Introduction: Black Feminism as the “Vanguard Center”

In this chapter, I examine the emergence of Black feminism in the second wave, a movement that grew out of changes in the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights movement was predominantly rooted in local community institutions in the South; women played key roles within these institutions (Crawford et al. 1990; McNair Barnett 1993; Payne 1989, 1990; Robnett 1997). But by the mid-sixties, the movement's social base had shifted, becoming younger and more northern; with this shift of the movement's social base came an infusion of a masculinist version of Black nationalism. Black women were subsequently discouraged from keeping the positions of responsibility that they had held, and were asked to take “supportive” roles behind the scenes. These role constrictions sat poorly with many Black women, who argued that male activists were being influenced by a white middle-class conception of traditional gender roles, roles that were in any case alien to the Black community, and which contradicted the revolutionary goals that movement activists espoused.