“We Cannot Live Without Our Lives”: Art-Activism and the Struggle for Black Women’s Lives in Boston, 1979

The Combahee River Collective’s political work in response to the murders of twelve Black women in Boston in 1979 is a crucial chapter in the history of Black queer socialist feminism, with important political lessons about resistance for activists and scholars today. This essay explores this history, with a focus on two benefit readings organized at the height of the movement in July 1979: one advertised as “An Evening of Poetry by Black Women” featuring Audre Lorde, Donna Kate Rushin, and Barbara Smith, among others, and a second reading featuring Lorde and Adrienne Rich. These readings created space for public mourning and resistance, affirmed life amid death, and committed participants to bearing witness and imagining freedom. I contend that they also played a critical role in the creation of a woman of color lesbian canon that is foundational to lesbian studies now. I contextualize Lorde’s “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices,” which was inspired by the Combahee River Collective’s organizing and read at both events, within this social movement history, underscoring its use as a political organizing tool while modeling an intersectional activist aesthetics that remains deeply influential to contemporary artists, activists, and theorists. Then as now, art and politics were central to challenging the invisibility and silence around the lives and deaths of Black women and to developing an antiracist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic political analysis and movement.