00:07:39.240editing newsletters, giving speeches, strategizing campaigns. Without them, nothing works. But when
00:07:46.440it's time to write the manifesto or stand at the microphone, men's voices often dominate.
00:07:51.560The unofficial script says, first we defeat racism and imperialism, then we'll sort out
00:07:56.160sexism and homophobia. In practice, later is a very elastic concept. If you're a black woman,
00:08:02.700especially a lesbian in these circles, and you bring up the way women are sidelined or the
00:08:07.160homophobia that makes you have to hide part of yourself in meetings, you might be told that
00:08:11.620you're creating division. You're essential, but your comfort is negotiable. Gay liberation after
00:08:17.780Stonewall looks like a breath of fresh air. People are coming out, forming organizations, marching,
00:08:22.840but those organizations are often dominated by white men. Lesbians have to fight to be taken
00:08:27.440seriously at all. Queer and trans people of color run into racism inside the very movements that
00:08:33.080talk about liberation. If you're a black lesbian trying to be politically active in the 1970s and
00:08:38.640you do the full tour, civil rights meeting Monday, women's group Tuesday, socialist collective
00:08:43.340Wednesday, lesbian group Thursday, you're hearing a version of the same instruction every time.
00:08:48.700Please leave parts of yourself at the door. We'll return them when we're done changing the world.
00:08:53.680This isn't a brand new problem. Black women have been naming it for generations.
00:08:57.820Sojourner Truth stands up in 1851 and asks, in essence, where do I fit in your definition of a
00:09:03.560woman. Anna Julia Cooper writes in the 1890s that when and where black women enter, the whole race
00:09:09.620enters with them. Ida B. Wells documents lynching and calls out white women who allow myths about
00:09:15.220protecting womanhood to fuel racial terror. Black women organize for suffrage, education,
00:09:20.900health care, and anti-lynching campaigns, constantly navigating white women's racism
00:09:25.200and black men's sexism. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hammer in the mid-20th century build and
00:09:30.760sustain the civil rights movement while questioning its hierarchies. For over a century, black women
00:09:35.940have been saying, your race-only politics don't see me, your sex-only politics don't either. By the
00:09:42.300time we get to Boston in the mid-1970s, that frustration has a long history behind it. And
00:09:47.600Boston itself is not a neutral space. This is a city that loves to tell stories about abolitionists,
00:09:52.660freedom trails, and righteous New England conscience. But it's also a place of vicious
00:09:56.860school desegregation fights, racist housing policies, and feminist spaces that are often
00:10:01.560as white as the snow in their fundraising brochures. In our last episode, Quaker women
00:10:06.160in this region were fighting to be heard in meeting houses, insisting that their inner light
00:10:10.380made them spiritual equals. In the 1970s, black women in Boston are walking into progressive
00:10:15.560women's centers, looking around at who's on the walls, who's running the show, and thinking,
00:10:20.680we helped build this house. How did we end up locked in the basement? That's the maze that
00:10:25.460Combahee River Collective is born into. Not a lack of movements, but a surplus of them,
00:10:30.340all allergic to the full complexity of Black women's lives. Before there's Combahee, there's
00:10:36.200NBFO, the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in New York in 1973. For Black women who
00:10:42.960felt squeezed out of both white feminism and Black nationalism, NBFO is a revelation. It says
00:10:48.740plainly that Black women need our own political space. That race-only and sex-only frameworks
00:10:54.160aren't cutting it. Boston women, including Barbara Smith, her twin sister Beverly, and
00:10:59.000Demita Frazier, connect with MBFO and form a local chapter. They go to conferences, meet black
00:11:04.760feminists from other cities, and experience that dizzying relief of realizing you are not in fact
00:11:09.980the only person seeing what you see. For a while, that's enough. They read, talk, and organize under
00:11:16.040the MBFO umbrella. But Boston in the mid-70s is a pressure cooker. Racist backlash to school
00:11:22.000desegregation, economic crisis, a feminist scene that often treats racism as an optional issue,
00:11:27.240and a gay and lesbian scene where whiteness and maleness still dominate. Over time, it becomes
00:11:32.460clear that the national NBFO structure is not meeting the intensity of their local reality.
00:11:37.920The Boston group wants a sharper socialist analysis, an explicitly lesbian-inclusive politics,
00:11:43.300and a more grounded approach to a working-class life. They find the national organization too
00:11:48.180tied to middle-class respectability, too cautious, too diffuse. There's no dramatic schism moment,
00:11:53.940with doors slamming and declarations read into microphones. It's more like a gradual shift.
00:11:59.440Their Boston meetings drift away from NBFO's national agenda and toward the urgent questions
00:12:04.180in front of them. Eventually, they decide they need to be something else. They become the Combahee
00:12:09.420River Collective. The name we've already talked about, but it's worth repeating here. Naming
00:12:14.020themselves after Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid is not just an aesthetic, it's strategic.
00:12:19.480They are claiming lineage from a black woman who planned and led a liberation campaign,
00:12:23.640not just from generic strong woman vibes. Inside the collective, the work is not glamorous. Most
00:12:29.580of it happens in living rooms, borrowed church basements, women's centers. People show up tired
00:12:34.300from their shifts, delayed by buses, dragging kids in grocery bags and half-finished assignments.
00:12:39.860Meetings begin with the same kind of how is your week that could pass for small talk anywhere
00:12:44.000else. But here, those stories are treated as data. One woman talks about a boss who pays white
00:12:49.780employees more and calls her girl when she pushes back. Another talks about a landlord who ignores
00:12:55.220repairs in black tenants' units, but responds immediately to those of the white tenants.
00:13:00.240Someone else talks about being closeted at work or enduring endless jokes at family gatherings
00:13:05.400about how single they are. Another woman brings up a friend's boyfriend who is violent and the
00:13:10.460impossible choice between calling the cops or leaving him in a community already under siege
00:13:15.020from the police. Patterns emerge. Race, gender, class, sexuality, state power. They're all
00:13:21.620entangled in each story. The collective starts to see their weekly check-ins as something more
00:13:26.420than venting. They're a form of analysis. Barbara Smith later describes it bluntly.
00:13:31.660When they examined their lives, they found that race, class, sex, and homophobia were all kicking
00:13:36.620our behinds at the same time. Once you see that clearly, you can't unsee it. And you also can't
00:13:42.320keep pretending that existing organizations, each focused on one head of the Hydra, will somehow
00:13:47.200accidentally kill the whole monster. So Combahee pushes itself to become more than a support group.
00:13:53.140They start reading in a more systematic way. Black women's history, Marxist theory, anti-imperialist
00:13:58.640texts, lesbian feminist writing. They present papers to each other, then to broader audiences.
00:14:04.120They consider launching a black feminist publication because they know there are women out there who have never heard anyone name these patterns.
00:14:12.560They work on issues of reproductive health and abuse where black women are navigating both lack of access to abortion and birth control and the very real threat of coerced sterilization.
00:14:21.920They talk about opening a shelter for battered women in black communities, confronting the fact that violence is not just something happening out there in white neighborhoods or from the Klan,
00:14:31.140but also inside their own communities, with all the complications of calling a racist police force
00:14:36.160for help. They engage in campaigns around welfare rights, housing, and schooling. They join
00:14:41.280coalitions, bring black feminist perspectives into spaces that have not considered them,
00:14:45.700and sometimes get accused of making everything too complicated. Through it all, the collective
00:14:50.580is not a slick organization with a PR department. It's people, arguing over theory and over who gets
00:14:56.200to do the dishes this week. Laughing, crying, making up, breaking up. Somebody is always late.
00:15:01.360Somebody is always cooking. Somebody is always asking, okay, but what are we going to do about
00:15:05.220it? Then 1979 happens. Over a period of months, 12 black women in Boston are murdered. Their
00:15:12.200deaths do not prompt the citywide anguish and media obsession that similar crimes against white
00:15:16.940women might have. They are victims, but not apparently the right kind of victims. Tale as
00:15:22.700old as time. For Combahee, this is not an abstract crime statistic. It's a gut punch. In a diary
00:15:28.560entry, Barbara Smith writes that black women are dying and that, at bottom, black feminism is about
00:15:33.560keeping black women from dying, not metaphorically, literally. You can feel the statement coming at
00:15:39.760this point, not as an academic exercise, but as a desperate need to pull together everything they
00:15:44.860have seen and said and screamed into one coherent document that says, this is what is happening to
00:15:50.160us. This is what we believe. This is what we need. At some point, talking isn't enough. You need a
00:15:56.300document you can pass across a table and say, start here. At a retreat in the late 1970s,
00:16:01.980the Combahee River Collective decides to write that document. They aren't trying to invent a
00:16:06.360grand new philosophy. They're trying to capture in one place what years of meetings, fights,
00:16:11.060campaigns, and late night conversations have already taught them. They call it the Combahee
00:16:15.680River Collective statement. Putting it in writing matters for three audiences. First, for other
00:16:21.220black women. They know there are women like them scattered across the country who are trying to
00:16:25.700name what's happening in their own lives with no support. A statement can travel where they can't.
00:16:30.540It can be photocopied, mailed, read in consciousness-raising groups, slipped into a syllabus.
00:16:35.620Second, for white feminists, Combahee is done with, we didn't realize things were that bad,
00:16:40.380as an excuse. Once the statement exists, ignorance requires more effort. Third, for history. They've
00:16:46.400watched earlier black women's ideas disappear from official stories. Writing under their own names is
00:16:51.300a way of leaving a trace that's harder to erase. The heart of the statement is their description of
00:16:55.960interlocking oppression. They describe racism, sexism, class exploitation, and heterosexism
00:17:01.540as systems that work together, not separately, to shape black women's lives. They say that the
00:17:07.060synthesis of these oppressions creates the condition of our lives. In plain language,
00:17:11.600the world doesn't hit them one blow at a time. A black lesbian doesn't clock in at work and
00:17:16.080experience just sexism from her boss, just racism from the hiring committee, and just homophobia
00:17:22.520when co-workers make comments about her roommate. It's all one experience. You can't tease them
00:17:27.500apart without lying about how it feels to walk through the day. A black mother in a housing
00:17:32.200project dealing with underfunded schools, racist policing, and a clinic that might deny her pain
00:17:37.040medication while simultaneously pushing her to sterilize herself, is not moving through separate
00:17:42.460unrelated systems. She is standing at their crossroads. From that reality, Combahee draws
00:17:47.740a simple conclusion. You can't end any one of these oppressions in isolation and actually free
00:17:53.260black women. A racist feminism that ignores class and sexuality won't do it. A homophobic socialism
00:17:59.080won't do it. A sexist black nationalism won't do it. This is intersectionality before Kimberly
00:18:04.800Crenshaw gave it a name. Then they dropped the phrase that will have a very long, very weird
00:18:09.840afterlife. Identity politics. In the statement, identity politics means this. We start our
00:18:15.540politics from the identity and experiences of black women because no one else has consistently
00:18:20.340put us at the center. They note that white women's organizations have not historically been reliable
00:18:25.160defenders of black women. They note that black men's organizations have not centered black women
00:18:30.200either. Therefore, they say, the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly
00:18:35.120from our own identity and experience. That's not a demand for special treatment. It's a way of
00:18:40.060saying people who are getting hit from every direction are uniquely placed to see how the
00:18:44.780system works. If you build a world where black lesbians are safe, housed, fed, free to love who
00:18:50.400they love and in control of their own bodies, you have to dismantle so many interconnected systems
00:18:55.140of domination that nearly everyone else benefits too. They weren't saying only black lesbians
00:19:00.880matter. They were saying, if you can build a world where black lesbians are safe and free,
00:19:06.100that world will be good enough for everyone else. This is a huge part of why people find
00:19:10.920the statement threatening, even if they can't always articulate it. Because if you accept
00:19:15.260that analysis, you can't build your feminism around the most comfortable women in the room
00:19:19.440and call it universal. You can't declare racial justice achieved when black men are visible in
00:19:24.900leadership, and black women are still being sterilized without consent and murdered without
00:19:29.140headlines. You can't declare gay rights secure because white cis men can get married while black
00:19:34.920trans women are being killed. The statement also looks inward at movements that think of themselves
00:19:40.140as progressive. It calls out white feminists for refusing to grapple with racism, for assuming
00:19:45.120that women's issues look the same across race and class. It names the exhaustion of having to
00:19:50.340explain over and over and over again that racism isn't a side topic. It's the main topic that's
00:19:55.960woven into everything from hiring decisions to health care to whose pain is believed at the
00:20:00.760hospital. It calls out Black nationalists and civil rights spaces for ignoring sexism and
00:20:05.940homophobia, for treating Black women's desire to not be subordinated in their own communities as
00:20:10.960a distraction from the real struggle. And it unabashedly includes lesbianism as a political
00:20:16.460identity, in a time when being out could cost you your job, your family, and your safety.
00:20:21.820Combehi refuses to tuck sexuality into the closet for the sake of respectability.
00:20:26.520Betty Friedan and her fear of the lavender menace back in 1969 could never. They break three big
00:20:33.000rules of the 1970s left all at once. Don't call out white feminists, don't call out black men,
00:20:38.900and definitely don't put lesbians in your political platform. They do all three in a
00:20:43.620document that is frankly very calm about it. The statement also talks about method. Combahee insists
00:20:49.200that their analysis comes from life-sharing and consciousness-raising, from Black women talking
00:20:53.620about their jobs, families, relationships, and fears, and then collectively naming the patterns.
00:20:58.460If you were with us for the Quaker episode, you can hear the echo. Quakers believed an inner light
00:21:03.080could move anyone to speak truth in a meeting, regardless of credentials. Combahee believes that
00:21:07.780ordinary Black women speaking from experience have the authority to interpret reality and define what
00:21:12.520justice should look like. Testimony isn't an anecdote, it's part of the theory. Once the
00:21:17.980statement exists, it starts to travel. Mimeographed copies, anthologies, and of course readers. By the
00:21:23.8401980s and 1990s, it becomes a staple in women's studies and black studies classrooms. It sometimes
00:21:29.500gets more respect in the syllabus than it does in the streets, but it's there, quietly rewriting
00:21:34.280what counts as feminist thought. As an organization, the Combahee River Collective fades out by the
00:21:39.880early 1980s. There's no dramatic final scene. People move, burn out, take jobs, take care of
00:21:45.280family, shift into other work. But the statement doesn't fade. It's reprinted in socialist feminist
00:21:50.780collections in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It shows up in Homegirls, a black feminist anthology
00:21:56.760in 1983. It becomes a go-to text for professors trying to explain to students why race plus gender
00:22:03.140plus class is not just a list, but a lived reality. Meanwhile, in law, Kimberly Crenshaw is
00:22:09.380writing about black women plaintiffs who fall through the cracks of anti-discrimination law
00:22:13.720because the courts only know how to see race discrimination or sex discrimination, not both at
00:22:18.360once. She coins the term intersectionality to describe the way legal frameworks miss the
00:22:23.380intersections where they live. She is giving a formal name to the same dynamics Combahee described
00:22:28.560as interlocking oppressions. In the 1990s, black women like Beretta Ross and organizations like
00:22:34.460Sister Song crystallized the concept of reproductive justice, the right to have children, not have
00:22:39.640children, and raise the children we have in a safe and sustainable community. They explicitly talk
00:22:44.580about how racism, poverty, environmental harm, and state violence shape reproductive life. Again,
00:22:50.260it's Combahee's insistence on centering black women's survival and conditions now built into
00:22:55.100a movement framework. Queer and trans people of color develop queer of color politics, analyzing
00:23:00.820how racism, capitalism, gender, and sexuality intersect. They talk about prisons, borders,
00:23:06.240policing, welfare, family. Their work reads like an extended footnote to Combahee's decision to
00:23:11.600start from Black women's lives as the most revealing standpoint. Then, in 2013, three Black
00:23:17.580women, Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, give us Black Lives Matter. From the
00:23:23.140beginning, BLM's founding vision is explicitly intersectional. Its statements talk about queer
00:23:27.920and trans black people, disabled black people, undocumented black people, black women and girls.
00:23:33.320At least two of the founders are queer. They built a decentralized chapter-based network
00:23:38.380instead of a single charismatic male leader. If you squint, it looks suspiciously like the
00:23:43.680political future Combahee was imagining, just with smartphones. In 2014, after several high-profile
00:23:50.160police killings of black individuals, Kimberly Crenshaw and others launched Hashtag Say Her Name,
00:23:55.660a campaign insisting that black women and girls killed by police or who die in state custody
00:24:00.780must not be forgotten in narratives that focus almost exclusively on black men.
00:24:05.740When you see queer black women at the center of Black Lives Matter,
00:24:09.160that's Combahee's ghost in the corner checking off a box and saying,