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Robeson and Einstein

Two Stars Shining Over Princeton

by Stuart Mitchner

“In my dorm room, I hung two pictures on the wall — Malcolm X and Albert Einstein.” So writes Princeton University Professor Cornel West in his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Smiley Books $25.95). It’s a good bet that the self-described “bluesman in the life of the mind” would have deemed Paul Robeson no less worthy of a place of honor in his room. West is an eloquent and irrepressible living answer to the question “Has the racial dynamic in Princeton changed for the better since the days when Marian Anderson was refused lodging at the Nassau Inn and James Baldwin got similar treatment at a Nassau Street cafeteria?” A decade later, around the time he wrote Here I Stand (Beacon paperback $14), Princeton native Paul Robeson was telling the world that his hometown was “spiritually located in Dixie.”

It was Robeson’s friend Albert Einstein, by the way, who took Marian Anderson into his own home when, after singing to a full house at McCarter Theatre in 1937, she needed a place to sleep. From then on, whenever she came to Princeton, that’s where she stayed, even after the “whites only” policy had become a thing of the past. And it was following another McCarter concert in 1935 that Einstein first met Robeson. Five years later the two men got together again after a McCarter production of Princeton alumnus Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, in which Robeson played the title role. According to Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor (Rutgers $23.95), McCarter was an enlightened exception in a town “dominated by a university whose decision-makers kept their white hands clutching the old supremacy myth, and kept their schools, stores, and movie theaters segregated well into the 1940s.”

McCarter brought Robeson and Einstein together again when Robeson played the Moor in a production of Othello Broadway found “racially risky.” For Robeson “there was a special irony in performing Othello in Princeton,” as Jerome and Taylor point out. “So the kiss that couldn’t play on Broadway succeeded in the same town whose high school and university had barred Robeson and his brothers.”

At the time of his last meeting with Einstein, in 1952, Robeson had been the target of an assassination plot, blacklisted and deprived of his passport, and barred from “almost every concert hall in the country.” The two men spent close to six hours in Einstein’s second-floor study on Mercer Street, where, according to Robeson’s friend Lloyd Brown (as quoted by Jerome and Taylor), they talked about music, McCarthyism, “the intensifying freedom struggle in South Africa,” Einstein’s opposition to the new Jewish state, and Gandhi’s tactic of passive resistance, which Einstein thought black Americans should adopt. More important, the well-publicized meeting represented a show of solidarity at a time when Robeson was “under the sharpest political attack.”

Robeson on the Wall

Paul Robeson’s absence from the wall in Cornel West’s dorm room was most likely the result of a generational divide. In Paul Robeson (Knopf 1988), Martin Duberman refers to the hope for “a symbolic bridge between Robeson and the new generation of black activists” and suggests that Malcolm X wanted to meet Robeson, having praised him for his postwar questioning of “the intelligence of colored people fighting to defend a country that had treated them with such open contempt and bestial brutality.”

Although Robeson disagreed with many of Malcom’s precepts, he “felt a high regard for him” and a meeting was planned and then delayed. Before it could be rescheduled, Malcolm X had been assassinated.

Posters of Robeson were not easy to come by during the great celebrity-poster craze. In fact, this stupendously gifted star athlete, law school graduate, singer, actor, speaker/activist was more controversial, more feared and hated than Malcolm X ever was because he dared not only to give the world the benefit of his gifts but to speak out about his beliefs when the national psyche was riven with paranoia. Even before then, at a time when lynchings were widespread in America and some 30 years before Jackie Robinson put on a Dodger uniform, Robeson was a hard-driving, hard-hitting Rutgers All-American football hero. While Malcolm X was still a teenager, Robeson was speaking out on a whole host of explosive issues, including the one on which he and Einstein joined forces in 1948. The issue was lynching. The objective was to persuade President Harry Truman to make lynching a federal crime.

Two Bright Stars

Sixty years later Barack Obama is president, Mildred Trotman is the Princeton Borough mayor, and Robeson and Einstein are the two brightest stars in the Princeton firmament. “Stars” is the word for it. According to various online sources, an as yet untitled film about Einstein and Robeson and their fight to outlaw lynching is in the works. It may seem an unlikely subject, but indications are that it’s

for real and is reportedly being produced by the two actors who will play the lead roles, Danny Glover as Robeson, and Ben Kingsley as Einstein. If this project comes to fruition, chances are that the people of the Witherspoon neighborhood Robeson grew up in and to whom Einstein on Race and Racism is dedicated will have a part in the filming, if only as extras.

After referring to the “two giants…who shared a passionate belief in the brotherhood and sisterhood of human beings” and “the belief that when it comes to social justice, you don’t have to win but you do have to keep struggling,” Jerome and Taylor end their second chapter on Robeson and Einstein with an account of Robeson’s singing of “Old Man River” at a rally for the antifascist forces in Spain, when he changed the line from “I’m tired of livin’ but scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fighting until I’m dying.” If you watch “Tribute to an Artist” on the Criterion DVD Paul Robeson Icon, you’ll understand how and why he made the great American Kern-Hammerstein song his own. According to the documentary, the war came to a stop while he sang.

Books on Einstein far outnumber books about Robeson, but none go as deeply into his relationship with Princeton’s African American community as Einstein on Race and Racism. In addition to Duberman’s biography, one of the most useful accounts of Robeson—and surely the most visually rewarding—is the multi-author, lavishly illustrated Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen (Rutgers 1998) edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart.