How to read this timeline

The events, people, and publications featured here have been drawn primarily from two sources: Emily Thuma’s All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence as well as Beth Richie’s Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. Assembling the historical analyses of Black feminist organizing in both of these texts, this timeline demonstrates how the Black anti-carceral feminist movement gained momentum in this period,contesting mainstream feminism’s single-axis approach to ending sexual violence.

In drawing on Thuma and Richie’s works, this timeline defines activism as:

“a range of activities designed to change the social arrangements that privilege those in power at the expense of more marginalized groups.”

Richie provides more shape to this definition, outlining the many ways Black feminist organizers resist and fight for a more just world:

“When institutions failed us, Black women supported one another in autonomous selfhelp groups. We sought to change repressive anti-violence laws through electoral politics, and when material needs arose, we pooled resources. Black feminist anti-violence praxis responded to being silenced by mainstream organizations, by organizing our own national groups, taking great risks by speaking out against racial and gender injustice in our communities and in larger social venues. Black women writers have given voice to our struggle through essays, poetry,and fiction. Black women scholars have chronicled other Black women’s experiences of violence in books and journal articles. Significant partnerships sprung up between “everyday experts working at the grassroots level” and radical Black women intellectuals.... Many Black women have employed multiple tools and talents in defiance of male violence in their homes and communities, in defiance of neoliberal public policies, and importantly, in defiance of the mainstream feminist movement that has so blatantly denied our leadership, our analysis, and our unique needs for safety and autonomy.

reading the timeline Cont’d

There are several threads running through this timeline that may help readers make sense of it all. These categories are by no means static or self-contained -they are simply an attempt to make this work more legible.

Defense Campaigns

In the late 20th century, radical feminists engaged in participatory defense campaigns for Black women like Joann Little and Dessie Woods who faced prison time for defending themselves against sexual violence. These campaigns became crucial in the making of a feminist politics that saw the fight against the abuses of the carceral state and the struggle against sexual and gender based violence as indivisible.

Print Culture

Organizers in this period also took hold of the print culture of the anti-prison movement in their own efforts, minimizing the space between activists inside the carceral system and beyond its walls. The work featured in various anti-carceral feminist publications, particularly writings by incarcerated women, helped to establish a discourse among radical feminists on the interconnectedness of sexual violence and carceral violence.

Coalition Building

Establishing a Black feminist critique of the carceral state also meant building coalitions that could address the fundamental intersections of gender, racial, and economic violence. Beyond acknowledging the ties between issues of poverty, gender based violence and carceral violence, Black feminist organizers have worked together to imagine alternative community structures of public safety and protection to envision a world beyond the carceral state.