Paul Robeson Read Free

letter-writer and diarist, Essie tended to save, even to hoard, every scrap. Paul was the temperamental opposite. He had no instinct for “collecting” and scant interest in recording his own thoughts and feelings. To a remarkable—and, for a biographer, disheartening—degree, he avoided putting pen to paper. Except for some brief shorthand notes made at a few points in his life, he kept no diary. And he disliked writing letters; indeed, his avoidance of correspondence became something of a joke (and occasionally a source of recrimination) to his friends. The Archives contains hundreds and hundreds of pages of Robeson’s musical notations, his markings on film and theater scripts, and, for the period of the mid-thirties, some lengthy, valuable discursive ruminations on Africa. But of more private matters there is almost nothing, no substantial enough record of his personal response to individuals (or even to such critical public events as Khrushchev’s revelations to the Twentieth Party Congress) to allow a scholar to track his emotional life with retrospective confidence.
    His antipathy to keeping a personal record has been the chief stumbling block to this biography, and especially to any effort at probing his inner life. Time and again, the material in the Robeson Archives consists of Essie’s, rather than Paul’s, jottings and musings. Since they were very different people, often at odds emotionally and politically, her account can hardly be taken as an accurate reflection of his. Yet, in the absence of other material, I have sometimes had to use Essie’s letters and diary (especially for the period of the twenties) as the chief sources for a given event. In doing so, I’ve tried to remain alert to the danger of equating her attitude with his—and have periodically alerted the reader as well (see, for example, note 43, page 601; note 38, page 624; note 41, pages 644–45). Robeson’s refusal to leave behind a detailed record of his own is consonant with his temperament. Accurately described by one of his close friends as “a man with a thousand pockets,” he disliked the notion of anyone’s being able to rummage through them all, to pierce the secretiveness he came to regard as necessary protection.
    Since the Robeson Archives is heavily weighted with material Essie Robeson herself accumulated or wrote, I’ve attempted to leaven that bias by interviewing some 135 friends and associates of Robeson’s and by reading widely in other manuscript collections. Finally, nothing can substitutefor Robeson’s own voice (nor can any amount of scholarly diligence invent one), but the interviews have thickened the number of perspectives on him, and the supplementary manuscript sources have yielded much additional material about him (and even a few supplementary letters by him)—as well as enriching the general contextual background. Below is a full listing of interviewees, followed by the manuscript sources consulted other than the Robeson Family Archives itself.
    People Interviewed
    James Aronson
    Peggy Ashcroft
    Etta Moten Barnett
    Cedric Belfrage
    Mirel Bercovici
    Rada Bercovici
    Eubie Blake
    Charles L. Blockson
    Leonard Boudin
    Anne Braden
    Geri Branton
    Fredda Brilliant
    Oscar Brown, Jr.
    Oscar Brown, Sr.
    Margaret Burroughs
    Alan Bush
    Angus Cameron
    Lee Cayton
    Revels Cayton
    Frances Quiett Challenger
    Si-lan Chen
    Alice Childress
    Herbert E. Cohen
    Gertrude Cunningham
    Peggy Dennis
    Freda Diamond
    Earl Dickerson
    Hazel Ericson Dodge
    Bess Eitingon
    Inger McCabe Elliot
    Emma Epps
    Howard Fast
    Andrew Faulds
    Max Fink
    Ishmael Flory
    Moe Foner
    Harry Francis
    Milton Friedman
    Indira Gandhi
    John Gates
    Nina Goodman (Mrs. Ben Davis, Jr.)
    Sally Gorton (Mrs. Rockwell Kent)
    Joseph Gould
    Victor Grossman
    Bonnie Bird Gundlach
    Uta Hagen
    John Hammond
    Ollie Harrington
    Dorothy Healey
    Jean Herskovits
    Lena Horne
    Micki Hurwitt
    Jean Blackwell Hutson
    C. L.