The 1977 Combahee River Collective’s statement was a defining moment in black feminist thought. The statement was written by a group of Boston-based black women who started meeting in 1974. They named themselves after the Civil War–era Combahee River Raid led by black freedom fighter Harriet Tubman and paid homage to nineteenth-century black women activists such as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells. After years of working together, the Collective produced a statement which announced its goal to develop an “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” and asserted, “the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.” The Collective’s statement reflects several of the key tenets of black feminism as it honors the contributions of its predecessors in challenging the interlocking forces of oppression and details what we now recognize as an intersectional analysis or “intersectionality” in its collective action and theorizing of liberation for all.

As the Combahee River Collective illustrates, black feminists have long organized around and theorized the ways race, class, and sexuality as well as other categories of difference interact with each other to profoundly shape women’s lived experiences in the United States. Black women have also examined how these categories inform the interconnected issues of difference, identity, and power. This work of thinking and organizing at the intersections evolved across centuries of black women’s activism and political thought from Sojourner Truth and the early abolition movement, through the 1890s with Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign and Anna Julia Cooper writing from her “unique position” as a “Black Woman from the South,” to Claudia Jones’s call in the 1950s for more attention to the “special oppression” faced by the black woman “as Negro, as woman, and as worker,” and Fran Beale’s 1969 pamphlet Double Jeopardy. These foundational politics present a continuing challenge to the structures of white supremacy and patriarchy.

During the 1960s and 1970s, as black women organized and served as leaders in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, black feminist thought and activism carved a stronger foothold in politics. Black feminists were central in emerging women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) movement. Numerous black women–led organizations emerged at this moment such as the Black Women Liberation Organization (BWLO) formed in 1968 and the more mainstream National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) founded in 1970. The BWLO was founded by women active in the powerful student-led civil rights organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By 1971 the BWLO changed their name to the Third World Women’s Alliance and began publishing their groundbreaking newspaper, Triple Jeopardy: Racism, Imperialism, Sexism. Other foundational texts of the era included Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman; Audre Lorde’s second collection of poems, Cables to Rage; and Angela Davis’s 1971 field-defining essay, “The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slavers,” which she wrote while in jail awaiting trial in Marin County, California.

Black women’s liberatory vision and analysis of interlocking oppressions would continue to fuel black feminist politics even as the movements of the 1960s and 1970s faced increasing counter pressures. In 1983, Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” by declaring “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” Walker did so in an effort to note a black woman and woman of color feminist politics defined not only by gender but also race, sexuality, and community. This framing of black feminism or womanism stood as a power corrective to much of the mainstream (white feminist) activism. This type of analysis was also put forth by such groups as the National Welfare Rights Organization’s (NWRO) in its calls for economic justice for African American women and families and black women’s demands for not simply abortion rights but a more expansive reproductive justice and access to full health care. Such efforts challenged the single-axis analysis which often defined white feminist politics and concerns during the 1970s and 1980s. In her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a name to this longstanding practice of theorizing the interconnectedness of multiple categories of difference such as race, gender, and class, and making visible the ways oppression operated across multiple axes. She called this analysis of the interlocking forces of difference and power “intersectionality.” The term would stick and come to stand for perhaps the most widely circulated black feminist concept. Yet, even in Crenshaw’s theorizing, which discusses anti-discrimination legal cases, she also acknowledges the ways Sojourner Truth’s nineteenth-century critique of white feminists’ “single-axis framework” set the terms for her insights.

In this way, “intersectionality” names a common theme that has emerged from black women’s long history of political thought and activism. Black feminists’ emphasis on the ways race, class, and sexuality as well as other categories must be taken into account in detailing women’s experiences of gender has profoundly challenged dominant conceptions of gender and power. When black women called their experiences a “special problem” or “unique,” they revealed the ways their struggles couldn’t be analyzed simply by adding race, gender, class, or sexuality. In other words, new experiences are created at their points of connection and strategies of resistance must address these differences. Such insights have become the most noted contributions of black feminist theory to activism and academic scholarship as it informs a range of disciplines and methodologies. It has also broadened our understandings of difference and power in our social world and provocatively suggested that all identities and structures of power are intersectional.