1979 Black Women Organized for Action Newsletters: 3 Issues of "What it Is..."

Item Details

1979

very good

Three Issues (March, April, May 1979) of the scarce newsletter “What it Is…” published by the Black Women Organized for Action, San Francisco. Each 8-12 pages including covers, very good with some edge wear. Plus, a 1991 Stop the War Now protest flyer for a San Francisco anti-Middle-East War march.

On the organization from the Smith College Library:

“Black Women Organized For Action (BWOA) was an activist organization based in San Francisco, California, which formed out of a group of women in Black Women Organized For Political Action (BWOPA).  Around the end of 1972 a subset of women in BWOPA began to feel dissatisfied by the group's focus on political fundraising. “They had a broader vision of the needs of the communities in which Black Women operate and were not content to limit the organization, themselves or their sisters to formal, political activities…On January 3, 1973 Eleanor “Ellie” Spikes and Maxine Ussery contacted a group of like-minded women and invited them to the first meeting of Black Women Organized for Action on January 10, 1973 at The Cannery in San Francisco. Fifteen women attended that first meeting but the group grew to more than 400 members not long after.

A conclusive date of BWOA’s dissolution can not be determined, but the group stopped producing its newsletter around 1980 and few records remain from after that time, suggesting that the organization was less active in the 1980s and inactive by the 1990s."

BWOA’s Statement of Purpose, adopted around March 1973: "We are Black, and therefore imbedded in our consciousness is commitment to the struggle of Black people for identity and involvement in decisions that affect our lives and the lives of other generations of Black people who will follow us. We are Women, and therefore aware of the sometimes blatant, waste of talents and energies of Black women because this society has decreed a place for us. We are Organized, because we recognize that only together, only by pooling our talents and resources, can we make major change in the institutions which have limited out opportunities and stifled our growth as human beings. We are For Action, because we believe that the time for rhetoric is past; that the skills of Black women can be best put to use in a variety of ways to change the society; that, in the political world in which we live, involvement for Black women must go beyond the traditional fundraising and into the full gamut of activities that made up the political process which affects our lives in so many ways.”