Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. Both are titans in their respective industries, one the first Black man to play Major League Baseball, the other a highly respected stage and screen actor, singer, and director who travelled around the globe to entertain the masses. Both genuinely famous and remarkable people, who managed to fight against racial segregation to become recognized and accomplished trailblazers in their fields, literally and figuratively. Both are taxpaying, American citizens attempting to live out their lives without fear of harm or death at the hands of angry, hateful bigots, whether organized or rogue. And, both are advocates for peace and good will, even if they were doing so from very disparate and oppositional political ideologies. Sports journalist Howard Bryant’s new book, Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America speaks about these two notable men and how they climbed to the top of a ladder built and used by the White patriarchy, to then be pitted against each other during what was once considered the scariest time in American history: the Cold War. On its surface, this fantastic book is a well-researched historical document about how celebrities handled the House of Unamerican Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) decades-long reign of terror against those they believed were part of the Communist Party; but underlying Bryant’s text is a noteworthy discussion about Black-on-Black violence perpetuated by conspiracy theories and White anxiety.
No doubt, Kings and Pawns is timely, in that the book also speaks about what it means to be American, and what it meant to be a patriot during the Age of McCarthyism. As Bryant states, “Jackie Robinson was ready, willing, and quite able to prove he and fellow Negroes were proud to be Americans. Paul Robeson, in contrast, indicated things for members of his race would be much brighter in, say, Moscow Russia.” Bryant proves arbitrary and constructed definition of “American” was, and still is, ambiguous at best; and Robinson and Robeson, the human beings, were “a prologue of sorts” to what we are seeing now as it pertains to race relations, Black entertainment, and political discord during a time of crippling and polarizing strife. Bryant does this by studying these two individuals through the lens of W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of “double consciousness,” which stems from DuBois’s work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), where DuBois writes that Black people are forced to yield a sense of self-consciousness to see themselves “through the revelation of the other world” and to look “at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
In Paul Robeson’s case it could be argued that HUAC’s skewed perception of him as being a working member of the Communist Party and a lover of Russian ideals jaded him to the point of obscurity. Bryant writes a stunning and comprehensive narrative of Paul Robseson’s rise to fame and eventual fall from grace. As the leading, accepted Black figure/entertainer in America prior to his testifying in front of HUAC (he was called “America’s No. 1 Negro” by one magazine), Robeson had an immense amount of power and privilege during a time when Black people were still drinking out of “colored” fountains and living separately but equally in segregated towns, cities, and states throughout the nation. Having this form of supremacy was a threat to a democracy produced by a White establishment and Robeson’s authority needed to be suppressed and silenced so said democracy can be perpetuated. Bryant, with the use of accurate research and transcripts from the hearings, expertly shows how unrelenting members of the HUAC committee, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, were in trying to accrue and extract information from Robeson for years on end. Robeson’s fight would start to eat away at him and his professional career, a fact discussed nearer to the end of Bryant’s tome.
The same cannot be said for Jackie Robinson, the antithesis of Paul Robeson and the antihero of Kings and Pawns. Although he never met Robeson, Bryant claims Robinson spoke about how he did not agree with Robeson’s political leanings, which ended up painting Robinson as a patriot by the HUAC committee and Major League Baseball. Yes, Robinson faced racism and boycotts and systemic racism in the MLB throughout his career, which is proven throughout Bryant’s work; however, Robinson was also praised for his ardent traditionalism and his staunch stance on American ideological ethics. Bryant writes, “Robinson was content with [thinking of] America as a flawed country of good intentions whose racial shortcomings were borne of ignorance but not malice, and thus the violence it had inflicted on him during 1947 did not obscure the country’s potential.” Much of Kings and Pawns is a recognition of this point of interest, embodied in the lives of Robinson and Robeson: if you are Black in America and follow “the rules,” you can become successful, as long as White people are accepting of you and you are accepting of capitalism, the ultimate American ideological standpoint.
There is a discriminatory history behind this process and, ultimately, Kings and Pawns is an exposing of this history. According to Bryant, Robinson and Robeson both end up becoming victims of the White establishment, even if the mass media machine, government agencies, and their respective industries pitted each of them against each other. In other words, what Bryant successfully establishes is one was willingly treated as the patriot and the other was unwillingly treated as a traitor, but both were icons forced to suffer under the hands of White power structures steeped in racism and unsubstantiated fear.
