How We Get Free

And it talked about her having planned and led this raid on the Combahee River that freed over 750 people who were enslaved. So when we were talking about becoming independent and what to name ourselves, I suggested Combahee.

{"page": 18}

Read in the copy the archive holds, the Haymarket 2017 EPUB, in the chapter carrying Barbara Smith's interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The same text is in the corpus at work:w8d50e3ae44a8670c, whose corpus record names that same EPUB as its source file. NO PRINTED PAGE IS GIVEN because the copy on the shelf is an EPUB with no pagination; the corpus reports a page for this chunk, but it is derived from the EPUB rather than read off a printed page, so it is not offered as a locator. This is Smith's own account and it is what the claim rests on. The collective's 1977 statement never explains the name; the note printed with the statement in Home Girls does, and Taylor's own introduction to this volume dates the raid to 1853, but neither is Smith speaking. Nothing in the quoted span is altered.

I might not have called what we did “original” Black feminism, but instead wrote that the reason Combahee’s Black feminism is so powerful is because it’s anticapitalist. 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.

{"page": 35}

Read in the copy the archive holds, the Haymarket 2017 EPUB, at the end of Barbara Smith's interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, immediately before the chapter's endnotes. The same text is in the corpus at work:w8d50e3ae44a8670c, whose corpus record names that same EPUB. NO PRINTED PAGE IS GIVEN: the shelf copy is an EPUB without pagination. Asad Haider quotes the same passage in Mistaken Identity and cites it at page 67 of this edition, which is how the archive first found it, and Haider's own copy carries the sentence a clause shorter, beginning 'The reason Combahee's Black feminism is so powerful'; the wording here is taken from the book, not from Haider, and includes the clause he drops. Smith says in the sentence before that she first put it this way in an email a few weeks before the interview. Nothing in the quoted span is altered.

In 2005 she was elected to the Albany, New York, Common Council and served two terms (2006–2013).

{"page": 87}

Read in the copy the archive holds, the Haymarket 2017 EPUB, in the contributor biographies. The same text is in the corpus at work:w8d50e3ae44a8670c, whose corpus record names that same EPUB. NO PRINTED PAGE IS GIVEN: the shelf copy is an EPUB without pagination. THIS IS THE PUBLISHER'S BIOGRAPHY, NOT SMITH'S OWN WORDS, which is why the claim it supports is filed reported rather than documented. The same book's biography also gives her editorship of Home Girls and the founding of Kitchen Table. Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around agrees in its own contributor biography, 'served two terms as a member of the City of Albany's Common Council', and in its editors' chapter introduction, 'From 2006 to 2013, Barbara served in elective office'. Smith's own 2012 essay states the election but cannot state service through 2013. Nothing in the quoted span is altered.