Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America

Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America by Howard Bryant is best described by the endorsements below.

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

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

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.

More 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)

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