Indeed, the statement was initially published in Zillah Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism by Monthly Review Press in 1978. One of the most anthologized historical documents of the women’s liberation movement, and a foundational text in Black feminist thought, the anniversary edition also serves as a reminder that it was an explicitly socialist text, rooted in an anticapitalist framework and Marxism. That the fortieth anniversary of the CRC statement coincided with Trump’s first year in office, the eruption of the largest protests of women since the 1970s (perhaps the largest protest in US history), and resurgent interest in socialist politics, reminds us how necessary and relevant the vision articulated in the CRC’s 1977 statement remains.

One of the most important political contributions to the commemoration of this anniversary is the publication of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a book that promises to connect this radical tradition of Black feminism to the politicization and activism of a new generation of radicals, feminists, and socialists.

Two thousand and seventeen marked the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, one of the most powerful, influential, and enduring documents of Black feminism.* The political anniversary brought the founders of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) and the authors of the 1977 statement to conferences and events nationally to commemorate their political legacy and introduce a new generation of activists to an important tradition of radical Black feminism.

How we get free keeanga yamahtta taylor