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184 Chapter 11 William “Bill” Davis, the American National Exhibit, and U.S. Public Diplomacy  Who are the Negroes in Russia? How did they get there? How are they treated? How do they live? Are they really free?1 —William Davis (1960) In late July 1959, William “Bill” Davis was serving as one of seventy-five guides at the American National Exhibit in Moscow when another black man approached him. Davis was perplexed. He knew the three other black guides and the four black models in his group, but who was this fellow? To Davis’s amazement, it was Robert Ross, a black man from Montana, who had been living in the Soviet Union for over thirty years. Ross was an actor and lecturer.2 But, as Davis would learn, Ross was not alone; many other blacks had gone to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and at least four were still there at the end of the 1950s.3 Davis was determined to learn about these “Negro former Americans and others who were born in Russia ” and to find out whether life was better for them under the U.S. or the Soviet system.4 Continued Davis, “I asked Bob how he earned his living when he was not actually engaged in making a movie. Up to the time, he had not acted in a movie in more than three years. He said he received pay for lecturing to various groups on the life of Negroes in America, and on the ‘struggle’ of Negroes like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois [sic].”5 Ross was doing well. Besides his salary, he tapped into a range of other social benefits as a member of the theatrical workers’ trade union and special friend of the Soviet government. As technical specialist Robert Robinson observed, “[Ross was] the Kremlin’s expert lecturer on social conditions in the United States [and would] host visiting American Blacks . . . [treating] them . . . like dignitaries.”6 He had easy access to any visiting blacks and frequently feted these visitors at his well-appointed apartment. More than mutual gestures of hospitality, these meetings provided Ross with useful information about the country he had left in the 1920s, and the visitors were, for the first time, introduced to the subject of the black diaspora in Soviet Russia. William Davis and U.S. Public Diplomacy 185 Over the two months of Davis’s stay in Moscow, he and Ross met over twelve times. Davis also met three other original sojourners: Robinson, agricultural specialist George Tynes, and Paul Robeson’s brother in-law Frank Goode; and he also met eight descendants, some of whom were children of other black sojourners or expatriates.7 Blacks and the American National Exhibit After World War II, the Cold War made communication between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union difficult. The McCarthy hysteria not only stopped Robeson and Du Bois from traveling to the Soviet Union, but prevented others from doing so as well. It also prevented other forms of communication . However, in the latter part of the 1950s, the climate changed. With McCarthyism discredited and Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” providing for a new openness, people on both sides took steps to remedy the situation. So, not only were Robeson and Du Bois returning to the Soviet Union, but many others—white and black—also wanted to see what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. An exchange of national exhibits gave rise to exchanges and other visits of educators, artists, and other professionals.8 As Walter Hixon noted, the year 1959 itself saw ten thousand to fifteen thousand American citizens taking advantage of these increased opportunities.9 Besides the American National Exhibit staff itself, the larger delegation traveling along with them included a cross-section of journalists and entertainers, some of whom were black. John H. Johnson, the African American publisher of Ebony and Jet, was among them. He had been among the few blacks invited to do a Voice of America segment representing the “other side” of the United States some years before, and he was curious to see the country himself. He asked Russian-speaking Davis to help him meet some of the members of the black expatriate community and commissioned Davis to do a piece for Ebony.10 The American National Exhibit organizers were eager to show a specific kind of United States to the Soviets. The exhibit would demonstrate “Western ideas...

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