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Cherisse Jones-Branch, Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Page 631, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae254
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Historian Christina Greene adeptly chronicles the experiences of Joan Little, a twenty-year-old Black woman who in 1974 was jailed in rural North Carolina. On a fateful day in August 1974, her rapist, sixty-two-year-old white jailer Clarence Alligood was found stabbed to death in a cell in the women's section of the jail. Little fled the scene but later turned herself in claiming that she had killed Alligood, her rapist, in self-defense. She was acquitted after a five-week trial. With this back story, Greene brings to the fore the Free Joan Little campaign. She maps the decades-long connections between African American women's experiences with racial and sexual violence and mass incarceration, and the salience of these issues in 1970s and 1980s social movements.
As a poor, rural Black woman born and raised in Jim Crow North Carolina, Little lived in an era when African Americans were imprisoned in astonishingly disproportionate numbers. Those jailed often included Black women, who faced “special dangers of sexual vulnerability” in prison environments and indeed in life (p. 5). Greene complicates Little's narrative beyond a mere focus on her rape-murder trial by holistically examining the world in which she existed. She was more than “simply a lawless young woman” (ibid). Indeed, her supporters wrestled with her failure to adhere to the politics of respectability. Little, however, was intelligent and politically astute even as she was ensnared in the politics of race, sexual violence, and incarceration between the 1960s and the 1980s. Unfortunately, as Greene well relays, this image of her was not publicly projected.
