Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  It was remarkable that without a clear model, without a huge amount of applause from the stands or whatever, that we took this on. We took on the contradictions of being in the U.S. and living in U.S. society under this system. We took on race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. And we said, instead of being bowled over by it and destroyed by it, we are going to make it into something vital and inspiring. I have to say that I really did know what we were doing when we were doing it. I think that because I have such a grounding in Black history and in Black culture, I was quite aware that we were doing something new.

  One of the things that I used to feel was the lack of role models for myself. I used to feel like if only Lorraine [Hansberry ] hadn’t died so early then there would be someone who is older than me who is trying to carve out the territory. Audre [Lorde] was important to me in that way. Being able to look over to and up to someone who had been here more years than I, who shared the same kind of vision in politics, but I was very aware that we were doing something new because I knew enough about history and about political organizing to know that we were doing something that was never attempted before. But that doesn’t mean that I felt competent at every moment. It was absolutely daunting work. It was depressing. It was frightening. It was exhausting. Yes, I think that metaphor of a river that begins in a dark swamp and small spaces and opens out I think that is quite apt. I was excited because I assumed that the 80s would be similar in their degree of growth and energy as the 70s had been. But as it turned out, I was not right about that.

  The 1980s turned out to be the Reagan years, and political organizing became increasingly difficult. Public sentiment moved to the right, and the economic situation got even worse for those who were supposed to have benefited from trickle-down economics. Nevertheless, when 12 Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979, the Black feminist agenda would go into full effect. The only research that has been done to date about the activism of the CRC occurred in response to the collective’s action in response to this crime. In Jamie Grant’s unpublished article, “Who Is Killing Us?,” the author explained that between January 28 and May 30, 1979, 13 women, 12 Black and one white, were murdered within a two mile radius in Boston. All but one of the victims was found in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the contiguous districts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End. Many of the women were strangled, with bare hands or a scarf or cord, and some were stabbed; two were buried after they were killed, and two were dismembered. Several of the women had been raped.

  Boston, which was notorious for its poor treatment of Blacks with the busing situation, a Black attorney stabbed with an American flag, and an attack on a Black high school football player, reflected the social climate in its major newspaper, The Boston Globe. The January 30, 1979, edition of the Globe noted the discovery of the bodies of the first two murder victims, then unidentified, on page 30 beside the racing forms. The murders merited only a four paragraph description with the headline “Two bodies found in a trash bag.” On January 31, the murder of Gwendolyn Yvette Stinson was noted on page 13 under the headline, “Dorchester girl found dead.” Caren Prater’s death, on February 6, finally warranted a small block on the front page, followed by a confusing article about community outrage and police resources. On February 7, on page 8 of its Metro report, the Globe covered a community meeting with Mayor White at the Lee School in Dorchester, which more than 700 people attended.

  The Globe took no responsibility for its complicity in the lack of public attention to the murders. When the Globe did focus attention on the crimes, it was to attack the Black community’s response. Except for a small February 17 article on the murders, the Globe remained silent about the crisis until February 21, when Daryl Ann Hargett was found dead in her apartment. Even then, The Globe’s journalistic treatment of the fifth death of a Black woman within 30 days fell short of what such a situation warranted. Hargett, whose first name was misspelled, appeared on the front page in a small text box in the lower left-hand corner of the front page. In contrast to The Globe, The Bay State Banner, the Black community weekly, ran full coverage of the crimes from the first of February and reported on the Black community’s response. The Banner continued detailed, front page coverage throughout the year.

  On April 1, following the deaths of six Black women, 1500 people took to the streets to mourn the loss of their sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends. The memorial march commenced in Boston’s South End at the Harriet Tubman House and paused first at the Wellington Street apartment of Daryl Ann Hargett , the fifth victim, who was found strangled on the floor of her bedroom. The Combahee women reflected upon the tension in the political and cultural environment that pervaded Boston at the time:By that time in April, six women had been murdered and there was a memorial march in the South End about the murders. It was a protest march. It was also trying to commemorate them and there was a rally at the Stride-Rite factory field and you heard things that had already been said, but the message came across loud and clear from the almost entirely Black male speakers that what Black women needed to do was stay in the house. That’s the way you saved yourself from being murdered. You stayed in the house and/or you found a man to protect you. If you were going to leave the house, you had to find a man to go with you to take care of you.

  And also, the murders were being viewed at time as being completely racial murders. It was all women and some of the women had been sexually assaulted, but they were still seen as racial murders. There were a lot of feminist lesbians at that rally so there were at least some people there that when they heard this message that these were just racial murders, our ears perked up, stood up, whatever and we were thinking, no, no, I don’t think so because there was something called violence against women that we were all too familiar with and we just felt… so it was just such a difficult afternoon because at one level, we were grieving because Black women were being killed, we felt like we were at risk. We knew we were, in fact. We were scared. It was a very frightening time to be a Black woman in Boston. So there was that kind of collective shared grieving and then there was this real feeling of real fury.

  It was just infuriating because we knew that it was not a coincidence that everybody who had been murdered was female and as it turned out, by the time it was over, 12 Black women had been murdered. When the marchers reached the Stride Rite factory on Lenox Street in Roxbury, where the bodies of the first two women were found, Lorraine Bethel who eventually co-edited “Conditions Five” with Barbara Smith was there. Smith remembers Lorraine saying, “This is just horrible, we’ve got to do something.”

  Smith’s anger and frustration at the rally speakers’ failure to acknowledge sexism as a factor in the deaths of the women propelled her into action. She returned to her apartment in Roxbury and began developing a pamphlet that would speak to the fears of Black women in Boston. She remembered,I said, I think we really need to do a pamphlet. We need to do something. So I started writing a pamphlet that night and I thought of the title, “Six Black Women, Why Did They Die?” and I wrote it up. I always write everything longhand to begin with and then I type it. I had a little Smith-Corona electric portable at that time. And by the next morning, it was basically done. I called other people in the Collective. The Collective was never huge so I am not talking about calling 20 people. But I called other people in the group and I read it to them. This was before faxes and all that madness. I read it to them and then I also called up Urban Planning Aid in Boston and went down there and got assistance with laying out the pamphlet, using my actual typing from my own typewriter at home.

  Basically, what we wanted to say and did say in the pamphlet is that we had to look at these murders as both racist and sexist crimes and that we really needed to talk about violence against women in the Black community. We needed to talk about those women who did not have men as a buffer. Almost no woman has a man as a buffer between them and violence because it doesn’t make any difference if you are married or heterosexual, whatever, a
ll kinds of women are at risk for attack in different kinds of circumstances. And in fact, most women are attacked by the men they know. So obviously, having a man isn’t going to protect you from violence. But we really wanted to, first of all, get out that sexual political analysis about these murders. We wanted to do some consciousness-raising about what the murders meant. We also wanted to give women hope. So 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. It also had a list of things that you can do to protect yourself. In other words, self-defense methods. I remember consulting with people like some of the violence against women organizations to really check out to make sure that the things that we were suggesting were usable and good and then also, we had a list of organizations that were doing work on violence against women in Boston.

  We got great support from the community churches. We got a lot of support from very diverse groups of people, but I must say, the larger White feminist community was incredibly supportive. It was a real opportunity to do some coalition building and we were able to mobilize hundreds and hundreds of people to come out and to speak out to talk about the issue. We were able to bring together very diverse groups of people around the issue of violence against women. And we never felt that it had lost the focus on the fact that the women were Black. One thing we did say though is that these are women, these are Black women who were being murdered. They could have been you. It could have been any of us.

  Throughout the interviews, all six founding members of the CRC cited numerous reasons for the eventual disintegration of the organization. What seemed to come to the surface after much investigation were accusations that the group was less egalitarian than it claimed to be. Several of the interviewees alluded to the fact that although hierarchies were not supposed to exist, indeed they did. There was also mention of love relations that went awry, leaving at least one member of the Collective not wanting to attend retreats . Having given this issue much thought, it seems that the Collective was most cohesive and active when the issue of the murders in Boston was occurring. Having an event to respond to and organize around represented a cause where the group could concentrate its energies, which distracted them from the in-fighting that existed over power struggles and broken hearts. Also, according to Margo Okazawa Rey , who had attended graduate school at Harvard, this was a time in many of their twenty-something lives when geographical dispersion was bound to happen. By the early 1980s , several of the members had left the Boston area to begin the next phase of their lives.

  Most of the women continued the work of the collective through academia . Rey and Hull are examples of two members who ended up in California teaching race, class, and gender theory at San Francisco State University and The University of California-Santa Cruz, respectively. Sharon Page Ritchie plans to join the California University system to study clothing design. Cheryl Clarke is working on her dissertation about contemporary Black women poets at Rutgers University, where she is an administrator and advocate for the gay/lesbian/bisexual students on campus. Barbara Smith is working on a gay and lesbian studies anthology and resides in New York, and Demita Frazier has returned to Chicago to practice law. Although they no longer operate as a collective, the women of CRC left a legacy for Black feminists of the twenty-first century to study, to learn from, and to continue.

  Footnotes

  1Giddings, P. (1984). When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow and Company, p. 299.

  2In The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

  3In “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs 17 (2): 251–274, 1992.

  4In “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33 (6) (October/December): 14–32, 1986.

  5In “Afrocentricity: Moving Outside of the Comfort Zone.” The Journal of Physical Education, Dance, and Recreation 65 (5): 28, 1994.

  6As cited in Barbara Omalade’s. (1994). The Rising Song of the African American Women. New York: Routledge, p. 35.

  7Kennedy, J. F. (1960). Remarks. Allentown, PA. http://​www.​presidency.​ucsb.​edu/​ws/​index.​php?​pid=​74265. Retrieved on May 19, 2018.

  8As quoted in Cynthia Harrison. (1988). On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 160.

  9Harrison, Cynthia E. (1980). “A ‘New Frontier’ for Women: The Public Policy of the Kennedy Administration.” The Journal of American History 67 (3): 630–646.

  10Height, D. (2005). Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir. Washington, DC: Public Affairs.

  11Giddings, P. (1988). In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement. New York: William Morrow and Company, p. 219.

  12 National Council of Negro Women , Inc. http://​www.​ncnw.​org/​about/​index.​htm. Retrieved on December 20, 2007.

  13As cited in Franke, K. M. (1995). “The Central Mistake of Sex Discrimination Law: The Disaggregation of Sex from Gender.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (1): 1–99.

  14As cited in Berry, M. F. (1982). “Twentieth-Century Black Women in Education.” The Journal of Negro Education 51 (3): 288–300.

  15Scott, P. B. (2016). The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray , Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Vintage, pp. 306–307.

  16Black Women’s Oral History Project , p. 41.

  17Black Women’s Oral History Project , p. 13.

  18Black Women’s Oral History Project , p. 15.

  19Black Women’s Oral History Project , p. 16.

  20Thirteen (PBS) American Masters. “Lorraine Hansberry : Seeing Eyes/Feeling Heart,” Original air date: January 19, 2018.

  21hooks, bell . (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p. 186.

  22hooks, bell . (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p. 187.

  23National Organization for Women. “History: Highlights.” https://​now.​org/​about/​history/​highlights/​. Retrieved on May 20, 2018.

  24From the National Organization for Women “Honoring Our Founders.” Available online at http://​www.​now.​org/​history/​founders.​html.

  25Yamahtta Taylor, K. (2017). How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

  26 Sloan , p. 97.

  27Yamahtta Taylor, K. (2017). How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

  28In hooks, bell .

  29Yamahtta Taylor, K. (2017). How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

  30Yamahtta Taylor, K. (2017). How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

  © The Author(s) 2019

  Duchess HarrisBlack Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1_5

  5. Doubting the Democrats: Current Disenchantment and Political Futures

  Duchess Harris1

  (1)Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA

  Duchess Harris

  Email: harris@macalester.edu

  From the 1960s on, African-Americans have been one of the Democratic Party’s most important political constituencies. Black voters have offered nearly unwavering support to Democratic candidates. For the Democrats, it has been easy to maintain this relationship by taking credit for good deeds, and blaming the Republicans for trying to reverse the gains of the 1960s during the 1980s. The Republicans have never completely accepted the Democratic Party’s hold over the Black electorate, but they have never made a concerted effort until the opening of the tw
enty-first century. Recent Republican campaigns and even national conventions have been carefully orchestrated to appeal to Black voters, and several Black women and men hold high-level Cabinet positions, Condoleezza Rice being one of them.

  Two of the three African-Americans who addressed the 2000 Republican National Convention were also two of the biggest names in George W. Bush’s administration: Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell . Powell is, of course, the more familiar of the two names to most Americans, having served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during George Bush Sr.’s administration, gaining name and face recognition during the Gulf War, and acquiring a highly visible international presence as Secretary of State. Yet both Rice and Powell presented certain challenges to the kinds of narratives that had, until their tenure, characterized Black Americans’ involvement in political life. On the one hand, Colin Powell was largely able to surmount the race factor altogether. Consider, for example that former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was quoted as saying, “The fact of the matter is that with Colin I never think of whether he’s Black or white….” What stands at the center of Weinberger’s sentiment is that Black Americans have permitted white Americans to define Blackness for far too long. If Black racial identity is constructed in a manner that allowed the group’s members to have positive attributes related to character, Colin Powell could be simultaneously impressive and Black, a privilege that most Black Americans are denied.