Robeson and Robinson: Two American Legends Entangled in Cold War Politics

Howard Bryant details Paul Robeson's and Jackie Robinson's lives, tracing how they occasionally intersected and overlapped through civil rights history and Red Scare politics.

Posted on August 20, 2026 in Featured Reviews

As part of our efforts to support scholarly work in pursuit of racial justice, Choice regularly reviews important current titles that consider issues of race or racism, devoting additional space to these works through long-form reviews. Doing so, we hope to underscore the urgency of these issues and to highlight promising resources. Given the relevance of this endeavor to TIE‘s mission, we have decided to begin publishing these reviews exclusively under Toward Inclusive Excellence, moving them from the Choice Picks section of Choice360.org. We hope our readers find these reviews useful for developing their personal or institutional collections. The following review considers the book Kings and Pawns (2026) by Howard Bryant and appears in the November 2026 issue of Choice.

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Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America, by Howard Bryant. Mariner Books, 2026. 309p ISBN 9780063308169 $32.00, ISBN 9780063308190 $14.99

Bryant, a well-known sports writer and correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition, has written an illuminating account of the lives of two giants of twentieth-century American culture: baseball legend Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Paul Robeson, the famed Black actor, singer, athlete, and activist, and how their lives intersected through Cold War American politics.

Bryant centers the narrative on two appearances the men made before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Jackie Robinson testified on July 18, 1949, to denounce Paul Robeson’s communist leanings, though the two men had never personally met, nor would they during their lifetimes. Paul Robeson testified before HUAC on June 12, 1956, defiantly invoking the Fifth Amendment thirty times during the sixty-minute hearing.

Born in 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey, Paul Robeson was educated at Rutgers University, where, as “one of the greatest college football players,” he was selected “to [join] the prestigious All-American team,” before playing several seasons in the newly formed professional leagues. He earned his law degree from Columbia in 1923 while still playing football professionally. During this period, he married Eslanda Goode and, after a brief stint as a lawyer, began his career as an actor. His breakout role came in 1924 as the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones. From there, his career soared, eventually leading Robeson to become the first Black actor to portray Othello on the London stage, a role he later reprised on Broadway, and then to pursue a career in film.

As Robeson’s ideological sympathies evolved through the 1930s and 1940s, influenced in part by his experiences in London and his growing friendships with leaders of the anti-imperialist movement, his sympathy for socialism and the Soviet Union grew, especially after visiting Moscow. Although his attitude toward the Soviet Union cooled somewhat when revelations of Stalin’s brutality came to light in 1956, he always maintained he was treated well in Russia. During this time, Robeson became a staunch supporter of civil and human rights, speaking out often against racism in the United States and oppression worldwide. His activism led him to join the NAACP in 1948; however, his support for Moscow led the organization to break ranks with Robeson, despite his strong support for their integration efforts in the United States. Robeson nevertheless maintained close contact with W. E. B. Du Bois, whom the NAACP also deemed too radical. Together, the two men organized an anti-lynching march on Washington in 1946, founded the Freedom newspaper in 1950, and led the Council on African Affairs.

Born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, and raised in Pasadena, California, Jackie Robinson attended UCLA, where he played both football and baseball. After being drafted and discharged from the army during World War II, he played baseball professionally in the Negro leagues before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, becoming the first Black player in Major League Baseball. Robinson played ten years in the majors, including six World Series, and led the Brooklyn Dodgers to their only World Series championship in 1955. Despite his talents, Robinson endured much racism throughout his career, and as he began to speak out against it more and more, he angered the team’s politically conservative owners and managers. After being traded to the rival New York Giants in 1957, he retired from baseball.

In 1949, after Robeson made a speech at the Paris Peace Congress in which he vowed that Black Americans would not support the United States if it went to war with the Soviet Union, Robinson was called to testify against him before HUAC.

Ideologically, Robinson’s views did not line up neatly with either political party. He was generally anti-communist and pro-business, serving as an executive for the Chock full o’Nuts coffee company following his retirement from baseball, but he also supported civil rights and integration, even helping to establish the Black-owned Freedom National Bank in Harlem. In 1949, after Robeson made a speech at the Paris Peace Congress in which he vowed that Black Americans would not support the United States if it went to war with the Soviet Union, Robinson was called to testify against him before HUAC. He later regretted disparaging Robeson, noting that he attended the congressional hearings at the personal request of Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, who even helped Robinson prepare his testimony.

Personally and professionally, Robeson suffered tremendously in the following years. In 1949, a violent riot erupted at a benefit concert he had been invited to perform at in Peekskill, New York, to protest his appearance. Although Robeson himself was unharmed, hundreds were injured. A year later, the State Department confiscated and later revoked his U.S. passport, which prohibited him from traveling abroad and severely impeded his ability to earn a living. He finally had his passport renewed in 1958 after challenging the move through the courts and was able to travel abroad once more. Although he held some concerts at Carnegie Hall that year, Robeson had largely retired by the 1960s, living quietly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until his death in 1976.

In recounting this turbulent story, Bryant captures how Jim Crow not only affected the South but American culture at large, particularly surrounding the arts and sports. He details how Jackie Robinson was made a pawn against the king of the day, Paul Robeson. It should also be noted that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had Robeson under surveillance since the 1930s, and had indeed used Jackie Robinson as a surrogate during the Red Scare.

Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Racial Justice, African and African American Studies
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America

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Andrew M. Mayer is professor emeritus at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Previously, he was the night librarian for The Washington Post, head librarian for the New York Law Journal, and senior research editor for Wenner Media and Condé Nast Traveler. He has published over 100 professional book reviews for newspapers and academic journals.

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Be sure to also check out Choice’s archive of featured reviews. We publish a new one every month. A few related ones are:

	Joel Wendland Liu’s review of Black Scare / Red Scare (2023): “Entangled Legacies of Exploitation: How Capitalism and Racism Converge in American History“
	Derek Charles Catsam’s review of The Internal Colony (2025): “The Colony at Home: How Decolonization Abroad Shaped Black Politics in Postwar America“
	Andrew Mark Mayer’s review of New Prize for These Eyes (2025): “Eyes on the Future: Juan Williams Chronicles the New Frontlines of America’s Civil Rights Struggle“

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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