Black feminism, if sometimes sidelined in the US feminist movement, emerged beside Black Power. Resisting institutionalized racism, sexism, and class oppression, it pursued equality for black and all women.

Black feminists embraced freedom struggle. Indeed, slave and free black women were essential in creating families, support networks, and churches, which grounded black survival and resistance. Many joined the women's rights and abolitionist movements. Post–Civil War, they led efforts for equal citizenship in groups such as the National Association of Colored Women, a catalyst of women's suffrage. They partnered in campaigns against Jim Crow, including disfranchisement, lynching, inferior education, and employment, and helped bring desegregation. But men usually dictated 1960s–70s progressive agendas, as the Women's Liberation or Gay Liberation agenda isolated black women. Yet, they championed the antipoverty campaign and were strong supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (1972), namely that “Equality of rights shall not be denied or abridged ... on account of sex.” It failed to achieve ratification.

Black feminists’ organizing quickened, however. One of them asserted: “What if more of us had decided to build multi-issued grass-roots organizations in our own communities that dealt with Black women's basic survival issues and at the same time did not back away from raising issues of sexual politics?” (Marable, Frazier, and Campbell, 2013, p. 110). For example, the National Black Feminist Organization (1973) charged affiliates in New York, Chicago, and other cities to uphold “positive self-images” of black women, as well as fight racism and sexism. Boston based and important in the Northeast, the Combahee River Collective (1974) adopted an anticapitalist, antiracist, and antisexist agenda. It sponsored retreats to plan protests against homophobia, poverty, domestic violence, or sterilization abuse of black and poor women in America and the Third World.

Their struggles continued. In the 1980s, while joining antiapartheid demonstrations at the South African Embassy, black feminist educators spearheaded the development of courses, research, and publishing on black women's experiences in Africa, America, and the Caribbean. Books such as All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982) did much to integrate the study and teaching of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, expanding knowledge of women and men from diverse cultural backgrounds. Also, after televised Senate confirmation hearings for black Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, black feminists protested.