As she faces mortality, a human rights advocate starts a scholarship to keep her passion going.

For months, Jan Black says the advice from doctors has been: Don’t buy green bananas. Battling cancer for the better part of two years, she’s defied their prognosis more than once already. But planning an event for Sept. 7 seemed to be pushing it.

“My doctors have been telling me I’m living on borrowed time,” she told an audience of about 200, gathered at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “I’m here tonight to embarrass the hell out of them.”

The evening was to announce a scholarship Black is launching to support the study of human rights, and included remarks from State Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, and Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International. The night served a dual purpose as Black’s public farewell to an academic and activist community that holds her in high esteem. In an interview four months earlier, the day after Black learned cancer had returned in her liver, she said, “When I was a teenager, I said I’d rather live for 30 years than exist for 100. I think that’s still true.”

She’s spent her years living, merging activism – “What I care about is peace and justice and human rights” – and academia, teaching for the past 28 years at MIIS, where she says, “I’ve taught everything but underwater basket weaving.”

“Jan is a little bit like the fairy godmother of human rights,” Huang said at the scholarship launch. “You never know where she’s going to show up. There’s no question she has covered the most far-flung corners of our world, shaking her fists at dictators.”

Those corners have included Iran, where she brought students on a trip despite orders from MIIS administrators that it wasn’t safe; Cuba, repeatedly, until travel restrictions blocked that; Bhutan, just as it was opening for travel; and Taiwan, where in 1980, Black spoke out on behalf of an activist who’d been arrested for speaking at a human rights rally. Black’s lobbying helped get Lu Hsiu-Lien released early from prison and enabled her to get life-saving cancer treatment. In 2000, Lu was elected as vice-president; she praised Black in her inauguration speech.

“What I find when I travel is antennae that I just don’t have otherwise,” Black says. “If you’re walking the same way, dealing with the same people, there are a lot of things you just don’t notice anymore. When you’re in a place that’s really different, you just become more alert. You learn so much more that way.”

Black has always been comfortable as an outsider. “It starts with a liberal family in an illiberal South,” she says. “I took some satisfaction in understanding that I was different.” She still speaks with a southern drawl, reminiscent of her childhood in Tennessee, where her father was a charismatic state senator, and her mother, Black says, was a “lovely, gentle Southern belle.”

Her travels abroad began in Chile, where in 1962-64 she volunteered as a founding member of the Peace Corps. She began to learn about the displacement and disenfranchisement of the indigenous Mapuche people. After that she settled in Washington, D.C. It was there that she met and fell in love with a young attorney, John Black, who worked for the U.S. Senate then the Democratic National Committee – on the eve of Watergate.

“It was strange, strange times then,” Black says. It seemed like all the phones were bugged; she remembers once trying to call the neighborhood liquor store, and instead getting the White House.

Then their lives took an even darker turn. She was 34 when she and John were walking down the street, and he was gunned down next to her. “I was in shock for a long time,” Black says.

But she didn’t let the sudden loss define her; she went on to earn a Ph.D. in international politics from American University. (She also got married again, to political scientist Martin Needler.)

Black’s dissertation, titled United States Penetration of Brazil, was published as a book and aimed to prove a controversial thesis: that the U.S. was involved in the overthrow of democracy in Brazil. “That was a very subversive idea,” Black says. “It made me a lot of enemies too.”

She was fine with enemies, and continued to agitate for change. She served on the board of Amnesty International from 2011-18, and hopes to keep that mission going with her scholarship fund.

The Jan Knippers Black Fund for Human Rights Protection (which will be endowed if it reaches $100,000) will annually sponsor a speaker, award a MIIS alum $500 for human rights accomplishments and fund an Amnesty International student fellowship at $2,500.

Black says with a sigh that today’s world is less peaceful, but she’s hopeful. “Thank goodness there are so many people who are willing to do something,” she says, “march in the streets again as we did in the ’60s and ’70s, and really put heart and soul into bringing back some trace of civilization.”