In Radical Defense of Themselves: Women Prison Organizing in the 1975 Raleigh Revolt
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2013
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of History
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en
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Abstract
As an intervention in the limited, male-centric historiography of prisoner organizing
in the 1970s, this paper focuses on a weeklong revolt in the North Carolina
Correctional Center for Women in 1975 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Developing out
of the legacy of North Carolina’s homegrown tradition of Black armed resistance
throughout the rise and wane of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the
women of the Raleigh Revolt challenged the respectability politics of earlier,
dominant forms of Black women’s activism. The women inmates at NCCCW
understood and articulated the modern day emergence of mass incarceration as a
form of systemic and state-sponsored violence and physically revolted against these
conditions in defensive of their livelihoods and dignity. As poor and incarcerated
women, their radical public assertion of subjectivity and humanity, documented in
their self-produced zine Break de Chains of U$ Slavery, contests the scholarship of
prison activism in which incarcerated women are portrayed as passive victims.