Thinker — Interlocking Oppressions — The Combahee River Statement

The Combahee River Collective

1974 — 1980

A Black feminist, lesbian, socialist collective founded in Boston in 1974 by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier. They named themselves for Harriet Tubman's Combahee River raid of June 2, 1863, which she planned and guided herself — the first woman in the Civil War to plan and lead a major armed military operation, freeing more than 750 people in a single night, after a decade of leading people north on the Underground Railroad without losing one.

01The name

Tubman planned the Combahee River raid and guided the gunboats up the river herself. She ran the scout network that mapped the Confederate mines in the river, moved unseen, and brought the unseen out behind her. The lineage is carried in the collective's naming itself.

02Interlocking oppressions

The Combahee River Collective Statement, issued in 1977, said it plainly: the major systems of oppression are interlocking. If Black women were free, the destruction of all the other systems of oppression would have to follow — because the freedom of those at the intersection of every excluded category cannot be partial. They were not arguing for a place in the existing categories. They were rupturing the categories so something else could be.

03The practice before the name

The collective named this structure twelve years before Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it the theoretical word intersectionality. The reading was collective, and the work was the practice itself — consciousness-raising circles, mutual aid, political education — before there was a name for what it was doing.