The Combahee River Collective Statement
The CRC held retreats throughout the Northeast between 1977 and 1979. The first retreat was held July 8–10, 1977, in a private home at 10 Jewett Lane in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The purpose of the retreat was to assess the state of the movement, to share information about the participants’ political work, and to talk about possibilities and issues for organizing Black women (May 24, 1977, letter authored by Demita Frazier , Barbara Smith , and Beverly Smith). Subsequent retreats were intended to foster unity because of members’ geographic separation. The twenty Black feminists who were invited to the retreats were asked to bring copies of any written materials relevant to Black feminism—articles, pamphlets, papers, and their own creative work—to share with the group. Organizers Frazier, Smith, and Smith hoped the retreats would foster political stimulation and spiritual rejuvenation for participants. They encouraged the participants to come ready to talk, laugh, eat, dance, and have a good time. According to their recollection in interviews, this is what occurred:[Poet] Audre Lorde was involved in the retreats. I had just met her and I asked her to come and she was thrilled and that is really how we got to become friends because we would see each other periodically at these retreats. We would call them retreats , but in fact they were political meetings that had lots of different elements. So it was a way for people who were separated to be in the same place and do some political work with each other.
The discussion schedule for the retreat was comprised of five sections. The group met on Friday evening for a discussion about “What’s Been Done, What’s Happening Now, and What We Want for the Future.” During this session, the group discussed political activities in which they had been involved over the past few years. On Saturday, between ten in the morning and noon, the group’s topic was “Theory and Analysis.” They discussed the CRC as a means of focusing the first part of the session and then moved to other topics, including the need to develop a Black feminist economic analysis, the question of violence, and lesbian separatism. After lunch, there were two sessions on organizing. In the next session, the group addressed theoretical and tactical questions: Is there a Black feminist movement? How to develop new organizing skills for Black feminist revolution? How to build new institutions? What about barriers to organizing, such as anti-feminism, repression, class, the backlash, heterosexism , racism, ageism, and sexism? Can publishing be used as a tool for organizing? How do we work out the knots that have prevented coalitions between white women and Black women? After this two-hour discussion, the group focused for another two hours on sterilization abuse, Black women’s health, and battered women. For five hours on Sunday, they discussed the effects and remedies of isolation.
The second Black feminist retreat was held November 4–5, 1977 , at Cassie Alfonso’s home in Franklin Township, New Jersey. The items on the agenda included: (1) trust between lesbian and non-lesbian feminists; (2) socialism and a Black feminist ideology; (3) lesbian separatism and the Black liberation struggle; (4) Black feminist organization versus Black feminist movement; (5) Black feminist scholarship; (6) class conflicts among Black women; and (7) love between women—lesbian, non-lesbian, Black and white (August 25, 1977, letter written by Cheryl Clarke and Cassie Alfonso). The participants were asked to bring an object that would make a statement about themselves, such as a picture, a poem, or a journal excerpt. The retreat had five sessions that addressed a range of topics, including “the personal is political,” political definitions, political realities, from analysis to action, and where do we go from here. Two bodywork/exercise sessions were also scheduled at this retreat.
The third Black feminist retreat was held March 24–26, 1978 . The fourth retreat met July 21–23, 1978. After these retreats occurred, the participants were encouraged to write articles for the Third World women’s issue of Conditions, a journal that was edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith . The importance of publishing was emphasized in the fifth retreat, held on July 8, 1979 . Participants discussed contributing articles for a lesbian herstory issue of two journals, Heresies and Frontiers. Both Beverly Smith and Barbara Smith had been approached to compile an anthology on Black feminism. Ultimately, the group’s members were very active in publishing; a case in point is the anthology But Some of Us Are Brave, which was edited by two Combahee members.
The fifth retreat was important because the members cataloged indicators that Black feminism had grown between 1977 and 1979. Two Black feminist groups existed in Boston. Black academic women were organizing nationally in the field of history, at the Modern Language Association, and had formed Sojourner, a research newsletter in Third World women’s studies. A group for Black women in publishing was organizing in New York. Art collaborations, like Bernice Johnson Reagon and June Jordan’s performance, were happening in New York. CRISIS , a Black women’s “grassroots” organization, had formed in 1979 to combat murders in Boston. Coalitions between lesbian and straight Black women mothers in Kansas City had been established. Contacts had been made with Black social service workers in New Jersey and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The women at the fifth retreat also discussed the growth of Black feminist and lesbian culture as evidenced by the performance groups Varied Voices Tour, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Black Earth Sisters. The group noted that white feminists had begun to take responsibility for dealing with their racism , which in turn lightened the load of Black feminists. The CRC members also attended two important poetry readings: one at the Solomon Center’s Fuller Mental Health Center in Boston to hear Audre Lorde, Kate Rushin, and Fahamisha Shariat Brown, and the other at Sanders Theater at Harvard to hear Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
Participants at the sixth retreat of the CRC focused on two literary events in the 1970s. They discussed articles in the May/June 1979 issue of The Black Scholar, collectively titled “The Black Sexism Debate,” written in response to Robert Staples ’ “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists ,” which had been published in the previous issue. Participants also discussed the importance of writing to Essence to support an article in the September 1979 issue entitled “I am a Lesbian,” by Chirlane McCray . McCray was a Combahee member and the importance of the article was that at this time Essence had a policy on publishing articles and fiction about lesbians. The group was hoping that their positive letters would counteract the homophobic letters that they expected Essence to receive.
The seventh retreat was held in Washington, DC, on February 16–18, 1980 . Smith reflected upon the significance of the Combahee retreats :The retreats were multidimensional, multimedia events. They were so many different things. Of course, it was a time to talk politics. It was a time to have parties. It was a time to flirt, for some. It was a time to have these incredible meals. We used to bring literature and things that we had read, articles, we would bring enough copies for everyone. We would have stuff laid out on the table. Now, having been a publisher for 13 years for the only press of women of color in this country, I think how a part of that was bringing Xerox copies because that was all we had then if we wanted to read about ourselves in any fashion or read things that were relevant to us.
What I really see is Black feminism as a building block. I think that we always felt a kinship, sisterhood and solidarity with not just women of color, but with people of color, generally. That is articulated in the statement and certainly in the kinds of things that we move on to work on and do political work on, but it is like building blocks. Our major felt contradiction is/was, as Black women, this will be the White women’s movement. So if we were going to build something it was going to be the opposite of what existed, in other words, Black, which was who we were.
The retreats were wonderful. They sort of came about as a brainstorm. We realized we wanted to meet with more Black feminists. In Boston, we had a very large group, but we knew that there was organizing going on in New York and in New Jersey and in Chicago and very similar places. So we put a call out and called our friends and basica
lly that is what we did. We called everybody we knew who we thought might be interested in spending a weekend talking politics, playing cards, eating good food, and spending time together to give you the support and also to give ourselves a sense of a broader community. So I don’t remember what the year was. It might have been 1976, 1977… 1976, we organized our first Black feminist retreat. And we didn’t advertise, we just did word of mouth. And we met with 25 or 30 women at the first one, sleeping over on a weekend in Western Massachusetts in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was wonderful. First of all, at that point, we had been organizing for a couple of years and while we were feeling isolated, we did feel hungry for more. We wanted different perspectives. We were just ourselves. We wanted to hear from other people. The thrill of having people arriving, car load after car load of women who knew each other, but some of us didn’t know we were being brought together by five different women. We were just thrilled. There were so many colors, so many faces, so many bodies, from all over and a chance to hear what was going on in different cities. This standing around and looking at us all standing on that lawn and realizing we are all women who are taking this big risk because it was risky to be a feminist in the Black community.
We realized it was risky and there we were, all these risk takers, all these ground breakers. It was very powerful for us and it was wonderful also because we had the opportunity at that first meeting to go around and talk about, from sort of an autobiographical perspective, how we all came to be feminists and we got to tell our stories, fascinating places. Very interesting. One thing that I think we all had in common was again, we were all, it seemed like almost all of us were women who never quite fit any sort of stereotype about wherever we were. We weren’t appropriate little girls, necessarily. And if we were appropriate little girls, we weren’t very appropriate teenagers. We were girls who were rebellious and if we weren’t rebellious in act, we were definitely rebellious in thought. We were girls who early on either had been sexually abused or physically assaulted and never wanted that to happen to us again. So we were bringing a sort of reality politics, like you know I don’t want this to happen to me or my children. There must be a way to talk about this.
Community Activism
All of the Combahee women were involved in other civil rights and women’s issues groups and there was a lot of interconnection among the groups and their issues. When they first got together in the CRC, there was no battered women’s shelter in Boston or the surrounding area. Within several years, the women could count among their accomplishments the establishment of Transition House and the organization of take back the night marches. The work that the Combahee members had done had resulted in significant positive political and social outcomes; for the first time in Boston history, rape cases were not treating victims as criminals. A woman could bring a rape charge before the court and not be viewed as a perpetrator. Clearly, the work of the Combahee women had broad implications, affecting not only Black women, but whites and other ethnic women, too. As insider members of the Black community, Black women of the CRC had credibility in raising feminist issues that white women could not have pursued effectively. In publications and presentations, CRC members asserted that if Black women were free, then everyone would be free, because all the systems of oppression that affect Black women and women of color affect everyone else also.
When the collective got involved with the case of L. L. Ellison, a Black woman who defended herself against a sexual assault by a guard at Framingham State Prison by murdering him, it brought them into a circle of people who were fighting the death penalty in the state. This interaction helped Combahee forge a coalition with other community activists, and it brought them into another sector of the Black community they might not have reached otherwise. They worked with women’s church groups, including the auxiliaries of a couple of Baptist churches. They were asked to speak about Black feminist politics and implications for Black women. According to Barbara Smith, Combahee was very successful, because even though it caused a lot of upheaval, the members brought the question to the table:One meeting that we went to [was] in a church where we showed up. We used to show up for these gigs. We would show up ready to create our discussion. Talk about consciousness raising and the importance of looking into the issues of violence against Black women. And also, an analysis about what it meant for us to take one step back and what it meant to support Black men. Did we have to necessarily walk behind Black men to be supportive of Black men and therefore supportive of our whole community? So things got very hot and heavy at this meeting. We were being told ‘What made you think you represent all Black women? You don’t represent me, necessarily.’ It wasn’t a hostile group, but people were feeling what does this mean. How can you say this represents, how can you say that you are representing us? An older Black woman, she must have been in her sixties or seventies, said, “Well, from what I can understand, what they are saying sounds right to me, so they represent me.” And that was, again, one of those moments when we’ve got affirmation from someone who you would respect because you were taught to respect older Black people as a child. You were just taught to respect your elders and it was so affirming to have her say that. And it sort of really put other women… it sort of gave other women the permission to say that they could understand and support the issues.
The simple truth is because she didn’t have anything to lose. She is an older woman who has had a whole lifetime of experience. And I see it in my own mother now. You just don’t have to lie anymore after you get past a certain age as a woman, and she was just very clear. She worked in people’s houses cleaning them, and primarily White people, and she talked about having to fend off the husband or the older son when she was a young woman doing that work and what it meant for her. She lost many jobs and she understood sexual politics. So that was why she was important. It is so funny. If you knew the people involved, you would understand that it was never an issue. We were lesbians. We were not going to be repressed or oppressed in a group that we were organizing for it. We had a couple of women who were bisexual in the group and they were fine with us. At least I can say they were fine with me. Because the women who were integral to organizing Combahee were lesbians; it was just done, it was just as it was. We were the women who came together and we made it a part of our politics that we thought that we were open to all women, Lesbians, straight women and bisexual women. So at that time, as far as we were concerned, it wasn’t an issue. People always act as if homophobia is something the Black community invented. We all know that that is not true. We didn’t find that women were completely closed to the idea of being in a room with a group of lesbians talking about feminist politics. We just were a group of women trying to come together to talk about what it meant to be Black and female and Lesbians were on the spectrum. So that is just how it was.
I don’t ever remember us going anywhere and people saying things like, “Here come the bull daggers” or “Here come those dykes.” We didn’t have that problem. It also may have been because in the venues that we found ourselves, we took ourselves to, we were involved with progressive people and progressive organizations. It is different when you are going out to do a speaking engagement, to talk about Black feminist organizing, because inevitably we would always say, as an organization, we support and respect the right for women to make the decisions about themselves, their sexuality, their lives, whatever. And so we always stated that and if we got…. it would create some interesting discussions, but it was not as if we went someplace and got stoned or we went to a meeting in a church and had people threaten to nail us to the cross and set us on fire. It just didn’t happen that way.
What we had there was also a certain amount of respect that you get as a political activist. I found this to be true when you are working with people of color. Because we were really focusing on the issues and these were life and death, bread and butter issues. And we just acted as if it were perfectly alright for us to be who we were and be respected for
who we were. So we didn’t have problems as a group going into situations like that which is not to say, as individuals we didn’t have problems in the community. But I never did.
The women of the CRC created a theory that was more polyvocal than the theories espoused by the Kennedy Commission women and the NBFO. The theory that they were able to provide is a useful tool to analyze the position of Black women in the 1990s . As Smith recalled,I think we came up with the term “identity politics.” I never really saw it anywhere else and I would suggest that people, if they really want to find the origin of the term, that they try to find it in any place earlier than in the Combahee River Collective statement . I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else. But what we meant by identity politics was a politics that grew out of our objective material experiences as Black women. This was the kind of politics that had never been done or practiced before to our knowledge, although we began to find out that there were Black feminists in the early part of this century and also, perhaps, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But it had never been quite formulated in the way that we were trying to formulate it, particularly because we were talking about homophobia, lesbian identity, as well.
So there were basically politics that worked for us. There were politics that took everything into account as opposed to saying leave your feminism, your gender, your sexual orientation, you leave that outside. You can be Black in here, but you can’t be a lesbian, you can’t be a feminist; or you can be a feminist in here, but you can’t be Black. That’s really what we meant. We meant politics that came out of the various identities that we had that really worked for us. It gave us a way to move, a way to make change. It was not the reductive version that theorists now really criticize. It was not being simplistic in saying I am Black and you are not. That wasn’t what we were doing.
Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump Page 17
