Peekskill Riots, Paul Robeson & The Polo Grounds
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1949
After a relatively peaceful post-war period in American race relations, Westchester County became the scene of a dark time on Sunday, September 4, 1949, after a concert by African American singer and activist Paul Robeson. Riots broke out in the Peekskill, NY location of the concert, and the city of Peekskill became synonymous with bigotry when a stone-throwing mob erupted in violence after Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie and other prominent American musicians & leftists gave an outdoor concert on the city's outskirts in the early cold war days of 1949.
"It didn't happen here,'' officials in Peekskill now say of the attack, which took place in the town of Cortlandt. Others say the events were close enough, however. Many historians now say tho that the 1949 Peekskill Riots were THE Seminal Event that ignited the decades-long Civil Rights Movement for Blacks & Jews (leading to eventual Voting and Civil Rights legislation passing in the US Congress). Or, as Paul Robeson biographer Charles Wright puts it in his book "Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner", "Subsequent events suggest that Peekskill bears the same relationship to the Civil Rights Movement as Fort Sumter does to the Civil War."
"Peekskill Bears The Same Relationship to the Civil Rights Movement as Fort Sumter Does to the Civil War"
Peekskill also directly led to the Rise of Anti-Black, Anti-Jewish, and Anti-Communist/Anti-Trade Union rhetoric and the beginning of "McCartyhism" in America, which started the following year in 1950. So Peekskill can also be pointed to as the primal event that kicked off the Workers Rights struggle leading to the formation of Trade Unions & Fair Employment laws & practices for everyone.
Peekskill Riots of 1949 Lead To Rise of "McCarthyism" Beginning in America in 1950
While the Peekskill Riots were going on, at the very same time the Brooklyn Dodgers were playing the New York Giants at nearby POLO GROUNDS in Harlem, a mere 30 miles from Peekskill, NY, and essentially a second home to Paul Robeson since his early teenage years.
Civil Rights pioneer Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella faced off against Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson of the New York Giants, all former Negro League players.
The POLO GROUNDS is HIGHLY significant in the history of Paul Leroy Robeson & the Peekskill Riots. The Polo Grounds, located in Harlem just across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium and the Bronx, was basically a second home to Paul Robeson his entire life! Paul Robeson played many games at the Polo Grounds for the Rutgers Queensmen's football & baseball teams as a teenager from 1915 to 1919. And as a founding member of both the Harlem Renaissance and Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, Paul Robeson performed numerous concerts, live shows, readings, and organized political, Civil Rights & Trade Union Rallies at the Polo Grounds throughout his entire life as a stage & screen performer, actor, singer & political activist.
Paul Robeson was a four sport athlete at Rutgers from 1915-1919, an All American football player, star basketball player, and he ran track & field. Robeson also played baseball for the Queensmen. Paul Robeson played several college football games for Rutgers at the POLO GROUNDS. Paul Robeson & the Rutgers Queensmen faced off against Syracuse at the POLO GROUNDS on November 30, 1918. Paul also played for Rutgers at the POLO GROUNDS vs. Colgate, Fordham & Hamilton Fish All-Stars.
However, most prominently, it is at the POLO GROUNDS where, in 1943, Paul Robeson met both Itzik Feffer, world-renowned Soviet Jewish poet, and Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). Feffer and Mikhoels became the first Russians permitted by Stalin to visit the West as official representatives of Soviet Jewry. On July 8, 1943, at a JAC Rally chaired by Albert Einstein (a close friend of Paul Robeson’s) and held at the POLO GROUNDS in Harlem – the largest pro-Soviet rally ever held in the United States (50,000 attendees!)– Robeson met and befriended Feffer and Mikhoels.
Paul Robeson Played Rutgers Football Gms at The Polo Grounds; and Met Feffer & Mikhoels in 1943 Thru Mutual Friend Albert Einstein @Polo Grounds!!
World famous All-American athlete, NFL football player, lawyer, singer, actor, Civil Rights pioneer, Trade Union & political activist, a little known ingenuity of Paul Robeson was his linguistics breakthroughs. As a brilliant scholar of languages and world cultures, Paul Robeson spoke more than 20 languages, including a number of African languages, Chinese, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, to name a few. As an accomplished musicologist, he discovered common links in music through the pentatonic scale—a five-tone scale characteristic of both Chinese and African traditional music. He used this to also demonstrate that the Aorist form of Chinese and African languages has five different tonal patterns, each used regularly under certain conditions. These discoveries, arrived at through his own research, provided the historical and cultural foundation for his dedication to universal brotherhood and world peace.
Paul Robeson Spoke More Than 20 Different Languages!
Paul Robeson became the target of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Robeson, besides being one of the most popular and accomplished artists of the century, was a passionate forerunner of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Robeson learned Hebrew from his father, a Christian clergyman, and he became enamored with the Jewish stories and hymns of his childhood. As such, the Jewish foundation for his music began with Old Testament spirituals and Jewish themes that reflected the eternal story – and his own aspirations – of escaping physical and spiritual bonds and striving toward freedom. One of his frequently performed standards, which he characterized as “a Kaddish that is very close to my heart,” was ‘The Chassidic Chant of Levi Isaac” which, according to tradition, had been composed spontaneously by R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev on Rosh Hashanah.
Itzik Feffer (1900 – 1952), a prolific Soviet poet whose poems were widely translated into Russian and Ukrainian, is considered one of the greatest Soviet poets in the Yiddish language. His books reflect the major historical events of Soviet Jewish history and his poetry integrated revolutionary romanticism with worker’s movement propaganda. A proud Jew, he often wrote on Jewish themes, including “Ikh bin a Yid” (“I Am a Jew”), and his epic poem “Di Shotns fun Varshever Geto” (“The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto”) is a tribute to the Jews who rebelled against the Nazi liquidation of the ghetto during World War II. A founder of the Jewish Section of the All-Ukrainian Union of Proletarian Writers, Feffer's works include a Soviet Jewish genealogy, which includes Bar Kochba, King Solomon, and Baruch Spinoza.
In 1943, Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels, a popular Jewish actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater who headed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), became the first Russians permitted by Stalin to visit the West as official representatives of Soviet Jewry. On July 8, 1943 at a JAC rally chaired by Albert Einstein (a close friend of Robeson’s) and held at the Polo Grounds in New York – the largest pro-Soviet rally ever held in the United States – Robeson met and befriended Feffer and Mikhoels.
Feffer was later arrested for treason by the Soviet authorities along with other members of the JAC, including Mikhoels (1948); his “treasonous acts” included his support of Zionism; his enthusiastic embrace of the new state of Israel; and his alleged plans to establish a Jewish republic in Crimea. The question of “What happened to Itzhak Feffer?” became a broadly debated topic across the United States, with many Americans contending – accurately, as it turned out – that Feffer was only one among many Russian Jews being systematically murdered in a new Soviet purge.
In June 1949, Robeson visited the Soviet Union on a major tour and, concerned that he could not find many Jewish friends whom he had met during his earlier trips to Russia and disturbed about the rumors regarding Feffer’s fate, demanded a meeting with Feffer. Soviet officials told him that Feffer, who was “vacationing in the Crimea,” would see him upon his return. In fact, Feffer had already been imprisoned for three years and the Soviets were stalling: recognizing the serious consequences were their horrific treatment of Jewish prisoners to be publicized, they delayed bringing the emaciated poet to Robeson while they fed him, obtained the medical care he so desperately needed, and prepared him for his meeting with the American celebrity.
When Feffer was deemed sufficiently healthy, he was brought to a hotel room in Moscow and Robeson, accompanied by state police, was finally ushered in to see him. The two communicated through sign language and passed notes because the room was bugged and, when Robeson asked how he was, Feffer pantomimed a blade crossing his throat and wrote a note that Stalin “is going to kill us. When you return to America you must speak out and save us.” Feffer further advised that the Russian secret police had murdered Mikhoels in 1948 (they had staged his murder as a car accident) and stated that he was in fear for his own life.
During his momentous June 14, 1949 concert at Tchaikovsky Hall after meeting Feffer, which was broadcast across the entire Soviet Union, Paul Robeson spoke of the deep cultural ties between the Jewish people of the Soviet Union and the United States and his own warm friendship with Feffer and Mikhoels. Going further than any African-American performer ever had to pay tribute to Jewish Holocaust victims, he reduced his stunned audience to tears by singing Hirsh Glick’s great anthem from the Vilna Ghetto, ‘Zog Nit Keynmol,” also known as “The Partisan Song,” in both Russian and Yiddish.
Recordings of the concert survived, but Robeson’s spoken words are lost; not surprisingly, his “subversive” rendition of the song and his personal tribute to his Jewish friends were censored by the Russians.
After returning to America, however, Robeson categorically denied any Russian mistreatment of the Jews: “I met Jewish people all over the place…I heard no word about it.” According to his son, Paul Jr., Robeson took the approach that “I don’t know Jewish stuff is outlawed; nobody told me not to sing Jewish songs or talk about them, so what the hell. I’m an artist and not responsible for the undertones and sub-editorial policy of Pravda.”
The growing hostility toward Robeson, who had enjoyed a worldwide popularity, focused on his affection for the Soviet Union, where he said he felt at home for the first time in his life, and on his outspoken beliefs that Blacks should not go to war for a racist America. When he would not testify as to whether he was a member of the Communist Party, his concerts nationwide were canceled and his passport was revoked, in effect silencing him for nine years.
Paul Robeson was a remarkable man, born in New Jersey in 1898, a time of Jim Crow Laws and segregation. Paul Robeson's father was born a slave in North Carolina, escaping to the North and freedom in 1860. In spite of his mother dying while Paul was young, and being in a family of meager means, Robeson excelled at sports and academics at school and won a scholarship to Rutgers.
The only Black student at Rutgers at the time (only 2 students of African descent had preceded him there), Paul became a football star, joined the Debate Team, sang with the Glee Club and sang off campus. He later joined other sports teams and college associations, and became an All-American at football, later to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. More importantly, Robeson was elected class Valedictorian by his classmates. During his time at Rutgers, the US became involved in World War I, and Robeson noted the inconsistency with an expectation that African Americans should fight in and support a war for a country that did not give African Americans (and others) full rights and opportunities.
Paul continued his education at the New York University School of Law, but transferred to Columbia where he graduated in 1922, getting married and starting an acting career along the way. Paul also became an NFL football player for the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers, though he only played until 1922.
In spite of now being a lawyer and being a star pro football player, Paul turned toward singing and acting, skills that brought him national and international fame on the stage, screen, and recordings. His booming bass voice was wonderful. Perhaps his signature role was in the play and movie Showboat (1936) in which he sings the definitive version of Old Man River.
Paul did dally with the ladies, leading to a divorce and a brief new marriage to a White woman in 1932, but that marriage quickly ended and Paul remarried his first wife. During the 1930s and 1940s Robeson became politically aware, and chafed under the discrimination against Blacks in the United States. His travels overseas showed him such racism was not universal, and a trip to the Soviet Union with Anti-Imperialist British friends broadened his horizons.
Paul furthered his education in London, learning about his African ancestry and studying African languages. At the same time that Paul became a movie star, he became increasingly politically conscious, supporting causes of working people, trade unions, and oppressed minorities. Robeson even petitioned Major League Baseball to allow Blacks to play in the Majors. This activism was sure to cause him grief, and it did, at the hands of the US government, being placed on the Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations after World War II, altho he had conducted fund raisers to benefit the US war effort. Attention from the House Un-American Committee followed, and Paul became a pariah among racist White Americans.
By the time of the Peekskill concert that was followed by riots, Robeson had become a famous voice for African Americans and Working People, and was libelously portrayed in the American media as anti-American. The Robeson concert of September 4, 1949, was to be a benefit for the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, and was a rescheduling of an August 27 concert that was preempted by attacks from the KKK and White Supremacists. The KKK garnered 748 new recruits from the Peekskill area after the violence of August 27.
The September 4th concert went off without interruption, but the concert goers and performers (including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie) were attacked as they left the concert grounds. World War I combat pilot Eugene Bullard, the first African American combat pilot to fly for the US military, was filmed being beaten by Whites, including White police.
Reaction to the Peekskill Riots was predictably mixed, with Southern Congressmen denouncing Robeson as an agitator (rabble rouser was a common term during the Civil Rights Movement) and decrying the concert goers as the violent side of the riot. Northern lawmakers and commentators had a contrary view, bemoaning the lack of respect for the rights of African Americans and their supporters.
Controversy over the Peekskill Riots ruined Robesons career as a performer, getting him blacklisted by the White media and entertainment industry. With the end of McCarthyism, Robeson was somewhat rehabilitated and resumed his entertainment career, although he had never stopped his Civil Rights activities.
Residual hatred of Robeson by critics made his career resumption largely an overseas proposition, and he even suffered misinformation slander from the State Department meant to undermine his influence in foreign countries!
Robeson suffered from depression and panic attacks from 1961 to 1963, and was unsuccessfully treated in Europe at a variety of institutions. Paul returned to the US in 1963, and after a brief resumption of Civil Rights activity, his failing health led him to permanent retirement and seclusion, until his death in 1976 from a stroke. Among his pallbearers were Harry Belafonte and Fritz Pollard (the first African American coach in the NFL).
Paul Robeson is remembered in the many movies and musical recordings he made, and appeared on a US postage stamp. He is in the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and has a library (main campus) and common area (Newark) named for him at Rutgers. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Robeson has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. Even a Latvian oil tanker ship is named in his honor!
According to democratic socialist writer Barry Finger's critical appraisal of Robeson, while the Hitler-Stalin pact was still in effect, Robeson counseled American Blacks that they had no stake in the rivalry of European powers. Once Russia was attacked tho, he urged Blacks to support the war effort, now warning that an Allied defeat would "make slaves of us all".
Robeson reprised his role of Othello at the Shubert Theatre in 1943, and became the first African American to play the role with a white supporting cast on Broadway. The production was a success, running for 296 performances on Broadway (a record for a Shakespeare production on Broadway that still stands), and winning for Robeson the first Donaldson Award for Best Actor in a Play.
During the same period, he addressed a meeting with Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and team owners in a failed attempt to convince them to admit Black players to Major League Baseball.
He toured North America with Othello until 1945, and subsequently, his political efforts with the CAA to get colonial powers to discontinue their exploitation of Africa were short-circuited by the United Nations.
During this period, Robeson also developed a sympathy for the Republic of China's side in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1940, the Chinese progressive activist, Liu Liangmo taught Robeson the patriotic song "Chee Lai!" ("Arise!"), known as the March of the Volunteers. Robeson premiered the song at a concert in New York City's Lewisohn Stadium and recorded it in both English and Chinese for Keynote Records in early 1941.
Robeson gave further performances at benefit concerts for the China Aid Council and United China Relief at Washington's Uline Arena on April 24, 1941. The Washington Committee for Aid to China's booking of Constitution Hall had been blocked by the Daughters of the American Revolution owing to Robeson's race. The indignation was so great that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hu Shih, the Chinese ambassador, became sponsors.
However, when the organizers offered tickets on generous terms to the National Negro Congress to help fill the larger venue, both sponsors withdrew, objecting to the NNC's Communist ties. The song became the newly founded People's Republic of China's National Anthem after 1949. Its Chinese lyricist, Tian Han, died in a Beijing prison in 1968, but Paul Robeson continued to send royalties to his family.
Marilyn Elie, Abby Luby and Mike Dimeo, members of a research group called Voices From History, have prepared a video called ''The Robeson Concerts: Peekskill, 1949.'' The three-year project encompasses the first scheduled concert, which was aborted after a mob smashed chairs and terrorized concertgoers, and the second, which proceeded peacefully -- under the watchful eye of thousands of citizen guards -- until the homeward bound audience was ambushed and attacked on a narrow country road.
Paul Robeson was quite the remarkable person, highly talented in singing and acting, exceedingly intelligent academically, a world class athlete, and courageous in his social convictions. If you are unfamiliar with this amazing American, I encourage you to read more about him.