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and Unbossed, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Audre Lorde’s Cables to Rage signaled a literary awakening among black women and the beginning of a clearly defined black women’s liberation movement that would have priorities different from those of white feminists, and generate considerable debate, even hostility,
within the black community. Cade’s antiracist, antisexist, anti-imperialist agenda captures the essence of contemporary black feminism: conduct a comparative study of women’s roles in the Third World; debunk myths of the black matriarch and “the evil black bitch”; study black women’s history and honor woman warriors such as Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer; do oral histories of ordinary black women (migrant workers, quilters, UNIA grandmothers); study sexuality; establish linkages with other women of color globally (Cade, 11).
    The anthology includes SNCC activist Frances Beale’s pioneering essay on the “double jeopardy” of black women, which highlights their sexual and economic exploitation, the inappropriateness of white models of womanhood, black male sexism, sterilization abuse of women of color globally, abortion rights, and Sojourner Truth’s 1851 women’s rights speech. Beale also voices her disapproval of black nationalist demands that women be subordinate to men and their assumption that women’s most important contribution to the revolution is having babies: “To assign women the role of housekeeper and mother while men go forth into battle is a highly questionable doctrine to maintain” (Cade, 100).
    In 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) would emerge in part as a reminder to the black liberation movement that “there can’t be liberation for half the race” 11 Activist lawyer Flo Kennedy and Margaret Sloan decided to convene a small gathering of black feminists in May so that they could discuss their experiences within the racist women’s movement, and what it meant to be black, female, and feminist. In their statement of purpose, they objected to the women’s movement’s being seen as white, and their involvement in it as disloyal to the race. Emphasizing black women’s need for self-definition, they identified racism from without and sexism from within as destructive to the black community.
    The National Black Feminist Organization officially began November 30, 1973, at an Eastern Regional Conference in New York City at the cathedral of St. John the Divine. This was a historic gathering of the first explicitly black feminist organization committed to the eradication of sexism, racism, and heterosexism. Workshops focused on a variety of issues—child care, the church, welfare, women’s liberation, lesbianism, prisons, education, addiction, work, female sexuality, and domestic violence. Among those present were Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Flo Kennedy, and Margaret Sloan, NBFO’s first and only president. 12
    A year after the founding meeting, the Boston chapter of NBFO decided to form a more radical organization, according to lesbian feminist writer Barbara Smith, and named itself in 1975 the Combahee River Collective after Harriet Tubman’s “military campaign” in South Carolina (1863), which freed nearly 800 slaves. In 1977, after meeting informally for three
years and doing intense consciousness-raising (the major strategy for feminist organizing in the 1970s), a black feminist lesbian manifesto was issued that foregrounded sexuality and asserted that “sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in black women’s lives as the politics of class and race” (Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith, 16). Emphasizing the “simultaneity” of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of black and other women of color, they affirmed their connection to an activist tradition among black women going