The title of Dr. Keisha Blain’s critically acclaimed new book, Set the World on Fire, about Black nationalist women may portend her own future as a scholar and historian. This work and her other projects reveal a woman ablaze with momentum.
Blain, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, focuses her research on Black women who for the most part have been overlooked or under-appreciated for their pivotal contributions to freedom movements from the early 20th century to the 1960s.
Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, says Blain’s book “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.”
Blain, who received her bachelor’s degree in history and African-American studies from Binghamton University, SUNY, and her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University, tells Diverse that her interest in these women began with an undergraduate course at Binghamton.
She says the course, on global Black social movements in the U.S., Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, examined “the ways in which Black people worked together, also collaborating with various other groups to obtain citizenship rights [and] human rights.”
Once her interest was sparked, Blain says, “I wanted to understand more about ways in which Black women were critical to the movement — the kinds of things they did and the ways in which they were able to advance the cause of Black liberation.”
Blain’s book, written in a flowing, narrative style, is populated by such fascinating figures as Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, who was arrested in 1942 for sedition and conspiracy for urging Black people not to serve in World War II. She was convicted and served two years in prison.
