Eslanda Robeson: I will Not Sit Still

On February 19 at 2:30 PM join Ilene Evans at the St. Paul AME Church on Beechhurst Avenue, Morgantown, as she portrays Eslanda Robeson: I will Not Sit Still. Free and open to the public, followed by a reception. 

In a just world, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson would be known as a feminist foremother, studied and admired by every schoolgirl. She might have been secretary-general of the United Nations, or U.S. secretary of state. But even in a cruelly unjust world, this remarkable woman managed to participate in the founding of the U.N., write the influential anthropological text African Journey and champion women on the world stage.

Born in 1895 to a family of black professionals, “Essie” earned a chemistry degree from Columbia University and as a very young woman headed a lab at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, the first African American to do so. At 25, she eloped with a Columbia law student, the budding actor/singer Paul Robeson, and took on roles as tour manager, acting coach and breadwinner while he honed his skills. They made a formidable team. “She used her title as Mrs. Paul Robeson to open doors,” Ransby writes, “but once those doors opened, a smart, pragmatic and fiercely independent woman walked through.”

Despite the demands of managing her husband’s extraordinary career—his title role in Othello and star turn in Show Boat remain iconic—Eslanda developed an international sphere of influence. Often living abroad with her son and mother, she studied at the London School of Economics and traveled constantly, speaking at conferences and reporting for journals. She maintained lasting friendships with Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, independence activists Jawarharlal Nehru and Jomo Kenyatta, anarchist Emma Goldman, the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, Shirley and W.E.B. Dubois and other leading progressives.

Light-skinned enough to pass for Spanish or Italian in her cosmopolitan circles, Eslanda wholeheartedly claimed herself as one of the world’s people of color. “I feel brown, and I think brown and I am brown” she proclaimed in a speech to the All African Women’s Freedom Movement, a group that, in typical fashion, she had helped to found.