She Ain’t No Rosa Parks: The 1970s Joan Little Rape-Murder Trial & the Rise of Mass Incarceration

She Ain’t No Rosa Parks:
The 1970s Joan Little Rape-Murder Trial & the Rise of Mass Incarceration
Lectured by Christina Greene ’79
In the 1970s, Joan Little, an impoverished young Black woman, was tried for murdering her white jailer after he allegedly sexually assaulted her. The case attracted a wide array of Black Power, civil rights, feminist and prison reform activists and spurred a national debate over a woman’s right to defend herself against sexual assault.  This talk departs from earlier accounts of the rape-murder trial, by focusing on the circumstances that initially landed the young woman in jail and invites a broader analysis of race, gender and mass incarceration.
Christina Greene (Ph.D., Duke University, 1996) was a student of Gerda Lerner in the Women’s History Program at Sarah Lawrence College and is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin in the African American Studies department. Her teaching and writing focuses on African American women’s activism. She is the author of Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina, 1940-1970 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Award for best published work in southern women’s history from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Refreshments served.