As Black feminists,

it is our political mandate to know and examine our rich legacies, lineages, and histories across time, space, and place. It is imperative that we recognize and honor those who paved the way for us to understand Black feminisms as a discipline, praxis, politic, identity, and way of life.

Powered by Black Women Radicals and The School for Black Feminist Politics, Black Feminism Lives! Summit is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Power of Black Feminist Politics. A watershed moment in history of Black feminist politics, the NBFO gave rise to other formidable and pioneering Black left feminist organizations such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Alliance of Black Feminists.

An intergenerational Black feminist political convening, Black Feminism Lives! is an homage to the legacy of the NBFO and Black feminist movements and organizers worldwide, who have inspired and politicized a generation of Black feminists, then, now, and for years to come.

The NBFO emerged from several meetings of Black women at the offices of the National Organization of Women in New York City. The inaugural meeting of the NBFO was initiated to “...discuss Black women and their relationship to the feminist movement” (Hull and Smith, 2003, p. 12). Discussing their commonalities, they came together to not only repudiate racialized and gendered stereotypes but to also center the reproductive justice for Black women, as they recognized the patriarchal and misogynistic response to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision by many Black nationalists (Springer, 2005, p. 51).

In Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (2005), author Kimberly Springer examines the emergence of the NBFO and the importance of their initial meetings as a tool for Black feminist political consciousness-raising:

In May 1973, a group of Black feminists came together to establish the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). With members such as Margaret Sloan-Hunter, an early editor of Ms. Magazine and chairwoman and the only president of the NBFO; Doris Wright, Black feminist writer; Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, lawyer, radical feminist, and founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW); Jane McDougal Galvin-Lewis, vice-chair of the NBFO and staff member of the Women’s Action Alliance; Eleanor Holmes-Norton, lawyer and politician; organizers Deborah Singletary, Eugenia Wilshire, Dorothy King, Beverly Davis, and more, the NBFO was formulated in response to racist and sexist exclusion Black women endured in the civil rights, Black nationalist, and (white) women’s movements (Springer, 2005, pgs. 50, 51, 52, 68).

“In a 1974 report to Ms. Magazine on the founding of the National Black Feminist Organization, Margaret Sloan, the organization’s only president, describes how a three-hour discussion unexpectedly continued on well into the night: ‘We listened. We laughed. We interrupted each other, not out of disrespect, but out of that immediate identification with those words and feeling that we had each said and felt…many times alone. We had all felt guilty and crazy about our beliefs. And yet, all those things that have divided Black women from each other in the past, kept us from getting to that room sooner, seemed not to be important” (p. 50).

National Black Feminist Organization, Statement of Purpose, 1973

The distorted male-dominated media image of the Women's Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women, especially Black women. The Movement has been characterized as the exclusive property of so-called white middle-class women and any Black women involved in this movement have been seen as selling out, dividing the race, and an assortment of nonsensical epithets. Black feminists resent these charges and have therefore established The National Black Feminist Organization, in order to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast-aside half of the Black race in Amerikkka, the Black woman.

Black women have suffered cruelly in this society from living the phenomenon of being Black and female, in a country that is both racist and sexist. There has been very little real examination of the damage it has caused on the lives and on the minds of Black women. Because we live in a patriarchy, we have allowed a premium to be put on Black male suffering. No one of us would minimize the pain or hardship or the cruel and inhumane treatment experienced by the Black man. But history, past or present, rarely deals with the malicious abuse put upon the Black woman. We were seen as breeders by the master; despised and historically polarized from/by the master’s wife; and looked upon as castrators by our lovers and husbands. The Black woman has had to be strong, yet we are persecuted for having survived.

We will strengthen the current efforts of the Black Liberation struggle in this country by encouraging all of the talents and creativities of Black women to emerge, strong and beautiful, not to feel guilty or divisive, and assume positions of leadership and honor in the black community. We will encourage the Black community to stop falling into the trap of the white male Left, utilizing women only in terms of domestic or servile needs. We will continue to remind the Black Liberation Movement that there can’t be liberation for half the race. We must, together, as a people, work to eliminate racism, from without the Black community, which is trying to destroy us as an entire people; but we must remember that sexism is destroying and crippling us from within.

Source: Retrieved from the University of Michigan | Originally published in To Seize the Moment: A Retrospective on the National Black Feminist Organization (1988) by Beverly Davis; also published in Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (2005) by Kimberly Springer

 Meet the NBFO Summit Committee

Jaimee A. Swift, Chair

Dr. Jaimee A. Swift (she/her) is the creator, founder, and executive director of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics(SBFP), the Black feminist political education arm of Black Women Radicals. The mission of the SBFP is to empower Black feminisms in Black Politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives.

Swift is an Assistant Professor of Black Politics at James Madison University. Her research examines Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ+ women's organizing in Salvador, da Bahia, Brazil and their resistance against state, structural, and symbolic violence since Brazil's democratic transition from military dictatorship from the 1980's to present day. Moreover, she analyzes how their organizing is critical to challenging anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ+ violence and femicide in Brazil and transnationally. Swift is the co-author, along with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography on Black feminist icon, Barbara Smith.

Houreidja Tall, Committee Member

Houreidja Tall (she/her) is a New York City-based journalist who explores the stories of people across the African diaspora, highlights communities that are disregarded by traditional media and shows the nuances in their lives. She holds a Master’s degree in Engagement Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Brooklyn College.

Karla Mendez, Committee Member

Karla Mendez (she/her) is currently a student at Brown University, pursuing a master’s in American Studies. She recently graduated from the University of Central Florida, where she majored in Interdisciplinary Studies with a double minor in Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include representations of Black American and Latin American women in visual art, literature, performance, and poetry, Black feminist histories and movements, Black American and Latin American women-written literature, Black and Latina cultural productions, and social structures. She is the lead columnist for the Black Women Radicals column, Black Feminist Histories and Movements. She has forthcoming articles in Ampersand Journal and Latinx Project’s Intervenxions. You can follow her on Instagram at @kmmendez.

Zainab Floyd, Committee Member

Zainab Floyd is a Haitian and Afro-American multi-disciplinary artist born and based in New York. Floyd is interested in themes of Black feminism, and post-colonialism. Zainab is the founder and artistic director of Caribbean Archive. An archival page of Black Caribbean women who have created a scholarship of work that is representative of agency and resistance. She is also the co-founder of ZAZA Uptown, an artist collective founded by Angelica Calderon and Floyd, dedicated to the progress of Afro-Caribbean femmes, women, GNC artists in uptown New York.

Black Women Radicals (BWR) is a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting Black women and gender expansive people’s radical political activism. Rooted in intersectional and transnational feminisms and Womanisms, we are committed to empowering Black women and gender expansive activists and centering their political, intellectual, and cultural contributions to the field of Black Politics across time, space, and place in Africa and in the African Diaspora.

The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP) is a Black feminist political education initiative and hub powered by Black Women Radicals. Established in 2020, the mission of SBFP is to empower Black Feminisms in Black Politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives. The SBFP’s goal is to illuminate what has often been obscured and neglected in regards to our Black feminist histories, political memories, and productions, so that our past, present, and future understandings of Black feminist thought and behavior can be understood more fully and completely.

Black Feminism Lives! Summit