Uniquely Positioned to Combat Injustice

Randy M. Browne considers Keisha N. Blain’s new book, which finds that Black women, historically, haven’t simply argued for racial justice at home; they have, in fact, fought for and won human rights for everyone worldwide.

By Randy M. BrowneNovember 8, 2025

• History

• Politics

IN MAY 1919, Mary Church Terrell, one of the most prominent Black American civil rights activists of her era, traveled to Europe on a mission against global racism. She spoke before an audience of more than 200 women’s rights activists in Zurich, where the International Congress of Women met to lay the groundwork for a more peaceful world in the sobering aftermath of World War I. In her speech, Terrell pointed out the hypocrisy and practical limitations of advocating for democracy and women’s rights without including Black people. “You may talk about permanent peace till doomsday,” she insisted, “but the world will never have it till the darker races are given a square deal.”

Terrell proposed a resolution that would call on members of the League of Nations to amend their laws to recognize the equal rights of all people, without regard to “race or color.” A similar proposal had been rejected weeks earlier in Paris, where world leaders negotiated the peace treaty that would formally end the war. Terrell, however, succeeded in getting the International Congress of Women to adopt her proposal. As historian Keisha N. Blain writes in her illuminating new book Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights, it was “one of the earliest articulations of a human rights resolution that would encompass the needs and concerns of all peoples, regardless of race and ethnicity.”

Without Fear celebrates the activism of Black American women—an “often-overshadowed group of activists and intellectuals”—who pushed to expand the meaning of human rights. By the time the American Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” the notion of human rights—if not the term itself—had been around for some time. But to whom, exactly, did these supposedly universal rights pertain? To all humankind? Or just to men? To white people? And what about Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, or free people of color?

The Age of Revolution produced a variety of competing answers. During the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made forceful arguments for women’s—or at least white women’s—equality. The Black men who founded Haiti after overthrowing their French oppressors made racial equality a central pillar of their new nation. By the 1830s, as slavery expanded into new territories and white supremacy became even more entrenched than before, Black abolitionists, including Boston’s Maria W. Stewart, insisted that Black people across the globe deserved the same rights to freedom and equality as white citizens.

This is where Blain picks up the story. In Without Fear, she argues that Black women in the United States “were at the forefront of the struggle for human rights” from the early 19th century to the present day. Building on 18th-century precedents, Black women “made human rights theirs—moving beyond an esoteric concept to an organizing principle that fueled local, national, and global activism.” In telling their stories, Blain invites us to reconsider the familiar battle to secure civil rights for Black Americans as a larger, international fight for human rights. Civil rights pertain to citizens of specific nations; human rights are inherent in all people everywhere. “At the core of these women’s political consciousness,” Blain explains, “was a realization that the systems of oppression that imperiled the lives of Black people were fundamentally in opposition to the rights of humanity.” Consequently, Black women worked in solidarity with other oppressed peoples across the world, from the Caribbean to Africa and Asia.

In a series of vivid biographical sketches, Blain introduces us to a dozen or so remarkable women who, over the past two centuries, sought out new ways to address racism and sexism at home and abroad. Their personal experiences of discrimination—and the broader historical legacies of slavery and colonialism in which they lived—meant that, for Black women, there was nothing abstract or theoretical when it came to questions of human rights. “As the most subordinate group within racial and gender hierarchies,” Blain reasons, Black American women were “uniquely positioned to combat injustices in our society.” Connecting the personal to the political throughout allows Blain to foreground the ways that her characters’ “identities as Black women shaped their ideas and approaches to human rights activism.”

The journalist Ida B. Wells is widely known for her fearless campaigns against lynching and Jim Crow, but many readers will likely be surprised to learn that she also wrote critiques of the Armenian genocide and the imperialist impulses behind the United States’ invasion of Cuba at the beginning of the Spanish-American War. Wells’s anti-lynching activism itself was international too. On the heels of Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), her exposé of the white supremacist reign of terror in the United States, Wells twice traveled to Britain to rally public support and pressure the American government to act. There she delivered more than 100 speeches about the perversion of criminal justice in the Southern states and the federal government’s failure to protect the most basic rights of its Black citizens. As Blain writes, “Wells transformed the way many of the British public understood lynching” by framing racist violence as an obvious violation of human rights that demanded international protection.

Other activists whom Blain brings to life will strike most readers as less familiar. Among the “ordinary” Black women whose contributions to human rights have been largely forgotten is Detroit’s Pearl Sherrod, who worked with the Nation of Islam during the early years of the Great Depression and then joined The Development of Our Own (TDOO), a group of working-class activists that promoted Black-Asian unity. In 1934, Sherrod married the group’s Japan-born leader, Satokata Takahashi, and when he was deported, she took over the organization, which involved writing a column in the Detroit Tribune. Three years later, she became the first Black American woman to speak to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association. At their meeting in Canada, Sherrod pushed the group to see the concerns of Black women in the United States as part of its work toward peace and interracial harmony. Echoing Terrell’s arguments a generation before her, Sherrod condemned the ongoing terror of lynching, told delegates that the problems Black Americans faced were linked to the problems people of color faced everywhere, and urged them to advocate for the “rights of dark people in every part of the world.”

This is perhaps the most powerful of the book’s many revelations: the fact that many of the Black women whom Blain discusses not only sought international help to address the plight of Black women within the United States but also dedicated themselves to the rights of marginalized people around the world. During the first United States occupation of Haiti (1915–34), Black American women collaborated with other Black activists in the International Council of Women of the Darker Races to protest the brutal conditions that Haitians faced and the racist policies of the American occupiers. A decade later, educator Melva L. Price—best known for her work with the oldest Black Greek-letter sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha—organized efforts to help refugees displaced in 1935 after Italy’s fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. Inspired to fight fascism more broadly, Price then joined the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spanish Refugees after Francisco Franco’s 1936 military coup.

In the 1980s, Black American women continued to advocate for the rights of marginalized people overseas who were facing racist violence. They played key roles in the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which included founding the Free South Africa Movement, “the most influential anti-apartheid organization in the United States during the 1980s,” according to Blain. At the same time, they spoke out in defense of the rights of Palestinians. In a special 1983 issue of Freedomways, a prominent journal founded by Black radical women, writers condemned US complicity in the massacre of an estimated 1,400 Palestinian refugees by Israeli soldiers. Black Americans, the writers declared, “refuse[d] to ignore or be insensitive to the racist character of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.”

The global violence and political chaos that so many people across the world are struggling to survive right now remind us that the fight to secure even the most basic rights to life, liberty, and security is anything but finished—and that Black women continue to lead the fight. In this moment, Blain’s Without Fear is resonant and urgent.