26a Moultrie Street, Dorchester, Boston
In 1974, a group of black women activists, each with long histories in the antiwar, feminist, and black liberation movements began to gather at each other’s homes in Boston’s working-class communities.
The first place was Demita Frazier’s living room on Moultrie Street, where regular meetings occurred in the early years. In this intimate space, they analyzed their diverse commitments to these movements while lamenting the estrangement they experienced in male-led and/or white-dominated formations. In their conversations, Frazier, the twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith and several others addressed the challenges facing working class, black women activists, noting the energy and emotional work that they invested into various coalitions given the “interlocking” character of their oppression. Considering matters of gender, class, race and sexual-orientation, they evolved a theory of liberation that has proved to be very influential in academia and among social justice organizers, one based on the insights provided by multiple, intersecting oppressions and the resulting coalitions: with black men in the fight against racism, with white women in the struggle against male domination. Acknowledging also their class position, they defined themselves as socialists aiming to overthrow capitalist social relations. In this sense especially, they reflected a very different political orientation from the National Black Feminist Organization in which several of them had participated.
Naming themselves after an 1863 military campaign led by Harriet Tubman that freed 750 enslaved individuals in South Carolina, the collective foregrounded their commitment to action. This was not an abstract choice: the collective was founded in the midst of a Boston “race war” triggered by white opposition to integrated schools. Members of the collective themselves, especially the Smith sisters, had a background in organizing “freedom schools” during the Civil Rights movement.
Although the collective was itself a breakaway from mainstream feminism, its coalitions reached out broadly to address concrete issues of reproductive freedom, forced sterilization and violence against women. They also called attention to a series of murders and violent attacks against black women that were going uninvestigated by the Boston Police Department. Their community-based research and reports engaged both the Boston Globe and local African American papers which previously under-reported these incidents. By the late 1970s, their public demonstrations addressing these attacks had drawn broad public support and produced a strong coalition of feminist and community-based activists. The coalition’s organizing work prefigured future Boston coalitions including, most directly, the Rainbow Coalition mayoral candidacy of Mel King in 1983.
After their later years, the collective met regularly at the Women’s Center in Cambridge. The coalition disbanded in 1981 as its members moved on to other activities, including academic work.
Getting there:
Red Line to Shawmut Station. The private residence is a 0.3 mile (3-minute) walk.
To learn more:
- Cobble, Dorothy Sue , Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry. Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements. New York: W.W. Norton Press, 2015.
- Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.
- Extract from the Combahee River Collective Statement of April 1977:
“[W]e have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. The inclusiveness [emphasis added] of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression.”
Image: Members of the Combahee River Collective at an anti-police brutality rally on January 15, 1980. Photo by Susan Fleischmann.