The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) was born in the midst of the civil rights and feminist movements, which many Black women felt did not center their desires for liberation. Founded in August 1973, the NBFO was closely affiliated with the Combahee River Collective, which was originally a breakaway chapter of the NBFO that sought to address issues Black lesbian women in America were experiencing.
The NBFO, like the Combahee River Collective, disbanded in 1980. But that did not stop members from continuing their activism to push for a society that embraces Black feminist ideals. In August, the organization was honored at the Black Feminist Lives! Summit, organized by Black Women Radicals, and I was on the planning committee.
Fifty years after the founding of NBFO, Black feminism continues to be a polarizing topic. In two separate Zoom interviews, I speak with two members of the group’s original New York-based chapter, Eugenia Wiltshire and Deborah Singletary, to learn about their experiences in the organization and how their activism has evolved in the years since the group's dissolution.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Teen Vogue: How did you first learn about Black feminism? Who are some of the people who have helped shape your Black feminist outlook?
Eugenia Wiltshire: I didn't really learn about it anywhere. The women's movement was popular at the time, so I was paying attention to that. But I didn't feel that was a part of my experience, so I kind of was just searching….
I didn't grow up with an experience of a big family and strong women and that kind — I had absolutely no direction at all. It was more my, I guess, intuitiveness about what I felt and what I thought. It was pretty much just developed from experience, not from anything that was passed down or taught, regrettably, but that's the way it was for me.
Deborah Singletary: The women who have shaped my Black feminist outlook would certainly be the women who founded the organization, Margaret Sloan[-Hunter] and Jane Galvin Lewis, who were two large Black women, so you couldn't miss 'em. And they were both funny as hell…. They were highly intelligent and very sincere.
Beyond that, I would say my exposure to the culture. The first time I saw a picture of Nina Simone — this would've been before NBFO — I think I would've been 17. I looked at a cover, a jazz album cover, and saw this woman. She didn't look like the Supremes or the Shirelles. She didn't have big wigs and shiny clothes and makeup. I had an independent thought when I saw Nina Simone, which is that she was beautiful, and I knew that. I had been taught that beauty was not in Black features unless those features were enhanced and almost obliterated by makeup and wigs. So, I also consider Nina Simone to be a way-shower for me.
TV: How did you find out about NBFO? What made you want to join the organization?
EW: There was a little ad or article in a newspaper, a local newspaper, and it said that there was a meeting of Black feminists; it was in a church basement, a few blocks from where I live. I thought, Well, this sounds interesting. I'm gonna go and check this out. And I walked down there one evening and I walked into a room full of Black women.
We were all pretty much in our 20s at that point, and it was just a room full of Black women who were there because they heard about it too, and were drawn to something that could be…. For me, I was looking for a community. I was looking for people like myself who thought and believed and aspired and all of that kind of thing, and I walked into that room and I thought, Wow, here you all are.
DS: I first heard about the National Black Feminist Organization from a newspaper lying around somewhere, and it had been opened to the page that said, “Women” — I think there's an actual newsletter clipping somewhere — but [it said] “a national Black feminist organization is being formed.” And the moment I saw it and heard the word, I knew I was home. I just knew, Oh, that's for me. Then I brought it home to my sister and she thought the same thing. So we joined NBFO together.
TV: What are you most proud of accomplishing with the NBFO during your time as a member? What do you wish had been done differently?
DS: What I am most proud of is that I was the head of the consciousness-raising committee.
To me, consciousness raising is the most important component of feminism and any kind of self-actualization because in consciousness raising, you're looking within. You're not reacting to the forces outside. You’re not reacting to white people saying you're this way…. You're looking within and you're saying, “I see.”
EW: I would have liked us to have continued to grow and get stronger and be more well-known than we were. All these years later, when…I've had occasion to be in a conversation about NBFO people, women, have come up to me and, and said, “I didn't know about it. I would've been there.”
TV: Did you keep your feminist work going after the dissolution of NBFO, and if so, how?
EW: Yeah, because it was firmly ingrained and incorporated in my life and my behavior and how I engaged in the workforce. What I was appreciative of was the fact that I learned a lot, which was helpful.
One of the things I got to do, and one of the people I'm fondest of, that I mention from time to time, is Florynce Kennedy, who was an attorney and very involved in NBFO. I was chairing the [NBFO’s] media committee at the time, and I was interested in a career in journalism and broadcasting and that whole area. She made it possible for me to go to a meeting of the public broadcasting organization in Washington, DC; I didn't participate, but I found myself in this room of people involved in public broadcasting in production. What I learned from that exposure was that there's a whole structure that exists that I have no knowledge of….
There are so many things that go on that impact our lives that we don't even know about. We're not exposed to them, we don't know they exist. That taught me that there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, not just in television broadcasting, but in life and politics, and if we're not in the room, we can have no impact.
That's not the way I wanted to exist in the world. I wanted to be in those rooms. I wanted to have a voice.
DS: I did in the sense that now it was seeped into my consciousness. I did a lot of my work through languaging. Sometimes I worked in corporate America, and then when they would call us, they would say, "I'm gonna ask my girl” to, you know, get the papers.… That just irritated me. I was very sensitive to language because I knew that language was a subtle way of placing us and telling us who we are.
I continue to work as an astrologer and an artist. As an artist, I certainly am promoting the ideas of women.
TV: Many of your feminist contemporaries are no longer living. What is it like to be surrounded by a new generation of feminist activists? What do you hope to see for the future of Black feminism?
EW: It is very encouraging to see what the next generation is doing now. There is a sense of purpose, and you have available tools that we didn't have. We didn't have computers and social media, none of that. So you're able to get the word out more easily. And with social media, you're also able to be leaders by example, because you're there and you're visible.
We weren't nearly as visible as we needed to be and wanted to be, so our circle couldn't grow to the extent we had hoped and that it needed to grow. When I was talking about my experience of being in meetings and being in the room, there were more defined avenues, more defined places that we could look to be, as opposed to now, where you're creating your own. We were kind of dealing with things as they existed and tried to change them, but you are in a situation where you're creating your own modalities and your own structures and your own way of facilitating your lives, which was not anything we could ever have conceived of.
I think I can be more relaxed now because I don't have to look at what we did as a failure and not enough any longer, because we planted some seeds. But what is going on now is so powerful and so necessary and important. The way that this new generation is embracing each other is amazing to me, because when I was out there 50 years ago, there were so few of us in these places.
TV: What do you want people to remember about NBFO and its role in the women's rights and Black feminist movements?
DS: I would say you don't have to remember.… I think it's more important to own our power. You don't have to remember it if you own it, if you own the divine feminine. If you own the power of the feminine, if you respect the power of the feminine, then the memory is in our bodies of the truth about ourselves, and it will awaken.
EW: I would just like for people to know that it existed. And that it set out to be big and bold. When the [founders] talked about naming the organization, they just said, “Yeah, we'll call it a national organization. I mean, we're just gonna go for it.” And that was the attitude: Go for it. Be bold, be big.
So I'd like people to know that, yes, there was an NBFO and that the people who started it had such a sense of purpose and such a sense of need. It really was all-welcoming, and I think it laid a foundation. Certainly the people I met along the way I remember, and I learned something from so many of them. Some of them are doing quite well in their careers, some of them have passed on, but they've all left a mark.
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