In a Time of Backlash, the Combahee River Collective Still Shows the Way

The Combahee River Collective’s vision of collective liberation remains a vital roadmap for organizing.

The trailblazing and spirited twins Barbara and Beverly Smith are living and breathing monuments to intersectional feminism and progressive politics. We have so much to learn from them. Approaching octogenarian status, these radical Black feminist sisters are most well known for their pioneering role in co-creating The Combahee River Collective, as well for their unrelenting organizing for human rights as it relates to race, class, sexuality and gender over many decades.

Their work is startlingly applicable to the times and the context we live in today, serving as a potent reminder that facing multiple oppressions requires grassroots organizing. I had the opportunity to spend time with the sisters during the recent Boston College’s Blacks in Boston Conference dedicated to the Combahee River Collective’s legacy.

The night before the conference, Harvard’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America hosted a reception to celebrate their acquisition of the Smith Papers: 165 cartons of materials containing letters, photographs, essay drafts, notes and books documenting a pivotal moment in U.S. history. The archive is a veritable treasure trove of history that spans hugely important decades like the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, a burgeoning period of Black feminist writing and activism.

Next year will mark 50 years since the Combahee River Collective issued their iconic Black Feminist Statement. I have been thinking about the power and utility of this intervention as I teach Black feminist studies this spring. While the Combahee Statement might be most notorious for originating the term identity politics (a term purposefully misunderstood, maligned and misunderstood today) it should also be seen as an essential tool for organizing.

For their first written assignment, I have my students pen a manifesto using “A Black Feminist Statement” as their guide. The structure of the assignment is based on the second paragraph which reads: 

“We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows:

1. The genesis of contemporary Black feminism;
2. What we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics;
3. The problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and
4. Black feminist issues and practice.”

Based on this framework, students are asked to describe who they are, detail the genesis of their initiative/project or movement, explain what they believe, delineate some problems they’ve encountered, and expound on the issues and practice therein.

The Combahee Statement maps out a discerning structure for organizing that still endures. Regardless of their politics, it is an important practice for students to articulate what they believe, describe a concrete vision, consider the extant problems and explain (or imagine) how they will achieve that vision. The practice of “defining and clarifying” one’s politics is a useful (and crucial) exercise.

Even more, right now as we experience the realities of fascism’s rising tide, expansive war-mongering, raging genocide, denials of Black history, attacks on women’s bodily autonomy and the disavowal of transgender rights, there is much to learn from the moral imperative and call to organizing issued in the CRC statement.

Perusing some of these items in Smith’s archive, I was struck by the generative connections between women captured on the page. As we see in many archives from women of her generation like Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and June Jordan, there are intimate letters and notes exchanged between women who are friends, collaborators, lovers, truth tellers, organizers and fighters.

While debates about Black feminist solidarity then and now are percolating, it is important to hark back to what it meant for these women to do this work during the time they were living in.

When they write, for example, “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work,” it is with an acute sense of their terrifying endangerment.

After all, Combahee was born in response to the murders of 12 Black women in Boston at a time when racial violence had a pernicious vice-hold over the city.

When so many Black feminist icons of their generation have gone on to become ancestors, we are privileged to have access to these women, and other Black feminist elders like them today. At a time when books are being banned, there are galling attempts to erase the histories and the stories of marginalized groups, the radical beginnings of the Combahee River Collective must be amplified. These women were proud of their African American heritage, unequivocal about their socialist politics, and unabashed about their lesbian identity. They have as much to teach us now as they did then.