Combahee River Collective

The Combahee River Collective was a group of Black feminists in Boston, among them Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, named for the river where Harriet Tubman led a raid that freed seven hundred and fifty enslaved people. A Black Feminist Statement of 1977 argues that race, sex, class and sexuality are experienced together, so that a politics addressing one alone will fail, and that Black women’s liberation would mean the liberation of everyone. It introduced identity politics in its original sense and is the source of what later theory called intersectionality. The newest lists assign it beside Truth and Walker.