Joan Little (left) and one of her attorneys (Karen Galloway) wait for an elevator July 14, 1975 in the Wake County Courthouse where Little was on trial for the 1974 stabbing death of one of her jailers. Source: Washington Area Spark.

Joan* Little was acquitted on this day in 1975, the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. She had killed a guard in self-defense while incarcerated.

Her case received national attention, leading her to say:

My life is not in the hands of the court. My life is in the hands of the people.

There were “Joanne Little Legal Defense Committees” all over the United States, including a local chapter formed by Rosa Parks in Detroit.

The Washington Area Spark offers the following description:

Little was jailed for minor crimes in the Beauford County, North Carolina jail. On August 27, 1974 white guard Clarence Alligood was found dead on Joan Little’s bunk naked from the waist down with stab wounds to his temple and heart. Semen was later discovered on his leg.

Little claimed self defense against sexual assault but was charged with first degree murder.

The case attracted national attention in part because Little would have received the death penalty if convicted. Civil rights advocates, death penalty opponents and women’s rights advocates all rallied to her defense.

Source: U.S. Prison Culture website.

The jury of six African Americans and six whites deliberated for about an hour and a half before delivering a not guilty verdict.

Little may have been the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Her case also has become classic in legal circles as a pioneering instance of the application of scientific jury selection. Read in full.

The blog Prison Culture asks,

One has to wonder what it would take to build a similar coalition of groups and individuals in 2011 to take aim at dismantling the unjust prison industrial complex. The “Free Joan Little” movement is instructive because it underscores that it is possible to come together to address prisoner injustice and to WIN. Continue reading ‘Free Joan Little’: Reflections on Prisoner Resistance and Movement-Building.

Read more in Black Herstory: The Trial of the Decade at Ms. Magazine and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Learn more about Little’s trial and imprisonment and hear her 1975 speech at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in the Southern Cultures article “I Was There.”

Listen to the song Joanne Little by Bernice Johnson Reagon, sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. It became an anthem for the “Free Joan Little” movement. (Lyrics below.)

I always walked by the golden rule, steered clear of controversy . . .

Till along come this woman, little over five feet tall

Charged and jailed with breaking the law . . .

First-degree murder she was on the loose, Joanne . . . What is she to you?

Joanne Little, she’s my sister. Joanne Little, she’s our mama. Joanne

Little, she’s your lover. Joanne’s the woman who’s gonna carry your

child…

This is 1975 at it most oppressive best.

North Carolina state, the pride of this land, made her an outlaw…

Tell me what she did to deserve this name?

Killed a man who thought she was fair game.

When I heard the news, I screamed inside.

Lost all my cool. My anger I could not hide. . .

Joanne is you. Joanne is me. Our prison is the whole society

’cause we live in a land that’ll bring all pressure to bear

on the head of a woman whose position we share.

*Note Joan is pronounced Jo-ann so often spelled Joann or Joanne.

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The five defendants, behind the table, in court in 1990. Source: James Estrin/The New York Times

On April 19, 1989, the New York Police accused and arrested four African American teenagers and one Latino teenager for the brutal rape of a white woman. The trial of the “Central Park Five” — in the courts and in the media — became one of the most famous of the 20th century.

As with the Scottsboro Nine and countless other cases, racism carried more weight than the evidence and any hope of a fair trial for the five defendants. Donald Trump took out full-page advertisements in all four of the city’s major newspapers calling for their execution.

The young men — Yusef Salaam, 16, Antron McCray, 16, Korey Wise, 18, Kevin Richardson, 16, and Raymond Santana, 15 — spent between 6 and 13 years in prison. They were only exonerated and released after Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist in prison, confessed to the crime. DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. As Amy Goodman notes, “After the five boys were arrested, Reyes went on to beat and rape five women, murdering one of them, Lourdes Gonzalez, a pregnant mother of three.”

Ava DuVernay produced a dramatic mini-series about the “the exonerated five” called “When They See Us” that streams on Netflix.

Watch the interview with DuVernay on Democracy Now!, “They Are Not the Central Park 5”: Ava DuVernay’s Series Restores Humanity of Wrongly Convicted Boys.

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Fred Korematsu, courtesy of Karen Korematsu and the Fred T. Korematsu Institute.

Fred Korematsu, a U.S. citizen and the son of Japanese immigrants, had refused to evacuate when President Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Korematsu was arrested on a street corner in San Leandro, California on May 30, 1942 for resisting Executive Order 9066, in which all people of Japanese descent were incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps.  He was convicted and sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah.

While in jail, Ernest Besig, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, asked Korematsu if he was willing to challenge the constitutionality World War II Japanese Incarceration. Korematsu agreed and filed a case on June 12, 1942. The premise of the lawsuit was that Korematsu’s constitutional rights had been violated and he had suffered racial discrimination. However, the court ruled against Korematsu and he was sentenced to five years probation.

Determined to pursue his cause, Korematsu filed an appeal with Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, later, to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Dec. 18, 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that the denial of civil liberties based on race and national origin was legal.

In Of Civil Wrongs and Rights, Korematsu says,

I’m an American and just as long as I’m in this country I will keep on going and if there is a chance of reopening the case, I will do it.

An excellent book to introduce the Korematsu story to grades 7+.

This chance came in the form of Peter Irons, a law professor, researching the internment for a book. [Howard Zinn helped Irons become a lawyer.] Irons discovered long-forgotten documents that proved that the Justice Department had misrepresented the facts to the Supreme Court. He took this evidence to Korematsu, and they both decided to re-open the case.

Peter Irons enlisted a legal team consisting mainly of Asian-American lawyers. Their efforts ultimately uncovered documents that clearly showed the government concealed evidence in the 1944 case that racism—not military necessity—motivated the internment order. More than 39 years after the fact, on November 10, 1983, a federal judge reversed Korematsu’s conviction, acknowledging the “great wrong” done to him.

On Jan. 30, 2011, the state of California celebrated Fred Korematsu Day, the first day named after an Asian American in the U.S., now recognized by six states. [This description draws from the information on the PBS documentary Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story website.]

A 1983 press conference on the Korematsu internment case. Seated (L to R) Dale Minami, Fred Korematsu, and Peter Irons. Standing: Donald Tamaki, Dennis Hayashi, and Lorraine Bannai. Source: Chris Huie.

The Korematsu Institute provides free teaching materials to schools throughout the United States and around the world about Fred Korematsu’s story. Find resources below for teaching about Korematsu, Japanese Internment, and Asian American history.

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Through narratives, letters, drawings, poems, and more, A Queer History of the United States for Young People encourages young readers, of all identities, to feel pride at the accomplishments of the LGBTQ people who came before them and to use history as a guide to the future.

People and groups featured include:

• Indigenous nations who embraced same-sex relationships and a multiplicity of gender identities
• Emily Dickinson, brilliant nineteenth-century poet who wrote about her desire for women
• Gladys Bentley, Harlem blues singer who challenged restrictive cross-dressing laws in the 1920s
• Bayard Rustin, civil rights organizer

The book includes accessible descriptions and explanations of the identities included in the text, as well as an introduction to explain the relevance and necessity of LGBTQ history.

Regrettably, the book does not address the racist views of some of the LGBTQ historical figures described in the book, such as Walt Whitman.

IMDB: 9780807056127 | Penguin Random House

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Eddie Griffin

In response to our “This Day in History” post in 2014 about the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion, civil rights activist and former Black Panther member Eddie Griffin provided us with information about an act of resistance he participated in at the United States Penitentiary at Marion. Griffin’s account shows that the rebellion at Attica was not an isolated event, but one among many acts of resistance organized by prisoners to protest brutal conditions in U.S. prisons. 

On July 4, 1976 inmates at United States Penitentiary (USP) Marion (in Illinois) staged a hunger strike in protest of inhumane treatment by the prison administration. They planned the strike for two years in order that it may coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial celebration.

The prisoners involved in the planning—Eddie Griffin, Horace Graydon, Thomas Flood, Ed Jones and others—became known as the “Marion Brothers.” Following the Attica Prison Rebellion three years earlier, the Marion Brothers recognized the need to establish a network of outside support groups and media alliances prior to strike. 

Built in 1963 to replace the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Marion was the first super-maximum security “supermax” prison in the world. In 1968, Marion implemented a program called the “Care and Rehabilitation Effort” (CARE). Despite its name, the CARE program at Marion forced prisoners to undergo violent sessions of group “therapy” and long periods of solitary confinement.

The organizational behavioral psychology methods used on prisoners were adopted from Dr. Edgar Schein’s approaches to degrade and humiliate prisoners. The methods—including spying, convincing prisoners to mistrust one another, withholding mail, and sleep deprivation—were designed to weaken emotional ties, and induce fear and guilt. Prisoner Eddie Griffin details such occurrences in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1977): 

It is itself a Death Row for the living. Its creation added the ultimate dimension to the behavior modification system. The subtle implication behind its meaning is made sharp and clear: Conform or Die. 

Griffin describes the 1976 Marion prison strike below. (Note: This was in a statement of support for the 2011 Pelican Bay prisoners’ hunger strike.) 

The Great Bicentennial Hunger Strike was two years in the making. It was not a simple undertaking, because men were putting their lives at stake, and the planning had to be kept secret from the prison administration.

I was given the responsibility of drafting the petition for redress and issuing the press release. As a prelude, now part of the Marion Brothers archives, there were interviews with select political prisoners, which included Puerto Rican Nationalist Rafael Cancel Miranda, American Indian Movement Leonard Peltier, and Black Panther Lorenzo Komboa Ervin. These were internationally recognized political prisoners with grievances against the United States. And, it was their grievances, besides the human rights issues of prisoners that comprised the body of the petition, which I delivered to the warden on that Fourth of July.

The first redress was “to hire more minority prison guards.” Although most prisoners fought me, tooth and nail on this issue, it was the first to grab the media’s attention, and the most defenseless for the government.

The second redress was “to stop using prisoners as guinea pigs in mind control experiments.” This issue raised curiosity and initiated an investigation by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When the allegation proved true, and that the CIA was behind the experimentation, Angela Davis organized some 800 support organizations into the Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression.

Our case was presented to the United Nations, which declared 1977 as the Year of the Prisoner of Conscience. The World Peace Council convened at the University of Helsinki and named some 125 prisoners worldwide as Prisoners of Conscience. U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young acknowledged that there were hundreds of American political prisoners.

On the other hand, the warden at Marion, through the government, promised to hire more minority and women prison guards. But the “behavior modification” programs continued. Long-term segregation in sensory deprivation chambers took on new names. Today’s Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) is a replica of Marion’s notorious Control Unit.

Other notable affiliates to the organized prison rebellions were the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and Rafael Cancel Miranda, political activist and member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, mentor and next cell door neighbor to Eddie Griffin.

Related Resources

While subject to solitary confinement, Griffin wrote “Breaking Men’s Minds: Behavior Control and Human Experimentation at the Federal Prison in Marion”

“Hell in a Very Small Space” by Daniel Berrigan S.J., Eddie Griffin, Rev. Leon White, and others. Available on the Freedom Archives website.

Eddie Griffin’s Statement of Support for Prisoner Hunger Strike at Pelican Bay.

“Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972” by Alan Eladio Gomez on the acts of resistance at USP Marion in 1972.

From Alcatraz to Marion to Florence – Control Unit Prisons in the United States by the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. 

Find teaching materials about the Attica Prison Rebellion, prison strikes, and incarceration in the United States below. 

This post was prepared by Ravon Ruffin and Rhys Davis. Our appreciation to Eddie Griffin for alerting us to this story and providing background information.

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“The Amistad Trial” by Hale Woodruff from a mural at Talladega College called The Amistad Mutiny, 1939. Click image to learn more.

On July 2, 1839, Africans on the Cuban schooner Amistad rose up against their captors, seizing control of the ship, which had been transporting them to chattel slavery. Here is a description from the Library of Congress:

On July 2, 1839, Joseph Cinqué led fifty-two fellow captive Africans, recently abducted from the British protectorate of Sierra Leone by Portuguese slave traders, in a revolt aboard the Spanish schooner Amistad. The ship’s navigator, who was spared in order to direct the ship back to western Africa, managed, instead, to steer it northward. When the Amistad was discovered off the coast of Long Island, New York, it was hauled into New London, Connecticut by the U.S. Navy.

President Martin Van Buren, guided in part by his desire to woo pro-slavery votes in his upcoming bid for reelection, wanted the prisoners returned to Spanish authorities in Cuba to stand trial for mutiny. A Connecticut judge, however, issued a ruling recognizing the defendants’ rights as free citizens and ordering the U.S. government to escort them back to Africa.

The U.S. government eventually appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Former president John Quincy Adams, who represented the Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court case, argued in their defense that it was the illegally enslaved Africans, rather than the Cubans, who “were entitled to all the kindness and good offices due from a humane and Christian nation.” Cinque testified on his own behalf. The victory in the case of the United States v. The Amistad was a significant success for the abolition movement.

Find primary documents about the Amistad case at the National Archives.

For children, we recommend the picture book Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad about Margu, a child on the Amistad. The book includes the story of her captivity during the trial, the court case, her eventual return to Mendeland in Sierra Leone, her later return to the United States, and her graduation from Oberlin College. For high school and adults, read The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Marcus Rediker.

Read how students learned about slavery and abolitionism in New York, including the Amistad Defense Committee in Reclaiming Hidden History: Students Create a Slavery Walking Tour in Manhattan.

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Related Media

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“This mural for Philando Castile is art born out of resistance.” Click image to read about the mural’s creation.

On July 6, 2016 Philando Castile, an African American, was shot to death by a police officer after being pulled over in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Castile was known as “Mr. Phil” to the students at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, where he was employed as nutritional supervisor, and was a beloved member of the Twin Cities-area educational community. [The 395 Kids Philando Castile Left Behind.] His girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter were present at the time of the shooting.

The officer had pulled Castile over under the pretext that his brake lights had gone out and had falsely suspected that Castile was the perpetrator in an armed robbery that had happened the previous week. Upon being pulled over, Castile alerted the officer that he had a registered firearm in his pocket. Legally, Castile was not required by law to alert the officer that he was carrying a firearm. Despite repeated attempts to dissuade the officer that he was not reaching for his firearm, the officer disregarded Castile’s warnings. When he reached for his wallet, Castile was shot multiple times at point-blank range. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, streamed the aftermath of the shooting on her Facebook. Reynold’s four-year-old daughter had seen all of the events transpire from the back seat of the car. 

The shooting immediately demanded the attention of the nation, and Castile became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though public opinion and the evidence seemed to weigh against Officer Jeronimo Yanez, the jury composed of ten white individuals and two people of color acquitted the officer on all charges. The video of Castile’s final moments filmed by Reynolds, a key piece of evidence, was not shown in court by the prosecution. 

Despite his death, Castile will not be forgotten. When Yanez was acquitted, civil rights lawyer and former president of the Minneapolis NAACP Nekima Levy Armstrong (formerly Levy-Pounds) said in an interview with Democracy Now! (below) that “we waited patiently for almost a year for the verdict to come down. And to see that Jeronimo Yanez was not even found guilty on the lesser charges is extremely disappointing and frustrating. And so, it means that we have to continue protesting and demonstrating and challenging the laws and policies that allow these police officers to kill people with impunity.” 

In the aftermath of Castile’s death, teachers joined those demanding justice. During an American Federation of Teachers conference in Minneapolis on July 20, 2016, teachers marched alongside other protesters, leading to the arrest of twenty-one members of various educational unions.

This post was prepared by Zinn Education Project volunteer Rhys Davis.

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In this very personal work — proceeds of which will go to charity — Bryan Stevenson recounts many and varied stories of his work as a lawyer in the U.S. criminal justice system on behalf of those in society who have experienced some type of discrimination and/or have been wrongly accused of a crime and who deserve a powerful advocate and due justice under the law.

Through the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization Stevenson founded as a young lawyer and for which he currently serves as executive director, this important work continues. EJI strives to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States. [Description from GoodReads.com]

ISBN: 9780593177044 | Random House Children’s Books | Ember

Democracy Now! interview with Bryan Stevenson

Video clip: “Just Mercy”: Bryan Stevenson on Ferguson, Prison Reform & Why the Opposite of Poverty is Justice (2014)

Classroom Story

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Workers at Banner Mine. Source: Birmingham Public Library Archives

On April 8, 1911, an explosion at the Banner Mine in Alabama killed 128 men, almost all of them African American prisoners of the state. Many of them were serving time for misdemeanors such as violating prohibition and vagrancy — often known to be trumped up charges to help meet state quotas for convict labor. The men were effectively sentenced to enslavement and death through the convict lease system.

Within two weeks of the explosion, convicts were sent back to work at the mine. The use of convict labor in Alabama mines was in response by the owners to earlier efforts by miners to join labor unions and strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Those better working conditions might have prevented the Banner explosion and other mine disasters. The state colluded with the mine owners to protect their profits instead of the rights of the workers for health and safety.

Read more about the Banner Mine disaster at the Encyclopedia of Alabama and see the book and film Slavery by Another Name.

Meanwhile, the contemporary implications of coal get little mention in textbooks and the U.S. government is lifting all safety regulations on mining. Read and share The Poison We Never Talk About in School by Bill Bigelow from Rethinking Schools.

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