sometimes took the form of armed posturing, beginning with a notorious march on the state capitol in
Sacramento with guns in hand. Centuries of white oppression had prevented African American men from
inhabiting the positions of authority that white men took for granted; to this was added, as African
American feminist historian Robyn Spencer points out, a theory of black “emasculation at the hands of
superpowerful black women,”^17 a theory promoted as much by self-appointed white experts on black
poverty and crime as by black nationalists.^18 Although the Black Panther Party’s original agenda could
have been written by a feminist group, calling for full employment, decent housing, and education, its
early practice was as much about gender as about race, asking black women to step back into the
protection of their men. Numerous male civil rights activists charged that feminism was an attempt to
impose “white” values, although, as Fran Beal pointed out, “when it comes to women he [the black man]
seems to take his guidelines from . . . Ladies Home Journal.”^19
While the need for race solidarity led some women of color to accept the doctrine that they should
“step back,” others resisted male dominance in the movement. From the beginning female Panthers
pressed for power. Sixteen-year-old Tarika Lewis walked into the Black Panther Party office, asked to
join, and demanded her own gun. It was Panther women who created the positive programs that brought
the party widespread respect: free breakfasts, clothing, medical care, and classes on politics and
economics. Women in the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, which had grown out of a Chicago turf gang,
became incensed when they observed the position (literally) of women in Amiri Baraka’s Afrocentric
group: his female followers were required to approach him on hands and knees. Denise Oliver, who
observed this, told other female Lords that “if we didn’t do something we would end up on our hands and
knees” like them. So they conducted a “sex strike,” refusing to have sex with their male partners until the
Lords agreed to add women to the leadership and get rid of the call for “revolutionary machismo,” among
other demands.^20
Black feminism and other feminisms of color emerged from both male-dominated and autonomous
women’s groups. One pioneer was the Third World Women’s Alliance, which developed when a black
women’s group started by Fran Beal in 1968 wanted to reach out to Latinas. The name reflected the New
Left notion that people of color in the United States shared the oppression of “Third World” people, and
that Western imperialist domination over the “underdeveloped” world was of a piece with domestic
racism. The group’s core analysis—that women of color had to struggle against race, class, and gender
domination at the same time—was common among all feminists of color, but there was no more
homogeneity among them than among white women. Moreover, many African American women, like
Barbara Emerson, did not feel disadvantaged as women, but rather asserted the strength and leadership of
black women—at least until black nationalism became the dominant stream of the black movement.