Speaking Truth to Power

​Speaking truth to power.
Luke 6:27
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Before there was Malcolm X, before there was Martin Luther King, there was Paul Robeson. Before there was Sidney Poitier, before there was Nina Simone and Oprah Winfrey, there was Paul Robeson. Before there was Jesse Jackson and John Lewis, there was Paul Robeson. And there was only Paul Robeson, a single Everest among the foothills of the early civil rights movement in the first half of the 20th century.
 
Co-existing intimately with hostility of Whites against Blacks, poverty was a stalking horse in the Black communities, and hunger. Whites can only barely discern the desperation of survival behind chapter after chapter of the history books. Along with the growing industries of the 20th century, the suburbs, the leisure class, the creature comforts, the educational palaces, the owner classes built, in effect, a lavish movie set behind which Black people fought gracefully for their survival out of sight. That was Paul’s life, too, even in rural, northern New Jersey.
 
Paul’s life started right in the shadow of slavery. Robeson’s father Drew Robeson, born on a North Carolina plantation, bore the name of his owner. At the age of 15, he escaped with his brother with the help of the Underground Railroad to Philadelphia, in 1860. He migrated slightly north to the northernmost of southern towns of genteel Princeton N.J. where in 1880 he became the minister of a large Black community servant class to the white establishment there. Paul was born (1898) along with six other siblings to Drew and his young wife, Maria Louisa, who died when Paul was 6. Paul’s father lost his pastorate in a controversy over the proper role to their white employers who didn’t approve of his racial justice preaching. He worked odd jobs at the edge of poverty till he found pastorates in Westfield and Somerville N.J. This background is important because the churches he served belonged to the AME Zion denomination (see this image). Paul’s father died when he was 20.
 
The early years taught Paul bitter lessons about surviving in a racist society–absolute deference. But his minister father required of his family that one should maintain one’s dignity with no show of servility. The biblical demand for righteousness and New Testament virtues (as Jesus instructed his listeners in this morning’s lesson) could be honored without either challenging white superiority, which could be literally fatal, or descending to the subhuman, which could be spiritually fatal. Paul added his own survival strength with his charismatic smile and his genuine empathy for people including Whites. But it was a tightrope walk everywhere, as when trying out for the football team at Rutgers he was viciously attacked by his teammates on the field. By the end of the first week, he had a dislocated shoulder, deep bruises, and a mangled hand with fingernails ripped off (Paul Robeson, Jr.). He was enraged at the treatment, but he channeled his anger into running the plays successfully, and it made him a star which whites had reluctantly to concede. This channeling would serve him well his whole life long. It was observed of him that, whereas he would pass over all the little slights to himself that he experienced, privately he would explode in anger over the systemic brutalization of his people he observed every day. This translated into a fearless posture toward the U.S. government and Whites in general as waves of controversies arose while his fame as an actor and singer grew. Robeson never shrank from pointing out America’s treatment of Blacks in interviews or speeches that he gave over 40 years.
 
Paul Robeson’s effectiveness as a lightning rod for racial justice between 1920 and 1960 was due entirely to the interaction of his art and his person and his outspokenness on racial equity. His art compelled admiration, attention, adulation, and transformation. He was irresistible in three different venues–concert hall, theater stage, and film–he cycled back and forth among these as opportunities arose. His voice emanated from a powerful physique (so beautiful sculptors produced nude likeness of him that he posed for), its timbre, range, gravity and intensity were thrilling. But, being Black, the power of his performance was compounded by where, societally, racially, he was coming from. Especially in his film career. At first, he was being used by White producers, and he learned to guard against it. He consciously worked his way from “tragic black hero who is victorious” to “an epic black hero who triumphs over odds” (Paul Robeson, Jr.). His artistry was a vector of the national emotions. Imagine!–whites and Blacks hearing and seeing the same phenomenon differently, and all of them standing on their seats cheering after any performance of his. It’s hard to say what white people thought they were seeing when that Black man appeared on the Broadway stage of “Show Boat” (or film) to sing Ol’ Man River.
We should be wondering–did he make whites identify with the plight of all humanity, caught in the coils of social determinism; did he make whites feel powerless before fate and did that perhaps comfort them; or did they see in that man any reflection at all of white responsibility for the enslaved and their descendants in their midst?
 
Likewise, when Robeson played Othello, the interracial love scenes prompted different reactions in London (where the play’s run in the West End broke records that still stand) than they did in the United States (where the Broadway run broke records for longest playing Shakespeare play that still stands). I think, America experienced, in the transcendent presence of the man, his personally held truth–that Blacks and Whites share the same humanity and the same country. However, although America couldn’t deny it, America couldn’t own it.
 
At the same time, over the same decades, Robeson was also singing for larger audiences for more money as he gravitated toward national and ethnic folk songs projecting a sympathy for workers of all races in their combat against exploitation by their employers. He lived in London for 12 years, from 1928 to 1940, traveling in 1934 to Russia where he was embraced without reserve. He returned frequently because as he said, they don’t know what a Negro is.
 
It certainly didn’t hurt that he was a master of languages and learned to speak and sing in Russian. None of this ingratiated him back home once the U.S. government started battling the Soviet Union in the Cold War and sponsoring the House Un-American Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy. Everything made him a suspect of being a communist, which he was not and he frequently denied, although he found in communists a kindred spirit and formed common cause with them on multiple issues–his support of labor unions and workers, his outrage at the murder of Emmett Till, his vocal support of the African decolonization efforts. He condemned asking Black men to fight for a country they couldn’t even vote in. He was hounded by J. Edgar Hoover, had his passport taken away several times for long periods, and he was second-guessed by his own community who couldn’t afford to come down on the wrong side of Uncle Sam. But, admittedly, Robeson underestimated his political usefulness to the Soviet who sent Kruschev to the UN to bang on the table with his shoe and shout, “We will bury you!” 
 
All this led ultimately to destitution and broken health, just as the Black community were breaking out of the Jim Crow handcuffs, just as Robeson was in decline. All of them took positions he had been outspoken about during the immediately preceding decades.
 
Speaking truth to power is not so easy even when you are the same race and status as the king. Look at Mike Pence’s dilemma and the dozens of others in the Trump Administration who said “No.” But what if you are of another race and status? What are your chances of speaking truth to power and surviving? We’ll never know the number of the enslaved in America who dared raise their voice or fist against the slave owner. Frederick Douglas did and survived, but what a chance he took! Nat Turner had a different fate. James Meredith stood up to George Wallace; so did Medgar Evers and he didn’t survive.
 
And what about Paul Robeson? This magisterial actor/singer earned enormous accolades and sums of money with his performances, he enthralled entire countries including this one, and died in poverty. Curiously, it was the people who made him the equivalent of a Pharaoh against whom no one shall lift up hand or foot–like Joseph, who was prince in a foreign country where nothing was denied to him, Paul was showered with love around the globe. Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find anyone else like this—one in whom is the spirit of God?”
 
However, that didn’t change being Black in America for Paul Robeson. He died in 1976, his funeral was held at his brother’s former church in Harlem, mourned by common people all around the world. He showed that integrity is not only its own reward, it has positive results. The righteous are like trees by the river, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 13, 2022