Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment by Christina Greene (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment by Christina Greene
• Debra L. Schultz

Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment. By Christina Greene. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 348. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7131-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7130-7.)

In 1976, the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) drafted a Black Woman’s Bill of Rights. “The NABF’s logo,” as historian Christina Greene tells us in Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment, “was a pair of clenched fists in handcuffs, evoking both enslavement and imprisonment; one cuff was marked ‘sexism,’ the other labeled ‘racism’” (p. 83). This image distills many of the histories invoked and questions raised in this ambitious, groundbreaking work centered on Joan Little’s iconic 1974 sexual self-defense case against her jailer, a sixty-two-year-old white man, Clarence Alligood. The twenty-year-old African American woman fled her rural North Carolina jail cell, leaving Alligood naked from the waist down with multiple (and fatal) stab wounds. She escaped the death penalty through an international support campaign and a successful claim of self-defense against sexual assault, catalyzing important debates about such rights.

Greene writes engagingly, using the Joan Little case to make incisive intersectional contributions in several historiographies. She states, for example, “By the 1970s, female activists on both sides of the prison walls drew on the women’s liberation, civil rights, and Black Power movements to fashion a politics that included incarcerated women” (p. 83). By making visible southern Black women’s prison and anti-rape organizing, she challenges the declension theory of the Black freedom movement after the late 1960s, writes Black women’s leadership into second-wave feminism—particularly the antiviolence movement—and honors Black women’s contributions to critiquing state violence as embodied by the growing prison industrial complex.

The book is organized into three sections. The first demythologizes Joan Little (in the spirit of recent scholarship on Rosa Parks), illuminating how her case inspired alliances among many 1970s movements. The second sketches the foundations of a women’s tradition of prison organizing at the nexus of civil rights and Black Power. The third chronicles how a robust, multi-issue Black feminist movement led the way on organizing against sexual violence targeting women of color, part of a long tradition of Black women’s resistance to racialized and sexualized violence, including lynching. An epilogue on the 1994 Crime Bill and the Violence Against Women Act challenges readers to think critically about gender and carceral politics today.

The themes of visibility and voice weave throughout the narrative. The reader is repeatedly reminded to look beyond rape crisis centers to see Black women’s antiviolence organizing. The author’s extensive use of writings by [End Page 658] Joan Little and other incarcerated Black women is particularly powerful for constructing the history of a group of women society is so determined to make disappear. Greene analyzes a dialectical relationship between local women like Little and others incarcerated at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women and international superstars like Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. Careful documentation of Black women’s leadership in anticarceral politics—both as supporters of men’s prison uprisings and as instigators of their own women’s protests—challenges an Attica-centered, masculinist view of prison activism.

Using multidisciplinary scholarship, Greene skillfully weaves together primary sources, including manuscript collections, oral histories, and movement images and texts, with several bodies of historical scholarship and Black feminist theory, deftly arguing, for example, that incarcerated Black women activists defied both the state and reformers by refusing the politics of respectability.

The book’s nuanced portrayal of a multiracial women’s movement also documents how Black women leaders like Nkenge Touré, Loretta Ross, and Byllye Avery led or built their own multi-issue organizations, including the National Black Women’s Health Project, deploying strategic coalitions with white feminist organizations. White women like civil rights leader Anne Braden, lesbian feminist Mab Segrest, and poet Minnie Bruce Pratt took courageous stands for Joan...