The Robeson Record

...Instead, he seems to have willed his ignorance...

...They understood that their struggle was tough enough...

...Then, toward the end of his life, as Cold War fevers subsided and the recordings preserving that rich, warm, encompassing voicebegantobe played once more, Robeson was " rediscovered...

...Duberman's other ploy is to emphasize Robeson's role in the fight for civil rights...

...Short memories and misty nostalgia have done the rest, until now, when a major biographical effort transforms him from a pariah to a martyr...

...In appreciation of his undeviating efforts on their behalf, the Soviets awarded him their highest honor, the Stalin Peace Prize, in 1952...

...While they were rehearsing [The Emperor] Jones in Greenwich Village, 'the nearest and only place' Robeson could get a decent meal had been up at Penn Station...

...The constant harassment, culminating in the lifting of his passport in 1950, took a toll on the singer's health and undoubtedly contributed to the nervous breakdowns that plagued him for the last two decades of his life...

...As others fled, his loyalty grew...

...Their demands were already being labeled "Communistic," and the last thing they needed was to ally themselves with a defender of Stalin's prison camps...

...As one reads of the violence Robeson put up with on college football fields when he was Rutgers' first black player, of the restaurants that refused to serve him despite his celebrity, of the hotels in Indianapolis, Green Bay, Sacramento, and Santa Fe that denied him room or insisted he use the back entrance, the blood begins to boil...

...And at the FBI J. Edgar Hoover seemed to collect them as a hobby...

...In the course of his investigations, Duberman was unable to obtain 30-year-old documents from the FBI for reasons of "national security...

...But by leaping from one extreme to the other with almost dialectical simplicity, Duberman has stepped over a line that should have remained inviolate...

...If there was a Stalinist cause to be served, a lie to be fomented or an excuse to be mouthed, Robeson was available for the job, offering whatever prestige his name carried to some of the most heinous deeds of the century...

...In Robeson's defense, Duberman employs an old stratagem—minimizing the man's record by focusing on the excesses of his enemies...

...Indeed, Paul Robeson's story may be the American tragedy writ large...

...He argues that the State Department's revocation of Robeson's passport demonstrates an "underlying racist animus...

...Even New York City in the 1920s was a segregated town...

...Robeson himself had a tendency to identify his travails with the plight of blacks in America, calling the well-known riots that attended his 1949 appearance in Peekskill, New York, "an attack on the whole Negro people," and Duberman's approach is the same...

...Robeson's story is no such thing...

...He speaks of the "inability of white America to tolerate a black maverick who refused to bend, " and refers to "the racist component central to his persecution...

...In 1956, Nikita S. Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin's crimes were another major trauma for the faithful...

...Duberman cites a syndicated columnist who felt that "Mr...

...He could have known and should have known, but simply did not want to know...

...A tragedy it was, but representative of no more than one man's particular blindness and pigheadedness...

...Yet Robeson hung on...

...The cretins were burning down the house...

...It is an insult to the integrity of their beliefs to suggest, as Duberman does, that only whites were concerned about Communist dictatorship...

...To later civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., with roots in the Southern black churches, Robeson was less an opponent or an embarrassment than an irrelevancy...

...The latest and most thorough apologist is the acclaimed historian and playwright Martin Bauml Duberman who, with Paul Robeson (Knopf, 763 pp., $24.95), has written what he obviously hopes will become the definitive biography...

...the next nearest place was in Harlem.'" It becomes clear why someone in Robeson's position might end up a black radical, or at least in jail for throwing a few punches...

...Certainly, it is worth recalling that the battle for equal treatment had to be waged in the North as well as in the South...

...While Stalin's Great Terror was slaughtering millions in the 1930s, Robeson was singing the Soviet anthem at his concerts...

...Indeed, figures like A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Bayard Rustin, far from rushing to Robeson's support, were quick to distance themselves from him...

...Constitution...

...In 1978, for example, a "National Ad-Hoc Committee to End the Crimes Against Paul Robeson" was quickly put together to protest a rather innocuous play about the singer starring James Earl Jones...

...On a visit to the USSR in the 1930s, Robeson turned an equally deaf ear to the black expatriates who could have informed him about the purges, and even refused to help one disillusioned man who wished to return to the U.S...

...It is a tendentious, ultimately dishonest book, whose flavor is captured in the Preface, where Robeson's career is called "a singularly American story, emblematic of its times yet transcending them, encompassing not merely Cold War hysteria during one moment in our history but racial symbolism and racial consciousness throughout our history...

...he notes that NBC yielded to pressure from the superpatriots and canceled a TV appearance, "making [Robeson] the first American to be officially banned from television...

...He criticized Tito for breaking away from Moscow's embrace, accused the U.S...

...Neither was he an innocent ("Robeson was hardly naive," says Duberman...

...He supported the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 and silently acquiesced to the takeover of Eastern Europe after the War...

...He was also the worst kind of fellow traveler, slavishly parroting the Communist Party line through every curlicue of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, and never abandoning his public commitment to the Soviet Union down to the day of his death on January 23, 1976...

...Of dissidents in the Soviet Union, he declared, they "ought to get out of there or get shot, " and before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he explained that the inhabitants of the Gulag were "fascist prisoners...

...The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 constituted a turning point, disillusioning thousands...

...His patience in the face of the continual slights and insults was little short of heroic...

...Civil liberties—Robeson's and others—endured a beating in those years, and not just then...

...That is all I know about that...

...At the time that he was considering sending his son to school in Moscow, he was friendly with Emma Goldman, the anarchist who had gone to Russia and come back to the West as one of the earliest witnesses to Soviet tyranny...

...of racial genocide before the United Nations, and denounced the 1956 Hungarian revolt as a fascist uprising...

...Some left as early as the famines of 1932-33...

...He approved of them when Communists were being jailed for their beliefs, looked away or applauded when Trotskyists were on the block...

...The book's most powerful passages describe the indignities he suffered hardly more than a generation ago...

...Throughout its history, the CPUSA has shed adherents like a tree in November...

...Nonetheless, this biography is never more dishonest than when it tries to portray him as a martyr for the cause of civil rights...

...Her warnings were ignored...

...cultural and AfroAmerican history, pioneering a path into the national mainstream later followed by such black artists and entertainers as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby...

...Despite all, the Soviet Union stood for him as a bulwark in the fight against racism and imperialism...

...It is the tale of an artist of unassailable gifts and achievement who was brought low through his own political obtuseness...

...His own countrymen, not surprisingly, took a dimmer view of his activities...

...Robeson is as worthy of internment as any Jap who got penned away in the last [war...

...The record is there for all to see (even in Paul Robeson, since Duberman is too honest a historian to conceal it...

...Yet, though the argument for the freedom to travel and other human rights is in no way diminished, it is surely worth pointing out that Robeson himself was scarcely a champion of civil liberties, except if it served his purposes...

...Others departed with the Moscow Trials, or after word filtered back from Spain that Communists were assassinating their Socialist allies during the Civil War...

...Anyone wishing to argue that racism was "central" would have to explain why other blacks, leaders in the civil rights movement and more effective fighters for equality than Robeson, were not similarly isolated for their views...

...But the question is whether the hounding of Robeson was motivated by his race or by his political beliefs, and the evidence overwhelmingly indicates the latter...

...At worst, it might be said that he was singled out for special attention because he was the most prominent American black with Communist sympathies, yet even under this interpretation Robeson's case revolves around civil liberties, not civil rights...

...Robeson went his own misguided way with remarkable tenacity...

...No one would deny that the State Department contained its share of racists...

...Robeson has never lacked for sympathizers...

...In the late 1940s, during an anti-Semitic campaign, Robeson learned about the murder of a Jewish friend and said nothing...

...Nor was their hostility strictly tactical...

...He was no cold-blooded commissar...

...In dealing with the age of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he did not have to search very hard...

...The Pact with the Nazis "in no way whatsoever" altered his views, and he celebrated Khrushchev's Stalin speech by attending a birthday party for the U.S...

...Little wonder that once his health and sanity began failing in the mid-'50s, when American Communism was a shell of a movement, he complained about being lonely...

...Communist leader William Z. Foster...

...While he had the right to these opinions, he was not a man one would entrust with the U.S...

...In seeking to resurrect the public figure along with the artist, he attempts to do the impossible—to rehabilitate the unrehabilitatable...