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And thank you so much.

I'm Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. Barbara Smith has never been a single

issue activist. Her entire life she's demanded justice and dignity for those whose voices

are interred. That's just how she was raised. Barbara and her twin sister Beverly were

born in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio. That's where the family had settled after leaving

small town Georgia in the Jim Crow South. Their mother, Hilda, the first person in the

family to earn a college degree died when they were nine. The sisters were then raised

by their extended family and a household of women who put great stock in education. In

the mid-1960s, Barbara attended Mount Holyoke and all women's college where she later recalled

she was surrounded by quote, lesbian undercurrents that were not spoken. At the time, Barbara

wasn't aware of any gay rights efforts and while her feelings for women were nothing new,

she didn't come out until the mid-1970s. In 1974, Barbara co-founded the Combahee River

Collective, a black feminist organizing group dedicated to the struggle against quote,

racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. In 1980, Barbara and Audrey Lord, the self-described

black lesbian feminist mother poet warrior, co-founded the kitchen table Women of Color Press.

...