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LIVING FOR THE REVOLUTION
Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980
By Kimberly Springer Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3481-1
Chapter One
THE SOUL OF WOMEN'S LIB
We must begin to understand that a revolution entails not only the willingness to lay our lives on the firing line and get killed. In some ways, this is an easy commitment to make. To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns. -Francis Beal, "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female," 1970
The sociopolitical conditions and social movements of the late 1960s gave rise to an unprecedented growth in black feminist consciousness. That black feminist consciousness is reflected in contemporary feminist theorizing. Anthologies, such as The Black Woman and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, gave voice to black feminists' alienation from the sexism, racism, and classism found in the civil rights movement, the women's movement, social policy, and popular culture. Patricia Hill Collins's influential book Black Feminist Thought charts the historical, cultural, political, and societal factors shaping black feminist thought and theory since the first Africans arrived on the continent. However, we know little about theformal organizations that helped shape black feminist consciousness. Few know that any formal black feminist organizations existed.
Black feminists' voices and visions fell between the cracks of the civil rights and women's movements, so they created formal organizations to speak on behalf of black women with an explicitly feminist consciousness. Within five organizations I studied-the Third World Women's Alliance (1968-1979), the National Black Feminist Organization (1973-1975), the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1976-1980), the Combahee River Collective (1975-1980), and Black Women Organized for Action (1973-1980)-several thousand black women activists explicitly claimed feminism and defined a collective identity based on their race, gender, class, and sexual orientation claims. As one activist I interviewed remarked, black feminists conducted their "politics in the cracks."
Politics in the cracks, or, hereafter, interstitial politics, conveys two meanings for black feminists and their organizations. First, Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) member Linda Burnham notes, black feminists, not unlike activists in other social movements, fit their activism into their daily life schedules whenever possible, serving as full-time, unpaid staff for their organizations. Second, black feminists developed a collective identity and basis for organizing that reflected the intersecting nature of black womanhood. I maintain that black feminists are, historically, the first activists in the United States to theorize and act upon the intersections of race, gender, and class.
Just as black feminists crafted their collective identity and organizations from between the cracks of the civil rights and women's movements, studying these vital organizations has fallen between the cracks of these two movements in the scholarly literature. Living for the Revolution contributes a crucial, but ignored chapter to the historiography of the civil rights and women's movements. Black feminist organizations, with their roots firmly entrenched in the civil rights movement, provide a crucial link to the burgeoning contemporary women's movement. Black women, as leaders in civil rights movement organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a pivotal role in demonstrating the leadership capabilities of black women, as well as the burden of oppression under which they functioned.
Research in the area of black women civil rights leaders flourished in the late 1980s and 1990s, laying the foundation for examining the continuity of black women's activism through slavery, suffrage, the black women's club movement for racial uplift, and labor movements. African American history, in the process of unearthing a wealth of information about the leadership role of black women in the civil rights movement, makes little notice of how this leadership influenced black feminist activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Black feminists learned valuable skills and ideological beliefs from the civil rights movement and integrated these resources into their women's movement activism. They based their analyses and actions on the work of their activist foremothers, but they also took that work a step further by adamantly laying claim to gender as a salient point of black women's identity.
Similar to the gaps in civil rights movement historiography, women's movement histories lack in-depth descriptions and analyses of black feminist organizations that contributed to the expansion of the movement's goals and objectives. Previous studies of the women's movement document black women civil rights leaders who served as role models for white feminist activists, but they neglect to mention how the same black women leaders also mentored black feminist activists, in practical and ideological ways. In addition, black feminist activists, through their theorizing and organizations, broadened the scope of the women's movement by challenging Eurocentric and classist interpretations of women's issues. The literature on the women's movement and black feminist activism sometimes cursorily acknowledges the existence of select black feminist organizations-most often, the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization-but mainly as a reaction to racism in the women's movement.
The elision of black feminist organizations from women's movement histories perpetuates what Chela Sandoval calls a "hegemonic feminism." This type of feminism obscures, Becky Thompson notes, "a class and race analysis, generally sees equality with men as the goal of feminism, and has an individual rights-based rather than justice-based vision for social change." Thompson rightly asserts that since more histories of the contemporary women's movement are emerging at this point in time, it behooves scholars to "interrupt normative accounts before they begin to repeat themselves, each time sounding more like 'the truth' simply because of the repetition of the retelling." Living for the Revolution is but one intervention in the normative account of hegemonic feminism, an attempt to reshape the retelling.
However, just as Thompson notes the generation of women's movement history, recent scholarship in black women's studies and sociology is turning its attention to black feminist organizations as a parallel development to the predominately white women's movement, rather than merely a reaction to racism. Wini Breines takes issue with this model, asserting that the political articulation of black feminism came more than five years after the development of the white women's liberation movement. I still maintain that there was parallel development and believe that Breines's assertions of a nonsynchronous model of movement development depend on conflation of the development of ideology, organizations, and movements. If we separate these three distinct aspects, we could more confidently assert that black feminist organizations developed later than white feminist organizations, but black and white feminist ideologies developed on parallel tracks. By recasting black feminist organizing in this light, we gain a sharper picture of the development of black feminist theorizing on the matrix of domination, as well as a better understanding of how black feminists articulated their agenda in concrete action.
This book corrects the omission of black feminism's long, mostly unrecognized history in the United States, particularly in women's and African American historical narratives, by documenting and analyzing the emergence, activities, and decline of black feminist organizations from 1968 to 1980. Specifically, I ask when, why, and how black women developed a collective identity as feminists, and how this identity influenced the structure of the Third World Women's Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Collective, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, and Black Women Organized for Action.
Black feminists, through these organizations, enacted interstitial politics focused on articulating their race, gender, and class identities as interconnected. Emerging from the civil rights movement cycle of protest, but also at the same time as the predominately white women's movement, black feminists attempted to simultaneously define a collective identity and establish organizations that encompassed their rights as both blacks and women. In the process of this organizational and identity formation, black feminists found, sometimes in difficult ways, that black women held a plurality of visions for social change because of their differences from one another in sexual orientation, class, color, and educational achievement.
Given this heterogeneity among black women, it is important to draw distinctions between the black feminist movement, black feminist organizations, and black feminist activists. Meyer outlines four characteristics of social movements: (1) they make demands of the state or another authority; (2) they "challenge cultural codes and transform the lives of their participants"; (3) they use means in addition to, and other than, those offered by the political culture; and (4) they are part of a diverse field of organizations all pursuing the same goals. The black feminist movement encompasses the political and cultural realms of black feminists' activism including organizations, prose, essays, fiction, scholarly studies, films, visual arts, and dance that are the voice of black feminism in the United States. The organizations examined here were but a small part of a black feminist movement that continues to this day.
Reactions to black women writers are illustrative of the hostile environment in which the black feminist movement reemerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, texts such as Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), and Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf" (1976) provided black women with a very public, if controversial, forum to air grievances against sexism and racism. These texts were, and still are, powerful because they publicly listed the ways misogyny functioned in black communities, violating the edict against airing the black community's dirty laundry in the predominately white public arena. As a result, the mainstream and black press vilified black women writers, in particular, Wallace and Shange. However, these women are considered pioneers of the contemporary black feminist movement for daring to assert, if not ideologically feminist consciousness, a gender consciousness integral to the struggle for black liberation in the 1970s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, debates around these texts, and the rising number of black women fiction writers, such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, were often heated among black men and women. Black periodicals brought this debate to the public in popular magazines such as Ebony ("The War between the Sexes: Is It Manufactured or Real?") and Encore ("Women's Lib Has No Soul"). At least eight issues of the Black Scholar, including the 1973 "Black Women's Liberation" issue and the 1979 issue "The Black Sexism Debate," wrestled with two recurring issues about black women and feminism: the feminist movement as potentially divisive to the civil rights movement and the implication that gender oppression was a diversion from the primary goal of black liberation.
Black feminist organizations emerged in response to many of these debates. They are the structured, formal units that constitute the black feminist movement. These organizations held as their objective the eradication of racial and gender discrimination. However, as this book shows, black feminist organizations varied in their objectives. Some of them expanded their agendas to include the eradication of class and sexual orientation discrimination. Lastly, black feminist activists are those political actors who are the backbone of black feminist organizations and the movement. In the 1970s, these activists arrived at a particular black feminist collective identity at a specific point in time as the result of sociopolitical and personal experiences. Black feminist activists were the most important component of the black feminist movement and its organizations because they used their political agency and emerging personal transformation in service to the larger cause of the movement.
This book uses a telescoping lens to convey the richness of a movement, interrogating its historical roots to arrive at the big picture of contemporary black feminist activism. The organizations analyzed here, as well as the activists I interviewed, are the driving force behind a movement that in some ways has yet to fully get off the ground, depending on how one measures a successful movement outcome. However, this book serves as but a piece of the effort to build a black feminist movement in the United States that pushes past its own boundaries of socially constructed identity.
Memory and Methods
From my location as a scholar and a next-generation black feminist, my research methodology for this study is influenced by feminist, sociological, and historical methodologies. Semistructured, oral history interviews, and organizational archival records constitute the crux of this particular interpretation of black feminist organizational history with attention to black feminist standpoint theory as elucidated by Patricia Hills Collins, but as critiqued by feminists cautioning against essentializing the experience of black women. Listening to black women's voices, as they experienced the social and political times, is integral to constructing an interpretation few have written about from a firsthand perspective. These voices can lead us to important information about race, class, gender, and sexuality theories forged in the fires of black women's oppression but survived through a legacy of activism. Yet, it became increasingly clear that neither black women as a group nor black feminism are monolithic. Hence, standpoint theory is tempered with vigilance for the pitfalls of claiming one, unified voice and asserting an authoritative position on the events I relate here based on the women I interviewed. Thus, while I valued each respondent's recollections, differing ideas about what constitutes black feminism emerged. I should also note that other perspectives, by other scholars and black feminist activists of the time who I did not interview, could create different interpretations of this period of black feminist organizing.
While I do believe in the feminist project of centering women's voices in my inquiry, I also hope to have maintained respectful critical distance from the oral histories conducted for this study. With such distance, issues of personal and collective memory were the most challenging aspect to constructing a narrative of 1970s black feminist organizations. Specifically, I encountered the challenge of how to construct an accurate interpretation based on oral history interviews that valued my respondents' memories, but sought a representative middle ground when recollections conflicted with other respondents' memories or with the archival record.
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Excerpted from LIVING FOR THE REVOLUTION by Kimberly Springer Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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