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Combahee River Collective (1974)
Founded in Boston by three self-identified queer black feminists, Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith and Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective issued one of the clearest and most effective documents on the intersections of racial, gender and sexual oppression. They have also been recently credited with articulating the true inclusive power of identity politics.
“Most radical politics come directly” from black women’s identity, the women wrote in the Combahee River Collective Statement:
If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
