Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  In 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, white Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staffers, discussed the sexist treatment of women in SNCC in a position paper entitled “Women of the Movement,” which they delivered at SNCC’s Waveland Conference.10 Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, SNCC executive secretary (1966), died of cancer a year later at age twenty-five, and Kathleen Cleaver, a former SNCC worker and Black Panther, believed Robinson’s death was caused in part by overwork and “the constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman” (Cleaver, 55). Similarly, Septima Clark, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) director of education in 1961, criticized the sexism of SCLC in her autobiography Ready From Within: “... those men didn’t have any faith in women, none whatsoever. They just thought that women were sex symbols and had no contributions to make ... I had a great feeling that Dr. King didn’t think much of women either ...” (Crawford, 195—96). She also confronted King about his nondemocratic style of leadership and eventually joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968 because of its women’s rights agenda.

  The publication in 1970 of Toni Cade’s The Black Woman: An Anthology, Shirley Chisholm’s autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Audre Lorde’s Cables to Rage signaled a literary awakening among black women and the beginning of a clearly defined black women’s liberation movement that would have priorities different from those of white feminists, and generate considerable debate, even hostility, within the black community. Cade’s antiracist, antisexist, anti-imperialist agenda captures the essence of contemporary black feminism: conduct a comparative study of women’s roles in the Third World; debunk myths of the black matriarch and “the evil black bitch”; study black women’s history and honor woman warriors such as Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer; do oral histories of ordinary black women (migrant workers, quilters, UNIA grandmothers); study sexuality; establish linkages with other women of color globally (Cade, 11).

  The anthology includes SNCC activist Frances Beale’s pioneering essay on the “double jeopardy” of black women, which highlights their sexual and economic exploitation, the inappropriateness of white models of womanhood, black male sexism, sterilization abuse of women of color globally, abortion rights, and Sojourner Truth’s 1851 women’s rights speech. Beale also voices her disapproval of black nationalist demands that women be subordinate to men and their assumption that women’s most important contribution to the revolution is having babies: “To assign women the role of housekeeper and mother while men go forth into battle is a highly questionable doctrine to maintain” (Cade, 100).

  In 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) would emerge in part as a reminder to the black liberation movement that “there can’t be liberation for half the race”11 Activist lawyer Flo Kennedy and Margaret Sloan decided to convene a small gathering of black feminists in May so that they could discuss their experiences within the racist women’s movement, and what it meant to be black, female, and feminist. In their statement of purpose, they objected to the women’s movement’s being seen as white, and their involvement in it as disloyal to the race. Emphasizing black women’s need for self-definition, they identified racism from without and sexism from within as destructive to the black community.

  The National Black Feminist Organization officially began November 30, 1973, at an Eastern Regional Conference in New York City at the cathedral of St. John the Divine. This was a historic gathering of the first explicitly black feminist organization committed to the eradication of sexism, racism, and heterosexism. Workshops focused on a variety of issues—child care, the church, welfare, women’s liberation, lesbianism, prisons, education, addiction, work, female sexuality, and domestic violence. Among those present were Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Flo Kennedy, and Margaret Sloan, NBFO’s first and only president.12

  A year after the founding meeting, the Boston chapter of NBFO decided to form a more radical organization, according to lesbian feminist writer Barbara Smith, and named itself in 1975 the Combahee River Collective after Harriet Tubman’s “military campaign” in South Carolina (1863), which freed nearly 800 slaves. In 1977, after meeting informally for three years and doing intense consciousness-raising (the major strategy for feminist organizing in the 1970s), a black feminist lesbian manifesto was issued that foregrounded sexuality and asserted that “sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in black women’s lives as the politics of class and race” (Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith, 16). Emphasizing the “simultaneity” of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of black and other women of color, they affirmed their connection to an activist tradition among black women going back to the nineteenth century as well as to black liberation struggles of the 1960s. Despite the difficulty of sustaining a socialist black feminist organization with lesbian leadership for six years, they worked untiringly on a variety of “revolutionary” issues—reproductive rights, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women’s movement. They also understood the importance of coalition building and worked with other women of color, white feminists, and progressive men. Equally important was their breaking the silence about homophobia within the black community and providing lesbians and heterosexual women with opportunities to work together.

  In 1975, Michele Wallace wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” and precipitated an intense controversy within the black community when Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman appeared three years later. Wallace, a founding member of NBFO, critiqued black male sexism and the misogyny of black liberation struggles. Echoing Wallace, the August 27, 1979 issue of Newsweek chronicled a new black struggle that underscored intraracial tensions based on gender: “It’s the newest wrinkle in the black experience in America—a a growing distrust, if not antagonism, between black men and women that is tearing marriages apart and fracturing personal relationships.” This “wake-up call” came on the heels of Ntozake Shange’s award-winning Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” (1976) and Wallace’s polemic Black Macho, both of whom were demonized because of their negative assessments of black men.

  The issue of sexual politics within the African American community became a hotly debated topic in journals such as The Black Scholar, Freedomways, and Black Books Bulletin, and provided the catalyst for the founding of a short-lived bimonthly magazine, Black Male/Female Relationships by sociologists Nathan and Julia Hare. Black Scholar, however, would provide the most extensive and sober treatment of the debate generated by Wallace’s and Shange’s controversial feminist writings. The April 1973 issue of Black Scholar on “Black Women’s Liberation” led the way, followed by the March 1975 issue, “The Black Woman,” the 1979 “Black Sexism Debate” issue, and the 1986 “Black Women and Feminism” issue. Robert Staples’s essay “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” which appeared in the March/April 1979 issue, was a feminist-bashing response to Wallace and Shange, whom he accused of black male bashing; it stimulated a Readers’ Forum in the subsequent May/ June 1979 issue, in which the battle lines were drawn. Robert Chrisman’s editorial for this special issue acknowledged in very strong terms the validity of the accusations, and called for a reconciliation between black men and women: “Black feminists have raised just criticisms of black male sexism.... We believe that the effort to clarify the nature of black male/ female relationships is an important step in the process of reuniting our people and revitalizing the struggle against oppression.... the problems of black male/female relationships are neither new nor solely the creation of the white media.”

  A decade later, the controversy continued and grew more virulent; its most obvious manifestations were loud and angry litanies, especially among black professional men, about the portrayal of black male characters in the fiction of
contemporary black women writers. Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation sparked the most vitriolic responses. Shahrazad Ali’s self-published The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman (1990) was one of the most disturbing publications during this decade-and-a-half-old family battle and is one of the most blatantly misogynist and racist texts to appear in print.

  Black feminist writing proliferated during this period amid rancorous debate within the black community about the relevance of the contemporary white women’s movement to black women. One of the most passionate defenders of feminist ideology to emerge, though she also delivered scathing critiques of white feminism, was bell hooks, whose pioneering monograph, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) delineated the impact of sexism on the lives of black women; analyzed the devaluation of black womanhood, both historically and contemporaneously; and discussed the persistence of racism in the women’s movement and the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve gender equality. The chapter on “Sexism and the Black Female Experience” advanced the new thesis that slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal and racist social order not only oppressed black men but also defeminized slave women. Over the next decade and a half, a substantial group of black feminist writers, among whom were Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Hull, Paula Giddings, and Barbara Christian, would redefine feminism as a broad political movement to end all forms of domination. In the words of hooks, “... feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires” (hooks, 1981, 194).

  Reminiscent of the 1890s, writing, publishing, and organizing became a major preoccupation of black feminists during the 1980s, and heeding Cooper’s words, black women were clearly speaking for themselves. Other groundbreaking texts were Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists (1980); Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1981); Filomina Chioma Steady’s The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (1981); Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982); Paula Gidding’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Sex and Race in America (1984); Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983); Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983); Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984); Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); and Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded in 1980 by Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith for the purpose of publishing mainly feminist women of color; its mission (see brochure) was also to provide a “political support network for feminists and lesbians of color as well.” The first explicitly black feminist periodical devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African decent in the United States and throughout the world was founded in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia, and hosted by Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center, the first feminist institute on a historically black college campus. SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women would provide a major outlet for feminist perspectives on a variety of issues including mother-daughter relationships in the black community, health, science and technology, and the situation of women in rural Africa. During its founding conference in 1983, the National Black Women’s Health Project, whose newsletter Vital Signs provides black feminist perspectives on health, attracted the largest group of black women ever to assemble on Spelman’s campus.

  Black feminist theory would come of age during the 1990s and move from the margins to the center of mainstream feminist discourse. Patricia Hill Collins’s landmark Black Feminist Thought identified the fusion of activism and theory as its distinguishing characteristic, and analyzed its four core themes: the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression in black women’s personal, domestic, and work lives; the necessity of internalizing positive self-definitions and rejecting the denigrating, stereotypical, and controlling images (mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, whore) of others, both within and without the black community; and the need for active struggle to resist oppression and realize individual and group empowerment (Collins, 23, 32, 83—84). The Collins text would further establish, along with Toni Cade’s The Black Woman and bell hooks’s—Ain’t I a Woman, a continuous black feminist intellectual tradition going back to the publication of Cooper’s A Voice from the South a hundred years earlier.

  Despite their commitment to ending sexism, however, some black women continued to be alienated by the term “feminist.” Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) provided the alternative term “womanist” as a more culturally appropriate label for black feminists or feminists of color. “Womanist” recalled a black folk expression of mothers admonishing their daughters to refrain from “womanish” behavior. According to Walker, a “womanist” prefers women’s culture, is committed to the survival of the entire group, is serious, “loves struggle, loves the folk, and loves herself” (Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi-xii). Inspired by Walker, scholars such as Cheryl Gilkes, Katie Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, Renita Weems, and Emily Townes, for example, self-identify as “womanist” theologians as a way of differentiating themselves from white feminist theologians.

  President George Bush’s 1991 nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and Professor Anita Hill’s subsequent allegations of sexual harassment, which resulted in televised hearings for three days in October, sparked perhaps the most profound intraracial tensions around sexual politics that the modern African American community had ever experienced. Despite Hill’s allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked under him at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), on October 16 the Senate confirmed, 52—48, Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing outgoing Thurgood Marshall.

  A month later, a cogent statement opposing the racist and sexist treatment of Anita Hill appeared in the November 17, 1991, issue of the New York Times (A—53), “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” Over 1,600 black women reminded the nation of Thomas’s persistent failure, despite his own racial history and professional opportunities, to respond to the urgency of civil rights for disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, the statement called attention to a long history of sexual abuse and stereotyping of black women as “immoral, insatiable, perverse.” The failure of Congress to take seriously Hill’s sexual harassment charges was perceived as an attack on the collective character of black women (Chrisman and Allen, 292).

  More than any other episode in recent memory, including the angry responses to Black Macho, For Colored Girls, and The Color Purple, the Thomas/Hill saga unmasked problematic gender attitudes within the black community and in some cases outright misogyny. Because Hill had violated a deeply held cultural taboo—that racial dirty linen shouldn’t be aired in public—she came to epitomize black female treachery in breaking the silence about objectionable black male behavior. For over a decade, black women had been labeled traitors among some segments of the community because of their advocacy of feminism, which was associated with white women. Despite the criticism, however, contemporary black feminists, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, mobilized for struggle with the hope that eradicating the twin evils of racism and sexism would become a battle cry within the entire community. In the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill hearings, black women witnessed rancorous public dialogue about their character, which sparked the formation of a new feminist organization, African American Women in Def
ense of Ourselves.

  In January 1994, the largest gathering of black feminist scholars and activists took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during a national conference entitled “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name, 1894-1994.” Ironically, nearly one hundred years after the historic gathering of clubwomen in Boston in 1895, over 2,000 mostly academic black women gathered again. Like black women in the 1890s, they found themselves under attack, much of which was generated by the Thomas/Hill hearings and the propaganda associated with welfare reform and “family values.” In addition, two prominent black academic women with liberal politics, Johnnetta Cole and Lani Guinier (both of whom were keynoters at MIT), had been viciously attacked by the Right; as a result, both of them were abandoned as appointees of the Clinton administration. Twenty-five years earlier, Angela Davis (the third keynoter) had been fired from her faculty job at the University of California, Los Angeles, by Governor Ronald Reagan because of her political views and Communist Party membership.

  Among other things, the MIT conference demonstrated the persistence of black women intellectuals’ commitment to feminist discourse and action, despite the absence of common ground on a number of issues. A resolution was drafted and sent to President Clinton which, first of all, acknowledged the “complexity of social categories such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.”13 It called for a blue-ribbon panel on race relations in the United States; underscored the importance of research on black women that would promote the interests of the entire African American community; called for an examination of career advancement issues for women of color in higher education; and requested increased funding for community-based organizations serving poor black families and others in need, such as women in prison and people with AIDS. It also addressed international issues relating to Haiti, South Africa, Cuba, and Somalia. This document articulates the contours of contemporary black feminism and suggests a blueprint for the future.