Key Series: Racism, Prejudice, Cultural Studies
Note: This article is based on the Inaugural Lecture by Stephen E. Bronner in honor of Paul Robeson at Rutgers University. It was originally presented on 9 April, 2015.
By Stephen Eric Bronner
I appreciate all of you attending this event. This is a great honor for me — and I would like to thank Edward Ramsamy in particular for putting this together and setting the stage for a yearly lecture in honor of Paul Robeson. Speaking to you now is also special to me because years ago I lived on Witherspoon Street in Princeton, near where the church stood in which his father served as pastor, and where he was born in 1898. I was also acquainted with his son, Paul Robeson Jr. – or Robby — and, in fact, I appeared on a radio program with him many years ago. I’ve been at Rutgers now for close to 40 years — and it has always seemed to me that the appropriate recognition for Paul Robeson has been lacking even among black students.
He may have received his law degree from Columbia University in 1923, but his name is indelibly linked with Rutgers. A member of the class of 1919, if he is not this university’s favorite son — then he should be. There is probably no other graduate who evinced such a variety of talents. It was here at Rutgers that he received letters in basketball, track and football, where he became an All-American, where he deepened his knowledge of literature and theatre, where he sang, where he was named valedictorian of his class – and where he read the newspapers that were reporting on lynching, trumped up trials for Southern blacks, rank forms of discrimination, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the subsequent uprisings in Europe, the red scare of 1919, the rise of fascism, and a host of anti-imperialist rebellions. Later he would become attached to the Soviet Union, among the most notable advocates of the anti-fascist cause in Spain during its Civil War, a firm believer in the Popular Front, as well as a voice for peace during the Cold War and a voice for action during the civil rights movement. Robeson was both witness to and participant in the great political events that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century.
A word about the elephant in the room: Many are uncomfortable talking about his communist sympathies. They would rather talk about his gifts as a singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, writer, or intellectual. But the truth of the matter is that, whether technically in the party or not, Robeson was indeed a communist. And, especially given the blacklisting and abuse he experienced at home, he was surely delighted on being awarded the Stalin Prize in 1953. Robeson was naïve regarding the utopian hopes raised by the dictator’s attempts to collectivize the peasantry and industrialize the Soviet Union. He severely misjudged the corrosive role played by the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War and the French Popular Front. The 1930s was marked by communist terror, purges, show trials, and expansion of the gulag. Robeson never engaged any of this and there is little doubt that he often excused the inexcusable. Others like Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and a host of other white intellectuals made the same mistakes but, somehow, it was different. For better or worse, more was expected of Paul Robeson. Still there must have been a reason why the communist party was so appealing to so many leading black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Dubois, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.
No one has ever accused me of being a shill for international communism. But the fact is that no other political party in the United States did as much to aid especially Southern blacks in their struggles against political and institutional racism from the time of the Scottsboro trial to the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. There was an organizational vacuum when it came to combating racism – and, sadly, the communists filled it. For all the allure of propaganda predicated on the “inevitable” victory of the working class, and the attainment of socialism by the Soviet Union, the abject failure and inability of both established political parties to address segregation and racism surely made the communist movement more attractive to militant and revolutionary African-Americans. Communism was still popularly (if mistakenly) identified with revolutionary politics and perhaps only a full-scale transformation of the existing system could abolish prejudices that were manifest in American society from its very beginnings.
Communists employed “front” tactics that involved coordinating support from a variety of non-communist organizations in order to further any particular interest. The political world thereby became bigger for black intellectuals and it led them to identify with anti-imperialist uprisings in Africa and the Middle East as well as the great battles between fascism and anti-fascism in Europe. Robeson and many of his friends recognized their attempts to balance a historical concern for black identity with current anti-imperialist and broader struggles. The communist party organization had caucuses for any number of particular groups including African-Americans and, though American unions were notoriously racist, it was as if in the great strikes in Flint Michigan and elsewhere the prospect of class unity beyond race presented itself. That furthering what the young Marx called “human emancipation” meant accepting party discipline and the particular political “line” was a matter of course. The locomotive of history might then run just a bit faster and, in the process, obliterate hatred and prejudice among peoples and races.
Every achievement in Robeson’s multi-faceted and politically engaged life was somehow infected by the racism that his good friend, the great scholar and activist, W.E.B Dubois, called the “cancer” eating away at the American polity. Robeson saw that disease as living off not only hosts like the KKK, which had grown enormously in the aftermath of World War I, but by the emergence of other reactionary movements in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The political expressed itself in the personal. Aside from the discrimination he experienced in the minutiae of everyday life, Robeson was often jeered during speeches and concerts, targeted by racist demonstrations, vilified by McCarthyism, blacklisted while kept a prisoner in his own land, and demonized for his support of anti-lynching laws, the Spanish Republic, and the Soviet Union. The kind of bigotry faced by Paul Robeson today seems almost anachronistic – I say almost:
An attack on a church in Charleston South Carolina in June of 2015 cost nine black worshipers their lives. Unarmed African-Americans like Eric Gardner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri were killed by police and the treatment given the officers responsible triggered demonstrations that spanned the country and gave birth to “Black Lives Matter!” A huge controversy about flying the Confederate flag over the capital building in South Carolina, which should not have been a matter of debate in the first place, shows the extent to which many Americans deal with tradition in an uncritical manner. Some believe that there is no structural problem worth considering even though a federal investigation of Ferguson showed that, over the past two years, blacks accounted for 93% of all arrests, 90% of traffic tickets, and 95% of discretionary arrests like jaywalking (New York Times 3/4/2015). The killings are part of a pattern: Anywhere from 1-3 supposedly “justifiable homicides” by police shootings – overwhelmingly targeting people of color – take place every day all over America. Long-standing tensions exist between the police and those ghettos and neighborhoods in which minorities predominate.
There is pressing need for a more robust political discussion about bigotry and the interplay between race and class in American society. Robeson’s old concern with linking black identity to broader struggles for human rights and against economic exploitation remains with us. But the opportunity to begin such a discussion is inhibited by the adaptation of the bigot to a new society in which his prejudices are camouflaged as he turns them into public policy. Uncritical defenders of the police are always quick to note that race plays no part in these events that have so infuriated particularly the black community. That is also part of a pattern and part of the prevailing culture. Attempts to curtail voting are justified by a concern with “fraud;” cuts in the welfare state are justified by a concern with personal responsibility; opposition to gay marriage and abortion are justified by a concern with tradition and religious considerations. The bigot today uses camouflage. For all the talk, however, the traditional victims of discrimination are still targeted: people of color, women, gays, and the “poor” or working class in which they today constitute the majority.
Unfortunately, however, popular understandings of the bigot remain anchored in the time of Robeson. The preoccupation is still with the individual and the personal rather than the social and the political, crude language and sensational acts rather than mundane legislation and complicated policy decisions. Everyday citizens grow incensed when some commentator lets slip a racist or politically incorrect phrase. But they are far more tolerant when faced with policies that blatantly disadvantage the bigot’s traditional targets. After all, reasonable people can disagree about this or that policy as it applies to gays, people of color, and the poor. But ethical suspicions must arise when an entire agenda is involved. No conservative political organization today has majority support from women, the gay community, people of color, or the poor. There must be a reason. A bit less emphasis might well be placed on what the bigot says or feels than what he actually does. This, indeed, is what primarily concerned Robeson.
He was just what the bigot and the reactionary hated. A handsome and angry black man, erudite and articulate, accomplished and poised. He worked hard, very hard, until not long before his death in 1976. He finished law school while playing in the NFL. He was the first African-American star of a major motion picture, The Emperor Jones, redefined Othello and became a major interpreter of Eugene O’Neill. Later, when denied a passport by the State Department, Robeson argued his own case before the Supreme Court. He called for integrating unions, supported strike actions, and raised awareness about the terrible plight of Australian aborigines. He was an archaeologist of African traditions and as a popular writer and publicist, a unique representative of the Harlem Renaissance. And, of course—he was a singer with a signature song, “Old Man River” [see above], a song that became a rallying cry for anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War, but that Hollywood happily used to portray the African American’s acceptance of his miserable fate.
Paul Robeson was arguably the greatest of all African-American public intellectuals – among the greatest ever produced by the United States – during the first half of the twentieth century. He was a politically engaged artist who evidenced a concern for his roots and a cosmopolitan sensibility. He made his political mistakes — and they were often grave. But in a perilous political climate, at least, he dared to make them — and he paid the price unflinchingly and with dignity. For young people seeking a “role model” in a world saturated by commercial heroes, few are better than Paul Robeson.
Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Director of Global Relations at its Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and on the Executive Committee of the UNESCO Chair for Genocide Prevention. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages and his last book was The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (Yale University Press).
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