Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America

Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant (New York: Mariner Books, 2026)

In Kings and Pawns, Howard Bryant tells three important stories:

the story of Jackie Robinson.
the story of Paul Robeson.
the story of the fateful clash between Robinson and Robeson that crested in the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1949.

I teach at Bergen Community College and have found out this generation of my students tends to know of Jackie Robinson and his status as the first African American player in modern Major League Baseball (MLB). They nearly unanimously have never heard of Robeson and certainly do not know about his clash with Robinson. So, in my estimation, Bryant is telling important stories that are instructive and illuminating. Every April 15, MLB celebrates Jackie Robinson. But MLB rarely looks at the nuances of the Robinson story, the dark underbelly, and the troubling polarization that characterizes so much of the American narrative. Bryant sheds light on that dark part.

In Kings and Pawns, Bryant’s biography of Paul Robeson helps us understand the man and his place in our history, starting in 1927 when Robeson was a superstar on Broadway (Showboat / Old Man River) and was treated with great respect by the mainstream press. He was seen as immensely talented and intelligent, and his stardom became a symbol of America overcoming its racist past. Robeson was held up as the spokesman for the “Negro” people.

Bryant captures Robeson’s rise and then his fall and total collapse as persona non grata because of his allegedly toxic political views.

The story of the clash is complicated. Here it is in a nutshell. In 1949, Robeson, who had eschewed commercial success by highlighting concerts for fund-raising causes he believed in, was seen as a Communist sympathizer, particularly because of his visits to the USSR during which he expressed solidarity with the Soviet peoples and satisfaction for their acceptance of a Black man as an equal. He performed for civil rights causes and labor union causes, notably for striking coal miners in Wales. He had become beloved (also hated) worldwide. Robeson allegedly asserted during a 1949 Paris speech that the Negro people would not fight for the oppressor nation (the USA) against the USSR if the Cold War turned into World War III, but he said thereafter that his remarks had been distorted by the Associated Press:

Here is what Robeson actually said:

“We in America do not forget that it is on the backs of the poor whites of Europe . . . and on the backs of millions of Black people the wealth of America has been acquired. And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union.”

Here is what the AP quoted Robeson as saying:

“We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels… It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full human dignity of mankind.”

Typical news headlines about the Robeson speech were “Negroes Won’t Fight Soviet, Says Robeson” and “Negroes Loyal to Russia, Says Paul Robeson.”

African American leaders, such as those in the NAACP, understood this “unpatriotic” position was not a good look for its “spokesman.”

Enter Jackie Robinson, the most popular “Negro” in America in 1949 (it was his MVP season); the NAACP and others (such as Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ General Manager and part-owner) convinced him to counter Robeson by testifying before HUAC. Robinson did so on July 18, 1949.

Bryant covers that testimony and its aftermath in detail and very effectively. In short, Robinson did a “dance” at the committee, trying not to denounce Robeson while making clear that he did not agree that African Americans were unpatriotic; they had fought in every American war. Robinson himself was a WW II vet. The press generally did not report Robinson’s nuanced dance; the headlines tended toward “Jackie denounces Robeson.” But what did Jackie really say that day?

He said that Robeson “has a right to his personal views”
He insisted that “[t]he fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Just because Communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of Communist imagination……Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well.”

These were definitely not the words of an “Uncle Tom.”

Nevertheless, Robeson essentially disappeared from public view after 1949; he had been defanged as it were, and the suspension of his passport kept him off the world stage.

According to Bryant, late in Robinson’s life when his viewpoint on American race relations had darkened and he would no longer stand for the flag or sing the national anthem, “[i]n retrospect, he said, he would have refused the HUAC invitation.”

In America 2026, where racist rhetoric is openly heard in some quarters, and polarization keeps rising, and “divide-and-conquer” tactics are at the heart of Trumpian politics, Howard Bryant’s book truly speaks to us.

Reviewed by Mark Altschuler, Professor of English
Bergen Community College

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Editor’s Note: Bryant’s book is one of several recent works that study sports in a political/cultural context. Two books focus on Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball:

Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest for Black Citizenship, by Peter Eisenstadt, and Opening the Door for Jackie, by Keith Evan Crook. Eisenstadt tells us that his book “is about the meaning of integration as viewed through the life of Jackie Robinson,” that “integration means ending white domination of Black lives,” and that Robinson’s “favored way of working towards integration was strengthening Black organizations and businesses. Robinson’s understanding of integration was not premised on white good will, but on Black militancy.” Eisenstadt also notes the importance of New York State’s 1945 “Ives-Quinn Law” banning discrimination in employment. The law was a factor in Branch Rickey’s decision to sign up Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization and bring him up to the majors in 1947. The second book, Opening the Door for Jackie, places the Robinson integration story more in the context of postwar history, networks, institutions and collective action by, e.g., activists, labor leaders, journalists and politicians. It tries to answer the question, why did integration of baseball become possible at that point in time?

The Heyday of Willie, Duke, and Mickey: New York City Baseball’s Golden Age Amid Integration, by Robert C. Cottrell, who has written interesting baseball books about the great strike of 1994, the transformation of baseball by Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson, the Negro Leagues pioneer Rube Foster, and other books about our All-American Rebels. The author has much to say in his latest work about “Blackball” and about the major leagues in their early period of integration, but, more than the aforementioned works, it details the golden age of New York City baseball and the exploits of the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants and their great stars Mantle, Snider and Mays, until the two National League teams abandoned their devoted fans for golden pastures in sunny California.

Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team, is by A.M. Gittlitz, an organizer and writer focusing on counterculture and radical politics. The New Yorker’s book reviewer Adam Gopnik said that Gittlitz “writes from a hard-left, Marxist perspective,” and notwithstanding the Mets’ current ownership by baseball’s richest team owner, Steven Cohen, “Gittlitz truly believes that the Mets are the people’s team and that they have been engaged in genuine, if often contorted, class struggle on our behalf for the past sixty-five years or so.” The team has always had a populist and countercultural vibe, explains the author. But aren’t the Yankees the paladins of working-class Bronx? (Baseball fans will have to argue that out.) Gittlitz takes us on a Left-shaped tour of baseball history (not left field), advising that the rebellious “Brotherhood” league of the 1880’s was “inspired by the cooperationist ideals of the Knights of Labor,” and that Players’ Union head Marvin Miller, compared to his predecessors, “was like Lenin” as he freed his members from indentured servitude.

Karl Marx’s epigram, that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” applies, sadly, to the ballfield antics of this season’s New York Metropolitans (Mets).

[By Keith Danish]