From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

As Black History Month comes to an end, we've invited Professor Carol Anderson to discuss ongoing voter suppression efforts in the United States.

We'll also discuss an untold story in black history about how the civil rights movement in the U.S. supported anti-colonial and human rights activists around the globe.

Dr. Anderson is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University and chairs the

African American Studies Department.

She's also a rare historian who can speak clearly and compellingly to the current moment.

Professor Anderson, it's a pleasure to have you with us.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

I wanted to start with some of your early scholarship,

which relates to the role of the NAACP and other organizations in anti-colonial movements.

Can you tell us a little bit about that underreported story? Oh, absolutely. And, you know,

you just made me smile by going back to the older stuff. So thank you for that. The NAACP has a reputation

as being a kind of stodgy state organization that only dealt with legal issues, as if legal

issues weren't important issues. But as I was going through their papers, I found this incredible vision and activism that they had

on the global stage. One was the activism for human rights, where the NAACP conceptualized,

and this is in the 1940s, conceptualized the struggle for black equality as a human rights struggle,

not a civil rights struggle. And that meant that it encompassed not only what we understand as the

constitutional bill of rights, the right to free speech, the right not to be illegally

searched and seized, the right to a fair trial, but also the right to education, the right to housing, the right to living wage, the right to health care.

And they took that battle all the way to the UN and helped craft language in the UN charter, guaranteeing human rights and against discrimination based on

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