Paul and Eslanda Robeson: For the Rights of People. For the Rights of Workers. (Part 2)

How are we doing on sound and we doing the right things? Cardoza, right? But then you graduated from Cardoza, Marvin Gaye, see? Oh! That's what I thought. Oh, and then you went to Cardoza. Yeah, that's what I think, because my auntie went to Cardoza, she was like, "Oh, we would never." Yeah. This is part two of the two-part story of Paul and his Landa Robson. If you haven't listened to part one, I really think you should. Previously, on our ancestors were messy. She's like, "No, no, no, no, I think you're a generational talent. I see something here." What an incredible example of love and support. They say they're going to avoid politics for right now, but someday they will visit Africa and the Soviet Union. Milan lost a nerve. As these two were dealing with all their drama, the world around them was changing. Coming up, the Robsons take three trips. It's a couple's getaway, too. Do you want to guess? You know? And return home, transform. These people are doing nothing other than trying their best to imagine a space with people who are experiencing some of their things might be free and they've been punished. This episode stars 2024 MacArthur Fellow and New York Times best-selling author of Young Adult Novels and Poetry, Jason Reynolds. I'd have been like, "My mom already told you I would, you know, don't make me say it." And your host, Nick Hole Hill, "Look at the way we act." In front of a studio audience from a living room in Washington, D.C., this is our Ancestors We're Messy, a show about our ancestors and all their drama. Okay, so we're back in the '60s, 1965 to be exact, so this is one year after Polly Robeson met with that ex-CIA agent at the House Party. Now he's in a room at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City with his mom, Essie Robeson, and she's dying. A steady stream of friends, family and colleagues are visiting and calling dignitaries, heads of state and civil rights activists from around the world, send flowers and heartfelt letters paying their respects. In the movie version of this scene, Polly is in a corner and he's being distant. He's watching everybody carefully avoid any mention of his father. They all have an idea about why he can't be here with Essie during her final days, but no one has all the facts, and Polly can't help but blame Essie for that. A couple weeks after she enters the hospital, Essie Robeson passes away at the age of 69. Polly arranges for her to be cremated and then he has a private ceremony that he, his wife and his two kids attend. Her community is disappointed that they didn't get to give her a bigger send-off. After the service, Polly goes up to Philly to see his dad and tell him about the funeral. Polly seems to have his faculties about him this day, but he's silent when he hears the news. Later, Polly sets about sorting through his mother's things and he discovers that she has saved, with unbelievable and meticulous detail, over 30,000 letters, diaries, interviews, writings, speeches, photographs, newsclippings, and more from her and Paul's lives together. Polly isn't shocked, and he's grateful. Because this, along with the files from the FBI, CIA, State Department, and that clinic in London could help him finally understand what happened to his family. By then, Polly had to know that the Robeson's fates were sealed after they took these three trips. This is Act 3, how we came to fear the Robesons. Now we're in 1934. It's a year after S.E. and Paul had remixed their vows. They seemed to be doing well, they're going to start a movie together. Paul sees that S.E. is in school and he said let me do that too, so he enrolls in London University where he studies African history and culture. In the movie, he and S.E. are hanging out on the floor comparing notes after class, talking about maybe moving his films toward a more explicit politic. And then Paul gets this invite to go to Russia and meet with the director about a movie on the Haitian Revolution, and they're like, you know what, let's do it. We've been curious about Russia since way back in the day, let's go, let's meet this guy. The Robesons arrive in Moscow at Christmas time and receive the Red Carpet Treatment. It's all the best of this, it's standing the art that Paul performs Negro spirituals for huge crowd and you have to picture this. He is the son of a slave, singing the plantation songs of his parents, to the children of Serf's, whose parents had their own versions of plantation songs and similar struggles. So they're listening and they're vibing and then he sings the songs again, but in Russian because he's fluent, now they adore him. Our ancestors love Moscow, but they need to be sure that black folks are actually being treated well there, that this is not just special treatment for them. So they meet up with Marion Anderson, the renowned opera singer, she happens to be in town performing, and they meet with black college students studying there, they meet with some friends from Harlem, they meet up with Essie's older brothers, who moved to the Soviet Union to want to inspect buses and the other to wrestle in the Russian circus. Langston Hughes had been there, same with the boys, they all said the same thing. In the USSR, black people are treated like human beings and it feels amazing. And while that is true of their experience, there is a lot that people are not telling the robocents. After the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin falls ill and against his dying wish, Joseph Stalin secedes him and rules as a dictator over the USSR. Stalin begins the great purge, he rounds up everyone he perceives to be an enemy, tries them in show trials, and then exiles or executes them. In just three years, nearly a million people are exiled or sent to Gulags and an estimated 750,000 people are executed. Then, Stalin institutes economic reforms meant to get the USSR caught up with the rest of the world. These policies lead to famine and the death of millions, largely in non-Russian parts of the USSR, like Ukraine. America just started recognizing the USSR as a country, but they do not trust them. Paul and Essie though, they're all in. They don't make that Haitian Revolution movie, but they do enroll Paulie in the fourth grade in Russia. And then Essie's mom, they move her there to care for him, because getting to Russia was a lifelong dream of her, so she's very into this, and so is Paulie. He goes to school with Stalin's daughter, and he says his classmates are really nice, and he learns Russian from them very quickly. Paul tells the press how relieved he is that his son no longer had to deal with the racism that he'd been facing in 1930's US schools. And with that, Paul becomes one of the world's most famous supporters of the USSR. Paulie will later learn that the CIA opened a file on his dad. A few years after Russia, Paul makes a movie called "Sanders of the Ripper," and he was trying to call out colonialism in Africa, but it's a disaster. The black press is like, "Paul, did you mean to make a menstrual show?" He's like, "Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed." He runs away to London. Essie is like, "Okay, let me actually go to Africa, both for my studies, and so that we can not keep making movies like this." So she travels from South Africa to Uganda, and she brings Paulie with her. And while he plays, Essie interviews African women. Now, black American history is still so young at this point, so you have to imagine that these African women are telling Essie generations and generations worth of stories and legends that she's never heard. In fact, she's only really heard the opposite of all that they're telling her. And so learning this truth about African people, she said it fills her with pride at knowing that this is where she comes from, and she starts writing it all down. These women are mainly maids and cooks and nannies for their colonizers, and so Essie is talking to them and she's like, "Oh my God, I'm so excited to see you again." Like, you know, it's wild because they want your labor for as close to free as possible. And they want to treat you like second-class citizens, just like black Americans, and Russian serfs, and Welsh minors, and on and on and on. So she writes this article being like attention everyone. Paul and I have traveled essentially Earth at this point, and everywhere we go, we see the same thing, which is workers of every race being exploited. And I think that we need to come together across nationality and gender and race and class and culture and stand up to our real enemy, which is capitalism. She sends these reflections to the press, and the crowd goes wild. Suddenly, the name on everybody's lips is Essie Robeson. She steps away from Paul's world to be a writer and an international speaker on pan-Africanism, communism, and women's and civil rights. She'd finally found her outlet. Paulie will later learn that the FBI opened a file on his mom. What are you thinking right now? - Just at the FBI and the CIA and the State Department, and all just thinking about all the people who's had files opened up on them or for having an imagination. - Right. - These people are doing nothing other than imagining a better version of the life in which they've been, but the life that has been foisted upon them. You know what I mean? And trying their best to imagine a space where people who are experiencing some of the things might be free and they've been punished for these beings sort of investigated, due to set imagination, you know. It's just, it's interesting to think about. - It's a year after Africa. Paul has nailed it with his latest film, Jericho. So dignified, it's not racist. He permanently changes the lyrics to Old Man River to take out the N word, and all that racist dialects. That's the version that we know today. Then he pitches the third and final trip in this fateful series. It's a couples getaway to, do you want a guess? - No. (laughing) - 'Cause you're gonna say something wow, right? (laughing) - Does anyone want a guess? Not you. Jamaica, oh Roomba. - What? - Q, Roomba, they just came from Russia. - It's gonna be something wow, like the moon. (laughing) - Going to Mars. - Okay, it's not that wow. It's the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. - Oh wow. (laughing) - Here's a deal with that war. So you have to like try really hard to imagine this. So there's a group of millionaires and billionaires, and they've funded a takedown of a liberal democracy to replace it with a fascist dictatorship. You try to imagine that, okay? It's the past, it's not today. So that's what the Civil War is about, and the celebrities and everyday citizens and other countries are worried because now fascism has spread from Italy to Germany to Spain. Essie is worried too, but she's also like Paul, you're an artist and I'm a writer, so I'm not sure what difference we can make, but Paul believes that it matters that they're fair, so they go. (cheering) They meet with black and white Americans who volunteer to fight fascism in the war. I was like, look at these black poses. Look at the way we act. (laughing) It is what it is, like. (laughing) - I love it. They meet with Spanish soldiers, Paul sings to them all in English, and they love it, and then he sings again in Spanish, and they're undone. (singing in Spanish) America's official stance in the conflict and the rise of fascism in Europe was one of neutrality. Paul releases the following and one of his most enduring quotes. This is you. - Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There are no impartial observers. The artist must elect a fight for freedom or for slavery. I had no alternative. - He commits fully to a life of activism. - So we know about his messy past, of course. What are your feelings when separating the art from the artist or their lives from who they are? Like obviously today, if he was like, I want to take this stand, I think the internet and a lot of people would be like, okay, but what about all that stuff you did before? How do you think that that should factor into his activism? - I think it would depend on what the artist's life was. I think we, I think it's easy for, we try to figure out tweetable ways to have conversations like how do you separate the art from the artist? It would depend, it's contextual, right? If I'm looking at sort of Paul Robeson's life, the ups and the downs, the goods and the beds, I'm not sure if Paul Robeson is a man, I throw away, right? I think he's a man that is not above reproach and is a man that deserves critique, but he's also a person that deserves, that deserves his humanity to be highlighted as well as the part of it that is honoring the humanity of others, right? So I can acknowledge his humanity as in his shortcomings and I can also acknowledge his ability to shine light on the humanity of others, which he did do. - Right. - Right. - But also we got to honor his wife. It's like Frederick Douglass, really honoring Frederick Douglass, we got to honor his first wife. (laughing) Did all that work? - Paulie will later learn that British intelligence opened a file on his parents. - From the 1930s and into the '50s, while Paul continues to be an a-list international superstar and essay a sought-after writer and speaker, the two devote themselves to fighting racism, colonialism and class oppression. Their movement is as much about civil rights as it is about the global effort to defeat fascism. - The struggle of the Negro people or of any people cannot be by itself, that is the human struggle. And so I was attracted then to many members of the labor party and my politics embraced also the common struggle of all oppressed peoples, including especially the working masses, specifically the laboring people of all the world. - Paul leads an organization called the American Crusade against lynching. He recruits Albert Einstein and other prominent people of all races to back legislation to end mob violence and lynchings and prevent KKK members from joining Congress. - He receives the NAACP's highest honors. - Paul decides to stop starring in Hollywood films because of the racist depictions of black people, which ultimately leads to the end of his film career. - He devotes more time to joining labor strikes and civil rights protests across America and around the world. - His presence attracts press, which gives organizers a larger platform to voice their demands. - The eruptions don't officially judge the Communist Party, but they're passionately supported in its defense of civil and labor rights. - Once Paul leaves for college, SE hits the road speaking full time on behalf of liberation and labor movements across America and around the world with a special focus on Africa. - SE meets with an interview's emerging leaders of the day, including Wamen Gruma and Mahatma Gandhi. - She's invited to the first ever convening of the United Nations. She says, quote, "I am willing and eager to surrender as much of my personal sovereignty as it's necessary in order to secure as much freedom as possible, not only for myself, but for all members of society." - Paul and SE joined WAB the Boys Council on African Affairs, the most influential Black American organization, advocating on behalf of the colonized peoples of Africa. - What stands out to you about the priorities of this civil rights movement, of this era of the civil rights movement? - Of their era? - Yeah, their era. The more that it was global, right? I think we tend to think about civil rights in this particular country as something that's within the vacuum. I think right now we're seeing, when we think about Palestine, we think about Sudan, we're seeing sort of the global effects of civil rights again in this particular moment. And we're seeing the fall out and all the things that comes with that. But I think in their generation, it's incredible too. I think sometimes we forget that a lot of our ancestors are moving around the world. That they were citizens of the world, right? It's hard to imagine 'cause the way that sort of Black history has been sort of taught to us is that everybody was locked, right? Everyone is sort of landlocked or home locked or city locked or ghetto locked or whatever. And it's like yeah, but there were a lot of them, especially those who had risen to whatever, whatever the next sort of echelon, quote unquote, social echelon was, they were citizens of the world. And it mattered because then they were able to take, to think about civil rights as a global phenomenon or as a global effort, right? - More when our ancestors Ramessi continues. - Our ancestors Ramessi is an independent production, which means that there's no studio financing. This is just me, my team, and the household. There's seven. $1 monthly gifts cover the costs of research trips and sound design and this episode. If you aren't already a member, I'd love to invite you to join the household where you'll have access to director's commentary for each episode, outtakes, exclusive interviews, and for this one, a conversation between my guests and I about this history and how we hope it lives on. You can visit our ancestors where messy.supercast.com to make a monthly or one-time gift. The link is also in the show notes. We now return to our ancestors where messy. The robotsons are called extremists by some and they're told to leave America all the time if they have so many problems with the country, but they're like where Americans are parents built this country we're going to stay and we're going to help America realize her promise this is always their position. The couple's activism keeps them close intellectually, but romantically Paul is dating a lot of his younger co-stars. Essie has flings, some sound hot, she calls monogamy like a childish expectation and a marriage, but in her diary she does sound disappointed by their status, but they're never in the gossip columns again which is good because the black community seems thrilled to see leadership of the movement pass from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to WWE to boys to Paul. I think it's interesting to think about partnership and to think about what people find partnership in and what the glue is. And I think we'd like to believe in romance and we'd like to believe in, you know, happily of the afters and all the things that are oftentimes sort of shoved down our throats through popular culture, but there is something to be said about people who started as lovers created a commitment, however that commitment shook out, however whatever they decided it was and then figuring out what the glue was and leaning into the glue, especially knowing that it may have had a bigger effect outside of their household. Yeah. And so we talk about artists and like how we critique these people. And things deserve grace and we should also take our hats off to people who make certain choices. There are conversations around happiness that one could have of course was as he happy, was was was Paul happy, right? Like those are, you know, arguably important conversations that one could have, but I don't think that they have to come in lieu of the fact that these people made an effort and a choice. Yeah. We understood that it was bigger than even their marriage. It's 1948, Paul is in his 40s, they're both in their 40s and it's the US presidential election that year. He is campaigning for the Progressive Party, which is America's third party. Their candidate is Henry Wallace. He'd been called an extremist and been pushed out of the Democratic Party for his like wild beliefs, which were an end to Jim Crow equal employment opportunities for women, national health insurance disability benefits, crazy things like that. But Paul is like, how can I help? In 1948, after a summer spent risking his life campaigning for Wallace in the deep south, Paul visits a group of kids at a summer camp in New Jersey called Wochika, which stands for the workers children's camp. It's for the children of Communist Party and union members. So black and white kids go to this camp, they hike, they put on plays and they also organize themselves into little unions and they learn arts and crafts from like all the stars of the Harlem Renaissance. The KKK and other vigilante groups harass the leadership of the camp for years until they succeed in shutting it down. But before that, it's like this act of camp. Our mutual friend, sound designer John DeLore, he was at a goodwill in New York and he found these tapes labeled Paul ropes him. He bought them, he cleaned them up as best he could, and realized that they were recordings from Paul's 1948 visit. We contacted his official archive and they don't think that they have these tapes, so he's going to donate them to him, but right after you confirmed, he called me, he was like Nicole you're never going to believe was on these tapes. And so I was like, well, I have to change this all around so that I can play these tapes for you. Definitely. So, this is him, he's talking to a group of, I think they're fourth and fifth graders. He's going to do a little speech and then he's going to sing the battle him of the Republic, which is like a classic patriotic American like fight song, but he remixes it. For this event, that's coming up called the People's March. So now, live from Camp Olchica, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Robson. I would just like to add one other word that this is a time of struggle. It can remain in your as you grow up, a time still of great struggle. So that you have to carry on for your children. And remember that we are struggling for the great majority of the peoples in the world. And that we have to fight against people who are very powerful. People who might seem are pretty hard to bring down from those top places. But they can be brought down. If you remain unified, remain through in the things that you learn in a place like Olchica, I myself have great faith and great courage in you. And I come here every year as I say, not only to sing to you, but to go away with inspiration and to go away with courage and to go away knowing that if you have that belief in me, if you have that kind of faith, I can never get tired. I can never fail to carry on the struggle for a decent way. There's a press breeze blowing all across this mighty land, and it sings of peace and progress and prosperity and with security and plenty for the people to command, for the peoples marches on, the glory, glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah, glory, glory, hallelujah, all the peoples marches on from the bay of Massachusetts out into the Golden Gate, Henry Wallace meets his army gates, destruction, fear, and hate. The Americans will save the precious land that we create for the peoples marches on, the glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah, all the peoples marches on from the village, from the city, all the nation's voice has roared down the rivers across the prairies like a tall and it has poured, we will march with Indians army, we will fight with Indian sword for the people marches on. It's incredible the way that Paul Roverson was able to address fourth and fifth graders. I think sometimes we act like our young people can't handle complex topics, complex discussions, some of the weight of the world, some of the expectation of a future full of fairness. I think his ability to speak to them like people and not as children is something I think about probably every single day of my own life based on the work that I do. So it was powerful to hear something like that. I'm glad I got to play it for you. Paulie will learn later that the State Department opened a file on his parents. In 1949 Paul joins a peace conference in Paris where he gives a speech. In the speech he says like basically black and white workers built America, we want to share in its wealth, we're not interested in a war with the USSR. The press falsely reports Paul saying black people would help the Soviet Union in a war against America as revenge for slavery and Jim Crow. This goes viral, every paper covers it, public sentiment turns on Paul, the Chicago defender publishes an article with the headline Paul Roverson is he a man or a Soviet mouse. So Essie is like in Mexico when all this happens and she's like oh my god, she gets out of her typewriter, she's like everybody. You know us, we've been in this for 20 years, this point, 20 years, we understand that tensions are high but you know that we are doing everything that we're doing to help America realize its promise. And the public is like oh well yeah, that's kind of a good point. And then Paulie marries a white girl and the public is like boo, you guys are communists, we hate you, Essie goes back to her typewriter and she writes, oh yeah, I declare war on all of our enemies and then she just like writes this article going off on everybody, she's like you boot my son. I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you, I'm coming for you, she's just like-- I'm still a fan, yeah, I think this is what I'm talking about right now. You're laundry never. All right, it's the '50s, the robocins are now in their '50s, the US and the Soviet Union are in a cold war, and the red scare is in full effect. Labor unions, international legiances, and especially communism are red flags. Paul and Essie don't back off of any of these things. Evidence of human rights abuses in the USSR become undeniable, but the robocins refuse to denounce the Soviet Union. We don't know why, they just won't do it, they won't denounce it. You could speculate that her brothers are there, and maybe she's worried for their safety. He tells Paulie at one point that sacrifices have to be made for a greater good. He believes that the Soviet Union is working towards this workers anti-racist utopia, but from the public's perspective, he won't back down. Paul's stage is a benefit concert in peak-scale New York. A violent mob of veterans and young white men chanting kill the commie and racist slurs descend on the event. They attack attendees with minimal police intervention and over 100 people are injured. The mob makes an effigy of Paul and then they lynch it. He has to be physically restrained from fighting them. In the movie version of this, we're going to cut away from all that violence, though, to a quiet cottage, a few miles away. Here, a woman and her six-year-old daughter are chairing a slice of birthday cake. This is 47-year-old Luis Thompson. This is like 20 years after she was secretary to Langston Hughes and Zora Neil Hurston. And I don't know if it's coming also from this place of like, Luis being a card-carrying communist and thinking everybody's equal in this. Luis had been hired to handle Paul's performance calendar. So she's hanging out with her kid. All of a sudden, all these people start rushing into the cottage and they tell her what happened at the show. She's like, "Absolutely not." She and the rest of Paul's team restaged the event for two weeks later and they get 2,000 labor union and communist party members to come out to peak-skill and form a human shield around the venue and Paul. Paul then leads the concert's 20,000 attendees in singing Negro Spirituals and Protest songs. So it is massive news. The riots get way more press than the restaged event but the restaged event is everything. The State Department demands that Paul and Essie sign loyalty oaks disavowing communism. They refuse. Their passports are revoked in a campaign of government harassment begins against them. So your Polly, what are your conversations like with your parents at this point? They're in their 50s and they're taking on the United States of America. I'm proud of my parents. If I'm me and in my parents, the people who raised me, I know who my parents are. Like if these are folks who raised me, then I know what their constitutions are. So I know that they're willing to go down. I know that they're willing to, like I know that, and I think, and I think, and I recognize if they did what I believe they did when raising me, then I'm aware of the consequences of this kind of life, right? The King children or his wife was aware of what was possible. I think I would have been sad and it would have been anxiety inducing, but I also know that it would have been a waste of my time, a futile endeavor to try to convince them otherwise, right? Do you have them, your parents, and you go ahead and you sign up for what it is? Would you have anything you would want to say to the public? The same thing that S.E. already said, yeah, I know who we are. We've held the line for a long, long time, right? And even when one of us has stepped out of bounds, the other one was there to pull us back, right? We hold each other accountable. We've been each other's mirrors for 30 years and that mirror has only reflected the best, right? The best of what it is that we expect of ourselves and this country, right? Like, that's it. I would have said what she's already been saying, what she had been saying. So, I mean, you know, you got a good mama like that. You mama going, she already said everything, right? I'd have been like, my mama already told you what it is, don't make me say it. Don't make me say it twice, you know what I mean? All right, so this is act four. How he came to forget the Robesons. In 1956, they're called to DC to face Joseph McCarthy in the House on American Activities Committee. They're going with hopes of getting their passports back. Essie's questioned by Joseph McCarthy and his little protege, Roy Cohn, who is the mentor to the current president. They want to know why she's so obsessed with Africa. If she's like an American and why she love it there so much, Essie's like, why is everybody on this committee wipe? McCarthy's like, because we are who the American people voted for. Are you a communist? And she says, well, you know, Jim Crow is making it very hard for a lot of the American people to vote down south, maybe if they could, we wouldn't all be here wasting our time. So that's her position. During, oh yeah, I love this article, Mrs. Robes improves too much for Senator McCarthy. And she was, so during Paul's hearings, he's asked if he's a communist, why he loves Stalin so much, why he keeps criticizing America even though he's rich and famous. Just contempt for the committee is hilarious. You should absolutely read the transcripts. James Earl Jones does a reading and he's just like, I'm so bored. Why am I here? He reminds him that he's literally a lawyer, if you recall, that's where all this started, plus he's an order and he's a genius. And they're like, obviously we forgot that otherwise we wouldn't have invited all these reporters in here. And he's so funny. He's like, why are you saying that? Like, we already need new boys. Like, he's just like posing for the reporters. He does not care. They ask him over and over again if he's a communist and he says the following. I'm not being tried for whether I am a communist. I'm being tried for fighting for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country and they are not. They are not a Mississippi and they are not an Alabama. That is why I am here today. You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers. If you can believe that after these testimonies, they do not get their passports back. I can't believe that. I know, I know, I know. After the hearings, the Robesons are declared anti-American communists. And from there, Paul is blacklisted and banned from concert venues, the radio, television and movie screens, as he's speaking invites disappear. Paul's name is removed from awards and records. This pro football career is essentially erased and newspapers go so far as to destroy archival material that mentions him. Friends turn on the Robesons, the NAACP denounces them. Black churches and unions around the world sin their support but it's not enough to make up for so much lost income. Paul and Essie sell their home and move in with Paulie and they watch as Paul is slowly erased from public memory. In 1958, after eight years, the Supreme Court rules that the state can't take your passport over your politics and the Robesons get theirs back. Then against Paulie's wishes, they relocate to London. Essie returns to the speaker's circuit and Paul stages an international comeback. They both go way too hard, they're checking themselves in and out of clinics for exhaustion a few times. It's just a lot for six-tier-olds. Then Essie is diagnosed with cancer and Paulie is like y'all have to come back home. Paul kind of wants to because he needs help caring for Essie and also because they're seeing MLK and Malcolm X and all the young people start to build on the new Negro civil rights movement. They're adding boycotts and sit-ins. Essie loves that. Paul really likes how internationally focused Malcolm X is. He thinks that's amazing and then and this is me guessing. But Debbie B. DeBoys gives a speech around this time and he says, "Paul is without a doubt the best known American on earth only in his native land is he without honor or rights." Paul is watching his activism, his life, erased from the record in real time and he's furious about it. He gives statements he should not give, doubling down on his support for the USSR. He sounds like burnt out and really hurt. So when this question of coming home, of going back home comes up, he's like, "Essie, no, maybe we should go." Essie gets really upset and she puts her foot down in a way that both Paulie and Paul say they'd never seen before and she's like, "Paul, the US is going to kill you. We cannot ever go back home." So the couple decide to stay in London and Paulie is upset by this decision. So now it's 1961. Paul is in Moscow. He gets a call. By now he knows that the United States is tapping his phone and following him everywhere so he has a friend answer it. It's Fidel Castro. He's inviting him to visit Cuba and Paul, he does not want the US like, he knows they're listening so he's just like, "No, thank you, thank you, thank you, hang up, hang up." The invite, unbeknownst to Paul and Fidel, is for the week of the Bay of Pigs in Beijing. So later Paul is entertaining in his hotel room and some uninvited guests arrive. The next morning Essie who is back in London gets a call telling her that Paul is in the hospital. So she calls Paulie, she tells him you need to get to Moscow so he gets on a plane. [BLANK_AUDIO] Brushes to Paul's side and is told that at some point during or after this party, Paul went into his bathroom and slit his wrists. He was discovered and brought to the hospital experiencing some kind of a mental breakdown with severe hallucinations and extreme paranoia. The doctors treat him with mild tranquilizers that seems to help. Paul he arrives in Moscow, he checks on his dad. Then he grabs a meal, he suddenly begins experiencing some kind of a mental breakdown with severe hallucinations and extreme paranoia. After a week, Pauly recovers but Paul does not. Pauly pleads with his mom to come back to the US but Essie believes that they're safer overseas and Pauly is angry about this decision. For the next two years Paul is not himself. At times he seems fine and at other times he's dangerously depressed and completely disoriented. Pauly's looking for solutions back in the US, Essie's doing the same in London while also managing her cancer. And then Pauly's London doctors suggest that Essie check him into a clinic called the Prairie to receive special treatment. Essie agrees. So in letters home she tells everyone we're fine, it's fine, we're doing great. But after a few months, she finally lets it slip that she's worried about Pauly's treatment plan. So Pauly rushes to London and he's horrified. At the clinic, Paul has been subjected to near daily debilitating electroconvulsive therapy and a cocktail of powerful drugs. His father is a shell of himself. So he and Essie get Paul out of that clinic and into another one in Germany and when they get there the doctors are so shocked by Paul's condition, they tell Essie and Pauly that they will do what they can, but Paul will never be the same and what's left of him has to be quietly conserved. Some historians say that maybe he had a mental break. Others wonder if he had bipolar disorder and it appeared in his 60s. They don't like Pauly's theory because he can't produce enough evidence for it, but I'm going to tell you it anyway. Pauly spends 20 years trying to access his father's medical records from the Prairie and when he finally gets declassified files from the U.S. government. He says that he finds compelling evidence that the CIA in British intelligence may have conspired to administer LSD and ECT therapy as part of the covert CIA mine control and chemical interrogation research program known as MKUltra. Of Paul, Kretta Scott King will later say he was buried alive even before my husband for tapping the same wilds of latent militancy. I'm obviously a little more towards Pauly's side where it's like they definitely was poised. I think they poisoned him. If you know anything about bipolar, usually it comes around 27 between 27 and 35, right? 60? You going to the younger you went your whole life and they know you were bipolar? That's not the way it works usually, right? Before his son to get sick too? We know what it is, I just didn't know that part and I think that part kind of has me a little emotional and a bit rattled just because, I mean I mean there's anger there for me. S.E. agrees to move back to the U.S. and right before she passes she helps to organize a gala for Paul. All the black stars of the day turn out to celebrate him, Nora Holt reports live from the event and calls Paul a towering mountain of strength who'd suffered for his people. Paul is well enough to sing for them and thank them for their love and the night means the world to S.E. She would want you all to know because she documented it in such meticulous and unbelievable detail that everything she did was born out of a lifetime's worth of love for Paul. Paul lives the next 11 years with his sister largely in isolation and then he passes away in 1976 at the age of 77. By then lots of the activism of the new Negroes had been erased from public memory, along with Paul, who'd become one of those names that you know you know but you can't really remember why. However, there were those who refused to forget. James Baldwin, Jackie Robinson, James Earl Jones, and especially Sydney Potier and Harry Belafonte talked proudly about his influence on their lives and their work and their activism. They host tributes. They try to get movies made. They give interviews and speeches about Paul and his legacy for the rest of their lives. I said to him Paul, you have given us so much, you could have been anything you wanted to be. Was it worth it? He said absolutely. Paulie becomes an author, a historian, and an archivist. He establishes the Paul Robson archive containing over 50,000 artifacts, including much of his mother's collection, which is housed here at Howard University. The Paul Robson Foundation is going to develop a series of educational programs that will preserve and extend my father's legacy. For a long time, Essie's part in the story was completely overlooked. But in 2013, the first biography on Essie was published, and in it, her work as a talent manager, activist, anthropologists, and archivists are finally brought into focus. She turned to a new book that looks at Aslinda Robson, known by her friends as Essie. Both Essie and Paul lived to see the beginning of the end of colonialism in Africa when God had become the first African nation to gain independence in 1957, and they lived to see the legal defeat of Jim Crow with the passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and '65. There's so much more that happened, but for now, that is a story of how we came to know, love, fear, forget, and now remember the revolutionary Robson's. I know you have a very early flight, so I'll just ask you just high level, what are your thoughts? I think that the biggest misconception in this country is that I think it doesn't actually understand what love is, because the other thing is to be able to critique it, and to love a thing is to want more of it, to hold it to account, and I think in this country we look at patriotism as the opposite of that, as blind faith, and a thing that has never actually given us reason to be blindly faithful to it. I think Paul and his family loved America, they couldn't not be here, though, because America doesn't understand what love actually looks like, which is critique, honesty. I have to be able to look my brother in the face and say that you did me wrong if I love him. I want more for you. I deserve better and you deserve better. You can be better if I love him. And I think that's all they were trying to do their entire lives, and it's profound to think I did not know anything about Essie, which I'm grateful to know now, which by the way is also a whole other thing about this particular culture in our history. The women are always, I've done lots of work in the space, and what I realize over the course of history of my readings of many, many, many things is that black women have almost always been on the right side. Like if you look historically, we can go all the way back, do you think about the famous ones like a Harriet Tubman, or you know, Ida B. Wells and Fanny, Ida B. Wells saying, like, yeah, trust what they're saying about black men, and she knew that it wasn't you and did the extra work of journalism to prove it to be. We can go on and on and on and on and on and on and I think Essie is just another one of these figures that we now all can add to our, you know, sort of our, our, our quiver of arrows as another black woman on the right side, 99% of the time, right? And I think, so that matters to me. And then lastly, I did not know how his life ended. Right? I'm not surprised. It's not like surprise. I'm not like, I'm not, like, gobsmacked by it. Right. It happened so often, but it is another one of those moments of just anger and like, I, these people weren't, these people were being killed for being great. And that's kind of where I met with it. This episode was written, researched, produced, and performed by me and Nicole Hill. Thank you to the generational talent that is Jason Reynolds. You can find major sources for the show in the show notes, but I also want to specifically call out Barbara Ransby's incredible biography on his Landa called, as Landa, Colin, the large and unconventional life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a link to that is in the show notes, along with the talk that she gave that I just thought was so great. Thank you to my 18, that's executive producer, Adriana Ambrez. South. design or sound animator Kyle Murdock, story producer Martina Abraham Zalunga, research producer and voice talent Joke Ian Sen was show art by Asela Kasmith. Thank you to Nate Wong our host with the most sound proof home ever. All the audio people came in and started like touching the walls. He's like what is happening Nicole. Thank you for not throwing us out. Thank you to the team of audio wizards that made sure that the mics were set up just so that Thomas Lou with help from a female Shapiro and John DeLore. And speaking of John DeLore, thank you for rummaging around in good wills and finding tapes labeled Paul Robson and cleaning them up with your audio brilliance and then sharing them with me and all of us actually. Thank you to all of my absolutely brilliant incredible beautiful guests who came out that evening in November and brought your friends. Thank you to my mom and sister for letting me commandeer the holidays to play you rough cuts of these episodes. Thank you to my best friend Cassandra Sapa for making me the most delicious steak I've ever had after that show. You're a legend you should be on top chef. Thank you to all of my voice talent listed in order Joke Ian Sen, Esther de Rothschild, Elka Van Hacca, Helena de Groot, Robin Hill, Bernard Acha Punk, Jenna Murdock, Civil Murdock, is a bell cadenas canion, Ronald Young Jr, Stella Murdock, Le Cere Mjote, Bernadette Crojon, and Adriana Ambrice. To support us, become a donor. Enjoy in the household that our ancestors were messy.supercast.com and to learn more about the show visit our ancestors were messy.com. Before I go, I'll just say this, I'm a storyteller, historian, and an archivist, in part because of quotes like this from Martin Luther King Jr. We are not makers of history. We're made by history.