This essay appeared in the 2021 Fueling Discovery special section of the Wisconsin State Journal on 10/17/21. View the full 2021 Fueling Discovery PDF here.
About the author
Christina Greene is a Professor in the Afro-American Studies Department. Her research and teaching focus on the history of women’s activism, Black freedom movements, and race and incarceration in the United States.
In the summer of 1974, an imprisoned 20-year-old woman named Joan Little defended herself with an ice pick against sexual assault by a white jailer and fled from a rural North Carolina jail. When she learned that the jailer had died and that she had been declared a fugitive — meaning anyone could shoot to kill her on sight — the young, destitute escapee turned herself in to authorities. A grand jury never heard evidence of recent sexual crimes against Little in her jail cell before quickly indicting her for first-degree murder. If convicted, Little faced execution in the state’s gas chamber.
My forthcoming book from the University of North Carolina Press, tentatively entitled To Whom Will She Cry Rape: Joan Little, and Women’s Anti-Violence & Prison Organizing, moves beyond the rape-murder case to cast new light on the intertwined stories of sexual violence, systemic racism and mass incarceration.
The campaign to free Little drew on Black women’s long legacy of anti-rape organizing and testimony, and attracted feminists of all stripes, traditional civil rights and Black Power activists, students, politicians, and prison reformers. Little’s trial featured a pro bono defense team, headed by a white male attorney from her hometown, and included one of the first Black women to graduate from Duke University Law School. The case quickly became a national and international cause célèbre, hailed by the Washington Star newspaper as the “biggest civil rights trial of the ’70s.”
Sounding themes that have reemerged in recent years, the “Free Joan Little” campaign drew attention to the narrow, legal definition of rape; a woman’s right to lethal self-defense against sexual violence; and the underrepresentation of women and Black men on juries. It also highlighted a racially discriminatory criminal legal system that imprisoned and executed disproportionate numbers of African Americans, and that held special dangers for incarcerated women. After a five-week trial in August 1975, a majority female jury, composed equally of Black and white jurors, deliberated for 78 minutes before acquitting Little.
In researching Little’s courtroom victory, it became clear that her treatment by law enforcement and in the courts prior to her more well-known rape-murder trial was far more typical of Black women’s experiences in North Carolina and across the country. Joan likely was a target of racial profiling by local police when she was a teenager and subjected to racially biased sentencing practices.
Many writers focusing on mass incarceration have either ignored female imprisonment or claimed that women prisoners did not engage in organized protest the way men did. My book joins the growing scholarship on women’s prison activism, often inspired by Little’s case, on both sides of the prison walls. Antirape activists, stirred by Little’s predicament and the 1970s trials of other women of color, expanded grass-roots organizing and scored some of their most impressive legal reforms in the 1970s and 1980s.
Despite funding cuts and the decline in rape crisis centers, African American women found creative ways to advocate for their sisters throughout the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. Groups like the newly formed National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) organized women across the country and around the world. NBWHP founder Byllye Avery recalled that violence—rape, incest and intimate partner abuse—soon became their number one issue. Building on the long arc of Black women’s organizing legacy, groups like the NBWHP and the Black feminist Combahee River Collective adopted a multi-issue agenda.
They understood that protection from sexual violence had to encompass access to health care and public transportation, reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, affordable housing and childcare, a living wage, and an end to racially biased policing and imprisonment.
Nearly a half century before the #MeToo, #SayHerName, and Black Lives Matter movements emerged, African American women raised their voices and took action on the issues at the center of the 21st century’s battles for democracy and justice.