User:Wbrobertson/Combahee River Collective

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The Combahee River Collective (/kəmˈbiː/ kəm-BEE)[1] was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980.[2][3] The Collective was instrumental in highlighting that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and as Black lesbians, more specifically.[4] The mainstream feminist movement was racist, while much of the Civil Rights Movement had a sexist and homophobic reputation.[5][6] They are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement,[7][8] a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity politics as used among political organizers and social theorists,[9][10] and for introducing the concept of interlocking systems of oppression, a key concept of intersectionality.[11]

National Black Feminist Organization

Author Barbara Smith and other delegates attending the first (1973) regional meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization in New York City provided the groundwork for the Combahee River Collective with their efforts to build an NBFO Chapter in Boston.[12][13] The NBFO was formed by Black feminists reacting to the failure of mainstream White feminist groups to respond to the racism that Black women faced in the United States.[11] In her 2001 essay "From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective", historian and African American Studies professor Duchess Harris stated that, in 1974 the Boston collective "observed that their vision for social change was more radical than the NBFO", and as a result, the group chose to strike out on their own as the Combahee River Collective.[14] Members of the CRC, notably Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier, felt it was critical that the organization addressed the needs of Black lesbians, in addition to organizing on behalf of Black feminists.[14]

Naming the collective

Further information: Raid at Combahee Ferry

The Collective's name was suggested by Smith, who owned a book called: Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Earl Conrad.[15] She "wanted to name the collective after a historical event that was meaningful to African American women."[15] Smith noted: "It was a way of talking about ourselves being on a continuum of Black struggle, of Black women's struggle."[15] The name commemorated an action at the Combahee River planned and led by Harriet Tubman on June 2, 1863, in the Port Royal region of South Carolina. The action freed more than 750 slaves and is the only military campaign in American history planned and led by a woman.[16][11]

Developing the Statement

The Combahee River Collective Statement was developed by a "collective of Black feminists [...] involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while...doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements...."[17][18]

Members of the collective describe having a feeling of creating something which had not existed previously. The group believed that racism alone was neither a sufficient means of analysis nor a plan of action to deal with the discrimination faced by Black women in the United States.[11] Demita Frazier described the CRC's beginnings as "not a mix cake", meaning that the women involved had to create the meaning and purpose of the group "from scratch."[19] In her 1995 essay "Doing it from Scratch: The Challenge of Black Lesbian Organizing", which borrows its title from Frazier's statement, Barbara Smith describes the early activities of the collective as "consciousness raising and political work on a multitude of issues", along with the building of "friendship networks, community and a rich Black women's culture where none had existed before."[19]

The CRC sought to address the failures of organizations like the NBFO and build a collective statement to enable the analysis of capitalism's oppression of Black women, while also calling for society to be reorganized based on the collective needs of those who it most oppresses.[11] This was not an academic exercise, rather the CRC sought to create a mechanism for Black women to engage in politics. The catalyst for this engagement were the failures of organizations like the NBFO to successfully address the oppression Black women faced on issues like sterilization, sexual assault, labor rights, and workplace rights. This alienation as well as the domination of the Black liberation movement by Black men, led members of the CRC to reimagine a politics that engaged these issues.[11]

Other political work

In the encyclopedia Lesbian Histories and Cultures, contributing editor Jaime M. Grant contextualizes the CRC's work in the political trends of the time.

The collective came together at a time when many of its members were struggling to define a liberating feminist practice alongside the ascendence of a predominantly white feminist movement, and a Black nationalist vision of women deferring to Black male leadership.[20]

Grant believes the CRC was most important in the "emergence of coalition politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s [...] which demonstrated the key roles that progressive feminists of color can play" in bridging gaps "between diverse constituencies, while also creating new possibilities for change within deeply divided communities..."[20] She notes that, in addition to penning the statement, "collective members were active in the struggle for desegregation of the Boston public schools, in community campaigns against police brutality in Black neighborhoods and on picket lines demanding construction jobs for Black workers."[20]

Further information on school desegregation in Boston: Boston busing desegregation

The collective was also politically active around issues of violence against women, in particular the murder of twelve Black women and one white woman in Boston in 1979.[21] According to Becky Thompson, associate professor at Simmons University in Boston and author of A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, the Boston Police Department and the media "attempted to dismiss the murders [...] based on the notion that (the women) were alleged to be prostitutes and therefore not worthy of protection or investigation."[22] In a 1979 journal entry, Barbara Smith wrote:

That winter and spring were a time of great demoralization, anger, sadness and fear for many Black women in Boston, including myself. It was also for me a time of some of the most intensive and meaningful political organizing I have ever done. The Black feminist political analysis and practice the Combahee River Collective had developed since 1974 enabled us to grasp both the sexual-political and racial-political implications of the murders and positioned us to be the link between the various communities that were outraged: Black people, especially Black women; other women of color; and white feminists, many of whom were also lesbians.[23]

Smith developed these ideas into a pamphlet on the topic, articulating the need "to look at these murders as both racist and sexist crimes" and emphasizing the need to "talk about violence against women in the Black community."[21]

In a 1994 interview with Susan Goodwillie, Smith noted that this action moved the group out into the wider Boston community. She commented that "the pamphlet had the statement, the analysis, the political analysis, and it said that it had been prepared by the Combahee River Collective. That was a big risk for us, a big leap to identify ourselves in something that we knew was going to be widely distributed."[24]

Historian Duchess Harris believes that "the Collective was most cohesive and active when the murders in Boston were occurring. Having an event to respond to and to collectively organize around gave them a cause to focus on..."[24] In addition to this work, the CRC was also active in Boston "campaigns against the sterilization of Black and Brown women, [and] the abortion rights movement."[11]

Political, social and cultural impact of the Statement

The Combahee River Collective Statement is referred to as "among the most compelling documents produced by Black feminists",[25] and Harriet Sigerman, author of The Columbia Documentary History of American Women Since 1941 calls the solutions which the statement proposes to societal problems such as racial and sexual discrimination, homophobia and classist politics "multifaceted and interconnected."[26]

In their Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, M. E. Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan refer to the CRCS as "what is often seen as the definitive statement regarding the importance of identity politics, particularly for people whose identity is marked by multiple interlocking oppressions".[27]

So much of what the CRC contributed politically has been taken for granted by feminist politics.[11] Smith and the Combahee River Collective have been credited with coining the term identity politics, which they defined as "a politics that grew out of our objective material experiences as Black women."[28] In her essay "From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective: Black Feminist Organizing, 1960–1980", Duchess Harris credits the "polyvocal political expressions of the Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective (with) defin(ing) the nature of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and challeng(ing) earlier 'essentialist' appeals and doctrines..."[28] While the CRC did not coin the term intersectionality, it was the CRCs acknowledgement of interlocking systems of oppression which work together reinforcing each other.[11]

The Collective developed a multidimensional analysis recognizing a "simultaneity of oppressions"; refusing to rank oppressions based on race, class and gender.[29] According to author and academic Angela Davis, this analysis drew on earlier Black Marxist and Black Nationalist movements, and was anti-racist and anti-capitalist in nature.[30]

In Roderick Ferguson's book Aberrations in Black, the Combahee River Collective Statement is cited as "rearticulating coalition to address gender, racial, and sexual dominance as part of capitalist expansion globally."[31] Ferguson uses the articulation of simultaneity of oppressions to describe coalition building that exists outside of the organizations of the nation-state.

  1. ^ Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary, Third Edition (Merriam-Webster, 1997; ISBN 0877795460, p. 272.
  2. ^ "Duchess Harris. Interview with Barbara Smith". Archived from the original on 2008-03-15. Retrieved 2008-03-26.
  3. ^ Marable, Manning; Leith Mullings (eds), Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, Combahee River Collective Statement, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, ISBN 0-8476-8346-X, p. 524.
  4. ^ ""The Combahee River Collective Statement" (1977)", Available Means, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 292–300, 2001, doi:10.2307/j.ctt5hjqnj.50, ISBN 9780822979753
  5. ^ Delaney, Paul (12 May 2010). "Dorothy Height and the Sexism of the Civil Rights Movement". The Root.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ^ Manditch-Prottas, Zachary (2019). "Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular". African American Review. 52 (2): 179–195. doi:10.1353/afa.2019.0027. ISSN 1945-6182.
  7. ^ The full text of the Combahee River Collective Statement is available here.
  8. ^ Smith, Barbara, ed. (1983). Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. pp. 272–282. ISBN 0-913175-02-1.
  9. ^ Hawkesworth, M. E.; Maurice Kogan. Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, 2nd edn Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-27623-3, p. 577.
  10. ^ Sigerman, Harriet. The Columbia Documentary History of American Women Since 1941, Columbia University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-231-11698-5, p. 316.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h i How we get free : Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta,. Chicago, Illinois. ISBN 978-1-64259-104-0. OCLC 975027867.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  12. ^ Bowen, Angela. Combahee River Collective, Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America, October 2005 issue.
  13. ^ Collier-Thomas, Bettye; Vincent P. Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, NYU Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8147-1603-2, p. 292.
  14. ^ a b Harris, Duchess. "From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective", in Sisters in the Struggle, Collier-Thomas et al. (eds), New York University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8147-1602-4, p. 294.
  15. ^ a b c "Duchess Harris. Interview with Barbara Smith". Archived from the original on 2008-03-15. Retrieved 2008-03-26.
  16. ^ Herrmann, Anne C.; Abigail J. Stewart, Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Westview Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8133-6788-3, p. 29.
  17. ^ The full text of the Combahee River Collective Statement is available here.
  18. ^ Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein.
  19. ^ a b Smith, Barbara. "Doing it from Scratch: The Challenge of Black Lesbian Organizing", in Barbara Smith (ed.), The Truth that Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-2761-9, p. 172.
  20. ^ a b c Grant, Jaime M. (ed: Bonnie Zimmerman), Lesbian Histories and Cultures, Routledge, pp. 184–185.
  21. ^ a b Grant, Jamie. "Who Is Killing Us?" accessed in "All of Who I am in the Same Place": The Combahee River Collective, by Duchess Harris [1] Archived 2008-03-15 at the Wayback Machine
  22. ^ Thompson, Becky. A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-0-8166-3634-1, p. 147.
  23. ^ Smith, Barbara. "The Boston Murders", in Patricia Bell-Scott (ed.), Life Notes: Personal Writing by Contemporary Black Women, Norton, 1993, p. 315.
  24. ^ a b Smith, Barbara. Interview with Susan Goodwillie Archived 2008-03-15 at the Wayback Machine. 1994.
  25. ^ Sigerman, Harriet. The Columbia Documentary History of American Women Since 1941, Columbia University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-231-11698-5, p. 316.
  26. ^ Sigerman, Harriet. The Columbia Documentary History of American Women Since 1941, Columbia University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-231-11698-5, pp. 316–317.
  27. ^ Hawkesworth, M. E.; Maurice Kogan. Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, 2nd edn Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0-415-27623-3, p. 577.
  28. ^ a b Harris, Duchess. "From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective: Black Feminist Organizing, 1960–1980", in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (2001), p. 300.
  29. ^ Thompson, Becky. A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-0-8166-3634-1, p. 148.
  30. ^ Davis, Angela. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, John Wiley, ISBN 978-0-631-20361-2, 1998, p. 313.
  31. ^ Ferguson, Roderick (2004). Aberrations in Black. University of Minnesota Press. p. 134.
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