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Black women found themselves separated from the Black Power movement because of its sexism and the radical white women's movement because of its racism. Socialist feminist African American women were deeply angry at white women for their apparent ignorance about the significance of race and class in black women's lives and formed small feminist organizations. The Combahee River Collective in Boston developed out of the larger National Black Feminist Organization. The Combahee Collective's 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement” was, and still is, a crucial statement of black feminism. The authors argued that race, sex, and class had to be considered together in the lives of black women, and that no one would fight for them except themselves. They did not feel they had a home in black nationalism or white feminism.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s leadership in creating a black feminist movement to challenge the critical linkages between all forms of oppression, especially racism and sexism. By 1972, while she was excited about the growth of the predominantly white feminist movement, she was also profoundly disappointed that the struggle still did not fully embrace a black feminist position and make challenging racism as well as sexism central to its political agenda. Thus, Kennedy worked to create interracial feminist organizations that emphasized a black feminist praxis. Her activism during this period was central to building a women’s movement that included women of all races as well as an independent black feminist movement. To Kennedy’s thinking, Shirley Chisholm’s quest for the presidential nomination was the perfect opportunity for white feminists to build an alliance and support a black feminist politics. In 1971 she created the Feminist Party in hopes of bringing together an inclusive group of feminists to support not simply the candidacy of the black congresswoman but black feminism more generally. Equally interested in advancing black feminist praxis, she worked to create the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and pushed black women to form their own autonomous black feminist movement.

This chapter analyzes black feminist thought that grew out of civil rights-era activism. It highlights that while there is a broad scholarly understanding of black feminism, black feminists have often been hidden from public view. However, black women and black feminists have done much to alter what it means to be black and female in the United States. The chapter also specifically notes the origins of intersectionality in black feminist scholarship and the role that intersectionality continues to play in feminist discourses. It underlines not only the diversity of African American women's lived experiences—what it means to be simultaneously a racially minoritized individual but also a woman—but also the multiplicity of oppressions that black women experience, from racism to sexism and beyond.

This chapter focuses on abstract painter Howardena Pindell and her controversial Free, White, and 21 (1980), a video art piece in which Pindell—playing all parts—staged a dialogue between reincarnations of herself and a caricature of a white feminist who callously debunks the veracity of her experiences. The chapter interprets the video as a black feminist counterpublic that is not simply about critique, but also racism-as-trauma; furthermore, it detail Pindell’s performative engagements with cross-racial embodiment and avatar-play. Yet, in efforts to contextualize both the video’s content and Pindell’s career, the chapter begins with an examination of the various political and artistic communities Pindell participated in, or was denied access to, in the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the chapter’s aim is to render visible not only the manifold tensions that arose from the merging of art and politics in this period, but more explicitly the difficulties in being a black woman artist excluded from avant-garde circles (both black and white), partly for making abstract work that was deemed not sufficiently “black.” The last part of the chapter discusses Pindell’s vociferous rebuke of “art world racism” through her involvement in PESTS, an anonymous arts organization. It turns to PESTS’s remains—a flyer, poster replicas, and two obscure newsletters—that serve as public engagements with the invisibility, exclusion, and tokenism faced by artists of color.

This chapter examines the ways in which Flo Kennedy brought her legal expertise and political knowledge to the campaign to repeal New York State’s restrictive abortion laws. She served as counsel for Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first class-action suit in which women themselves insisted on their right to be heard. Coupling speak-outs and demonstrations with constitutional arguments, the case helped to convince the legislature to amend the law before it was settled in court. The tactics from this case would be used in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 federal case that legalized abortion nationally. Although by the late 1960s she was one of the country’s best-known black feminists, her role in helping to legalize abortion has long since been forgotten.

This chapter explores how Afro-Caribbean activists in London adapted the raw material of U.S. soul style to combat racial discrimination and sexism in England. Members of the Black Panther Movement Youth League in Brixton appropriated the language and imagery of U.S. soul to frame their own version of Soul Power that drew upon their Afro-Caribbean musical, culinary, aesthetic, and political traditions and responded to the discrimination and violence they encountered in their daily lives. Focusing on the brutal beating of young Afro-British Black Panther Olive Morris at the hands of the London police, this chapter shows how soul style was read as a sign of black criminality and civil disobedience—especially when worn by gender nonconforming women—by agents of the state.

This essay examines how the production, consumption, and adaptation of Shange’s play impacts black feminist collectivity as a response to communal violence. In For Colored Girls, an adaptation, filmmaker Tyler Perry commercializes Shange’s work, translating the radical form of the choreopoem into melodrama and normalizing the story of violence against women. In the decades between the premiere of the play (1974) and the debut of Perry’s film (2009), black feminists confront neoliberal assaults on collectivity. The adaptation of the play evidences the cultural impact of neoliberalism’s focus on individualism, transforming Shange’s play from a black feminist sacred object into a commercial one.

This chapter concludes the book by briefly examining Flo Kennedy’s multifaceted political actions in the mid-to-late 1970s and the early 1980s. Specifically focusing on her organizing against racism, sexism and a range of other oppressions during the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the International Year of the Woman conferences in Mexico City, Mexico and Canberra, Australia and through COYOTE, an organization in support of sex workers. Kennedy’s protests and flamboyant self-presentation have puzzled some organizers and scholars. In part, this confusion accounts for some of the reasons why Kennedy has been largely ignored and why her theoretical and strategic insights have not been incorporated into radical political perspectives of feminist and Black Power histories. To the people who worked with and learned from Kennedy, she was a teacher, a catalyst, a lawyer, a cheerleader, a bridge to other organizers and to expansive and broad concepts, an exacting critic, a complex thinker, and a sharp leader who animated political engagement and made political organizing less intimidating and far more appealing. Her black feminist intersectional analysis enlarged the scope of possible political alliances and both broadened and deepened the promise of radical social transformation.

This book examines the involvement of women in the fight against racism and segregation which was prevalent in the United States during the early twentieth century. While criticisms on the perceived dichotomy of the stand on racism and segregation of African Americans from the Caucasians existed, this book does not provide any suggestion of the advantage of integrationalism or black nationalism over one another, rather it looks on these two perceived different stands on race divide as a complex, rather than dichotomous, and multiple, rather that a singular, strategy; and it sees interdependent, rather than mutually exclusive, philosophies against racial discrimination. In this book, the involvement of prominent black women, their contributions and their strategies that helped define black feminist thought and curb the racial issue, is examined and analyzed. This book focuses on the political thought and activism exhibited by black women between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Evaluation of the literary endeavors, the activism, and entrepreneurship of some of the prominent women showed that black women challenged the existing dichotomy on the stand against racial discrimination, developed the black feminist tradition, and shaped black nationalism within the feminist framework. Among the studied black women include clubwomen Margaret Murray Washington, Nannie hellen Burroughs and Mary McLeod Bethune; black women leaders Eva Bowles and Cecilia Cabaniss; entrepreneurs Madam J. Walker and A'Lelia Walker; and writers such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Jessie Fauset.

This chapter is set in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California and demonstrates how Flo Kennedy’s parents contributed to the formation of her black feminist radicalism. Her parents not only stood up for themselves and their daughters against racist white authorities but also held progressive views about personal autonomy and female sexuality. Kennedy’s mother allowed her to kiss boys on the front porch and to discuss taboo topics, such as the scents and sensations of a woman’s body. Both her mother and father actively defended themselves against entrenched forms of power and had numerous run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, white employers, and black school officials. They taught Kennedy not to defer to any type of authority. The sexual freedom that Kennedy experienced and the battles with both black and white authorities that she witnessed helped her to embrace a black feminist politics and reject the politics of respectability and other social constraints that inhibited black women’s political activism and mobility.

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.

The introduction makes the case for black feminist practice as a study of black sociality by way of a personal narrative that explores the terrain of meaning between thought and practice, feminism and feminist practice, and social life and social death. It consequently outlines the parameters of the book’s primary argument that the logics of representation, which are typically coded by terms such as value, visibility, citizenship, diversity, respectability and responsibility, largely fails to account for the reality of lived black experience. As such, there is a need to consider black social life from the perspective of those who are most closely attuned to and identified with the indicia of blackness.

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s battle to challenge discrimination once she arrived in New York City during World War II. During her first decade in the city, she was an undergraduate at Columbia University and then a law student in Columbia’s Law School. In this stimulating and diverse political and social milieu, she began to expand and sharpen her family’s “take no shit” position. The combination of her formal education and her individual protests outside the classroom encouraged her development as a black feminist. Already concerned with challenging both racism and patriarchal expectations about her freedom of movement and sexual expression, she began in her late twenties and early thirties to critique capitalism, make direct connections between racism and sexism, and confront these interlocking systems of oppression.

This chapter examines black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) as well as Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), black women occupy the center of diaspora conceptions of modernity, particularly through the texts' critique of modern African American, Caribbean, and Pan-African political movements. Hurston's ethnography/memoir of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti explicitly draws links between US and Caribbean gender politics through the representation of spirit possession as a suspension and critique of the existing masculinist social order. Meanwhile, Brodber's novel similarly represents a Hurston-like subject possessed by diasporic black histories.

The introduction sheds light on the crisis of premature birth among Black women. It lays out the theoretical terrain on which premature birth is generally understood and develops the rationale of linking the issue to past ideologies and practices of medical racism. Premature birth and medical racism are introduced through the birth story of a young African American woman who was a college student when she became pregnant and later gave birth to a daughter, born three months prematurely, who was admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Grounded in a Black feminist framework, which privileges Black women’s experiences as a site of knowledge production, the chapter describes the book’s theoretical foundation; its methodological approach; and its use of birth stories, interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival sources to understand Black women’s medical encounters.

This chapter introduces early 1970s feminist antirape theorizing and organizing. The feminist antirape movement emerged within the context of the larger women’s liberation movement, sometimes also referred to as second wave feminism. Feminist antirape activists critiqued the failings of the law, medicine, and society at large in responding to rape. Initially a mostly white group, feminist antirape activists pursued a variety of organizing strategies—from demonstrations and speak-outs to creating rape crisis centers and hotlines to support victims. Over the course of the decade the movement diversified and black feminists pushed the broader movement to incorporate an intersectional analysis into their antirape agenda. Feminists of all racial and ethnic backgrounds held particular contempt for the legal system which, from local police to the state courts, dramatically failed to meet the needs of rape victims. In law journals nationwide, feminist legal scholars exposed the inadequacies of rape law, argued that the legal system was totally ineffectual in stopping rape, and advocated for significant law reform.