By C. James and Bill Silver
The late Harry Belafonte once referred to Robeson as “one of our kings.” How, then, could a king become so obscure, especially to his own people?” —Howard Bryant
In Kings and Pawns (Mariner Books, January 2026), Howard Bryant, the author of several books about baseball and racism, skillfully shows how the lives of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson collided in 1949, with Robinson becoming a “pawn’’ of the ruling class and their media minions during the Cold War.
The “collision’’ was the product of two interconnected events. The first was a speech made by Paul Robeson at the Paris Peace Conference on April 20, 1949. Robeson— a superstar football player, world-renowned stage performer opera singer, self-declared socialist, and “fellow traveler” in the orbit of the US Communist Party—was world-renowned for his cultural achievements and political activism. As reported by the Associated Press, Robeson in his 1949 speech said it was “unthinkable” for Black Americans to “go to war” against the Soviet Union “on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations.”
This demanded a response from the powers that be, and who did they recruit to repudiate Robeson? Jackie Robinson. Yes, the most famous Black athlete in the US who broke baseball’s color line at great personal sacrifice to himself and his family. So, in late 1949, the second critical event occurred. Robinson, at the request and insistence of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who had brought him into the major leagues, agreed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating “communist infiltration.” Robinson told HUAC that Robeson’s remarks were “silly” and “unpatriotic,” and he set out to clearly separate himself from Robeson, who was probably at the time the most famous African American in the U.S. and most parts of the world—yet today little remembered.
Evaluating Jackie Robinson’s Legacy: Capitulator, Patriot, or Pawn?
So, why did Robinson do it? Was he a capitulator yielding to state pressure, an American “patriot” who genuinely disagreed with Robeson’s pro-Soviet rhetoric, or a pawn caught between powerful forces?” According to Bryant, he was simply a pawn:
The biggest reason he found himself pitted against Robeson is due to his employer, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the man responsible for integrating the big leagues with Robinson in 1947. Rickey pressured and implored Robinson to appear. Jackie really felt a responsibility and loyalty to Rickey, though in his memoir he said he testified because he did not want the white allies who were sympathetic to civil rights to abandon that fight if they felt that Black citizens were disloyal to the United States…
Years later, Rickey again showed his true colors when he said that baseball’s reserve clause, tying a player to one team for life, was only opposed by those with “avowed communist tendencies.”
How did history judge Jackie Robinson? Robinson himself, as of 1960, “revisited his HUAC testimony” and according to Bryant, stated in his own book Wait Till Next Year that “I knew that many Negroes welcomed Robeson’s remarks, not because of disloyalty…but because they feared white America would never grant the Negro a position of equality simply out of a sense of justice and decency.” While Robinson never said he regretted testifying against Robeson, he did say that if asked again to testify, he would refuse.
Four months after the March on Washington in 1963, Malcolm X still was not buying Robinson’s logic or second thoughts. Malcolm wrote:
They (the White Man) sought desperately to find another Negro who would be dumb enough to champion their bankrupt “white” cause against Paul Robeson—a man who took a “brilliant stand” questioning the intelligence of Negroes fighting to defend a country that treated them with such open contempt and bestial brutality. You let them use you to destroy Paul Robeson.
Yet following Robinson’s death in 1972, Bryant also notes that the Black Panther Party remembered Robinson as:
...a man who refused to see Black people denied or exploited in the field of sports. To many he was a “Tom,” to some a lost man. The BPP believes that his contributions were great, his courage undeniable…the contributions to the total liberation of Black and all oppressed people have been many from all segments of the Black community…and we remember Jackie Robinson.
These two perspectives—Malcolm X’s and the BPP’s—point to divergent interpretations of Jackie Robinson across the different periods of his life and the changing contours of this country’s political landscape.
Bryant is insightful here but also somewhat frustrating—addressing these divergent interpretations without really staking out a position. He writes:
…it was just so representative of this question that African Americans are constantly having [to deal with] and we have to this day about belonging and about patriotism and about that twoness, that ability to, one, be patriotic and feel like you are part of this country while at the same time living in at that time a segregated society and all of the forces that sort of came to it…The complacency that we have today is very, very similar to the complacency that people felt back then [was] that we still believed in our institutions, and the institutions would save us and that common sense would prevail.
The Unanswered Question: How the Ruling Class Erased Paul Robeson
The bigger question to us in reading this book is: how could the erasure of the most famous Black person in the United States become so all encompassing? Excellent biographies on Robeson by Martin Duberman and Paul Robeson Jr. had little to say about this erasure.
Bryant’s book does a good job of tracing how Robinson’s testimony, coupled with an extensive smear campaign, legal repression, the complete denial of work opportunities, and organized violent mobs that twice tried to kill Robeson at his rallies in Peeksville, New York, deeply wounded Robeson both personally and politically.
And without a doubt, Robeson’s close ties to the Soviet Union in the midst of a mushrooming cold war had a large bearing on the ruling class’s concerted, successful effort to “disappear” him. Just as important was their ability to threaten many careers in order to eliminate Robeson’s name from public view and discussion. Bryant notes that even legendary poets and writers on the radical left such as Langston Hughes and David Halperstam sacrificed Robeson during this period to “protect” their careers and reputations. Facing subpoenas from HUAC, they did this by eliminating Robeson’s name from their stories, poems, and speeches. Hughes, at the time a world-famous African American poet, had previously collaborated with Robeson to have him record and present on multiple occasions Hughes’ famous poem “Freedom Train.”
Come the late 1970s and 1980s, Bryant writes that “America did not want to talk about race anymore, except within a conservative movement committed to dismantling civil rights gains…” Unfortunately, that is where Bryant leaves it. He does not deal with the consciousness and historical memory of the masses of African Americans in any serious way. Bryant does turn briefly to W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,’’ something Du Bois wrote about regarding the “souls of Black folk’’ in 1903. Du Bois’s analysis could have shed light on a lot of unanswered questions, but unfortunately, Bryant never deepens or updates this important theory vis-a-vis Robeson and Robinson.
The ideological processes that allowed the ruling class’s stunning achievement, while not within the scope of this most worthwhile book, are a critical, missing part of this story. The book could have included something, even something short, involving this idea of ideological domination, or even a slight digression to juxtapose two similar, more recent examples of ruling class retribution directed at outspoken black athletes: Muhammed Ali and Colin Kaepernick. Both athletes had quite different outcomes that would, in turn, highlight two differences. One was the power of the civil rights and Black Lives Matter movements and the raised consciousness of people inspired by those movements. Secondly, Ali and Kaepernick were both able to continue the struggle despite the threat of prison and the impact on their careers. Ali, whose passport was not revoked like Robeson’s, fought boxing matches around the world after being banned in the US and won massive supporters in this country who supported his refusal to fight in the Vietnam war and his stand for justice and equality for African Americans. Kaepernick, a successful NFL quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the national anthem before his games to protest racial injustice and police brutality. Despite every team subsequently refusing to sign him, Kaepernick was able to successfully sue the NFL, started a social justice organization called Know Your Rights Camp, and has just written a book called The Perilous Fight.
No doubt, at least to Marxists, a big challenge conceptualizing oppression of any kind is understanding the questions of how it is organized and how it is reproduced. To answer that question, the diffuse circuitry of power and ideology must be examined. Unfortunately, Bryant cannot or will not deal with this in this book, which hinders any more thorough examination of how Robeson simply disappeared from the public’s consciousness, from US history and, most germane to Bryant’s book, from the memory of Black people today. So it goes. Still, a terrific read.
C. James was a Division 1 basketball player in early 70s till his involvement in the new communist movement. He recently retired from teaching at the University of Illinois.
Bill Silver is a community activist who recently retired after 40 years as a union member and staff organizer. Bill traces his early socialist beginnings to a high school walkout following the killings at Kent and Jackson State. He is an avid athlete and sports fan who has currently found a new home on the pickleball courts.