Barbara Smith

In February 2020, Smith endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in the Democratic Party primaries.

Season 6, episode 3 of the podcast Making Gay History, released in 2019, was about Smith.

Smith has continued to lecture and speak. She donated her papers to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York, and gave oral histories of her life to Columbia University and Smith College. She appeared in Marlon Riggs's 1994 documentary Black Is...Black Ain't and the 2013 PBS and AOL documentary Makers: Women Who Make America. On February 2, 2017, she made a speech at Claiming Williams, "an annual event where the campus community comes together to discuss issues of race, gender, identity, religion and community". Claiming Williams is "moral courage day" at Williams College. Smith said that "taking the high ground, being honest, and deciding to do something that is objectively frightening" are key components of moral courage.

Smith is an activist against Islamophobia. She established a website, "Stop Islamophobia", to demonstrate support for immigrants and refugees. She created a "United States of All" decal and coordinated marches in November and December 2016.

In 2015, the University at Albany awarded Smith an honorary doctorate degree.

In 2014, SUNY Press published Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, a reflective conversation through four decades of activism. Editors Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks worked with Smith to explore her life from her childhood to her recent work as an elected official. By combining hard-to-find historical documents with new unpublished interviews with fellow activists and scholars, the book uncovers the deep roots of today's “identity politics” and “intersectionality” and serves as a primer for practicing solidarity and resistance. It has a foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

Continuing her work as a community organizer, Smith was elected to the Albany, New York Common Council (city council) in 2005, representing Ward 4, and reelected in 2009. She also worked during this period with David Kaczynski at New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty on innovative solutions to violent crime. During her two terms on the Albany Common Council, Smith was active on issues of youth development, violence prevention, and educational opportunities for poor, minority and underserved persons. She did not seek reelection in 2013. Smith now works with the Albany Mayor's Office spearheading initiatives to address economic, racial, and social inequality.

Smith was a Fellow at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute in 1996 and received a 1994 Stonewall Award for her activism. She received the Church Women United's Human Rights Award in 2000 and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Smith continued to write and produced a collection of her essays, articles, and reviews after her involvement in Kitchen Table ended. Her article "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" (1982), first published in Conditions magazine, is frequently cited as the breakthrough article in Black women's literature and Black lesbian discussion. Smith has edited three major collections about Black women: Conditions 5: The Black Women's Issue (1979, with Lorraine Bethel); All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982, with Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott); and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (first edition, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983; second edition, Rutgers University Press, 2000). She has since collected her various writings in the anthology The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (1998).

In 1981, Smith completed all but the dissertation for her doctoral studies at the University of Connecticut. By that time, she was a well-established, well-known activist for Black, feminist, and LGBTQ issues.

As a socialist Black feminist organization, the collective emphasized the intersections of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of African-Americans and other women of color. Like other Black feminist organizations at the time, Combahee articulated "many of the concerns specific to Black women, from anger with Black men for dating and marrying white women, to internal conflict over skin color, hair texture, and facial features, to the differences between the mobility of white and Black women...also attacking the myth of Black matriarch and stereotypical portrayals of Black women in popular culture." The collective also worked on issues such as "reproductive rights, rape, prison reform, sterilization abuse, violence against women, health care, and racism within the white women's movement." It was deliberately structured to avoid hierarchy and give members a sense of equality; Smith cited this structure as essential to ensuring that Black feminism survived "as a radical movement." Combahee members organized retreats to discuss issues within the Statement, ways to incorporate Black feminism into Black women's consciousness, and pressing issues in their own communities. But the organization lost momentum as conversations about lesbianism and educational advancement alienated some members. As a result of leadership conflict and interpersonal disputes, Combahee's membership declined. The last meeting was in February 1980.

In 1975, with Beverly and Demita Frazier, a Chicago activist, Smith established a Boston NBFO chapter. Due to lack of direction from the national organization, the Boston chapter had an independent nature, deciding as a group to focus on consciousness-raising and grassroots organizing that assisted Boston's poor and working classes.

Smith settled in Boston after receiving an MA in literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Her sister Beverly's staff position at Ms. Magazine allowed Beverly to obtain critical contacts, and through the publication, Barbara met Margaret Sloan, a founder of the NBFO. Intrigued by the call for attendance to the NBFO's Eastern Regional Conference in 1974, Smith caucused with women from the Boston area and made contacts in order to establish a Boston NBFO chapter.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Smith pursued an MA in literature at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 1971. In Pittsburgh she began to become active in the Women's movement and the Gay Liberation movement.

As a lesbian, Smith's intersectional approach to feminism extended beyond race and gender into sexuality. She was the first scholar to identify a Black lesbian feminist body of literature, although she separated lesbianism from a political identity. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Smith was active in LGBT rights movements, but became disillusioned by the movement's lack of complexity, which she felt revolved around single issues like gay marriage and "celebrity culture." Mainstream LGBT movements centered the experience of white gays while ignoring the compounded oppression faced by queer people of color. Since then, Smith has preferred multi-issue LGBT activism that addresses the oppression faced those who are most marginalized in society.

In high school, Smith excelled in honors and AP classes and scored very high on the PSAT. Her grades and test scores gained her entrance to Mount Holyoke College in 1965, but, fatigued by racial animosity at the college, she transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York City, where she studied social sciences for a year. She returned to Mount Holyoke for her senior year and graduated in 1969.

An enthusiast of American literature and writing, Smith pursued English study throughout her education. After being enthralled by James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain she resolved to become an expatriate writer, but due to her interest in social movements in the 1960s, she resigned herself to literature studies at home. She pursued graduate study in literature in an attempt to seek out women writers of color, but came to terms with the fact that the American literary canon did not include Black women. After reading in a Ms. article that Alice Walker would be teaching a course on African-American women writers, Smith enrolled and vowed to teach women writers of color whenever she taught. She began doing so at Emerson College in 1973.

Barbara Smith (born November 16, 1946) is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

Although the Smith family was of relatively little means, her grandmother, aunts, and mother were all well-educated, especially for the level of education accessible to Black women in the 1940s and 1950s. Her grandmother and great-aunts taught in segregated schools in the South before moving north, though her mother was the only one in her family to have received a college diploma, a Bachelor's of Science in education from Fort Valley State University (then Fort Valley State College). Barbara's family were all active readers who emphasized education, inside and outside of school.