Free Joan Little

Early on a summer morning in 1974, local officials found the jailer Clarence Alligood stabbed to death in a cell in the womens section of a rural North Carolina jail. Fleeing the scene was Joan Little, twenty years old, poor, Black, and in trouble. After turning herself in, Little faced a possible death sentence in the states gas chamber. At her trial, which was followed around the world, Little claimed that she had killed Alligood in self-defense against sexual assault. Local and national figures took up Littles cause, protesting her innocence. After a five-week trial, Little was acquitted. But the case stirred debate about a womans right to use deadly force to resist sexual violence.Through the prism of Littles rape-murder trial and the Free Joan Little campaign, Christina Greene explores the intersecting histories of African American women, mass incarceration, sexual violence, and social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Greene argues that Littles circumstances prior to her arrest, assault, and trial were shaped by unprecedented increases in federal financing of local law enforcement and a decades-long criminalization of Blackness. She also reveals tensions among Littles defenders and recovers Black womens intersectional politics of the period, which linked womens prison protest and antirape activism with broader struggles for economic and political justice.