All the Women are Meeting: Black Women’s Solidarities in the Struggle for African Decolonization

Yatta Kiazolu
Global and International Studies
UC Irvine

After World War II, as intensifying anticolonial movements around the world challenged an international racial hierarchy, Black women activists across the diaspora seized the moment to establish new terms of racial and gender dynamics. All the Women are Meeting examines how Black women activists on both sides of the Atlantic collaborated to develop autonomous agendas that centered Black women’s interests within the struggle for decolonization. It argues that through these relationships, African and African American women redefined the terms of anticolonial critique, decolonial nation-building, and global Black freedom, creating alternatives to masculinist nationalism and imperial internationalism. Building on earlier international ties forged by Black women’s organizations, figures who were radical communists, Black nationalists, and liberal reformers employed varied strategies to advance Black women’s status globally—from informal letter exchanges and press mobilization, to international tours, joint conferences, and engagement with international institutions. Spanning different organizational and ideological positions, these women sometimes found common ground; other times they remained in tension. Yet their strategies and commitments to Black women’s self-emancipation shaped new political subjectivities, international alliances, and projects of decolonial Black feminist solidarity that continue to shape the world today.