Barbara Smith
AKA: Barbara Smith
The Record
Smith was among the founders of the Combahee River Collective.1 She was one of the three women who wrote "A Black Feminist Statement" in 1977, and she wrote the draft the group revised.2
Forty years on, asked how Combahee's black feminism differed from other kinds, she named the part she thought did the work: "One would expect Black feminism to be antiracist and opposed to sexism. Anticapitalism is what gives it the sharpness, the edge, the thoroughness, the revolutionary potential."3
She is ranking those three, not listing them. Race and sex are the price of entry. The economics is what she credits for the force, and she said it in 2017, having watched what the word became.
She spent the next two decades putting black feminism into print. She cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981, in her own words "the first publisher in North America committed to producing and distributing the work of Third World women".4 She edited the 1983 anthology Home Girls.5 The point was control: the press existed so the writing did not have to pass through anyone else, including feminist publishers.
Then she took the theory into a government. Albany elected her to its Common Council in November 2005,6 and she served two terms.7 Writing in 2012, she described what she carried in with her: "I rely upon the lessons of Black feminism every day in the very different political arena in which I now operate."6
That sentence is why this file matters. One of its authors was still applying an analysis three women wrote up in Boston in 1977, in city government, thirty-five years later. Doctrines usually reach institutions through other people. This one walked in itself.
Sources
- Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier were among the founders of the Combahee River Collective. Source: How We Get Free, Demita Frazier interview, Beverly Smith interview, and contributor biographies. Frazier on beginning the Boston NBFO chapter, Beverly Smith on Barbara Smith beginning the Boston organising, and the contributor biography naming Frazier a founding member. ↩
- Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier wrote the Combahee River Collective's 1977 statement, "A Black Feminist Statement". Source: Barbara Smith, foreword to The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing In The Seventies and Eighties (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986), p. 3 ↩
- Barbara Smith later said that anticapitalism is what gives the Combahee River Collective's black feminism its edge. Source: Barbara Smith, interview by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017), the closing exchange of the interview ↩
- Barbara Smith cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1981. Sources: Barbara Smith, 'Our Stories: Women of Color', in Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks (eds.), Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (SUNY Press, 2014); Barbara Smith, interview by Matt Richardson, in Jones and Eubanks (eds.), Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (SUNY Press, 2014), on the beginning of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press ↩
- Barbara Smith edited the 1983 anthology Home Girls. Source: Copyright page of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith (Rutgers University Press, 2000; first published 1983 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press) ↩
- Barbara Smith was elected to the Albany Common Council in November 2005. Source: Barbara Smith, 'Black Feminist Activism: My Next Chapter' (2012), in Jones and Eubanks (eds.), Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (SUNY Press, 2014) ↩
- Barbara Smith served two terms on the Albany Common Council. Sources: Contributor biography of Barbara Smith, in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017); Contributor biography of Barbara Smith, in Jones and Eubanks (eds.), Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (SUNY Press, 2014) ↩
Relationship Ledger
No sourced connections on file.
Referenced in
Records whose text names Barbara Smith. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- Combahee River Collectiveis mentioned in