50 Years of Combahee: Special Blog Issue
The Combahee River Collective in 1974. Left to right bottom: Demita Frazier and Helen Stewart. Left to right top: Margo Okazawa-Rey, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Chirlane McCray, and Mercedes Tompkins
Artwork by Sed Miles.
By emerald faith, Karla Méndez, and Jaimee A. Swift
Black Women Radicals is celebrating “50 Years of the Combahee River Collective” with a special VOICES IN MOVEMENT blog issue.
1974 Boston, Massachusetts saw the formation of the Combahee River Collective – a Black lesbian socialist feminist organization named after and in the revolutionary spirit of the Harriet Tubman-led South Carolina Combahee River Raid of June 1863, which resulted in the freedom of over 750 enslaved people.
Founding members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Margo Okazawa Rey, Gloria Akasha Hull, Chirlane McCray, Mercedes Tompkins, and Sharon Page Ritchie parted ways with the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization due to a lack of clarity on the organization's commitment to a class analysis and critique of heteronormativity. Furthermore, the impetus for the Collective’s founding was also rooted in disillusionment with the racism of mainstream white feminist organizations and the homophobia and sexism of Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Nationalist movements and discourses.
The Collective formulated a socio-political vision, philosophy, and praxis – best exhibited through its 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement– that foregrounded a Black feminist material analysis of the most vulnerable and marginalized under our white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist, heteropatriarchal society, with the goal of liberating all oppressed people. From their socialist position, the Collective dispelled the assumption that Black feminism’s attention to Black women’s intramural sexual, physical, and psychological suffering represented a kind of “confusion” about the real source of their oppression and the revolutionary actions necessary for its resolve.
Organized into four key sections: 1) The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism 2) What We Believe 3) Problems in Organizing Black Feminists 4) Black Feminist Issues and Projects, the now field-defining, movement-grounding statement put forth concepts and frameworks like identity politics and interlocking oppressions that have since become integral to the further development of Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, transnational Black queer and trans feminisms, and beyond.
To honor 50 years of the Combahee River Collective, this special blog issue asks us to return to the text – to sit with how the Combahee River Collective and their political and theoretical offerings have been taken up, pulled apart, wrestled with, challenged, and built on since 1974.
“We Were Undeterred”: Demita Frazier on the Complex History of the Combahee River Collective
Demita Frazier by Sedrick Miles.
To launch the special blog issue of Voices in Movement honoring the 50th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective, we sat with founding member Demita Frazier, who spoke about the formation of the collective, the impetus for writing the statement, and the importance of establishing clear political commitments, values, and praxes.
Read the interview here.