Tom's guest for the hour today is Dr. Keisha N. Blain, a historian and Africana Studies professor at Brown University. She also serves as editor-in-chief of Global Black Thought, a journal of ideas about the Black experience in the US and across the African diaspora.

With her deep scholarship in African American history, Dr. Blain has written extensively on the pivotal role Black women have played in the struggle for civil and human rights here at home and around the world.

Dr. Blain's latest book, published last month, is called Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights. It's a sweeping history that illuminates the heroic but often unsung human rights activism of Black women in the United States, from the early 19th century to the present.

Dr. Blain will be speaking about the book tonight at 7pm at the Enoch Pratt Library. She’ll be in conversation with the acclaimed historian Dr. Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University.