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back to the nineteenth century as well as to black liberation struggles of the 1960s. Despite the difficulty of sustaining a socialist black feminist organization with lesbian leadership for six years, they worked untiringly on a variety of “revolutionary” issues—reproductive rights, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women’s movement. They also understood the importance of coalition building and worked with other women of color, white feminists, and progressive men. Equally important was their breaking the silence about homophobia within the black community and providing lesbians and heterosexual women with opportunities to work together.
    In 1975, Michele Wallace wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” and precipitated an intense controversy within the black community when Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman appeared three years later. Wallace, a founding member of NBFO, critiqued black male sexism and the misogyny of black liberation struggles. Echoing Wallace, the August 27, 1979 issue of Newsweek chronicled a new black struggle that underscored intraracial tensions based on gender: “It’s the newest wrinkle in the black experience in America—a a growing distrust, if not antagonism, between black men and women that is tearing marriages apart and fracturing personal relationships.” This “wake-up call” came on the heels of Ntozake Shange’s award-winning Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” (1976) and Wallace’s polemic Black Macho, both of whom were demonized because of their negative assessments of black men.
    The issue of sexual politics within the African American community became a hotly debated topic in journals such as The Black Scholar, Freedomways, and Black Books Bulletin, and provided the catalyst for the founding of a short-lived bimonthly magazine, Black Male/Female Relationships by sociologists Nathan and Julia Hare. Black Scholar, however, would provide the most extensive and sober treatment of the debate generated by Wallace’s and Shange’s controversial feminist writings. The April 1973 issue of Black Scholar on “Black Women’s Liberation” led the way, followed by the March 1975 issue, “The Black Woman,” the 1979 “Black Sexism Debate” issue, and the 1986 “Black Women and Feminism” issue. Robert Staples’s essay “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry
Black Feminists,” which appeared in the March/April 1979 issue, was a feminist-bashing response to Wallace and Shange, whom he accused of black male bashing; it stimulated a Readers’ Forum in the subsequent May/ June 1979 issue, in which the battle lines were drawn. Robert Chrisman’s editorial for this special issue acknowledged in very strong terms the validity of the accusations, and called for a reconciliation between black men and women: “Black feminists have raised just criticisms of black male sexism.... We believe that the effort to clarify the nature of black male/ female relationships is an important step in the process of reuniting our people and revitalizing the struggle against oppression.... the problems of black male/female relationships are neither new nor solely the creation of the white media.”
    A decade later, the controversy continued and grew more virulent; its most obvious manifestations were loud and angry litanies, especially among black professional men, about the portrayal of black male characters in the fiction of contemporary black women writers. Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation sparked the most vitriolic responses. Shahrazad Ali’s self-published The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman (1990) was one of