That’s just how she was raised.īarbara and her twin sister Beverly were born in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her entire life she’s demanded justice and dignity for those whose voices aren’t heard. Credit: Photo by Tia Cross.Įric Marcus Narration: I’m Eric Marcus, and this is Making Gay History!īarbara Smith has never been a single-issue activist.
Sisters Beverly (at left) and Barbara Smith at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, October 14, 1979. Hear more audio from the march here and here, and read the program of events. Read more about the march here and listen to the speech Audre Lorde gave to the many thousands who assembled for the march’s rally. Īt the top of Barbara’s Making Gay History episode, she describes a photo of her and her sister at the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (you can see it below). For more audio recordings of Audre, visit the Lesbian Herstory Archives website. To learn more about Audre Lorde, watch this short video, listen to this interview about her experiences as a young black lesbian in 1950s New York City, or read her poetry. You can read it here and hear Barbara talk about it here. 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. 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. That’s the power of her unapologetic truth-telling, passion, and open-hearted joy for life. From Eric Marcus: Barbara Smith inspires me to sit up straight, pay attention, and strive to do better.