In 1969 Bernadette Devlin traveled to the United States on a fundraising tour. At age twenty-two, she was the youngest woman ever elected to Westminster and already a veteran of the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement and the radical student group People’s Democracy.

Whisked through New York by a police force blissfully unaware of her revolutionary politics, she appeared on Meet the Press and the Johnny Carson Show and received the key to New York City from Mayor John Lindsay.

But soon the conservative Irish America that had brought Devlin to the country had to reckon with her radical politics. She felt a deep affinity with black America, whose struggle had inspired her own in the Six Counties, and insisted on visiting Black Panthers and other militants. Before long she was comparing Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s police force to the Royal Ulster Constabulary who persecuted Catholics in Northern Ireland.