Welcome to Part 2 of our series highlighting Black lesbian feminist collectives and individuals who have helped pave the way for Black folks on our path to liberation. Today, we’re celebrating the Combahee River Collective.
The 1970s were revolutionary. Organizations like the Black Panther Party led the Black Power Movement; women’s and gay-rights organizations formed rapidly; and the environmental and anti-war movements captured the nation’s attention as organizers demanded an end to U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. This organizing work was crucial, and many vulnerable communities were left out.
Black women were and continue to be foundational to Black families and communities; however, their experiences were not meaningfully represented among movement efforts. The invisibility of Black women’s experiences in the women’s and civil-rights movements, for example, is a product of Black women’s social positionality. Black women sit at the intersection of patriarchal misogyny and anti-Black racism, which means they are doubly disregarded and plagued by both hypervisibility—the experience of being overly scrutinized when our bodies are stereotyped or commodified—and invisibility—where violence against us is ignored or disregarded.
Black, queer women understood they could not rest the futurity of their freedom on anyone else’s shoulders; only they could appreciate the nuanced intersections and architecture of their lives and drive organizing for their liberation.
Black women formed their own organizations to articulate and share a vision of the world in which they were included, safe, celebrated, and powerful. In 1974, a new Black feminist organization emerged in Boston: the Combahee River Collective.
The collective wanted to be named after an act of liberation to represent the type of impact they wanted to have on the world. So, Barbara Smith, a founding member, took their name from a book detailing the historic raid on Combahee River in South Carolina and the instrumental part Harriet Tubman played in freeing 750 slaves. Founding and early members included Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde. They met to share readings, thoughts, and ideas about Black feminism and what it meant to be Black women in the movement.
Although the collective did not explicitly identify as a lesbian organization, member Demita Frazier said in a 1995 interview with Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, that “most of us who were the founding sisters were lesbians or in the process of coming out but there were heterosexual women who quickly joined us.” Their unique experience of being Black and queer provided insights and knowledge to critique patriarchy intimately and profoundly.
The collective’s analysis manifested into notable work that was foundational in developing Black feminist theory. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) was, and still is, a crucial assertion of Black feminism. This statement was one of the first in-depth articulations of contemporary intersectional feminism, and it is still an essential point of reference for organizers and academics today. In the statement, they talk about their beliefs and goals for themselves and the larger community, the challenges in organizing Black feminists, and the issues and projects that collective members were actively working on.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction. Read the complete statement here:
“We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
One of the most prominent examples of their organizing work occurred after the murders of 12 Black women in Boston between January and May of 1979, just two years after the Combahee Statement was published. The collective mobilized a group of activists and local community members to organize a protest that gathered more than 500 people and garnered national attention.
To draw even more attention to the murders, they circulated a pamphlet titled Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?, amending the number each time another Black woman was killed. The pamphlet was significant because it offered tips to women in the area on how to protect themselves better, explicitly named the societal conditions that allowed for these murders to occur, held the city accountable for not responding to the tragedies in any meaningful way, and powerfully emphasized the value of Black women’s lives.
To spread their message and story throughout the country and beyond, the collective didn’t just meet among themselves. They gathered community members at seven feminist retreats between 1977 and 1980, all over the East Coast. Thousands of women attended and discussed Black feminism, nurtured bonds with each other, and developed strategies to spread their knowledge and ideas about intersectionality. Many leaders of the Black feminist movement emerged from these spaces and helped solidify the collective’s belief systems as a viable world perspective.
The collective disassembled in 1980, leaving behind a blueprint for traditional Black feminism and hope for a more inclusive future for all. Inspired by them and so many others, we continue to fight for that future.
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Sources:
The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement
Black Past: The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)
Comhabee River Collective website
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Combahee at 40: New Conversations and Debates in Black Feminism, Volume 19, 2017, Issue 3
“This Boston Collective Laid the Groundwork for Intersectional Black Feminism”
Greenhouse 17: The Combahee River Collective
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