In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. For them, this presented a clear impediment. The Collective was instrumental in highlighting that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movementwere not addressing their particular needs as Black women and as Black lesbians, more specifically. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. This is the political statement from the Combahee River Collective, a … This document was one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s:The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. They got involved in an initiative to stop African, African American, and Puerto-Rican women from being sterilized against their wills. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. Both are essential to the development of any life. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. "The Boston Murders", in Patricia Bell-Scott (ed. They are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee Ri… Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with whom we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to encourage us to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs. After a period of months of not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising. Since 1977, that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators. [2]We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. 'Arthur' Character Mr. Ratburn Comes Out as Gay on Cartoon SeriesRwandan School Teaches Boys How to Stop Gender-based Violence[TALK LIKE SEX] Author Timeline of Boston's LGBTQ African American HistoryThe Combahee Collective was large and fluid throughout its history. The CRC also emphasized that they held the fundamental and shared belief that "Black women are inherently valuable, that...(their) liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of (their own) need as human persons for autonomy...."Political, social and cultural impact of the StatementIn a 1994 interview with Susan Goodwillie, Smith noted that this action moved the group out into the wider Boston community. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with whom we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to encourage us to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs. We had always shared our reading with each other, and some of us had written papers on Black feminism for group discussion a few months before this decision was made. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have.http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html