Combahee River Collective

Combahee River Collective, Black, feminist, lesbian, socialist group primarily based in Boston, Massachusetts. The group, created in response to racism within the feminist movement and sexism and homophobia within the civil rights movement, operated from 1974 to 1980. Barbara Smith, a founder of the collective, named the organization after the raid organized by Harriet Tubman on the Combahee River on June 2, 1863, which freed more than 750 enslaved people.

Founding

The Combahee River Collective started as a breakaway group from the National Black Feminist Organization. After some disagreements with that organization’s failure to address class struggles faced by Black women, the group quickly became a coalition in its own right in 1974. According to Smith, the Combahee River Collective formed out of a desire to synthesize a theoretical understanding of the intersectional oppression experienced by Black women. Although traditionally marginalized from leadership positions in adjacent advocacy groups due to their race or gender, many leaders of the Combahee River Collective came with previous organizing experience, such as cofounder Demita Frazier, who was an active member of the Chicago Black Panther Party. Though criticized as separatist or divisive for the specificity of their identification as Black lesbian socialists, the Combahee River Collective leaders reported that they believed this articulation of their identity served a critical purpose: not to force members to leave any of their identities behind. The organization believed that the current equal rights movements failed to capture the systemic oppressions they experienced, such as classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. These convictions culminated in a statement of beliefs put out collectively by the group in 1977 after years of weekly meetings and retreats across the Northeast.

The statement

Historians credit “The Combahee River Collective Statement” as a formative text in developing the contemporary Black feminist movement. The statement begins with a short account of the group’s purpose and proceeds to discuss the history of contemporary Black feminism, the collective’s political beliefs, the problems they faced in organizing Black feminists, a short history of their organization, and the issues facing Black feminism.

The statement claims that the origins of contemporary Black feminism lie in Black women’s life-or-death struggle as members of two oppressed groups within the American political system. It specifically cites the role that the intersection of gender and race play in the increased risk of physical and sexual abuse. The document declares that the Combahee River Collective’s beliefs originated from a shared conclusion that “Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.” They further conclude that if all Black women were free, that would mean everyone had become free “since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

The major problem facing Black feminists, as cited by the statement, consists of the two-front fight against sexism and racism as well as the economic challenges faced as a result of these obstacles. In light of the latter, the Combahee River Collective saw themselves as champions of women in the Third World and, for this reason, advocated taking dedicated action against oppression that involved race, sex, and class both within and outside the United States. Lastly, they accuse the mainstream, white feminist movement of allowing racism to go unchallenged within its circles.

Impact and legacy

Although the group dispersed only six years after its founding, the Combahee River Collective changed the course of the contemporary Black feminist movement. The collective brought transgender and queer Black women’s voices into the centre of the movement for the first time and made combating class and socioeconomic struggles a significant priority for Black feminists. Moreover, the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” which is read and taught in gender studies and Africana studies classes across the country, coined terms such as identity politics and interlocking oppression that have become popular lenses through which to understand political constituencies’ needs and preferences. Such concepts would go on to be considered by political analysts as new ways to understand and describe aspects of oppression. Thus, while the Combahee River Collective was not the first group to recognize Black women’s intersectional struggles, they were the first to make explicit the underlying interacting oppressions ignored by the mainstream civil rights and feminist movements.