This dissertation investigates the life and work of Florynce "Flo" Kennedy, an activist and intellectual whose black feminist organizing and political theorizing provides a critical window into postwar radicalism. Kennedy worked in most of the major radical U.S. struggles and organizations of the postwar era, such as, the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, Black Power and women's liberation movements. She traveled between these movements and organizations appropriating theories and strategies and then extending what she believed to be the best elements of each movement. Kennedy's example demonstrates that the boundaries around organizations and movements were far more porous than scholars have previously conceived.

As the first researcher to have unlimited access to Kennedy's papers and over one hundred videotapes of her political talk show, I am able to place Kennedy and black feminism within the narrative of postwar radicalism and make two related claims. First, I contend that Kennedy's work revises the story of the predominantly white liberal and radical feminist struggles in the 1960s and '70s through the particular contributions of black feminist politics. Contrary to historical representations and popular belief, black feminists, as members of predominantly white feminist organizations and movements, attempted to remake the mainstream women's movement by shifting their agenda away from one that privileged gender-based oppression to an agenda that theorized and acted upon the intersections of oppression.

Second, I also assert that Kennedy's example forces us to view the Black Power movement as central in shaping "second wave" feminisms. I argue that the significance of Black Power to both white and black feminists has been vastly undervalued. I demonstrate how strategies and theories understood to have originated in Black Power struggles were absorbed, if at times unevenly, by both black and white feminists. These Black nationalist influences were then used to build broad based anti-racist alliances and to describe race and gender oppression in distinctive ways.