This is based on edited and revised excerpts from Eslanda: the large and unconventional life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, the first biography of Paul Robeson’s wife, Essie, an important thinker and activist on a range of progressive causes. It details her stand against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the treatment of significant Black figures during the scare and how struggles for racial justice and political freedom were seen as intertwined.
News release entitled ‘Mrs. Robeson Denounces McCarthy Quiz’, partial document in ‘primary sources’ folder 15, extracted from Associated Negro Press (ANP) files with ANP byline, in author’s possession; for what Eslanda was wearing, see the photograph by Susan Robeson, The Whole World in His Hands: a pictorial biography of Paul Robeson (New York, Citadel Press, 1981). Also see HorneGerald, Mau Mau in Harlem? The US and the liberation of Kenya (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
2.
Eslanda Goode Robeson, testimony before the Executive Session of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations of the US Senate, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 2 (1953), p. 1223.
3.
RobesonEslanda, ‘Mrs. Robeson tells McCarthy about the 15th Amendment’, National Guardian (20July1953), p. 6.
4.
‘Mrs. Robeson jars Joe McCarthy’s “All-White” probe’, Daily Worker (8July1953), p. 1.
5.
Eslanda Goode Robeson, testimony before the Executive Session of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
6.
‘Mrs. Robeson jars Joe McCarthy’s “All-White” probe’, op. cit.
7.
Thelma Dale Perkins, ‘Untitled’, in Paul Robeson: the great forerunner, by the editors of Freedomways (New York, International Publishers, 1998).
8.
RobesonEslanda, ‘Loyalty – lost and found’, in ‘Writings of Eslanda Robeson’ (PERC, 1949).
9.
RobesonEslanda, ‘A citizen’s state of the union’, Daily Worker (19March1953).
10.
Ibid.
11.
RobesonEslanda, ‘I know a communist’, Freedom (March1952), p. 4.
12.
JonesClaudia, Ben Davis: fighter for freedom (New York, National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, 1954), p. 3.
13.
‘Thousands greet Mrs. Eslande [sic] Robeson at American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) picnic’, press release (CBP, n.d.).
14.
The term ‘race rebel’ is taken from Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels: culture, politics, and the Black working class (New York, Free Press, 1996).
