KINGS AND PAWNS

Groundbreaking heroes, Cold War combatants.

With subtlety and insight, respected sportswriter Bryant spotlights Black men who rose to professional preeminence before landing on opposite sides of a political standoff. In 1949, world-renowned stage performer and unabashed socialist Paul Robeson reportedly declared it “unthinkable” for Black Americans to “go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations” against the more equitable Soviet Union. Robeson might’ve been misquoted, but his apparent comments aided Red Scare opportunists. Soon thereafter, Jackie Robinson, modern Major League Baseball’s first Black player, told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Robeson’s remarks were “silly” and unpatriotic. Bryant astutely plumbs the meaning of Robinson’s congressional appearance, made “at the behest of Branch Rickey,” his Brooklyn Dodgers boss. Robinson had long been subjected to vile bigotry, “but the United States remained his country,” and its “contradictions gnaw[ed] at him.” Rickey, among a “coterie of anticommunists,” persuaded Robinson “that testifying against Robeson was part of his responsibility.” Criticism from another prominent Black man sped Robeson’s professional ruin, recounted here in poignant detail. The first Black man to play Othello in the U.S. alongside a white cast, Robeson too was a top athlete who pushed to integrate baseball. But after the Robinson contretemps, Robeson’s appearances were targeted by violent racists and his accomplishments removed from reference texts. He spent “his last years in seclusion.” Robinson later “regretted” his Robeson comments, his widow said. This book is a narrative and interpretive triumph. Bryant is excellent at explaining midcentury communism’s appeal to some Black Americans and at viewing his subjects’ actions through the lens of ideas developed by W.E.B. Du Bois. His tightly focused reporting on a sad mid-20th-century episode says plenty about the injustices of the 21st.

A first-rate look at the very public ideological quarrel between Black superstars.