In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, gathered in New Jersey for their second retreat, where they worked together to formulate a collaborative letter.

race and gender issues The Heresies Collective, whose membership consisted predominately of white women, had just published its third feminist art journal, titled “Lesbian Art and Artists,” but had neglected to feature a single woman of color. The Combahee River Collective, which was formed to raise consciousness about, had assembled to craft a response.

“We find it appalling,” they wrote, “that a hundred years from now it will be possible for women to conclude that in 1977 there were no practicing Black and other Third World lesbian artists.”

The critical debate that it provoked was an expression of the complex and often tumultuous relationship between mainstream feminism and the black women who were so often excluded from it—a tension that continues today. The activities undertaken by black women to push back against their erasure, in the late ’60s through the early ’80s, effectively amounted to a desire for a revolution.

It is from this fervor that a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum gets its title: “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.”