Fifty Years of Combahee River Collective

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

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The use of the wave metaphor for describing feminism has been criticized for suggesting unified progression across the Women’s Movement and fixing activism to chronological moments in time.^[1] The wave metaphor disregards the shifting nature of collective needs across different contexts and the different approaches taken to organize in response. As such, it is not well suited to evoke the complex, layered, and fluid nature of Black feminism and intersectionality. Perhaps, then, a river metaphor might provide a more fitting representation, as it emphasizes the continuous flow and movement of ideas, struggles, and non-linear progress.

Fifty years ago, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) emerged as a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization that centered and aimed to redress the oppression that Black women experienced. It took its name from Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee Ferry Raid, which liberated over 750 enslaved people in South Carolina.^[2] Active between 1974 and 1980, the CRC’s radical leftist stance was concerned with dismantling racism, sexism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy as mutually sustaining forms of oppression. This commitment traces back to the civil rights, Black power, and women’s movements, highlighting the Collective’s deep historical and political lineage. Collectively, these movements not only shaped the CRC’s philosophy but also 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 teenagers and picketed with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), where they met prominent activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Margaret Sloan-Hunter.^[3] Margaret Sloan-Hunter was the president of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which called out mainstream white feminism’s unwillingness to address the racism that Black women experienced.^[4] At a 1973 NBFO conference in New York, the Smith sisters were exposed to political discussion about Black women’s experiences. Returning to Boston after the conference, they began organizing with Black women in the area and established the Boston chapter of NBFO; it was during this time that they connected with Demita Frazier. Eventually, the trio separated from the NBFO to establish an organization that more committedly responded to Black lesbians’ needs by explicitly opposing homophobia and rejecting the stance of lesbian separatism. Identifying themselves as “Black feminists and Lesbians,” they argued that lesbian separatism “completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.” They wanted a more “viable political analysis or strategy” that would not leave out “far too much and far too many people.”[5]

The Collective called for a deeper analysis that recognized the importance of class and sexuality as other oppressive structures alongside race. In pursuit of a more inclusive and radical organization, Barbara, Beverly, and Demita formalized their standpoint and principles in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. It remains a formative text in Black feminist thought, addressing the intersection of racism and sexism as mutually sustaining oppressions that shape Black women’s material conditions.^[6] The trio drew on Black socialism, Black communism, and Black Marxism to consider the economic, social, political, and historical circumstances that influence Black women’s lives. By interrogating the multifaceted nature of Black women’s identities, the Combahee River Collective Statement offered a tangible framework for many Black women to understand their shared experiences and struggles. The statement is recognized as an early articulation of the underlying principles of “intersectionality” and is considered the first document that described “identity politics.”^[7] As such, it laid the foundation for many Black feminist theoretical developments and strategies for resistance.

Though the term ‘identity politics’ has since become subject to the separatism the CRC was fighting against, the Collective was in fact deeply committed to organizing around collective needs, recognizing the multiplicitous nature of identity and the interconnectedness of oppression to resist exclusionary mainstream feminist politics. Members recognized the personal as political and were committed to organizing around that understanding. This approach was not about focusing on individual aspects of identity, but instead organizing across identities and finding salience across differences. The Collective worked in coalition with Third World women, Black men, lesbians, and other marginalized groups.

As part of its organizing, the CRC often focused on feminist reading and writing. In her 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara called for an analysis of Black women’s experiences through their history, literature, and culture, challenging the exclusionary practices of white feminist publishing.^[8] Several years later, she edited Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), a collection of Black lesbian and Black feminist essays. Many of the CRC’s members identified as Black feminists and lesbians, and some are considered to be key figures across the development of Black women’s studies. Those who played a role in the Collective’s organizing, including Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Chirlane McCray, Gloria Akasha Hull, and Margo Okazawa-Rey, continue to advocate for Women’s studies, the Black arts movement, and Black queer people’s rights today. Their contributions to Black feminist thought are documented in works like Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1995) by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and its companion text Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (2021) by Briona Simone Jones.^[9] Together, these three anthologies span fifty years of Black feminist and lesbian thought to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Barbara has reflected on her early commitment to build Black women’s studies and Black feminism, though she admits that they were not necessarily confluent.^[10] Indeed, it is possible that Black feminism’s travel into the university served as a point of contradiction for the CRC as a collective—in How We Get Free, Demita highlights the academy as a site where Black feminism has “been both strengthened theoretically and co-opted.”^[11]

The CRC’s influence is also evident in contemporary analyses of intersectionality, particularly in how Black feminist scholars like Moya Bailey, Jennifer Nash, and Marquis Bey extend their analyses to new contexts. Each offers criticism on how the figure of the “Black woman” is constructed through caricatures in both the academy and popular culture. Moya Bailey developed the concept of “misogynoir” to critique discriminatory portrayals of Black women online and in media.^[12] Jennifer Nash extends this critique to the notion of “intersectionality” itself, arguing that the overdetermination of the Black woman as the beholder of intersectional feminism is limiting for the future of Black feminism.^[13] Marquis Bey returns to abolition, calling for a departure from gender and a greater interrogation of categories of identity themselves.^[14] These approaches extend the CRC’s intersectional analysis to name the ways that images and an essentialization of the category of “Black women,” both within and outside the university, sustain the mutually constitutive conditions that shape the material conditions of people who are categorized by race, gender, and sexuality.

Just as a river shapes and is shaped by its surroundings, the CRC’s legacy continues to inform and inspire contemporary Black feminism and wider liberation movements. Reflecting on the Collective’s lifecourse in 2021, Demita Frazier explained: “The Combahee lived its life and had a natural beginning and end. That’s why I said there was no big blow up, no big fight, no internal schism. People’s politics just diverged.”^[15] Like the water cycle, revisiting the CRC as a vital source of Black feminist thought underscores the necessity for addressing the overlapping nature of categories of identity (including race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality)—not only through theoretical exploration but also through tangible political action. By honoring and building upon the CRC’s radical work, we can ensure that the river of Black feminist thought remains a powerful and unifying force for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.

Parise Carmichael-Murphy is a Lecturer in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and a member of the Feminist Review Editorial Collective. She is passionate about celebrating Black feminisms and is currently guest editing a special issue on ‘Black British Feminisms and Performance’ with Lorna French for Feral Feminisms journal.

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^[1] Constance Grady, “The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting over Them, Explained,” 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 War Raid,” History.com, Aug. 29, 2023, https://www.history.com/news/harriet-tubman-combahee-ferry-raid-civil-war.

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

^[4] Kayomi Wada, “National Black Feminist Organization (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 Statement.” 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, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher, 7 (March, 1978), 20–27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20709102.

^[9] “Beverly Guy-Shefthall,” National Women’s History Museum, https://www.womenshistory.org/about-us/our-people/beverly-guy-sheftall; Emerald Rutledge, “Black Lesbian Thought: An Interview with Briona Simone Jones,” Black Perspectives, 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 Finding Hope in the Struggle,” 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 News, Jan. 11, 2021, https://news.mit.edu/2021/3-questions-moya-bailey-intersection-racism-sexism-0111.

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

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

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