[Nancy Pearl] Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Howard Bryant and his new book,
“Kings and Pawns Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.”
Howard, thank you so much for joining me
to talk about this book, which I, I thoroughly enjoyed.
I just I kept reading it, putting it down, telling my husband,
you have to listen to this all it all it all came together and was.
So it was just a fascinating read.
So thank you for writing it.
- No, it's my pleasure.
And thank you for having me on.
What was the inspiration for for this book?
- Well, the biggest inspiration.
Well, there are two real inspirations.
The first one was embarrassment.
To be honest, I am a huge Jackie
Robinson, person.
I'm a huge baseball fan.
And obviously I'm a huge history person.
I love history, and one thing that I have been saying to people over
and over again is, boy, you know, you know,
if you like writing books,
did you like research?
There aren't very many people who like to write, but they don't like to research.
I feel for those people. I love doing research.
And the number of times that I had been reading about this baseball history and,
and I know my baseball history
and in that history had been reduced to one sentence.
Jackie Robinson testified against Paul Robeson in front of HUAC.
And that was it.
And the number of times that I had read that sentence, the number of times,
even in the great Arnold Rampersad, biography
of Robinson, in 1997,
that chapter was a page, if maybe, maybe two pages.
I've never read anything where, you know, in a book where it was more than that.
And when you think about it from an equivalency standpoint,
that would
be like today, like Michael Jordan, you know,
testifying against Denzel Washington or something in front of Congress.
I mean, it's that big.
And so for someone like me to have read as much as I've read
and just to skip past it as if that's all there was to the story,
the embarrassment was, I sort of think that there was more to it, I think.
I think that the these two giants being placed
in opposition to each other when they've never met,
in front of the most notorious government body this country's ever produced.
I think that qualifies as news.
Yeah.
The second reason that really motivated me to do
this book was Robeson himself
was when I went to college, at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Paul Robeson was a huge name. It was in 1987.
He'd only been dead not even a dozen years.
He died in 1976.
This is the 50th anniversary of his death in January of 76. And
his name was everywhere,
still in the black community, especially at Temple University.
At my school, there's the Charles Blockson and, you know, the collection
has a Robeson, section in it.
And so that name is everywhere.
And it was just embarrassing to me.
And it was sort of a I wouldn't say a mission of mine, but it was always
a thought to to know more than I did.
And at some point to be able
to really dig into who this man was.
And, and I think that was a real big motivation for me.
As, as I've been repeating this over and over again, the great David Maraniss
has given me sort of a model for my, my work,
which is, you know, history writes people out of the story,
and it's our job to write them back in, that's it.
That is such a tremendous thing to say.
- Yeah.
And with Robeson, I mean, he did everything
he you know, he played baseball before Jackie Robinson played baseball.
He, you know, was starred in Othello
I mean, he was a lawyer.
I mean, he just was this amazing man.
And because of the the state of the country
at that time and because of the House un-American Activities Committee
and the what's her name, Ruth Shipley, who was, you know, deciding
who could get a passport or not. - Who decided who traveled and who didn't.
- Exactly.
And it was like he was canceled in 2026 terms.
I mean, Jackie Robinson was really
you know, what David Maraniss said?
I mean, he was written out of history today.
- We like to throw a lot of terms around and we throw them around recklessly.
And there are so many people out there, whether they be
comedians or whomever
or media people take your pick
who talk about being canceled
while they're actually still working,
and they talk about being canceled, but they're still very much in the public eye.
They talk about being canceled just because people criticize
something that they actually did,
some malfeasance, some transgression, and
Paul Robeson never broke the law.
Paul Robeson had political beliefs,
and his life was ruined because of his political beliefs.
Right.
And that, to me, is worthy of exploration.
That it's not as though, well, everybody deserves a second chance.
He didn't deserve a second chance
because he should have never lost his first chance. Right.
And so to me that these two people were so interesting to me,
and I think when I was working on the proposal and starting to decide
whether or not this was going to be a project that I was going to take on,
it was also that you're dealing
with these two gigantic, incredibly talented Americans who in different
stages, you know, born 21 years apart, who did everything that America asked.
And they were placed,
on, on the podium, on the pedestal of people who were proof
of what this country was capable of, even though it was a segregated nation.
And then as soon as they expressed any sort of dissent,
were treated as traitors, both of them.
And the story to me was how did these two people
end up so disillusioned at the end of their lives,
and while at the same time maintaining
that wonderful spirit that makes us all still care about them?
- Yeah.
And I think that I think that with Jackie Robinson,
one of the things that I think that casual
baseball fans who have heard Jackie Robinson's name don't really see the
the influence, why he decided to go before the House
un-American Activities Committee and at whose behest
he did it, which was Branch Rickey and
and what that meant for Jackie Robinson.
The rest of his life.
- Yeah. That's right.
Well, one of the things that one of my great pet peeves in sports
is how we mangle the language
is how we mangle the term legacy.
A guy goes out and scores,
you know, two touchdowns and he says, I'm just trying to add to my legacy.
No, no no no, no.
That's your accomplishments.
Those are your you're adding to your list of accomplishments.
Your legacy is what you leave behind.
Your legacy is what lives on after you and
what I
really wanted to sort of get at in this project was how
what was the legacy, what was the effect of what Robinson had had done?
And that's really where the title plays out as well.
The legacy of the Cold War, this moment in time
has really been sort of detached from the modern civil rights movement
because of the Cold War and because of this second Red scare,
when so much of what would take place in the 50s,
whether it's the Montgomery Bus boycott or the civil rights movement
to come, so much of it that essentially been pushed back,
because of what took place during, during this period.
And so it just seemed like
there was a real forgotten story here that deserves some.
It deserved a little bit of sunlight.
One thing that I really enjoyed most about working on this was that
that most times we treat black history
separate from history, separate from American history.
If it's something that has to deal with black people, we just put it over here.
And this the Cold War has never been considered black history.
The Cold War is simply history.
And there are tons
and tons and tons of Cold War stories and this happens to be a Cold War story
that centers two African Americans in the center of the mainstream history.
And I really sort of liked that juxtaposition as well.
- I thought it was interesting
that at the end, toward the end of his life, Jackie Robinson,
who was who was a conservative man,
the way that he came to see that.
That that he changed his position
because he was, in a way,
the, the, the black civil rights movement was not fond of Jackie Robinson
or where he placed himself in the political spectrum.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, it's very fair to say.
- And it's even more fair to say that that,
it is interesting to go and look,
because we all live in these binaries today, and we all feel
that we can't remember what happened last Thursday,
but yet we feel like where we are today has always been this way.
And it has. And things change.
And in Jackie's case,
I think that
the, the, the idea of
where he was
and what he felt the country needed, he was very much a conservative man.
He was not a registered Republican.
He always considered himself an independent.
He was a registered independent.
However, he was conservative in his politics and conservative and in his life.
And he also believed,
which is very different from the divided politics that we have today.
He also believed that, you know, when you're black and you're eight, nine,
10% of the population, that you need to have representation
in both parties, that both parties have to have some interest in you.
And part of his disillusionment was realizing that that wasn't the case,
was realizing that as we get to the early 1960s, the mid 1960s,
and he that the Republican Party
didn't have his best interest at heart, even though he had campaigned
for Richard Nixon, even though he was aligned
with Eisenhower, even though following his playing career,
he had a direct line to the white House and in the library of Congress,
there are plenty of telegrams from Jackie Robinson to the white House
saying that the civil rights situation in the South is exploding.
What are we going to do about it?
And then finding out that they really weren't
going to do much of anything, or that they were very reluctant to do anything.
And that began to, to, to wear on him as well.
And so to the point where by 1963,
he writes a, an essay in the Saturday Evening
Post titled the GOP for White Men only.
And and that is, is a real repudiation,
not just of the GOP of the time,
but of his past that I trusted this group.
And while this is happening simultaneously,
there's this new generation of far more,
militant, far more aggressive black young civil
rights, activists who are looking at him like he's out of touch
and like he's out of time and he's he's not with it.
He's not with the modern movement.
So in a lot of ways, he's sort of this the great Jackie Robinson
who has done everything, is sort of this man without a country
that the civil rights movement is moving beyond him,
and the people that he had trusted to, and, you know, to support
his positions had sort of a band had definitely had abandoned him as well.
- I think one of the most
moving things that you have in this book is the letter
that Malcolm X wrote, to Jackie
Robinson, detailing what Malcolm X saw
as his betrayal of civil rights and,
and and the black movement toward equality.
- Yeah. That's right. Well,
and that's what we mean about legacy in a lot of ways.
Jackie's legacy, Jackie's legacy never survived that testimony against Robeson.
And and for a new, once again, that new generation of activists,
for Malcolm X to bring that up is to say, look at what you've done.
And and in working on this book, you're
you're looking at a moment in history,
you're trying to assess that moment in history,
and you're trying to sort of sift through the different places.
But the most important thing you can't do, the thing you cannot do.
There are things you can do in things you cannot do.
The one thing you can't do is you can't try
to look at this through a 2026 lens.
You have to look at it through the lens of the time.
And at that time, in 1949, Jackie Robinson
was, in a lot of ways, a compromised man.
He is, at the behest of Branch
Rickey, who has integrated the major leagues.
Jackie not only had a personal love for Branch Rickey,
but also a professional responsibility, and he felt a personal responsibility
as well.
He certainly didn't feel like he could say no to his boss, who was telling him
to testify against this great black man that he's never met.
But at the same time, he's also convinced.
And that's also where the title comes from in terms of who are the kings
and who are the pawns.
He's also, you know, convinced as well
that all of the white allies who are committed to civil rights
are going to run for cover.
If you're associated with the Communist Party,
you know, and that's what that was the black establishment's position as well.
That's the Urban League's position.
That's the NAACP position.
And so it's not simply a personal thing against Robeson.
It's also a strategic thing.
It's a strategic it's a question of tactics.
And the black establishment chose that.
The proper tactic here was to isolate themselves from Robeson's
politics, from Robeson's far left anti-capitalist, very much.
You know, Robeson was never officially
a member of the Communist Party, but he was absolutely aligned with them.
He was aligned with them personally.
He was aligned with them professionally, and he was unapologetic about it.
And the number of folks who felt like that
was detrimental to the civil rights movement, starts at the top.
Whether it's Walter White, whether it's Roy Wilkins,
whether it's Bayard Rustin, whether it's Thurgood Marshall,
I mean all of the civil rights giants.
The only one who said, no, there's room for everybody was W.E.B.
Dubois.
- I was going to ask you about the role of W.E.B.
Dubois played in, in, in Paul Robeson's thinking about
the role of, you know, the black population
of, of the United States and, and how how
that was going to work for people.
Well, you could say it better, the whole patriotism thing.
How can you be a patriot?
- Well, one of the great questions that we always ask, and sometimes in jest,
but it's always serious, is who radicalized you? Right.
Where did it come from?
In in both Robeson and Dubois case.
One is the upbringing,
but two, it was the treatment of black
soldiers coming back from both World War one and World War two.
And and today, once again, you can't write these things
in a 2026 mindset, because today we live in a post 911.
Thank you for your service.
We give dignity to veterans.
We give dignity to soldiers.
If you wore the uniform, it matters.
And people tend to act as though they respected.
And that doesn't just include, you know, the 9/11 post 9/11,
Iraq, Afghanistan war veteran, but
also it's retroactive to Vietnam, it's retroactive to the Tuskegee Airmen.
It's retroactive to World War Two,
to those that didn't get that Greatest Generation treatment.
But at that time, in real time, if you were a black man
walking around in uniform in 1917,
1919, 1942, 1943, you were a target.
Your life was in danger, and there was a large number
of people in this country who wanted to harm you.
And that really set Robeson and Dubois.
That was the moment for both of them, where it was.
We can't just sit on the sides. From a Du Bois standpoint.
He was like, I just can't be an anthropologist here.
I need propaganda.
I need to really build the case that this is immoral.
It's un-American, the whole thing.
At the same time, this is happening both Du Bois
early because he's 30 years older than Robeson.
Both Dubois and and Robeson over
this time are committed to the African, independence movements.
So for Dubois, there's a real Pan-Africanism element to this.
And Robeson as well, that wrote that they are thinking about
not just a black movement in the United States, but
the treatment in the Caribbean is the same as the treatment in the United States.
The treatment in in Kenya, in Ghana and in the Congo is the same.
The treatment in India,
in those colonial anti-colonial movements, it's the same things that what they saw
was a total Pan-African movement and the black leadership,
because for its own reasons.
But the black leadership saw the civil rights movement
as a strictly domestic movement.
And obviously the Cold War plays a huge piece of that.
And so the romance of Dubois and the romance of Robeson, and also
the danger of them, was the linking of the black struggle,
the black global struggle to the black domestic struggle.
And that was something that the local black
that the domestic black establishment wanted very little to do with.
And it was certainly something that the State Department
and the FBI wanted nothing to do, nothing to do with.
- Right.
I know that in your book you have, part of an interview,
with Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow, and in which she says
the two things that Jackie Robinson regretted about his life.
The things he regretted doing.
And one of those was testifying, against Robeson at Newark,
and the other was his strong support of Richard Nixon.
- That's right.
- And I wondered whether the,
the Urban League or, the NAACP has ever spoken
about their treatment of of Robeson and what that meant at that time.
- No, they actually did not.
It was very personal with them.
And, you know, the NAACP is an organization, but,
you know, an organizations don't have feelings.
It was the people. It was the Walter White specifically.
It was Roy Wilkins specifically, who really interesting to another extent
as well.
And Marshall,
that they were very,
very happy with Robeson when he was raising money for the NAACP.
But they certainly felt like his politics were very messy,
and they felt like his politics were making their jobs harder.
And then and he wasn't responsible for the mess he was making.
And so they did not change their minds on him.
They felt like.
And they believed he was a communist, and they believed once again that he well
and not incorrectly, but they believed that they were,
you know, that that he was making life difficult for them.
And he was not helping the movement.
And I don't think that that ever changed.
And one of the very interesting things in this, you know,
both in working on the book and in the aftermath of the book,
was this idea of, the number of people.
And this is why the Branch Rickey piece is so important that
the number of people
who really supported Jackie and felt a massive betrayal.
If the baseball owners felt that Rickey had betrayed them
by integrating the sport.
Then there was the the left wing political,
element of the United States.
A lot of the, the Jewish community, a lot of the labor community,
a lot of the new York progressive community felt
incredibly betrayed by Jackie's testimony to to HUAC.
How could you do this?
We supported your integration of the game.
We were your biggest supporters.
How could you do this to us?
And then I did an interview, a couple of weeks ago,
where one of the pieces of the book obviously is.
It's Jackie's testimony, but it's also Robeson's testimony
seven years later in front of HUAC on June 12th, 1956,
where he is going hammer and tongs with this committee and the committee.
You know, this is also happening in 56, when Khrushchev is now the head of the
Soviet Union.
And he acknowledges Stalin's crimes.
And the question
that was asked of me was, don't you believe it really wasn't a question?
It was more of a comment.
Don't you believe that Paul Robeson is a lesser man
for not acknowledging what Stalin had done?
Because there were so many progressive, members of the Communist
Party of the CPUSA, who left the party after learning
what Stalin had done in Robeson, wasn't willing to to denounce it.
Neither was the Dubois.
And their reasoning was,
you really don't want me to admit I.
I had to evolve on this, but you really just want me to admit I was wrong.
That's all you want me to do.
And I'm not going to give you that satisfaction.
You. You want me to say that the Soviet experiment
was a mistake all along, but America apologizes for nothing,
so I'm not going to apologize because you haven't apologized
for what you've done to my people for the last 350 years.
And so it was a massive, tense standoff.
And and one of the interviews said to me, yes,
but don't you think that Robeson was could have made a different call?
And the answer is yes.
He could have made a different call, but he didn't.
And and that was the decision that he made.
And so that is the that's a bittersweet piece to me
because it's obvious that that Robeson was hurt by that.
And it goes back as we talk about Jackie Robinson
being sort of a member of that country.
So too was Robeson, because this country, he felt, betrayed him.
But also, there is no way that he could feel that the that
the Soviet, you know, elements
that he had supported had held up their end of the bargain either.
- Howard Bryant, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you for writing this book,
and I really look forward to your next book as well.
Thank you.
- My pleasure. We could have talked that we were just getting started.
- I know that's exactly how I felt.
Yeah, we could have talked more and more and more.
Thank you. - Thank you.