Kitchen Table published dozens of works, including Barbara’s own Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. In 1980, Barbara and her friend Audre Lorde co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first national publishing company run by and for women of color Barbara describes the founding of the press in this essay. Learn more about Frances Cress Welsing, the psychiatrist who responded to Barbara’s speech by declaring homosexuality “the death of the race,” here. In 1977, Barbara published “ Toward a Black Feminist Criticism ,” the groundbreaking essay that prompted her invitation to speak at Howard University the following year. Credit: Photo courtesy of Margo Okazawa-Rey. The Combahee River Collective’s first black feminist retreat, July 1977, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She was one of the primary authors of its statement, a powerful articulation of lesbian-inclusive black feminist politics.
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In 1974, Barbara co-founded the Combahee River Collective. For a list of books she’s written and edited, go here. Watch Barbara in conversation with young black feminist leaders here. Read about her frustrations with the mainstream LGBTQ civil rights movement in the Nation and the New York Times. Listen to Barbara talk about coming out here, and check out her oral history, which is kept at Smith College.įor more on Barbara’s broad and intersectional social justice agenda, read this Autostraddle interview and watch this lecture. For an in-depth look at her life and work, read Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks. Get better acquainted with Barbara Smith by watching this short video. Credit: Photo by Shalor/CC BY-SA 4.0 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Barbara Smith at the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association conference, November 17, 2017. We had a memorably far-ranging conversation about her lifetime of activism and scholarship-all accompanied by plenty of laughter, although some of the laughter you’ll hear is my incredulous response to the shocking things Barbara shared with me. It was Barbara’s founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and her involvement in the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights that caught my interest, but those topics were only the jumping-off point. (The other interviewees included Al Gore and Ellen DeGeneres, among others.) We first met in my living room in upstate New York nearly two decades ago for one of a dozen new interviews that I conducted for the second edition of Making Gay History.
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That’s the power of her unapologetic truth-telling, passion, and open-hearted joy for life.
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From Eric Marcus: Barbara Smith inspires me to sit up straight, pay attention, and strive to do better.