The Black Women's Liberation Committee was founded in 1968 by feminist activist Frances Beal as one of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC's) post-1966 initiatives (Carson). My artifact is a flier printed by the Women's Liberation Committee around 1970 entitled “Women Unite!”. The flier's focus is the text with two images in the top and bottom corners. The flier is a call to action- demanding that women unite and rally in support of the 9 Panthers- those who they have described as wrongfully imprisoned for “trumped up” murder charges, when in fact they were only working to address the needs of the Black community. 

The critical understanding of the “oppression of black people in Amerika” and need to “liberate all oppressed people...and create a new society” is a radical idea central to many Black intellectuals thoughts, expressed by Black Panther members such as Angela Davis and George Jackson in Angela Davis and Soledad Brother respectively as well as earlier thinkers such as Wright and Baldwin. The prison persists throughout these texts as a locus of systematic oppression, facilitating the government’s oppression of radical movements.

History may not often remember the critical programs that were brought forward by the Black Panther Party but the flier reminds us of the “free breakfast for children, free health clinics, and Liberation Schools”- programs that characterize the critical needs of Black people as access to food, healthcare, and unbiased education regardless of socioeconomic status. The protest, much like the movement, proves to be accessible in every sense as the flier provides the numbers for buses as well as for daycare at the bottom so that any women with children have access to childcare should they desire it.

The use of posters saying “Women’s Liberation” as well as “Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves” speaks to the centering of the woman’s role both in this flier and in this critical movement. Like bell hooks in Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center, the flier explains that the racist, exploitative system that oppresses “blacks, browns, and working class whites” is the very same one that oppresses Black women and must be changed for all to be liberated. 

Additional Sources
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981); personal interviews by authors.