Out-FM show aired on Tues., December 16, 2025

Press play to stream show or green down arrow to download mp3 file.

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The Iconic Black Lesbian Socialist-Feminist

Combahee River Collective

Members of Combahee River Collective at the March and Rally for Bellana Borde against Police Brutality (Boston, January 15, 1980). Photo credit: Susan Fleischmann.

The Combahee River Collective (1974-80) was a Boston-based group of Black lesbian socialist-feminists that blazed trails of mutual solidarity, forged bold new Black feminist theory (particularly their 1977 Collective Statement), and led important struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. The Collective pioneered the development of the concept of overlapping oppressions that Kimberle Crenshaw would later coin as "intersectionality." (They took their name from the Combahee River (SC) Raid, an 1863 military action led by Harriet Tubman that freed 750 enslaved people.)

On this Out-FM program, you will hear co-founder and leader Demita Frazier recount and analyze the events leading to Combahee's founding -- sparked by a combination of widespread racism in the mostly white-led mainstream feminist movement; sexism and homophobia by Black men in the Black Power movement; and the lack of support for socialism or lesbian freedom in the then-new National Black Feminist Organization. She also talks about the important work done by the Collective.

Demita Frazier spoke in October at the Lesbian Lives Conference, hosted by Sinister Wisdom (a multicultural lesbian arts and literary journal),the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and CLAGS: the Center for LGBT Studies at the City University of New York. This was part of the continued celebration of the 50th anniversary of Combahee. We thank Lesbian Lives for permitting us to broadcast this important presentation.

Demita Frazier at the Lesbian Lives Conference

DEMITA FRAZIER'S BIO (from Lesbian Lives): Demita Frazier, J.D., is an unrepentant lifelong Black feminist, social justice activist, thought leader, writer, and teacher. She is a founding member of the Combahee River Collective who has remained a committed activist in Boston for over 44 years, was a radical even as a child. While a high school student in Chicago, she helped organize a student walk out in protest of the Vietnam War. She has worked in coalition with many organizations on the issues of reproductive rights, domestic violence, the care and protection of endangered children, urban sustainability issues affecting food access in poor and working-class communities, and a host of other important issues affecting communities of color. She has been an organizer and architect behind the scenes of many movement initiatives including the Chicago Black Panther Party’s Breakfast Program, Jane Collective, and more. After receiving her JD from Northeastern University, Frazier contributed to local and national campaigns for gender and racial justice. For more on Demita’s extraordinary activist journey, please see Keeanga–Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She has been a consistent advocate for the unequivocal freedom of Black women so that we can get on with the urgent business of freeing the world.

A short history of the Combahee River Collective is available here.