Last updated: December 9, 2024
Person
Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson
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Quick Facts
Significance:
Author and anthropologist who wrote about African decolonization, African American civil rights, and international politics
Place of Birth:
Washington, DC
Date of Birth:
December 15, 1895
Place of Death:
New York City, New York
Date of Death:
December 13, 1965
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.1
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).2 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 Most of her earliest work remained unpublished.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).3 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.4 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.”5
Eslanda Robeson died on December 13, 1965.
1 Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
2 Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul Robeson, Negro (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1930).
3 Eslanda Goode Robeson, African Journey (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1946).
4 Pearl S. Buck and Eslanda Goode Robeson, American Argument (New York: The John Day Company, 1949).
5 Buck, American Argument, 39.
This page was written by Dr. Sarah Pawlicki. This page was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship program is administered through a partnership between NPS, NPF, and American Conservation Experience.