Paul Robeson and the Passport the State Department Took Away

On September 4, 1949, an estimated 20,000 people climbed a hillside outside Peekskill, New York to hear Paul Robeson sing, eight days after a mob had blocked the same concert before it could start. This time the concert went ahead, and Robeson performed without incident. Then the crowd tried to drive home. Rioters lined the road out of the grounds and threw rocks through car windows as police stood by, and between the two riots, more than 140 people were hurt. Less than a year later, the United States government took Robeson’s passport. He would not get it back for eight years.

The man the country was working this hard to silence was, by any plain measure, one of its own success stories. Paul Robeson was a Rutgers valedictorian, a two-time All-American football player, a Columbia-trained lawyer, and the actor who still holds the record for the longest run of a Shakespeare play on Broadway. What changed was what he started saying, in public, about race, labor, and the Soviet Union.

Rutgers and Columbia

Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, the youngest child of Rev. William Drew Robeson, who had escaped slavery in his teens, and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson. He entered Rutgers College as the third Black student in the school’s history, and in 1919 he graduated its valedictorian, twice named an All-American in football, and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a law degree from Columbia in 1923 and took a job at a New York firm the same year. He left that job, and the practice of law altogether, when the firm’s stenographer refused to take dictation from a Black attorney.

Broadway’s record

The theater had already claimed him; he had appeared in the Broadway revue Shuffle Along while he was still in law school. By 1943 he was famous enough to headline a production no one else had attempted: a Broadway Othello with a Black actor in the lead and a white supporting cast. The Theatre Guild’s staging, directed by Margaret Webster, opened in October 1943 and ran 296 performances, a Shakespeare record on Broadway that, per Guinness World Records, has never been matched. He was rewriting the biggest song of his career at the same time. Beginning around 1938, Robeson sang his own ending onto “Ol’ Man River” in concert: where the Show Boat script had him resigned to being tired of living and scared of dying, he swapped in a line about keeping on fighting until the day he died. Robeson kept singing the song for the rest of his career, and kept changing what it said.

Paris, April 1949

By 1949, Robeson was also one of the most prominent Americans defending the Soviet Union in public, and it caught up with him at the Paris Peace Congress that April. The Associated Press’s account of the speech, later reprinted by Smithsonian magazine, had him telling the crowd:

It is unthinkable that American Negros would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has lifted our people to full human dignity.

Smithsonian’s review of the French transcript of the same speech gives a different quote:

We in America do not forget that it is on the backs of the poor whites of Europe…and on the backs of millions of black people the wealth of America has been acquired. And we are resolved that it shall be distributed in an equitable manner among all of our children and we don’t want any hysterical stupidity about our participating in a war against anybody no matter whom. We are determined to fight for peace. We do not wish to fight the Soviet Union.

The distinction mattered to no one in Washington. By the next day, editorialists and members of Congress were calling him a traitor, and the Peekskill mob followed that August.

The affidavit

The State Department moved in August 1950. It ordered Robeson to surrender his passport, and told him he could have a new one if he signed an affidavit swearing he was not a member of the Communist Party. Robeson refused, sued to get the passport back, and lost: a federal court upheld the State Department’s refusal on August 16, 1955. He never signed the affidavit, and he never publicly confirmed or denied Communist Party membership.

What he would defend, without hedging, was the Soviet Union itself. In 1952, with his American concert income already collapsing, he accepted the International Stalin Prize, the USSR’s highest civilian honor. Seton Hall historian Maxim Matusevich has argued that Robeson’s refusal to ever publicly break with Stalin was a real moral failure on his part, not a footnote to an otherwise clean record.

Before the committee

Congress got its chance to ask him about all of it on June 12, 1956, when Robeson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked whether he had praised Stalin on a trip to Moscow, he refused the frame entirely:

Whatever has happened to Stalin, gentlemen, is a question for the Soviet Union, and I would not argue with a representative of the people who, in building America, wasted sixty to a hundred million lives of my people, black people drawn from Africa on the plantations.

Asked why he had not simply stayed in the Soviet Union, he answered:

Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you.

When a committee counsel pressed him about defending a colleague’s patriotism, Robeson turned the question back on the room:

I say that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the nonpatriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Eight years

None of it moved the State Department. By Smithsonian magazine’s accounting, Robeson’s income fell from more than $150,000 a year before the ban to less than $3,000 a year during it; the concert halls, recording studios, and international audiences that had made him wealthy were simply gone. What finally forced the government’s hand was a case that had nothing to do with him. In Kent v. Dulles, decided June 16, 1958 by a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of State had no authority to deny an American a passport over political belief or association alone. Robeson had never been a party to that case. The ruling reached him anyway, and he got a new passport that year. He and his wife, Eslanda Robeson, left for London.

Philadelphia

The Robesons came back to the United States. By 1966 he had moved into his sister Marian Forsythe’s home in Philadelphia, where he lived until he died on January 23, 1976, at seventy-seven. His passport had been back in his hands for eighteen years by then, but the American concert bookings and record contracts that dropped him during the blacklist mostly stayed dropped. Eugene Debs went to an Atlanta cell for a wartime speech in 1918. Robeson never spent a day in an American prison for anything he said or sang, and the free speech case against him ran entirely through a passport office instead.