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.