Kings and Pawns
Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 20 Jan 2026
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
“I loved this book.... I looked forward to [it] more than any other in a long time, and Howard Bryant exceeded my great expectations. Kings and Pawns is brilliantly conceived and powerfully written.” — David Maraniss, author of Path Lit by Lightning
A path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the 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 and fame, Black America 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 America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in America. 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 America.
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 Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. 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 America 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 within and beyond Black America. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sports journalist Bryant (Rickey) charts in this powerful history the intersecting paths of baseball star Jackie Robinson and singer and actor Paul Robeson against the backdrop of U.S. segregation and Cold War politics. In 1943, Robeson was the first Black actor to play Othello in a major U.S. production, and a few years later Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Though the two never met, they were publicly pitted against each other. In 1947, Robeson, an advocate for civil rights and critic of capitalism, was deemed a "sponsor of communism" by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Encouraged by Dodgers president Branch Rickey, who wanted an opportunity to separate baseball from any associations with communism, Robinson reluctantly agreed to testify against Robeson. In his testimony, Robinson praised American democracy and denounced Robeson, which led government leaders and the mainstream press to laud him as a national hero. This moment, Bryant astutely demonstrates, personified Black Americans' internal conflict between patriotism and protest, with "one man appearing in conflicted service to and the other hunted for ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both." Deeply researched and expertly crafted, this is an important corrective to the popular understanding of race and politics in mid-century America.
