Hi, I’m Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast.
To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement.

During today’s episode, we will learn about Anita Hill and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Many people know about both of these extraordinary women, but you may not have known about how they crossed paths.

In 1991, Anita Hill made history when she testified before Congress about the sexual harassment she had experienced while she was an aide to Supreme Court Nominee Clarence Thomas.
Before finding herself at the center of Thomas’ Supreme Court Nomination Hearing, Hill received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1980.  In 1981 she became an attorney-adviser to Thomas, who was then the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. In 1982, when Thomas became chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or the EEOC, Hill went along to serve as his assistant. She left the job in 1983.
According to Hill, Thomas asked her out socially many times during her two years of employment as his assistant. After she declined his requests, he used work situations to discuss sexual subjects, showing her films involving group sex or rape scenes, and even describing his own sexual encounters.
During the hearing when she was questioned why she followed Thomas to the second job after he had already allegedly harassed her, she said working in a reputable position within the civil rights field had been her ambition, and she didn’t want to go back into private practice at her previous firm. She also said "at that time, it appeared that the sexual overtures ... had ended."
Four female witnesses were ready and waiting to testify, but they were not called, due to what the Los Angeles Times described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and then Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Democrat Joe Biden.
Thomas denied these allegations, saying that he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks" by white liberals who were seeking to block a Black conservative from taking a seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas' supporters questioned Hill's credibility, claiming she was delusional or was seeking revenge.
After extensive debate, the United States Senate confirmed Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin since the 19th century. 
Congress cited the time delay of ten years between the alleged behavior by Thomas and Hill's accusations, and noted that Hill had followed Thomas to a second job and later had personal contact with Thomas, including giving him a ride to an airport—behavior which they said would be inexplicable if Hill's allegations were true. 
Hill testified that after leaving the EEOC, she had had two "inconsequential" phone conversations with Thomas, and had seen him personally on two occasions, once to get a job reference and the second time when he made a public appearance in Oklahoma where she was teaching.
Hill’s behavior and communication with Thomas after the harassment occurred is actually very common and normal for survivors. There are many reasons survivors continue to interact with their abusers - some may fear for their lives if they don’t, they may be dependent on that person for resources or care, or may have no other options. 
Hill countered that she had come forward because she felt an obligation to share information on the character and actions of a person who was being considered for the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, when victims are involved in high profile cases like this one, they are further subjected to public scrutiny.
In the year after Hill gave testimony, complaints to the EEOC about sexual harassment skyrocketed - with a 71 percent increase in the first quarter, followed by a 50 percent increase for the rest of that year. Some of the working women’s groups reported their phone lines ringing off the hook with many women asking: “You mean this is illegal? You mean I can do something about this?” 
In an interview with the New York Times, Hill is quoted as saying, “Many people viewing the hearings didn’t even realize that sexual harassment was something that was actionable, that they could file a complaint about. They had no idea what the concept was about. So we were at a very different point.”
While Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already protected sex and race discrimination under federal law, after the confirmation hearings, President George H. W. Bush dropped his opposition to a bill that gave harassment victims the right to seek federal damage awards, back pay, and reinstatement, expanding the remedies under the 1964 Act. Ultimately, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed by Congress. 
Among other provisions, the 1991 Act allows for the recovery of compensatory damages,  punitive damages for intentional discrimination, recognized the right to a jury trial in Title VII and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) cases, and provided for damages for disability discrimination.
And, in the year after the hearings, a record number of women ran for Congress.


What most people don’t know about this story is that Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is responsible for the term “intersectionality” was part of Hill’s legal team.
Two years prior to the hearing, in 1989, Crenshaw, an attorney and professor at UCLA, coined the term “intersectionality” when she published a paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
In her paper, Crenshaw argued that the courts treated Black women as purely women or purely Black, which repeatedly ignored specific challenges that Black women face as a group. Since Black women are both Black and women, they endure specific forms of discrimination that Black men, or white women, do not.
Specifically, Crenshaw cited the case of Emma DeGraffenreid, an African-American woman who sued GM, claiming that she had faced employment discrimination based on race and gender. The judge, finding that African-Americans and women had both been hired by the company, dismissed her case. But, as Crenshaw pointed out, the African-Americans were men, and the women were white; neither represented the case of a woman of color. “This is what I’d call an intersectional failure,” she said.
Intersectionality describes how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap -- and therefore people experience discrimination differently depending on their overlapping identities. 
Intersectionality has become a critical part of feminist theory, though today it’s unfortunately often misunderstood or misused.
Prior to that, Crenshaw was involved in defining “Critical Race Theory,” which emerged by students of color in the early 1980s at Harvard Law School as protest to Harvard’s lack of racial diversity in the curriculum, students, and faculty.
As Crenshaw detailed in an article written for the Baffler in 2017, critical race theory emerged in response to what seemed like a false consensus: that discrimination and racism in the law were irrational. She argued that this was a delusion and dangerous. Crenshaw didn’t believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor that once racism was corrected through legislative action, it would no longer impact the law or the people who rely upon it.
Crenshaw played a critical role in supporting Anita Hill during Justice Thomas’ Senate confirmation hearings.
In an article written for the New York Times in September 2018, Crenshaw described her time on Hill’s support team, sharing, “I worried that she would be trapped between an antiracist movement that foregrounded black men, and a feminism that could not fully address how race shaped society’s perception of black victims.” 
Crenshaw argued that with these two groups - white feminists in support of Hill, and the African American community that supported Thomas - rising up against one another during this case, Anita Hill lost her voice as a Black woman. She had been unintentionally chosen to support the women's side of things, silencing her racial contribution to the issue.
Crenshaw said, "It was like one of these moments where you literally feel that you have been kicked out of your community, all because you are trying to introduce and talk about the way that African American women have experienced sexual harassment and violence. It was a defining moment."
During the hearings, Black feminists rallied together to purchase a full-page advertisement in The New York Times titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” The letter was signed by 1,600 people who noted the racism and sexism playing out in the Hill-Thomas hearings, with the letter stating “We speak here because we recognize that the media are now portraying the Black community as prepared to tolerate both the dismantling of affirmative action and the evil of sexual harassment in order to have any Black man on the Supreme Court. We want to make clear that the media have ignored or distorted many African American voices. We will not be silenced.”
At the time of Hill’s case, Crenshaw was writing another paper, Mapping the Margins, on the erasure of black women’s history of being sexually harassed and abused. The Hill case showed the result of the fact that sexual harassment had largely only been discussed in relation to white women.


In 1996, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. She continues to speak out in support of sexual violence survivors, civil rights, and against police violence against Black women. Her podcast, Intersectionality Matters, explores the concept and its practical application to discrimination today. She has co-authored Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, and Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.
Hill is currently a university professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. In December 2017, the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace was formed, and Hill was selected to lead its charge against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.
The contributions of Anita Hill and Kimberle Crenshaw live on today - and both women continue to make sure that Black women and survivors are believed and valued - and we thank them for that.
Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Anita Hill and Kimberle Crenshaw, check out the resources shared in the episode description. To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosphy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.