Kings and Pawns

Howard Bryant examines a largely overlooked chapter of mid-20th-century Black history: the intertwined fates of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, two of the most prominent Black Americans of their era, placed in public opposition during the early Cold War. Bryant anchors his analysis in W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness," the tension identified by the pioneering Black scholar between being both Black and American in a segregated society. He argues that Robinson and Robeson served as early prototypes of a figure still visible today: the prominent Black entertainer as national political spokesperson. The standard narrative of baseball integration, Bryant contends, was constructed through the perspective of Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey and collapses once Robeson's story is excavated.

The book opens in December 1949, with Robinson at the apex of his career: newly named National League Most Valuable Player, living with his family in the integrated Queens neighborhood of St. Albans. Five months earlier, Robinson had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional body investigating alleged communist subversion, publicly opposing the political views of Paul Robeson, the legendary bass-baritone singer, actor, and former college football star who was once the most famous Black man in the country. Bryant traces the forces that led to that confrontation and its consequences.

Robeson's rise began decades earlier. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, to a father who had escaped slavery, he became a two-time All-American football player at Rutgers, a Columbia Law School graduate, and an international concert and stage star. In August 1942, he performed in Othello, becoming the first Black man to play Shakespeare's Moor in an interracial cast on American soil and challenging the longstanding tradition of white actors performing the role in blackface. The Broadway production ran for 296 performances, a Shakespeare record.

While Robeson electrified the stage, the push to integrate baseball gained momentum. In December 1943, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis invited a delegation of Black publishers, along with Robeson, to address team owners at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. Meeting transcripts, made public for the first time in 2017, reveal that Landis used Robeson to validate baseball's denial of a color line, introducing him as a man who "has not been fooled by the propaganda that there is an agreement in this crowd of men to bar Negroes from Baseball" (33). Robeson appealed to wartime patriotism and received sustained applause, but the meeting produced no action. The sole exception was Rickey, who interrupted the proceedings to seek clarity on the integration question, an exchange Bryant interprets as the first evidence of Rickey's intention to break the color barrier.

Landis died in November 1944, and Rickey moved toward integration under mounting pressure, including New York's Ives-Quinn Act outlawing job discrimination. On October 23, 1945, he signed Robinson to a minor-league contract with the Montreal Royals. The owners reacted with fury. A secret owners' committee issued a report arguing that Black players would attract Black fans, whose presence would repel white ticket buyers. Robinson dominated the International League in 1946, but Rickey kept him in the minors for the entire season. Before Robinson's 1947 promotion, Rickey warned Black community leaders that the greatest obstacle to Robinson's success would be "the Negro people themselves!" (76). Bryant notes that no record exists of Rickey challenging white owners or the white public to exercise similar restraint. Robinson's debut season brought racist verbal attacks, hotel refusals, and teammate boycott threats. He won the Rookie of the Year award, but the toll was severe; by Opening Day 1953, more than half of baseball's 16 teams had still never fielded a Black player.

As Robinson's star rose, the government escalated its campaign against Robeson. The FBI had surveilled him since 1941. In September 1946, Robeson led a delegation to President Truman seeking a federal anti-lynching bill, prompted by the brutal beating and blinding of Isaac Woodard, a Black Army veteran. When Robeson challenged Truman on American hypocrisy, the president abruptly ended the meeting. Meanwhile, Alvin Stokes, an ambitious Black staffer at the Bergen County Sheriff's Office, convinced his congressman, anticommunist Republican J. Parnell Thomas, to let him investigate Black organizations for communist infiltration. Over two years, Stokes cultivated the Dodgers, appealing to Rickey's anticommunism, to deliver Robinson to Washington.

In April 1949, Robeson addressed the World Congress of Partisans of Peace in Paris. An Associated Press dispatch reported he said American Negroes would refuse to fight against the Soviet Union. Robeson maintained he was misquoted, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Walter White and Roy Wilkins, launched a coordinated attack. Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin recalled the consensus among Black leaders: "We have to prove that we're patriotic" (115). On July 8, HUAC announced Robinson had been invited to "give the lie" to Robeson. Rickey insisted Robinson testify. Robeson sent Robinson a letter seeking to prevent a public clash, but Robinson did not respond.

Robinson testified on July 18, 1949. Rachel Robinson had rejected earlier drafts written by Rickey's assistant Arthur Mann and by Rickey himself, and the couple turned to civil rights leader Lester Granger for help with the final version. Robinson used most of his statement to indict American racism, police brutality, and lynching rather than attack Robeson directly. He dismissed Robeson's reported Paris remarks as silly but acknowledged Robeson's right to his views, adding that the words sounded like "a siren song sung in bass" (142). National coverage reprinted Robinson's criticisms of Robeson while largely omitting his indictment of American racism.

The fallout was polarizing. White America hailed Robinson as a hero, but the Baltimore Afro-American warned he was being used as a pawn. Weeks later, veterans groups attacked a Robeson fundraising concert in Peekskill, New York, burning a cross and injuring concertgoers before Robeson could perform. A second concert on September 4 proceeded under protection, but rioters stoned departing vehicles and attacked audience members, injuring dozens more.

The systematic erasure of Robeson from public life followed. His name disappeared from record books, sports histories, and children's literature. The State Department canceled his passport in June 1950, and his annual income dropped from an estimated $104,000 to roughly $2,000. Rickey, meanwhile, shaped Robinson into a Cold War anticommunist figure through a propaganda film and right-wing organizational memberships. On June 12, 1956, a physically diminished Robeson returned to Washington for a combative final hearing before HUAC. He invoked the Fifth Amendment repeatedly but used the forum to deliver a sweeping indictment, telling the committee that his father "was a slave, and my people died to build this country" (212). Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Kent v. Dulles that the government could not require noncommunist affidavits for passports, restoring Robeson's freedom to travel.

Robinson retired after the 1956 season. Freed from the sport, he threw himself into civil rights but made costly political missteps, including supporting Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. In Wait Till Next Year (1960), he displayed an evolved respect for Robeson, admitting he lacked the experience to say what he "really wanted to say about communism" (240) and acknowledging that Rickey had pushed him to testify. By the late 1960s, Robinson had broken with Nixon and the Republican Party, opposing the Vietnam War that Robeson had warned against decades earlier. Diabetes left him nearly blind. Robinson died on October 24, 1972, at age 53. Robeson died on January 23, 1976, after years of seclusion and declining health. In a 1976 interview, Rachel Robinson called the HUAC testimony one of Jackie's two major mistakes, alongside supporting Nixon, acknowledging they had received "bad advice" and that Robinson was "at that time very patriotic, his-country-right-or-wrong" (273). Bryant concludes that the two men, pitted against each other in life, were in death no longer adversaries.