The Boston Chapter: Learning from Combahee’s Emergence
By Olivia Polk
In the latest installment of our Special Blog Issue, “50 Years of Combahee”, scholar Olivia Polk reflects on the Combahee River Collective’s emergent strategic practices for building relationships, and complexifying our imagination in the face of multiscalar legacies of violence.
While Barbara Smith marks the beginning of the Combahee River Collective as 1975, this Black Women Radicals series memorializes a 1974 origin story, when a collective of Black women formed the Boston Chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization (footnote 1). In the section of the Combahee River Collective Statement “Problems in Organizing Black Feminists,” authors Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier recall the sense that struck them after the first few meetings of a small group of Black, feminist, (some) lesbian, (some) socialist women in Boston early that year: “The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other” (footnote 2). They recall that those early meetings emerged as an impulse and inventory-taking, rather than a pre-meditated program that would transform the terms of Black and feminist movement-making as we knew it, writing, “We just wanted to see what we had” (footnote 3). On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the collective that would become the Combahee River Collective, my small contribution is to turn our imagination to the conditions of those first meetings, and that prefiguring collective that I will refer to here as “the Boston Chapter.”
For our purposes, 1974 is what Black feminist organizing historian Kimberley Springer refers to as a “date of emergence” (footnote 4). I want to extend Springer’s initial use of “emergence” as a way of negotiating the historical periodization of Black feminist organizations in order to mark Combahee’s first year as a period of emergence interpersonally and politically for its membership. adrienne maree brown has described emergence as a concept that “emphasizes critical connections over critical mass” and “notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies” (footnote 5). The impulse for a small group of women to come together in 1974 as the Boston Chapter was the first of Combahee’s emergent strategic practices for building relationships, and complexifying our imagination in the face of multiscalar legacies of violence.
“In what follows I invite us to notice the naissance of the Boston Chapter, to look at the image of the small group in 1974 as evidence of the interpersonal labor of openness that radical organizing requires, and to note what it took for the emergence of the complex system of Black feminist socialist lesbian ways of living that would take hold in the world.”
Before the core members of Combahee authored one of the most thorough, aspirational manifestos of Black feminist politics we know, they had to engage the small work of making connections under the time, place, and conditions of where they were. That labor of connection-making is the fundamental unit of emergent strategy. It is the unglamorous and often sparsely documented work necessary to cultivate collective political values that gave us the Combahee Statement, and mobilized Combahee’s various political actions in Boston from 1975-1980. In what follows I invite us to notice the naissance of the Boston Chapter, to look at the image of the small group in 1974 as evidence of the interpersonal labor of openness that radical organizing requires, and to note what it took for the emergence of the complex system of Black feminist socialist lesbian ways of living that would take hold in the world.
Black Feminist Prefiguration and the Boston Chapter
The transformation of the Boston Chapter into Combahee was famously a matter of political differences: about the desire for an actionable program of political organizing that would be based on intersecting principles of socialism, Black feminism, and a sexual politics that meaningfully addressed lesbian experience. By now the story of Combahee’s origins out of the Boston Chapter has been ubiquitously narrated in interviews and academic accounts of both Combahee and NBFO. Among the most notable of these is Springer’s 2005 book Living for the Revolution. In the fall of 1973, Margaret Sloan— co-editor of Ms. — along with Flo Kennedy, Michele Wallace, and other prominent Black women cultural workers convened in New York City after being dissatisfied with the racial politics of the national women's movement, particularly within organizing bodies like the National Organization for Women (NOW). In spite of being called the "Eastern Regional Conference,” the meeting was nationally-attended. At the gathering, hundreds of Black women—including Barbara and Beverley Smith— connected, discussed, and negotiated what it could look like to develop political platforms that made the concerns of Black women central to the broader feminist movement underway in the U.S. According to Barbara Smith, the Boston attendees huddled in a crowded stairwell to get each other's information so that they could be sure to see each other after the watershed moment in New York was over (footnote 6).
Although the aim of the NBFO convening was to create a kind of centralized political body that could closely resemble the structure of NOW, the excitement that NBFO generated for women like the Smith sisters and the 400 or so women who came to New York was an instance of what leftist organizers might call “prefigurative politics,” a phenomenon where people “adopt organizational forms now that they would like to see in the world they wanted to create” before more formal or programmatic organizational structures for that world are entirely in place (footnote 7). Even though as a matter of practical political fact, no nationalized, resourced, and critically mass-ed political organization for Black women with feminist politics existed, Black women from Chicago to Boston decided to act like it did. For Smith and a dozen others that meant convening an organizing chapter in somebody’s front room, and deciding what would be done from there.
“When the intention of Black feminist organizing and collectivity does not readily fall into place, what would it take for you to show up again?”
The result was the first meeting of the NBFO Boston Chapter, which took place in the Black neighborhood of Roxbury in January 1974. Smith told the story of that first meeting to Kimberley Springer in an oral history interview in 1998: Brenda Verner, a self-described “media-analyst” and local Black woman who was highly critical of feminism and the women’s movement was in attendance (footnote 8). At the meeting Verner apparently expressed her “vehement antifeminism” so intensely that the spark of momentum generated at the NBFO conference was meaningfully undermined. Smith told Springer that after having an “experience in our head [from the Eastern Regional Conference] of ‘Yeah, you can do this. Yeah, four hundred people can be with you. Yeah, Shirley Chisholm can be there and Eleanor Holmes Norton and it can be like that.’ ….I think that what Brenda Verner did was much more frightening, and, as I said, some of those women never came back” (footnote 9).
Leftists generally talk about prefiguration as a galvanizing, but ultimately limited radical political practice. This is because of the perceived challenges to transpose the small-scale behaviors of the “prefigurative” onto a system of “strategic politics” of organizational action at scale (footnote 10). There is a lesson in that January meeting as recounted by Smith (here in brief) about the limits of prefigurative politics to materializing the conditions of a seamless movement ecosystem—even among a set of Black women who heeded the call to be a part of a Black feminist organization. What happened from there was an exercise in the interpersonal work that it takes to move from radical visioning to radical action: even after a blow-up, and Barbara Smith—the instigating party behind the first meeting—leaving town for months, Demita Frazier wrote to insist that the group keep meeting in some capacity. Before the end of 1974, there was a small group of Black women who decided to keep showing up to see what they had. Following brown’s work on emergence as an address to the U.S. left in particular, I would name Fraizer’s persistence and Smith’s willingness to return as emergent strategies: tools that move us from prefiguration to the organized radical action on the ground that can concretely intervene on entrenched political conditions (misogynoir, homo-and transphobia, racial capitalism).
When the intention of Black feminist organizing and collectivity does not readily fall into place, what would it take for you to show up again?
Traces of Transformation
I am fascinated by the interval between prefiguration and political action that made the Boston Chapter, and the period largely after 1974 in which they enacted multiple forms of organized political action in the city of Boston. One trace of the emergent strategy work of building connection and community inside the Boston Chapter is a photograph of seven young Black women, circulated by Boston Chapter member Margo Okazawa-Rey. The image has circulated in the past few years in publications like organizer Marian Jones’s 2021 mini oral history of Combahee’s members in The Nation, and here on Black Women Radicals (footnote 11).
The Combahee River Collective in 1974. Left to right bottom: Demita Frazier and Helen Stewart. Left to right top: Margo Okazawa-Rey, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Chirlane McCray, and Mercedes Tompkins.(Margo Okazawa-Rey/The Nation).
People who have close relationships of trust, mentorship, and generative exchange with the elders in this photo may know just what each of the women recall about the night the image was taken, or their first time entering into the Boston Chapter. What must have felt possible to these women in the moment that this picture was taken? What must have felt terribly precarious? Were they nervous?— Would this other black woman desire me (as a neighbor, comrade, friend, or lover?) at first meeting, or once she really, really got to know me? So many different issues were laid in front of them that resonated from their own lives: forced sterilization, abortion access, the particular strange violence of being epistemically invisible in the university halls at Emerson, the University of Connecticut, Harvard, or Yale– where many of them labored or where educated over the years– while being hypervisible as “black pussy” in the street (footnote 12). Did they feel pressure to create a singular platform in order to be seen? I want to ask each woman.
“What must have felt possible to these women in the moment that this picture was taken? What must have felt terribly precarious? Were they nervous?— Would this other black woman desire me (as a neighbor, comrade, friend, or lover?) at first meeting, or once she really, really got to know me?”
The women in this photo are a collective. They are together with a common intention of enacting a politics complex enough to hold all the pieces of their Black, woman, lesbian, socialist, meal-sharing, book-loving selves. And yet they are also not yet the formation that made them or their being-together iconic to us. Its core membership hadn’t yet authored its 1977 statement, which has laid a textual foundation for generations and multi-hemispheric Black feminist and anti-capitalist organizing.
Barbara Smith has made it plain that the first meeting of the Boston Chapter in January was small and contentious. Verner’s rhetoric in the meeting was evidently noxious enough that some people “never came back.” But Okazawa-Rey’s photograph is evidence that between January and November of 1974 there was enough belief in the emergence of a Black lesbian feminist socialist politics to keep seven women coming together, and to do so in a city where deep-seeded anti-blackness was about to escalate in the violent resistance to school desegregation, and where it was possible (like Los Angeles, Atlanta and…) for Black women to be missing and murdered without public outcry. The image is a testament to the connection-work that would distill the values of the Boston Chapter, so that it could become Combahee.
My friend Eshe Sherley, a Black feminist historian of Black working poor women’s organizing in 1970s Atlanta, reminds me that this is important. In order to move past the igniting prefigurative impulse, these women needed to exercise a fundamental vulnerability with one another. Without deeply knowing each other or the precise shape their political action would need to take, they had to first assess and move across difference to make collective action possible. Eshe says this is what Fannie Lou Hammer called “spade work:” the ordinary and unremarkable political business of sitting down with those around you, listening for what matters to them, sharing what matters to you, and figuring out what can be done from there. Reactions to Verner at the first meeting of the Boston Chapter attested to the reality that what it took to get into the room together and “see what we had” was not guaranteed to seamlessly bridge the radical aspiration of Black feminist community. And yet, I look at this photograph and see the small, needful work of continually showing up to make community as a critical part of the organizing.
Lessons for now: Seeing what we have
50 years after the Boston Chapter moved from a moment of emergence and excitement into vulnerable and materializing “spade work” in their first meeting, we are living in a world where Combahee’s best-known contribution, the Black Feminist Statement, is a text that communicates in a subjunctive mode– a kind prefigurative political desire: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (footnote 13). Like in 1974 and 1977, those words still do not name the conditions in which we live. As I was thinking about how to answer the invitation to memorialize the Boston Chapter, I was also having conversations with people in my life who are steeped in the practice of Leftist organizing in the United States. Those people where exhausted by the embattled conditions of their work in context of an ongoing genocide in Palestine, ecocide, and the rightward lurch of domestic politics in the 2024 election cycle (particularly in form of the multiracial right).
In our current conditions we have every reason to believe that the rigorous liberatory work prefigured in the Combahee Statement will not be met with institutional regard– even under the flimsy auspices of neoliberalism, which have manifestly failed in light of the 2024 election—but outright fascistic opposition. We must hold in mind the small work of connection as the bridge to organizing for another world. When we make the emergence story of Combahee a focal point of our attention to its legacy, we can perhaps orient ourselves to embrace the vulnerability and uncertainty of collectivity that the foundations of radical organizing require, still. I am lingering on this aspect of the founding year of what would be Combahee because I feel the resonances, now, of their moment of slow comings-together of community where we are.
“We need to know, and frequently re-tell Black feminist organizing emergence stories because we need to be reminded that the structures, direction, or consensus we feel we need (and do need!) to activate our most desired and transformative political values most often do not simply fall into place.”
When asked about the origins of Combahee, Demita Frazier reminded Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor that the Boston Chapter began as “a group of very odd and interesting people— women from the Black church, Black Democratic politicians, and then a handful of roughhousing lesbians” (footnote 14). From that starting point of difference, friction, and vulnerability, something else came through. We need to know, and frequently re-tell Black feminist organizing emergence stories because we need to be reminded that the structures, direction, or consensus we feel we need (and do need!) to activate our most desired and transformative political values most often do not simply fall into place. Those elements are the result of what comes after the moment of invigoration. They come through in the social interval between coming together to “see what we have,” and the feeling that “we had finally found each other.”
About the author: Olivia R. Polk is a Black dyke living on territories of the Eno, Occaneechi Band of Saponi, Shakori and Tuscarora peoples (Durham, NC). Her writing and teaching draws on Black lesbians’ experiments with cultural production, criticism, political organizing, and intimate relationships to make the case for Black Lesbianism as an ethical way of life. She is a former graduate worker and earned a Ph.D. in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Africana Studies at UVA, and is an incoming Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Olivia’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, Feminist Theory (UK), The Black Scholar, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and on the Visual AIDS blog.
Footnotes
Barbara Smith, interview by Loretta Ross, transcript of video recording, May 7, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, 34.
“The Combahee River Collective Statement,” How We Get Free: Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Ed. Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 24.
“Statement,” 24.
Springer. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 9.
brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017), 3.
Springer, 58
Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2023), ebook edition without pagination. Thanks to my friend CP for reminding me of this book as I was writing.
Verner notably appeared on WGBH Boston’s African-American public affairs program, Say Brother, in a debate with Michele Wallace on the role of Black women in the Third World Women’s movement and (white) women’s liberation movement in the U.S. See “Say Brother; Say Sister: A Tribute to Third World Women; Brenda Verner comments on women's rights movement,” 11/18/1977, GBH Archives, accessed August 23, 2024, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_B56B1EA399F54B4CBBC3CF2762F47CBD.
Springer, 58.
See Samuel Farber, “Reflections on ‘prefigurative politics,’” International Socialist Review, Issue 92 (Spring 2014). https://isreview.org/issue/92/reflections-prefigurative-politics/index.html . Accessed August 26, 2024.
See Marian Jones, “’If Black Women Were Free:’ An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective,” The Nation. October 21, 2021. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/combahee-river-collective-oral-history/ . Accessed August 14, 2024; Karla Méndez, “An Interview with Dr. Kimberley Springer,” Black Women Radicals Blog. https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/kimberly-springer Accessed August 14. 2024.
Demita Fraizer Interview. How We Get Free, 123.
“Statement,” 22-23.
Demita Fraizer Interview, 126.