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Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)
01:15:08
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stouch, and today I'm here with Kayn Wiesner to talk about her new book, between the street and the State, Black Women's Anti Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime, which is out now from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Caitlyn Wiesner is an assistant professor of history at Mercy University who specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, race and crime control policy in the 20th century United States. She's also the author of the War on Crime and the War on Rape, the Leaa and Philadelphia Woar from 1974 to 1984, which appeared in the journal Modern American History in March 2024, as well as numerous book chapters and reviews. When she is not writing or in the classroom, Dr. Wiesner enjoys cooking and eating new foods and exploring the natural and historic wonders of her native New Jersey. Caitlin, welcome to the show.
- [01:59]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:01]
B
Well, I'll jump right in. Your book is called between the street and the Black Women's Anti Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime. That title represents a nice synopsis of the book's argument. Could you talk a bit about how you came to that title?
- [02:15]
C
So I started with this ideas of the street and the State really as a reflection on the relationship between interpersonal violence and state violence. Because one of the things that I wanted the book to focus on really explicitly was the inseparability of interpersonal violence that's experienced by all women, but African American women in particular, that is the street component of it, but also the forms of violence that are inflicted upon communities of color and black women in particular by state actors, by hostile law enforcement. So that's the state police part of that equation. So part of that title was to really insinuate the extent to which African American women, anti rape organizers, who are the heart of this book, are really cognizant of the simultaneity of interpersonal and state violence and the necessity of devising and developing strategies that account for both of those vectors of violence. The other respect in which I thought the street and the state was a powerful metaphor for this book was I was really thinking alongside other scholars like Emily Thuma, Ann Gray Fisher, and Treva Lindsay, who have published wonderful books that have been deeply inspiring to me in the past five years or so that really look to the streets as a spot where police power is increasingly practiced on black bodies since the 1970s. So that's the next layer of how I arrived at that metaphor. Not only as a way of spotlighting and honoring what I think is really distinctive and unique about African American women's anti violence organizing, but also drawing attention to the streets, to public spaces, as a venue for both the expansion of police power and also an arena where that expansion of police power can be challenged.
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, I think that's great. And I think it comes across really well in. In the book itself. To take a step back for a moment, I wanted to ask how you maybe a little bit of biographical details. How did you get here, where did you study and with what mentors? And how did those specific things also influence the direction that your research took and. And the big questions that you pursued?
- [04:42]
C
Absolutely. So I think like many people who write their debut monograph after emerging from grad school, this idea really began with a seed that was planted. Undergraduate days at the College of New Jersey, where I was a history and women and gender studies double major. I was involved with some campus anti violence organizing. And it was there through both my extracurricular work in anti violence organizing and also what I was encountering in the classroom being taught by wonderful professors like Ann Marie Nicolosi about African American women's history. That's where I encountered this long, rich, well documented history of not only black women's vulnerability to sexual violence in the United States. But also this equally rich, robust and documented history of organizing against, testifying and resisting to and resisting sexual violence. One that precedes what we often in the United States assume is the beginning of the anti rape or anti violence that we place as a product of the women's liberation movement, the second wave of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s or early 1970s. So that led me into a paper in which I was investigating the free Joanne little movement of 1974, which to give the briefest of snapshots of this. But there are other scholars who can do this far more justice. Danielle McGuire and Christina Green come to mind. Joanne Little was a young African American woman who was incarcerated in North Carolina in the early 1970s. And she becomes a controversial national figure when she is put on trial for murdering her guard in prison. And her defense, she claims self defense. And it's argued in court that she murdered him in self defense when he attempted to sexually assault her in her cell. And it inspires this very broad and eclectic freedom movement that brings together women's liberationists and radical black actors, anti carceral activists who are all coming together to insist to really spotlight the inhumane conditions that produce violence within the prison system, especially women's prisons in North Carolina. But also the extent to which Joanne Little is sort of the latest in this longer history of African American women organizing and speaking in defense of themselves. So I thought I was going to go to graduate school at Rutgers University, Fabulous place to do women's history, gender history and African American history to investigate interracial organizing around sexual violence across the 20th century. So I wanted to work backwards from Joanne Little. Essentially half of that plan came to fruition in that I did go to Rutgers University to complete my doctorate. But when I was there, I fortuitously ended up in a seminar on race criminalization and the carceral state that was taught by the brilliant Donna Murch, which completely reframed how I was approaching my topic because it exposed me to the literature on the ways in which the feminist movement against sexual violence in the United States became increasingly intertwined with the federal war on crime and therefore carceral state agencies beginning in the 1970s. So that led me to really think about the extent to which I knew that African American women were involved in the feminist movement against sexual violence in the 1970s. How were they in real time parsing and responding to that intertwining, that co optation? This led me onto my dissertation topic, which then became the topic of this book.
- [08:42]
B
I see. Um, real quick, how could you talk a little bit about the relationship between the dissertation and the book? Like, what did. What changed from one to the other?
- [08:54]
C
Certainly. So when I produced the dissertation, what was really fueling me, at least politically, when I was writing the dissertation, especially towards, towards the end of the research process, was the resurgence of the MeToo movement in 2017-2018. A bit into 2019, I defended the dissertation in early 2021. So that gave a sense of political urgency to the dissertation, because, as we'll recall.
- [09:33]
There was a lot of controversy surrounding MeToo. But one aspect in particular was the extent to which the hashtag was originated by an African American woman, longtime anti violence organizer Tarana Burke. And in its Twitter iteration, hashtag MeToo was sort of extracted from her control as a black woman community organizer and service provider, and became applied much more broadly to signify kind of a national, basically implicit tolerance for sexual violence. That was empowering in many ways, but also left out a lot of the important context that Tarana Burke was working with. So the dissertation was in some ways framed as a sort of prehistory to MeToo. I spent a good chunk of the epilogue of that dissertation talking about my oral history interviews with the organizers in this book. And those conversations typically drifted into conversations about MeToo. So that was really the organizing principle of the dissertation is really looking at the extent to which the feminist movement against sexual violence becomes intertwined with the rise of the post war American carceral state. And what do African American women do about that? What really changed in going to the book is that the new through line, what I saw as defining the praxis of the women who are documented in this book was the concept of care. And that was a revelation that came from thinking really critically about what do these women have to offer or what defines their activism and their advocacy across these almost three decades that are encapsulated in the book because they're responding to different legal, political and social contexts. But ultimately, what remains consistent about their advocacy is the extent to which they prioritize caring for black women and girls. And in against the backdrop of the ascendancy of a very hostile carceral state that criminalizes blackness at an accelerated rate and is mostly interested in controlling crime. I was struck with this recognition that care is in many respects the opposite of control. So that was one extent to which the book really separated itself from the dissertation by centering that through line of care as a tactic. And I would add, in addition to that, the Other thing that sort of set the book apart was in some ways a return to what I had originally gone to grad school to do. Reaching backwards a bit. Because when you're really making care the through line of the book, I'm realizing that so many of the women who are the stars of this book and the heart of this book, their care is certainly inflected by the advents of organized black feminism in the late 19. In the early and mid-1970s. They have that political content, but they're really part of a much longer traditional of black women's care work that stretches all the way back to the 19th century, where care is an important weapon in the arsenal to mitigate the worst effects of living under white supremacy.
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B
Yeah, great. Thank you for that. Yeah. It's always fascinating to hear about the transition from the dissertation to the book for people who haven't done it yet, but also for people who are thinking about going to graduate school. And you also raised a lot of meaty topics. I'd like to return, for example, to the intersection of war and of the war on crime and the war on rape that you mentioned encountering in Professor Mertz's class. And also this MeToo movement and the connection between that and the book itself. But before we do that, I wanted to kind of drill down a little bit more on the structure of the book itself. You cover a wide range of cities, which I was really impressed by. And you also tell the story of numerous activist groups, as well as, you know, spanning several decades, like you just mentioned. So can you talk a little bit maybe about where the book started from in terms of archival research.
- [14:06]
And, you know, which groups and which policies you started that specific part of the book with?
- [14:13]
C
My first task when I was sizing up the dissertation that then became the book, was to investigate the archives of the feminist movement Against Sexual Violence traces examples of black women's activisms within these groups, and also to mine them for what is their relationship with law enforcement entities like. And that archive was very, very diffuse. Anyone who has done histories of radical social movements post war know that they're. That their outrage is not always in order, that they are perhaps their documents are scattered amongst multiple institutions and people, if they survive at all. So I was fortunate in that I could really mine the footnotes of scholars who have already worked on laying that groundwork of locating sources relating to the feminist movement against sexual violence. Scholars like Maria Bevacqua, Ann Valk, and once again, Emily Thuma. From them, I knew what repositories I could turn to. To begin digging in.
- [15:25]
And a true gold mine came in the form of Smith College Libraries, the Sophia Smith Collection, which held the papers of activists Loretta Ross and Nkenji Ture, who were both black women leaders of the D.C. rape Crisis center, who became, you know, just instrumental in telling this story. So I had some liens in the archive that way and to expand out, because I knew this was really a national story, it was not limited to just one particular city. I decided to turn to nationally circulated publications like the Feminist Alliance Against Rape newsletter, which later changed its name to Aegis. And from there I could see if individuals who are discussing sexual violence as it relates to African American women or discussing, you know, the growth, growing relationships between the feminist movement against sexual violence and law enforcement entities. Especially within these publications, we see a lot of debate about the merits of accepting.
- [16:36]
Grants from the leaa. For example, we see a lot of discussion about whether and to what extent anti rape organizers should lobby for the renewal of the Victims of Crime act, which comes later in the 1980s. Within these publications, I could pick up individual names. I could pick up smaller organizations that didn't have a robust archival collection that I could visit. And that's what led me to some other repositories. This is how I learned about Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape, which is abbreviated to Philadelphia war, who had a relatively unexplored and massive archive at Temple University that was a game changer for the dissertation and then later the book, because this organization in particular had a relatively well documented Third World Women's Caucus, an organization within it that advocated for the needs of women of color. And Philadelphia WAR also had a lengthy financial relationship with the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. So these two pieces of. Of the project came together in that one organization, Though I only learned about it from investigating these national publications. And the last piece that really came in, crucially for documenting this project was really going beyond the archive in the form of oral history interviews, seeking out oral history interviews with activists who are mentioned once or twice within these papers and perhaps don't tell an entire detailed narrative of what black women are doing within a particular organization or the debates that flow about how to fund or structure their advocacy. So those oral history interviews kind of led me on a breadcrumb trail to other activists. So I would find one activist through Facebook, for example, we'd sit down to have a conversation, and in our conversation she would point to, oh, so and so in Chicago also did something similar. You should really talk to her. You know, I haven't spoken to her in, you know, like 20 years. But let me. Let me see if I can get some contact information on her. And it really was like that sort of step by step. So building out this web, that's how I end up learning about the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, who are really crucial in the latter chapters of the book. So all these steps of weaving together archives that I knew would have some traces of African American women's activism and references to law enforcement entities, plus mining these national publications for the movement and combining that with some oral history interviews, allowed me to weave together this national story in Chicago and Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. the Bay Area, Atlanta, that is anchored by a few national points of communication, whether that be a conference like the First National Conference on Third Row, Women and Violence or the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, which meets repeatedly.
- [19:59]
B
Right. Well, thank you for that. I love the phrase sizing up the archive, first of all, as a way of kind of imagining the work ahead of you. But I also love the idea of pursuing in a dedicated and systematic fashion the leads that you find in order to construct something like that. So I think it's really great. My book also started in the radical archive and kind of expanded outward. So I also, I find that a really fascinating note.
- [20:23]
C
I'll also just add that part of that strategy also came out of necessity to an extent that I was completing the later stages of this dissertation amid the COVID 19 pandemic, as so many were, and the availability of formal archival repositories sharply contracted. So part of that was trying to find alternative ways to tell this story without, for example, being able to go to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, which I was later able to do when it came time to write the book. But that was also an adaptation to adverse conditions for scholarship and graduate students at that moment.
- [21:04]
B
Right, right. Well, I also actually think that there's an opportunity to move those archives about radical history from the 70s and onward into the formal archives that hasn't been fully systematically taken on yet. So I think that that's an exciting addition that you're making as well.
- [21:21]
C
I agree. Thank you.
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B
So let's dive more deeply into that archive and meaning the stories that you're able to excavate from that archive in some way. Early on in the book, you describe what you call an arsenal of pract that black anti rape organizers used to negotiate federal funding imperatives while avoiding the criminalization of black men. Can you describe those practices for our listeners? And I'm thinking here, you mentioned this phrase, subversion Diversion and resistance. So I would love if you could just explain what you mean by those terms for everyone, certainly.
- [21:59]
C
So as I grew my compendium of African American women who were doing anti violence organizing in the 70s, 80s and 90s and navigating the hostile terrain of the carceral state, what I discovered about them was that many of these black anti rape organizers were not explicit anti carceral activists or prison abolitionists in the way that we might expect today, where they're leading, you know, very vocal protests against criminalization and the carceral state. They recognized that an anti rape practice that hinged on law enforcement collaboration, which was increasingly an expectation of feminist rape crisis centers that were receiving federal grant money, but that risked engaging hostile state actors and exposed black women and girls to greater violence at both individual and community levels. They had that critique that emerges from black feminism. But that critique didn't manifest in full on confrontational protests with carceral state entities. The way that it manifested was more subtly. It manifested by providing community based care for assaulted black women and girls that did not simply default to law enforcement. So I saw them as sort of preserving the space between black women and girls who were vulnerable to sexual assault, making sure that their needs are being met, but keeping some distance between them and law enforcement entities for their own safety and security. And as I mentioned earlier, this definitely draws on a much older tradition of care and labor for the community to mitigate the effects of anti black racism. So I decided to term this very rich and diverse praxis and arsenal of practices partly to sort of crib the language of the war on crime, that because law enforcement takes on this militaristic complexion following the 1960s, that the response similarly has a almost martial quality to it. But really it's a way of accounting how their praxis changes over time as the landscape of carceral state development and funding continues to change. So I was able to place my activists, who are the actors within this text, into those three categories. Subversion, diversion and resistance. So the ones that I placed in the subversion category, I'm seeing examples of at a time when federal crime control agencies are funding feminist rape crisis centers relatively open handedly, subversion is the means of taking those funds and deploying them for purposes that run contrary to the goals of expanding police power over rape. We see this really clearly in Philadelphia. Women organized against rape. The second category of diversion tends a little later, towards the 1980s, is really the heyday of divers at a time when federal anti rape funding contracts and Subversion is less feasible. Diversion is a tactic of carrying black centered anti rape advocacy into other venues where there is more freedom to center the needs of black women and girls. I see this abundantly in the Washington D.C. rape Crisis center doing child sex abuse prevention education in the public Schools of Washington D.C. we see this with the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network.
- [25:52]
Embedding anti rape advocacy and training into the social welfare landscape and community health landscape of Chicago in the 1980s. And we originally see it in the National Black Women's Health Project when they are based in Atlanta. Resistance as a third category comes much later. We really see it in earnest in the early 1990s when the National Black Women's Health Project openly opposes the Violence against women Act of 1994. And of course when Critical Resistance partners with incite women of Color against violence in 2001 to release their statement on gender violence and incarceration. And resistance here means openly opposing legislation that presents policing and punishment as the solutions to rape.
- [26:44]
B
Great, great. Well, I want to continue a little bit on that topic. Give you an opportunity to describe some of the archival stories that you found that were that were emblematic of these different strategies. And the first one, you know, maybe you could talk about women organized against Rape at Lynn Moncrief and Deborah Johnson and the work that they did.
- [27:03]
C
Sure. So Lynn Moncrief is a central figure in the second chapter of the book. She is a self described black radical feminist. That is her words when she introduces herself in the newsletter of Philadelphia war. But she has a much richer activist history beyond the feminist movement against sexual violence. That's sort of a later in life form of activism for her. Prior to that she has a history in the War on poverty. She has a history in welfare rights organizing, in busing activism in north and West Philadelphia. So I describe her as someone who is abundantly used to working within broken systems to extract what is necessary for the marginalized and the powerless. So Lynn Moncrief is hired by Philadelphia WAR to be their outreach coordinator. That is her official title. At the time she was the only black woman on war's paid staff besides an administrative assistant. And as outreach coordinator, the objective of hiring her is the Philadelphia WAR leadership who is exclusively white women at the time. They recognize the extent to which their rape crisis center, which at the time is the only rape crisis center in the city of Philadelphia, overwhelmingly serves African American women. African American women represent more than 75% of their A clientele of victims who they serve in their rape crisis center, who they intercept in the emergency rooms of Philadelphia to offer support and resources. And this, you would think, is at tension with what is funding or making possible Lynn Moncrief's position within Philadelphia war. And that is money from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, or leaa. For a large chunk of its early history, Philadelphia war is subsidized almost completely by grants that are dispersed through the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to through state level entities in Pennsylvania. That's the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania for a bit of context on what the LEAA is. So the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration is really an engine of the federal war on crime. It is a federal entity that is signed into law by President Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, following the urban rebellions of the late 60s to provide crime fighting funds to urban communities to control what are seen as these uprisings that are threatening his the security of the cities and his own political agenda. So rape crisis centers do end up becoming one of the entities that can receive these funds. Now receiving LEAA monies as a feminist rape crisis center. The objective of the leaa, the only reason why they're interested in funding feminist rape crisis centers is they see this as an avenue for controlling crime. And the main ways that feminist rape crisis centers can claim to control crime or reduce crime rates is by consistently referring and bringing their women and victims that they serve to the police to report their assaults, bringing them to court to prosecute their assailants. This is repeated all the time in the grant applications of Philadelphia women organized against rape, that if we receive these monies from the leaa, we will be able to point to a demonstrable dip in the rate of sexual assault in Philadelphia. That is precisely what the LEAA would like to hear. So you would think that somebody hired using LEA monies to pay their salary, the expectation is clear that they are going to advance that mission, they're going to advance that police power agenda. Moncrief is quite firm in her writing that she is not prioritizing police reporting. She does not see see that as the objective of her job. What she repeatedly states is if my job is to build bridges between Philadelphia war and black Philadelphia centering law enforcement is perhaps the worst thing I could do to build trust because she's so deeply aware of that hostile relationship that stretches back, you know, a century. So what she does in some instead while she's being paid and collecting her salary from the LAAA is she spends almost all of her time developing prevention through community based education on sexual politics and especially self defense training. There's a wonderful image from the book of her a poster that she developed that she delivered at one of the public housing projects in West Philadelphia that says rape, can it be prevented? And she kind of answers the question through the image her where it's a hand drawing of a woman's fist clutching a set of keys very assertively so suggesting that the answer is yes, lies in some form of self defense. So this is where I see Lin Mon Grief practicing subversion at its best. She's paid through the leaa, but she is not at all interested in raising rates of police reporting within war. She's dedicating most of her time to forging connections with black Philadelphia. And what she sees black Philadelphia demanding is community based education to prevent sexual assault in the first place. Something that directly interrogates sexual politics and patriarchy that allows sexual violence against black women to flourish. And even when the LEAA is gone, no longer funding Philadelphia women organized against rape. The fact that Lynn Moncrief is instrumental in creating the Third World Women's Caucus within Philadelphia war. This guarantees a seat of power for women of color, which is predominantly black women. In the case of Philadelphia war within the leadership of the Rape Crisis center to make sure that the praxis, the policies of Philadelphia WAR continue to account for black women's experience, which includes a distancing of law enforcement.
- [33:46]
B
Right. It's an amazing story. And I the. The detail that you. You've excavated from this is really powerful. I want to continue on this on this level, give you an opportunity to talk more about this archival research. One of the most powerful archival moments in the book for me came when you described how the activist Nkenji Ture adapted a tradition of caring among black women in a similar kind of. In a similar relationship to federal money, but also with a related focus on connecting victims of sexual violence to law enforcement. That's what the federal money wants to do. But instead she does this thing where she's creating this impactful child sexual abuse program in D.C. public schools. So can you talk a little bit more about this as, as, as part of the story that you're telling?
- [34:31]
C
So this chapter started with an archival gem. When I was working in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College Libraries, as I'm working through the holdings of Nkenji Ture that are documented there, I come across this pamphlet called Staying Safe. And it's a short pamphlet that has illustrations of black children that is all about teaching them how to resist becoming a victim of child sexual abuse, recognizing situations that could endanger them and violate their sexual sovereignty and how to escape that. So it's set up as like a quiz where there would be like a scenario and then that involves a child in a particular situation and then a page asking the child, what would you do? Or what do you think so and so should do? And the next page explains, you know, and models what the correct response is. So as I was reading through this pamphlet, which I found fascinating for its really explicit discussion of sexual violence against children towards the back, I discover that Nkenji Ture is not only the author or the co author of this pamphlet, but also that it's used in tandem with an entire curriculum called Staying Safe. And in fact, the booklet is meant to accompany the curriculum or if for whatever reason a child was not able to experience the curriculum, you could purchase the book separately if you wanted to replicate some of that instruction at home. So that is when I discover that the DC Rape Crisis center, under the leadership of Nkenji Ture, leads a child sex abuse prevention education program within the public schools of Washington D.C. that has a fully realized curriculum as well as these pamphlets that go along with it. And in an oral history interview, Ture discusses how essential that program was to DCRC in the late 70s and early 1980s. She claims that it was the first program of its kind in the country, which as far as I can tell, is true, or at the very least, it's on the cutting edge of that kind of programming. And the other thing that she mentions, and Loretta Ross, her comrade and colleague at the D.C. rape Crisis center, also states that the contracts that the DC Rape Crisis center had from the municipal government to do this kind of training within the schools, elementary school, middle school, and even up to high school, allowed the DC Rape Crisis center to stay afloat financially for long periods of time without having to accept crime fighting funds. So that was really essential to them because they had already concluded very early on that they were not going to seek the monies of the LEAA for fairly obvious reasons. But this particular program, why it's so fascinating is not only is it an example of African American women who are breaking the silence about child sex abuse and incest, which is an enormously difficult and controversial subject within black America, and they did receive some fairly significant pushback for doing this, but also I thought that it was really emblematic of how unique Washington D.C. is in this moment of the late 70s and early 80s, and also how contrary it is to mainstream narratives of child sex abuse from the 1980s in particular. So the D.C. rape Crisis center has the sort of unique niche that it can fill, partly because Washington D.C. is a majority black city in the late 70s and early 80s. And they have some vestiges of black power governance under the newly created mayor's office, which at that time is inhabited by Marion very before his own sort of fall from political power.
- [38:52]
And on the second part. So the fact that Washington D.C. allows for some degree of black power governance in the late 70s and early 80s allows them to create a program that really centers the black family and black children in ways that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else in the country. But also we're so used to thinking of the 1980s in the United States as characterized by a moral panic about child sex abuse that kind of drowns out the nuanced feminist interpretation of the patriarchal family as the main root of sexual danger for children. Paul Renfro does a great job in his own book sort of unpacking the ways in which the moral panic over stranger danger in the 80s allows for and empowers some carceral state actors with respect to things like surveillance and child removal and the like. But so much of that 1980s moral panic over child sexual abuse imagines the default victim in these scenarios to be white middle class children. So what I found here was not just a really great example of diversion where.
- [40:11]
Black feminist anti rape organizers are carrying their advocacy into public schools where they could continue to do really radical things and sidestep law enforcement. But it also shows us the extent to which those dominant narratives of the 1980s about the vulnerability of children that became fuel for building a lot of carceral state momentum is sort of being undermined in very specific pockets. And that black women are doing a lot of that work.
- [40:42]
B
Right. Okay. Yeah, that's. I also love this idea that you start with one very specific archival, what you call an archival gem, and by pursuing it through the archive, you. You open up an entire vista onto this curriculum and this activism that folks are involved in that had been lost to history in some ways. So that's, that's fantastic. I wanted to then move on to talk about this Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, which is also using the practice of diversion in relation to state and federal funding. But this time I'm not sure if this is the, what you would call the distinctive thing about it. This time they're advancing this ethic of care among black victims of sexual violence. Can you talk a little bit more about how that work contributed to that or drew on that legacy perhaps?
- [41:28]
C
Certainly. So this is the second time that I focus on Chicago within the book. The first chapter that really explores the extent to which organized black feminism was taking up sexual violence, and specifically intra racial, that is black on black sexual violence as an organizing principle. And also how even within Chicago, we have groups like the Coalition of Concerned Women in the War on Crime who are led by Chicago Defender editor Ethel Payne, who are also concerned about sexual violence in black Chicago, but reach very different conclusions about what is to be done about it. So I returned to Chicago later in the book in the 1980s where the LEAA has folded. A lot of the feminist anti rape organizations like Rape Victim Advocates are either struggling or have folded in the absence of that funding. And there's a sense that black women on the city's south and west sides are not being served by the surviving rape crisis organizations. So I happen upon the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network not as a traditional rape crisis center. That's not what they set out to do. But the original members of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network are mostly black women who are social service professionals of one sort or another. Though upon digging deeper, most of those black women social service professionals have, you know, a more radical tutelage. For example, Mary Scott Borea, who was a social worker and becomes the first head of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, was a former member of the Black Panther Party at the time of Fred Hampton's murder by the Chicago police. Farrell Fitzpatrick has her own radical tutelage as well. She was, at the time of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network working in a daytime homeless shelter. But she has a path with the national alliance of Black Feminists and the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
- [43:59]
So the Sexual Assault Services Network that starts in Chicago, we have these black women social service professionals who are noting the extent to which black victims are underserved within the city. But their solution is not to create a rape crisis center in the south or west side. Their idea is a diversionary one. Theirs is to say, what if we lodged counselors who are capable of counseling black women and girls in the besieged social welfare and community health agencies of Chicago where black women and girls who have been sexually assaulted already are? And that is a way to provide them with the care that they need again without sort of betraying them into the hands of law enforcement automatically, which was so often the condition of feminist rape crisis centers that had survived that winnowing of the 1980s. And I mentioned that the women, the black women in particular who are running the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, they have histories of exposure to police violence and police hostility towards black women and girls. That really drives home for them not only the impossibility of extracting care for black women and girls within that context, but also how much caring for the minds, bodies, and souls of assaulted black women and girls is the closest thing to justice in several situations. So to tell a brief anecdote from one of the oral histories that I conducted, Phyllis Pennise was a black woman who, before she came to the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, she worked with a feminist rape crisis center in Chicago called Rape Victim Advocates. And she recalled very clearly a story in which a woman who she was counseling, she brought her into the police station to try and identify her assailant from a lineup. She had the assailant's blood on her clothing. So there's the possibility of positively identifying the assailant here. And she says that what actually happens once she has that woman in the set in the police station is the police turn on her and arrest her after discovering she has an outstanding warrant for prostitution, much to Pennise's outrage. So that was a story that drove home for her that partnering with law enforcement is not likely to produce justice or care for black women and girls. And this is especially important in the context of the 1980s, where welfare state retrenchment is severely limiting the kinds of resources from the state that black women and girls have access to. The other person who I mentioned earlier, Beryl Fitzpatrick, the way that she lands upon this ethic of care as so essential comes from her experience with rape Victim advocates as well, where she was called to a woman who had been sexually assaulted in the Henry Horner Housing Project, which is a notoriously decrepit housing project in Chicago where a black woman with children had been assaulted and was experiencing essentially a nervous breakdown, like unable to care for herself and her children. And what Fitzpatrick witnessed in this space when she arrives was that her neighbors, who were also black women within the housing project, had begun this work of bathing her, of combing her hair, of keeping her warm, preparing food, taking care of her children. And that was a profound moment for Fitzpatrick, where care and this ethic of care is, in fact, justice in the context of an increasingly conservative state that refuses to provide any resources to care for those deemed undeserving. So that is really, in a nutshell, the ethic of care that the Chicago Sexual Assault Service Network develops, one that not only sidesteps law enforcement, but also one that understands providing care as foundational to justice.
- [48:35]
B
Right? And it's such an achievement to be able to document that kind of thing through oral histories and through detailed archival work. I think it's a real achievement. Now in chapter six, we move to Atlanta again, another one of the cities that you're covering. In this amazing book, Before Atlanta, you tell this incredible story about residents in the McDaniel Glenn Homes, which is a public housing project, who themselves organized a self help group in 1987. So that was a story that was really striking to me because it's it. I wanted to know more about how you found the story.
- [49:13]
Because it seems so specific and important. Important, but also like I was just really struck. So. So tell me more. How did you come across the story?
- [49:23]
C
So as I was going through the archival traces of the National Black Women's Health Project, the National Black Women's Health Project had a newsletter called Vital Signs that sort of documented what member chapters around the country of the National Black Women's Health Project were up to and doing. And the National Black Women's Health Project is started up by Billy Avery in the early 1980s as a black woman centered organization within the women's health movement that specifically centered the health issues that African American women faced. And what I discovered through looking through the Vital Signs newsletter and also through interviews with Billy Avery was how much organizing against sexual violence was part of the agenda of the National Black Women's Health Project. And at first blush, you would think, well, this doesn't so much sound like a health issue, right? This sounds like, you know, a health issue would be diabetes or breast cancer or other, you know, systemic health issues. But what Billie Avery makes abundantly clear in a lot of her interviews, both oral histories and interviews that she conducted with formal publications that are in her archive was that gender violence, both battering and sexual assault were, as far as she concerned, the number one issues that faced African American women from a health perspective that damaged their health, both their mental health, which then manifested as issues with their physical health. And that is why the self help method that the National Black Women's Health Project patents and spreads, it basically consists of semi structured groups of black women coming together to discuss the sources of their poor health, which oftentimes included discussions of the violences that they were experiencing in their lives or had experienced in their lives. So that became a real touchstone of the National Black Women's Health Project's self help movement. And when it comes to the McDaniel Glenn Holmes and how their self help group came in, that is because they were discussed and got spotlighted in Vital Signs because they were part of the center for black women's wellness in Atlanta, which was basically an attempt to institutionalize self help provision within Atlanta, which was the, at the time, the home front of the national black women's health project. So Marie Rashid and Deborah James are black women who are residents of McDaniel Glenn Holmes, and they also end up with paid positions within the center for black women's wellness. So I categorize the self help groups that are formed by the national black women's health projects and their discussions of sexual violence in diversion as part of the arsenal of practices.
- [52:34]
But in the case of the center for black women's Wellness.
- [52:40]
They'Re really holding honest appraisals of the violences they encounter in their lives, not only how it impacts their mental and physical health, but they also understand that violence as systemic in origin. And because they identify that violence as systemic in origin, that it's a function of poverty, that it's a function of living under capitalism, it's a function of living under white supremacy, which in turn aggravates black sexual politics. That is what leads them to develop responses and care based responses to sexual violence that in which, once again, law enforcement is kind of irrelevant. Perhaps they're not completely opposed to the existence of law enforcement as a tool, but it's ultimately irrelevant to their bigger project, which is care through the self help method.
- [53:35]
B
Okay, okay, Great, great. Well, I love the, the, the. The way that all these activists are appearing and reappearing and the way that you drill down on their own experiences as part of what's informing their activism. And so on that note, I was really struck while reading your book about the way that the activists you describe had also been active in earlier groups and in some ways had had, you know, gained a lot of experience about their later activism through groups like the student nonviolent coordinating committee, Congress of racial equality, Black panther party. So can you talk a little bit about what we gain with a history like yours that advances or advances the study of black freedom struggles past the 1960s?
- [54:18]
C
Yes. So to answer this question, I'll have to tie in a scholar who has been enormously influential on me, and that is Danielle McGuire, who is the author of at the Dark end of the street. For those who, if you haven't read the book, you absolutely should, dear listeners. But it is an account of the extent to which organizing against sexual violence and testifying against sexual violence, specifically the sexual violence inflicted by white men on black women in the Jim Crow south, how that becomes a crucial organizing locus of the Civil rights movement or black freedom struggle in a way that really recenters black women in that conversation about what does full citizenship mean? Well, it means also freedom from sexual assault, freedom and bodily autonomy. So most of those discussions of black women's organizing against sexual violence tend to end around the time of the black freedom struggle and present the black freedom struggle as kind of a culmination of those politics and that organizing. And of course, we have the example of Joanne Little, who she wins, she's able to successfully claim self defense and not be convicted of murder for assaulting her jailer in her cell. And that's sort of linked to this longer narrative. And what I wanted to do with this book is show the extent to which the rise of organized black feminism in the 1970s is also part of that continuum. Very often I think these stories are told separately, but in fact, the rise of organized black feminism in the early 1970s is an outgrowth of the black freedom struggle for the specific reasons of many of these women, as you mentioned, have histories within those organizations like sncc, CORE and the Black Panther Party. And part of what drives them to black feminism is their experiences of sexism and in some cases, even sexual assault within these organizations. Which is not to say that these organizations are dens of sexual assault or are inherently misogynist or anything like that. But they realize quite quickly that issues pertaining to black women are marginalized often within these organizations. And their solution to that is to move into separate black feminist organizations where both race and sex can be interrogated simultaneously. And where this relates to sexual violence is. So we've already mentioned that for much of the 20th century, leading up to the civil rights movement, the main focus of organizing against sexual violence. If you are an African American woman, the only really speakable sexual violence is sexual violence inflicted by white men on black women. Why? Because it fits into the narrative of the black freedom struggle. And it also does not play into the historical stereotype of black men as sexual assailants. That is a crucial plank of Jim Crow and white supremacy. So what happens with black feminists is they start speaking very openly about intraracial sexual violence, sexual violence that's committed by black men against black women. And interpreting this as an example of patriarchy and white supremacy and gearing the activism of organized black feminism to it. And they acknowledge, repeatedly and correctly that that is actually the larger source of sexual violence, that black women are experien that the sexual violence that they are witnessing is predominantly intraracial, and that requires a reckoning with patriarchy. That is not really possible within those organizations like SNCC Corps and the Black Panther Party, or at least not as possible as they would like it to be. So what this brings to us when we think about histories of the long black freedom struggle is I think, that the black feminist emergence in the 70s, and especially the ways in which they take up this battle against intraracial sexual violence, oftentimes that's sort of tethered to ideas about identity politics, or it's sort of factored into this kind of declension narrative we have or that circulates about the black freedom struggle, that black women kind of turn on black men or become too, you know, focused on black women's issues. And that deprives the black freedom struggle of momentum. I think a much greater culprit here is the state violence and surveillance that's wielded against the latter black freedom struggle, especially in the late 1960s. But because organized black feminism doesn't last terribly long, most of these organizations fold by the early 1966. I think that also contributes to the sense that their impact was very limited and they're just sort of the smoldering embers of the black freedom struggle. But by putting organized black feminism in the context of the feminist movement against sexual violence and black women's continued organizing against it, we see black feminist ideas, such as the inseparability of interpersonal and state violence surviving in pockets within those movements in ways that really, I think, show that the reach of the black freedom struggle is longer. It is surviving in pockets, not necessarily in organizations that bear that name, but it shows the extent to which ideas that have roots within the black freedom struggle survive, even if organizations are no longer active.
- [60:36]
B
Right, right, right. That provides us in some ways a nice segue toward the end of the book where you suggest that the Violence Against Women act merged the so called war on crime at the federal level with this activist driven war on rape. Can you describe for our listeners the changing relationship between anti rape activists and the federal government?
- [60:57]
We're at the 1990s in a way, but it might also be helpful to remind us about where we've come by the time we land in the 1990s.
- [61:05]
C
Right. So the Violence Against Women act of 1994 is treated as the zenith of carceral feminism. It's also treated as the culmination of federal investment in the feminist anti rape movement. That kind of fuses it in many ways permanently to law enforcement responses and attempts to control rape. Of course, it does not sort of fall from the sky in 1994. In the book I really refer to, there are many different, you know, laws and acts and agencies that structure the book, but there's really three tent poles, as I see it, where the federal government, as part of its crime fighting agenda, works to partner explicitly with feminist anti rape organizations. The LEAA is the first one in 1970. In the early 1970s, feminist rape crisis centers become eligible for funding through the leaa. And that LEAA money flows on the assumption that you will help the police and it will pull those funds if you aren't interested in helping the police. There's actually a pretty widely circulated anecdote from the book where a rape crisis center in Baton Rouge who was using LEAA money, when the director refused to suspend services for victims if they did not choose to report their assaults to the police, the LEA fired her, had her fired and replaced her. So the, the threat was not just implicit. You could see it playing out in real time. So the LEA is that first tent pole in the 1970s, the 1980s. The tent pole is the Victims of crime act of 1984. The LEAA is done by this point in time. There's not kind of these open ended grants that are being offered operationally for feminist rape crisis centers. The Victims of Crime act does offer block grants to feminist rape crisis centers, but that's actually a side project to what the Victims of Crime act ultimately does, which is much more neoliberal. Individualized compensation for victims of crime, where individuals who have been victimized by crime, including sexual assault, can apply for individualized compensation through this program, where federal penalties for penalties from federal crimes are collected and that can be redistributed to deserving or qualifying victims. And going back to the example of Phyllis Pennies in Chicago, in order to qualify for victim compensation under the Victims of Crime act, the victim must be shown to not have any contributory misconduct. That is the exact phrase that is used. In other words, you couldn't have done something to precipitate the crime against you, which in the case of African American women who are always assumed to be lascivious, who are always assumed to be, you know, provoking sexual assault and attack, they very seldom if ever fit that definition. And even then, in order to qualify for VOCA funds as an individual, you would have to report and cooperate with law enforcement, which again is a major obstacle for African American women and girls who have been sexually assaulted. So the existence of these block grants for feminist rape crisis centers through the Victims of Crime act depends upon this other process. Where the state is allocating resources to individual deserving victims of crime in no small part by expanding its police apparatus and also by withholding welfare state funding at the same time. If you go through the records of the National Coalition Against Sexual assault in the 1980s, you will see the extent to which major feminist anti rape organizations are constantly lobbying for the renewal of the Victims of Crime Act Act. So they're certainly in no position to criticize or challenge those provisions that knit law enforcement and anti rape services closer together. And VAWA, the Violence Against Women act is in passed in 1994 as a facet of the larger Clinton crime bill, and that establishes basically a permanent spigot of federal funds for anti violence organizations and groups who are doing service provision now. It has to be renewed periodically, but it seems it's a much more stable source of federal funding than, say, the LEAA or VOCA had been. And it's impossible to ignore the extent to which the existence of the Violence Against Women act depends upon the larger Clinton crime bill, which dramatically expands police hiring and prison construction. The Office on Violence Against Women is located within the Department of Justice. And for that reason, many of the activists who I catalog within this book who fall into that category of resistance, they are taking up a critique of the Violence Against Women act basically from the time that it is first passed, which was really striking to me when I was in the archive, because we're used to thinking of the Violence Against Women act as this feminist success story. It's widely regarded as such. The federal government makes a permanent commitment to fighting rape, to fighting gender based violence. And yet you have groups like the National Black Women's Health Project, when they embark on their policy turn in the early 1990s, where they're commenting frequently for their membership on laws that are being passed by Congress, write this lengthy takedown of the Violence Against Women act that hinges on two reasons. The first is that the Violence Against Women act is happening at the same time that Clinton is threatening to end welfare as we know it, which we now know comes to fruition in 1996 with the personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation act, which dramatically contracts the amount of social welfare support available for poor Americans. And the members of the National Black Women's Health Project know this and say the main thing that's going to produce safety for black women and girls who are served by our organization is having the resources to leave dangerous and abusive situations. So eliminating welfare as we know it is directly undermining any project of women's and girls safety. So they reject the Violence Against Women act on those terms, but they also reject the Violence Against Women act on its own terms because so many of those funds that are going to flow to anti violence organizations are going to expect those organizations to work hand in glove with law enforcement. They're going to measure their success by the number of police reports that come out of these organizations. And in the National Black Women's Health Project, they're well aware of this long history of animosity between African Americans and the police, and especially the extent to which black women and girls are victimized by police as well, making this a non starter in terms of securing safety for them. And that happens in 1994. Of course, the National Black Women's Health Project is not going to secure, succeed in overturning the Violence Against Women act, much less the larger Clinton crime bill. But they plant a seed of protest against this law that we will see really blossom in the 21st century in the new millennium with the emergence of groups like Insight who release even more direct criticism of legislation like the Violence Against Women act because they see it as bolstering the carceral state that is ultimately harmful to black women and girls.
- [69:30]
B
That was great. You kind of came full circle there with the. The National Black Women's Health Project leading into insight. That, that, that was amazing. One last thing just to sum up, this has been a delightful conversation. We've covered a lot of ground. I wanted to ask who, who, who is the ideal audience for the book? Who do you hope the book reaches? What, you know, what, what are your, you know, if we have the grand aspirations for what, what we achieve, what, what, what are you hoping for?
- [69:57]
C
So what I would like to see happen with who this book reaches, I am really interested in it reaching those who want to apply an intersectional lens to the rise of crime control policy and the rise of the American carceral state since 1975. I'm really inspired by Anne Gray Fisher's words that in her own book that police power, that women matter in the history of police power. And I'd like this book to really advance that claim that we're not used to thinking of sexual violence as an arena of the rise of mass incarceration or the like. That conversation mostly focuses on narcotics enforcement or anti gang enforcement or other forms of street crime. But what I think this book makes abundantly clear is the extent to which the architects of mass incarceration are thinking about sexual violence as well, though they certainly aren't thinking about it with informed in which they're informed about patriarchy in the way that feminists would want them to be. They just see sexual violence as one of many forms of crime that need to be controlled in order to produce, quote, unquote, safe streets. So I hope those who are interested in having that intersectional approach to the rise of mass incarceration would be drawn to this book. But I also think, more broadly, anyone who's interested in how we can build movements for freedom from violence in the 21st century, these women have lessons for us. They really do. To that extent. I'm really inspired by Treva Lindsay in her book America Goddamn, who is also really invested in the ways in which black women survive despite all of the odds against them, and how care is a crucial ingredient of that survival.
- [71:54]
B
Great. Well, it's been a pleasure doing history with you for our listeners between the street and the state. Black Women's Anti Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime is available now from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and you can find it wherever fine books are sold. Caitlin, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [72:11]
C
Thank you. The pleasure was all mine.