Eslanda Robeson - Infinite Women

Born: 15 December 1895, United States
Died: 13 December 1965
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Essie Cordozo Goode

The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson had a multifaceted career: an anthropologist, actor, chemist, manager, author, journalist, and human rights activist. She was an advocate for Black civil rights in the United States and decolonization efforts worldwide. Her husband, Paul Robeson, was famous as an actor and singer. Eslanda was his long-term collaborator and career manager.

Eslanda Cardozo Goode was born in Washington, DC on December 15, 1895. She became involved in political activism as a teenager by protesting racial segregation at a local shop.

As a young woman, Eslanda won a competitive fellowship to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She transferred to Columbia University, earning a Bachelor of Sciences degree in chemistry. While a student at Columbia, she took a job at New York-Presbyterian Hospital as a histological chemist (examining human tissues under a microscope).

She met fellow Columbia student Paul Robeson in 1919. They married in 1921.

Her husband was the subject of her first book, Paul Robeson, Negro (1930). She also wrote novels, plays, musicals, newspaper articles, and interviews. Most of her earliest work remained unpublished.

Robeson enrolled in the London School of Economics in 1933 as a visiting scholar, studying anthropology with Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Her research focused on African freedom movements.

In 1936, she and her son traveled to sub-Saharan Africa, spending time in Senegal, Uganda, Zanzibar, Madeira, Kenya, and what was then known as the Belgian Congo and is today the Republic of the Congo. Robeson studied the gender and racial dynamics in rural villages and cosmopolitan hubs. The research trip inspired her second book, African Journey (1946). She continued her anthropological work as a graduate student at Hartford Seminary.

Robeson believed that solidarity across different freedom struggles was important. She became friends with the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian head of state after the nation won independence from Great Britain. The Robesons traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), supporting the anti-fascist resistance. Eslanda’s brothers lived in the Soviet Union, and she regularly spoke and wrote about her experiences there.

In 1949, Robeson coauthored a book called American Argument with Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck. In a dialogue about the pressing political and social issues of the day, she expressed her perspective on American democracy, civil rights, and the Cold War. Most controversially, Robeson spoke in support of the Communist Soviet Union. She suggested that American democracy was fundamentally flawed, as Black Americans were treated as fundamentally unequal citizens. Buck observed that “The firmest conviction that Eslanda has, and she is a creature of firmness, is that she is American above all else. However much of our country is denied her, she knows that it is all hers at least as much as it is mine.”

Eslanda Robeson died on December 13, 1965.

This biography is republished from The London School of Economics and Political Science and was written by Howard University’s Sherese R Taylor. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.

Eslanda Cordozo Goode Robeson, also known as Essie, was an anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, and feminist born in Washington, DC on 15 December 1895. She received a scholarship from the University of Illinois and later transferred to Columbia University to receive her BSc degree in Chemistry. It was at summer school at Columbia that she met Paul Robeson and in 1921 they were married.
A staunch opponent of injustice, Eslanda found her intellectual community and political point of view in New York, where she was located in history on the eve of the Harlem renaissance and the end of the Bolshevik revolution.[1] After receiving her degree in Chemistry, she became the first histological chemist of surgical pathology at New York Presbyterian hospital and worked there until 1925. In Eslanda: the large and unconventional life of Mrs. Paul Robeson the author Barbara Ransby describes Eslanda as the architect of Paul Robeson’s singing and acting career, after she changed her plans to become a doctor, to be his manager. His popularity provided the couple with the opportunity of performing all over the world.
By the 1930s Paul and Eslanda Robeson moved to London where their careers flourished. Eslanda Robeson was featured in three films, and studied at LSE from 1933 to 1935 and in the Lent term of the session 1937/38. At LSE, she studied under Bronislaw Malinowski, the Chair of Anthropology, who was considered one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century. At LSE her classmates included Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya.[2] There she developed her interest in Africa.[3]
One of her seminal works was the text African Journey. In this text, she published an anthropological piece that differed from many publications around Africa by calling for an African independence and not pathologising Africa. She opposed the notion of African primitivism and refused to substantiate these types of racist claims, which were rampant in early 20th century anthropological research. Her political point of view was black autonomy and there was also a globalised emphasis on liberation. She saw the interconnectedness of oppressed peoples and often drew upon the image of a common humanity. Her pan-Africanism led to involvement in the Council of African Affairs, along with W E B Dubois and Paul Robeson, where they pushed for autonomy in Africa.
In 1945 Eslanda Robeson received her PhD in Anthropology from Hartford Seminary School and continued in her opposition to injustice. In 1951 she interrupted the United Nations postwar conference on genocide supporting the Civil Rights Congress petition stating that “the lynching and other forms of assault on the lives and livelihoods of African Americans from 1945 to 1951, especially the frenzied attacks on returning black American veterans, amounted to genocide.” According to Gerald Horne’s Paul Robeson: the artist as revolutionary, it was these revolutionary tactics that garnered attention and outrage from the international community and provoked investigations by the US Congress into her Communist sympathies (Rummel, 171).
Both Paul and Eslanda were questioned and testified before Congress, Paul for his friendships and Eslanda for her text African Journey. As a result of their politics, their passports were confiscated and for the next eight years Paul’s income declined drastically due to his inability to travel. After 1958 their passports were returned and Eslanda attended the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana. There she met leaders like Kwame Nkrumah who had also attended LSE. She died in 1965 in New York from breast cancer.
Eslanda Robeson was a unique black woman of her time, who engaged in transnational politics and saw the importance of a globalised perspective. At a time when most African American women were domestics, her story offers a unique point of view on the unraveling of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, the Cold War, and the rise of fascism.