Words of Fire (6 page)

The two most important civil rights organizations in the black community—the National Urban League and the NAACP—supported the use of birth control because they believed that smaller families were more viable economically. This issue sparked controversy, however, within certain circles as nationalist concerns about racial extinction and traditional male views about women's primary role as mothers clashed with feminist demands for sexual autonomy among black women. There was a range of attitudes among black leaders on this issue. Marcus Garvey felt that contraceptives were retarding the growth of the race. Sociologist and Pan-Africanist William E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, argued in “The Damnation of Women” (1925) that women must be free to choose motherhood, and he repeated this progressive stance in “Black Folks and Birth Control” in the June 1932 issue of
Birth Control Review.

Concern for black working women also fueled black women's activism during the 1940s and the aftermath of World War II. Because of the labor shortage with men at war, thousands of black women left the rural South again and migrated to the North for better jobs in industry. The promise of a better life remained elusive, however, since they were relegated to the most menial, hazardous, low-paying factory jobs. Poor living conditions in crowded urban settings, job discrimination, the absence of child care facilities, and segregated, substandard housing produced a climate ripe for agitation.

One of the most radical voices during this era was Claudia Jones, whose family had migrated to Harlem from Trinidad in 1924. Economic hardship during the Depression caused her to drop out of school and get a factory job. At age eighteen, she joined the Young Communist League along with many other working-class Harlemites during the 1930s. During the 1940s, she became one of the most outspoken black Communists on the issue of women's rights; in a 1947 issue of
Political Affairs,
a Communist Party journal, she argued that black women, “as workers, as Negroes, and as women,” were “the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” (Jones, 4). In her passionate analysis of the situation of black women historically, the plight of the contemporary worker, and the struggles of militant “Negro women” for peace, civil rights, and economic justice, she anticipated a sophisticated black feminist discourse which was a generation away. Though she applauded women in organizations such as the National Association of Negro Women and trade unionists, she chastised the latter for being insensitive to the misery and urgent needs of domestic workers who were unprotected by labor legislation. She also made an insightful connection between the sexist treatment of black domestics and the dehumanizing treatment of black women in general. Reminiscent of Cooper and other nineteenth-century black women feminist-abolitionists, she exposed the racism of white women and reminded them that it was in their own selfinterest to work for black women's liberation “inasmuch as the super exploitation and oppression of Negro women tends to depress the standards of all women” (Jones, 12). Her prophetic call for the women's movement to embrace an antiracist agenda anticipated similar pleas by black feminists two generations later. “A developing consciousness on the woman question today ... must not fail to recognize that the Negro question ... is
prior
to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people, and [the] right for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights” (Jones, 15).

In the 1960s, black feminist struggle came to the forefront in a more sustained manner and among a larger group, mainly as a result of the failure of the Civil Rights and women's rights movements to address
the particular concerns of black women. Heightened consciousness about the confluence of racism and sexism in their lives was one result of their experiences with male chauvinism within the Civil Rights movement. In her autobiography,
The Trumpet Sounds
(1964), Anna Arnold Hedgeman describes her feelings about the male-dominant civil rights leadership and her experiences as the only woman on the planning committee for the 1963 March on Washington. When she discovered the omission of women as speakers on the program, she was appalled and wrote a letter to director A. Philip Randolph in which she alluded to black women's important roles in the Civil Rights movement. She also argued that “since the ‘Big Six' [civil rights leaders] [had] not given women the quality of participation which they [had] earned through the years,” (Hedgeman, 179), it was even more imperative that black women be allowed to speak. The outcome, according to Hedgeman, was that on the day of the March the wives of the civil rights leaders and a few other black women were asked to sit on the dais, Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words, and Rosa Parks was presented, but didn't speak. Hedgeman's response that historic day was one of disappointment: “We grinned, some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture” (Hedgeman, 180).

In 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, white Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staffers, discussed the sexist treatment of women in SNCC in a position paper entitled “Women of the Movement,” which they delivered at SNCC's Waveland Conference.
¹⁰
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, SNCC executive secretary (1966), died of cancer a year later at age twenty-five, and Kathleen Cleaver, a former SNCC worker and Black Panther, believed Robinson's death was caused in part by overwork and “the constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman” (Cleaver, 55). Similarly, Septima Clark, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) director of education in 1961, criticized the sexism of SCLC in her autobiography
Ready From Within:
“... those men didn't have any faith in women, none whatsoever. They just thought that women were sex symbols and had no contributions to make ... I had a great feeling that Dr. King didn't think much of women either ...” (Crawford, 195—96). She also confronted King about his nondemocratic style of leadership and eventually joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968 because of its women's rights agenda.

The publication in 1970 of Toni Cade's
The Black Woman: An Anthology,
Shirley Chisholm's autobiography
Unbought 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 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 the most disturbing publications during this decade-and-a-half-old family battle and is one of the most blatantly misogynist and racist texts to appear in print.