“Without Fear” is a long-awaited new book by scholar Dr. Keisha N. Blain. The book, as she writes in the intro, “offers a window into the everyday application of human rights among an often-overshadowed group of activists and intellectuals in the United States.” Basically, let’s do a better job of telling the history of human rights NOT with white European philosophers like Nietzsche and Troeltsch, as well as the UN.

She explains what it means to center Black women and that when they began to fight and to push back against the systems that oppress them, “they found little assistance from their white female counterparts who, with somee xceptions, were more preoccupied with securing rights for themselves or ‘uplifting’ the less fortunate—often by advocating for middle-class white values and behaviors—than addressing global racism and its vicious impact.”

As early as the 1830s, “Black women in the United States began to weave connecions between their freedom struggles in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.” Black women have called attention to the devaluating of Black lives all over the world, particularly in places under colonial rule.

Her first chapter focuses on Ida B. Wells, who devoted her life to fighting back against the American system that regularly inflicted racialized violence, and lynchings, on Black people.

Blain provides a deep and comprehensive history of the Black women in particular who fought for equal rights, profiling several people across different chronologies. She also makes it a point of highlighting both the figures that people have heard of, like Wells, and others they may not be as familiar with.