Throughout her life, Truth recognized the importance of intersectionality and criticized the 14th Amendment's lack of voting rights and citizenship for Black women.

Though the speech is famous for the "Ain't I A Woman" quote, that probably isn't actually what Truth said. That quote comes from a later "translation" by a white man who wanted to portray Truth's way of speaking as a racial caricature of a formerly enslaved person to make her more palatable to white audiences.

To be clear, Douglass supported women's suffrage- but was declaring a state of emergency for Black people in the US. Black men’s suffrage was an urgent matter of survival in the face of the unimaginable violence and racial terrorism Black families were facing in the post-slavery era.

After Black people gained suffrage (temporarily), Democrats strategized to support women's voting rights to maintain political power and white supremacy. Stanton and Anthony's suffrage movement was funded by white supremacist Democrats a tool for maintaining anti-Black violence and white dominance.

The CRC emphasized that lived experience was a valid basis from which to analyze oppression. Because the CRC was founded by Black women with so many marginalized identities, its politics were radically inclusive and grounded in liberation for all. The CRC expressed the idea that if poor Black women were free, then everyone would be free.

The CRC rejected respectability politics because it left out Black lesbian women. They also rejected lesbian separatism because it denied liberation to many Black people. They argued that patriarchy, not men, was the problem, and that they needed solidarity with Black men in order to get liberation. As a group of queer women, this was a really impactful stance for them to take. The CRC also emphasized that the most profound politics come from working from one's own identity.

The CRC is one of the most influential organizations of the second wave. Its radical and intersectional politics impact our work in the movement today.

She explains that Black women do not face racism and sexism as separate oppressions, but as a combined force that oppresses them in unique ways- like an intersection at a crossroads. White supremacy and patriarchy are interlocking and part of the same system of oppression. Crenshaw focused on examples including sexual violence, police violence, and job discrimination. Black women are most marginalized by sexism, so anti-patriarchal movements must be centered on the experiences of Black women.

Intersectionality later became one of the defining features of third-wave feminism, and today fourth-wave feminism.

Walker wrote that “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” Essentially, feminism is a specific type of womanism. Feminism advocates for gender equality (historically in a way that excluded BIPOC women and fed into white supremacy), while womanism is far more intersectional, inclusive, and solidarity-oriented.

The NBFO signifies a rising focus on Black Feminism and Black feminist thought in the 1970s.

Black women face state-sanctioned violence and are murdered by police, but mainstream media and politics often leave them out of conversations about police violence.

#SayHerName is a movement to bring awareness to police violence against Black women and end all forms of anti-Black violence. The hashtag #SayHerName was created by the African American Policy forum.

Instead of believing Hill, politicians and media flipped the narrative and attacked her, blaming and discrediting her. They used racist stereotypes to dismiss her, depicting her as a jezebel, hypersexual, and undesirable.

Anita Hill had done everything possible to be seen as a "respectable" Black woman in politics, but still faced sexist and racist persecution for speaking out. This trial led many feminists to re-evaluate "postfeminism."

This is an example of how white women systematically excluded Black women from the suffragist movement, despite the movement being built by Black people.

The MeToo movement has been one of the defining moments in the so-called "fourth wave" of the feminist movement. Much like the other "waves" the fourth wave has been criticized for focusing on the experiences of white upper-middle-class women, despite relying on Black women for labor in its origins.

The forced labor and abuse that Black women were subjected to under slavery contradicted white patriarchy's assertions about women. To justify this contradiction, white enslavers deemed Black women as not "real" women. This was at the same time as the cult of true womanhood, which wrote Black women out of womanhood altogether.