A (non-exhaustive) timeline of anti-carceral feminist activism

1968

The Third World Women’s Association (TWWA) is formed out of the Black Women’s Liberation Committe of SNCC to address male chauvinism within the anti-racist movement. The feminist organizers of TWWA were determined to “dispel the myth of the Black matriarch within the community, to prioritize work that responded to the ongoing oppression of Black women, and to legitimize Black women’s role in the revolutionary struggle for civil rights”(Richie, 144). As one of the earliest groups advocating for an intersectional approach to understanding women’s oppression, their organizing principles (in direct opposition to essentialist theories in the mainstream feminist movement) paved the wayfor Womanism and Black feminism as critical feminist theories. TWWA’snewsletter, Triple Jeopardy, helped to advance understandings of the simultaneity of oppression.

1972

Women incarcerated at MCI-Framingham hold a protest against the deplorable conditions inside. Their protests were part of a nationwide wave of protests inside American prisons, fueled by the Attica rebellion. This political unrest would later be used as justification in prison officials’ attempts to build a behavior modification for women in the MCI system; pathologizing criminalized women as “dangerous” would become another method of state control.

August, 1972

Yvonne Wanrow, a Native American woman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation is arrested in Washington state for shooting and killing William Wesler, a white man who threatened to sexually abuse her young son.

October 13th, 1970

Angela Davis is arrested in New York for alleged involvement in a shoot-out outside a California courthouse following activist Jonathan Jackson's attempt to free three prisoners. Though Davis had not been present, she was accused of purchasing the guns used in the incident; she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy. Her arrest spurred on the Free Angela Davis campaign, a national movement that would continue until her acquittal in 1972. The campaign drew public attention to the lengths the state would go to suppress and quell the revolutionary potential of Black feminist voices.

Spring, 1972

The D.C. Rape Crisis Center (RCC) is established, one of the first of its kind in the United States. While the organization’s original involvement included young, white, working-class women involved in the women’s liberation movement, the RCC would later transform its initial single-axis analysis of the criminal justice system -- thanks to its emerging Black feminist leadership -- to link the city’s Black liberation and women’s movement.

1973

Yvonne Wanrow is convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) rallies behind Wanrow to launch a national defense campaign. The campaign would go on to secure representation by feminist lawyers for Wanrow from the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in 1975.

August, 1974

Joann Little is arrested for the killing of Clarence Alligood, a white Correctional Officer who sexually assaulted her in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail. Her arrest would be met with outrage by local anti-violence activists.

September, 1974

The Feminist Alliance Against Rape is founded as a subgroup to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. FAAR sought to network among feminists in the anti-rape movement, establishing a bimonthly newsletter, first published in September of 1974. The newsletter invited groups to join the discussion on violence against women and provided resources and practical information for grassroots organizers.

March, 1974

Inez García is arrested in California for defending herself against Miguel Jiminez, who stood guard while she was raped by another man.

1973

The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) is founded as a space for Black women who want to discuss the inclusion of feminist politics in the Black liberation movement. The NBFO, like TWWA, was one of the first national organizations geared towards the experiences and needs of Black women, setting the stage for other organizations like the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF), also founded in 1973. Building a radical self-help model, the NABF focused on the impact of sexual harassment on Black girls in school settings, coordinated health fairs to address disparities in care that included treatment for violence, and planned employment seminars with information on workplace harassment. The NABF also created a rape crisis hotline for Black women dealing with sexual violence.

September, 1974

The Joann Little Defense Fund is established in Durham, NC by Black feminist organizers.

November 16th, 1974

A crowd of demonstrators from a local group, Action for Forgotten Women (AFW), assemble outside of the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women (NCCCW) in Raleigh to denounce the terrible conditions inside the prison, as well as to support Joann Little who was incarcerated inside. Organizers inside the prison coordinated with AFW to join in with chants as the demonstration went on. by Black feminist organizers.

1974

The Combahee River Collective is established as the Boston Chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In 1975, the Collective would cut ties with the NBFO after deciding their politics were at odds. The Collective would go on to exist as a political home base for Black feminists in the Northeast and Boston a rea, participating in coalition building for socialist, anti-imperialist, and queer anti-violence organizers.

February, 1975

A march is held in San Francisco, California to uplift the Justice for Inez García campaign and the rights of all incarcerated women. Protestors circulate a petition directed at Governor Jerry Brown that demands that he recognize a woman’s right to self-defense, pardon García and establish a multi-racial women’s commission to review the convictions of all women serving time in California.

June, 1975

Dessie Woods and Cheryl Todd are arrested after defending themselves against attempted rape by a white man in Reidsville, Georgia.

August 15th, 1975

Joann Little becomes the first woman acquitted of murder on a self-defense claim. Her trial drew national attention, and illustrated a success for anti-carceral feminist organizers who fought against the racist claims that Little was lascivious and had seduced Alligood in an escape plot. Still, Little is reincarcerated to finish out her original sentence of 7-10 years imprisonment for a survival crime, burglary. The Berkley-based Inez García Defense Fund is established, as well as the Viva Inez campaign.

1975

The DC Rape Crisis Center and FAAR establish the DC Coalition for Joann Little and Inez García, drawing a parallel between their circumstances and the carceral and sexual violence that both women experienced.

June, 1975

Angela Davis publishes her article, “Joanne Little: The

Dialectics of Rape” in Ms. magazine, highlighting the specific violence of white male sexual exploitation of

Black women. This article sought to combat the

“everywoman” narrative that was emerging in white feminist circles around cases like Little’s. This narrative white-washed instances of sexual violence against

Black and criminalized women, with claims that white women should care about cases like Little’s because the violence she faced “could happen to any of us.”

JunE 15th, 1975

400 women imprisoned at NCCCW spontaneously sit-in to protest conditions inside. Building on the attention the prison was receiving from Joann Little’s case, the women take advantage of the moment to raise consciousness about the violence of the carceral system on all imprisoned women. They are supported by a coalition of organizers from the outside, including AFW.

Spring, 1976

The first issue of Seattle-based grassroots publication Through the Looking Glass: A Women and Children Prison Newsletter is published. Their mission was to encourage discourse on the iss3ue of women’s incarceration, to communicate ideas around decarceration, and build networks of incarcerated women organizing inside.

March, 1977

Inez García is acquitted on self-defense grounds.

October 1st, 1977

The Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence (CSIV) begins protests against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections plan to build a Center for Violent Women in Worcester.

1977 The Combahee River Collective publishes their canonical manifesto “A Black Feminist Statement”, arguing for an “integrated analysis and [anti-violence] practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” After working with a new lawyer and appealing her conviction, García is finally granted a new trial.

February, 1976

Dessie Woods is convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison; the National Committee to Defend Dessie Woods (NCDDW) is established by the African People’s Socialist Party.

September, 1977

The NCDDW carries out a National Day of Action in Atlanta, demanding justice for Dessie Woods. The protest was attended by 500 people.

1977

Santa Cruz Women Against Rape publish “An Open Letter to the Anti-Rape Movement”. The letter explicitly addresses anti-rape activists who are working in concert with law enforcement, stating “the time and energy that is now used on developing a good working relationship with criminal justice system agencies and on reform legislation could be much better spent. Instead, the anti-rape movement should work on community education, and on developing practical alternatives that deal with both the systems and the roots of sexism and violence.”

1978

Women of All Red Nations (WARN), a coalition of 200 activists with many ties to AIM, is formed. They forward reproductive rights, imprisonment, and environmental degradation as central priorities in their anti-carceral feminist campaign.

1978

FAAR merges with the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion to publish Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women. As a space for counterpublic discourse, Aegis provided information on the cases of Little, Woods, Wanrow and García, bolstering anti-carceral feminist networks until it ceased publication in the mid 80s.

april, 1978

Washington’s first-ever March to Stop Violence Against Women (later, their Take Back the Night March) takes place. The march was the culmination of the D.C. RCC’s community education project “Anti-Rape Week”, which focused on exploring community responses to violence against women rather than the involvement of the criminal justice state.

april 1st, 1979

The Combahee River Collective (CRC) and a grassroots organization known as CRISIS organize a march of 1,500 people, most of them Black, in the South End of Boston. The group aimed to express grief and outrage around several murders of Black women in the city that year. According to attendees, the demonstration speakers, many of them men, missed the mark by describing the women’s deaths in terms of racial violence alone, with no mention of sexual politics.

1978

Women Free Women in Prison, a Brooklyn based feminist collective, launches a women’s prison newsletter to publicize incarcerated women’s political thought and activism.

august, 1978

Boston’s Take Back the Night (TBTN) coalition holds its first annual nighttime march from Fenway to Copley Square. Organizers from a broad range of feminist organizations participate in the action, demanding: the decriminalization of sex work, public funding for feminist self-defense classes, shelters and rape crisis centers. The CSIV proposed that Massachusetts use the $600,000 earmarked for the Worcester center for so-called violent women to fund these programs, reflecting an anti-carceral feminist approach to radical self-help and mutual aid.

aPril 2nd, 1979

Barbara Smith from the CRC would begin work on a groundbreaking pamphlet entitled 6 Black Women: Why Did They Die? to offer an intersectional analysis of violence against Black women, motivated by the protests just a day before. The pamphlet emphasized a reliance on community networks to combat violence against Black women, as opposed to carceral systems and the police, who had routinely ignored the murders in Roxbury.

1979 The Coalition for Women’s Safety (CWS) is founded in Boston with a “bottom line commitment to work towards ending violence against women in our communities” in response to the Roxbury murders. CWS would organize for two years, advocating a program of self-protection in lieu of increased police involvement in communities, and successfully launching grassroots community services.

august, 1979

CWS sponsors its first Freedom Stride, a run-a-thon intended to echo the 1961 Freedom Rides that confronted Jim Crow segregation in interstate bus systems across the South. The demonstration raised funds for the group’s grassroots efforts. As a public demonstration, the event symbolized women’s rights to public spaces and safe streets.

august, 1980

One hundred activists gather in Washington, D.C. for the first National Conference on Third World Women and Violence. Conference coordinators Loretta Ross, Nkenge Touré, and Deirdre Wright identified “isolation, alienation and racism” within feminist anti-violence organizations as the motivating factors for a conference to network BIPOC women and men in antiviolence activism. Activists also sought to address the concern of increasing partnerships between anti-rape organizations and the carceral state.

1979

Yvonne Wanrow and her lawyers accept a plea for 5 years of probation rather than going through another trial.

1980 Barbara Smith founds Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a publishing company that would become "one of the most significant institutions [to] helped shape Black feminist analyses” according to Richie. As an organizing vehicle for critical analyses of issues like violence against Black women, Kitchen Table provided a platform for several groundbreaking texts that contributed to anti-carceral feminist discourse, including:

-bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism -Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class -poet-activist June Jordan’s book of essays entitled Civil Wars -Feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, including contributions by Black feminists Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Toni Cade Bambara -Barbara Smith, Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott’s co-edited anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies

November 1st, 1980

D.C. organizer and RCC board member Yulanda Ward is shot and killed in what police called a “robbery gone wrong”. Ward’s comrades, including Nkenge Touré and Loretta Ross of the RCC, argued instead that Ward was assassinated. They claim her death was a concrete manifestation of the state’s propensity to exact violence against those who challenge racial, gender, economic orders. Ward’s work, and the murky circumstances of her death, reveal the ways that racial capitalism’s deep oppressive features -specifically economic inequity -- disproportionately impact the lives of Black women.

1981

The activist anthology Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence is published to forward nonstatist anti-violence strategies.

1991 A national network that organized in response to Anita Hill’s testimony at the congressional hearings to confirm Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (AAWIDO) -- is founded. Elsa Barkley Brown, Deborah King, and Barbara Ransby drafted the influential “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves” statement, which denounced both the seating of Clarence Thomas and the treatment of Anita Hill. Over 1,600 Black women signed the statement, which appeared in the New York Times and seven other notable newspapers as a full-page advertisement.

1997

Critical Resistance is founded by several Black feminist activists, including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Rose Braz. Holding prison abolition as its central tenet, the organization is committed to ending the nation’s reliance on racist carceral structures, and replacing prisons with anti-poverty measures that provide everyone with basic necessities (food, shelter, freedom, instead of incarceration and punishment). 1990 Evelyn C. White publishes The Black Women’s Health Book, which recounts the development in the mid-to-late 1980s of the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP) under the leadership of Byllye Avery. Credited as one of the first national groups to recognize that Black women’s health was greatly impacted by interpersonal violence from within homes and communities, as well as by the ever-grinding pressure of living in a racist, sexist, and classist society, the NBWHP aimed to expose the intersecting systems that so damaged Black women’s health. The NBWHP advocated a holistic response to health as a resistance strategy.

1995

Beverly Guy-Sheftall publishes Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. This anthology, which included several entries referring to male violence from a Black feminist perspective, reasserted the voices of Black feminists writers as the conservative Reagan/ Bush years came to a close. In including works by Black women from as early as the 19th century, Words of Fire provided ample evidence that Black feminist consciousness has a long and storied legacy.

September 1998

CR holds its first conference, “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex”, at U.C. Berkley. Speakers challenged the “prison industrial complex” (PIC) by revealing the ways in which racial capitalism benefits from the marginalization, disenfranchisement, and exploitation of incarcerated people.

Anti-violence activists gather in Santa Cruz, California for “The Color of Violence: Conference on Violence Against Women of Color.” The 2,000 attendees engage in a call for anti-violence strategies that fight rather than bolster the growth of the prison industrial complex. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is formed as a way to further these conversations through a national network of participating organizations. In her keynote address, Angela Davis argued that the conference would “be remembered as a milestone for feminist scholars and activists, marking a new moment in the history of anti-violence organizing.”

Incite! chapters have formed in 11 states around the country since 2000. The national organization also partners with sister groups like Sista II Sista in New York, Sisters in Action for Power in Portland, Domestic Workers United in the Bronx, and Sisters Organizing Against Sexual Assault.

2004

Mimi Kim founds Creative Interventions (CI) to discuss new solutions to sexual and carceral violence. CI holds self-determination, collective action, and liberation at the heart of its resource building. They aim to shift the anti-violence movement away from social services and criminalization toward community based responses to violence.

2015

At Union Square in New York City, the African American Policy Forum hosts #SayHerName: A Vigil in Memory of Black Women and Girls Killed by the Police. The vigil provided space for the family members of Black women killed by police to come together from across the country and draw attention to their loved ones' stories. The family members of Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson were present and supported by hundreds of attendees, activists, and stakeholders.

2001

Incite! and CR produce a joint statement criticizing the anti-violence movement for feeding the prison industrial complex. The statement also addressed blindspots in the anti-prison movement around the carceral experiences of Black women. In the ethos of Black feminist organizing, CR and Incite! also highlight the need for intersectional and coalition-based organizing.

2006

INCITE! releases The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, coining the term “non-profit industrial complex” to identify the ways in which nonprofit organizations participate in and replicate the oppressive practices of the state. Condemning not only pro-criminalization stances taken up by anti-violence organizations but also the neoliberal logic of funder-driven initiatives, competitive posturing in the nonprofit marketplace, and individualized service delivery, this critique suggested a wary relationship between those within the nonprofit anti-violence sector and anti-carceral feminist organizers.

2015

Members of the national campaign to Free Marissa Alexander -- a Black mother facing 60 years in prison for defending herself against her abusive husband -- organize a defense campaign workshop for the Color of Violence Conference, organized by Incite!. There, they met members of the Stand with Nan-Hui defense campaign to free Nan-Hui Jo, a Korean mother and survivor of domestic violence who was targeted by prosecutors and imprisoned in ICE detention. The group then connected with members of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) a grassroots advocacy organization that had been organizing for the freedom of people in women’s prisons for over 20 years. This collective of organizers, in exchanging their experiences with defense campaigning and the intersections of criminalization and sexual violence, established a new national organization: Survived & Punished (S&P). The national group would meet officially in Chicago in March 2016 to develop a national organizing plan.

2020

Ejeris Dixon Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha publish Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, a collection of essays and resources on transformative justice practices. Authors included in the anthology use a variety of forms— from toolkits to personal essays—to delve deeply into the “how to” of transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police, ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of community-based murder investigations and more. The AAPF and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, in partnership with Andrea Ritchie, release a report entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, outlining the goals and objectives of the #SayHerName movement. The report provides an intersectional framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and carceral violence, offering suggestions on how to mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.

May 20th, 2015

At Union Square in New York City, the African American Policy Forum hosts #SayHerName: A Vigil in Memory of Black Women and Girls Killed by the Police. The vigil provided space for the family members of Black women killed by police to come together from across the country and draw attention to their loved ones' stories. The family members of Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson were present and supported by hundreds of attendees, activists, and stakeholders.