Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Wells Barnett, and Fannie Lou Hamer are but a few names from a growing list of distinguished African American women activists. Although their sustained resistance to Black women s victimiza tion within interlocking systems of race, gender, and class oppression is well known, these women did not act alone. 1 Their actions were nurtured by the sup port of countless, ordinary African American women who, through strategies of everyday resistance, created a powerful foundation for this more visible Black feminists activist tradition. 2 Such support has been essential to the shape and goals of Black feminist thought.

The long-term and widely shared resistance among African American women can only have been sustained by an enduring and shared standpoint among Black women about the meaning of oppression and the actions that Black women can and should take to resist it. Efforts to identify the central concepts of this Black women s standpoint figure prominently in the works of contemporary Black feminist intellectuals. 3 Moreover, political and epistemological issues influ ence the social construction of Black feminist thought. Like other subordinate groups, African American women not only have developed distinctive interpreta tions of Black women s oppression but have done so by using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself.