User:Asweezy/sandbox

As a response to the first six (unrecognized) murders, 1,500 people gathered on the streets of Boston on April 1, 1979 to have a memorial for the six black women who were murdered within a two-mile square radius beginning that year. 

Combahee River Collective

Black community leaders held that these murders were acts of racialized violence, but Barbara Smith along with the Combahee River Collective wanted it to be recognized as both racialized and sexualized acts of violence against black women. Following the march/memorial that spring, Smith and the Collective wrote and distributed pamphlets entitled “Six Black Women: Why Did they die?” The pamphlets were distributed to the women within the community. The pamphlet itself focused specifically on the murders which were not being covered extensively by the police or media. The collective held that these murders were both racists and sexist, because not only were the people who were murdered black but they were also women and that they were killed because they were black women who were systemically undervalued  in American society