Five times Gloria Steinem stood with Black women

 In the wake of Gloria Steinem’s death at 92, we gather five times the activist had Black women’s backs.

The legendary feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who insisted the feminist movement couldn’t be separated from civil rights, has died. She was 92.

On Tuesday, Sept. 2, the journalist and activist died at her home in New York City surrounded by many loved ones, according to the Gloria Steinem Foundation and her official social media pages.

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” read a statement on Instagram.

“Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard,” the statement continued. “Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.”

It went on to explain that after starting a tradition of welcoming hundreds into her living room for “Talking Circles,” there are plans to turn her brownstone into a center for social justice movements.

The statement added, “Gloria loved the tradition of lighting signal fires on hills to light the way to the other side of the mountain. Lighting your own candle for Gloria makes you part of this global and celestial community circle.”

In the wake of her death, Steinem leaves behind an enormous legacy that helped transform American feminism. Through her investigative journalism, holistic activism, and fearless organizing, she fought for reproductive freedom, equal pay, and political representation, co-founded Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus, and spent decades championing the plights of others that intersected with feminism, and she did it all standing shoulder to shoulder with many Black women. 

That relationship stretched back to Steinem’s early years in the women’s movement, when a reporting assignment led to a chance encounter with Black feminist and community organizer Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who would become one of her closest organizing partners. Over the decades that followed, Steinem stood alongside Black women in the feminist and civil rights movements, used her growing platform to champion their work and, perhaps most importantly, remained candid about just how much they had shaped her own understanding of feminism.

In 2017, she told theGrio how she learned feminism from Black women.

“People talk to me about white feminism, and I say, ‘Are you kidding me?’ If it’s white, it can’t be feminism. I mean, hello? It either includes all women or it’s not feminism,” she said.

She added, “There is just no such thing as defeating sexism without also being anti-racist, and no such thing as defeating racism without also being a feminist.”

From her iconic raised-fist portrait with Hughes to her support of Shirley Chisholm’s historic presidential run, Steinem’s nearly six decades in the movement were filled with moments that reflected that belief in practice. Below, we break down five times Steinem stood with Black women.

When Dorothy Pitman Hughes inspired her

Steinem met Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1969 while reporting on the Black activist and community organizer’s work running a childcare center and organizing mothers in New York City for New York magazine. It was then that Hughes first encouraged Steinem, who was still reluctant to speak publicly, to join her onstage, kicking off a partnership that would take the pair across the country to speak about feminism, racism, childcare, and equality, essentially launching Steinem’s advocacy era. 

Their partnership was immortalized in 1971, when photographer Dan Wynn captured Hughes and Steinem in an infamous photo standing side by side in 70s glam, their fists raised in solidarity. The image has become one of the most enduring photographs of the women’s movement. Right up until the end, Steinem credited Hughes with helping shape the activist she became.

When she partnered with Shirley Chisholm

Steinem joined Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and hundreds of other women in founding the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, an organization created to increase women’s involvement in politics and their representation in elected office. A year later, Steinem supported Chisholm as the New York congresswoman made history as the first Black woman to seek a major party’s presidential nomination.

Steinem continued encouraging women to vote, organize, and run for office throughout her life, with a particular emphasis on getting young people and women of color more involved in the political process.

When she forged an alliance with Florynce Kennedy

Steinem began traveling and speaking with Florynce “Flo” Kennedy in the early 1970s, taking their message about women’s liberation and racial justice to audiences around the country. Kennedy, a legendary Black civil rights lawyer and feminist who fought racial discrimination, sexism, and restrictions on abortion, would become one of Steinem’s closest friends and collaborators. She would also become one of her greatest influences.

Steinem, who repeatedly credited Kennedy with shaping her own understanding of feminism and activism, once summed up her impact as, “Five minutes with Flo will change your life.”

When Ms. magazine became a major platform for Black women’s voices

Steinem helped launch Ms. magazine in 1971, creating a national feminist publication that would go on to publish the work and stories of Black women, including Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Alice Walker. Walker became a contributing editor and published major work in its pages, including her 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which helped revive interest in the then-sorely-overlooked Black literary giant.

However, the relationship was not without its tensions. Walker ultimately left Ms. in 1986, criticizing the magazine for rarely featuring women of color on its covers and telling Steinem she did not “feel welcome in the world you are projecting.” The criticism came amid larger questions about how well the predominantly white feminist movement represented Black women, something Steinem herself would continue to grapple with throughout her career.

Ms. continued evolving, eventually becoming independent of advertisers and later naming journalist Marcia Ann Gillespie its first Black editor-in-chief. Steinem, for her part, never claimed to have gotten feminism perfectly right, but remained unusually willing to credit the Black women around her with challenging and changing her along the way.

When she declared feminism couldn’t be separated from racial justice

Through it all, Steinem never stopped crediting Black women with helping shape the activist she became. She pushed back against attempts to separate feminism from racial justice and against a version of feminist history that erased the Black women who had been fighting for both all along.

“Nothing in this country is not affected by racism and sexism and class,” she said in 2015, per Huff Post. “I learned feminism disproportionately from Black women.”

That belief followed Steinem through generations of activism, to later even championing Black Lives Matter, and praising the Black women who helped build it. For nearly six decades, even as movements changed, new generations picked up the fight, and the language of liberation evolved, Steinem remained steadfast in something the Black women around her had helped teach her long ago — none of us gets free alone or without a willingness to learn.