Black Like Us

by Devon Carbado

  Two years after his controversial departure from FOR, however, Rustin was back at the center of the movement as special advisor to Montgomery’s bus protest organizers. Until the boycott, King, according to Rustin, knew little about Mahatma Gandhi and did not self-identify as a pacifist. “He was still working out of the framework of Christian love. I believe he soon came to see what I had recognized while working with Gandhi’s movement in India—that you ought not to separate the secular from the religious.”12 Rustin at the time was among the leading American authorities on nonviolent direct action, and soon it became the centerpiece of King’s ideology.

  Nevertheless, Rustin’s sexual orientation remained a source of friction in spite of his influence on civil rights activism, or perhaps because of it. In 1960, for example, the black Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York threatened to report to the press a fabricated homosexual coupling of Rustin and King unless the minister canceled his plans for a demonstration at the Democratic national convention. Rather than stand firm against this groundless charge, King acquiesced, advising Rustin to sever all relations with SCLC. Among the activists most shocked by King’s capitulation was novelist James Baldwin, who wrote that King had “lost much moral credit…in the eyes of the young, when he allowed Adam Clayton Powell to force the resignation of his extremely able organizer and lieutenant….”13

  Rustin’s appointment to lead the 1963 March on Washington was equally contentious. Roy Wilkins, the NACP’s leader and one of the key march strategists, argued that civil rights opponents might seize on Rustin’s homosexuality and his brief affiliation with the Communist Party in the 1930s to discredit both the march and its supporters. Despite Wilkins’s protestations and the upheaval they engendered, King, along with a majority of the leaders of the march, supported Rustin. “[King] looked on every human being as a child of God,” Rustin later explained. “He had absolute respect for individuals and individual differences. He felt they should all be treated equally.” King’s ecumenical approach to human diversity, Rustin pointed out, “never diminished his considerable affection for the Gay people on his staff, and certainly not myself.”14

  Accordingly, King—now backed by labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the pioneering elder statesman of the movement, and SNCC’s John Lewis—supported Rustin’s appointment, with Wilkins agreeing to allow Rustin to lead the march under the diminished title of deputy director. Still, the announcement that Rustin would assume this leadership position did not go unnoticed. Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina who would later oppose the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, jeopardized Rustin’s already vulnerable authority by denouncing him as a sexual degenerate from the Senate floor just days prior to the event. This, of course, was precisely the sort of controversy Wilkins had feared. But, in a political about-face, the NACP director championed Rustin. “We have found in the past six weeks that he is a man of exceptional ability, who has delivered an extraordinary project that should have required a full three months but is being completed in two,” Wilkins answered in Rustin’s defense.15 In the end the march proved to be the largest public demonstration for civil rights in U.S. history, contributing to the passage of both the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter’s Rights Act in the following year.

  Not all African Americans, however, applauded the march. Malcolm X, the firebrand Black Muslim minister who publicly ridiculed “the farce on Washington,” signaled the impending tactical shift among black activists by the mid-1960s. “Revolutions are never based upon love-your- enemy-and-pray-for-those-who-despitefully-use-you. And revolutions are never waged singing ‘We shall overcome.’ Revolutions are based on bloodshed.”16 White liberals and the civil rights establishment had repeatedly betrayed the trust of time-worn nonviolent demonstrators like SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who drew on Malcolm X’s teachings to espouse “Black Power” beginning in 1966. At this juncture, when African Americans began to separate themselves from whites, women activists began speaking out on sexism in the civil rights struggle.

  Mary King and Casey Hayden, two white SNCC staff members, wrote a 1964 position paper, “Women in the Movement,” which was distributed anonymously among organizers. They argued, among other things, the following:

  The average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumptions of male superiority…[which] are as widespread and deep-rooted and [every bit as]…crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.... [SNCC] should force the rest of the movement to stop the discrimination and start the slow process of changing values and ideas so that all of us gradually come to understand that this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.17

  Although SNCC executive secretary James Forman recognized that “subtle and blatant forms of discrimination against women” existed both inside and outside the organization, Carmichael dismissed the authors’ complaint as a diversion by white women who believed Black Power would politically displace them.18 Carmichael’s response might help to explain why, according to Paula Giddings, African American women did not rise en masse with white women against sexism. While Giddings did not deny the existence of black male chauvinism, she argued that African American women did not perceive sexual discrimination—at least within the black civil rights movement generally and SNCC in particular— to be nearly as damaging as white women claimed. Presumably, part of what informed that perspective was the fact that black women members such as Donna Richards Moses, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith were involved in SNCC’s decision-making processes. And more generally, “The influence of Black women was actually increasing at the time; it was White women who were being relegated to minor respon-sibilities…” 19 (emphasis added). Because this political relegation was race-specific, many black women simply did not perceive it to be about gender per se.

  As white women activists joined predominantly white organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the burgeoning women’s movement, the Black Panther Party offered African American women a revolutionary alternative to the reform-oriented protest tradition.

  The Party welcomed progressive whites as political allies, thereby appealing to both black women and black men who were interested in racially inclusive forms of black liberation. Founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party initially was an armed self-defense force whose ten-point platform called for full employment, housing, education, and an end to police brutality, among other demands. Almost from the Party’s inception, women members, including Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, and Ericka Huggins, held leadership roles, with Brown chairing the Party during the mid-1970s. Lesbians and gay men also served the organization, sometimes openly and occasionally in positions of national authority. “There were gay operatives in the Black Panther Party working at the highest levels of leadership,” remarked Black Panther Party founding member and former chief of staff David Hilliard. “Lesbian relationships were more acceptable in the Party than homosexual relations between men. But the uneasiness over gay men was expressed primarily by men, most of whom were insecure with their own sexuality. Still, no one ever asked you to define your sexual orientation. We didn’t divide ourselves like that. First and foremost you were a Black Panther.”20

  An enduring point of controversy remains the inflammatory rhetoric of Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Party minister of information, whose best-selling Soul on Ice (1968) likens homosexuality to “a sickness” and chronicles the author’s past exploits “practicing” rape on African American women until he became “smooth enough” to assault “white prey.”21 Cleaver’s politics of gender and sexual orientation was extreme, yet his chauvinism did not go unchecked. Writing in a 1970 essay “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton laid out the Party’s political platform with regard to sex and gender in unequivocally inclusive terms. “We must understand
[homosexuality] in its purest form…. That is, a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants. Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.”22 Never before had a black civil rights group recognized lesbians and gay men as an oppressed population (perhaps “the most oppressed people in the society,” according to Newton) facing a struggle for acceptance and equality comparable to that of African Americans. For the first time in the movement’s history, blacks sought political coalitions with gay activists based on their similar oppression.

  Issues of sexual identity complicated relations within the emerging women’s movement as well, just as gender and sexual orientation had proved controversial in the civil rights and black liberation movements. Consider, for example, the National Organization for Women (NOW), whose initial response to lesbianism was at best cautious and at worst unabashedly hostile. NOW was founded in 1966 by twenty-nine women, including feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, as the first postwar feminist organization to advocate women’s rights on a national scale. Its cornerstone “Bill of Rights for Women” demanded passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enforcement of Title VII (prohibiting both sexual and racial discrimination), and equal education and employment opportunities for women. NOW’s focus on women’s rights, as opposed to women’s liberation, however, signaled its primary difference from radical feminist groups emerging at that time. As Susan Brownmiller put it, “At its inception the women’s movement appeared to have two distinct wings—the reformers of NOW and the radicals of Women’s Liberation.”23 These two wings differed not only in ideological orientation but also in the nature of their political action. While the reformers of NOW preferred traditional forms of protest (litigation and political lobbying, for instance), radical feminists were far more confrontational. Women’s Liberation brought to the attention of the American public antiviolence issues such as rape and sexual harassment, while insisting that lesbian issues be incorporated into the broader goals of the feminist movement.

  Friedan and like-minded feminists felt concern that a radical feminist agenda would discredit the women’s movement. (This, of course, parallels the respectability concerns of black leaders at the turn of the twentieth century.) Friedan called lesbians “the lavender menace” of feminism, a remarkable statement given that relatively few lesbians in the movement openly identified as such. In the words of Karla Jay,

  It was one thing to hang out in a bar where everyone simply assumed similar sexual proclivities…. It was quite another to announce one’s lesbianism and then demand it take center stage in a room full of straight feminists who were likely to be heterosexists…and who had just issued an ultimatum to keep on sleeping with men as part of a program to mend the oppressors’ ways.24

  Nevertheless, antilesbianism in the women’s movement was confronted head-on in May 1970 after NOW omitted the Daughters of Bilitis from its list of sponsors of the Second Congress to Unite Women. On the first evening of the congress, several hundred women sat waiting for a panel to begin when the lights suddenly went out. When they were switched back on, seventeen women dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Lavender Menace” lined the auditorium aisles to address homosexuality in the women’s movement. By the end of the demonstration, more than thirty women from the audience had joined protesters on stage as the first post-Stonewall group to focus on lesbian issues.

  From this gathering the Lavender Menace—or Radicalesbians, as the group was renamed—presented a statement to the closing session of the congress, which read:

  Be it resolved that the Women’s Liberation Movement is a Lesbian plot.

  R esolved that whenever the label “Lesbian” is used against the movement collectively, or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied.

  In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate form of contraception.

  A ll sex education curricula must include Lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.25

  The Lavender Menace produced a manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” which defined lesbianism as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”26 The more fundamental purpose of the manifesto was to convey the idea that “Homosexuality is a by-product of a particular way of setting up roles (or approved patterns of behavior) on the basis of sex; as such it is an inauthentic (not consistant with ‘reality’) category. In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.”27 After continuous pressure,

  NOW passed a resolution in 1971 acknowledging “the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.”28

  If Betty Friedan’s work defined early feminist discourse, Kate Millet’s groundbreaking Sexual Politics (1970) advanced the movement toward a more fundamental understanding of the inherently political nature of sexual relations between men and women. Since all societies are patriarchies, Millet asserted, so-called “masculine” and “feminine” traits cannot be attributed to human nature. According to her, “the enormous area of our lives, both in early ‘socialization’ and in adult experience, labeled ‘sexual behavior,’ is almost entirely the product of learning.” For Millet, “even the act of coitus itself is the product of a long series of learned responses…to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual choice, which are set up for us by our social environment.”29 Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1978), which demonstrated how heterosexuality oppresses all women, furthered Millet’s insights by dissecting the politics of sexual orientation. Rich conceived of heterosexuality, like other disciplinary aspects of identity (such as motherhood), as a “political institution.” She put the point this way:

  When we look hard and clearly at the extent and elaboration of measures designed to keep women within a male sexual purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue feminists have to address is not simple “gender inequality” nor the domination of culture by males nor mere “taboos against homosexuality,” but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional access.30

  For Rich, women, regardless of their sexual orientation, could benefit from the liberating potential of understanding what she called “lesbian existence” (“the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence”) and the “lesbian continuum” (“a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history— of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had genital sexual experience with another woman”).31

  Race matters were just as divisive among feminists. Toni Morrison, writing in the New York Times in 1971, spoke of the overwhelming distrust black women felt toward the women’s movement. “It is white, therefore suspect,” she observed in “What the Black Woman Thinks.” According to Morrison, “In spite of the fact that liberating movements in the black world have been catalysts for white feminism, too many movements and organizations have made deliberate overtures to enroll blacks and have ended up by rolling over them.”32 The establishment of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) thus marked a turning point in the history of feminism. The organization emerged out of a meeting of some thirty African American feminists in 1973. In its Statement of Purpose, NBFO announced:

  Black women have suffered cruelly in this society from living the phenomenon of being both black and female, in a country that is both racist and sexist…. We must, together, as a people, work to eliminate racism, from without the black community, which is trying to destroy us as an entire people; but we must remember that sexism is destroying and crippling us from within.33

  When,
in 1974, several members of the Boston chapter of NBFO felt that the larger organization was not adequately concerned with issues relevant to disenfranchised populations of African American women, they established The Combahee River Collective (CRC). “The most general statement of our politics at the present time,” wrote Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, and Beverly Smith in the Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement,” “would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression.” This struggle required that black feminists develop an “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems are interlocking…. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”34

  Black feminism was truly a departure not only from traditional white feminism but also from a lesbian feminism that advocated “dyke separatism” from the women’s and gay male movements. The CRC, for example, built coalitions with women of all races and sexual orientations, as well as with African American men. Its mission statement made it clear that “Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand…. We struggle with black men against racism, while we struggle with black men about sexism.”35 With the advent of modern black feminism, African American women had begun to draw correlations between the black civil rights struggle and women’s liberation. As with the women’s movement, black feminists looked to black women writers for political leadership. Toni Cade Bambara, writing in The Black Woman (1970), likened the atmosphere of the period to an embrace: “a hardheaded attempt to get basic with each other.”36 Although she made no mention of lesbianism in her book, The Black Woman broke new ground by becoming the first collection of African American feminist thought. Among the anthology’s important contributions was Bambara’s own inquiry into the authenticity of feminist protest literature. Citing the works of Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, and Betty Friedan, she remarks, “The question for us arises: how relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of white women to Black women? Are women after all simply women?”37 Friedan’s best-selling work The Feminine Mystique (1963), which has been described as the genesis for the new women’s movement, argued that traditional gender expectations limited women to “careers” as housewives and mothers. The book was soundly criticized for its shortcomings, including its white middle-class orientation. As bell hooks explained, Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique.38