Paul Robeson’s lifelong stand for human rights worldwide opens a conversation about the forces challenging our freedoms today, the responsibilities we carry as citizens, and how we can preserve our liberties for future generations.

Meet the Panelists:
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Moderator) is a geographer and writer whose books include Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made; Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names; and Island People: The Caribbean and the World. His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, teaches journalism at New York University and is director of publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where he hosts the popular Author Talks series and is coeditor in chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast.

Ellen Schrecker is a historian, known for her work on McCarthyism, political repression, and American higher education. Her latest book, co-edited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, is The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (2024).

A retired Professor of History at Yeshiva University, she serves on the Steering Committee of Historians for Peace and Democracy and is a member of the American Assoication of Universtiy Professors' Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Dr. MaryLouise Patterson is a retired pediatrician living in NYC. Her parents, Louise and William Patterson, were Leftist civil rights activists and members of the Communist Party their entire lives. They represented the best in the Black Radical tradition.

She is committed to and active in the struggle for universal health care and to ending institutionalized racism in medicine. She is the co-author of “Letters from Langston: From the Red Scare to the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond”.

Howard Bryant is the author of eleven books on sports history, including Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America, Rickey, Full Dissidence: Notes from an uneven playing field, The Heritage, and The Last Hero (2010).

He has been the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday since 2006. Bryant has also collaborated on several Ken Burns projects and appeared in a wide range of documentary films.

“On ourselves alone will depend the preservation of our liberties and the transmission of them in their integrity to those who will come after us." - Paul Robeson, Valedictorian Speech, Rutgers College, 1919