On Keisha Blain, and the woman who wanted to take her people home.

Keisha N. Blain is Professor of Africana Studies and Professor of History at Brown University. Her scholarship works across the twentieth-century United States, Black internationalism, and Black women's intellectual history, and has consistently pulled forward the women on the margins of the record who advocated revolutionary social change.

Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) recovered a transnational network of Black women whose political work in the early-to-mid twentieth century was foundational to Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and largely absent from the histories of either. The Dan David Prize honored Blain as "a historian of the twentieth century United States with specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women's and Gender Studies", whose research uncovers "the histories of Black women on the margins of society who advocated revolutionary social changes."

A working poor Black woman in Chicago imagined how it could be if all the Black Americans who were being denied civil rights in their own country joined together and moved back to a country in Africa. That is somewhere between Theodor Herzl and Moses. It is also, and this is the point, entirely absent from the histories most people have read of either the twentieth-century United States or the pan-African movement. Blain's argument is that this was not a footnote. It was a mass political imagination that a woman like Mittie Maude Lena Gordon led, and that a country like the United States has, from its opening chapter, been very good at not seeing.

Blain herself has said, and Daniella shares this, that it matters to her as a woman of color to highlight the stories of women who look like her. The film was our way of joining that commitment visually. We took our cue from Gordon, and from the archival photograph of her movement standing on the steps of the Capitol in Washington. We reconstructed that photograph as an animated scene, so that a girl of color, or a woman of color, seeing this film in 2026, might see in front of her eyes what these women looked like, at scale, in the political theatre of the country they were arguing with. Whether Gordon's plan succeeded is not the point of the film. The visibility is.

Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.