Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America

A path-breaking work of biography about the collision of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would be forever altered by Robinson’s 1949 appearance before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee—from one of the best sports and culture writers working today.Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports, fame, and politics through the lens of two transformative events at the dawn of Cold War America. The first occurred July 18, 1949, on a warm summer morning 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 America, testified at the behest of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor—himself once the most famous Black man in America. Robinson’s testimony would effectively end Robeson’s once iconic stage and screen career.The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the final, demagogic roar of McCarthyism when a battered Robeson stood before that same committee after nearly a decade of government and public persecution. These two moments, seven years apart and in front of the most notorious government body in American history, would epitomize the Black American dilemma of straddling the impulses of patriotism and citizenship, protest and revolution. Robinson and Robeson represent the two poles of a people pitted against itself on the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement—with 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 larger political division, where Black athletes and entertainers are expected to take political positions (and are often silenced for doing so), the long-ago collision of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government “loyalty oaths,” questioning the patriotism of fellow citizens, and the return of Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story that feels hauntingly present. What is past remains prologue.