Without Fear

Historian Keisha N. Blain argues that Black women in the United States have been at the forefront of the struggle for human rights for well over a century, long before the phrase entered widespread public discourse. She frames human rights around three core elements: natural rights inherent in all humans, universality applicable everywhere, and equality extended to all people. By centering figures both famous and obscure, from the 1830s through the present, Blain distinguishes her account from standard human rights histories that focus on diplomatic relations and international law, instead capturing activism from the ground up.

The book opens with the 2020 uprisings following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, in which Black women such as activist Tamika Mallory and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors played central roles. Blain argues that their prominence was not a sudden development but the continuation of a tradition stretching back nearly two centuries.

The first chapter reaches back to the late eighteenth century, when Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts, sued for her freedom in 1781 by citing the state constitution's guarantee that all people are born free and equal. In the 1830s, Maria W. Stewart, one of the first Black women to publish political essays, articulated an early vision of human rights by appealing to common humanity and God-given rights, connecting Black liberation to global movements including the Haitian Revolution. Backlash forced Stewart from public life after only two years. The chapter traces the emergence of the Black Women's Club movement, the founding of Woman's Era in 1894 as the first nationally distributed newspaper published by and for Black women, and the anti-lynching campaign of journalist Ida B. Wells. Wells traveled to Britain in 1893 and 1894, delivering over a hundred speeches and securing anti-lynching resolutions from British organizations. In 1898, she met President William McKinley to demand federal anti-lynching legislation, framing racial violence as a human rights issue by comparing it to the Armenian massacres and U.S. intervention in Cuba.

The second chapter examines how a new generation built on this activism during and after World War I. Madam C. J. Walker, the first self-made female millionaire in the United States, hosted the founding meeting of the International League of Darker Peoples (ILDP) at her New York home in January 1919. The ILDP sought to influence the 1919 Paris Peace Conference by securing Japan's support for a racial equality proposal, but President Woodrow Wilson blocked it by insisting on a unanimous vote. Walker resigned from the ILDP after being placed under government surveillance and denied a passport; the organization soon folded. Activist Mary Church Terrell, one of the first African American women to earn a college degree, delivered a speech at the 1919 International Congress of Women in Zurich addressing racism, imperialism, and human rights. She drafted a resolution calling for the end of racial discrimination, which the delegates adopted, predating the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by nearly 30 years. In 1922, Black women established the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the first independent international organization of its kind. Suffragist Addie Waites Hunton traveled to Haiti in 1926 with a delegation from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, documenting human rights abuses under the U.S. occupation and co-publishing Occupied Haiti in 1927.

The third chapter centers on working-class Black women who advanced human rights through grassroots organizing during the Great Depression. Pearl Sherrod, an activist from Detroit, arrived uninvited at the 1937 Pan-Pacific Women's Association conference in Vancouver, Canada, and delivered an impromptu speech condemning lynching and demanding recognition of the rights of people of color worldwide. After her political awakening through the Nation of Islam, Sherrod joined The Development of Our Own, an organization advocating Afro-Asian solidarity, and assumed its leadership when its founder was deported in 1934. Harlem educator Melva L. Price expanded her activism through the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, supporting anti-lynching legislation and raising funds for the legal defense of the Scottsboro boys, nine African American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama. Price also worked with the Negro People's Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, linking domestic racism to fascism abroad.

The fourth chapter examines the post-World War II era and the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, attended the UN Conference on International Organization in San Francisco as the only African American woman among the consultants. She advocated for the abolition of colonialism, but the ratified charter did not reflect her proposals. Martinican journalist Paulette Nardal, who had co-founded the Pan-African journal La Revue du monde noir in the early 1930s, became the first Black woman to formally join the UN as an area expert in 1946. Actress Lena Horne used her platform to call for "freedom, for equality, for citizenship [and] for the right to human dignity" (87), linking civil rights to broader human rights principles.

The fifth chapter covers the 1950s. The Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a leftist Black feminist organization established by Louise Thompson Patterson and actress Beah Richards, helped popularize the "We Charge Genocide" petition documenting violence against Black Americans and campaigned for the release of Rosa Lee Ingram, a Black sharecropper in Georgia sentenced to death after killing a white neighbor in self-defense. After sustained advocacy, Ingram and her sons were released on parole in 1959. Journalist Marguerite Cartwright, a professor at Hunter College and columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, provided extensive coverage of the UN and African liberation movements, making more than 25 trips to the continent and building relationships with leaders including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria.

The sixth chapter focuses on the civil rights era, centering Aretha B. McKinley, who became national director of the American Council on Human Rights (ACHR) in 1959. The ACHR, a coalition of Black Greek-letter organizations founded in 1948 to lobby Congress, had already gained observer status at the UN General Assembly. McKinley launched a Write for Civil Rights campaign that generated such a volume of letters to senators that the U.S. Postal Service increased its Washington staff. She organized voter registration drives and a Sacrifice for Rights campaign redirecting sorority funds to Southern civil rights activists.

The seventh chapter examines the journal Freedomways, which served as a platform for Black women's human rights advocacy for 25 years. Managing editor Esther Cooper Jackson and co-founder Shirley Graham Du Bois launched the journal in 1961. Despite FBI harassment of subscribers, Freedomways drew readers in 40 states and internationally, covering the Vietnam War, challenging scientific racism, and devoting sustained attention to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The journal ceased publication in 1985, but its legacy endured through former contributors like attorney Gay McDougall, who went on to oversee South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.

The eighth chapter traces how Black women fought police violence as a human rights issue. On February 4, 1999, Kadiatou "Kadi" Diallo learned that her 23-year-old son Amadou had been killed by four plainclothes NYPD officers who fired 41 shots, hitting him 19 times, after mistaking his wallet for a gun. Born in Guinea in 1959, Kadi became a human rights advocate after her son's death, organizing rallies, testifying before Congress, and founding the Amadou Diallo Foundation in 2001 to promote racial healing and improve police-community relations. When an Albany jury acquitted all four officers in February 2000, protests erupted across the city. Kadi framed police violence as "a human rights issue" (214) that transcends race and ethnicity.

In the afterword, Blain connects this narrative to the founding of Black Lives Matter in 2013 and co-founder Ayọ Tometi's 2016 address to the UN General Assembly identifying global capitalism, white supremacy, and the suppression of democracy as central obstacles to human rights. Blain concludes that Black women's tradition of advocacy, from Stewart in the 1830s through Diallo in the 2000s, will continue to sustain this movement.