Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

The Combahee River Collective was a North American black lesbian feminist socialist movement active in Boston, Massachusetts in the late 1970s. The Collective emerged following a meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973, where black feminists argued that ‘mainstream’ feminism had failed to tackle the inherent racism in the USA and, worse still, excluded black women from debate. The Collective therefore wanted to create spaces where black women’s voices could be front and centre.

Significantly, the Collective’s members contextualised their views by drawing on the history of the struggle for social justice by black women stretching back to the nineteenth century. The Collective was named after a military operation at the Combahee River in 1863, led by a former enslaved woman, Harriet Tubman. It freed over 750 enslaved people and was the only campaign in the American Civil War led by a woman. The speech of another former enslaved woman, Sojourner Truth, at the predominantly white Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851 was also influential for the Collective. Truth’s ‘Ain’t I a woman’ speech drew attention to the ways in which the racial, patriarchal and class-based social order of the time meant that her lived experience as a woman of colour, as a farm labourer and as a producer of children for sale into slavery was qualitatively different from that of middle-class white women demanding the right to vote.