Black Feminism:
The Movement That Was There First

Sojourner Truth's 1851 "Ain't I a Woman?" speech — delivered at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio — is the founding text of Black feminist thought. Truth dismantles, in a few minutes, the Victorian ideology of womanhood that white suffragists were using as their political foundation: that women were too delicate for public life, too fragile for hardship, too emotional for politics. Truth, who had plowed fields, been beaten, and had her children sold away from her, asks simply: weren't all those things done to her? "And ain't I a woman?" The white women in the room had no answer.

Ida B. Wells documents lynching at personal risk and challenges both the white suffrage movement (which excluded Black women) and the Black male leadership (which sometimes minimized anti-Black violence that threatened to embarrass the race before white allies). Anna Julia Cooper, in A Voice from the South (1892), argues that Black women's liberation is the essential measure of racial progress — that the advancement of the race will be measured by the condition of its women. These are not peripheral figures. They are the intellectual architects of a tradition.

In 1977, a group of Black feminist women in Boston — the Combahee River Collective, named for Harriet Tubman's 1863 military raid — publishes a statement that becomes one of the most influential documents in American political thought. The statement, drafted primarily by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, articulates what is later named intersectionality before the word exists: the idea that Black women face oppressions that are not simply additive (racism plus sexism) but interlocking and mutually constituting.

The statement's key passage: "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously." The statement also coins the phrase "identity politics" — in its original meaning, the argument that people organize most effectively around their own specific material conditions. The phrase has since been distorted, stripped of its context, and weaponized against the very communities that created it.

In 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw publishes "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, coining the term intersectionality to describe what Sojourner Truth had pointed to and the Combahee Collective had articulated: that people who occupy multiple marginalized identities face specific forms of oppression that are not captured by analysis of any single identity category. Her example: Black women who faced workplace discrimination that was neither race discrimination (which affected Black men but not in the same way) nor sex discrimination (which affected white women but not in the same way) — but both simultaneously, creating a gap in legal protection that existing civil rights law could not address.

Intersectionality is now one of the most-cited frameworks in sociology, political science, gender studies, legal studies, and public health. It has been adopted (and often distorted) across political movements worldwide. It is also the most attacked concept in current American culture wars — which is itself a measure of its effectiveness. When a framework threatens existing power structures, the people with power attack it. The attacks on intersectionality are a form of evidence that the concept does what its creators intended: it names something real about how multiple oppressions operate, in a way that makes those oppressions harder to ignore.