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#AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – On the afternoon of Sunday, September 4, 1949, violence broke out after renowned but controversial African American baritone Paul Robeson sang at an outdoor concert near Peekskill, New York, to a mixed-race audience of more than 20,000 people.

This was a rescheduled performance. The original concert, slated for August 27 as a benefit for the leftist Civil Rights Congress, had been preempted by violence aimed at Robeson’s race and politics.

While the second concert itself went off peacefully despite nearby protests, concertgoers leaving the venue were ambushed by attackers who threw stones and overturned cars while local police stood by. Together, the two incidents have come to be known as the Peekskill Riots, and interpreted not only as a test case for free speech rights, but as a harbinger of both the reactionary politics and protest movements that would unfold in the post-WWII era.

Paul Robeson had performed in the Peekskill area for several years without incident, but several  factors converged to generate new controversy in 1949. The singer-actor’s left politics were well-known, as was his advocacy for civil rights. Considered a Communist “fellow traveler,” he had first visited the Soviet Union in 1934, where he claimed that he was treated  with a level of respect he had never experienced in his own country. By 1947, as the Cold War heated up, the House Un-American Activities Committee had started its investigations into alleged Communist influence in Hollywood, and Robeson was one of the targeted performers. Robeson had, in fact,  put his career on hold to help organize the Progressive Party’s 1948 presidential campaign. But then, in April, 1949, he gave a speech at the Congress of the World Partisans of Peacein Paris that was widely covered, and likely misquoted, in the American press—recasting his intended pacifist and antiracist message as a strongly pro-Communist one. One article from Peekskill’s local Evening Star newspaper, for example, featured the subhead “Robeson Says U.S. Negro Won’t Fight Russia.”¹

In addition, the newly-controversial Robeson’s pending appearance helped to catalyze the simmering resentments of year-round Peekskill residents toward the area’s Jewish summer community. A mix of union members and professionals, some immigrants, some political radicals, Jewish New Yorkers routinely escaped the heat of the city at upstate camps and bungalow colonies; near Peekskill, their presence more than doubled the size of the area’s population each year. When local chapters of the American Legion and other veterans’ groups, as well as the Chamber of Commerce, set themselves in public opposition to Robeson’s concert in the name of patriotism, there was an undercurrent of deeper tensions in the rhetoric. “The time for tolerant silence that signifies approval is running out,” proclaimed one Evening Star editorial on August 22.²  Once protest against Robeson’s appearance did turn violent, the violence was directed especially at the members of his audience, who were taunted with racist and anti-semitic epithets or openly assaulted. “The outbreak thus embodies the combined expressions of the most explosive prejudices in American life—against Communists, Negroes and Jews,” claimed one report soon after.³

As a singer Robeson was known for his renditions of spirituals and folk songs as well as show tunes he had helped to popularize such as Showboat’s “Ol’ Man River.” His first Peekskill concert had been planned by People’s Artists Inc., a group recently started by rising folk singer Pete Seeger to facilitate bookings. Novelist Howard Fast was the intended emcee who, because he had arrived before the rioting started, became a defacto leader for the hundreds of audience members trapped on the concert grounds. Fast’s book-length Peekskill, USA: A Personal Experience recounts events such as the burning of a cross on a nearby hill, blockades at nearby roadways, attack on the makeshift stage and destruction of thousands of rented wooden chairs on the evening of August 27. Robeson had not made it past the blockades to the concert grounds that day.  Once he returned to Harlem, at a press conference denouncing the violence he vowed to come to Peekskill again and sing. Plans quickly emerged for a larger concert at a different venue the following weekend. This time, both Robeson and his audience were protected by a body guard of WWII veterans and union members on the stage, with a ring of hundreds more surrounding the venue. The show of solidarity led Pete Seeger—who both sang at the concert and whose car was later attacked with stones—to write “Hold the Line” with his colleague Lee Hayes, which was recorded by their folk group The Weavers soon after:

Let me tell you the story of a line that was held,
And many men and women whose courage we know well,
As they held the line at Peekskill on that long September day,
We will hold the line forever till the people have their way.

Paul Leroy Robeson was born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, the youngest child of a father who had escaped from slavery on the eve of the Civil War and a mother whose ancestors included prominent members of the Northeast’s Free Black community. Robeson grew up in nearby Somerville and then won a scholarship to attend Rutgers College (now University) in New Brunswick. He was one of the school’s first African American students, and the very first to play for the school’s football team, with great success but some controversy surrounding his race. Robeson was indeed multi-talented: admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, he earned fifteen varsity letters in four different sports, won the class oratory prize each year he attended, and—to a standing ovation—gave the college’s commencement address on the topic of his choice, “The New Idealism.”

After college Robeson moved to Harlem, studied law at Columbia University while playing professional football to help finance his education, and cultivating his singing talent by giving recitals. In 1921 he married Eslanda Cardozo Goode and it was Essie, as she was known, who encouraged him to take up acting as a hobby. After encountering significant racism in his legal work, Robeson turned to acting as a profession. His 1924 appearances in two Eugene O’Neill plays, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, launched his professional career.  His 1930 appearance in London as one of the first Black actors to ever play Othello was considered a triumph for the quality of his performance; he later reprised the role on Broadway. Robeson’s illustrious acting career included dozens of movie credits; his musical career hundreds of recordings.

The fallout of the Peekskill riots took a significant toll on Robeson himself. Late in 1949 he was blacklisted, his passport revoked, and he was unable to travel or perform for most of the 1950s. In 1958 he published Here I Stand, as much a manifesto as a memoir. Having regained his passport due to a related Supreme Court case, Robeson spent only a few years traveling abroad. By 1963 he would retire due to deteriorating health—which his son Paul, Jr. attributed in part to the toll of long-term surveillance—and after Essie’s death lived with a sister in Philadelphia until his own death from stroke complications in January, 1976. As one biographer summarized, “Paul Robeson is an American tragedy. He was an enormously talented black man whose imposing personality and uncompromising political ideals were more than a racist and anti-Communist United States could appreciate or tolerate.”⁴

1. “‘Peace’ Rally Hits North Atlantic Pact. Robeson Says U.S. Negro Won’t Fight Russia,” The Evening Star(Peekskill, New York), April 21, 1949: 1. (Return to text)
2. “The Discordant Note,” The Evening Star(Peekskill, New York), August 22, 1949): 4. (Return to text)
3. American Civil Liberties Union, Violence in Peekskill (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1949): 1. (Return to text)
4. Larry R. Gerlach, “Robeson, Paul,” American National Biography(Online edition: 2000). (Return to text)

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