Fifty Years of Combahee River Collective

This piece is a response to our name for submissions, Celebrating Combahee at Fifty: Black Feminism, Socialism, Race, and Sexuality. For our submission pointers, click on here.

Using the wave metaphor for describing feminism has been criticized for suggesting unified development throughout the Ladies’s Motion and fixing activism to chronological moments in time.^[1] The wave metaphor disregards the shifting nature of collective wants throughout totally different contexts and the totally different approaches taken to arrange in response. As such, it isn’t nicely suited to evoke the complicated, layered, and fluid nature of Black feminism and intersectionality. Maybe, then, a river metaphor may present a extra becoming illustration, because it emphasizes the continual circulate and motion of concepts, struggles, and non-linear progress.

Fifty years in the past, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) emerged as a Black feminist lesbian socialist group that centered and aimed to redress the oppression that Black ladies skilled. It took its title from Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid, which liberated over 750 enslaved individuals in South Carolina.^[2] Energetic between 1974 and 1980, the CRC’s radical leftist stance was involved with dismantling racism, sexism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy as mutually sustaining types of oppression. This dedication traces again to the civil rights, Black energy, and ladies’s actions, highlighting the Collective’s deep historic and political lineage. Collectively, these actions not solely formed the CRC’s philosophy but additionally its founding members.

The CRC’s founder-members are sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier. The sisters had participated in antiwar demonstrations as youngsters and picketed with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the place they met outstanding activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Margaret Sloan-Hunter.^[3] Margaret Sloan-Hunter was the president of the Nationwide Black Feminist Group (NBFO), which referred to as out mainstream white feminism’s unwillingness to handle the racism that Black ladies skilled.^[4] At a 1973 NBFO convention in New York, the Smith sisters have been uncovered to political dialogue about Black ladies’s experiences. Returning to Boston after the convention, they started organizing with Black ladies within the space and established the Boston chapter of NBFO; it was throughout this time that they linked with Demita Frazier. Finally, the trio separated from the NBFO to ascertain a corporation that extra committedly responded to Black lesbians’ wants by explicitly opposing homophobia and rejecting the stance of lesbian separatism. Figuring out themselves as “Black feminists and Lesbians,” they argued that lesbian separatism “utterly denies any however the sexual sources of girls’s oppression, negating the details of sophistication and race.” They needed a extra “viable political evaluation or technique” that might not miss “far an excessive amount of and much too many individuals.”[5]

The Collective referred to as for a deeper evaluation that acknowledged the significance of sophistication and sexuality as different oppressive buildings alongside race. In pursuit of a extra inclusive and radical group, Barbara, Beverly, and Demita formalized their standpoint and ideas within the 1977 Combahee River Collective Assertion. It stays a formative textual content in Black feminist thought, addressing the intersection of racism and sexism as mutually sustaining oppressions that form Black ladies’s materials circumstances.^[6] The trio drew on Black socialism, Black communism, and Black Marxism to think about the financial, social, political, and historic circumstances that affect Black ladies’s lives. By interrogating the multifaceted nature of Black ladies’s identities, the Combahee River Collective Assertion provided a tangible framework for a lot of Black ladies to know their shared experiences and struggles. The assertion is acknowledged as an early articulation of the underlying ideas of “intersectionality” and is taken into account the primary doc that described “id politics.”^[7] As such, it laid the inspiration for a lot of Black feminist theoretical developments and methods for resistance.

Although the time period ‘id politics’ has since grow to be topic to the separatism the CRC was preventing towards, the Collective was in truth deeply dedicated to organizing round collective wants, recognizing the multiplicitous nature of id and the interconnectedness of oppression to withstand exclusionary mainstream feminist politics. Members acknowledged the non-public as political and have been dedicated to organizing round that understanding. This strategy was not about specializing in particular person features of id, however as a substitute organizing throughout identities and discovering salience throughout variations. The Collective labored in coalition with Third World ladies, Black males, lesbians, and different marginalized teams.

As a part of its organizing, the CRC typically targeted on feminist studying and writing. In her 1977 essay, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara referred to as for an evaluation of Black ladies’s experiences via their historical past, literature, and tradition, difficult the exclusionary practices of white feminist publishing.^[8] A number of years later, she edited Residence Women: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), a group of Black lesbian and Black feminist essays. Lots of the CRC’s members recognized as Black feminists and lesbians, and a few are thought of to be key figures throughout the event of Black ladies’s research. Those that performed a job within the Collective’s organizing, together with Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Chirlane McCray, Gloria Akasha Hull, and Margo Okazawa-Rey, proceed to advocate for Ladies’s research, the Black arts motion, and Black queer individuals’s rights at present. Their contributions to Black feminist thought are documented in works like Phrases of Hearth: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1995) by Beverly Man-Sheftall and its companion textual content Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (2021) by Briona Simone Jones.^[9] Collectively, these three anthologies span fifty years of Black feminist and lesbian thought to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Barbara has mirrored on her early dedication to construct Black ladies’s research and Black feminism, although she admits that they weren’t essentially confluent.^[10] Certainly, it’s attainable that Black feminism’s journey into the college served as some extent of contradiction for the CRC as a collective—in How We Get Free, Demita highlights the academy as a web site the place Black feminism has “been each strengthened theoretically and co-opted.”^[11]

The CRC’s affect can also be evident in up to date analyses of intersectionality, notably in how Black feminist students like Moya Bailey, Jennifer Nash, and Marquis Bey lengthen their analyses to new contexts. Every affords criticism on how the determine of the “Black girl” is constructed via caricatures in each the academy and well-liked tradition. Moya Bailey developed the idea of “misogynoir” to critique discriminatory portrayals of Black ladies on-line and in media.^[12] Jennifer Nash extends this critique to the notion of “intersectionality” itself, arguing that the overdetermination of the Black girl because the beholder of intersectional feminism is limiting for the way forward for Black feminism.^[13] Marquis Bey returns to abolition, calling for a departure from gender and a larger interrogation of classes of id themselves.^[14] These approaches lengthen the CRC’s intersectional evaluation to call the ways in which photographs and an essentialization of the class of “Black ladies,” each inside and outdoors the college, maintain the mutually constitutive circumstances that form the fabric circumstances of people who find themselves categorized by race, gender, and sexuality.

Simply as a river shapes and is formed by its environment, the CRC’s legacy continues to tell and encourage up to date Black feminism and wider liberation actions. Reflecting on the Collective’s lifecourse in 2021, Demita Frazier defined: “The Combahee lived its life and had a pure starting and finish. That’s why I mentioned there was no massive blow up, no massive battle, no inner schism. Individuals’s politics simply diverged.”^[15] Just like the water cycle, revisiting the CRC as a significant supply of Black feminist thought underscores the need for addressing the overlapping nature of classes of id (together with race, gender, class, sexuality, incapacity, and nationality)—not solely via theoretical exploration but additionally via tangible political motion. By honoring and constructing upon the CRC’s radical work, we are able to make sure that the river of Black feminist thought stays a strong and unifying pressure for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.

Parise Carmichael-Murphy is a Lecturer in Fairness, Variety and Inclusion, and a member of the Feminist Assessment Editorial Collective. She is obsessed with celebrating Black feminisms and is at the moment visitor modifying a particular situation on ‘Black British Feminisms and Efficiency’ with Lorna French for Feral Feminisms journal.

^[1] Constance Grady, “The Waves of Feminism, and Why Individuals Preserve Combating over Them, Defined,” Vox, July 20, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth.

^[2] Alexis Clark, “After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil Battle Raid,” Historical past.com, Aug. 29, 2023, https://www.historical past.com/information/harriet-tubman-combahee-ferry-raid-civil-war.

^[3] “Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Analysis and Training Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/congress-racial-equality-core.

^[4] Kayomi Wada, “Nationwide Black Feminist Group (1973–1976),” BlackPast, Dec. 29, 2008, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/national-black-feminist-organization-1973-1976/.

[5] Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Assertion.” BlackPast, 1977, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] “What Is Intersectionality?,” Blackfeminisms.com, 2016, https://blackfeminisms.com/what-is-intersectionality/.

^[8] Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Instructor, 7 (March, 1978), 20–27, https://www.jstor.org/secure/20709102.

^[9] “Beverly Man-Shefthall,” Nationwide Ladies’s Historical past Museum, https://www.womenshistory.org/about-us/our-people/beverly-guy-sheftall; Emerald Rutledge, “Black Lesbian Thought: An Interview with Briona Simone Jones,” Black Views, April 19, 2021, https://www.aaihs.org/black-lesbian-thought-an-interview-with-briona-simone-jones/.

^[10] Janell Hobson, “The Ms. Q&A: Barbara Smith on Discovering Hope within the Battle,” Ms., Nov. 17, 2017, https://msmagazine.com/2017/11/17/ms-qa-barbara-smith-finding-hope-struggle/.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017).

^[12] “3 Questions: Moya Bailey on the Intersection of Racism and Sexism,” MIT Information, Jan. 11, 2021, https://information.mit.edu/2021/3-questions-moya-bailey-intersection-racism-sexism-0111.

^[13] Matt Hartman, “Jennifer Nash: Unsettling the Romances of Black Feminism,” Duke Right this moment, Oct. 16, 2020, https://at present.duke.edu/2020/10/jennifer-nash-unsettling-romances-black-feminism.

^[14] Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (2021).

^[15] Marian Jones, “‘If Black Ladies Have been Free’: An Oral Historical past of the Combahee River Collective,” Nation, Oct. 29, 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/combahee-river-collective-oral-history/.