Paul Robeson by Martin Duberman Page A

instruments for helping the race.
    Most blacks were too open-eyed to believe, as most whites did, that Robeson’s success proved that the American system “worked,” that it even remotely offset the otherwise prevalent enormities of discrimination. Nor did most blacks interpret (as most whites did) the phenomenon of one exceptionally gifted black man’s being allowed through the net as evidence that the net was porous—or even that Robeson’s own acceptance was without very real boundaries and qualifications. Still, it was worth knowing, however much white America overemployed the information, that a few supremely gifted blacks did occasionally get the chance to demonstrate their gifts. It was worth even more to know that one such black had become determined to see that others—gifted or not—got their entitlement to a dignified life.
    Had the class prophet resumed his duties in 1940 and tried to castahead yet another twenty years, he might have justifiably been confident that Robeson’s triumphs would multiply and his influence consolidate. This time he would have been woefully wrong. From 1940 to 1960 Robeson evolved fully from an artist with a conscience to an artist committed to political action. He moved from the view that his own accomplishments would open doors for others to the conviction that the doors remained so firmly secured that those who had somehow pushed through them had to see to their permanent dismantling as a primary obligation. During the years of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Robeson remained reasonably hopeful that white America would itself recognize the worst aspects of institutionalized racism and work to expunge them. But as the democratic impulses of the New Deal drained off into the intolerance of postwar McCarthyism, his real hope fastened on the ultimate transforming power of international socialism. He never ceased being an American patriot—continuing to believe in the inspirational promise of the country’s principles, if not her practice—but the more white America failed, in the post-World War II years, to stand up for the rights of people of color, the more Robeson grew into a militant spokesman for the world’s oppressed. The country’s failure to set its house in order, to ransom its own promise, brought out in him not—as in so many others—weary acquiescence but, rather, uncompromising anger, a dogged refusal to bow.
    Robeson’s stand endeared him still further to those who shared his politics and his principles, but cost him dearly with the multitude of mainstream Americans who had once been among his admirers. By 1960 his career and health had been broken, his name vilified, his honor—even his good sense—assailed, his image converted by a now hostile establishment from public hero to public enemy. Branded a Soviet apologist, kept under close surveillance by the FBI, his right to travel abroad denied by the State Department and his opportunities to perform at home severely curtailed, deserted by most of the beholden black leadership, Robeson became an outcast, very nearly a nonperson.
    This extraordinary turnabout in what had been one of the great twentieth-century careers is 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. That a man so deeply loved all over the world could evoke in his own country such an outpouring of fear and anger may be the central tragedy—America’s tragedy—of Paul Robeson’s story.

Acknowledgments
    The many Robeson friends who allowed me to interview them, the correspondents who shared firsthand anecdotes, and the owners of privately held manuscript materials who shared them with me are cited in the Note on Sources. That still leaves a large number of acknowledgments to make for a large variety of