Combahee was never just about talk. Most of us had been politically active well before Combahee, including in the movement to end the war in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Black student organizing, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Institute of the Black World, Marxist Leninist organizing, support for Eritrean independence, and more.
Not long after its founding, Combahee supported campaigns to free Joan Little and Ella Ellison, Black women who had been unfairly prosecuted by the criminal injustice system. When Dr. Kenneth Edelin, a Black physician, was convicted of manslaughter in 1975 for performing a legal abortion at Boston City Hospital, we joined in the effort to get his conviction overturned.
In 1977 Combahee initiated a series of seven political retreats held over three years in locations around the East Coast, where Black feminists who did not live in Boston could meet, strategize, and work together. Among those who regularly participated were the writers Cheryl Clarke, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Audre Lorde.
We accomplished all this and much more while going to our day jobs, going to school, and struggling to get by financially. Combahee never had an airy, spacious office. We never had an office at all. We had no executive director or staff. We did not have funders. If we needed money, usually for photocopying, we would take up a collection. What we did have was each other and a vision.
After we stopped meeting at the Cambridge Women’s Center, we met in each other’s apartments. As serious as we were about the work, our meetings were full of laughter. Saturday Night Live premiered in the fall of 1975, and we often began with recaps of the latest episode. We always shared food, most of it homemade. Demita Frazier talked with us about vegetarianism, alternative healing, and spirituality. In the summer, we met by the Charles River and took day trips to local beaches. One of our most memorable outings was to Amandla, a concert held in 1979 to benefit the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, featuring Bob Marley and Patti LaBelle.
Most people know about us because of our Combahee River Collective Statement. In 1977 my sister Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, and I wrote the statement for Zillah Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. With a clear anticapitalist perspective, the statement captured the voices and concerns of Black women and articulated the concept of simultaneous, interlocking oppressions, laying the groundwork for intersectionality. By explicitly challenging homophobia, the statement was groundbreaking, although some, particularly members of our Black community, viewed it as incendiary.
Few are aware that the widely used and often-maligned concept of “identity politics” originated in the statement. Attacked by both the right and the left, identity politics has been consistently misunderstood. What we meant was that Black women had a right to determine their own political agendas based upon who they were and the multiple systems of oppression that targeted them. Although narrow interpretations of identity politics have been used to justify separatism, Combahee believed in coalitions and was open to working with anyone with whom we shared political values and goals.
On January 29, 1979, the bodies of two teenaged Black women were found dumped in Roxbury. During the next four months, twelve Black women were murdered, all but one in Black neighborhoods. When Combahee began, a race war was raging. Now we faced a war on Black women. The collective’s Black feminist analysis and relationships with diverse segments of the community put us in a unique position to provide leadership in a time of crisis.
We produced a pamphlet titled Six Black Women: Why Did They Die about the pervasive reality of violence against women and made a particular effort to circulate it in the Black and Latino/a community. The murders were initially framed as racially motivated, despite the fact that all the victims were women and some of them had been raped. The pamphlet insisted that the murders had to be understood in the context of both sexual and racial violence in order to organize effectively and to increase Black women’s safety. We eventually distributed forty thousand copies and were a major force in building coalitions among communities that had not previously worked together, especially people of color and antiracist white feminists. The fact that we did this bridge building as out Black lesbians was unprecedented. All that the collective had stood for and built since 1974 culminated in our response to the Roxbury murders.
Almost half a century ago we could not have known that in the twenty-first century, the paradigm-shifting Black Lives Matter movement would arise and use Black feminist analysis to address injustices not primarily rooted in gender or sexuality. We could not know that the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, which was centrally involved in unseating the governor of Puerto Rico in 2019, would draw inspiration from Combahee.
In many ways, the equivalent of political lightning struck in 1974 to bring together in one improbable place the women who created Combahee. I am grateful to have been there for the creation.
AND THE RECORD REPEATS
Chet’la Sebree
There’s dust, a scratch in a groove,
and here we are repeating
the same two seconds of “Strange Fruit.”
It’s the same sound from the 78 rpm
to the vintage vinyl to which we listen
in our apartments, where we return
bruised and bloodied and beaten,
unrecognizable in our mothers’ arms,
if we find the right path back to them.
All our lives we’ve cried a rallying cry,
from the river, from the water wanting
baptism, a rebirth to an earth
where it wasn’t dangerous to be
young and gifted and us—slinging
school bags over shoulders—where
we could go to church and
little Black girls could remain
little Black girls
not only in memoriam.
Through a liturgy, no,
a litany, we learned to pray.
Warriors taught us
to dance through minefields—
pirouette and grand jeté a revelation
in the face of annihilation,
bouquets blossoming
between cracks in concrete.
In pressed page
and in song
and on stage,
we felt the weight
of sun and rainbows and shade,
patient tenderness and pennilessness,
felt a rhapsody reverberate our ribcages.
The good Lorde told us