Paul Robeson and the Black Press: The 1950 Passport Controversy

Abstract

In late July of 1950, acting on orders from J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents in New York City set out to find Paul Robeson, ordinarily a highly visible figure. After searching for several days they managed to contact him by phone, and he agreed to meet them at a St. Nicholas Avenue apartment. When they arrived, Robeson was there along with his lawyer, who established a formal tone by asking to see their identification. The agents then told Robeson what he already knew--that the State Department had canceled his passport and they had come to pick it up. The actor replied that he did not have it with him, but offered to meet them the following morning to turn it over--something he had no intention of doing. (1) If you set out to explore the early years of the Cold War through a drama of individual experience--the kind of thing Michael Frayn did for the development of atomic weapons in his play, Copenhagen--you might choose the encounter described above as the opening scene. This was the point at which agents of the world's most powerful nation acted to keep the world's most famous man from traveling overseas to speak on equality for people of color, the rights of workers, world peace, the merits of Soviet Russia, and the ills of colonialism. (2) Eight years and numerous lawsuits later the U.S. Government issued Robeson a new passport, but the ordeal took its toll on him professionally, politically, and personally. The scene in the St. Nicholas Avenue apartment meets the classical requirement that a drama begin in medias res. Consider the situation beyond Harlem in 1950. Abroad, China had been lost to the communists; Russia had successfully tested its first atomic bomb; most pointedly, U.S. troops were newly engaged in a conflict, attempting to save South Korea from domination by communist North Korea. At home, Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the top of his form. Hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee mesmerized the public. And unknown to most citizens, the Office of Policy Coordination, an unpublicized arm of the National Security Council, had embarked on a program of psychological warfare, with activities ranging from covert operations abroad to control of information sources at home. (3) The Cold War had found its trajectory. What witchcraft had been to seventeenth-century Salem, communism was to the post-World War II U.S.--a source of fear and a weapon to enforce conformity. The cancellation of Paul Robeson's passport made headlines. Letters supporting him poured in from Sweden, Norway, England, Wales, Scotland, Australia, Czechoslovakia, and Colombia. The communist press objected loudly. (4) But the newspapers of the US., that had praised Robeson's successes and applauded his efforts on behalf of civil rights and organized labor, against lynching, fascism, and colonialism, handled the continuing story on the whole with silence and ambiguity--a response that raises questions. This article examines the Robeson passport case, and particularly the press coverage, as a manifestation of the Cold War and the accompanying mentality that gripped the nation at that time. To begin with, I will outline the series of actions by Robeson that drew attention to him as a possible threat to national security. Then I will examine in some detail the coverage by newspapers immediately after the cancellation. My premise is that newspapers both shape and reflect the ideas of their readers, and that this was particularly evident in the African American press during and just after World War II, when journalism enjoyed what historian Brenda Gayle Plummer calls its 'golden age.' She writes that black newspapers in that era [the late 1940s and 1950s] still had a limited advertising base and a somewhat captive market. Their relative independence from sanctions and reprisals from whites proved to be the most important factor in allowing them to unequivocally condemn the political victimiza tion of dissidents and urge immediate action on the racial front. …