How does a middle-class white woman from South Dakota end up becoming a political prisoner in 1950’s Puerto Rico convicted of trying to overthrow the colonial government? In her new book, Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024), Lisa G. Materson unravels the puzzle of how Ruth Reynolds, an American adherent of Gandhian nonviolence, became a close ally of Puerto Rican revolutionaries resisting U.S. control of Puerto Rico. This unlikely story prompts us to consider what it means to believe in U.S. democracy and to take personal responsibility for U.S. government injustices and raises questions of how an outsider can provide true allyship and tie local battles to larger global themes of oppression. 

Through “radical solidarity,” a form of support not premised on strategic agreement, Materson chronicles key moments in Reynolds’s transformation from an observer to a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement. At each stage of her career, Reynolds refined her vision, homing in on techniques that bridged strategic differences. In Materson’s telling, readers meet fascinating anti-colonial voices who, despite their trailblazing methods, heroic activism and lasting importance, have been erased from the history books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa G. Materson is a professor of modern US women’s political history at the University of California at Davis. She documents the lives of women who challenged institutional power and its abuse, often at great cost to themselves, in order to assert the promises of US democracy. In addition to Radical Solidarity, she is the author of For Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (UNC Press, 2009). Materson is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (Oxford, 2018) and the author of multiple articles on Puerto Rican women’s independence activism and African American women's internationalism.

Access the book via The University of North Carolina Press.