The Martin Duberman Reader (17 page)

David made it clear to Barbara that he'd never laid claim to being “an orthodox feminist,” and insisted, probably accurately, that “very few groups have taken feminism as seriously as WRL,” in which both were members, and the radical
WIN
magazine, for which both wrote. Barbara remained unpersuaded: “I used to feel listened to, there at the League,” she responded, “but the painful truth I'm trying to speak is that now that I'm a feminist, I
don't
feel listened to.” She spelled that out more fully in a one-page piece she entitled “Should We Be Alarmed?” Although many whites, she wrote, “took part in the black struggle, and paid close attention to the words of black leaders, men on the Left have paid no comparable attention to the words of feminists. They may speak up for the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment then pending, which would ultimately fail to win over a sufficient number of states, but—here Barbara repeated an earlier charge—they don't read any of “the many extraordinary books feminists have written over the past few years.”

Since Barbara had already recycled those charges several times (which didn't mean they weren't true), the repetition got David's dander up. He replied that, speaking only for himself, he had too little time to read more than a few books, “often mysteries written by women (but not by the right kind of women—I know).” Then he, too, repeated a stale charge that Barbara had already answered—that she'd “chosen a separatist road.” In the face of that charge, Barbara remained comparatively calm, but she did insist that David was making “assumptions about what it is that I believe which are inaccurate.” (He'd also again accused her of wanting to restore, assuming it had ever existed, “matriarchy” and of believing that men and women had essentially different natures.)

Since she'd earlier refuted those interpretations, Barbara settled for citing some of her published essays that had argued the opposite. She concentrated instead on David's charge that she was a separatist. “I have never given myself that name,” she wrote him. “Yes, I do feel strongly that
for a time
women must talk above all among
ourselves.” But she assured him that she had
not
abandoned her old comrades: “Many of the actions I have taken and the actions WRL has taken have been the same actions. Do I repudiate my past? I do not. I will always be proud that we took those actions. And many actions indeed”—like protesting nuclear proliferation and demanding unilateral disarmament—that “we still take in unison.” David, in turn, also tried to turn down the heat and to emphasize instead their commonalities. That marked the end of their latest quarrel. Another round of recriminations had ended. The friendship held.

—from
A Saving Remnant
(2011)

BIOGRAPHY

Robeson experienced overt racism less often when he entered high school in 1912 than most teenage black males, but the subtler variety—the kind that allowed him, through practice and forewarning, to keep his temper under wraps—was more frequent. A distinct social line was drawn. He often walked to and from school with a white girl in his class, but she acknowledges (“There never really was an occasion to ask him in”) that he never entered her house. Though everyone was “very nice to Paul” and Paul in turn was famously nice to everyone, he and his classmates didn't exactly “pal around” together. As one of his teachers put it, “He is the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can't forget that he is a Negro.” Another of his teachers did urge him to attend high-school parties and dances, but Paul himself knew better. “There was always the feeling,” he later wrote, “that—well, something unpleasant might happen.” Yet a third teacher applauded Paul's discretion: he remained an “amazingly popular boy” because “he had the faculty for always knowing what is so commonly referred to as his ‘place.' ” Early habituated to solitude, Paul would all his life seek it, deeply marked in the eyes of some by the melancholy
of confirmed apartness. Yet he would never be a true loner. Unwilling ever to live by himself, he would prefer later in life to sleep on a friend's sofa rather than to stay alone. His ideal situation would always be to have loving friends in near proximity, but to be able to retreat at will to an inner monastic fortress.

He learned early that accomplishment can win respect and applause but not full acceptance—although he tried to follow the established protective tactic of African American life in America: to “act right,” to exhibit maximum affability and minimal arrogance. Even while turning in a superior performance, he had to pretend it was average and that it had been accomplished offhand, almost absentmindedly. Any overt challenge to the “natural supremacy” of whites had to be avoided, and on any occasion when whites were surpassed, the accompanying spirit could never smack of triumph. “Above all,” Robeson later wrote, as if repeating a litany drummed into his head by his father, “do nothing to give them cause to fear you, for then the oppressing hand, which might at times ease up a little, will surely become a fist to knock you down again!”

This balancing act required enormous self-control. Robeson could safely stay on one side of the exceedingly fine line that separated being superior from acting superior only by keeping the line in steady focus. The effort contributed to the development of an acute set of antennae that he retained all his life—he later told a reporter that he could size someone up immediately, could sense, when introduced to a stranger, “what manner of man he is,” regardless of the words he spoke. But having to maintain constant self-control took its emotional toll. “I wish I could be sweet all the time,” he once said when under intense pressure, “but I get a little mad, man, get a little angry, and when I get angry I can be awful rough.” No young man of Robeson's energetic gifts could continuously sustain a posture of bland friendliness without the effort's exacting some revenge—especially since his father had also taught him to be true to himself. The tension was further heightened by a lifetime conviction that “in comparison to most Negroes” he had had an easy time of it growing up in white America, and complaint
might appear, even to other blacks, as ungrateful and unwarranted. He preferred to “keep silent,” a tactic for coping with emotional distress that he maintained throughout his life. As an adult he could never reflect with ease on his youth, once confessing to a friend that, when he did recall some of his experiences, they only “aroused intense fury and conflict within him.”

Robeson's natural talents were so exceptional that he had to make a proportionately large effort in order to forestall resentment in others. He learned early: even as a boy he is remembered as “a shy kid who did everything well, but preferred to keep in the background.” Had his warmth and modesty not been quite so engaging, the astonishing record he compiled at Somerville High might well have stirred more fear and envy. Several of his classmates swore he never took a book home at night—even as Paul sat each evening under his father Reverend William Drew Robeson's rigorous eye reviewing the day's lessons in Virgil and Homer. He was wise enough to appear occasionally less than thoroughly prepared, or to use humor to “take the teachers on a bit, in a nice way.” Even so, one classmate confessed, “He used to get my goat, everything seemed so easy to him.”

Indeed it did—in athletics especially. Robeson excelled in every sport he attempted. In baseball he played the positions of shortstop and catcher with equal facility, ran fast, and hit well. In basketball—in those days essentially a guarding game—his height and dexterity made him “good at stopping a man.” He also ran track and (after school) played a fair game of tennis. But it was his skill as a fullback in football that gained him the most attention. Paul “had such a big strong hand,” one contemporary said, that “he could almost wrap [it] around a football [somewhat rounder than the modern ball] and throw that thing just like a baseball.”

Envy of such prowess (especially in someone of his race) did occasionally surface. In a game against the superior team of Phillipsburg High (known as “a rough bunch of kids” and outweighing Somerville ten pounds to a man), the opposition “lay for him” and piled on—but the attack energized him and he scored a touchdown;
still, “handicapped by the work of officials” (as the local paper put it), Somerville lost “the greatest game ever played” on the Phillipsburg grounds. Paul's father was often on hand for the games. A contemporary recalls that “he would keep his eyes upon Paul through every second of play.” Far from disapproving of sports, he wanted his son to distinguish himself in that area, as in all others—and stood on the sidelines to remind him that, should adversity arise, he had to resist both the sin of lashing out and the sin of stunting his purpose.

In 1915, the seventeen-year-old Robeson took a statewide written exam for a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University. His family preferred all-black Lincoln University, from which both his father and his brother Bill had graduated, but the strain on his father's limited income made the possibility of a scholarship appealing. Besides, Paul himself did not prefer Lincoln. As his teacher Anna Miller recalled, “Several of the Negro colleges were suggested to him, but Paul had his heart set on a large school, and no hints as to the difficulties he might encounter on that path could daunt him. . . . ‘I don't want to have things handed to me,' he declared. ‘I don't want it made easy.' ” The other students competing for the Rutgers scholarship had previously taken a test covering their first three years of high school; not knowing of the test in time, Robeson had to sit an exam that included the entire four-year course of work. Nonetheless, he won the competition. “Equality might be denied,” he later wrote, “but I knew I was not inferior.”

William Drew Robeson had passed on to his son an intricate strategy for survival. He had taught him to reject the automatic assumption that all whites are malignant, to react to individuals, not to a hostile white mass. At the same time, he knew the extent of white hostility—he had, after all, been born a slave—and he counseled his son to adopt a gracious, amenable exterior while awaiting the measure of an individual white person's trustworthiness. But he was no Uncle Tom; Paul was constantly reminded of his “obligation to the race,” constantly reminded of its plight. Taught to be firm in his dedication to freeing his people, Paul was also taught to avoid
gratuitous grandstanding. His job was to protest and to stay alive; outright rebellion against a slave system was as suicidal as subservient capitulation to it.

Founded in 1766, Rutgers was one of the country's oldest colleges; yet in 1915, when Robeson entered, it was still a private school with fewer than five hundred students, bearing scant resemblance to the academic colossus it subsequently became. Prior to the Civil War, Rutgers had denied admittance to African Americans (Princeton continued to refuse them admission until World War II), and only two had officially attended the school before Robeson—though rumor had it that an additional few had in another sense “passed” through its portals. The year after Robeson entered, a second black student, Robert Davenport, enrolled, and “Davvy” and “Robey” (as they were known during their undergraduate years) became good friends, joining a scattering of other black collegians from the Philadelphia–Trenton–New York corridor to form a social circle. They would need each other.

Robeson's path at Rutgers was centrally defined by his race, though not—thanks to his own magnetism and talent—circumscribed by it. The simple fact of his dark skin was sufficient to bring down on him a predictable number of indignities, but his own settled self-respect kept them from turning into disabling wounds.

When freshman Robeson walked onto the practice field to try out for Rutgers football, the team had no blacks on it—indeed, like almost every other top-ranked college, Rutgers had never in its history had a black player. The “giant's” reputation had preceded him. Rutgers coach G. Foster Sanford had seen him play for Somerville and had been duly impressed. The Rutgers first-stringers had also heard about Robey's athletic prowess—and skin color. Several of them set out to prevent him from making the team. On the first day of scrimmage, they piled on, leaving Robeson with a broken nose (which troubled him ever after as a singer), a sprained right shoulder, and assorted cuts and bruises. He could hardly limp off the field. That night (as Robeson described the incident thirty years
later) “a very, very sorry boy” had to take to bed and stay there for ten days to repair his wounds. “It was tough going” for a seventeen-year-old and “I didn't know whether I could take any more.” But his father had impressed upon him that “when I was out on a football field, or in a classroom, or anywhere else, I was not there just on my own. I was the representative of a lot of Negro boys who wanted to play football and wanted to go to college, and, as their representative, I had to show I could take whatever was handed out. . . . Our father wouldn't like to think that our family had a quitter in it.”

Robeson went back out for another scrimmage. This time a varsity player brutally stomped on his hand. The bones held, but Robeson's temper did not. On the next play, as the first-string back-field came toward him, Robeson, enraged with pain, swept out his massive arms, brought down three men, grabbed the ball carrier, and raised him over his head—“I was going to smash him so hard to the ground that I'd break him right in two”—and was stopped in the nick of time by a yell from Coach Sanford. Robeson was never again roughed up—that is, by his own teammates. Sanford, a white New Englander committed to racial equality as well as to football prowess, issued a double-barreled communiqué: Robey had made the team, and any player who tried to injure him would be dropped from it. But it was only gradually that Sanford's attitude came to be adopted.