By emerald faith and Karla Méndez, Editors, 50 Years of Combahee

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.

By the time Black feminist, thought leader, writer, teacher, and social justice activist Demita Frazier moved to Boston and partnered with Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith to found the Combahee River Collective, she had already experienced a political awakening. She had watched as Black Americans across gender and sexuality fought for equality and equity throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. She first began her lifelong dedication to activism during the Vietnam War, participating in demonstrations and protests. She continued her political organizing, working with the Chicago Black Panthers’s Breakfast Program and the Jane Collective.

While Frazier, Smith, and Smith met through the National Black Feminist Organization, the hierarchical politics and structure of the organization alienated them, resulting in the formation of the CRC. During their years together, they asserted a Black lesbian feminist socialist politic in the face of rampant antagonism from white racists and other Black communists and socialists, engaged with identity politics, and introduced the concept of interlocking oppressions, which would later develop into intersectionality.

emerald faith and Karla Méndez spoke with Demita Frazier about the development and history of the Combahee River Collective, voting, and her thoughts on the future of radical Black feminist politics.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Demita Frazier (DF): I’m really excited to be part of this conversation, and I have a lot of things to share with you, especially right now, for three reasons. First is that I’m writing a memoir about my life as a political activist and radical, and having the opportunity to talk with young people about what was occurring in a way that offers clarification and a level of honesty and realness about what it actually takes to try and organize as a group of people is important to me. The backstory is always more interesting than what you see and is easily accessible.

The chance to talk with younger people in the current moment is very inspiring to me, and I try to say to people, I’m thrilled to be talking about those past moments because, as you get older, you realize you did have an impact and that people do recognize the work. I do, however, sit with the conundrum that, although the work has been used in a lot of places, it was and has been very much in the academy. Black women are central to my life and existence, and I won’t even tell you about how many people don’t know anything about Combahee - have never heard of Combahee. I’m from a very regular, working class community, and I’m really aware that while it’s known in certain sectors of society, much of it is not. As a political activist first and a reluctant academic second, I’m always struck that having an opportunity to have these conversations on various platforms now means that I will be able to bring the work to the present moment in the light in which I want to be seen, to integrate my own response and relationship to the work I actually did.

Editors, 50 Years of Combahee: One of the things we’re trying to work through is how difficult it has been to get accurate information about the history of the Combahee River Collective. What is your understanding and experience of the formation of the Collective?

Photo of Margaret Sloan-Hunter, chairwoman and president of the National Black Feminist Organization, from the 1973 *New York Times* article, “Black Feminists Form Group Here; National Body Hopes to End ‘Myths” and Intimidation” by Barbara Campbell. Art by Keshia White.

Demita Frazier (DF): You already know that we were initially supposed to be a branch of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), and in fact, one of its founders and later, chairwoman and president, Margaret Sloan (later Margaret Sloan-Hunter) was my housemate in Chicago. We met in the Chicago Lesbian Liberation in the fall of 1971. At the time, Margaret was traveling with Gloria Steinem, who was very much interested in a multicultural setting with feminists who were talking about issues that weren’t just relevant to white mainstream feminism. When the NBFO was formed, Margaret contacted Barbara Smith (who was already in Boston by that time) when she found out I had moved there. After meeting through the NBFO, it became obvious that there was so much about the way that they were structuring themselves that was very hierarchical and based on a model that didn’t make sense for us. I had certainly figured out at a young age that my interest was in economic parity and the importance of looking at other forms of organizing ourselves as human beings, and that included socialism. I was committed to socialism but not to the socialist community because of its racism and misogyny. We recognized that we wanted to take a different approach. I had moved to Boston with a women’s collective that I helped to form in Chicago. I was trying to understand what socialism and collectivity meant in practice. Does that mean mutual aid? Does that mean interdependence? This group was full of a bunch of different women across racial, national, and religious backgrounds, and we formed a greenhouse women’s collective and moved to Boston together.

With Combahee, we never had the kind of in-depth conversations that I would insist on now with my understanding of how people operate, to explore the meaning of what we were talking about in practice. It was easy to adopt these words, but when you don’t explore the meaning, it can get confusing. It’s also important to know, at 22, I was the youngest member. Barbara and Beverly were 30, and that 8 year age gap became more significant as time went on. I had been on my own since I was 16; however, I didn’t understand the importance of that generational difference until much time had passed. We wrote a letter to them [NBFO] saying, “There are probably other Black women in Boston who are interested in forming a Boston chapter of NBFO, but we’re going to remove ourselves from the organization because we’re trying to form something different.” That was in 1973, years before the statement was written. Barbara had encountered the history of the Combahee River Raid, and we adopted the name; we adopted the notion of a collective, and proceeded to hold ourselves accountable to how we wanted to organize in Boston. Importantly, many of the women who were involved in the initial grouping weren’t from the Boston area. That was important because we started the organization at the beginning of bussing and a time of increased racism and racial violence in the city.

“We were talking about Black feminism, and positioning ourselves in the historical stream of Black feminists organizing in the Black community, and we weren’t going to be talked out of it or written off.”

At the same time, there were so many Black nationalists, communists, and socialists in Boston at that time who completely dogged us. People who I later became “comrades” with were just outright, “I don’t know who the fuck y’all think y’all are, but we’re not into feminism.” We had a lot of difficulty because we were so isolated as Black radical feminists in a city that likes to pretend it’s progressive, but it was not prepared for us. We were a bunch of lesbians–I wasn’t out as bisexual at the time because of how ostracizing it would’ve been–and folks didn’t want to work with us. For example, when we were trying to do reproductive rights work, they said we didn’t know anything about it because that issue didn’t pertain to us. That was also why the statement had to be written–it had to be understood that we weren’t trying to join the white feminist ranks. We were talking about Black feminism, and positioning ourselves in the historical stream of Black feminists organizing in the Black community. Because we were mostly practical midwesterners, we were looking for places to plug-in, and we had many opportunities to do that because we believed deeply in coalition building. So, we worked with many movements, including one to increase the number of Black and brown people in the carpenters' and builders’ union. We got familiar with one of the Black men that was running the organization, and we showed up for their demonstrations and stood on their picket lines. There was also a series of Black women being murdered without any kind of resolution–all of them, except for one, are cold cases to this day. We agitated, held demonstrations, and facilitated public meetings to talk about why Black women were being murdered and asking where the Black community was in terms of talking about it. The thing about Boston that you need to know is that, despite its abolitionist roots, it’s a conventional city in many ways when it comes to the Black community. These women were being described as prostitutes, drug addicts, and boosters, so the churchy people really didn’t care. I remember handing out pamphlets, and this older Black woman passed it back to me and said, “This isn’t serious.” It didn’t stop us though because we were committed and understood that we had a political role to play.

The members of the Combahee River Collective march down Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, at a 1979 memorial for murdered women of colour. Photograph by Ellen Shub.

“We didn’t have a model for the kind of engagement that allows for the vulnerability, the space, the real witnessing of what it means to be a Black woman in America.”

All of the pushback and a lot of the need to clarify ourselves from white, conventional feminism and conventional black feminism, like NBFO and few other organizations, resulted in needing to stand in and on our idea that our politics were based in looking at all of our oppressions, including economic oppression, and say that none was going to be higher than the other. We weren’t going to take 10 steps back for Black men, no, none of that. To fast forward a bit, Barbara was a writer and was getting her PhD in English, and she knew it was important for us to make a statement. I had been terrorized out of writing, but agreed that this was very important. Barbara, Beverly, and I began to glean from our conversations with women in our consciousness raising groups and in our collective various contributions to be made to the statement. Then, Barbara pulled it together and began writing drafts.

And, though I’m reluctant to say it, intersectionality was a concept that I was developing at that time. I was working for the Youth Activities Commission in Boston to help the city deal with bussing and the impact on Black and brown youth. I’m walking to work one day on Dorchester avenue, and all of a sudden, this voice yells out at me, “Hey! Black P*ssy! You wanna come suck my d*ck?” In that moment, even though I had already known that to be Black and female was rich and problematic, it never really hit me until I said in a meeting later that, we stand at an intersection of race and gender, and at that intersection, there is a set of dynamics and an energy that we need to pay attention to because it provides us an insight and awareness of the complexity of the project we’re engaging in. Although the term is now mostly associated with the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, I am glad that it was elevated in her work because even though it didn’t enter into the consciousness of everyday Black women and Black people, it did become part of academic life and reasoning.

“We cooked together, we ate food together, we played cards. All of this was happening in the context of talking about Black feminist politics.”

Also, part of the impetus of writing the statement came from Zillah Eisenstein who wrote the book Socialist Feminism, which is where the statement was first published. When the statement came out, it didn't create a lot of attention because it was in an academic book–we weren’t handing out the statements on street corners like we had done previously. This sort of returns me to my previous point about one of our core issues, which was we had not a single consciousness raising meeting about what it meant to define ourselves as socialists. We had adopted the notion, but the practice wasn’t there. I think it’s also true that when you’re kind of at the cutting edge of something, it’s so embryonic, you’re literally creating it while you fly the plane. In some ways, in the interest of preserving the possibility of being cohesive, we avoided certain controversies and conversations because to address certain issues, like queer domestic violence, wouldn’t have fit the narrative of the superiority of Black lesbian life. There were avenues that we did not take and subjects that got raised among us that were politically interesting but we did not explore further. Some of those things I regret because, inevitably, we lost members. We didn’t take seriously that some of us didn’t come from Black middle-class, “upstanding” families. Some of us were unchurched. And, there wasn’t always space for that. I was the only person in that group who came from a marginal class family.

People were aging out–they were in college when they were in the group, then graduated and went on their way. But also, many people in the community were intimidated by the assumed educational privilege of members. Many women were coming out of prison, out of being sex-trafficked, out of treatment for drugs, trying to keep their kids. I was involved with that work, but the whole of Combahee was not. There was also the issue of personality, ego, and power that affected how conflicts were handled, and we didn’t have the tools to properly deal with them. This is part of what I’m working on in the book chapter I’m writing right now, further exploring our underdevelopment because we didn’t have a model for the kind of engagement that allows for the vulnerability, the space, the real witnessing of what it means to be a Black woman in America. As the group continued to shrink, by the end of it [in June 1981], there were four of us remaining: Ellie [Ellie Johnson], myself, Barbara, and Beverly. Ellie was really amazing. We noticed a significant shift in her behavior after she became lovers with a psychologist friend of mine. She was coming apart, isolating herself in her apartment for weeks at a time. We tried many times to intervene, and that was also when I realized that we didn’t have the resources and institutions necessary to really save and help us. We were at the mercy of the dominant paradigm. She ended up being taken back to her abusive family in New Jersey where she ultimately died by suicide as a result of a really awful situation. So many parts of the Black movement at the time would not get involved with a story like that, and as young people, we didn’t know how to help her. We disbanded following her death, and I think it’s important to note that Barbara and I didn’t speak to each other for 40 years because it became very clear to me that I never had the capacity to really affect how we organized ourselves as a collective.

However, to offer some clarity on the difference between the collective and the retreat groups. We had seven Black feminist retreats across the period of the organization [1974-1981]. The first one was at Mount Holyoke in Western Massachusetts either in 1975 or 1976. Our focus, consciousness raising groups with the local Boston and Cambridge community, were held at the Women’s Center in Cambridge, and we really found a home there. We didn’t have to pay rent or anything. The retreat groups included folks from the west coast to the east coast—dancers, writers, troublemakers. We never said that if one participated in the retreat groups that they were then part of the collective itself. Our retreats weren’t rigid. We cooked together, we ate food together, we played cards. All of this was happening in the context of talking about Black feminist politics. There were a lot of lesbians, but there were straight women too. This thread of organizing across differences is actually a chapter I’m writing in my book about how building coalitions without addressing what’s between us is deeply problematic. This was something that was relevant to me in my early organizing days as well. For example, I was involved with the Breakfast Program of the Black Panther Party in Chicago when I was 16. If you don’t know this about me, food, gardening, and access to food sovereignty is central to my belief in life. Fred Hampton—he was solid. I really loved him, he was brilliant. They started talking about doing coalition work, so I helped to build the People’s Community Garden. While working there, this Puerto Rican guy told me, “Y’all keep trying to teach us about Blackness, but we don’t need that lesson. Because we’re different from you. We’re not like you.” When I tried to bring up the larger issue in the Panther meetings as we were establishing these coalitions, nobody wanted to hear from me. They were like, you’re just causing trouble. Why’re you bringing that up? Again, it was kind of like, let’s pretend bad things aren’t happening and it’s not going to cause issues amongst us. We’re not ready to deal with that.

Left to right: Demita Frazier, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Barbara Smith (with megaphone) protesting nine murders of women of color that took place in 1979. April 1979. Photography by Ellen Shub. Artwork by Keshia White.

“I feel like we need the opportunity to come together and talk about what this all means because there’s a thing that has emerged where if you call yourself a Black feminist, then you’re a Black feminist, and that’s not real.”

Editors, 50 Years of Combahee: We wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the present and future of radical Black feminist politics? What advice would you give to Black feminists today?

DF: The folks that I’ve met in the cohort of ages 25-45, who I can identify as being solid, Black radical feminists, are isolated. They are not finding one another easily. And this relates to something Barbara and I talk about, many of them, whether they went to primarily white institutions or HBCUs, found themselves isolated because they had a feminist ethos and politics that didn’t mesh with how Black feminism has been transformed in the last 40 or 50 years. People want to form organizations but are lacking in a solid foundation with an analysis about the current conditions that Black women are finding themselves in. Everyone wants to pretend like everybody’s middle class, and it’s the 50s and 60s all over again. The dominant cultural story was that the poverty and plight of Black people was left behind. The Civil Rights Movement was really caught up in, as Ruby Sales says so beautifully, “People in the North were about the Civil Rights Movement. People in the South were about a Freedom Movement.” And, there’s a difference.

I believe that part of my responsibility, especially to my young self as well as to y’all, has been to be part of the continuing story of freedom, agency, and [the development of] an analysis that really looks hard at where we are, and accepts the burdens that come with that. I feel like we need the opportunity to come together and talk about what this all means because there's a thing that has emerged where if you call yourself a Black feminist, then you’re a Black feminist, and that’s not real. I believe that we have to be operating in all fields, in all areas, and that includes the bullshit that’s voting in America. We cannot afford that guy. We can push her. I’m an environmentalist. I worked at the EPA after law school. I worked with Black folks in the South who were dropping dead from cancer in Louisiana, and still had other Black people asking me why I was involved with “environmental nonsense.” We have to accept that we live in a fucked up world, and democracy is a participatory sport, and that means everybody —not just the educated, not just the wealthy. We have to coalesce so that we can put the pressure where it has to be taken because we can continue to build our radicals, but we can’t pretend like we’re not a part of this larger world.

On May 22, 2024, Black Women Radicals hosted the Zoom event, “50 Years of Combahee”. The event featured two founding members of the organization, Demita Frazier and Barbara Smith.

Editors, 50 Years of Combahee: Thank you for bringing up voting. I’m interested to hear your perspective about Kamala as someone who has a clearly developed radical Black feminist politic, a history of Black feminist organizing, and who is also talking about voting for Kamala. I think something that feels difficult as I’ve been inundated in voting discourse is that Kamala hasn’t done or said anything that makes me believe that she can be pushed in any real way. Right now I’m thinking about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine and its violence that is spreading to Lebanon. Time and again she’s reinforced her commitment to supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself,” and although she has sort of passively acknowledged the “unnecessary loss of civilian life,” she makes clear her commitment to Israel. That, for me, makes it really difficult to say, okay, I’ll go vote for her and assume that she will do anything other than continue to send Israel billions of dollars. Alongside this, I think there’s a level of condescension and patronizing that’s happening where, even the mention of this, the mention of an apprehension of voting for Kamala for legitimate reasons, is met with all manner of insults about one’s intelligence.

DF: As you were talking, I was reflecting back on the things I was saying with regard to how it was for us back in the day organizing as radical Black feminists. It was constantly, “you dumb bitches, you don’t really see or know the real story.” This is the thing I’ve come to. We live in this fucked up place. There is no way a Black radical is going to be elected for shit in this country. That doesn’t mean we don’t vote. We have to develop who we want to empower. That means empowering everyday people and critically thinking about how you build in a hostile environment. Absenting yourself from the ugliness of the process and the fight, how does that empower you? It might make some feel like, well, I took a stand. But then where are you? You might feel ideologically pure, but where are you because you still have cousins, grannies, neighbors, all of them. And there are those who say, “We cannot be doing this same thing over and over.” And, I say, “Okay, so what are we doing? What’s our plan?” I love a critique; I love an analysis, but what are we going to do?

Editors, 50 Years of Combahee: Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. Our final question is could you share any memories that stand out to you the most being a member and co-founder of Combahee? What are you proudest of?

DF: There are some moments in our formulation and our life as a collective that stand out, like the decision to have the Black feminist retreats. I was thrilled that we held those retreats because it not only informed our politics but it sort of lessened the isolation we were experiencing daily. Out of those came the consciousness-raising groups that hundreds of women came to over a year and a half. I still don’t know where those seeds landed. I always wondered what they left with but then I realized that I don’t need to know. I’m just glad that we were there to seed the ground. We were unrelenting in building coalitions across lines. I am proud that we did a lot of the work that we did. Despite the deficiencies, we did something lasting because it may not be the current generation or these last two, but somewhere along the way there’s gonna be other young women who don’t want to be blond; who don’t want to wear wigs and weave; who are just trying to be Black women. And they’re going to look at those old pictures of us with our afros and barely wearing jewelry, no makeup. It was that freedom to just be who we were. We did our work in that regard.

“We Were Undeterred”: Demita Frazier on the Complex History of the Combahee River Collective