# Combahee River Collective A **Black-lesbian-feminist organization based in Boston**, active from **1974 to approximately 1980**. The Collective was co-founded by **[[Barbara Smith]]**, her twin sister Beverly Smith, **Demita Frazier**, and others. Despite its small size and short operational lifespan, the Collective's **1977 *Black Feminist Statement*** is one of the foundational documents of contemporary American intersectional political theory. ## The Name The Collective took its name from **Harriet Tubman's June 2, 1863 raid on the Combahee River** in South Carolina — the only [[U.S. Civil War]] military operation **planned and led by a woman**, which freed approximately 750 enslaved people. The name choice was deliberate political signaling: the Collective located itself in a Black-women-led-liberation lineage that the mainstream Black liberation and (white) feminist movements both elided. ## The Black Feminist Statement (1977) The Collective's most-cited single document — the ***Black Feminist Statement*** — was drafted in April 1977 and circulated in mimeograph form before being widely republished in subsequent feminist anthologies. The Statement: - **Coined the term "identity politics"** in a sense substantially different from how the term has subsequently been deployed in critical conservative usage. The original sense was that political organizing must begin from the specific material conditions of the organizers' own identities — Black women organizing as Black women rather than as "women" abstractly or as "the working class" abstractly - **Articulated the "interlocking systems of oppression"** framework — racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class oppression as systems that operate together rather than separately, producing distinctive consequences for people positioned at their intersections - **Explicitly framed Black-feminist analysis as inseparable from Black-lesbian-feminist analysis** — refusing both the racial-only frame of mainstream Black liberation and the gender-only frame of mainstream white feminism - **Predated [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]]'s coinage of "intersectionality"** by twelve years (Crenshaw's term first appeared in a 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article); the Statement is the most-cited single document in tracing the intellectual ancestry of intersectional theory ## Operational Activities The Collective met regularly in Boston from 1974 through approximately 1980 in member homes and at the Cambridge Women's Center. Activities included: - **Consciousness-raising groups** for Black feminist women - **Retreat workshops** — six were held between 1977 and 1980, hosting Black women from across the U.S. - **Public political organizing** around specific cases including the 1979 Roxbury, Massachusetts murders of Black women (which the Collective organized to politicize as a Black-feminist issue at a time when both the white-feminist movement and Black-male-led civil-rights organizations were not addressing the cases) - **Publishing infrastructure development** that fed into **Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press** (1980, co-founded by Barbara Smith) ## Place in the Vault The Combahee River Collective is the **organizational origin point of contemporary intersectional political theory** — and a movement-level example of how very small, short-lived collectives can produce documents whose theoretical influence vastly outlasts their organizational existence. The post-2010 academic and political revival of attention to the Collective — particularly through Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's 2017 anthology *How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective* — has positioned the Collective as one of the foundational ancestor movements of contemporary multiracial-queer-feminist organizing. --- ## See Also - [[Identity Politics]] — the term the Collective coined in 1977 - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Barbara Smith]] - [[Audre Lorde]] - [[Patricia Hill Collins]] - [[Matrix of Domination]] - [[Intersectionality]]