Cosponsored by Not Without Black Women!In
1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old
Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa.
In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural
black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home
in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing
campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million
black Americans to West Africa.Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena,
Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and
understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the
World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women
engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the
1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey
movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of
declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great
Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black
nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment.
In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain
to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe,
agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States
and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple
protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political
ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom.
Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers,
government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights
the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who
demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
"Blain illuminates an oft-ignored
period of black nationalist and internationalist activism in the U.S.: the
Great Depression, World War II, and early Cold War. Her engrossing study shows
that much of this activism was led by African-American and Afro-Caribbean women
. . . Adding essential chapters to the story of this movement, Blain expands
current understanding of the central roles played by female activists at home
and overseas."—Publishers Weekly (starred
review)"Set the
World on Fire is history at its very best. Keisha Blain has given us
an unobstructed window into the minds of black nationalist women. Sharp voices
and gripping stories reveal a philosophical flexibility paired with an
inflexible challenge to global white supremacy."—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped
from the Beginning"Keisha Blain
has dug deeply into twentieth-century history to reveal the personal and
political lives of African diaspora women determined to Set the World
on Fire as they walked a fine line between leading and adhering to the
black nationalist dictate of masculine leadership. Drawing upon a range of
materials, including FBI files, personal letters, newspapers, and federal
census records, Blain details every step of these women's organizing efforts
and their pan-African visions."—Ula
Taylor, author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of
Islam
"Set the
World on Fire illuminates a dark though important area of history.
Deftly written, it is also a signal contribution to African American studies
and women's studies. It shines brightening light on a previously—and
scandalously—neglected topic." -Gerald
Horne, author of Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and
the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity