Martha Biondi

I'm a scholar of the long global Black freedom movement from the 1940s to the 1990s. My first book To Stand and Fight, tells the story of African Americans who mobilized to make the war against fascism a launching pad for a postwar struggle against white supremacy at home. Rather than seeking integration in the abstract, Black New Yorkers demanded first-class citizenship—jobs for all, affordable housing, protection from police violence, access to higher education, and political representation. This powerful local push for economic and political equality met broad resistance, yet managed to win several landmark laws barring discrimination and segregation.

My second book, The Black Revolution on Campus, is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge.

My latest book, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation, extends my exploration of the impact of Black and multiracial left organizing in American life into the 1980s and 1990s and beyond.