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On Saturday, January 25, 1975, over 450 activists gathered at the North End Community Center in Detroit, Michigan to discuss the position of Black women in the Black Freedom struggle. The gathering emerged from discussions among members in the Women's Division of the Congress of African People (CAP), a federation of Black progressive and nationalist organizations headed by famed poet and activist Amiri Baraka. The meeting brought together organizers from CAP's flagship group, the Committee For Unified Newark (CFUN); activists from the Youth Organization for Black Unity; and agitators from the National Welfare Rights Organization, among others.1 By the end of the meeting, "all groups present agreed that they saw a need for a black women's united front and that this front should be anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, rooted in the working masses of women, bringing together toiling women who would be willing to struggle alongside and within the general Black Liberation Movement." Participants formed a coalition that day, establishing a collective dedicated to the "abolition of every possibility of oppression & exploitation."2
Situated at the intersections of Black nationalist, Black feminist, and Marxist thought, the Black Women's United Front (BWUF) transformed activists' Black Power theorizing in the mid-1970s. Its origins lay in CAP, a group with capacious orientation to Black liberation and complicated gender politics. Looking to reconcile their gender-specific goals with the group's ideological commitments, women members extensively debated and theorized about their position in the Black liberation struggle. Their conversations resulted in the BWUF, a CAP subsidiary dedicated to understanding Black women's oppression and liberation. BWUF members developed an expansive ideological platform and organizational structure that not only advanced intersectional approaches to radical Black organizing but also expanded CAP's ideological perspective and programs. The collective ultimately became a key engine of Black feminist thought within the Black Power movement, and it accelerated CAP members' adoption of more equitable and holistic understandings of Black Power.
Despite its central ideological and organizational role, the BWUF is all but forgotten in Black Power histories. To be sure, recent interest in Black Power has given rise to studies that foreground Black women's activism and advocacy of progressive gender politics within the movement.3 A significant number of these histories focus on women in...