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Eslanda Essie Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalins Russia, and China two months after Maos revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishmentan anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of womens rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century.