The Black Biographer's Burden.

Paul Robeson Jr. interprets the controversial legacy of the towering

20th-century artist and intellectual who was also a black man--and his father, too

The biographer's relationship to his subject is always tricky. For black writers exploring the lives of famous black people, there is added pressure. When a black writer exposes a black leader s life in all its glory--including so-called dirty laundry--a nationwide choir of black opinion is quick to identify a Judas. The critics never point to the subject's actual human failings. Instead they point to the poison pen which they say potentially betrays the progressive struggle for black advancement in America.

This puts Paul Robeson Jr. on the cutting edge of a very sharp divide in black America over how to deal with the lives of leading black figures. His new biography of his father, The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey, 1898-1939 (John Wiley & Sons, April 2001, 384 pp., $30.00; ISBN 0-47124265-9) is an honest and penetrating study of the legendary actor, singer, athlete and social activist.

Politically motivated critics of the elder Robeson, who died in 1976, have contended that the artist's controversial connections to the Communist Party undercut any claim to his place in the pantheon of great American heroes. Though Robeson himself was never a member of any political party, his ties to an array of Communists activists and his outspoken defense of the Soviet Union still provokes intense debate. The thesis of his son's unique biography, however, is that Robeson's career as a path-breaking black actor and singer and also how he positioned black culture and creativity on the world stage are more important than his ideological leanings. Robeson Jr. insists, in fact, that ideology was anathema to his father's brand of political commitment.

Robeson Jr. further argues that his father was only able to take a leading role as a political activist because of his unprecedented standing as a dominant artist and respected athlete in America and Europe. Throughout the book the son makes no attempt to hide the truth of the man's life--even writing nonjudgmentally about his father's of extramarital relationships (several of them long-term) during his more than 40-year marriage to Paul Jr.'s mother, Eslanda Goode Robeson.

Robeson Jr. and his wife of more than 50 years, the former Marilyn Greenberg (they met as classmates at Cornell University in the late 1940s), graciously hosted Black Issues Book Review for an interview over lunch in their comfortably furnished brownstone in Brooklyn's Fort Greene, their home of 30 years. The Robesons are old settlers in this once down-at-the-heels urban neighborhood very recently gone trendy and upscale. A magnificent bronze head of the elder Robeson has a prominent place in the family living room, and on one wall is a colorful poster from a 1973 seventy-fifth birthday tribute to his father held at Carnegie Hall.

Robeson Jr. has inherited his father's legendary athletic physique, which he has kept in tip-top shape, enabling him at 73 to be easily mistaken for a man at least two decades younger. His mind is sharp, and he is dearly passionate about, but anxious not to appear obsessed by, his father's legacy. Having just completed the first of what will be a two-volume work on his Dad, Robeson Jr. contends that most previous treatments of his father's life have "blotted out" the real basis of his father's greatness.

A two-time all-American football player in college and an outstanding professional player, the first Paul Robeson was the leading concert singer in the world in the 1930s and 40s, and Robeson Jr. emphasizes that his father's trail-blazing career in theater and in film challenged this culture's image of the black man by breaking down the low-comic or melodramatically tragic stereotype and extending his range to epic hero. It was these very achievements in the world of the arts that allowed Robeson Sr. to become the important political voice, according to his son. Other portrayals of his father, he says, have allowed his political views to overshadow the artistic achievements. "He might sing at a political meeting," the son declares, "but he never gave a political speech at a concert."

But while determined to have his say and set the record straight in this biography, Robeson Jr. emphatically denies being fundamentally motivated by his disagreements with previous representations of this major 20th century figure. "The last thing on my mind is arguing with someone about him," he said. "I am content with accurately portraying his point of view in his own statements and actions. What did he say? What did he feel?"

Nonetheless, Robeson Jr. does have quite a public record as an outspoken critic of some Robeson portraits others have drawn. He wrote a seven-part series in New York's black weekly, The Amsterdam News, taking to task the widely praised 1988 volume Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Duberman (now available in paperback from The New Press), Although Robeson Jr. had cooperated with Duberman from the book's inception, he said he came to "sour" on the project and disliked the results. Previously, he had also, in countless lectures and radio appearances, joined other prominent African Americans like Ossie Davis, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin in criticizing James Earl Jones' 1977 depiction in the one-man show, Paul Robeson.

"I set out to show Patti Robeson as he really was, a magnificent human being" Robeson Jr. says simply about his own biography. "I did not want to paint an icon.... He hated sycophants" He also acknowledges that he had no intellectually honest option but to tell his father's story in full. If he had held back on details of his father's extramarital affairs (each of his parents wrote about them in their personal letters and diaries) or minimized his longstanding friendships and ties to politically active Communists in both America, Europe and Africa, then the book could be dismissed as a son's misguided "whitewash."

But unfortunately, some of my initial questions on these very sensitve subjects unwittingly pushed the wrong buttons with Robeson Jr. and seemed to put him on the defensive. In response, he interrupted the collegial give-and-take of our interview with long, impassioned soliloquies. While we never quite got back on track to having the casual and easy exchange BIBR had hoped for--our talking as one biographer of a major black historical giant to another--the afternoon concluded very cordially. Later Robeson Jr. apologized for his "filibuster" and admitted that being questioned about his father and Communism reminded him of the bad old Red Scare days when congressmen questioned prominent people about their ties to the Soviets. Back then, orchestrated innuendo from the U.S. intelligence community unfairly labeled people like his father as subversives and traitors. The U.S. government even revoked Paul Robeson Sr.'s passport in 1950 and did not restore it until 1958.

Robeson Jr. also strenuously objects to what he sees as the all-consuming focus of the American press on sex and gossip. Indeed, he is offended by cheap and prurient interest his father's sex life, but he thinks his mother's memory is enhanced by having the whole story of their relationship told in its full context. Now, decades after Essie Robeson's 1965 death, her son reveals that to cope with her discovery of one of her husband's longstanding affairs, his mother temporarily stopped writing in her diary. He writes that she found it "easier to cope if she kept protective blinders on and her personal life had become too painful to record."

"My mother joined my father in a crusade to advance our people and our culture" he told BIBR. "She was his advisor and a sharp intellect. She assisted his career in so many ways as a critic and a manager. She overcame the tensions between them for bigger causes. That says a lot. There was 44 years of marriage, respect, commitment and love. It has to be put in that context. He didn't pay any attention to puritanical culture then and he wouldn't now. He could not confine his emotional and sexual spirit to any one woman."

The U.S. government certainly has a history of using prurient gossip diminishing the status of black leaders to undermine their demands for racial equality. The FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. is legendary. And local police departments have tracked and taped black leaders, probed their tax returns and surveilled their relationships--all to keep them under control, if not completely silence them.

That ugly history has led to an understandable reluctance on the part of black audiences to embrace biographies of black leaders that reveal their human flaws. Even fictional works, such as Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son brought condemnation from civil rights organizations who feared the negative portrayal of the lead character. There is a psychological element at work here, too. How many black people still live with the idea that public airing of bad behavior by any black person is an embarrassment to us all?

The result of this wariness about full-blooded accounts of the lives of black leaders has limited the range of black biography, even by white writers. One notable 1986 biography about Martin Luther King Jr., Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by white historian David L. Garrow, won a Pulitzer prize. Garrow's book makes almost no mention of his extramarital affairs, although another white author Taylor Branch, in his awardwinning book Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, acknowledges how King's sexual dalliances were the focus of FBI investigations, as they tried to discredit him, and a constant subject of concern for King's supporters.

But the pressure on white writers to use discretion in portraying black leaders is just a fraction of the pressure on black biographers. The rules on this twisted road seem to be that it is okay for black people to have private conversations about the flaws, sins and extravagances of prominent black people. But talk is cheap, and putting a critical view of a black personality in print is a different matter, especially when a black hand is doing the writing.

When I was writing critical news articles and columns about Marion Barry's tainted career as Mayor of Washington, D.C. in The Washington Post, I got used to public tongue lashings and late night phone calls threatening my family. The abuse came from black people. At a book signing after publication of my 1999 biography, Thurgood Marshall: An American Revolutionary (Times Books), a woman who once worked as Marshall's secretary gave me a kiss. Then she slapped me. "It's a wonderful book," she said as I rubbed my stinging cheek. Then she demanded to know, with a smile, why I had written about Marshall's drinking, his love affairs and his marriage to an NAACP secretary less than a year after the death of his first wife. I explained that it was Marshall's life story and he was a heroic character, but also a man with the longings and flaws of a human being.

"People don't need to know all that," she replied, "Especially white people! They'll use it to put him down."

A recent biography, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad by Karl Evanzz (Pantheon, 1999), prompted widespread complaints that Evanzz was a government agent because he touched on Muhammed's affairs with secretaries. An early biography of King in the late sixties by the novelist, John A. Williams, prompted so much criticism of the writer that it is often cited as a turning point in his career. More recently, Michael Eric Dyson ran into charges of being less than faithful to black America when he argued in I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (Free Press, 2000) that it is important to see King's personal flaws--and openly discuss them--in order to keep King from becoming a plastic icon that has no relevance to today's young people.

The good news may be that black readers are becoming more open to a full treatment of the lives of black people. In the past decade, David Levering Lewis's prize-winning biography of W.E.B. Du Bois has included details on Du Bois' sex life as well as his controversial political stand without generating the backlash that usually attends such revelations. "The readers are happy and I'm happy to have reached this point," said Lewis. "It's about time." And Paul Robeson Jr. is counting on black audiences reading his portrait of the artist who was his father with our broadest and most receptive minds.

Author of the best-selling book, Eyes On The Prize, Juan Williams has spent 23 years as a political analyst and national correspondent for The Washington Post. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Williams has won an Emmy Award for his television documentary writing, and has contributed features to Fortune The Atlantic Monthly, Ebony, GQ and The New Republic He is a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday, host of America's Black Forum and host of NPR's Talk of the Nation. Williams lives in Washington, DC. The inheritance of a legacy is bought to life in Mr. Williams' interview with biographer Paul Robeson Jr. in our cover story on page 28.