Without Fear

Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights is historian Keisha N. Blain's history of how Black women in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the present, built and claimed the idea of human rights. Long before the phrase entered mainstream political language, they argued that the fight against slavery, lynching, segregation and disenfranchisement at home could not be separated from struggles against colonialism and oppression abroad — and they said so in the global Black press, on international speaking tours, and later in the corridors of the United Nations.

Blain moves between figures who are widely remembered — Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, Lena Horne — and organizers and writers who are not, among them Pearl Sherrod, Aretha McKinley and Marguerite Cartwright. Across two centuries she traces how these women turned human rights from an abstract legal concept into an organizing principle, often while facing surveillance, exclusion, and sidelining by the very movements and institutions they were helping to shape.

A professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University, Blain draws on archival research to place Black women at the center of a story usually told through male leaders and Western institutions.