Why Jackie Robinson Testified Against Paul Robeson

Six days later, he gives another performance, in Washington, D.C., in Room 226 of the Old House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Senator John Wood, of Ku Klux Klan progeny, then shepherd of the HUAC, had invited him to testify about the “communist infiltration of minority groups,” seemingly evidenced by the interest that Black American figures had demonstrated in the Soviet Union, which had championed racial equality. “The appeal of the Soviet Union to Black Americans could be best seen not through the convoluted rubric of U.S.-Soviet foreign relations, but rather through the political disenfranchisement, daily hardships, and violence of Black life in the United States,” Bryant writes. In the thirties, a cadre of Black artists, including the poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, had been welcomed by the Soviets. But it was no longer the thirties, and the exigency of Negro loyalty had everyone spooked.

Robinson is an “unenthusiastic” witness, Bryant relays, appearing before the committee, which has by then burnished its persecution tactics on “subversives” in Hollywood and beyond. His testimony is a divided text, serving a few different masters, according to Bryant. Having consulted with his wife, Rachel, Robinson tries to moderate the hotheadedness of the committee, citing the Negro plight: “Just because communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of the communist imagination.” But this is not the substance of the speech that sticks. It’s his comments about Robeson that would draw headlines. In April, while Robeson, a global star, was on his way to a concert in Russia, he had attended a convention of leftists in Paris. He had sung “Joe Hill”—the protest song about the eponymous laborer, songwriter, and communist, who was accused of murder in 1914, and executed in Utah the following year. Robeson had also given a speech in Paris condemning the arms race. “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has lifted our people to full dignity,” Robeson reportedly said, according to the Associated Press—a statement that was twisted in the media as an insurrectionary call to Negroes back home. When the HUAC asks Robinson about these remarks, he hedges: if Robeson did make those comments, well, then, “it sounds very silly to me.”

“Silly”—no doubt a Robinson word. If he is an elocutionist, then he is an elocutionist of the unaffected. He would go on to say that Robeson “has a right to his personal views, and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that’s his business and not mine. He’s still a famous ex-athlete and a great singer and actor.” But the testimony doesn’t end there. Later, Robinson declares that Negroes have invested too much in the country’s welfare to “throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass”—a shock of hostile poetry in the testimony. Bryant believes that Robinson did not craft this phrase himself. The writer argues that it has the fingerprints of Robinson’s manager, Branch Rickey, all over it. In the standard Robinson myth of interracial union, Rickey is the progressive innovator—the manager who took the player under his wing and broke the color line of the game. That’s oversimplifying things, Bryant counters. Rickey was also an opportunist and a manipulator; in other words, he was the father figure. A hard-nosed nationalist, and an acquisitive evangelist, he had stock in the expulsion of the anti-imperialists, including Robeson. “Siren song sung in bass,” Bryant argues, could not have been written by anyone but Rickey. The torque of it points to the intensity of his obsession. It is also the phrase that cements Robeson’s fate.

Why would Robinson go along with it? In “Kings and Pawns,” Bryant probes the “dormant Black history” of postwar machinations, overshadowed in our collective consciousness by the sheer momentum of the civil-rights movement. Robinson would have seen himself as a combatant (he was a veteran, and did experience the special mistreatment of the Black soldier) in what was known in the Black press as the “Double V” campaign, meaning the defeat of fascism abroad and of racism at home. This bias toward the future, even at the expense of would-be allies like Robeson—this is why a 2019 article in The Nation frighteningly misrepresents Robinson’s testimony, a moment of a political voice being compromised, as moving, a precursor to the rebellion of Colin Kaepernick against the N.F.L.