Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud

the early staff of Ms. magazine. It also included acclaimed poets Audre Lorde and Cheryl Clarke within its shifting membership, as well as the writer and political activist Chirlane McCray, who became the first lady of New York City in 2014. The Smith sisters had both been active in CORE in Cleveland during the 1960s, and the civil rights movement had a deep influence on both their theoretical and organizing work. “I always say that’s the movement that shaped my politics, because it was the first movement I was involved in, but also because of the values of the civil rights movement, particularly the nonviolence,” Barbara Smith recalled in a 2016 interview. That embrace of the civil rights tradition was one factor that set her and her collaborators apart from many black nationalist contemporaries in the seventies; gender politics divided them even more dramatically. “Black women were supposed to walk seven steps behind and have babies for the nation,” Smith explained. “I’m not saying that everybody who was a black nationalist had those reductive, misogynistic views of women, but there was enough that it definitely affected people like me.”¹⁸

      Combahee tackled an array of local organizing projects that involved questions of race, gender, and sexuality, such as mobilizing support for Kenneth Edelin, a black doctor who was charged and convicted of manslaughter after performing a legal abortion, and defending Ella Mae Ellison, a black woman who was falsely convicted of first-degree murder of a police officer. They organized a major feminist response to a series of murders of black women in Boston that had been largely ignored by authorities and the mainstream media. Some black community leaders—male leaders—had viewed the murders in strictly racial terms and suggested that women should protect themselves by only going out accompanied by male companions. “It’s true that the victims were all Black and that Black people have always been targets of racist violence in this society, but they were also all women,” explained a pamphlet that the Combahee Collective produced about the murders. “Our sisters died because they were women just as surely as they died because they were Black.” The pamphlet, originally entitled “Six Black Women, Why Did They Die?” offered self-protection tips and lists of both organizing projects and resources for support, and went into printing after printing as the number of murders grew; according to Barbara Smith, who drafted the initial text, the collective distributed some 40,000 copies.¹⁹

      It was the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 manifesto, though, that had the greatest and most lasting political impact. “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” the Combahee River Collective statement read. “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” This analysis offered a profound shift in perspective. Rather than viewing those, like black lesbians, who simultaneously experienced multiple forms of oppression as representing a narrow constituency, as classic interest-group politics might do, the collective argued that their unique vantage point gave them a broader, deeper, and more nuanced view of the complex workings of power and domination. This vision of identity was rooted in a socialist-feminist framework: “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses,” the Collective wrote, with the manifesto first appearing in a collection entitled Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.” This influence, all too rarely acknowledged, provided the liveliest and most consequential legacy of the socialist tradition in this period. The women of color feminism created by the Combahee River Collective and others in the late 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for what would later be termed intersectionality, a focus on the ways systems of power and domination combine and overlap that has been a defining influence on the Movement for Black Lives and the activism of the Millennial generation more broadly.²⁰

      Combahee River Collective leaflet, circa 1979 (designer: Urban Planning Aid; courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives)

      But while the charges of narrowness and fragmentation lodged against identity politics rather missed the point, there was undoubtedly a general tendency toward localism, introspection, and small-scale organizing throughout this period of contraction and restructuring. With all the focus on community-based projects and institution-building, large mobilizations with large ambitions were few. There was great pragmatism in this shift but a sense of resignation as well—a recognition that acting on a scale larger than the local had become very difficult indeed. Rudy Perkins, an activist with the Clamshell Alliance and later the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, remembers reading in an anarchist journal of the time a “lovely little poem drawing an analogy of tidal pools on the beach, that the wave had receded and now all that was left was little bits of active life in little pools scattered around. And that’s how it felt.” It was a far cry from the revolutionary dreams of just a few years before. But in some of those little pools Perkins spoke of, activists would experiment—with varying degrees of success—with making their ambitions larger, and direct action would be their primary method.

      On August 1, 1976, fourteen men and four women carrying sleeping bags, oak and sugar maple saplings, and small corn plants marched down the railroad tracks leading into the construction site for the Seabrook Nuclear Station, located within an ecologically fragile tidal marsh on the New Hampshire coast. Earlier that summer, despite vocal public opposition throughout New England, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued a permit for the Seabrook facility. In response, several dozen anti-nuclear campaigners, assisted by two seasoned organizers from the Boston-area office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Quaker pacifist organization, met and decided to push their fight to a new level. The time had come, they felt, for “direct, nonviolent action such as one-to-one dialogue, public prayer and fasting, public demonstrations, site occupation and other means which put life before property.” In an allusion to the mollusks that environmental researchers said would be harmed by the Seabrook nuclear plant, they named their new organization the Clamshell Alliance.²¹

      The founders of the Clam (as the group was colloquially known) took much of their inspiration from an extraordinary anti-nuclear direct action that had taken place the previous year in Wyhl, West Germany. After police brutally evicted a modest encampment of 150 protesters from a nuclear construction site there, some 28,000 people, ranging from conservative local farmers to counterculture radicals, swarmed the site and took it over. Thousands stayed and held the space for nearly a year, ultimately forcing the German government to abandon the project. The Wyhl encampment, and the West German anti-nuclear movement more generally, would repeatedly serve as touchstones for direct-action organizers in the United States.²²

      The eighteen people who marched to the Seabrook plant had no illusions that their small group could replicate the Wyhl experience, but the items they carried onto the site gestured toward the ideal of permanently reclaiming the site. They brought the young trees in “a symbolic attempt to reforest the area there,” explained one of the protesters, Rennie Cushing, in an interview just before the action; the corn was “a symbol of the native people that once inhabited this land.” There was a Native American burial ground on the nuclear site, testimony to that historic habitation, which inspired a small but significant Native American presence in anti-Seabrook organizing. Cushing continued, “Also, the corn shows our intention to be here in the fall to harvest it and the trees show our intention to be here at a later date and view them at maturity with our children and our grandchildren.”²³

      The group of eighteen barely managed to get the corn and saplings into the ground before they were arrested for trespassing and hauled away by the police. But they achieved what they wanted: their act of civil disobedience was prominently covered by the local media. Three weeks later, in an escalation that had been carefully planned from the start, 180 people were arrested in an even more widely publicized second occupation attempt. Though activists around the country had long rallied, gathered petitions, attended hearings, and lobbied politicians in opposition