NOW Meets the Black Panther Party: The National Black Feminist Organization
The NBFO officially began on November 30, 1973, at an Eastern Regional Conference at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Among those present were Shirley Chisholm , Alice Walker , Eleanor Holmes Norton , Flo Kennedy , and Margaret Sloan , the NBFO’s first and only president. According to Sloan, “by organizing around our needs as Black women, we are making sure that we won’t be left out,” which was what she felt was happening in both the Black liberation and the women’s liberation movements.26 Before and during this time, many Black women felt frustrated by the treatment they received from Black men involved in the Black Power movement . According to Pauli Murray , “Black women began to sense that the struggle into which they had poured their energies – Black Liberation and the Civil Rights Movement – may not afford them rights they assumed would be theirs when the civil rights cause triumphed.” Many women saw how they were being placed three paces behind their men and were expected to be content to serve as secretaries and breeders of (preferably male) revolutionaries in a movement that was supposed to be liberating for all.
The NBFO focused on issues that were not addressed by Black liberation or feminist organizations. Their initial topics for discussion were welfare rights and reform, rights of domestic workers, reproductive freedom, and the problems of unwed mothers. The NBFO formed taskforces on media, drug addiction, and women in prisons, rape , the arts, and the Black lesbian. Other task forces were formed to create an ongoing structure for the organization, to plan for a national conference, and to make connections with the press. NBFO was also concerned with healthcare issues, unemployment, childcare, and the problem of forced sterilization. The group emphasized the inclusion of all classes of women in “consciousness raising” activities.27
Unlike NOW , the first public statements of the NBFO emphasized issues of class and sexual orientation, a reflection of the times since the NBFO was founded seven years after NOW . The purpose of the NBFO was to be a business as well as an educational forum, with regular programs devoted to topics as diverse as female sexuality, Black women as consumers, sex role stereotyping and the Black child, and the passage of the ERA . In the organization’s statement of purpose, the NBFO dealt with the response of the wider Black community to Black women’s involvement in the feminist movement. The belief that these women were “sell-outs” or that there really was nothing that related to Black people within the concept of feminism was challenged. The authors explored the multiple ways in which Black women in the USA have suffered from the combined forces of racism and sexism , and exposed the myth of the Black “matriarch,” the stereotypes, and the lack of positive images for Black women. They argued that their presence would lend an “enormous credibility” to the feminist movement, which unfortunately had not been valued as a “serious political and economic revolutionary force.” This coming together of feminists would strengthen the Black Power movement and encourage “all talents and creativity of Black women to emerge strong and beautiful.”
With regard to women and employment, Black women had more in common with Black men than with white women. In their task force on employment, the NBFO focused on the issue of household workers, 97% of whom were female, and of those, 64% were Black. In supporting the efforts of Black domestic workers to organize for their rights, the NBFO advocated pressuring the government to enact laws to guarantee the inclusion of domestic workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This would mean that domestic workers would be covered by all federal laws and would be guaranteed minimum wage, sick pay, paid vacations, insurance, and the right to collective bargaining. In their report on economics and class, the women in the NBFO demonstrated their knowledge and understanding of the intersecting nature of multiple oppressions. NBFO members understood their oppression as having roots in the “classist, racist, sexist, capitalist-imperialist structures of this country.” Some of their suggestions for eliminating Black women’s economic distress included “income sharing, cooperative ventures, coalition politics , education and communication projects.” Although the NBFO membership did not espouse socialism, some of the NBFO’s ideas could be considered socialist in nature. They also recognized the class biases of some of their membership and actively encouraged Black women from every socioeconomic class to become involved. They stated, “class distinctions must be abolished and classist attitudes and policies will not be tolerated within our ranks.”
The ERA was also an important issue for the NBFO. The leaders called for the ratification of the amendment by the states and encouraged their members to lobby for its passage. They endorsed the use of boycotts against a state’s products to apply pressure to ratify the amendment. For Black women, the protection under the law in the workplace was more of a necessity than it was for many white women. Birth control and a woman’s right to choose when and how she would bear and raise children were also important issues during this time, but they posed particular challenges for Black women. Within the Black Power movement , many of the male leaders were preaching against the use of birth control because they believed it was a “tool of the oppressor to slowly kill off the Black race.” Many Black men wanted Black women to throw away their birth control pills and breed revolutionaries. Many Black women, however, felt this was just another excuse for Black men to keep women in traditional roles. For example, novelist and social critic Toni Cade argued that the pill offered women a choice as to when they feel prepared emotionally, economically, and physically to have a child, and was not a sign that the woman would not want a child in the future. bell hooks posed a more dramatic question. If birth control is truly the “trick of the man” and the Black women needed to have revolutionary babies, she asked, why are so many babies in Black orphanages? hooks called upon Black revolutionaries to adopt children until all the orphanages were empty if they wanted more Black revolutionaries.28
In their educational sheet on rape , the NBFO estimated that over 60% of rape victims were Black, the majority of them young girls. Rape was an important issue for the members of the NBFO, and they suggested that all states eliminate “collaboration laws,” which required a witness to be present at the time of the alleged rape . The NBFO also wanted to outlaw the use of a victim’s previous sexual history as evidence in rape trials. Often times, the defendant’s lawyer used scare tactics to intimidate a woman who was testifying against an accused rapist; this practice discouraged other women from wanting to bring charges against their rapists. NBFO members also saw a need for a change in laws to prohibit the legal rape of wives by their husbands, for at the time non-consensual sex within marriage was not considered rape . The NBFO also planned to pressure government officials to create special police units that would be trained to deal with rape cases.
The strategy that the NBFO members used to promote all of their concerns was referred to as CR , and they explained how it had helped them explore their own heads and hearts and celebrate their strength as women. NBFO saw CR as a way to “establish a basis of trust and commitment to each other as individuals and to the organization as a whole.” The goals of CR were:1.developing love, trust and sisterhood within the group;
2.facilitating open and honest communication and positive confrontation (as opposed to negative squabbling);
3.enabling women to deal with personal prejudices;
4.raising the feminist consciousness of all Black women.
The NBFO developed a CR strategy that was intended to reach out to Black women and educate them about feminism. They stressed that the number of members of their organization was not as important as the quality of those members; a small and effective organization, they reasoned, is better than a large and ineffective one. The organization also stressed the need to include marginalized groups, such as lesbians and incarcerated women, as part of their target audiences. This approach was very different from that of NOW , which clearly had other priorities. The women of the NBFO valued action on a more
personal and practical level, rather than on a mainstream political structural level. Perhaps the women of the NBFO thought that they lacked appropriate access to those political arenas, or perhaps they saw these changes as having a more direct effect on Black women in the USA than working within the system. Whatever their reasoning, the effect was the creation of an organization that filled a specific need. Unfortunately, the unique approach and organization of the NBFO could not be sustained. After six years, the organization disintegrated. According to Michele Wallace , the NBFO “got bogged down in an array of ideological disputes” and “action became unthinkable.” Wallace also saw how “women who had initiative and spirit usually attended one meeting, were turned off by the hopelessness of ever getting anything accomplished, and never returned again.” These types of problems were in no way unique to Black feminist organizing, but they did impact Black feminists’ successes considerably. Black feminists continued organizing in an effort to overcome such problems. The CRC was one such effort.
The Combahee River Collective
The CRC began as the Boston chapter of the NBFO, but it broke off in 1977 to focus more exclusively on issues of sexuality and economic development. Whereas the NBFO’s framework was socialist in its ideology, the CRC overtly defined itself as anti-capitalist, socialist, and revolutionary. During the six years of its existence, its members worked on a variety of issues that affected Black women, including racism in the women’s movement. The CRC asserted the legitimacy of Black women’s opposition to sexual exploitation and oppression and made a major contribution to the growth of Black feminism in the USA. Its widely circulated “Combahee River Collective Statement ” helped to lay the foundation for feminists of color organizing in the 1980s and the 1990s . In addition to the Statement, which became a seminal document of Black feminist activists, the women of Combahee also did important work focused around media exposure of Black women’s issues. One of the most important accomplishments of the CRC in this regard was their work to get the stories of the twelve Black women who were murdered in Boston moved from the sports section of The Boston Globe to headline news.29
The CRC has been printed in numerous publications, but a history of the organization and information about its members has, for the most part, been missing from the literature. In its first years, the Collective was active in projects such as support for Kenneth Edelin, a Black doctor at Boston City Hospital who was charged with manslaughter and arrested for performing a legal abortion . Collective members were also involved in the case of Ella Ellison , a Black woman who was accused of murder because she had been seen in the area where a homicide was committed. CRC members also picketed with the Third World Workers Coalition to ensure that Black laborers would be hired for the construction of a new high school in the Black community. These are just a few of the many projects in which they group participated over a five-year period.30
The Collective was comprised of highly educated Black lesbian feminists, six of who—Barbara Smith , Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke , Gloria Akasha Hull , Margo Okazawa Rey, and Sharon Page Ritchie —were interviewed for this book. Like the women who participated in the Fourth Consultation, it is important for scholars to recover the histories of contemporary Black feminists whose roles in the development of Black feminist consciousness have been central.
All of Who I Am in the Same Place: The Women of Combahee
Barbara Smith
Reentering the world of activism was something that Barbara Smith did not think she would do. Her early political work was in the civil rights movement, which she expected would lead to a social revolution. After disappointments in this first experience with political organizing, Smith did not have hope that the Black women’s movement would be significantly different. As Smith recalled,I think that I felt my status change so much from having been raised Colored/Negro to becoming Black in the space of a short lifetime. And what those names, those labels represent is a world of difference. There is a difference between our naming ourselves and other people declaring who we were with an insulting label. When I entered college in 1965, I thought that by the time I got out of college things would be basically “fixed,” you know, and since that didn’t happen, I don’t know if I thought we were on the verge of a revolution. It’s hard to look at history with hindsight because you realize so much more than when you were actually experiencing it. I think one of the things that I was so happy about is that I had thought that I would never be involved in political work after I graduated from college because that was the height of Black Nationalism and I felt like I just wasn’t permitted to be the kind of person I was in that context. I was supposed to marry someone or not marry them, who cares, but my job was to have babies for the Nation and to walk seven paces behind a man and basically be a maidservant. I didn’t get involved in the women’s movement for a few years after it became very visible because my perception was that it was entirely White.
After attending the NBFO meeting in New York in 1973, Smith felt she could do more in the Boston community by working from a Black feminist base. When Smith returned from the NBFO conference, she met with people from Boston and started trying to build a Boston NBFO chapter. She met Demita Frazier a few weeks later, in early 1974, and when Smith and Frazier began to meet regularly they discovered that their vision was more radical than that of the NBFO. In a 1994 interview, Demita Frazier remembered,We wanted to talk about radical economics. Some of us were thinking that we were socialists. We thought that we needed to have an economic analysis. We were also concerned that there be a voice for Lesbians in Black women’s organizations and we weren’t certain where NBFO was going, even though they had been founded by women who were Lesbians. So after one of our members – and I do believe it was Barbara – went to the Socialist Feminist Organizing Conference that was held at Oberlin College in Ohio, we decided that we wanted to be a collective and not be in a hierarchy organization because it was antithetical to our beliefs about democracy and the need to share. We also felt that we had a more radical vision. And so we decided [to send] a letter saying that we were no longer going to be the National Black Feminist Organization chapter in Boston. Towards the middle of 1975, we were having serious discussions about our relationship to the National Black Feminist Organization and we made a decision [to create an independent organization] during that summer.
The organization got its new name from Barbara Smith, who had read a small book published by Left Press entitled Harriet Tubman , Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Earl Conrad. The Combahee River is where the abolitionist Harriet Tubman planned and led the only military campaign in US history organized by a woman. Smith wanted to name the collective after a historical event that was meaningful to Black women. There were women’s groups all over the country named for Harriet Tubman , and Smith wanted to select a name that honored Tubman while offering unique symbolic value that distinguished her organization from existing groups. Smith liked the idea of naming the group for a collective action as opposed to one heroic person’s feats. She chose the name of the river where 750 slaves escaped to freedom. Smith explained the symbolic meaning of the choice of the name as follows:The boats were out there, the Yankee Union boats were out there and they [the slaves] were running, literally, to get on them, I guess, during this battle, but the thing is that it wasn’t just one person who did something courageous; it was a group of people. The Combahee River is an incredible militant chapter of U.S. history, not just of Black history, but of world history. In fact, at the time when people looked at their conditions and they fought back, they took great risks to change their situation and for us to call ourselves the Combahee River Collective, that was an educational [tool] both for ourselves and for anybody who asked, “So what does that mean, I never heard of that?” It was a way of talking about ourselves being on a continuum of Black struggle, of Black women’s struggle.”
In the summer of 1994, Barbara Smith was filmed by the Combahee River in South Carolina. When the videographer
asked Smith about the importance of the collective, she responded:Combahee was really so wonderful because it was the first time that I could be all of who I was in the same place. That I didn’t have to leave my feminism outside the door to be accepted, as I would in a conservative Black political context. I didn’t have to leave my lesbianism outside. I didn’t have to leave my race outside, as I might in an all-White women’s context where they didn’t want to know all of that. So it was just really wonderful to be able to be our whole selves and to be accepted in that way. In the early 1970s to be a Black lesbian feminist meant that you were a person of total courage. It was almost frightening. I spent a lot of time wondering if I would ever be able to come out because I didn’t see any way that I could be Black and a feminist and a lesbian. I wasn’t thinking so much about being a feminist. I was just thinking about how could I add lesbian to being a Black woman? It was just like no place for us. That is what Combahee created, a place where we could be ourselves and where we were valued. A place without homophobia, a place without racism, a place without sexism . (emphasis added)
Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump Page 15
