How We Get Free

Edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, this 2017 collection marks the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) Statement by compiling the full text of that founding document alongside four oral history interviews and conference remarks by historian Barbara Ransby. The CRC was a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974. Taylor's central argument is that the CRC's politics, rooted in socialism, coalition building, and an analysis of interlocking oppressions, remain essential to twenty-first-century struggles for liberation.

Taylor opens with the 2016 presidential election, observing that while 94 percent of Black women who voted cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, that figure represented only 64 percent of eligible Black women voters, part of the first decline in Black voter turnout in 20 years. She argues that explanations for Donald Trump's victory focused too narrowly on who voted, overlooking the conditions that kept millions from participating, including deep dissatisfaction among African Americans even after the Obama presidency. Taylor contends that Black women's experiences cannot be reduced to race or gender alone: African American women earn 64 cents for every dollar earned by white men, serve as the sole or primary provider in 80 percent of Black families, and constitute 25 percent of the poor. These realities demand a framework that accounts for how race, gender, and class compound one another.

Taylor traces the origins of the CRC, named after Harriet Tubman's 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people. The collective emerged as a radical alternative to the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which had itself formed in response to white feminist organizations' failure to address racism but whose analysis the CRC founders considered insufficient. Taylor credits the CRC with articulating the concept that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering, an idea Kimberlé Crenshaw later named "intersectionality" in 1989. She explains the CRC's key insights about identity politics: that oppression based on identity was a source of political radicalization, and that identity politics called not for exclusion but for organizing to confront the specific oppressions one faced. The CRC also identified class as central to Black women's experience, embraced internationalism by identifying with anticolonial movements worldwide, and argued that if the most oppressed people could be freed, everyone would have to be free.

The book reprints the CRC Statement in full. It opens by declaring the collective's commitment to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression simultaneously, and traces Black feminism's roots to earlier activists such as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells Barnett. The statement connects these roots to the disillusionment Black women experienced in both the white feminist movement and Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and introduces identity politics as the belief that "the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity" (19). It declares the collective's socialism while cautioning that a socialist revolution not also feminist and antiracist will not guarantee liberation. The statement rejects lesbian separatism as politically inadequate, affirms solidarity with progressive Black men, and outlines campaigns around sterilization abuse, abortion rights, support for survivors of domestic violence, and racism within the white women's movement.

The interview with Barbara Smith, coauthor of the CRC Statement and a credited founder of Black women's studies, provides a detailed account of the collective's formation. Smith explains that she suggested naming the group after the Combahee River to invoke a political action for liberation rather than a person. She traces her radicalization through the antiwar movement at Mount Holyoke College and participation in the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, and recounts encounters with sexism that made gender oppression concrete, such as being denied credit for a typewriter because she was an unmarried woman. Smith describes the collective's break from the NBFO and the Boston group's coalition work with socialist feminists on sterilization abuse and abortion rights. She recounts cofounding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde in 1980 and organizing seven Black feminist retreats beginning in 1977 that built a national network. Smith insists that identity politics was never intended to be exclusionary but called for solidarity across differences, and she identifies anticapitalism as what gives the CRC's Black feminism its revolutionary potential.

Beverly Smith, Barbara's twin sister and the third coauthor of the statement, describes growing up in an all-female household in Cleveland as foundational to her feminism. She recounts becoming politically active as a teenager through the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), picketing Cleveland's board of education over de facto school segregation, and meeting civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. At the University of Chicago, she encountered overt racism from professors and was shut out of Black political circles, leaving her without a political community until she attended the NBFO's first conference in 1973. Beverly identifies the CRC's major contribution as developing an analysis of how oppressions compound each other, arguing that existing frameworks, whether socialist, feminist, or civil rights, each offered only a partial view. She emphasizes the collective's impact in Boston, where its presence held the broader movement accountable on race, and describes the collective's response to a series of murders of Black women in the late 1970s, including producing a safety pamphlet and organizing a demonstration that drew a diverse crowd.

Demita Frazier, the third coauthor, describes her political awakening in Chicago between 1967 and 1969, including being expelled from a predominantly white high school for organizing an antiwar walkout and discovering feminism at 16 through Celestine Ware's book Woman Power. She recounts a brief involvement with the Black Panther Party's breakfast program, which she left because of persistent sexual harassment, and her work with the Jane Collective, an underground Chicago network that helped women obtain then-illegal abortions. Frazier explains that the CRC evolved from the NBFO's Boston chapter when the group found the national organization's politics too conservative. She clarifies that the CRC Statement incorporated economic analysis because the collective could not examine Black women's condition without addressing capitalism. Reflecting on the collective's seven-year existence, Frazier calls for new structures, including cooperatives and Black feminist Freedom Schools designed to teach the history of cooperatives and socialist thinking.

Alicia Garza, cocreator of #BlackLivesMatter and special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, describes discovering the CRC Statement through the anthology This Bridge Called My Back while at UC San Diego. A documentary about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's connections to the eugenics movement prompted Garza to leave the organization's campus program and seek out Black feminist thought instead. She recounts nearly a decade of organizing in Oakland and San Francisco where Black women did most of the work yet rarely led organizations. At a 2007 meeting of Black left organizers, roughly 150 people were present but only four were women; when Garza asked where Black queer women fit in a vision of liberation, the room fell silent. These experiences, shared with fellow organizer Patrisse Khan-Cullors, directly shaped Black Lives Matter's centering of Black women and queer politics. Garza calls for a new vision of Black socialism and argues the movement must engage with electoral organizing to build tangible power.

The book closes with remarks by historian and activist Barbara Ransby, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ransby identifies five principles in the CRC Statement: materialism rooted in the lived experiences of poor and working-class Black women, self-determination, explicit anticapitalism, intersectionality before the term existed, and radically democratic practice. She argues that the Movement for Black Lives, the broader Black-led coalition connected to Black Lives Matter, has embraced radical Black feminist praxis as its ideological foundation, citing organizations like Black Youth Project 100, which frames its work through a queer Black feminist lens. Ransby distills the CRC's legacy into three directives: speak truth to power, choose to fight in the face of threats, and always ally with those at the margins.