Kings and Pawns - by Howard Bryant (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"I found this book excellent and unexpectedly fascinating. Unexpectedly 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

"Beautifully written and culturally important . . . tells the Aaron story with gusto and a ferocious sweep. . . . Bryant may just have given us a classic." -- The Washington Post on The Last Hero

"Illuminating and rigorously researched." -- New York Times Book Review on The Last Hero

"Seldom does a sports biography -- especially a page-turner -- so comprehensively explain the forces that made an icon the way they are." -- Sports Illustrated on Rickey

"Thanks to Howard Bryant's new biography, we can peel back a few of those inscrutable layers and find the man beneath the swagger.... Bryant does some of his best work along the fault line of race and culture, an area he covers well in most of his writing.... Henderson ultimately had the last laugh: Today he's seen as an all-time great. Bryant's book shows how he got there, and the hits he had to take along the way." -- San Francisco Chronicle on Rickey