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885: Bless This Mess
Brief
The second arc shifts to politics and repression: Hill and Reynolds describe the Robesons’ embrace of the USSR in the 1930s as part of a broader internationalist anticolonialism and labor critique, which made them targets during the Red Scare. After a misreported 1949 Paris speech, Paul’s passport was revoked in 1950 and he was summoned before HUAC in the mid-1950s; the State Department declared him “the most dangerous man in America,” institutions erased his records, and concert/book/film opportunities dried up. Though a 1958 Supreme Court ruling restored their passports, Paul’s later life was devastated by a psychiatric collapse in London—Hill and Paul Jr.’s research raise the possibility of MKUltra-style drugging and abusive ECT at a clinic, an allegation Reynolds finds plausible and enraging. Hill and Reynolds close by stressing deliberate cultural forgetting: archival suppression, blacklisting, and institutional erasure turned two globally consequential figures into obscured “ghosts,” and Hill models archival recuperation as the remedy—retrieving messy, human details from Black newspapers, family testimony, and sound archives to restore the Robesons’ full, complicated legacy.
Why it matters
Nichole Hill narrates that Eslanda “Essie” Robeson and Paul Robeson eloped in August 1921 after meeting as Columbia students in Harlem; Essie later quit her job (she became the first Black woman to run a lab at Columbia Presbyterian, Hill) to manage Paul’s acting career full time.
Key details
- According to Hill and guest Jason Reynolds, Paul Robeson rose to international stardom in the 1920s–30s (playing in Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 film Body and Soul and winning acclaim for Show Boat and his rendition of “Old Man River”), while also being a multilingual scholar, former NFL player and trained lawyer.
- Hill recounts that the Robesons became high-profile supporters of the Soviet Union after visits in the 1930s, receiving warm treatment in Moscow, and that their international activism on anti-colonialism and labor rights drew FBI and CIA scrutiny (Hill: both Paul and Essie had government files opened on them).
- Emanuele Berry and Hill report that in 1950 Paul’s passport was revoked after a misreported 1949 Paris speech and sustained McCarthy-era attacks; Hill says the State Department labeled him “the most dangerous man in America,” he was blacklisted from radio, screen and TV, and institutions including Rutgers erased records of his achievements.
- Hill and Jason relay that a 1958 Supreme Court ruling forbade revoking passports over politics and the Robesons got their passports back, but Paul’s later life was marred by a severe psychiatric decline in the 1960s; Paul Jr. (cited by Hill) alleged potential CIA/British-intelligence involvement (MKUltra-style drugs/ECT), a claim Jason said he found plausible.
- Jason Reynolds and Hill emphasize the cultural erasure: Reynolds calls Paul’s removal from history a deliberate redaction—turning a public giant into a ‘‘ghost’’—and Hill stresses that archival recovery (her podcast and research in Black newspapers) is how these stories reemerge.