Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

In the fifth essay, Kelley focuses on the vision and contributions of Black women to Black radical movements for liberation. He opens the essay with a discussion of how Black women have often been ignored by the American Left in general and the Black radical movement specifically. The American Left often treats the Black community as a monolith, a vision Kelley describes as “ostensibly gender-neutral” (137). While early Black feminists did push back against this conception, it wasn’t contested more systematically until the late 1960s and early 1970. Kelley clarifies that he views Black feminists as distinct from the broader feminist movement not because they didn’t engage with the movement as a whole, but rather because they have racial, class, and gender critiques specific to their experience.

In the section entitled “Smashers of Myth […] Destroyers of Illusion,” Kelley details the contributions and struggles of Black women during what is known as “second wave” feminism, a period spanning from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, which was focused on equality and gender discrimination. He notes that despite figures like Florynce “Flo” Kennedy being founding members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a key second-wave feminist organization, mainstream and radical feminist groups at this time, such as the New York Radical Women group, did not specifically address the concerns of Black women. Later splinter groups, such as the Redstockings, which launched in 1969, did specifically incorporate antiracist principles. Nonetheless, these groups did not attract large numbers of Black women, many of whom found it ridiculous and offensive when white feminists claimed that the discrimination they faced was comparable to that faced by Black people.

Instead of joining feminist organizations, many Black women fought sexism within the Black radical movement itself. Some male leaders in the Black Power movement at the time argued that Black women oppressed and “emasculated” Black men by demanding gender equality (142). This view was popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published in 1965. This was not unique to the Black radical movement; Kelley notes that male white New Left leaders were also sexist and women in that movement faced similar struggles for recognition.

In response, Black women created their own organizations, such as the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), and started publishing their own writings analyzing the intersections of gender, race, and class, such as the 1970 anthology of essays The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade Bambara. These groups differed from white feminists in numerous ways, including around conceptions of motherhood and birth control. For white women, birth control was seen as a path for liberation from the demands of motherhood, whereas Black women were conscious of how birth control and sterilization had been forced on them due to pro-eugenics policies such as those advocated by the white feminist Margaret Sanger. Black women wanted to ensure that there were legal protections against involuntary sterilization while also providing access to birth control for those who wanted it. At the same time, they were fighting against those within the Black radical movement who took firm stances against all forms of birth control, such as the Nation of Islam.

Some felt that the Black feminist community was not sufficiently addressing the rights of lesbians, and so a group broke with the NBFO and formed the Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective was anticapitalist but did not believe that socialism would solve issues of race, gender, and sexual oppression. They also connected their work to the struggles faced by women in the Third World. In the section entitled “New Knowledge, New Dreams,” Kelley describes in detail how the work of the Combahee River Collective and other Black radical groups creates new modes of understanding, drawing from the text Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation by Julia Chinyere Oparah/Sudbury (1998). Kelley also describes the contributions of Angela Davis to the Black radical movement, specifically her work on behalf of imprisoned people. He notes that the work of these activists changed the definition of who is a source of authority on the Black experience to include women, artists, teachers, preachers, and others. He admires radical Black feminism because its definition of freedom “recognizes the deep interconnectedness of struggles around race, gender, sexuality, culture, class, and spirituality” (154), and the essay ends with a call for greater Black female leadership in radical organizations.