king as far as how a story and has treated her and eslanda robeson because of her husband paul robeson and rosa parks as one dimension away and eslanda robeson almost invisible. i can't tell you how many people said paul robeson's wife. i knew he had a wife but i didn't know much about her. eslanda robeson indeed was a remarkable person and a biographer's treasure because she had such a rich life and she spent a lot of time documenting that life so that made my job a little bit easier but she began her career as a chemist working at at columbia presbyterian hospital then quickly shifted to serve as the architect of paul's early career. she was his manager, publicist etc. but that's not really her main contribution our accomplishment. i was most drawn to her and interested and excited to do this work because of her largeness of her life and i mean that on a global stage. i think the importance of telling her story in particular and rosa parks is the international significance of their political contributions and eslanda robeson in particular was an anticolonial activist, a writer and hu

from the 2013 harlem book fair a discussion about the legacy of rosa parks and eslanda robeson. this is about one hour and 15 minutes. it's good to have everybody out this afternoon. we have got a distinguished conversation here with my professor mary berry at the university of pennsylvania. [applause] barbara ransby is the author of a tiger free of ella baker of eslanda robeson and jeanne theoharis the author of the new biography on rosa parks. [applause]

, and so while we're going around quoting frederick douglass, that's think about miss parks, miss robeson and all these people, and real rise that people tell you, you don't need to have a moment or be protesting. all you need to do is vote. first of all they're trying to suppress the vote in case you hadn't noticed. but the lesson is that you really, really have to be -- you need a movement and you need to be persistent, and you need to not give up, and you need to be strategic, and you need to think about what you're doing. so that you can make -- and that you can make change by doing that. and you don't have to be violent. you can be totally nonviolent. many ways to make change. so i think these are the lessons i learned. >> i was at the memorial for vicki garvin in died in '95, i believe. they did a video, and she was in a nursing home. and she said, i'm telling all these people out there, you have no excuse for not being active because i'm here in this nursing home rite can letters, trying to educate myself. so it seems to me that many of the women we're talking about were long dista