PAUL ROBESON
Different families react differently to current events, especially my progressive one in 1949, for example.
On one visit with Westchester friends whose kids were my age (9) we sat in the livingroom listening to the radio on the afternoon a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, NY, was attacked by mobs. He had been called before HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), who only four days earlier had questioned Jackie Robinson in their attempt to link anti-racism with 'communist subversion.' Under severe pressure, Jackie distanced himself from Paul and repudiated communists in a statement he regretted and apologized for years later. People's Artists, a progressive NYC theatrical agency, had scheduled a concert for Robeson Aug. 27, 1949. The Peekskill Evening Star whipped the town into a frenzy with anti-communist hysteria, inciting the Regional Veterans Council, The Veterans of Foreign Wars, The American Legion and The Catholic High School to violently sabotage the performance. A dozen people were sent to the hospital while police looked on and did nothing. All but the left-wing press blamed the violence on 'the communists,' and Gov. Dewey refused to comment. The concert was rescheduled for Sept. 4. The Fur & Leather Workers Union, the United Electrical Workers and the Longshoremen sent their members to act as bodyguards. They circled Robeson and the audience, forming a human shield.
When Robeson sang 'Old Man River,' the song he had made famous on Broadway in Show Boat, the great man changed the lyric, 'I'm tired of livin' and 'feared of dyin'' to 'I must keep fightin' until I'm dyin'.'
This time the police and State Troopers joined in on the ambush after the show, preventing people from reaching their automobiles, which were vandalized, or buses which were overturned. Veterans and Catholic High School kids lined the road from the concert site shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans and throwing rocks at the cars. This time they sent 150 people to the hospital. Our friend Fran was driving away from the concert when a rock smashed through a window of the van in which she and her four-year-old daughter were riding. She remembers sitting in the back seat and picking slivers of glass from the driver's neck while dropping pieces of chewing gum on the floor in a desperately improvised game to keep little Sally busy and away from the windows. 'I could see the troopers standing back, doing nothing,' she said.
Embattled caravans made their way back to the city and to Harlem, where the whole community—far less vulnerable to anti-communist hysteria—came out in a massive welcome with food, shelter and medical care. Grounded in daily political experience, Harlem residents recognized racism when they saw it, unlike a majority of white Americans oblivious to their country's racist track record from earliest kidnapping and slavery up through the current litter of congressional Dixiecrats who routinely coupled 'nigger-lovin'' with 'commie' in their diatribes. Few living above 125th Street took seriously the President's 1948 Executive Order banning 'Communists, Fascists and totalitarians' from public life.
Communists had consistently come through as allies, and within that political reality, Paul Robeson was a champion, and the returning audience were heroes. Dewey blamed 'red totalitarianism,' and, bullied into silence, even the normally courageous Eleanor Roosevelt declined to place responsibility where it belonged. Nevertheless, headlines around the world focused on the violence at Peekskill, and the FBI was forced to look into the blatant breakdown of law and order. J. Edgar Hoover balked at an investigation even though one of his own agents reported that the Vets had started the riot.
Prime target for racist attack, Eleanor was much admired north in Harlem, but even her most persistent efforts failed to secure FDR's public support for anti-lynching bills in the 1930s. Her cause surfaced again in 1946 with Robeson's public criticism of Truman for continuing to kowtow to the vile Dixiecrats. The high cost of taking on racist America is tired, old news to non-whites of any era, and Peekskill was the latest battle in a seemingly endless war on Black people.
We took in every word of the broadcast, fearful of the hostility our politics had unleashed in our fellow Americans, and heartsick about the brutal violence wrought by our fellow New Yorkers who would hate and attack us too, given the chance. In the home of the free, it was the brave who were unsafe.
