“I Got a Home in That Rock”: Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand and Cold War Resistance to McCarthyism

Mid-century anticommunists denounced African American public intellectual Paul Robeson as red and un-American; Robeson’s retort, the autobiography Here I Stand, aims to “set the record straight,” a response to the accusations’ gendered subtext. Attending to his creation of cultural authenticity and intelligibility through a performance of heterosexual, black masculinity reveals Robeson’s Cold War resistance.

In October 1945, African American singer, artist, public intellectual, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was awarded the prestigious NAACP Spingarn Medal, the highest distinction annually presented by the organization to members of the African American community for outstanding cultural and political achievements. In the same year, Howard University granted Robeson an honorary degree. It was to be the height of Robeson’s fame (Duberman 294–95). Robeson entered public notice as an All-American football player in his college days at Rutgers and became one of the highest paid and most distinguished actors and singers in the United States and worldwide. But 1945 also marked the onset of Robeson’s troubles with the anticommunist Cold War establishment. His speech at the Spingarn Medal reception caused confusion among the guests when Robeson attacked the pro-colonialist tendencies of American foreign policy and praised the Soviet Union for its non-discriminatory race politics (299–301).

Robeson was an outspoken public intellectual who challenged racism in the United States and colonialism in Africa and Asia, and who advocated peace with the Soviet Union. His political and personal difficulties intensified with the beginning of the Cold War and the rise of McCarthyism in post-World War II US culture. He became increasingly the focus of McCarthyite anticommunist repression during a time when Communism came to signify everything other, and in a place where anticommunist discourse had power to contain this otherness. It didn’t matter whether its (leftist) victims were actual card-carrying members of the Communist Party of the United States, the CPUSA, or not. By 1950, in the wake of Robeson’s infamous and often-misquoted 1949 Paris Peace Conference Speech—in which he allegedly stated that it was “unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war” against the USSR (qtd. in Duberman 342)—and after two concert appearances at Peekskill in the same year that led to outbreaks of anticommunist violence against concertgoers, Robeson was firmly entrenched in the minds of most Americans as a Communist and as un-American.¹ His steadfast refusal to “sing” and simply to “go on being Paul Robeson,” as The New York Times called it in a 1949 editorial (qtd. in Cygan 87), led him to become one of the most vilified African American public intellectuals in US early-Cold War culture: for the State Department, he became at least discursively “one of the most dangerous men in the world” (qtd. in Duberman 433). Likewise, in many hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Robeson symbolized how loyal and patriotic African American citizens were not supposed to behave. Denouncing Robeson in this way became a loyalty test for African Americans testifying in front of the Committee (Navasky 187); that is, these individuals could pledge their allegiance to capitalism, freedom, and the American way of life by rejecting Robeson, thereby participating in what Anthony Perucci calls the “Paul Robeson myth as a mode of disciplining blacks in Cold War culture” (“Tonal Treason” 146).²

In 1958, the year Robeson published Here I Stand, McCarthyism was declining, but Robeson’s image was far from being fully rehabilitated. When Here I Stand was published, Robeson was still ostracized from the African American community, had been stripped of his passport and of the right to travel and perform abroad, and had lost large parts of his audience in the US. The publication of the book helped to improve his image within the black American community. Although white mainstream publications ignored Here I Stand (The New York Times did not even list it in its “Books Out Today” section), the leftist press and most African American newspapers reviewed the...