Paul Robeson was an acclaimed singer, actor, and athlete best known for films like The Emperor Jones (1933) and Show Boat (1936). He was also a political activist with communist sympathies, leading to his being blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Today on the show, we learn more about Paul Robeson’s amazing story with comic artist Sharon Rudahl, who recently published a graphic biography of Robeson titled Ballad of an American.

Sharon Rudahl is an American underground cartoonist. She was one of the female comic artists who contributed to the first underground comix publications of the early 1970s, and was part of the collective that started Wimmen’s Comix in 1972. She is the author and graphic artist of many books, most recently Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson (Rutgers University Press, 2020).