Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America

Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America is the untold story of sports and fame, Black life in the United States, and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949, in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in the United States, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in the United States. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson’s iconic reputation in the eyes of the United States.

The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson – prohibited from leaving the United States – faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing conflict between patriotism and protest for Black people in the United States. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return – one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.

In a time of great division, with the United States in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9780063308169 | Mariner Books

Watch a Democracy Now! interview with author Howard Bryant, “Kings and Pawns”: Howard Bryant on What Jackie Robinson & Paul Robeson Reveal About America, below.

Praise

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. — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

With characteristic elegance and insight, Howard Bryant discovers in the entangled lives of Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson a heartrending tragedy of lost opportunities, not only debunking the legend that white liberalism and Black grit desegregated baseball, but lays bare the common forces keen on destroying both men for daring to stand against racism. This book could not be timelier. A truly magnificent and moving read. — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Excellent and unexpectedly fascinating, because I thought I knew something about both its key figures, and even more about the sordid history of political witch-hunting in this country. But Howard Bryant adds a whole new layer of far less familiar history about the interweaving of racism and anticommunism during a particularly grim period of American life. And he tells the story both subtly and vividly. — Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis

This is a book we’ve needed for 75 years. The engineered collision between Robinson and Robeson explains what we’ve become, as does the efforts to disappear the great Robeson and everything he stood for. The real confrontation was not between Robinson and Robeson, but them standing on one side and their Jim Crow tormentors on the other. — Dave Zirin, author of The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn