Care Cage: Black Women, Political Symbolism, and 1970s Prison Crisis

Abstract

Mary Fitzpatrick's historical life sheds light on the role of liberal discourse and racialized and gendered affective politics in entrenching black captivity. Her imprisonment and coerced domestic servitude reveal the role of black women's carceral exploitation in a pivotal 1970s moment in which the future of the U.S. carceral state was contested and contingent.

Keywords:

• black women
• black feminism
• Georgia
• prisons
• U.S. history

Acknowledgments

I thank Shana L. Redmond, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Kali Gross, and members of the “States of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern U.S. History” seminar at Radcliffe College for their insights as well as Kali N. Gross and Keisha Blain for their important work in Black women’s history and curating this special issue.

Notes

1 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997), 65.

2 Erica R. Edwards, “Sex after the Black Normal,” Differences 26, no. 1 (May 2015): 142.

3 On the long history of the policing of black women for self-defense and the absence of protection for black women and girls, see Beth E. Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (New York: Routledge Press, 1996); Beth Richie, “Queering Antiprison Work: African American Lesbians in the Juvenile Justice System,” in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed. Julia Sudbury (New York: Routledge Press, 2005); Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Fight to End Violence, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Priscilla Ocen and Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed-Out, Over-Policed, and Under-Protected,” African American Policy Forum, 2015, http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/BlackGirlsMatter_Report.pdf (accessed January 15, 2016); and the following grassroots organizations and mobilizations: California Coalition of Women Prisoners, Love & Protect, Survived and Punished, and the Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign.

4 “A Story of Love and Rehabilitation: The Ex-Con in the White House,” People, March 17, 1977, Mary Fitzpatrick folder, box 59, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady’s Office (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, Atlanta, GA).

5 “Brief Biography of Mary L. Prince Fitzpatrick,” Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, ibid.

6 Mary Fitzpatrick Biographical Statement, ibid.

7 “Amy’s Nursemaid,” United Press, Feb. 4, 1977, ibid.

8 “For Amy Carter’s Ex-Baby Sitter, Inauguration Was a Fairy Tale,” New York Times, January 25, 1977, 16, ibid.

9 “A Story of Love and Rehabilitation.”

10 On Mammy and American cultural politics see Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

11 Nicole Ivy, “Bodies of Work: A Meditation on Medical Imaginaries and Enslaved Women,” Souls 18, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 11–31.

12 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Toni Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1978), viii; Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738–55.

13 Comptroller General of the United States, “Women in Prison: Inequitable Treatment Requires Action,” 40, December 10, 1980, U.S. Government Accountability Office, https://www.gao.gov/assets/140/131280.pdf (accessed March 5, 2016).

14 “Georgia Gets Funds for Major Correction Plans,” Atlanta Daily World, July 11, 1974; “Prison Reform Focus of Meet at JFK Center,” Atlanta Daily World, October 9, 1977.

15 National Moratorium on Prison Construction, Incarceration Rates and Numbers of Prisoners in Local, State, and Federal Penal Institutions, August 1979, box 2, Georgia Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice folder, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records #4655, Southern Historical Collection (Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

16 Colossal imprisonment in Georgia was neither a result of uniquely high rates of crime, nor did prison expansion thwart crime in the state. The violent crime rate in Georgia ranged from 304.5 in 1970 to 555.3 in 1980; the national rate was 363.5 in 1970 and 596.6 in 1980; Georgia’s property crime rate ranged from 2,577.1 in 1970 to 5,048.3 in 1980 compared to a national rate of 3,621 in 1970 and 5,353.3 in 1980. The number of property crimes in Georgia was eight times higher than violent crimes in Georgia in 1970; approximately seven times higher in 1974, and approximately 8.5 times higher in 1978. United States Department of Justice, Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics.

17 Georgia was the subject of both the Supreme Court case leading to the death penalty’s de facto suspension and its reinstitution; see Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238 (1972) and Gregg v. Georgia 428 US 153 (1976) respectively. “Facts About the Death Penalty,” Civil Liberties, May 1978, box 2, Georgia Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice folder, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records #4655, Southern Historical Collection.

18 Georgia: Race and Hispanic Origin 1790 to 1990 (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2002).

19 Georgia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Georgia Prisons (Washington, DC: National Criminal Justice Reference Service, 1976), 5; Georgia Department of Corrections, Annual Trend Analysis Georgia’s Female Offender Population 1978–1988 (Washington, DC: National Criminal Justice Reference Service, May 1989), 8.

20 Jimmy Carter, speech to the Georgia Association of Broadcasters, June 13, 1972, “First Debate: Carter and Crime” folder, box 1, White House Special Unit Presidential Files, 1974–1977 (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI).

21 “Federal Courts Attack Southern Prison Conditions,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11, 1975; “Georgia’s Soaring Prison Population at 10,330 Record High; Future Gloomy,” Atlanta Daily World, March 18, 1975.

22 Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (1975; Nashville: Broadman Press, 1996), 108.

23 “Inmate Unity or Racial Time Bomb,” Civil Liberties, May 1978, box 2, Georgia Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice folder, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records #4655, Southern Historical Collection.

24 Reidsville Brothers Defense Committee, “Free the Reidsville Brothers! Put the State on Trial!,” 1978, box 2, Georgia Clearinghouse on Criminal Justice folder, Southern Coalition on Prison and Jail Records #4655, Southern Historical Collection.

25 “Prison Must Cut Population, Ease Tensions,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1978.

26 Georgia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Georgia Prisons, 66.

27 “Georgia Gets Funds for Major Correction Plans,” 11; “Report Challenges Contentions of Georgia Prison Officials,” 5; “MacDougall Opposes Several Prison Reforms for Georgia,” Atlanta Daily World, November 18, 1973.

28 Reidsville Brothers Defense Committee, “Free the Reidsville Brothers! Put the State on Trial!”

29 Georgia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Georgia Prisons, 24; “40 Women Prisoners Protest, Grab Guard,” Atlanta Daily World, January 23, 1973. On the long history of laundry worker organizing in Georgia, including everyday practices of resistance, see Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

30 Georgia Department of Rehabilitations Officer Sara Passmore quoted in, “Mansion Help,” Associated Press (N115), February 4, 1977, Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady’s Office.

31 “A Governess for Amy,” Washington Post, February 5, 1977.

32 “Report Challenges Contentions of Georgia Prison Officials.”

33 Ibid.

34 “Georgia Gets Funds for Major Corrections Plans”; “Ault Sees No ‘Neglect’ In Myrick Death,” Atlanta Daily World, July 18, 1975.

35 Georgia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Georgia Prisons, 11; “GA. Prison System in Civil Rights Compliance—ACLU,” Atlanta Daily World, March 11, 1976.

36 “Ga. Grant to Train Female, Black Police,” Atlanta Daily World, November 22, 1973.

37 “Report Challenges Contentions of Georgia Prison Officials.”

38 Ibid., 5.

39 Karen Wald, “The San Quentin Six Case: Perspective and Analysis.” Social Justice 40, no. 1–2 (2014): 239. On prison movements in the 1960s and 1970s see Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014); Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Donald F. Tibbs, From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Marie Fort Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994); Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Matt Meyer, ed., Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners (Oakland: PM Press, 2008); Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Angela Y. Davis, ed., If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971); and Michael Hames-Garcia, Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

40 Emily Gibson, “There’s a Crying Need for Prison Reform,” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 11, 1973.

41 South Georgia Woman Serving Sentence in Food Stamp Fraud.” Atlanta Daily World, January 25, 1974.

42 Ibid.

43 Dorie Klein and June Kress, “Any Woman’s Blues: A Critical Overview of Women, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System,” Social Justice 5 (Spring–Summer 1976): 40.

44 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “The Crime of Survival: Fraud Prosecutions, Community Surveillance, and the Original ‘Welfare Queen.’” Journal of Social History 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 329–54.

45 Davis, If They Come in the Morning, 60.

46 Resources for Community Change, Women Behind Bars: An Organizing Tool (Washington, DC: Resources for Community Change, 1975).

47 Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Security State, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Routledge, 2008), 152.

48 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Justice Expenditure and Employment in the U.S., 1971–1979 (Washington, DC: National Criminal Justice Research Service, 1984), vii.

49 Vesla Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (Fall 2007): 230.

50 Ibid., 243.

51 “Accord is Reached to Reorganize Federal Law Enforcement Agency,” New York Times, July 6, 1978; “Controversial Law Agency Gets Reprieve,” Baltimore Sun, July 11, 1978; “Carter Reorganization Plan for LEAA Leaves Its Crime-Control Budget Intact,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1978.

52 Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, “Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New ‘Realists,” Crime and Social Justice 8 (Fall–Winter 1997). On Carter and the LEAA, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

53 The Comptroller General reported 12,720 women in U.S. federal and state prisons in 1978. Comptroller General, Women in Prison: Inequitable Treatment Requires Action Report to the Congress of the United States, US General Accounting Office, December 10, 1980, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/archive/prison/WomenInPrison.pdf (accessed June 20, 2016). In 1989, the Correctional Association of New York reported that the national women’s prison population was 43,541, Correctional Association of New York, Women in Prison Fact Sheet, December 1980, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/archive/prison/BreakingTheSilence.pdf (accessed June 20, 2016). See also, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 1979 (May 2004), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/psfi79-fr.pdf (accessed June 20, 2016), which reports a 12,741 female prisoner population in 1978. “Prisoners in 1989” reports a female prisoner population of 43,845 in 189. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 1989 (May 1990), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p89.pdf (accessed June 20, 2016).

54 For a brilliant analysis of imprisoned women’s politics and self-defense practices see Thuma, All Our Trials; and Emily Thuma, “Lessons in Self Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization and Anticarceral Feminism,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2015): 52–71.

55 Georgia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Georgia Prisons, 24; “40 Women Prisoners Protest, Grab Guard,” Atlanta Daily World, January 23, 1973.

56 “Busbee Rejects New Probe of Myrick Death,” Atlanta Daily World, August 15, 1975.

57 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 9, 17.

58 See Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Talitha Leflouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

59 “GA To Rehabilitate Women Prisoners Recommended,” Atlanta Daily World, October 31, 1974.

60 “Ault Sees No ‘Neglect’ in Myrick Death,” Atlanta Daily World, July 18, 1975, 1. On parole audit campaign see “Penal Reform Groups Ask Parole Review,” Atlanta Daily World, March 24, 1974; Church Group Urges Review of Georgia Prison Cases, Atlanta Daily World, April 23, 1974.

61 “Demonstrators in Plains Decry Carter’s Human Rights Policy,” Washington Post, July 5, 1978, A6.

62 Ibid,; National Committee to Defend Dessie Woods, “The Story of Dessie Woods,” March 1977, https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Dessie%20Woods/513.DessieWoods.JusticeAmerikkkanStyle.pdf (accessed January 10, 2016). On Woods’s case see Emily Thuma, “Lessons in Self Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43 (Winter 2015); and Victoria Law, “Sick of the Abuse: Feminist Responses to Sexual Assault, Battering, and Self-Defense,” in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

63 Obituary, East Bay Times, November 16, 2006.

64 Thuma, “Lessons in Self Defense,” 54.

65 Johnnie Tillmon, “Welfare is a Woman’s Issue,” Ms. Magazine, spring 1972. On welfare rights activism see Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); and Felicia Kornbluh The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

66 Priya Kandaswamy, “‘You Trade in a Man for the Man’: Domestic Violence and the U.S. Welfare State,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 2010): 254.

67 “Tillmon Attacks Welfare,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 6, 1975, A1.

68 Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981), 320. Emphasis added.

69 Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. Nancy Hewitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Roberta Gold, “‘I Had Not Seen Women Like That Before’: Intergenerational Feminism in New York City’s Tenant Movement,” in No Permanent Waves, ed. Hewitt, 328–35.

70 Williams, The Politics of Public Housing, 128; Roberta Gold, When Tenants Claimed the City: the Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

71 “Brief Biography of Mary L. Prince Fitzpatrick,” Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clipping Files, Records of the First Lady’s Office.

72 James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to Mr. Carter,” New York Times, January 23, 1977, reprinted in James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 640.

73 Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 122.

74 Dan F. Hahn, “The Rhetoric of Jimmy Carter, 1976–1980,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 14, no. 2 (spring 1985), 266, 275, 265.

75 Carter, Why Not the Best, 108–109.

76 On Lucy Laney, see Kent Anderson Leslie, “No Middle Ground: Elite African Americans in Georgia and the Coming of Jim Crow,” in Paternalism in a Southern City: Race, Religion, and Gender in Augusta, Georgia, ed. Edward J. Cashin and Glenn T. Eskew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Audrey Thomas McCluskey, “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: Black Women School Founders and Their Mission,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 22 (Winter 1997): 403–26.

77 For histories of black women’s criminalization and imprisonment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Cheryl Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Leflouria, Chained in Silence; Haley, No Mercy Here.

78 “Lucy Laney Was Fined in Recorder’s Court,” Atlanta Independent, November 30, 1907.

79 Ibid.

80 Tracie Murray of the Georgia Capitol Museum provided information about the portrait’s description, for which I am grateful.

81 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

82 “Address by Jimmy Carter on Law Day,” University of Georgia, Athens, GA, May 4, 1974, First Debate: Carter and Crime folder, box 1, White House Special Files Unit Presidential Files, 1974–1977.

83 “Carter, in Detroit, Scores Ford on Crime, Then Offers a 16-Point Plan to Reduce It,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1976.

84 “Carter Explains Rights Record,” Memphis Tri State Defender, May 22, 1976; “Carter’s Record as Georgia Governor: Activism and Controversial Programs,” New York Times, May 17, 1976, 59.

85 For a brilliant analysis of racial liberalism and the carceral state, see Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3; Jimmy Carter, Democratic Convention acceptance speech, July 16, 1976, First Debate: Carter and Crime folder, box 1, White House Special Files Unit Presidential Files, 1974–1977.

86 “Preliminary Media Plan for President Ford Campaign,” August 21, 1976, box 1, Dorothy Downton Files (Ford Presidential Library).

87 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 309.

88 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” March 1965, United States Department of Labor, https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm (accessed February 5, 2016).

89 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

90 On racial liberalism see also Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

91 “Amy’s Nursemaid.”

92 Ibid.

93 Nick Thimmesch, “Odyssey of Prisoner Provides an Insight,” Junction City Daily Union, February 15, 1977.

94 Mary Fitzpatrick’s pay reported in “Amy-Nurse Lead,” Associated Press, February 2, 1977. Salary conversion from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed April 5, 2018). Median income data by year is published in Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States” (Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau, 2013), http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf, 50 (accessed June 20, 2016).

95 “From Jail to the White House: Amy’s Nurse Comes to Stay,” Washington Star, February 5, 1977. Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady’s Office.

96 “Amy’s Nursemaid.”

97 “Amy Comes Home to Find an Old Friend Waiting,” Atlanta Constitution, February 2, 1977. Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady's Office.

98 Mary Fitzpatrick, “My Life with the Carter Family—And My Joyful Reunion With Amy,” National Enquirer, undated clipping. Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady's Office.

99 “How Little Amy’s Love Unlocked Door to Her Nanny’s Prison Cell,” National Enquirer, undated clipping. Fitzpatrick, Mary folder, box 42, Mary Hoyt Press Clippings Files, Records of the First Lady's Office.

100 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, ch. 5.

101 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 87. On the black maternal in American literature and culture see also, Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and Sara Clarke Kaplan, “Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of reading (Un)representability,” Black Women, Gender + Families vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 94–124.

102 “D.C. Maid Position Stirs Comment,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 12, 1977, 3.

103 Ibid.

104 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 3.

105 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 124.

106 Bruce Schulman. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 121.

107 Ibid.

108 “Backstairs at the White House,” Ludington Daily News, April 26, 1977; “Despite Loss of Mitchell Black Women Still Have Key Roles on Carter’s Staff,” Jet, September 21, 1978.

109 “Loud and Clear,” New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1977.

110 “Where Do Jimmy’s Ideas Come From,” St. Petersburg Times, February 26, 1977.

111 Ibid.

112 Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 289.

113 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 70.

114 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford Press, 2005), 25.

115 Platt and Takagi. “Intellectuals for Law and Order,” 3.

116 Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, “Historical Statistics on Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions, Yearend 1925–1986,” May 1988, Bureau of Justice Statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hspsfiy2586.pdf (accessed June 21, 2016); Justice Policy Institute, “The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium,” May 2000, http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/00-05_rep_punishingdecade_ac.pdf (accessed June 21, 2016).

117 Stein, Pivotal Decade, 78.

118 Murakawa, First Civil Right.

119 Grace Hong, Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 7, emphasis in the original.

120 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 95.

121 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 9.

122 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5.

123 Ibid., 38.

124 Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 538.

125 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 6.

126 Ibid., xviii.

127 Ibid., xvi.

128 Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

129 This increase is compared with a 388 percent rise in the male prison population. Natasha A. Frost, Judith Greene, and Kevin Pranis, “Hard Hit: The Growth in the Imprisonment of Women, 1977–2004,” Institute on Women and Criminal Justice, Women’s Prison Association, May 2006, 31.

130 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order, February 23, 2015, http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/the-worrying-state-of-the-anti-prison-movement/ (accessed February 28, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Haley

Sarah Haley is associate professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She is the author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016).