News & Letters, August-September 1998

Barbara Smith on the Black Radical Congress

I was overwhelmed by the political energy at the Congress, which had 2,000 people present. Because of the numbers there, it is hard to think of a historical precedent. The Niagara Movement comes to mind perhaps as a comparable benchmark, but there weren't the numbers. Seneca Falls comes to mind, but it is not a date of great significance for Black women. The Congress was reinvigorating for the Black liberation movement, although in the present historic context we will have to see if this can be sustained. It is true there are political differences among those who attended especially around sexual political issues. All the documents published before the Congress stated that it was opposed to homophobia and to sexism. These were at times major sticking points. The issue of nationalist versus socialist agendas was also up for debate. These points are connected since some strains of nationalism have been reluctant to confront sexism and homophobia and have even questioned if these struggles are relevant to Black communities.

The "Intergenerational Dialogue" Friday night was one of the most memorable evenings of my life. It was the first time I was ever invited to speak as a peer with leaders in the Black liberation movement. Although I am a couple of years younger than Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver and Amiri Baraka, I am part of the same generation of Black activists from the sixties. But I believe because I am out as a lesbian and have done much of my work in the Black feminist movement, I have usually not been included under the umbrella of Black liberation.

At the dialogue, I spoke along with General Baker, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Nelson Peery, and Ahmed Rahman. I was the only one who received a standing ovation. At the Plenary the next morning, Cathy Cohen, another Black lesbian feminist, also got a standing ovation. This response was not because everyone there was necessarily on the same page in fighting sexism and homophobia, but I believe it was because people recognized courage when they saw it. At those moments people had a sense of what we had been through and what it took for us to operate with integrity in relationship to our sexual orientations in a Black context.

At the Black Feminist Institute held on Thursday, the day before the Congress opened, I was asked to give a brief presentation on the history of Black feminist organizing in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which included our work in the Combahee River Collective [in the 1970s]. Although it was well attended, I was struck by how few Black women have had the opportunity to do Black feminist organizing on Black women's issues within the Black community.

Not many people across the country have done this kind of organizing. Many women of color have worked on domestic violence and other women's issues, but that work has often been in coalition with white organizations. Our work with Combahee was rare because we were doing it in the Black community and not in academic contexts or other environments where it might be more comfortable to raise Black feminist critiques. To this day there are very few community-based autonomous Black feminist organizations. I believe the basic reason few of us have had the opportunity to raise Black feminist issues in the Black community is fear. Black women wonder: If I raise issues about sexism in the Black community, what will happen to me? How many friends will I lose? How many will ostracize me? How much violence might I be subjected to? This is the kind of challenge we face in this movement. It was remarkable to have space made for these dialogues at the Congress.

It was painful, however, to have to choose between attending the lesbian/gay caucus and the feminist caucus meeting, which met at the same time. The lesbian and gay sessions were among the most exciting meetings I have ever been in because they created a network of people who are activist, leftist and out in the context of whatever political work they do, whether gay related or not. Although Black lesbians and gays have formed a number of organizations, their purpose is usually to be with others sharing the same sexual identity and not necessarily to do political work with a radical critique of the system.

It was wonderful for me to be in a room full of out lesbians and gays who could relate to the concept and were committed to attending something called the Black Radical Congress. I spoke there about the Millennium madness [a reference to conflicts over a proposed march on Washington-ed.] and the idea some of us have been discussing for a national lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered people of color conference in the year 2000.

This meeting itself was historic. As Barbara Ransby [one of the organizers] said at one of the planning meetings, just by virtue of the fact that the Black Radical Congress has asserted that it is against homophobia and sexism something unprecedented has been achieved politically. And of course with our commitment to continue organizing nationwide under the banner of the Black Radical Congress until the next Congress in 2000, we achieved a lot more than that.

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