Contemporary activists and advocates organizing against rape and other forms of sexual assault frequently refer to the anti-rape movement of the 1970s American women's liberation movement as "the" anti-rape movement (from here, referred to as the '70s movement). The brave activists from the '70s movement took incredible risks in their work of defining rape, speaking out publicly about it, and developing rape crisis centers as a response - work that continues to benefit American rape survivors. However, much of the analysis about rape that came out of the '70s movement included a critique of male domination as if it were the only dynamic of oppression that needed to be undermined in order to eliminate rape.

In truth, specific oppressions (male domination, white supremacy, class exploitation, etc.) rarely work singularly. Instead, oppressions feed off of each other, their dynamics changing according to specific contexts. The current challenge for anti-rape organizers is to develop solid analyses of rape and rape culture that recognize a multiplicity of oppressions that constantly shape and influence each other.

One way to begin to develop more complex analyses is to be clear that the '70s movement is not the only anti-rape organizing that was done in American history and to examine other anti-rape movements. For example, an assumption is often made that the only organizing that was done by women of color was within their (marginalized) participation in the '70s movement. This is not true. A brief example, one of many, of anti-rape resistance by Black women follows.

Black women took deadly risks in confronting rape throughout the history of this country. Black women who were slaves participated in concentrated and deliberate resistance of rape by white male slave owners. There are many documented accounts of female rebellion manifesting in the poisoning of rapists, burning of property, and assassination. Also, enslaved rape survivors who were mothers often killed their girl-children as a form of resistance to slave rape.

Looking at anti-rape activism done on the part of Black slave women forces us to think about rape in a much more complex way than the '70s movement. Rape is not only a tool for male domination over women. Rape is also a tool for economic exploitation and white supremacy. The example of rape survivors killing their babies to keep them from being raped is also resistance to their womb being a source of a perpetual labor force. (It is well-documented that slave owners would often rape slave women for the purpose of creating more slaves without having to buy them.) We can see the capitalist and white supremacist dynamics within rape not only in the case of the rape of thousands of black slaves, but also currently in institutions such as "mail-order brides" and global sex-trafficking.

Another anti-rape movement headed by Black women is the anti-lynching movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During post-Reconstruction, southern white people were determined to regain control over Black people. As a result, they instituted a system of lynching Black women, men, and children when they "got out of line." Lynching was a very sexualized form of murder. Often, the justification for lynching Black men was that they raped white women. The issue of rape was utilized as a scare tactic geared directly towards white women. As a result, many southern white women supported lynching efforts instead of recognizing that sexual violence towards white women (by anyone) is deeply connected to sexual violence towards Black people (as well as other forms of oppression). When Black men were lynched, the lynchers would often torture them before hanging them, cutting off sexual parts of their anatomy in particular. When Black women were lynched, they were often raped first.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an activist and writer during this time, spoke openly against rape and did not defend Black men who were, in fact, guilty of rape. But after she researched and investigated 728 lynchings that had taken place during the 1890s, she found that only a third of murdered Black people were even accused of rape, much less guilty of it. Spurred by her investigation, hundreds of Black activists at the time, including the NAACP and Black intellectuals, developed an anti-lynching movement for which activists were burned out of their homes and businesses, run out of town, and murdered.

It is not traditional thinking to consider the anti-lynching movement an anti-rape movement because the goal of these activists was not specifically to end rape, but to end lynching. Nonetheless, it is so profoundly an anti-rape movement because the theory and activism work the organizers produced challenged all forms of racialized sexual violence. Deconstructing the myth that Black men are overwhelmingly more desirous of white women was critical in order for white women to eventually reflect on the sexual violence being done to them by white men as well as their own sexual freedom.

Most importantly, though, the anti-lynching movement forced America's hand in recognizing that other manifestations of oppression are inseparably linked to sexual violence. There is no authentic way to discuss rape and organize against rape without being committed to deconstructing complex ways that race, ability, religion, age, economics, and sexuality are integrated into rape.