue.
Speaker At least he could go out or at four or five. Fifty five. It’s covered these places, you know, hop right down. He said Harlem or someplace he wants to be. But you can’t do that at Edgefield anyway. So now they had the problem in nineteen fifty five. Come along. Paul needs a place to live as they stay in a hotel, buy a house. This was the thought which of those of us who are working with Paul. And knew that he had this problem, he was staying with his brothers and his brother here, but that couldn’t be a permanent arrangement. Very good to have settled somewhere. So buying this house as he lived on one floor.
Speaker She she could do the cooking to which she did, and so she could manage the house and what she did, Paul would have a floor to himself, the second floor up, what she did and plenty of room for him, his books and his records and everything.
Speaker So he could be quite comfortable living there with her. So it was from that point of view, it was a very good solution to the problem. So there. The Robertsons are living they’re presumably living together, although I don’t really think many people are much worried about that at that time, there was a time when Paul was aware that it would be he would run into a lot of difficulty with the black community where he divorced. Were he to divorce his wife because of those days that was considered bad.
Speaker You didn’t do that. And no matter what the relationship was, you’re supposed to stick it out. You’re not the women are all going to be mad at you if you leave the woman, particularly if you become a success. And you know, and they feel she made you a success, too. She helped to make you a success. And now that you’re up, you’re good. So it just would you just couldn’t do something. We would be denounced by everybody. So, uh, you know, so we went along.
Speaker So now you had they were living together at 16 year terrace where they did until he died.
Speaker Uh, just two quick questions about, OK, what about my good. What kind of a person was, you know.
Speaker Oh. Oh, uh.
Speaker Islam was her name is Linda Cardozo. Good, she would say she was a Cardozo. She insisted she was a Cardozo. She called herself a Spanish Jew.
Speaker Cardoso, Jacob Cardoso was a slave owner in South Carolina and typically he had a.
Speaker Vestris, probably a mulatto or an octoroon. All his class did that in Charleston, so many that they even had a school for their own children. That’s a fact. They had a school for the children of these unofficial relationships. But the whole town knew about them.
Speaker So this Cardozo, who is a from the same family that gave Benjamin Cardozo the Supreme Court judge, comes from that same Spanish Jews, from that Southern background. So it’s a good concept. Now, she’s Spanish, Jewish.
Speaker Not Negro or black, Hispanic, Jewish, her father, Francis Cardozo.
Speaker The son of the illegitimate son are the son of this relationship had been sent to school in Scotland. I got an education. That’s what you did with your children. That’s what these rich people did with their children. Send them to Europe, to school. He went to school and he became in Scotland. And we got an education, became a minister, came back to the United States, and we had a church in Connecticut, this Francis Cardozo after the Civil War. And there’s reconstruction. Then you need anybody of any education down in the south. He went down there first. He became head of a school that they established for blacks in South Carolina. Then he became secretary of state of the reconstruction government in South Carolina, Francis Cardoso. So now to Aslan, the good cheese.
Speaker As I said to to Paul what I says, Paul, when you talk, you only had one relative that was your father and where he talks, he only had one relative. That was her grandfather.
Speaker And Paul says to me he was a Cardozo.
Speaker She never talked about her father.
Speaker Good.
Speaker Who had married as Ladder, but at anyway essay as he had a grandfather, Cardozo. So to her, she identified constantly with Paul’s maternal side. Paul’s mother was a busto and an essay in her book. She caused Paul a great deal of grief and me a problem that I still haven’t solved, she said in her book. He was named Paul Busto Rabson. Which he was, of course, and he hated that fact that that was done because he did not like his Aunt Gertrude, who was very much like. A slander. The mother has made good that type of person who looks down upon lower classes, looks down upon darker skinned elements, feeling that they’re somehow superior type of person. This is slander. Good definitely felt that way. She felt that she was a superior person. And so she was had a very negative attitude toward common people, which the Bustillos had to when they had their family reunions. Reverend Robertson could come and Paul could come because he was accomplished.
Speaker But the Reverend Robson’s brothers couldn’t come or their wives couldn’t come. They were labourers in Princeton.
Speaker And so the Bustillos had this caste attitude toward lower class people. And so the same was true of S’s mother had that same attitude negative. So that, for example, something really funny.
Speaker Oak Bluffs, Oak Bluffs, you know, about Oak Bluffs. OK, this was where what the upper class, so to speak, blacks had a little colony there. The robes is what they’re. So Marian telling the story that.
Speaker When little Paul was there and his grandmother, he was not allowed to go down to the beach and play with all those other no good something or other. Well, was in Edwards here and germ’s to. Instead, said Marion, the ocean water was brought into the house and Paul got his sea baths in the bathtub under those sanitary conditions, not playing around out there with all these other so-called people and those people that he wasn’t supposed to play with, these were not what you call slum kids.
Speaker These are middle class kids, which is the stuff. I mean, what what what did she do? I mean, she wanted to be an actress. She became a manager. Yes. That fell off. You know, she wanted to make Paul. And other than that, what else did she achieve or wanted to do?
Speaker Well, as he said, he did want to be. A writer.
Speaker And she did write a a novel at one time.
Speaker And for years and years and years. Anybody that she met, she would give them that manuscript by the time I saw it was well worn and I did struggle. It had absolutely no talent, nobody would ever publish it. It never was, but she really felt that this should be published. And so in that respect, she did not succeed in becoming that. She did write articles, journalistic articles. And of course, she did do that. And she would would very often she would write an article in the black press defending Paul Robeson from some charge or other that was made against him. So in that respect, she was making a defense of Paul Robeson as a journalist so that she lived her life through Paul.
Speaker I mean, essentially. Oh, definitely. Well, if you could just say that, like. Uh.
Speaker Far as he was concerned.
Speaker Paul Robeson was important to make her important, she became important through Paul and of course.
Speaker The the heights that he did reach, for instance, in London, they lived in what would be the equivalent of our Park Avenue, only a house, not an apartment like yours if you own a house on Park Avenue. That’s how they lived in London. She saw to that as he wanted to have a chauffeured limousine and not just an ordinary one, but a Daimler. Now they tell me that’s even more than the Rolls-Royce that’s had a Daimler and and so on. And also, she finished dinner at eight. Naturally, you have a house, you’ve got the cook and everything, and you have dinner at 8:00. You just you get dressed up for your dinner at a Apollo. Supposed to be there. Well, I think is Paul wasn’t there. He he he rebelled against the whole system, the whole idea. And he would be out where. He could be with dock workers, he got to like Africans who were in London. He would be out with college professors whom he got to like many of them leading educators in London. They like Paul. They felt he was one of them so he could be with them or he could be with, as I said, with really people that he did not approve of, like dockworkers and so on. But the thing about it was he made it a point not to be home at dinner at 8:00 and end because that was at regimented style that had nothing to do with his life. He did not want to be regimented. He wanted to. When he wanted to eat, go, when he wanted to go and to say that was a very unfortunate she did try always to make him conform to what she thought was proper conduct. But Paul was a nonconformist.
Speaker OK, I’m basically OK. But what I didn’t know was why then did he marry? I mean, really, what do you think? I mean, you know.
Speaker Well, I.
Speaker I would say, why did he marry her? Because he was attracted. He was attracted to her.
Speaker She was bright and outgoing and.
Speaker Good looking.
Speaker And so that’s why he was attracted to her as as people get attracted to the fact that there were, as she describes herself in her book, the difference between herself and were very great. She was a morning person. He was a night person. She believed in programs and schedules. He resisted them. They were very personal. And their habits and their character, they were actually opposite as really opposite. And you just could not achieve that. They just didn’t complement each other. They didn’t fit together that way, although originally that wouldn’t have come out because in their early part of their life, he was still a student.
Speaker He was going to school. So they didn’t begin, let’s say, married life, even living together. They didn’t live together after they got married. For one thing, their the marriage wasn’t announced as family to his friends. Nobody knew about the wedding. And Paul was still in school playing football on weekends to earn his way through Columbia. So there there are married life began and a rather unorthodox fashion from that and remain that way to the end.
Speaker It was it was unusual. It was unusual.
Speaker I’m I’m still surprised he went for it, though. I know.
Speaker Now, one thing did say I think I say in this book, Fritz Pollard now, he told me a lot of people told me that they introduced the two.
Speaker Fifth, Paula, I don’t think I didn’t quote him on that, I have him on tape saying that I didn’t believe it and I didn’t see any reason why I should carry that story. But what he did tell me was true. He found out one day when they were going to this football game, play a game. That Fritz Pollard said, he says to Fred, he says, you know what, I married.
Speaker Really, Fritz Pollard was surprised, really, and he says he told them who he was married to. And so Fritz Pollard said, well, he was sure that S.E. Was the kind of woman who would want Paul, he says, and I quote him somehow or other in and in the chapter telling about his Columbia days that he won it all. He put it this way that she would want to have a big shot, some kind of a big shot. She would marry. He always he had known say that’s true before they were married. So he felt that he would want to marry high, high up and get somewhere. That’s that’s what that’s what he told me.
Speaker OK, let’s cut for a minute. How are you feeling?
Speaker I do I but I think really and I and now when I’m talking, I’m doing a lot of talking. You know, I go to libraries and schools.
Speaker I’m going out to, uh, this week to California and, uh. And then I’ll be in Princeton and Westville in Somerville next month.
Speaker One thing I do emphasize it, though, I want to emphasize, and that is.
Speaker To take Paul Robeson at his word, don’t revise him, don’t bring him up to date. Don’t try to switch him to something. Don’t try to sanitize him. I don’t try to make him pleasing to this group or that group, which Paul Junior is specializes in. You have, for instance, Jackie Robinson, last year’s big celebration I read in The New York Times. That Paul is talked about.
Speaker All right, all right. Yeah, about Jackie Robinson. All right. Because I was wondering about that. Yeah, about Paul and Jackie Robinson. OK, things they didn’t. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. All right. So, OK, Jackie Robinson.
Speaker In one consequence of.
Speaker The charge that Paul Robeson had said that black Americans will not go to fight for this country against the Soviet Union was pressure on Jackie Robinson, who was then the most popular black man in America. Not Paul, but I would say Jackie Robinson was at that time. And so Jackie Robinson was called to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee. I get to refute what Paul Robeson had said. Before were knowing that Jackie Robinson was going to go there. Paul Robeson sent a letter to Jackie Robinson telling him what he had said in Paris so that Jackie knew before he went there, but he was under pressure to go. He was under pressure from the Dodgers, from the government, and I mistake. I used to think it was from the NAACP, but that’s not true.
Speaker It was the Urban League, the NAACP, actually, I did find out wrote to the committee objecting to this. This hearing on the grounds that that’s imputing you don’t have to have. Are we loyal or not loyal? Then I objected to that hearing on that subject, but they went ahead and did it anyway. So Jackie Robinson went down and he did say if Paul Robeson said that.
Speaker It’s mighty silly, says a very silly it sounds to me all right now what happened after that?
Speaker I and other friends of power also were very pleased to say, very angry at Jackie for what he did. We know that Paul Robeson had played a role in getting blacks into the big leagues. Jackie knew that to.
Speaker We felt that he could have said, look, I’m a baseball player, I don’t have to go, I’m not in politics, he could have gotten out and we thought but he didn’t think that he could get out or he had to go now. They have a Paul Robeson has a press conference at the Hotel Theresa, I’m there and it’s Paul Robeson tells the reporters. If you’re out to get me to attack Jackie Robinson, Rog, I’m not going to that’s what they want us to do. Pit one against the other. I’m not going to do it. So if that’s what you want from me, he says, I’m not going to do it. I’m not here. I’m not going to say no. But one of the reporters, Afro-American press, Paul, on what he says. Do you think it was a disservice for Jackie Robinson to do that? As Paul said, yes, it would be a disservice for Eddie.
Speaker They grow to go down there and testify before that committee, a real disserve. That was Paul’s attitude. Now, Paul never once expressed a personal feeling about how he felt to us who were indignant. He never said, I’ve talked to off the record privately. He never said a word about that, how he felt. I felt he had to resent it. He could not. But one day it came out this way.
Speaker Uh.
Speaker Sutton, I came to see him one day and Paul has the Herald Tribune on his desk and he looks at us with a big smile and he says, Well, he says, I guess your people. He says, I guess your people will not be mad at me if I now become a Giants fan. Why? The paper that day said the Giants had signed Henry Thompson to play third base for the Giants. Now, Paul said because he knows Paul know all of his people in the United States are Dodger fans are going from all over. Everybody’s a Dodger. Paul knows all. But now Paul says your people, they have in other words, he’s got got it out. He could be a giant. But that showed me that how he if I had to feel, particularly when all of his people are now hero worshipping Jackie and Jackie has attacked him, had attacked him. And now he’s got to feel it, and it came out that way later on when he was in retirement in Philadelphia and when I saw him, he had the book, Jackie Robinson. I never had it made. And typically, Paul, instead of saying, oh, you know, he what he did now, I told you so, Paul Felt is one comment was Jackie must have suffered.
Speaker That’s what he thought Jack him must have suffered all this time because in his book, Jackie Robinson said, I wouldn’t do it again, and he paid tribute to Paul as having sacrificed so much for his people. And Jackie said if he’s called upon now, he wouldn’t do it again. So but Paul, instead of feeling, let’s say, vindicated.
Speaker Our triumphant.
Speaker That he’s now got the last word and in fact, he’s just he says, Jackie, he must have it must have hurt him, must have suffered a lot from this. That was Paul’s. But now a strange bit of revision came into this story because Paul Junior said that Jackie really. Did a poll a favor when he did testify and by. He says otherwise, he says they would have you know, they would have. Hang my father or something, but as I recall that I was there at the hearing wall, that you would never know that this committee had been softening up on Paul because they went after him.
Speaker And the most outand out I mean, they were really out to hang Paul to the extent that they could. So I saw no sign of this now. I think that one could tell the truth about Jackie Robinson.
Speaker You can be honest about Jackie Robinson, and you don’t have to fix up the story so that you make Jackie Robinson a hero for something, that it was not heroic. You can give him credit for what he did, but you so don’t change Paul Robeson into. Now, just to say that was OK. Now to Paul Robeson, what Jackie did. How could it be it could not be so much for that people who were.
Speaker Robeson’s political influences, I mean, his associates, well, influence influences, I guess.
Speaker OK, OK, Paul Robson’s.
Speaker Many, many, first of all, radical influences came early on and his connection with the Provincetown Theater because the Provincetown Theater was a collection of nonconformists, there were all kinds of radicals, socialists, anarchists, communists. That was what Greenwich Village, you know, the bohemians there. And so early on, Paul was used to fitting in with nonconformist poets, writers or whatnot to what their beliefs, aside from the standardized or accepted beliefs here early on, met them. Then he early on met radicals like William Patterson and Patterson became later on became a communist, a member of the Communist Party. And so he was an early associate of Paul Robeson for Paul Robeson Yogas days here in Harlem. Patterson was so that was one in terms of a person. And then through the years, Paul, by being as it became in England, England was the principal.
Speaker Influence on him, both in terms of left ism and.
Speaker Is that his concepts about socialism? He he became two things happened to him in England, as he says he discovered Africa while he was there, started to learn African languages and got interested in the subject of African liberation that happened to him in London, in London. He also became a man of the left of hope. There were many in England at that time. Some are communists, others were not. There are some are socialists like George Bernard Shaw, whom Paul knew there, H.G. Wells, another one there. They were early on visitors to the Soviet Union to see what they said was the experiment that was going on there. Beatrix’s Sidney Webb, were other distinguished British intellectuals who went to. So Paul was a part of this left liberal labour group in England and then connected up with the not just with African liberation, but also with India, for instance. Paul was a big supporter when there was a in in England trying to get support and get money for his liberation movement. You know, Paul gave him money. Paul sang concerts to the benefit of the Indian Liberation Movement. So later on, of course, when narrow becomes the prime, India gets liberated, becomes the prime minister. And then one day we see on The New York Times for Paul’s sixtieth birthday, I believe it was a statement by Nehru hailing Paul on his birthday. Front page of all this country was the State Department was greatly upset, you know, a leader, a big leader of a big country like this, praising Paul Robeson as a wonderful man on his birthday. And this is at a time when Paul Robeson is a non-person in the United States, is the target for all of these attacks. And here Nehru comes out, sends a greeting to Paul on his birthday. Now that, of course, people might not have known how come that was. Well, Paul had earlier been a supporter of Indian liberation movement.
Speaker And they knew that the the, um.
Speaker It did Paul feel we sort of got a little early, OK, but did he feel betrayed by. Who did he feel betrayed by when he when he when he lost all his battles? I mean, I know that the powers that be. Yeah, but he didn’t get certain support and a lot of ways. What did he feel betrayed by?
Speaker Well, Paul.
Speaker I don’t think that I never felt a sense that Paul Robeson felt that he was betrayed pretty much, for instance, through the end of his at the end of his life, it seemed to him that the countries that he thought were building socialism, they were still functioning. As a matter of fact, the Soviet Union was a superpower at that particular time. So he didn’t see any he saw, in fact, a growth of in his lifetime here. Well, there was China. There was the Chinese revolution in this hemisphere. There was the Cuban the Cuban revolution. There were the revolutions in Africa, in in Guyana with people who were as friends and Croma.
Speaker And in Kenya, there was Jomo Kenyatta, who he whom he knew and befriended in London.
Speaker As a matter of fact, he gave Jomo Kenyatta got a job as an extra in one of these movies which make it in Africa. So here was Jomo Kenyatta as a spear carrier, very literally in a robust movie in there.
Speaker So that, as Paul saw at the the liberation movement is coming about, he saw that that was successful. He saw his side as he saw our side in the war against Hitler being victorious, which to him as an anti fascist, he had supported the movement in Spain, the anti Franco movement in Spain. He had supported there. He had gone there. It had greatly influenced them when he found black Americans fighting in or that really made people think, what am I doing here? He is.
Speaker He’s leading this life of of a big time entertainer, star stage screen concerts and so on, living really high off the hog in England at Biard, everything. And yet he’s concerned about fascism. Was that a defining moment? Oh, no question.
Speaker 1937 was that was when he really decided that. His career as a concert, as a performer of any kind now has to take second place to his the political. So at that time he made it and he made a speech in Albert Hall in England for Spanish relief. And and it was there. And that speech that he made that he made the remark, which is now his epitaph, where now where it says the artist, that he sees himself as must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice, I had no alternative. Now, that last part that I had no alternative is really how he felt everything that he believes in, all of his principles, all of his ideas, the way his father is raised him to be. He’s got to take a step regardless of the consequence, that’s why he says he has an alternative. It’s not he has no choice. And particularly what moved him was when he went to Spain and he sees the international volunteers and he sees from America. His own people. San Francisco, New York, in the south and whatnot, and he sees these people there over there, they have volunteered to fight who? Not for four. They don’t know one Spaniard from another. They weren’t there to fight the enemy. Fascism, which to Paul, fascism. Is the Ku Klux Klan in power, that’s what fascism is, he saw it as it’s fundamental, it’s racism. He he saw this early on before any subject of of. The final solution or this wiping out Paul early on saw that fascism and racism, this is the thing now here he sees his own people coming over there giving their lives and many of them were killed. In Spain, his own people, not all he thinks to himself, what am I doing? I’ve got to get back home, I got to be touched again to by people that I can see that I’ve got to be with them and I’ve got to put this struggle primary to other things.
Speaker That was a turning point. So that’s why when he came back in 93, lived mostly in England for about 10 years. So when he came back to America in nineteen thirty nine, this was already a new Paul Robeson. This is a Paul Robeson who is now really going to well, he will use his art for political purposes, definitely. And of course, there was that wonderful coincidence of the song ballad for Americans. He comes out. And so that really made him like to be an all American in the progressive movement. It was a song that over all of the nationalities, he’s one of them. All of the occupations. He’s one of them. The American history. He brings that in. Crispus Attucks, Haim Solomon. People didn’t know said whose hopes are high, Solomon. And maybe the people who know I’m Celebuzz. Never heard of Crispus Attucks. But at Thomas Jefferson Theater and Tom Paine, he’s, you know, that song. He’s got the whole thing in and then he winds up and who are you, Mister America? That’s what he says. Yeah. OK, now. All right. That’s a moment. Yes. And he does all that stuff. Yes. But on personal life.
Speaker Some of the unions didn’t support him.
Speaker That was later. Yes, what I mean, that was later. Oh, definitely about. Oh, Max, Yarragon. Oh, yes. OK, one. Now, this was. No, no, but this this moves ahead, though. Now when he comes back so that he’s acceptable and incidentally, he becomes a hero to all these unions and he’s made a lifetime member. But when once the McCarthy period comes, for instance, the leader of the New York the National Maritime Union, Dan Ammu, a guy named Joe Curran who was had been a left winger, now becomes a right winger. And Paul Robeson, they who had been made a lifetime member, was now removed as he was expelled as a lifetime member in the Maritime Union here. This this happened in several other instances. In other words, Paul Robeson was removed because they can’t go along with him anymore. You know, the heat is on, McCarthy is on and so on. So there was this, which Paul understood perfectly what what was motivating these people to turn against him that way and where he had been had support. He didn’t have it support. Now, Max, Yarragon was. Interesting thing about Maxygen that I found out.
Speaker When Paul formed, Paul wants to have an organization dedicated to African liberation, so if he made the Council on African Affairs his principle, this is to be his politics. This is to be the organization he’s going to support. He’s most concerned about that at the beginning. He’s associated with Max Juergens on that. Max Juergens had been a YMCA secretary in Africa, South Africa and whatnot. And so he saw in Paul an opportunity for himself. I’m sure he was an opportunist. So he he goes along with Paul and they set up the Council on African Affairs. They got considerable support from people. And this but what I found out later was WB. The boys did not trust Maxygen. He did not think he had no use for him. I never discussed that with Dubois.
Speaker But Dubois did not immediately associate himself with the Council on African Affairs because of his distrust of Maxygen and turn out that distrust was based because the minute this business in Paris happened back Qiagen Novikoff, suddenly he’s against communists. He I have nothing to do with communists and he’s denouncing Paul Robeson. And of course, he continues on a path to finally in the 50s, Max, Jurgen’s actually became a paid lecturer for the South African government. Did you know that a paid lecture for Malon was there and he went around the country paid by the South African government as a spokesman for them here? That’s where Max Yarragon went well, so he went all the way. Other there’s been another other people have have done this, have gone from one extreme to the other, depending upon, uh, opportunism.
Speaker And in a characteristic of Paul Robeson. Was he had. Many associations, different associations, different levels. Some are personal, some were intellectual, some were personal, and he he he maintained all of it, maintained many relationships separate from each other, didn’t have to come together so that he could have many close friends who were his close friends but weren’t associated with each other.
Speaker It wasn’t never there was not one group of people say this is the ropes and associates. There were these different categories and branches in many different ways. As I said, some were educators, some were writers, some were artists. He had he would have relationship, for instance, with musicians like jazz musicians, and that would be entirely separate from some other place.
Speaker He would go to hear, let’s say, Dizzy Gillespie and these other wonderful musicians. They would perform. Now, other people did not know that Paul had any interest or knowledge about that at all because they weren’t involved in that. It was a different Paul Robeson that they knew.
Speaker So in this respect, there were a lot of there were a lot of Paul Robeson that way with the with the number of relationships, a lot of people during the relationship, let’s say with a Peggy Ashcroft. Yes. How in those times with the danger that implied if it had gotten out to friends ever Koshland, did he ever address that?
Speaker Well, Paul, first of all, Paul’s, let’s say, relationship with women. I was always, if private, insofar as I was concerned, for example, I was with him working with him steadily.
Speaker So now when he disappears, I might have an idea where he’s going, but he’s not saying anything to me. It was all private. So any relationships that he had with women were always private, never public.
Speaker He never talked about them. He didn’t talk to me about anybody. And I knew many people that he was associated with, including women who were I was friendly with. But that particular aspect of his relationship with them, he never mentioned it. And presumably, I suppose I’m not even supposed to know about it, even though I was aware. But that’s that’s what so it seems that the people seem to feel that any relationship they had with Paul was just between the two of them and didn’t involve somebody else. So I guess that might be the private Paul Robeson being very private that way.
Speaker Last one.
Speaker Uh, and you mentioned that you’ve got to the whole thing of his what music was to him and singing couldn’t sing anymore. Yes. And what I loved is when you quoted, um, Neruda.
Speaker I came here to say, oh, Paul, I’ll take that is just that’s beautiful. Well, I don’t want to sum up. Oh, definitely, I.
Speaker That, of course, I don’t have it here, so I how can I read it? Well, you got if you have the book came here to sing really well, that’s the end. Yeah, but I mean, that sort of sums it up.
Speaker Well, yes, and in in his book Here I Stand, Pat Robertson concludes with a quotation from Neruda. The quotation was from a long poem that Neruda wrote called Let the Rail Splitter Awake. I had met at a Mexican peace Congress in 1949. I interviewed Neruda and I brought back no, that’s not true. We had published in our magazine Masses in Mainstream Let the Rail Splitter Awake by Neruda. When I went to Mexico, I brought back to Paul a beautiful bound volume of that poem with end papers by Siqueiros and Orosco, top Mexican artists. Anyway, Paul loved the poem. He liked the feeling of it. Let the rail splitter awake. That was an invocation of Abe Lincoln. Let America become back to its roots, be democratic again. But then Neruda and what on this personal note and which he and Paul like that. And he used it and I first heard him use it, I believe at one of the concerts at the border. I was with Paul when he was singing across the border to the Canadians who came there.
Speaker And I noticed that Paul ended one of his program by reciting that those lines from Neruda that I came here. He says, I did not come here to solve anything. I came here to sing and for you to sing with me.
Speaker So then when I got around to writing the book, I made sure to include that in his book, Here I Stand and. Actually. And I included in my own book in the in the foreword to my book, I again bring up that because this really was how Paul felt, how it was another.
Speaker What is he here for? He summed it up like a I came here to sing and for you to sing with me. That’s what Paul really saw, what he was for that that was that was it.
Speaker And the fact that, of course.
Speaker There was this touching part about it when I interviewed Neruda and came back and told Paul Neruda was not allowed in the United States. Paul was not allowed out of the United States, both for the same reason both wonderful artists, both really representative of their country, of their people as Naruto was of Chile. The road ahead to escape from Chile was hunted out, had been a senator, so Neruda had been high and then he suddenly a fugitive.
Speaker So like Paul in reverse, he can’t come to the United States. Paul can’t leave the United States.
Speaker But the Neruda felt as he wrote a wonderful ode to Paul Robeson, he thought Paul Robeson was really a representative of the human spirit, Neruda thought. Now, Neruda has since been honored as the Nobel winner of literature, Nobel Prize for Literature, Neruda. Now, I was happy to see that. And still. Hurt by the fact that in America there has not been that equivalent recognition of ropes and the fact our effort to have a Paul Robeson centennial stamp.
Speaker Never in the history, I’m sure, of the United States, with so many people trying to get a certain stamp issued, there were tens of thousands of petitions sent in to the Postal Service. Some 60 members of Congress signed a petition for apostle’s many I heard that the New York City council passed a resolution urging us. So all of this in the face of all of that demand, no post, no postal stamp for Paul Robeson, Okemah, which which means that he is still.
Speaker If not persona non grata, he is still ostracized. He is still not accepted for what he really is like. But what why wouldn’t he be? Yeah, we got Mickey Mouse on a postage stamp. So so this recognition has not yet come to Paul Robeson as an artist and as a man that has come to, let’s say, people like Neruda. In fact, even Dubois was on a postage stamp. We got on. But but not but not Paul Robeson. And, uh, that that’s going to have to be corrected someday, hopefully.
Speaker This two hour documentary, The American Masters, will help bring Paul Robeson to a lot of young people.
Speaker Generations have never, never heard of him. That’s true.
Speaker What would you say to those people? The importance of the.
Speaker I think Paul Robeson is an example of how really a demonstration of how somebody should live. That’s what I believe. I believe that he is an example for young person and all people for that matter. I think he is an example. He he shows that what’s important in life.
Speaker He established what is important in his life, and that is, again, not what you can get, but what you can give.
Speaker And so from this point of view, I really think that that Paul Robeson is is an exemplar of.
Speaker Of what it means to be a good person, to be a good human being and all aspects and one interviewer asked me was pressing me, in fact, for what negatives do I see in Paul?
Speaker I said. If I told you what my criticisms of Paul, it will sound like praise, because what I was critical of him was the fact that he was I felt too giving too generous of his time in every respect. To his own detriment, I felt heat, in other words, he did too much and.
Speaker I know I once read a line somewhere where Machiavelli says that a man who professes to do goodness in all and all ways must necessarily come to grief from those who are not so good. That’s what Machiavelli said. Well, it often happens. I’m not sure about that necessarily. I hope it isn’t. But but I did feel and I could just cite example after example where Paul Robeson, I felt, was taking advantage of the fact by people who, uh, that he gave too much and the fact that he couldn’t that he couldn’t said no.
Speaker And and and that he would be have.
Speaker Uh, well, I don’t want to continue it, but I could, like, give give it I could give many examples to show that this hurt me when I would be with him and see that, you know, he goes and he’s got to raise some money for somebody. And he he not only doesn’t he get a fee, he doesn’t even get his expenses.
Speaker And if they did say that to him, he’d say, oh, that’s all right, put that in with the rest and I would be unhappy.
Speaker He’s not making any money yet.
Speaker Or at least give him, you know, what, something. But Paul would say, oh, no, don’t put it in with the rest.
Speaker That hurt me. I wasn’t as generous as he was with the firm.
