Gwen Patton, Frances Beal, and the Making of Black Revolutionary Feminism

In 1968, Gwen Patton and Frances Beal co-founded a Black women’s caucus in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), marking a new wave of Black feminist organizing amid the global decolonization and Black Power movements. Wilson’s presentation challenges the notion that Black Feminism, articulated by African American women, was limited to the US social order. Instead, her presentation restores the international component of Black feminist activism during the late 1960s. By tracing how co-founders Fran Beal and Gwen Patton arrived at their political worldview, Wilson focuses on the role revolutionary internationalism played in Black American women’s construction of identity, oppression, and resistance. Like many civil rights activists of the time, Beal and Patton labored in multiple organizations simultaneously, which led to the constant flow of ideas between groups. While Gwen Patton approached Black Power from a Southern perspective, Frances Beal’s radicalization stemmed from her Northern roots. Drawing on oral histories and archival records, this presentation reveals how these women had fully formed anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist ideologies when they established the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in SNCC. The genealogies of their radicalism and multifaceted political work placed them in the position to articulate the oppression facing Black women of the late 1960s.