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 “All of Who I am in the Same Place”: 
The Combahee River Collective  

 

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by Duchess Harris  

 
 

Black and Lavender                             

I am Black 

        and lavender

     is the color

     that I wear (proudly)

     inside my heart.

We are Black

    and lavender

    and remain against all rhyme

    and reason has no answer

    except-- we love who we know

    and know who we love

We are the old gay bulldagger

       in Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit

       with pointed brown-toed shoes

       packing it big

       behind the straining zipper

We are the two poets who died of cancer

       leaving a legacy of words

      to heal

      our still, beating hearts

We are the author who is coming out

       slowly

       and the actress

       who hides behind the blessed vow

We are the bitch with attitude

       the shy folk singer

       the female athlete

       and the ordained bishop

We are a joyous woman, stirring

       We black women

       who dare love women

We seem a mystery and

       a contradiction

       and or drums are

       beating . . . beating . . . beating . . .

  --Margaret Sloan-Hunter (National Black Feminist Organization founding member)1  

The Combahee River Collective statement has been printed in numerous publications since it was written in 1977, but a history of the organization or information about its members has yet to be documented.  In its first years, the Collective was active in such projects as support work for Kenneth Edelin, a Black doctor at Boston City Hospital who was arrested for manslaughter for performing a legal abortion.  Collective members were involved in the case of Ella Ellison, a Black woman who was accused of murder because she had been seen in the area in which a homicide was committed. They also picketed with the Third World Workers Coalition to ensure that Black laborers would be hired for the construction of a new high school in the Black community.2  This is only a short synopsis of what the group did over a five-year period. The Collective was made up of highly educated Black Lesbian feminists, six of whom--Barbara Smith, Sharon Page Ritchie, Cheryl Clarke, Margo Okizawa Rey, Gloria Akasha Hull, and Demita Frazier--I have interviewed and will describe in this article. 

Barbara Smith 

Re-entering the world of activism was something that Barbara Smith did not think sh ewould do.  She did her first political work in the Civil Rights Movement, where she thought there was going to be a revolution.  After that disappointment, she did not have hope that the Black women's movement would be much different.  Quoting her:   

I think that I felt my status change so much from having been raised Colored/Negro to becoming Black in the space of a short lifetime.  And what those names, those labels, represent is a world of difference.  There is a difference between our naming ourselves and other people declaring who we were with an insulting label.  When I entered college in 1965, I thought that by the time I got out of college things would be basically, “fixed,” you know and since that didn’t happen, I don’t know if I thought we were on a verge of a revolution.  It’s hard to look at history with hindsight because you realize so much more than when you were actually experiencing it.  I think one of the things that I was so happy about is that I had thought that I would never be involved in political work after I graduated from college because that was the height of Black Nationalism and I felt like I just wasn’t permitted to be the kind of person I was in that context.  I was supposed to marry someone or not marry them, who cares, but my job was to have babies for the Nation and to walk seven paces behind a man and basically be a maidservant.  I didn’t get involved in the women's movement for a few years after it became very visible because my perception was that it was entirely white.3

After attending the National Black Feminist Organization meeting in New York in 1973, Barbara Smith felt she could do more in the Boston community because she was doing it from a Black feminist base. When she returned from the NBFO conference, she met with people from Boston and started trying to build a Boston NBFO chapter.  She met Demita Frazier a few weeks later, in early 1974, and when Smith and Frazier began to meet regularly they discovered that their vision was more radical than that of the National Black Feminist Organization.  According to a 1994 interview with Demita Frazier:

We wanted to talk about radical economics.   Some of us were thinking that we were socialists. We thought that we needed to have an economic analysis.  We were also concerned that there be a voice for Lesbians in Black women’s organizations and we weren’t certain where NBFO was going, even though they had been founded by women who were Lesbians.  So, after one of our members (and I do believe it was Barbara) who went to the Socialist Feminist Organizing Conference that was held at Oberlin College in Ohio, we decided that we wanted to be a collective and not be in a hierarchy organization because it was antithetical to our beliefs about democracy and the need to share.  We also felt that we had a more radical vision.  And so we decided [to send] a letter saying that we were no longer going to be the National Black Feminist Organization chapter in Boston.  Towards the middle of 1975, we were having serious discussions about our relationship to the National Black Feminist Organization and we made a decision during that summer.4

The organization got its new name from Barbara Smith, who had a small book published by Left Press entitled Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Earl Conrad.  The Combahee River is where the abolitionist Harriet Tubman planned and led the only military campaign in U.S. history organized by a woman.  Smith wanted to name the collective after a meaningful historical event that was meaningful to African American women:

There were women’s groups all over the country named for Harriet Tubman and Smith wanted to do something different.  She liked the idea of naming the group for a collective action, as opposed to one heroic person’s feats.  She chose the name of the river where 750 slaves escaped to freedom: 

The boats were out there; the Yankee Union boats were out there and they [the slaves] were running, literally, to get on them, I guess, during this battle --  but the thing is that it wasn't just one person who did something courageous, it was a group of people.  The Combahee River is an incredible militant chapter of U.S. history, not just of Black history, of world history.  In fact, at the time when people looked at their conditions and they fought back, they took great risks to change their situation; and for us to call ourselves the Combahee River Collective, that was an educational [tool] both for ourselves and for anybody who asked, “So what does that mean, I never heard of that?”  It was a way of talking about ourselves being on a continuum of Black struggle, of Black women’s struggle.5

 In the summer of 1994, Barbara Smith was filmed by the Combahee River in South Carolina. When the videographer asked about the importance of the collective, this was her response: 

“Combahee was really so wonderful because it was the first time that I could be all of who I was in the same place.  That I didn’t have to leave my feminism outside the door to be accepted as I would in a conservative Black political context.  I didn’t have to leave my lesbianism outside.  I didn’t have to leave my race outside, as I might in an all-white-women’s context where they didn’t want to know all of that.  So, it was just really wonderful to be able to be our whole selves and to be accepted in that way.  In the early 1970s, to be a Black lesbian feminist meant that you were a person of total courage. It was almost frightening.  I spent a lot of time wondering if I would ever be able to come out because I didn’t see any way that I could be Black and a feminist and a lesbian.  I wasn’t thinking so much about being a feminist.  I was just thinking about how could I add lesbian to being a Black woman.  It was just like no place for us. That is what Combahee created, a place where we could be ourselves and where we were valued.  A place without homophobia, a place without racism, a place without sexism.”6 (Smith interview)

Sharon Page Ritchie 

Sharon Page Ritchie became involved with the Combahee River Collective through her connection to Margaret Sloan of the NBFO, whom she met at the University of Chicago.  Ritchie grew up in a little house on the South Side of Chicago, where her father worked for the city as a building inspector and her mother was a public schoolteacher:

When I talk about my family, I say that I come from a long line of teachers and social workers, so education was a critically important value in my family.  Literacy, reading, writing, ideas . . . my mother’s house was nice because it was filled with books and magazines, and it was always more important that we should be interested in them than that we should be perfect little housekeepers.  We had an education, but we didn’t have much money.  My mother and my aunts were Deltas.  I wasn’t a Delta because I was a lesbian.  However, I was a Links debutante.  I wore three hairpieces and a white dress.  Other girls in the cotillion were the daughters of the doctors, lawyers, and probably the undertakers, and so people, like my mother always talked about the rich dentist like that was his name.  So, financially speaking, we were not in that class.  There was more focus on the arts and literature and those things in my family and less so on furs.   

The church is really not a very big thing to me, and I really don’t remember people talking about it very much.  It may have been, but I don’t remember.  My feeling was growing up in Chicago that sort of traditional strict Baptist church thing and the moral judgements that came out of that about how men were supposed to be and women were supposed to be, in my family that was presented as something that people of our class didn’t go for.  That was more of a country thing, more of a Southern thing, more of a working-class thing.  So, I did not think of the women who I thought of as feminists, intellectuals, or writers, or any of that kind of thing, to have come from a very strong religious background.

Connected to the Northeastern Collective through people she had known in Chicago, Ritchie met Demita Frazier at a Chicago Lesbian Liberation meeting when she was in her late teens. When Demita Frazier and another member, Linda Powell, moved to the East Coast, Ritchie was doing temp work which she realized that she could do anywhere.  If she moved to the Eastern seaboard, she could be close to a supportive community of friends. 

Cheryl Clarke  

Cheryl Clarke was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947 and grew up there.  She did her undergraduate work at Howard University, and then left Washington in 1969 to do graduate work at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she still lives.  Her mother was born in North Carolina in 1916 and migrated to Washington via Detroit around 1920.  Her father was born in Washington in 1913; and the only time he has was ever out of D.C. was in the service during World War II.  She characterized her family as lower- middle-class people whose forebears were laborers.  Her mother’s mother had been in domestic service.  Her father was a dishwasher.  Her father’s parents had a little bit more mobility: his mother worked for the federal government for years and retired in the late 50’s. Widowed early, she was the bastion and sole support of the family; but they had a large extended family, so she had much help.  She had three children, in addition to Cheryl.

By the time Cheryl was born, both her parents were working for the government.  Her mother worked for the city government in Washington as a recorder of deeds, and her father worked as a security guard at the Bureau of Standards.  Both of them retired in the mid to late 70’s after thirty-­five years in government.  She told me:

We were always told we were poor, but I always had security--my basic needs were met, and I had a very sheltered upbringing.  I remember at one point telling my mother that I wanted to be a nurse, and she said, “I don’t care what you want to be if you are going to college first.” So we sort of grew up knowing that.  Also, they nurtured a kind of independence in the house. My mother said, “I want you to get your education so you don’t have to dependent on anybody.”  And that was how we were raised and sort of pushed.  They gave us dance lessons, piano lessons, took us to museums.  Basically, it was like my mother who took charge of those kinds of things, because she wanted to cultivate some kind of appetite for other than material kinds of things – or, at least, that was in terms of how I see my upbringing.8

In 1965, Clarke went to Howard where she and Paula Giddings were classmates:   

We were in the same major.  Paula was the editor of the undergraduate journal, and she was always a leader.  She was always articulating a position.  Extremely smart and extremely well- liked, as she still is now.  We were in our last year; well, the Spring of 1968 to the Spring of 1969 involved in a writing workshop, and there were other people, plus two or three faculty members who were involved where you would meet every other Sunday.  And I was writing poetry then, and we were reading our work to one another, and it is very interesting-the results of that activity enabled us to know how to have a public voice.    

Now, I was not an activist when I was in college.  I had other interests, and was much more shy than I am now.  But because of that workshop, we met editors from Random House who met with us and encouraged us.  We met Toni Morrison, who was an editor at Random House at that time and one of my teachers.  Howard exposed me to the richness of Afro-American culture, which I have particularly focused on in the literature in terms of my own intellectual development.  And began really myself in literature in 1968 when I took Arthur Davis’ course, Negro Literature in America, which was only offered once a year.  But I watched a whole transformation of the curriculum in Howard during the time that I was there because there were many scholars at Howard who had specialized in Afro-American study who were ostracized --  people like Sterling Brown, people like E. Franklin Frazier, people like Chancellor Williams, most of them historians and sociologists.  

And during that whole Black power thing, students really began to bring those people out of the woodwork.  So, by the time I graduated, the courses that addressed Afro-American issues came to the foreground and, you know, Afro-American studies began to become a hot thing, and you could hardly get into Afro-American history courses.  It became an intellectual hotbed as well as a political hotbed, and it was a real process for me to grapple with the Black nationalist issues.  I have never really been a nationalist because I have always considered it impractical and negative and limited.  And remember, I told you, they always nurtured independence in us, so I did not want to be constrained by narrow politics.  I loved Howard because of how it opened another world to me in terms of Afro-American culture.9

Margo Okizawa Rey 

Margo Okizawa Rey was born in Japan in 1949 to an upper-middle-class Japanese woman and an African American G.I. from working-class Chicago.  Rey told me that she obtained her class identity from her father and her cultural identity from her mother: 

Women’s class is very much connected to the men they are attached to; my mother’s class background didn’t really have an impact on how we lived our lives.  So, I would say I grew up working-class, lower-middle-class, but with definite sort of Japanese cultural sensibilities as well African American.  I think my father has gotten more politicized in his old age, but when we were together, you know, he was sort of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy.  He was one of those people who thought that you just have to be the best person you can be.  He didn’t talk about race that much, and it is ironic that my mother, who is Japanese and didn’t know much about American culture, instilled --  but that was more of a private thing.  I think the thing that is interesting about my mother is that she is a feminist, although she would never use the term.  The men in her family just seemed to get everything.  The boys got to do things first, like eat, take baths.  Her father got to do everything first; her mother was just kind of waiting on him hand and foot.  She said to herself that she was not going to let any man boss her around, which is completely counter to traditional Japanese culture.  Somehow, she met my father, and one of the things that she was struck by was these American men would say “ladies first,” and she thought [that] was wonderful; but, of course, she didn’t understand the sexist underlying stuff.  She thought America must be a wonderful place if ladies get to go first.   So, that sort of captured their imagination, and they got together.  So, my early feminist leanings come from her.10

Gloria Hull 

Gloria Hull grew up in a three-room shotgun house in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Neither of her parents finished grammar school.  Her mother was a cook and a domestic.  Her father was disabled, but did whatever kind of work he could pick up as a carpenter.  She considered her upbringing to be working poor:

I remember very clearly that my mother made three dollars a day.  She did that so that my brother and sister and I would be able to go on trips at school, or have a white dress at graduation.  Early memories that situate me class-wise were that there was no liquid money, so we kept a running tab going with the Italian grocer at the end of the block.  We were paying very high prices for whatever we bought, but were able to pay him with the little bit of money that did come in.  I remember that the days that we bought food were really the high point of the weekdays.  Food was essential.11

Hull graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1962 as the valedictorian of her class. She went to Southern University, and then won a National Defense Education Act fellowship to the University of Illinois at Urbana to study English literature:

What I really wanted to do was be a journalist.  The first time I got out of the South and saw a little bit of the larger world was between my junior and senior years [of college].  There was this program where Black kids from Southern colleges were brought to Northern campuses, and I spent the summer at Yale working with the New Haven Human Relations Council.  I had written for the high school newspaper, the college newspaper, so I said journalism, that’s really what I want to do.  I had heard that Columbia was one of the best journalism schools in the country.  When I was in New Haven, I figured out how to get myself to New York City and I had an interview with the assistant dean at the Columbia School of Journalism.  This is the summer of ‘65.   I’m just walking around with no sense that I’d be afraid or anything; I’m just doing this.  It was a really good interview, and I feel that I might have gotten somewhere with it, but no one encouraged me.  The highest aspiration anybody could see me doing or achieving was being a teacher.  With the grades and the fellowship, “teacher” got translated into “college teacher,” but still a teacher.  So, that is how I ended up in graduate school for English.12

Before Hull went to graduate school, she married her college sweetheart, who had graduated the year before her from Southern and had gone to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.  He came from a family that was even more economically disadvantaged than hers: he had one pair of jeans that he had to wash out at night and dry in front of a space heater, iron, and put on the next morning.  There were twelve children in his family.  After spending one semester at Urbana, Hull gave up her fellowship and went to be with her husband at Purdue, where she became a teaching assistant.  Her husband got a job at the University of Delaware when Hull was finishing her dissertation and looking for a job:   

When I look back on this, I laugh about how tremendously naive I was.  I mean naive in the sense of not knowing the protocol for academic professionalism.  I went down there to see the chairman of the English department at the University of Delaware with my husband, with my son on my lap, dressed up in my Sunday School-type chic dress, little heels.  I didn’t know from beans, so they offered me this position.  I didn’t know that I could bargain or anything. The reason he was just sitting there amazed is that a Black woman had dropped in their laps. Another little index of it is that I didn’t even know how to do a professional vita.  I had on it stuff like, I played piano for the Black Baptist church that I grew up in.  There was no Black woman to say, “This is how you do it”; nobody took me under her wing.  It is so different now.13

During three years in Delaware, Hull made connections that would change her life and inevitably link her to the Combahee River Collective.  She ended up working on the Feminist Reprints Committee, where she met Florence Howe and Alice Walker.  Although she had done her dissertation on Byron and English dramatic poetry, she had become interested in Black women writers and African American literature, particularly the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.  When she went to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York City in 1974, she met Barbara Smith.  Having met Smith and the rest of the Boston women, she began to attend Combahee retreats to expand her network of Black feminist thinking. 

Demita Frazier 

Demita Frazier, who is from Chicago, brought issues of urban poverty to the Combahee discussions.  Frazier arrived in Boston intending to organize Black women around feminist issues, but it took about a year to find others who might be interested in doing Black feminist consciousness- raising:   

We each got our names from different people, and we all had been involved in the National Black Feminist Organization.  When we arrived, it took a while, but that first meeting when we met at my house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, . . .  was quite something, because we were strangers to one another.  We had gotten phone numbers and said, “Llet’s try to have a meeting and talk about what we could do in terms of organizing an NBFO chapter here in Boston.”  We were actually saying we were feminists.  We were proud of that.  We were not worried about flack from anybody else.  It was a moment of power because, I think, we all recognized very quickly on that meeting in my living room that we were at the precipice of something really important.  That was literally how it started, sitting in someone’s living room, having a discussion about the issues, and it wasn’t even the issues so much as getting to know one another and what our issues were, what brought us to think of ourselves as feminists. Where did we get these ideas?  What books did we read?  And then, of course, there was a sense of sharing.  We were interested in so many similar things, even though we came from very different places.  Most of us came from an academic background.  Others had been really involved in organizing from the cities that we had come from.  It was quite something for us.  It was really very different for men.14

The Boston chapter of the NBFO started with four Black women sitting in Frazier’s living room discussing what had brought them to think of themselves as feminists.  Boston in the 1970s was in turmoil over court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools. Barbara Smith describes the racial tensions:

I moved to Boston in about 1972, and there were many places in Boston that to this day I have never ventured into.  It was absolutely known that as a Black person you did not go to South Boston.  You did not go to East Boston.  You did not go to Chelsea.  Those are a few of the names of neighborhoods that I remember right off the top of my head.  Sometimes on the way to somewhere else, like to trying to get to Dorchester, one might get lost in South Boston, and on those occasions it was always like, “Uh oh, I really need to get out of here.”  It was really frightening, if indeed one got lost in those neighborhoods trying to go from one place to another.  But, in general, one knew that one did not go.  

For example, there was an attorney named Ted Lanzvark who was down in City Hall Plaza, which is this very modern setting.  It doesn’t look like colonial Boston.  So, he was down there for business, I am sure.  And he was attacked by a group a white men, and they used an American flag to beat him up.  I don’t know who was there on the spot with the camera, but that picture went out over the wire services all over the country, probably all over the world, to show what this country was all about -- and that was only about twenty years ago.    

Another example was a high school student who was playing football; and I don’t remember what neighborhood they were playing in, if it was one of those places where one dare not venture if one was Black, but he was shot from the stands, and he was paralyzed for life.  So, that was the kind of atmosphere that we lived in.  Going into a store and being followed.   When I went into a store the assumption was that I came in to rob it.15

In a 1994 interview with Susan Goodwillie, Demita Frazier described the political climate of Boston in the 1970s:

I think what drew a lot of us here was the chance to really establish identities that were our own, apart from family and apart from the communities or origin that we came from.  So, you can picture us in 1973 and 197,4 coming together as women in a city where there was so much political activity going on in Boston at that time.  If you think about it, some of it wasn’t progressive.  Busing was just beginning at that time.  The desegregation order had come down, and so the busing was beginning in Boston and . . .  was causing a lot of political foment.  There was a lot of discussion about race and about class.   So, we arrived in that atmosphere.  And for those of us who had been feminists before we came to the city, and for those of us had been organizers, we were thrilled at the chance to be in a city where there seemed to be a lot of discussion.  There was a feeling that you could talk about nearly anything, and you could raise issues about just anything.16

Coming Together: The Combahee River Collective Retreats  

We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression are interlocking.   The synthesis of these oppressions creates the condition of our lives.  As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

--The Combahee River Collective Statement   

The Combahee River Collective held retreats throughout the Northeast between 1977 and 1979.  The first retreat was held 8-10 July 1977.  The retreat was held at 10 Jewett Lane at a private home in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  The purpose of the retreat was to assess the state of the movement, to share information about the participants’ political work, and to talk about possibilities and issues for organizing Black women (24 May 1977 letter authored by Demita Frazier, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith).17  Subsequent retreats were meant to foster unity because of geographic separation.  The twenty Black feminists who were invited were asked to bring copies of any written materials relevant to Black feminism--articles, pamphlets, papers, their own creative work -- to share with the group. Frazier, Smith, and Smith, who organized the retreats, hoped that they would foster political stimulation and spiritual rejuvenation.  They encouraged the participants to come ready to talk, laugh, eat, dance, and have a good time.  According to the interviews that I conducted, this is what occurred:  

Audre Lorde was involved in the retreats.  I had just met her and I asked her to come and she was thrilled; and that is really how we got to become friends, because we would see each other periodically at these retreats.  We would call them retreats, but, in fact, they were political meetings that had lots of different elements.  So, it was a way for people who were separated to be in the same place and do some political work with each other.18 

The discussion schedule included five sections. The group met on Friday evening for a discussion entitled, “What’s Been Done, What’s Happening Now, What We Want for the Future.” During this session, the group discussed political activities in which they had been involved over the past few years.  On Saturday morning between 10 a.m. and noon the group's topic was “Theory and Analysis.”  They discussed the Combahee River Collective Statement as a means of focusing the first part of the session, then moved to the need to develop a Black feminist economic analysis, the question of violence, and lesbian separatism.  After lunch there were two sessions on organizing.  In the next session the group approached several questions: Is there a Black feminist movement?  How to develop new organizing skills for Black feminist revolution?  How to build new institutions? What about barriers to organizing such as antifeminism, repression, class, the backlash, heterosexism, racism, ageism, and sexism?  Also, can publishing be used as a tool for organizing?  Is it a viable Black feminist mode?  How do we work out the knots for coalitions between white women and Black women?  After this two-hour discussion, the group focused for another two hours on sterilization abuse, Black women’s health, and battered women.  They spent between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Sunday discussing the effects and remedies of isolation.

 The second Black feminist retreat was held 4-5 Nov. 1977 in Franklin Township, New Jersey, at Cassie Alfonso’s home.  The seven items on the agenda were the following: 1) trust between lesbian and nonlesbian feminists; 2) socialism and a Black feminist ideology; 3) lesbian separatism and the Black liberation struggle; 4) Black feminist organization versus Black feminist movement; 5) Black feminist scholarship; 6) class conflicts among Black women; and 7) love between women --lesbian, nonlesbian, Black and white (25 Aug. 1977 letter written by Cheryl Clarke and Cassie Alfonso). The participants were asked to bring something that would make a statement about themselves: a picture, a poem, or a journal excerpt.  The retreat had five sessions that addressed the issues: the personal is political, political definitions, political realities -- from analysis to action, and “Where do we go from here?”  There were also two bodywork/exercise sessions scheduled. 

The third Black feminist retreat was scheduled for 24-26 March 1978.  The fourth retreat met 21-23 July 1978.  After these retreats occurred, the participants were encouraged to write articles for the Third World women’s issue of Conditions, a journal edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith. The importance of publishing was emphasized in the fifth retreat, held 8 July 1979.  They discussed contributing articles for a lesbian herstory issue of two journals, Heresies and Frontiers.  Both Beverly and Barbara Smith had been approached to compile an anthology on Black feminism. It is interesting to note that All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (date) was edited by two Combahee members. 

 The fifth retreat was important because they catalogued the following indicators that Black feminism had grown between 1977 and 1979:  There were now two Black feminist groups in Boston; Black academic women were organizing nationally in the field of history, and at the Modern Language Association, and had formed Sojourner, a Third World Women’s Studies research newsletter.  A group for Black women in publishing was organizing in New York.  Art collaborations were happening in New York.  CRISIS, a Black women’s “grassroots” organization, had formed in 1979 to combat murders in Boston.  Coalitions between lesbian and straight Black women mothers in Kansas City had been established.  Contacts had been made with Black social service workers in New Jersey and in Minneapolis.  The women at the fifth retreat also discussed the growth of Black feminist and lesbian culture as evidenced by the performance groups Varied Voices Tour, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Black Earth Sisters.  The group noted that white feminists had begun to take responsibility for dealing with their racism, which lightens the load of Black feminists.  And they went to two important poetry readings: at the Solomon Fuller Mental Health Center in Boston to hear Audre Lorde, Kate Rushin, and Fahamisha Shariat Brown; and at Sanders Theater at Harvard to hear Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.

Participants at the sixth retreat dealt with two literary events in the 1970s.  They discussed articles in the May/June 1979 issue of  The Black Scholar collectively titled, “The Black Sexism Debate,” written in response to Robert Staples’ “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists” in the previous issue.  They also discussed the importance of writing to Essence to support an article in the September 1979 issue entitled “I am a Lesbian,” by Chirlane McCray. McCray was a Combahee member, and the importance of the article was that at this time Essence had a policy on publishing articles and fiction about lesbians.  The group was hoping that their positive letters would counteract the homophobic letters that they expected Essence to receive.  The seventh retreat was held in Washington, D.C., 16-18 Feb. 1980.19  According to Smith:

The retreats were multidimensional, multimedia events.  They were so many different things. Of course, it was a time to talk politics.  It was a time to have parties.  It was a time to flirt, for some.  It was a time to have these incredible meals.  We used to bring literature and things that we had read, articles, we would bring enough copies for everyone.  We would have stuff laid out on the table.  Now, having been a publisher for thirteen years for the only press of women of color in this country, I think how a part of that was bringing Xerox copies, because that was all we had then, if we wanted to read about ourselves in any fashion or read things that were relevant to us.    

What I really see is Black feminism as a building block.  I think that we always felt a kinship, sisterhood, and solidarity with not just women of color, but with people of color, generally. That is articulated in the statement and certainly in the kinds of things that we move on to work on and do political work on; but it is like building blocks.  Our major felt contradiction is/was as Black women, there will be the White women’s movement.  So, if we were going to build something, it was going to be the opposite of what existed -- in other words, Black, which was who we were. 20    

The retreats were wonderful.  They sort of came about as a brainstorm.  We realized we wanted to meet with more Black feminists.  In Boston, we had a very large group; but we knew that there was organizing going on in New York and in New Jersey and in Chicago and very similar places.  So, we put a call out and called our friends and basically that is what we did. We called everybody we knew who we thought might be interested in spending a weekend talking politics, playing cards, eating good food, and spending time together to give you the support and also to give ourselves a sense of a broader community.  So I don’t remember what the year was.  It might have been 1976, 1977 1976, we organized our first Black feminist retreat.  And we didn’t advertise, we just did word of mouth.  And we met with twenty-five or thirty women at the first one, sleeping over on a weekend in Western Massachusetts in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  It was wonderful.  First of all, we had, at that point, we had been organizing for a couple of years, and while we were feeling isolated, we did feel hungry for more. We wanted different perspectives.  We wanted to hear from other people.   The thrill of having people arriving, car load after car load of women who knew each other, but some who didn’t know we were being brought together by five different women.  We were just thrilled. There were so many colors, so many faces, so many bodies, from all over, and a chance to hear what was going on in different cities.  [We were] standing around and looking at us all standing on that lawn, and realizing we are all women who are taking this big risk, because it was risky to be a feminist in the Black community.  We realized it was risky and there we were, all these risk takers, all these ground breakers.  It was very powerful for us, and it was wonderful also, because we had the opportunity at that first meeting to go around and talk about -- from sort of an autobiographical perspective -- how we all came to be feminists; and we got to tell our stories, fascinating places.  Very interesting.  One thing that I think we all had in common was again, we were all -- it seemed like almost of all us -- were women who never quite fit any sort of stereotype about wherever we were.  We weren’t appropriate little girls, necessarily.   And if we were appropriate little girls, we weren’t very appropriate teenagers.  We were girls who were rebellious, and if we weren’t rebellious in act, we were definitely rebellious in thought.  We were girls who early on either had been sexually abused or physically assaulted and never wanted that to happen to us again.  So, we were bringing a sort of reality politics like, “You know, I don’t want this to happen to me or my children.   There must be a way to talk about this.”21

Community Activism 

All of the Combahee women were involved in other Civil Rights and women's issues groups. For example, several belonged to the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse.  There was cross­pollination between Combahee and other organizations to which the members belonged.  When they first organized in the Combahee River Collective, there were no battered women’s shelters in Boston or in the Boston area; but soon after they began, Transition House opened, and women were organizing the night marches.  They were providing the information that a woman can bring a rape charge and not be viewed as the perpetrator.

When the collective became involved with the case of  L. L. Ellison, a Black woman at Framingham State Prison who defended herself against a sexual assault by murdering a guard, it brought them into a circle of people who were fighting the death penalty in the state.  This interaction helped them to form coalitions with other community activists, and brought them into another sector of the Black community: women's church groups, including the auxiliaries of Baptist churches. They were asked to speak about what Black feminist politics meant for Black women.  According to Barbara Smith, they were very successful, because even though it they caused upheaval, they brought the question of violence against Black women to the table:

We would show up ready to create our discussion, [to] talk about consciousness-raising and the importance of looking into the issues of violence against Black women.  And also, [to frame] an analysis about what it meant for us to take one step back and what it meant to support Black men.  Did we have to necessarily walk behind Black men to be supportive of Black men and therefore, support of our whole community?  So, things got very hot and heavy at this meeting.  We were being told, “What made you think you represent all Black women? You don’t represent me, necessarily.”  It wasn’t a hostile group, but people were feeling, “What does this mean?  How can you say this represents that you are representing us?”   An older Black woman (she must have been in her sixties or seventies) said, "Well, from what I can understand, what they are saying sounds right to me, so they represent me.”   And that was, again, one of those moments when we’ve got affirmation [from] someone who [you] would respect, because you were taught to respect older Black people as a child.  You were just taught to respect your elders, and it was so affirming to have her say that.   And it sort of really put other women --  it sort of gave other women --  the permission to say that they could understand and support the issues.  

The simple truth is . . . :  she didn’t have anything to lose.  She is an older woman who has had a whole lifetime of experience.  And I see it in my own mother now.  You just don’t have to lie anymore after you get past a certain age as woman, and she was just very clear.  She worked in people’s houses -- cleaning them  ---    and primarily White people’s, and she talked about having to fend off the husband or the older son when she was a young woman doing that work and what it meant for her.  She lost many jobs and understood -- she understood --  sexual politics. . . . It is so funny.  If you knew the people involved, you would understand that it[sexual orientation] was never an issue.  We were Lesbians.  We were not going to be repressed or oppressed in a group that we were organizing for.  We had a couple of women who were bisexual in the group, and they were fine with us.  At least, I can say they were fine with me.  Because the women who were integral to organizing Combahee were Lesbians, it was  done just as it was.  We were the women who came together, and we made it a part of our politics that we thought that we were open to all women: Lesbians, straight women, and bisexual women.  So, at that time, it was as far as we were concerned, it wasn’t an issue. People always act as if homophobia is something the Black community invented.  We all know that that is not true.  We didn’t find that women were completely closed to the idea of being in a room with a group of Lesbians talking about feminist politics.  We just, we were a group of women trying to come together to talk about what it meant to be Black and female and Lesbians on the spectrum.  So, that is just how it was.  

I don’t ever remember us going anywhere and people saying things like, “Here come the bull daggers” or “Here come those dikes.”  We didn’t have that problem.  It also may have been because in the venues that we found ourselves -- we took ourselves  -- to, we were involved with progressive people and progressive organizations.  It is different when you are going out to do a speaking engagement, to talk about Black feminist organizing, because inevitably we would always say, as an organization, we support and respect the right for women to make the decisions about themselves, their sexuality, their lives, whatever.   And so, we always stated that and if we got it would create some interesting discussions, but it was not as if we went someplace and got stoned, or we went to a meeting in a church and had people threaten to nail us to the cross and set us on fire.   It just didn’t happen that way.  We had, there was, also a certain amount of respect that you get as a political activist.  I found this to be true when you are working with people of color.  Because we were really focusing on the issues and these were life and death, bread and butter issues.  And we just acted as if it were perfectly all right for us to be who we were and be respected for who we were.  So, we didn’t have problems as a group going into situations like that, which is not to say, as individuals, we didn’t have problems in the community.  But I never did.22

Simultaneity of Oppression: Defining a Politic 

The women of the Combahee River Collective created a theory that was more polyvocal than the theories espoused by the Kennedy Commission women and the National Black Feminist Organization.  The theory that they were able to provide is a useful tool to analyze the position of Black women in the 1990s:  

I think we came up with the term “identity politics.”  I never really saw it anywhere else, and I would suggest that people -- if they really want to find the origin of the term -- that they try to find it in any place earlier than in the Combahee River Collective statement.  I don’t remember seeing it anywhere else.  But what we meant by “ identity politics” was a politics that grew out of our objective material experiences as Black women.  This was the kind of politics that had never been done or practiced before, to our knowledge, although we began to find out that there were Black feminist in the early part of this century, and also, perhaps, in the latter part of the nineteenth century.   But it had never been quite formulated in the way that we were trying to formulate it, particularly because we were talking about homophobia, lesbian identity, as well.  

So, there were basically politics that worked for us.  There were politics that took everything into account as opposed to saying, “Leave your feminism, your gender, your sexual orientation  --  you leave that outside.   You can be Black in here, but you can’t be a lesbian, you can’t be a feminist; or, you can be a feminist in here, but you can’t be Black.  That’s really what we meant.  We meant politics that came out of the various identities that we had that really worked for us. It gave us a way to move, a way to make change.  It was not the reductive version that theorists now really criticize.  It was not being simplistic in saying I am Black and you are not.  That wasn’t what we were doing.  

It was remarkable that without a clear model, without a huge amount of applause from the stands or whatever, that we took this on.  We took on the contradictions of being in the U.S. and living in U.S. society under this system.  We took on race, class, sexual orientation, and gender.  And we said, instead of being bowled over by it and destroyed by it, we are going to make it into something vital and inspiring.  I have to say that I really did know what we were doing when we were doing it.  I think that because I have such a grounding in Black history and in Black culture, I was quite aware that we were doing something new.29  

One of the things that I used to feel was the lack of role models for myself.   I used to feel like, if only Lorraine [Hansberry] hadn't died so early, then there would be someone who is older than me who is trying to carve out the territory.  Audre [Lorde] was important to me in that way.  Being able to look over to and up to someone who had been here more years than I, who shared the same kind of vision in politics, but I was very aware that we were doing something new because I knew enough about history and about political organizing to know that we were doing something that was never attempted before.  But that doesn’t mean that I felt competent at every moment.  It was absolutely daunting work.  It was depressing.  It was frightening. It was exhausting.  Yes, I think, that metaphor of a river that begins in a dark swamp and small spaces and opens out, I think that is quite apt.  I was excited because I assumed that the 80’s would be similar in their degree of growth and energy as the 70’s had been.  But as it turned out, I was not right about that. 24

The 1980s turned out to be the Reagan years, and organizing became much more difficult.  Public sentiment moved to the right, and the economic situation became even worse for those who were supposed to have benefited from trickle-down economics.  Nevertheless, when twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979, the Black feminist agenda went into full effect.

Theory, Practice, and Action: Twelve Murders --The Final Act 

The only research that has been done to date about the activism of the Combahee River Collective in response to the time when twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979 is Jamie Grant’s unpublished article, “Who Is Killing Us?”  According to Grant, between 28 January and  30 May 1979, thirteen women,  twelve Black and one white, were murdered within a two-mile radius in the city of Boston.  All but one of the victims were found in predominately Black neighborhoods in the contiguous districts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End.25  Many of the women were strangled, with bare hands or a scarf or cord, and some were stabbed; two were buried after they were killed, and two were dismembered. Several of the women had been raped.26 

Notorious at the time for its poor treatment of Blacks with the busing situation, the Black attorney who had been stabbed with an American flag, and for an attack on a Black high school football player, Boston reflected this social climate in its major newspaper, the Globe. The 30 January 1979  edition noted the discovery of the bodies of the first two murder victims, then unidentified, beside the racing forms on page thirty, in a four-paragraph description headlined,  “Two bodies found in a trash bag.”  On 31 January, the murder of Gwendolyn Yvette Stinson was noted on page thirteen under the head, “Dorchester girl found dead.”  Caren Prater’s death, on 6 February, finally warranted a small block on the front page, followed by a confusing article about community outrage and police resources.  On 7 February, on the eighth page of its Metro report, the Globe covered a community meeting with Mayor White at the Lee School in Dorchester, which more than 700 people attended.

 The Globe took no responsibility for its complicity in the lack of public attention to the murders.  When it did focus attention on the crimes, it was to attack the Black community’s response. Except for a small 17 February article on the murders, the Globe remained silent about the crisis until  21 February, when Daryl Ann Hargett was found in her apartment.  Then, inside a small box in the lower left-hand corner of the front page, the Globe reported the death of the fifth Black woman in thirty days, misspelling Hargett’s first name.27  In contrast to the Globe, the Bay State Banner, the Black community weekly, ran full-blown coverage of the situation from 1 February, and reported on the Black community’s response.  The Banner continued detailed, front-page coverage throughout the year.27 

On 1 April, following the deaths of six Black women, fifteen hundred people took to the streets to mourn the losses of their sisters, daughters, mothers, friends.  The memorial march commenced in Boston’s South End at the Harriet Tubman House, and paused first at the Wellington Street apartment of Daryl Ann Hargett, the fifth victim, who was found strangled on the floor of her bedroom:

By that time in April, six women had been murdered and there was a memorial march in the south end about the murders.   It was a protest march.   It was also trying to commemorate them, and there was a rally at the Stride-Rite factory field, and you heard things that had already been said, but the message came across -- loud and clear from the almost entirely Black male speakers -- that what Black women needed to do was stay in the house.   That’s the way you saved yourself from being murdered.  You stayed in the house and/or you found a man to protect you.  If you were going to leave the house, you had to find a man to go with you to take care of you.  And also, the murders were being viewed at time as being completely racial murders.   It was all women, and some of the women had been sexually assaulted, but they were still seen as racial murders.  There were a lot of feminist lesbians at that rally; so, there were at least some people there that, when they heard this message that these were just racial murders, our ears perked up, stood up, whatever, and we were thinking, “No, no, I don’t think so,” because there was something called violence against women that we were all too familiar with; and we just felt so --  it was just such a difficult afternoon because at one level, we were grieving because Black women were being killed; we felt like we were at risk.  We knew we were, in fact. We were scared.  It was a very frightening time to be a Black woman in Boston. So, there was that kind of collective shared grieving, and then there was this real feeling of real fury.  It was just infuriating, because we knew that it was not a coincidence that everybody who had been murdered was female, and as it turned out, by the time it was over, twelve Black women had been murdered.  When the marchers reached the Stride Rite factory on Lenox Street in Roxbury, where the bodies of the first two women were found, Lorraine Bethel, who eventually co-edited Conditions Five with Barbara Smith, was there. Smith remembers Lorraine saying, “This is just horrible; we’ve got to do something.”28

Smith’s anger and frustration at the rally speakers’ failure to acknowledge sexism as a factor in the deaths of the women propelled her into action.  She returned to her apartment in Roxbury and began developing a pamphlet that would speak to the fears of Black women in Boston:   

I said, “I think we really need to do a pamphlet.  We need to do something.”  So, I started writing a pamphlet that night and I thought of the title -- “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” -- and I wrote it up.  I always write everything longhand to begin with, and then I typed it.  I had a little Smith ­Corona electric portable at that time.  And by the next morning, it was basically done.  I called other people in the Collective.  The Collective was never huge, so I am not talking about called twenty people.  But I called other people in the group and I read it to them.  This was before faxes and all that madness.  I read it to them and then I also called up Urban Planning Aid in Boston and went down there and got assistance with laying out the pamphlet, using my actual typing from my own typewriter at home.    

Basically, what we wanted to say --- and did say -- in the pamphlet is that we had to look at these murders as both racist and sexist crimes and that we really needed to talk about violence against women in the Black community.  We needed to talk about those women who did not have men as a buffer.  Almost no woman has a man as a buffer between them and violence, because it doesn’t make any difference if you are married or heterosexual, whatever, all kinds of women are at risk for attack in different kinds of circumstances.  And, in fact, most women are attacked by the men they know.  So, obviously, having a man isn’t going to protect you from violence.  But we really wanted to, first of all, get out that sexual political analysis about these murders.  We wanted to do some consciousness-raising about what the murders meant.  We also wanted to give women hope.  So, the pamphlet had the statement, the analysis, the political analysis, and it said that it had been prepared by the Combahee River Collective.  That was a big risk for us, a big leap to identify ourselves in something that we knew was going to be widely distributed.  It also had a list of things that you can do to protect yourself.  In other words, self-defense methods.  I remember consulting with people, like some of the violence- against-women organizations, to really check out to make sure that the things that we were suggesting were usable and good and then, also, we had a list of organizations that were doing work on violence against women in Boston.   

We got great support from the community churches.  We got a lot of support from very diverse groups of people, but I must say, the larger white feminist community was incredibly supportive.  It was a real opportunity to do some coalition-building, and we were able to mobilize hundreds and hundreds of people to come out and to speak out, to talk about the issue. We were able to bring together very diverse groups of people around the issue of violence against women.  And we never felt that it had lost the focus on the fact that the women were Black. One thing we did say, though, is that “These are Black women who were being murdered.  They could have been you.”  It could have been any of us.29

Life After The Combahee River Collective 

Throughout the interviews, I conducted there were numerous reasons cited for the eventual disintegration of the Combahee River Collective.  What seemed to come to the surface after much investigation were accusations that the group was less egalitarian than they claimed to be.  Several of the interviewees alluded to the fact that, although hierarchies were not supposed to exist, indeed they did.  There was also mention of love relations that went awry, leaving at least one member of the partnership not wanting to attend retreats.

 It seems that the Collective was most cohesive and active when the murders in Boston were occurring.  Having an event to respond to and to collectively organize around gave them a cause to focus on, which distracted them from the in­fighting that existed over power struggles and broken hearts.  Also, according to Margo Okizawa Rey, who had attended graduate school at Harvard, this was a time in many of their twenty­-something lives that geographical disbursement was bound to happen.  By the early 1980s, several of the members had left the Boston area to begin the next phase of their lives.  Most of the women continued the work of the collective through academia.  Rey and Hull are examples of two members who ended up in California teaching race/class/gender theory at San Francisco State and Santa Cruz, respectively.  Sharon Page Ritchie plans to join the California University system to study clothing design.  Cheryl Clarke is working on her dissertation (which is about contemporary Black women poets) at Rutgers University, where she is an administrator and advocate for the gay/lesbian/bisexual students on campus.  Barbara Smith is working on a gay and lesbian studies anthology and resides in New York, and Demita Frazier has returned to Chicago to practice law.  Although they no longer operate as a collective, they left a legacy for Black feminists of the 1990s to continue.

 

Notes  

  1  “Black and Lavender,” in Margaret Sloan-Hunter’s Black and Lavender (pub.info) 

 2  Grant, unpublished manuscript, p. 153.

 3   Smith interview (1994).

 4   Frazier interview (1994).

 5  Smith interview.

 6  Ibid.

 7  Ritchie interview (Oct. 1995).

 8 Clarke interview (Aug. 1995).

 9  Ibid.

10  Rey interview (Oct. 1995).

11 Hull interview (Oct. 1995)

12  Ibid.

13  Ibid.

14  Frazier interview.

15   Ibid.

16  Ibid.

17  Demita Frazier, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith, letter, 24 May 1977. 

18  Smith interview.  

19 Combahee River Collective Retreat Minutes.

20  Smith interview.

21  Ibid.

22  Ibid.

23  Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Grant.

26 Ibid.

27  Grant.

28  Smith interview.

29  Ibid.

 

References

Clarke, Cheryl.  Interview with Duchess Harris.  August 1995.

Combahee River Collective Retreat Minutes.  Gloria “Akasha” Hull, personal papers.

Frazier, Demita.  Interview (videotape) with Susan Goodwillie.  1994.

---, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Smith.  Personal letter.  24 May 1977.

Grant, Jamie.  “Who is Killing Us?”  Unpublished manuscript.

Hull, Gloria “Akasha.”  Interview with Duchess Harris.  October 1995.

Okizawa-Rey, Margo.  Interview with Duchess Harris.  October 1995.

Page-Ritchie, Sharon.  Interview with Duchess Harris. October 1995.

Smith, Barbara.  Interview (videotaped) with Susan Goodwillie.  1994


Duchess Harris is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota and a former Fellow of the Womanist Studies Consortium.

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