How We Get Free - Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free."

-Combahee River Collective Statement

The Combahee River Collective, a pathbreaking group of radical Black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and '70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members and contemporary activists reflect on the organization's contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

This expanded second edition features a new preface by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.

List of contents

Introduction

The Combahee River Collective Statement 

Barbara Smith 

Beverly Smith

Demita Frazier

Alicia Garza

Angela Davis

Comments by Barbara Ransby

Acknowledgments

Contributor Biographies

About the author

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. A professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, she is also a contributing writer at The New Yorker, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and a coeditor of Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, a semifinalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Product details

• Authors: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Taylor Keeanga-Yamahtta
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 13.01.2026
• EAN: 9798888903643
• ISBN: 979-8-88890-364-3
• Illustrations: No
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Political Ideologies, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Radicalism, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Feminism & feminist theory, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, Feminism and feminist theory, HISTORY / African American & Black