Black Feminism - Black Feminist Organizations

Black Feminist Organizations

The NBFO, the National Black Feminist Organization, was founded in 1973. This organization of women focused on the interconnectedness of the many prejudices that were faced by African American Women such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and lesbophobia. As an active organization the NBFO stopped operating nationally in 1977.

The Combahee River Collective was one of the most important black socialist feminist organizations of all time. Primarily a black feminist and lesbian organization this group began meeting in Boston in 1974, a time when socialist feminism was thriving in Boston. The name Combahee River Collective was suggested by the founder and African-American lesbian feminist, Barbara Smith, and it refers to the campaign led by Harriet Tubman who freed 750 slaves near the Combahee Rive in South Carolina in 1863. Smith said they wanted the name to mean something to African American women that “it was a way of talking about ourselves being on a continuum of black struggle, of black women’s struggle”.

The members of this organization consisted of many refugees from other political movements such as the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, labor movement, and others. Demita Frazier, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective says these women from other movements found themselves “in conflict with the lack of a feminist analysis and in many cases were left feeling divided against .”

As an organization they were labeled as troublemakers and many said they were brainwashed by the man hating white feminist, that they didn’t have their own mind they were just following in the white women’s footsteps. Throughout the 1970s the Combahee River Collective met weekly to discuss the different issues concerning black feminists. They also held retreats throughout the Northeast from 1977-1979 to help “institutionalize black feminism” and develop an “ideological separation from white feminism.”

As an organization they founded a local battered women’s shelter and worked in partnership with all community activists, women and men, gay and straight playing an active role in the reproductive rights movement. The Combahee River Collective ended their work together in 1980 and is now most widely remembered for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement, a key document in the history of contemporary black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity.