Paul Robeson's Smile

Abstract

Paul Robeson's Smile Dan Berger (bio) Its pages are tattered and waterlogged, its cover barely intelligible. The smiling figure on the cover has become a victim, a white splotch blocking the joy in his eyes. This special issue of Freedomways celebrating the seventy-three-year-old artist and activist Paul Robeson had been recently published when the Attica Rebellion began on September 9, 1971. By the time investigators collected it as evidence after state troopers violently retook the prison four days later, the journal was, like the men of Attica, weathered and beaten. Freedomways, a "quarterly review of the freedom movement," had been publishing for a decade by the time of the Attica Uprising. At the center of its editorial direction lay legendary Black activists W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Esther Cooper Jackson. Begun as the modern civil rights movement accelerated its impact—the inaugural issue appeared around the time interracial freedom riders braved Southern roadways to challenge segregation—Freedomways bridged generations of Black radicalism. Its founding directors had come of age in earlier periods of struggle, often in tandem with the Communist Party. And the journal remained fiercely internationalist, connecting the civil rights movement to the national liberation struggles or newly independent governments on the African continent.1 Its broad, intergenerational mission was evident in the fall 1971 special issue dedicated to Robeson, "the great forerunner." Robeson, the consummate renaissance man, was nearing the end of his life in 1971. The Freedomways editors wanted to honor his trailblazing efforts invigorating a Black left international.2 In that, Robeson was indeed a forerunner to the Attica revolt. Robeson's booming voice echoed in L. D. Barkley's passionate declaration from D Yard that "we are men! We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of Freedomways magazine featuring image of Paul Robeson. new york state museum collection [End Page 18] as such." It was not just the timber but the content of Robeson's voice that echoed at Attica. When the Attica rebels initially demanded transport to a "non-imperialistic country," they channeled Robeson's commitment to the Third World. Robeson had been chair of the Council on African Affairs in the 1940s.3 He was one of the few U.S. participants of the legendary 1955 Bandung Conference, a gathering of African and Asian liberation movements that outlined a Third World solidarity outside the sphere of either the United States or the Soviet Union. "Peace in Asia is directly linked with the problems of freedom and full sovereign rights for the nations of Asia," Robeson greeted the conference. Surveying the rising tide of anticolonial movements sweeping the African continent, Robeson averred "this is the time of liberation, and Africa too shall shout in freedom and glory."4 The Attica Rebellion embodied Robeson's political presence. Shadows of his towering physique can be spied in Frank "Big Black" Smith, who headed the security detail during the uprising. And his willingness to risk personal safety for collective freedom was the guiding ethos of the uprising. Robeson's promising career as a singer and actor was cut short when he was blacklisted for his radical affiliations. Yet he embraced that sacrifice with a stoic piety. In the same issue of Freedomways found in the rubble of the Attica Rebellion, Robeson described "The People" as "the real guardians of our hopes and dreams."5 Similarly, the Attica rebels saw in their actions—both the uprising itself and the years-long trials and humiliations they were forced to endure afterward—as a commitment to upholding a global vision of emancipation. So, too, did their lawyers, one of whom, an aging veteran of the National Lawyers Guild named Ernest Goodman, had even represented Robeson.6 Robeson was not the only palimpsest at Attica. When police retook the prison, they uncovered a poem of rebellion etched into the walls. "If we must die" it began, and concluded "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back." What a Time journalist described as a "crude but...