Howard Bryant is an authoritative, prizewinning writer of many books on race and sports in America, including one on Branch Rickey. It was Rickey who, to his everlasting credit, in 1945 hired Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization and put him on the field on April 15, 1947, integrating major league baseball. (Bryant has a great deal to say about the racism in baseball; integration was, team by team, slow and ugly.)
Robinson of course was a superstar: rookie of the year in 1946, Most Valuable Player in the NL in 1949 and so on. His number, 42, is retired forever in all of baseball. He was the most famous Black man in America.
The other subject of this book, however, is less well known today—and that is shocking. Paul Robeson, born in 1898, was an All-American football player for Rutgers, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. Robeson played professional football and held a law degree from Columbia.
A multi-talented man, Robeson, a bass-baritone, performed to sold-out houses. He also became a world-famous actor starring in O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and then broke an American theatrical color line by playing Othello opposite a white actress. He was perhaps the most famous Black American of HIS time.
Despite these seemingly parallel lives, these two giants never met in person, but there was a powerful, unfortunate connection, Cold War politics, which is the centerpiece of Bryant’s study. Robeson was an early and vociferous advocate for civil rights, furious at the racism in America and a believer in the Soviet communist system. He was particularly irate at the rotten treatment given returning Black veterans in both world wars.
A Black man in uniform should have been a symbol of patriotism and love of country and thus given respect, advancing the dissolution of Jim Crow. But, in fact, the sight enraged bigots and there were many violent, even murderous, incidents, including one in Aliceville and one in Montgomery.
In Paris, in April of 1949, at the height of the Second Red Scare and anti-communist fervor, Robeson was misquoted as saying that it was “unthinkable” that American Negroes “would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations.”
Branch Rickey, a staunch anti-communist, then persuaded Robinson to appear at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, declaring Black Americans’ patriotism, essentially denouncing Robeson. The state department, unlawfully, took away Robeson’s passport for nine years.
A Republican, later a Nixon supporter, and not yet a civil rights activist, Jackie Robinson had helped Hoover and the FBI destroy Robeson’s career. Robinson later joined the Movement and regretted his statement but, Bryant assures us, one Black King had been used as a pawn to discredit another.
