Without Fear
Black Women and the Making of Human Rights
by Keisha N. Blain
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Pub Date Sep 16 2025 | Archive Date Aug 31 2025
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Description
Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change, weaving connections between their own and others’ freedom struggles around the world.
Without Fear tells how, during American history, Black women made humans rights theirs: from worldwide travel and public advocacy in the global Black press to their work for the United Nations, they courageously and effectively moved human rights beyond an esoteric concept to an active, organizing principle. Acclaimed historian Keisha N. Blain tells the story of these women—from the well-known, like Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, and Lena Horne, to those who are still less known, including Pearl Sherrod, Aretha McKinley, and Marguerite Cartwright. Blain captures human rights thinking and activism from the ground up with Black women at the center, working outside the traditional halls of power.
By shouldering intersecting forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, and classism—Black women have long been in a unique position to fight for freedom and dignity. Without Fear is an account of their aspirations, strategies, and struggles to pioneer a human rights approach to combating systems of injustice.
About the Author: Keisha N. Blain is professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University. She is a Guggenheim, Carnegie, and New America Fellow, and author—most recently of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Until I Am Free.
Advance Praise
“Without Fear tells the stories of Black women who, like Deborah in the Bible, have engaged in social justice agitation, refusing to simply suffer by engaging in the redemptive work of challenging injustice while in the midst of it. Each of us can and must learn from these women if we are to reconstruct America and build a just world.” —Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, coauthor of White Poverty
Keisha N. Blain has written a necessary and bracing history of Black women’s critical role over the past two centuries in defining the concept of human rights. Moving beyond the focus on diplomats and famous philosophers, Without Fear highlights the words and actions of the most marginalized women in society, whose insistence on the natural, universal, and equal rights of all human beings have made them an inspiring example to the world. -Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth
In Without Fear, distinguished historian Keisha N. Blain takes us on epic journey through time as she shines a light on the too often overlooked generations of Black American women, who, from the ground up, advanced the cause of human rights at home and abroad. This is an important, and accessible work that helps to fill in a major void in our shared historical narrative. It’s also an inspiring study of how Black women have continuously carried the torch of justice and made the cause of human rights their own for the uplift of all. -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box
Every page of Without Fear highlights Keisha N. Blain’s research prowess. She powerfully weaves together stories from both history and the present to paint a moving portrait of what is true: Black women have always been—and remain—at the forefront of the struggle for freedom. A must-read for anyone who truly wants to understand America, and the world at large. -Sharon McMahon, best-selling author of The Small and the Mighty and creator of Sharon Says So
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780393882292 |
| PRICE | $31.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 320 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Anita S, Librarian
“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.
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