A newly opened reading room at West Philly’s Paul Robeson House honors Paul’s wife, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson

The Paul Robeson House and Museum in West Philadelphia naturally focuses on the accomplishments of Paul Robeson, the larger-than-life bass-baritone concert artist, actor, lawyer, and human rights activist.

But for all of Robeson’s achievements, very few people know much about his wife, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson. With the opening of a reading room in December, leaders at the museum hope to change that.

Paul Robeson, who was born in Princeton in 1898, starred in The Emperor Jones on stage in New York in 1925 and in the 1933 film, as well as in Othello in London in 1930. He is widely known for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” which he performed in the musical (1928) and film (1936) productions of Show Boat. He also sang it in 1960 as the first singer to perform at the Sydney Opera House when it opened.

“At one point, he was the number-one entertainer in the world,” said Vernoca L. Michael, the former executive director of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which owns the Robeson House and Museum.

“When I gave tours to young people, I would ask them to think of a man who was 10 times bigger than Beyoncé or Michael Jackson, except there was no social media then.”

Michael, who is now vice president of the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance board, said she has long wanted the Robeson Museum to acknowledge Eslanda’s accomplishments as well.

The Eslanda Robeson Reading Room, which opened Dec. 13, will serve as a space for research and digitizing the family’s collection.

“You knew he had a wife, but you didn’t know how important she was to who he was,” said Janice Sykes-Ross, the current executive director of the alliance and the museum.

“She was his manager and she got him involved in activism,” Sykes-Ross said. “She got him involved in the arts. She was the person who encouraged him to pursue acting and singing on a professional level.”

Some say that Eslanda Robeson, who traveled through Africa and Asia and supported growing independence movements among former European colonies, was the catalyst for her husband’s political activism.

The museum was able to get a Leeway Foundation grant to hire media artist Malkia Okech, a recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, to help organize, scan, and digitize many of the materials for the reading room, Sykes-Ross said. Okech’s work took about a year.

“Eslanda has always been a conversation of the museum,” Sykes-Ross said. “You can’t talk about Paul Robeson and not have a conversation about his wife.”

Eslanda Robeson gave up a career in medicine to manage her husband’s stage, concert, and film career; she later earned a doctorate in anthropology and wrote two books. She also acted in Jericho (1937), Big Fella (1937), and Borderline (1930).

“She was the one who pushed him out in the world, yet nobody knew about her,” Michael said.

After Paul Robeson graduated from Rutgers College in 1919, he enrolled at Columbia University’s Law School in New York. Paul and Eslanda met in New York in 1920 and married a year later.

Eslanda Goode, who was two years older than her husband, was born in Washington, D.C. Her father, John Goode, was a law clerk in the War Department in Washington; her maternal grandfather was Frances Lewis Cardoza, the first Black American elected as secretary of state in South Carolina in 1872 during the Reconstruction era.

When Paul and Eslanda met, she had already earned her chemistry degree at Columbia and was working at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, becoming the first Black person to work in its surgical pathology department, according to the Women’s Film Project at Columbia University.

After completing law school in 1923, Paul went to work at a white-owned firm, but “the white secretary would not take dictation from him,” Michael said.

Eslanda urged Paul to focus on a career in the arts instead.

Once he began to get stage and film roles, she left her hospital job, and gave up plans to go to medical school. Instead, she traveled with Paul to London and became his manager.

“You can’t talk about Paul Robeson and not have a conversation about his wife.”

Eslanda would later study anthropology at the London School of Economics. She earned her doctorate in anthropology at Hartford Seminary.

She wrote two books: a biography of her husband, Paul Robeson, Negro, and African Journey, a book based on her trips throughout Africa in 1936 and 1946.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel, a scholar of French and African diaspora literature and politics, wrote in an essay that when Eslanda traveled through central Africa in 1946, she sometimes clashed with then-imperial powers of the United States, France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

“She asked questions about African independence that made colonial administrators nervous. She was also vocal about the possibilities for solidarity among oppressed peoples in Africa, the Americas and Asia,” Joseph-Gabriel wrote.

The Robesons were involved in the Council for African Affairs, a pro-independence movement for colonized countries, and the American Crusade Against Lynching, which Paul Robeson founded.

That activity, along with their pro-labor positions, resulted in their being questioned by Senate and House committees investigating communism in the United States in the 1950s.

The organizations they belonged to were placed on a list of “subversive organizations” by the FBI.

Their passports were canceled in 1950 and they were told that frequent criticism of the treatment of Black people in the United States “should not be aired in foreign countries.” Their passports were restored in 1958.

The Robeson House originally belonged to Paul’s sister, educator Marian Forsythe, and her husband, Dr. James Forsythe.

Eslanda died in 1965, and a year later, Paul moved to Philadelphia to live with his sister. He spent the last 10 years of his life there and died in 1976.

Sykes-Ross said the museum will continue to research and digitize materials in the Eslanda Robeson Reading Room.

“We wanted to honor her legacy, and we need to do more to recover the work of people behind the scenes,” she said.