Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death

Abstract

Between January and May of 1979, twelve similarly situated black women were murdered in Boston, Massachusetts. Just two years past the writing of what would become their canonical feminist statement, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) mobilized around the series of deaths along with other grassroots organizations and members of the local community. The CRC’s most significant intervention in that crisis was the creation and circulation of a pamphlet that was initially titled, “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” that was meant to (1) help women within the affected area know how to better protect themselves, (2) name the conditions that had produced the women’s deaths and the city’s subsequent failure to acknowledge or contend with their deaths in any meaningful way, and (3) evince the value of black women’s lives. The serial murders of black women have continued on unabated since 1979, and this article uses the occasion of the Boston murders to discuss how the CRC’s writing and activism enable a theorization of the serialization of black death that expands meaningfully on the scholarship around serial murder.

Keywords:

• Black feminism
• black women
• Combahee River Collective
• death
• racialized gender violence
• serial murder
• serialization of black death

Notes

Grace Kyungwon Hong, “‘The Future of Our Worlds’: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization,” Meridians 8, no. 2 (2008): 97.

Barbara Smith, “Black Feminism: A Movement of Our Own,” in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), 63.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2015), 210.

Barbara Smith, interview by Kimberly Springer, in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around, 72.

Ibid.

Jaime M. Grant, “Who’s Killing Us?,” in Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing, edited by Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 150.

“A Climate of Fear in Boston,” Boston Globe, May 9, 1979.

Robert Jordan, “Arrests Ease Black Community’s Fears,” Boston Globe, August 17, 1979.

Timothy Dwyer, “Woman Identified in 12th Murder,” Boston Globe, May 8, 1979.

Michel D. McQueen, “As Different as Night and Day,” The Harvard Crimson, March 17, 1979.

Barbara Smith, introduction to “Twelve Black Women: Why Did They Die?,” in Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence, edited by Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman (Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 1981), 68.

Combahee River Collective, “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?,” Radical America 13, no. 6 (November–December 1979): 45.

Grant, “Who’s Killing Us?” 151.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 211, 213.

Ibid., 215.

For a discussion of the importance of black feminism to epistemological critique in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” see Kyungwon Hong, “‘The Future of Our Worlds,’” 108–09.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators (Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, 2008), 8–9.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 213.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

While law enforcement would eventually link twenty-nine deaths to the Atlanta Child Murders, there were discrepancies in the reported number of victims throughout the case, with some commentators arguing that the list of victims could and should have been much longer and more inclusive. Eric Gary Anderson, “Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 197.

Jeffry Scott and Bill Torpy, “Atlanta’s Nightmare: Doubt Lingers,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 15, 2005.

James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1985), 74, 72.

Angela Davis, “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape,” Ms. 12, no. 2 (1975; repr., 2002), 39.

Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 200–18.

Davis, “Joan Little,” 39.

Ibid., 40.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 210, 213.

Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 66–68.

Emily Thuma, “Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2015): 59.

Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115–64.

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 246–78.

Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 11.

Ibid., 86–87.

Ibid., 10.

McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 249.

Patricia A. Turner, “The Atlanta Child Murders: A Case Study of Folklore in the Black Community,” in Contemporary Legend: A Reader, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (New York: Routledge, 2011), 299–310.

Smith, introduction to “Twelve Black Women,” 68.

Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 10.

Ibid., 39–40.

I know of only one case, a series of eight murders committed across several Midwestern states in the summer of 1984, in which a woman was convicted in a serial murder case involving black girls and women. In that case, the female perpetrator, Debra Brown, was the accomplice of her male partner, Alton Coleman.

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 12.

Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 18.

Nenomoshia “Neno” Yates (12) was one of the six black girls killed by the so-called “Freeway Phantom” in Washington, D.C.; Telacia Fortson (31) was one of eleven black women killed by Anthony Sowell in Cleveland, Ohio between 2007 and 2009; Charquanaque Johnson (33) was one of eight similarly situated black women killed in and around the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago in 2000; and Kaliquah Gilliam (21) was one of four black women killed by Daniel Jones in Kansas City, Missouri between 1998 and 2001.

Rhonda Jackson (23) was one of eight black women killed by Ivan Hill in Southern California between 1986 and 1994; Rhonda King (24) was one of eleven black women killed in Chicago by Andre Crawford between 1993 and 1999; Rhonda Tucker (21) was one of five black and Latina women killed by Vincent Johnson in Brooklyn, New York between 1999 and 2000; and Rhonda Myles (45) was one of at least two, but as many as seven, black women killed by Shelly Andre Brooks in Detroit, Michigan between 2001 and 2006. Maxine Walker (41) was one of eight black women whose murders Eugene Britt confessed to committing in Gary, Indiana in 1995, and Pammy Annette Avent (16) and Opal Charmaine Mills (16) were both victims of Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, who was convicted in 2003 of killing forty-eight women (he confessed to killing more than seventy women), at least eleven of whom were black, in the 1980s and 1990s in the Seattle, Washington area.

McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 17.

For a further discussion of the relay between violence and value as pertains to black female victims of serial murder, see Terrion L. Williamson, “In the Life,” in her Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 113–34.

Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4.

McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 20.

Ibid., 22.

Ibid., 23.

Grant, “Who’s Killing Us?,” 145.

McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 23.

Freddie A. Brown Jr., “A Helping Hand for Families of Suitland Victims,” Washington Post, February 12, 1987.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Rebecca Cathcart, “In Los Angeles, Unresolved Serial Killings Reflected Era,” New York Times, July 20, 2010.

C. J. Clemmons, “Support for the Grieving,” Charlotte Observer, December 31, 1995.

Mike Hixenbaugh, “Victims’ Families Organize,” Rocky Mount Telegram, December 23, 2009.

Hong, “‘The Future of Our Worlds,’” 97.

Barbara Smith, interview by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around, 255.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 213.

Barbara Smith, interview by Kimberly Springer, 71.

Combahee River Collective, “Six Black Women,” 44.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terrion L. Williamson

Terrion L. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she is also jointly appointed in American Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Her first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, was published by Fordham University Press in 2016.