What do Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Welles Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell have in common?
None of them were Black feminists.
They were Black women who used words, stories, writing, and action to improve the lives of those around them.
As early as the 1880s, nearly 150 years ago, there were Black women in the United States graduating college. This was at a time when virtually no one was graduating college. Almost immediately, Black women began organizing for their own benefit.
By the 1890s, when most of America lived in abject poverty, wealthy Black women
Helen Appo Cook, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julie Cooper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Jane Patterson, formed the Colored Women’s League in Washington, D.C. for what they considered to be in Black’s best interests.
120 years ago the American Association of University Women integrated, making any Black woman wealthy enough to go to university eligible. White and Black feminists were intrumental in the formation of what Malcolm X referred to as the “National Association for the Advancement of Some Colored People”.
Women are very good at bringing attention to a problem and making it a priority for everyone else to solve. The market economy, [1][2][3][4] the media [5] the civil rights industry and Marxist destruction [6] are all driven by this principle.
From Rosa Parks to mansplaining, manspreading, and from the natural hair movement to using the hashtags #melanin and #BlackGirlmagic and Black safe spaces, Black women have always used their Power to make things better for Black women.
Beginnings of Intersectionality
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when white women and Black women started working together for the benefit of women. Audre Lorde, Caribbean-American feminist and essayist, stated: “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?”
I guess that’s a start.
In 1973, at a National Black Feminist Meeting in New York City, the Combahee River Collective, tired of the racism in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the sexism in the Black Liberation Movement decided to write a statement.
Identity politics was born.
Not long after Black Lesbian Feminism came into vogue, came Barbara Smith, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Darlene Pagano, Kate Rushin, Doris Davenport, Cheryl Clarke, Margaret Sloan-Hunter. In 1991, Kimberle’ Williams Crenshaw, an oppressed law professor at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world, wrote, “Mapping the Margins” and coined the term, “Intersectionality.”
Now, every Black lesbian pickup artist had a simple framework to become a political activist.
Black Lives Matter
96% of all police homicides are men. It took three women Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Kahn-Cullors Brignac to turn a hashtag and a movement of Black lesbian pickup artists, into a mechanism to round up a bunch of white women and teenagers to raise almost $100 million in just a few short years.
While the number of men killed by police hasn’t gone down, there are more incidents of police brutality against men, and the surveillance state has advanced more than ever, most women consider Black Lives Matter to be a success.
Of course, more work has yet to be done.
Black Liberation Movement
Sorry, with all of that focus on Black Feminism, there’s no time left to talk about Black Liberation.
