Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  Sharon Page Ritchie

  Sharon Page Ritchie became involved with the CRC through her connection to Margaret Sloan of the NBFO, whom she met at the University of Chicago. Ritchie grew up in a little house on the South Side of Chicago, where her father worked for the city as a building inspector and her mother was a public schoolteacher. She spoke about her early years, recalling:When I talk about my family, I say that I come from a long line of teachers and social workers, so education was a critically important value in my family. Literacy, reading, writing, ideas… my mother’s house was nice because it was filled with books and magazines and it was always more important that we should be interested in them than that we should be perfect little housekeepers. We had an education, but we didn’t have much money. My mother and my aunts were Deltas. I wasn’t a Delta because I was a lesbian. However, I was a Links debutante. I wore three hairpieces and a white dress. Other girls in the cotillion were the daughters of the doctors, lawyers, and probably the undertakers, and so people like my mother always talked about the rich dentist like that was his name. So, financially speaking, we were not in that class. There was more focus on the arts and literature and those things in my family and less so on furs.

  The church is really not a very big thing to me and I really don’t remember people talking about it very much. It may have been, but I don’t remember. My feeling was growing up in Chicago, that sort of traditional strict Baptist church thing and the moral judgments that came out of that about how men were supposed to be and women were supposed to be, in my family that was presented as something that people of our class didn’t go for. That was more of a country thing, more of a Southern thing, more of a working-class thing. So I did not think of the women who I thought of as feminists, intellectuals, or writers or any of that kind of thing to have come from a very strong religious background.

  Connected to the Northeastern Collective through people she had known in Chicago, Ritchie met Demita Frazier at a Chicago Lesbian Liberation meeting when she was in her late teens. When Demita Frazier and another member, Linda Powell , moved to the East Coast, Ritchie was doing temp work, which she realized that she could do anywhere. If she moved to the Eastern seaboard, she could be close to a supportive community of friends, and that was the decision she made.

  Cheryl Clarke

  Cheryl Clarke was born in Washington, DC, in 1947 and grew up there. She did her undergraduate work at Howard University and then left Washington in 1969 to do graduate work at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she still lives. Clarke’s mother was born in North Carolina in 1916 and migrated to Washington, DC, via Detroit around 1920. Her father was born in Washington, DC, in 1913, and the only time he was ever out of Washington was in the service during World War II. Clarke characterized her family as lower-middle-class people whose forebears were laborers. Her maternal grandmother had been a domestic. Her father was a dishwasher. Her father’s parents had a little bit more mobility; his mother worked for the federal government for years and retired in the late 1950s. Widowed early, Clarke’s mother was the emotional bastion and sole economic support of the family; however, their large extended family provided as much help as they could. She had three children in addition to Cheryl. She recalled:We were always told we were poor, but I always had security – my basic needs were met and I had a very sheltered upbringing. I remember at one point telling my mother that I wanted to be a nurse and she said, “I don’t care what you want to be if you are going to college first.” So we sort of grew up knowing that. Also, they nurtured a kind of independence in the house. My mother said, “I want you to get your education so you don’t have to dependent on anybody.” And that was how we were raised and sort of pushed. They gave us dance lessons, piano lessons, took us to museums. Basically it was like my mother… took charge of those kinds of things because she wanted to cultivate some kind of appetite for other than material kinds of things or at least that was in terms of how I see my upbringing.

  In 1965, Clarke went to Howard, where she and Paula Giddings were classmates:We were in the same major. Paula was the editor of the undergraduate journal and she was always a leader. She was always articulating a position. Extremely smart and extremely well liked, as she still is now. We were in our last year – well, the Spring of 1968 to the Spring of 1969, involved in a writing workshop and there were other people plus two or three faculty members who were involved where you would meet every other Sunday. And I was writing poetry then and we were reading our work to one another and it is very interesting – the results of that activity enabled us to know how to have a public voice.

  Now I was not an activist when I was in college. I had other interests and was much more shy than I am now. But because of that workshop we met editors from Random House who met with us and encouraged us. We met Toni Morrison who was an editor at Random House at that time and one of my teachers. Howard exposed me to the richness of Afro-American culture, which I have particularly focused on in the literature in terms of my own intellectual development. And began really myself in literature in 1968 when I took Arthur Davis ’ course, Negro Literature in America, which was only offered once a year. But I watched a whole transformation of the curriculum in Howard during the time that I was there because there were many scholars at Howard who had specialized in Afro-American study who were ostracized too, people like Sterling Brown , people like E. Franklin Frazier , people like Chancellor Williams, most of them historians and sociologists.

  And during that whole Black power thing, students really began to bring those people out of the woodwork. So by the time I graduated, the courses that addressed Afro-American issues came to the foreground and you know, Afro-American studies began to become a hot thing, and you could hardly get into Afro-American history courses. It became an intellectual hotbed as well as a political hotbed, and it was a real process for me to grapple with the Black nationalist issues. I have never really been a nationalist because I have always considered it impractical and negative and limited. And remember, I told you, they always nurtured independence in us so I did not want to be constrained by narrow politics. I loved Howard because of how it opened another world to me in terms of Afro-American culture.

  Margo Okazawa Rey

  Margo Okazawa Rey was born in Japan in 1949 to an upper-middle-class Japanese woman and a Black G. I. from working-class Chicago. Rey asserted that she obtained her class identity from her father and her cultural identity from her mother:Women’s class is very much connected to the men they are attached to. My mother’s class background didn’t really have an impact on how we lived our lives. So I would say I grew up working-class, lower-middle-class, but with a definite sort of Japanese cultural sensibility as well as African-American. I think my father has gotten more politicized in his old age, but when we were together, you know, he was sort of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy. He was one of those people who thought that you just have to be the best person you can be.

  He didn’t talk about race that much and it is ironic that my mother, who is Japanese and didn’t know much about American culture, instilled it but that was more of a private thing. I think the thing that is interesting about my mother is that she is a feminist, although she would never use the term. The men in her family just seemed to get everything. The boys got to do things first, like eat, take baths. Her father got to do everything first; her mother was just kind of waiting on him hand and foot. She said to herself that she was not going to let any man boss her around, which is completely counter to traditional Japanese culture.

  Somehow she met my father and one of the things that she was struck by was these American men would say “ladies first” and she thought it was wonderful, but of course she didn’t understand the sexist underlying stuff. She thought America must be a wonderful place if ladies get to go first. So that sort of captured their imagination and they got together. So my early feminist leanings come from her.

  Gloria Hull

  Gloria Hull
grew up in a three-room shotgun house in Shreveport, Louisiana. Neither of her parents finished grammar school. Her mother was a cook and a domestic. Her father was disabled, but did whatever kind of work he could pick up as a carpenter. She considered her upbringing to be working poor:I remember very clearly that my mother made three dollars a day. She did that so that my brother and sister and I would be able to go on trips at school, or have a white dress at graduation. Early memories that situate me class-wise were that there was no liquid money, so we kept a running tab going with the Italian grocer at the end of the block. We were paying very high prices for whatever we bought, but were able to pay him with the little bit of money that did come in. I remember that the days that we bought food were really the high point of the weekdays. Food was essential.

  Hull graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1962 as the valedictorian of her class. She went to Southern University and then won a National Defense Education Act fellowship to the University of Illinois at Urbana to study English literature. The move was significant for her and would shape her future activism. She recalled,What I really wanted to do was be a journalist. The first time I got out of the South and saw a little bit of the larger world was between my junior and senior years [of college]. There was this program where Black kids from Southern colleges were brought to Northern campuses, and I spent the summer at Yale working with the New Haven Human Relations Council. I had written for the high school newspaper, the college newspaper, so I said journalism, that’s really what I want to do. I had heard that Columbia was one of the best journalism schools in the country. When I was in New Haven I figured out how to get myself to New York City and I had an interview with the assistant dean at the Columbia School of Journalism. This is the summer of ‘65. I’m just walking around with no sense that I [should] be afraid or anything; I’m just doing this. It was a really good interview and I feel that I might have gotten somewhere with it, but no one encouraged me. The highest aspiration anybody could see me doing or achieving was being a teacher. With the grades and the fellowship, teacher got translated into college teacher, but still a teacher. So that is how I ended up in graduate school for English.12

  Before Hull went to graduate school she married her college sweetheart, who had graduated the year before her from Southern and had gone to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Hull’s husband came from a family that was even more economically disadvantaged than hers; he had one pair of jeans that he had to wash out at night and dry in front of a space heater, iron, and put on the next morning. There were twelve children in his family. After spending one semester at Urbana, Hull gave up her fellowship and went to be with her husband at Purdue, where she became a teaching assistant. Her husband got a job at the University of Delaware when Hull was finishing her dissertation and looking for a job. About this time, Hull recounted,When I look back on this, I laugh about how tremendously naive I was. I mean naive in the sense of not knowing the protocol for academic professionalism. I went down there to see the chairman of the English department at the University of Delaware with my husband, with my son on my lap, dressed up in my Sunday School type chic dress, little heels. I didn’t know from beans, so they offered me this position. I didn’t know that I could bargain or anything. The reason he was just sitting there amazed is that a Black woman had dropped in their laps. Another little index of it is that I didn’t even know how to do a professional vita. I had on it stuff like, I played piano for the Black Baptist church that I grew up in. There was no Black woman to say this is how you do it; nobody took me under her wing. It is so different now.

  During three years in Delaware, Hull made connections that would change her life and inevitably link her to the CRC. She ended up working on the Feminist Reprints Committee, where she met Florence Howe and Alice Walker . Although she had done her dissertation on Byron and English dramatic poetry, she had become interested in Black women writers and African-American literature, particularly the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance . When she went to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York City in 1974, she met Barbara Smith . Having met Smith and the rest of the Boston women, she began to attend Combahee retreats , expanding her network of Black feminist contacts and thought.

  Demita Frazier

  Demita Frazier, who is from Chicago, brought issues of urban poverty to the Combahee discussions . Frazier arrived in Boston intending to organize Black women around feminist issues, but as she remembered, it took about a year to find others who might be interested in doing Black feminist CR:We each got our names from different people and we all had been involved in the National Black Feminist Organization. When we arrived it took a while, but that first meeting when we met at my house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, it was quite something because we were strangers to one another. We had gotten phone numbers and said let’s try to have a meeting and talk about what we could do in terms of organizing an NBFO chapter here in Boston. We were actually saying we were feminists. We were proud of that. We were not worried about flak from anybody else. It was a moment of power because I think we all recognized very quickly in that meeting in my living room that we were at the precipice of something really important. That was literally how it started, sitting in someone’s living room, having a discussion about the issues and it wasn’t even the issues so much as getting to know one another and what our issues were, what brought us to think of ourselves as feminists. Where did we get these ideas? What books did we read? And then, of course, there was a sense of sharing. We were interested in so many similar things even though we came from very different places. Most of us came from an academic background. Others had been really involved in organizing from the cities that we had come from. It was quite something for us. It was really very different for me.

  And so the Boston chapter of the NBFO—the precursor for Combahee—started with four Black women sitting in Frazier’s living room discussing what had brought them to think of themselves as feminists. Boston in the 1970s was in turmoil over court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools . Barbara Smith described the racial tensions of the time:I moved to Boston in about 1972 and there were many places in Boston that to this day I have never ventured into. It was absolutely known that as a Black person you did not go to South Boston. You did not go to East Boston. You did not go to Chelsea. Those are a few of the names of neighborhoods that I remember right off the top of my head. Sometimes on the way to somewhere else, like trying to get to Dorchester, one might get lost in South Boston and on those occasions it was always like uh-oh, I really need to get out of here. It was really frightening, if indeed one got lost in those neighborhoods trying to go from one place to another. But in general, one knew that one did not go.

  For example, there was an attorney named Ted Lanzvark who was down in City Hall Plaza, which is this very modern setting. It doesn’t look like colonial Boston. So he was down there for business, I am sure. And he was attacked by a group of White men and they used an American flag to beat him up. I don’t know who was there on the spot with the camera, but that picture went out over the wire services all over the country, probably all over the world, to show what this country was all about and that was only about twenty years ago.

  Another example was a high school student who was playing football and I don’t remember what neighborhood they were playing in, if it was one of those places where one dare not venture if one was Black, but he was shot from the stands and he was paralyzed for life. So that was the kind of atmosphere that we lived in. Going into a store and being followed. When I went into a store the assumption was that I came in to rob it.

  In a 1994 interview with Susan Goodwillie , Demita Frazier described the political climate of Boston in the 1970s:I think what drew a lot of us here was the chance to really establish identities that were our own, apart from family and apart from the communities or origin that we came from. So you can picture us in 1973 and 1974 coming together as women in a city where the
re was so much political activity going on in Boston at that time. If you think about it, some of it wasn’t progressive. Busing was just beginning at that time. The desegregation order had come down and so the busing was beginning in Boston and that was causing a lot of political forum. There was a lot of discussion about race and about class. So we arrived in that atmosphere. And for those of us who had been feminists before we came to the city and for those of us had been organizers, we were thrilled at the chance to be in a city where there seemed to be a lot of discussion. There was a feeling that you could talk about nearly anything and you could raise issues about just anything.

  Coming Together: The Combahee River Collective Retreats

  We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the condition of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.