All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
246
All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
246Paperback(1st Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252084126 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2019 |
| Series: | Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 246 |
| Sales rank: | 753,672 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lessons in Self-Defense
From "Free Joan Little" to "Free Them All"
I'm only one out of a thousand. Don't forget it.
— Joan Little (1975)
So these four cases — Dessie Woods, Joanne Little, Inez García, Yvonne Wanrow — were cases that raised national attention and brought out a lot of the contradictions, the conflict, you know, was played out and so, it was a very educational process for people who were paying attention.
— Nkenge Toure? (2005)
On Saturday morning, November 16, 1974, a crowd of demonstrators assembled outside the gates of the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women (NCCCW) in southeast Raleigh. In the back of a pickup truck with a bullhorn in hand stood Celine Chenier, a black community activist in her thirties from nearby Durham and cofounder of a newly formed local group, Action for Forgotten Women (AFW). When she shouted, "Can you hear me, sisters?" to the more than 400 people held captive in the prison, cheers erupted from behind the fence. Chenier, along with Brooke Whiting, a young black student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was also a cofounder, had called the demonstration to help their fledging grassroots group recruit new allies for the state's women prisoners, including a particular NCCCW prisoner by the name of Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann and sometimes spelled JoAnne and Joann) Little. The twenty-year-old black woman had recently been charged with the murder of a white jail guard.
Activists from throughout North Carolina's Triangle area and beyond — including members of the Winston-Salem group Mothers for Black Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and the Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists — joined Action for Forgotten Women that morning to support Little and to denounce the deplorable conditions at the prison. The incarcerated women's grievances included involuntary and unpaid labor, overcrowding, an abysmal health care system, scant educational and vocational training opportunities, and a library nearly empty of books. Those assigned to work in the laundry, a principal industry at the institution, reported having to lift heavy loads of unsanitary clothing from the prison and nearby hospitals and sanatoriums in temperatures as high as 120 degrees. Activists inside and outside also condemned the institutional violence of routine vaginal and rectal searches. The protesters, mostly black and white women, held handmade signs that read "Free Joan Little!" and "Abolish Women's Prisons!" as they chanted along with Chenier: "Free Our Sisters, Free Ourselves!"
Little had begun serving a seven-to-ten-year sentence for burglary and larceny in the Beaufort County jail in the state's Coastal Plain region that summer. In the early morning of August 27, sixty-two-year-old Clarence Alligood was found dead in Little's cell. According to the autopsy report, the night jailer's "shoes were in the corridor, his socks on his feet. He was otherwise naked from the waist down. ... Extending from his penis to his thigh skin was a stream of what appeared to be seminal fluid." Little would later testify in court that Alligood had held an icepick to her head as he forced her into oral sex. She managed to gain control of the tool he was wielding as a weapon and stabbed him with it multiple times. Traumatized, terrified, and unaware that the wounds could be fatal, she fled from the jail. One week later, with the help of an activist attorney, Little emerged from hiding and surrendered to police on the condition that she would not have to complete her sentence at the same county lockup. She was taken to the women's prison in Raleigh, and a grand jury swiftly handed down an indictment for murder in the first degree, which could carry the death penalty.
By the close of Little's trial the following summer, thousands had participated in a national campaign to save her life, and countless others had become familiar with her name, if not the details of her plight. The far-reaching mobilization of civil rights, Black Power, prisoner rights, and other left-wing and feminist activists helped to secure her exoneration in what some at the time dubbed the "trial of the decade," making her the first woman in the United States to be acquitted for wielding deadly violence to protect herself from rape.
Joan Little's murder trial was one of several causes célèbres in the 1970s that involved a black, brown, or indigenous woman who killed her or her child's sexual assailant. The cases of Inez García, Yvonne Wanrow, and Dessie Woods inspired significant numbers of activists to work together to raise funds for legal costs and to engage in direct action and education to raise public consciousness about women's right to resist sexual violence. The Wanrow and García decisions set legal precedents, allowing the courts to consider the history of a battering relationship in cases where women killed abusive partners. All four defense campaigns brought diverse social-movement actors, ideologies, and agendas into contact, exchange, and at times contention with one another.
More than a legal strategy, "self-defense" was a shared and galvanizing rhetoric that transected the radical social movements of the era. The breadth and efficacy of these four campaigns were made possible by the extent to which each woman's story of violation and resistance came to symbolically represent multiple and intersecting struggles for racial, gender, and economic justice. As American Studies scholar Rebecca Hill suggests in regard to the history of defense organizing in the United States, "campaigners assert the value and strength of their own people, their own ideas, and their own movements, and they create a popular history of America as a struggle between forces of repressive terror and heroic defiance."
This chapter demonstrates the catalytic role that defense organizing played in the emergence of an expressly anticarceral feminist agenda in the 1970s. It uncovers the intellectual and organizing work of activists who established connections between the coalitional campaigns for Little, García, Wanrow, and Woods. This labor produced an understanding of the four cases as a collective symbol of the intersecting race, gender, class, and colonial politics of using self-defensive violence, and as a cautionary tale for feminist antirape activists about the dangers and costs of aligning with the state. I begin with the Free Joan Little campaign, which played a critical role in generating political momentum for the other three mobilizations. I trace how it expanded the boundaries of who was considered a "political prisoner," made the coercion of incarcerated women visible, and contested a single-axis analysis of rape as a matter of gender power alone. I then turn to the other three defense campaigns, focusing primarily on the ways they overlapped in time, political milieu, and participants, as well as in the new perspectives they articulated and propagated. Finally, I explore how these four cases figured in debates about whether, in what ways, or to what ends feminist antiviolence activists should accept criminal justice funding and prioritize criminal legal reform. Radical women of color and antiracist white women in multiple locales engaged with these cases and developed and circulated arguments against a criminal justice–centered approach. In the process, they produced an intersectional account of the sources of violence in women's lives as well as a nascent feminist politics of prison abolitionism.
The Crossroads of the Free Joan Little Movement
Upon Joan Little's indictment for murder, her newly assembled legal team quickly realized that an activist groundswell would be necessary to save her from a death sentence. The local papers in Beaufort and surrounding eastern counties cast Little as a calculating, Jezebel-like seductress who lured Alligood, "a man who gave his life in the line of duty," into her cell as part of an escape plot. Her attorneys anticipated that the prosecution would construct a narrative of "a sexually deviant delinquent who murdered Alligood in cold blood," and they feared that Little's biography provided ample fodder for the state's ploy. She routinely ran away as a teenager, eager to escape a stressful home environment, and, when she dropped out of school at age fifteen, a judge ordered her to a nearby training school for delinquent girls. Because Little had not earned a high school diploma or GED, she had great difficulty finding steady and decently paying work. By nineteen, she had a reputation as a "bad girl" and rumors flew that she and her older boyfriend were the organizers of local theft and prostitution rings. Prior to her indictment for burglary and larceny in March 1974, she had been arrested several times for shoplifting, though none of the charges stuck due to lack of evidence. The young woman's nonconforming behavior not only earned the condemnation of local whites but also violated the standards of black middle-class respectability.
As several historians have demonstrated, Little's case must be situated in the context of unfinished struggles for racial and economic justice in the Tar Heel state. The violent white supremacist power structure remained in place ten years after the civil and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965. The Ku Klux Klan, which had a resurgence in the 1950s and 1960s, was thousands-strong. Racism and economic oppression remained starkly intertwined. Black North Carolinians fought pitched battles with whites in the streets and in courtrooms over school desegregation, voting rights, and police brutality. Moreover, Christina Greene has recently reconstructed Little's earlier encounters with the criminal justice system: jailed as a youth, harassed by police, failed by a public defender, and sentenced at age twenty to seven-to-ten years in prison for confessing to stealing $1,300 worth of property. Greene argues that these experiences reflected a widespread "pattern of racially discriminatory policing, judicial, and sentencing practices" and were perhaps fueled as much by Little's reputation as a wayward girl as "by any alleged criminal activity on her part." Not merely vestiges of Jim Crow, the forces of racial criminalization in North Carolina were emboldened by federal sponsorship from the LEAA beginning in the late 1960s, and by 1980 the state incarcerated more people per capita than any other in the country. Like Little, the majority of North Carolina's prisoners were black, indigent, and had not graduated high school. Moreover, black women comprised two-thirds of the women's prison population but only one-fourth of the state's citizenry. Little's lawyers and grassroots campaigners alike sought to draw national attention to entrenched racial and economic inequality in the state, especially in its criminal justice system.
In September 1974, Little's legal team — which included Jerry Paul, a prominent white civil rights attorney, and Karen Galloway, an African American recent graduate of Duke University Law School — along with several local and seasoned civil rights, Black Power, and women prison activists, promptly established the Joan Little Defense Fund, the organization that anchored what soon became a national campaign. Through publicity materials and speaking engagements, Defense Fund members laid the groundwork for a multivocal understanding of the case, intended to draw the broadest possible array of supporters. They suggested that the case raised and connected several critical issues, including "the very right of a woman to defend herself against sexual attack; prison conditions for women, including misuse of prison guard authority to obtain sexual gains; the discriminatory use of the death penalty against poor people and blacks; the selection processes which fail to produce juries of true peers; [and] the right of a poor person to an adequate defense."
In Durham, North Carolina, where the defense fund was headquartered, the campaign's eclectic and predominantly African American base included university students and professors, everyday working and unemployed people, and organizers for regional and national racial justice organizations. Defense committees sprouted up in numerous cities around the country, including Atlanta, Boston, New York City, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. They were encouraged to "follow their own initiative" while keeping Durham apprised so that their strategies could be shared through the growing communication network. A central task for these campaigners was fund-raising. In addition to putting together Little's massive bail bond of $115,000 ($562,000 in today's dollars), the Defense Fund needed tens of thousands of dollars to defray legal, publicity, and campaign expenses, including those associated with the effort to get the trial moved from eastern to central North Carolina. The coastal counties had exceptionally few registered black voters, so few black citizens were prospective jurors, and polling data showed strong support for the death penalty among whites. Thanks in no small part to the national mobilization, the legal team ultimately won an unprecedented change of venue to Wake County, home to the capital city of Raleigh and the university cities of Chapel Hill and Durham. A jury comprised of six African Americans and six whites, the majority of whom were women, ultimately heard the case and unanimously voted to acquit Joan Little after only seventy-eight minutes of deliberation.
The campaign became a common cause among antiracist, feminist, and leftist organizations at the regional and national levels as well. It drew support from prominent civil rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, NAACP, and Urban League; the more recently established Southern Poverty Law Center; and antiracist and anticapitalist organizations such as the Black Panther Party, National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and Young Socialist Alliance. It also garnered endorsements from women's organizations, ranging from the equal rights–oriented American Association of University Women and National Organization for Women (NOW) to the left-wing and antiracist Black Women's United Front, Third World Women's Alliance, National Black Feminist Organization, and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The decidedly decentralized character of the mobilization meant that these campaigners created and circulated different narratives of Joan Little as they wrote fund-raising appeals, convened teach-ins, and staged rallies: she was a target of a racist, classist, and draconian southern criminal justice system, a victim of male violence, a militant rape resister, a political prisoner. To some activists, she was indivisibly all of these things.
The defense movement drew upon and extended a long history of black women's antirape activism, and veteran organizers from previous struggles participated directly in the Little campaign. The renowned southern civil rights organizer Rosa Parks helped to found a Joan Little Defense Committee in her new home city of Detroit. Parks's antirape activism dated back to the 1940s, when she led a campaign to demand that a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama, be prosecuted for raping a young black woman. The mobilization for Recy Taylor was only one of several civil rights coalitions in the 1940s and 1950s to demand criminal accountability for white men's sexual violence against black women.
Little's case resonated most poignantly with that of Georgia sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram in the late 1940s and 1950s, which had brought unprecedented activist and media attention to the state's long-standing practice of criminalizing and imprisoning black women who defended themselves against rape and domestic violence. Ingram, a widowed mother of twelve, and her two teenage sons were sentenced to death by an all-white jury in January 1948 for the murder of John Stratford, a white local landowner. She maintained that Stratford had, on multiple occasions, made unwanted sexual advances toward her, and that in November 1947, her two sons had come to her defense in the face of the man's armed sexual attack. The NAACP lent vital legal support, filing several appeals and staving off the executions until the courts ultimately reduced the death sentences to life in prison. According to one scholar, "no issue galvanized black women in the black left more than the Ingram case" during the 1950s. Black women activists spearheaded two national organizations that endorsed Ingram's claim of self-defense and fought for the family's freedom by organizing demonstrations, collecting signatures, visiting the Ingrams in prison, and drumming up publicity. The Women's Committee for Equal Justice of the leftist Civil Rights Congress took up the cause, and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice placed Rosa Lee Ingram at the forefront of its work, unequivocally asserting "self-protection as a right for all black women." Despite these efforts, the Ingram family spent more than ten years in prison before being released on parole in 1959. Several veteran black women activists in the Raleigh-Durham area who had campaigned for the Ingram family's freedom helped to found Concerned Women for Justice in 1974 to raise money for the Joan Little Defense Fund among black church congregations across the state. The group also visited Little and other women imprisoned at NCCCW.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "All Our Trials"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.