Prisoners Against Rape, the DC Rape

“That neat, angel-devil theory was no longer useful:”

Prisoners Against Rape, The D.C. Rape Crisis Center and the Partnership that Transcended the Prison Walls and Critiqued the Society that Built Them

By Sophie Kupetz Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts In the Department of History at Brown University Advisor: Françoise Hamlin December 10, 2019

Table of Contents

With Gratitude 3

Dear Mr. Paige, 7

A Note on Letters 8

Introduction: Within and Beyond Lorton Reformatory 14

In the Overlaps & the Cracks: Placing the Story of Prisoners Against Rape in the Historiograpy

“In Their Own Words:” Oral History & Close Reading as Methodology

A Practice of Quilting

I.“Enter[ing] the Movement:” Loretta Ross, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and Third World 28 Women Against Violence

“We just didn’t talk about those things:” Ross’s Early Years

“Falling from Grace:” Growing up Gendered Female and Racialized Black

With Malcolm X and Toni Cade Bambara In Hand: Ross’s Politicization

“Not a Good Case:” Black Women and Sexual Violence

Whose “Our:” Creating a Responsive Rape Crisis Center in the Era of Against Our Will

II. “In All of Their Complexity:” Building and Being Prisoners Against Rape 43

“Off the ground:” Forming Prisoners Against Rape

“Made to understand:” The Prison as a Radical Political Site

“Revolutionary from the heart:” Consciousness Raising

“What’s really going on:” Community & Vulnerability

“Carrying it Out:” Building Connections Beyond the Prison

III. An Unconventional “Book Group:” The Collaboration Between Ross and the 62 D.C. Rape Crisis Center and Prisoners Against Rape

“The Locus of Black Feminist Organizing:” Ross and the DCRCC

“Not the Saviors of the Black Community:” Turning away from the Police

“All the Right Language:” Re-creating a Partnership wit the DCRCC

“Attentive to Our Needs:” Building Relationships

“Making Noise?:” An Outsider’s View on PAR

IV. “Rape is a social disease and requires a social antidote:” Learning from the 78 Writings of Prisoners Against Rape

“Living the truths they now reveal:” Grounding Analysis in Personal Experience

“Inseparably Connected:” Calling for Women & Men to Work Together in the Fight Against Sexual Violence

“About Power:” Reframing the Conversation about Rape

Not the “Cure:” Critiquing the Prison System

“A Social Antidote:” PAR’s Suggested Approaches

William Fuller’s Address 92

A Call to Remember Prisoners Against Rape 94

Honoring Tensions & Sitting with Uncertainty

A Call to Remember

PAR’s Words Resound: “Courts serve neither the victim nor the offender” 102

Bibliography 108

With Gratitude

One of my teachers, Professor Abdur-Rahman taught me that “the practice of study is also a practice of honor,” of bringing people into the space.1 Her words resonated deeply. I have studied in traditional classrooms for the past seventeen years. However, my identity as a “student” transcends my time in class - I believe that study occurs when thinking deeply, sharing humbly, learning eagerly and engaging authentically with a text, with myself, or, most importantly, with others. I hope this project honors all of these forms of study.

My studies started in my family. Thank you to my grandmas, Buddy and Nana, who teach me, by example that learning is a lifelong project and to my grandpa, Zaidie who shows up to every debate, every sporting event, every presentation, every graduation and every convocation of his ten grandchildren. Thank you to my extended family, to Jakob and Ethan, to Noa, to Auntie Heidi, who show me what it feels like to be held and loved by a collective. Thank you to my cousin Adam, who always makes sure I feel at home in Providence and who I admire deeply for the way he collaborates with others to build educational spaces that truly honor and foster authentic learning. Thank you to my Mama who I can call to complain or cry to without feeling any shame, who embodies care for others - whether family, friends or strangers - and who helps me understand that we are always growing. Thank you to my Dad for reading and discussing my papers even after a long day of work, for reminding me that learning is not about the outcomes, but the process, and for teaching me, by example, to find spaces in which to question, read, and learn. Thank you to my sister, Zoe, who is truly my partner in all things and especially, in learning, who is there to help me process my mistakes, to tell me to pause when I am self critical, to hug me, to send me an article to read, to

1Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, "Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture" (Lecture, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Future, Providence, RI, February 7, 2019).

challenge our parents with me, and to teach me, everyday, through the way she operates in the world with care and intention.

My studies developed in the classroom. Thank you to Oakwood, where I learned to ask questions, where teachers encouraged my intellectual pursuits, and where learning was fun. Thank you to my professors at Brown who share their wisdom with me and guide me as a student, activist and person.

Thank you to Professor Emily Owens, Professor Amy Remensnyder, Professor Susan Smulyan,

Professor Naoko Shibusawa, and my advisor, Professor Françoise Hamlin who teach me that the study and practice of history can and should be critical, responsible work that is not confined by disciplinary bounds; for helping me work through questions; for challenging me to think deeper; and for encouraging me in this project and many others. Thank you to the Center for the Study of

Slavery and Justice, to Shana Weinberg, Maiyah Gamble-Rivers, Catherine Van Amburgh, and

Professor Tony Bogues who create a space on campus that strives to hold the university accountable to its history and current practices, for honoring knowledge that comes not just through advanced degrees, but through lived experiences, and for supporting my intellectual pursuits. Thank you to all those whose financial support allowed this project to happen: the John Nicholas Carter Brown

Center for Public Humanities, the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Professor Amy Remensnyder, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the

Pembroke Center. Thank you to my classmates, with whom I have had the privilege to study.

My studies gained meaning outside of the classroom. Thank you to my friends, with whom I laugh, cry, talk, learn, study and play. I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude for each of you in these pages, but you all teach me through your questions, studies, work, passions and most importantly, through the people you are. I am excited to continue to grow together. Thank you to Dylan, who provides me with constant support, comfort and love. Thank you to the organizing spaces that have welcomed me and reminded me that learning cannot happen in the vacuum of the university: to

Direct Action for Rights and Equality’s Behind the Walls committee which taught me what grassroots community organizing feels like; to Critical Resistance which taught me that abolition is both a long-term vision and practical organizing strategy; to Petey Greene and the students in the classes at the prison who showed me how learning can be a tool of resistance in even the most oppressive of places; to Railroad with whom I have made mistakes, learned that organizing is messy, and worked to leverage our resources as Brown University students; and to the Carceral State

Reading Group which taught me the importance of building educational spaces within and outside of the academy that foster collective learning. Thank you to Mario Montiero, who resists everyday from within the confines of the prison, fighting for himself, for other Juvenile life-sentencers, and for all those incarcerated yesterday, today and tomorrow. It is a joy and a privilege to learn in community with you all.

My studies at Brown culminate in this project. Thank you to all those who generously shared their time and memories with me: Loretta Ross, Nkenge Touré, Nancy Shia (who shared not only her experiences but the interviews she conducted), Karen Ruckman, Margaret Lazarus, Roach Brown,

Ricki Brown, Freada Kapor-Klein, and Samuel Paige, who gave so wholeheartedly to this project and who motivated me to continue this work. Thank you to the multitude of organizations -

Survived and Punished, Critical Resistance, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, INCITE!

Women of Color Against Violence, and so many others - that carry on PAR’s work today. And last, but definitely not least, thank you to the men in PAR for providing an example of what radical community education and anti-carceral responses to violence can look like. Through sharing and engaging with their work, I hope to honor William Fuller, Larry Cannon, Nelson Bostic, Gary L.

Alston, Mahonny Kassima, James Jenkins, Frankie Allen, Aubrey Pierson, Robree Earle, James

Long, Donald Luckett, my new friend Samuel Paige and the other men who participated in

Prisoners Against Rape whose names I do not know. This project is for them and I hope it does their work justice.

Sophie Rae Kupetz '19.5 E: [email protected] T: 818.738.3142

A.B. History Candidate Student Employee at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

Dear Mr. Paige,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am a senior at Brown University and am writing my undergraduate history thesis on incarcerated person led groups at Lorton Prison in the 1960s-1980s.

In my research about Lorton, I came across the group Prisoner’s Against Rape (PAR) and an article that listed a Sam Paige as part of the group. I also interviewed a woman named Nancy Shia, who volunteered at Lorton in the 1970s and 1980s and she mentioned your name as someone involved in PAR. I found your address and telephone number in an online “Yellow Pages.”

I am writing to reach out to see if you are that Sam Paige. I am interested in and inspired by the work of Prisoners Against Rape and am speaking with people who were involved with the group. I want to document the group's work because I think it is an important part of history that should be remembered. If you were involved, I would love to hear your story. I would be happy to use a pseudonym if you do choose to speak with me.

If you were involved in Prisoners Against Rape and are willing to speak with me, please call me at 818.738.3142 or email me at [email protected]. If I do not hear from you, I plan to call you next week, and wanted to first send a letter introducing myself.

If this is not you, I am very sorry to bother you! Please let me know if I have the wrong person, as I will not follow up.

Thank you so much.

Best,

Sophie Kupetz

A Note on Letters

Dear Reader,

Letters are central to the story that follows. The men in Prisoners Against Rape transcended the walls of the prison through the writing of letters. Communicating via letter, they forged connections with those outside the prison, resisting the carceral logic of separation. Through letters, they gained a platform for their voice. So, it is only fitting that foundational to this project is a letter.

I first learned of Prisoners Against Rape two and a half years ago now. I was a Sophomore, enrolled in Professor Emily Owens’ seminar, “Consent: Race, Sex, and the Law.” While I took this course, I could feel that it was, and would continue to be, central to my intellectual development.

Professor Owens exposed me to the interconnectedness of legal and social history and showed me how history can help us comprehend present-day issues. In this course I learned what history could and needed to be: a discipline that not only allows for, but honors narratives and analyses that draw from a range of archives, not just the dusty box found in the university or state library, but from alternative stories, memory, theory, narrative, feelings, and questions that, as Saidiya Hartman teaches us, “tell an impossible story and… amplify the impossibility of its telling.”2 What I did not know at the time was how much these lessons would inform my further studies at Brown, and in particular, this thesis.

Our conversations about consent, and particularly the ways that constructs of consent intentionally exclude enslaved people, made me think about the way that consent functions in a current system of confinement: the prison-industrial-complex. Preliminary research about the intersection of sexual violence and incarceration led me to Emily Thuma’s article, “Lessons in Self-

Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anti-Carceral Feminism.” Discussing the

2Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 12, no. .2 (June, 2008), 11.

Feminist Alliance Against Rape (FAAR) newsletter, Thuma writes: “An article on Inez García’s unfolding trial followed one written by the founders of Prisons Against Rape, a self- and peer- education program organized by a group of black men convicted of rape and incarcerated in Lorton

,Virginia.”3 She then moves on, discussing the other articles found within the pages of FAAR. I, however, remained stuck on Prisoners Against Rape.

+ + +

` This same semester, I was a teacher’s assistant in a college level course at the Rhode Island

Correctional Institute (or, more plainly, the Rhode Island prison) John Jay Moran Medium Facility.

Each week, I traveled fifteen minutes from Brown University, down the I-95 South to the prison, smiled at the Correctional Officers, walked through the metal detector, past the barbed wire fences and between the heavy, automated metal doors to participate in class. One-and-a-half hours later I would walk back through the heavy, automated metal doors, past the barbed wire fences, say goodbye to the Correctional Officer and return to Providence. I confronted the disturbing reality that I came and went with relative ease from a place in which people were held for years, if not decades.

I must note that, in contrast to Loretta Ross’s experience visiting the Lorton (discussed in the following pages), I and others who teach or tutor in the prison have to undergo a Department of

Corrections led training, wait weeks for approval, and make sure we are completely prepared each week: no underwire bra, no midriff showing, no jeans, and as became evident once I entered the prison for the first time, no khaki. Even then, there is no guarantee of entry. This aside, each time I entered and exited the complex, I was hyper-aware of my freedom to move, to choose to be inside the space of the prison for an hour-and-a-half, and then to leave.

3 Emily Thuma, "Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism." Women's Studies Quarterly, 43, no. 3/4 (2015), 60.

My mobility, in contrast to the containment of those inside, speaks to the dehumanization inherent in incarceration. The space between this movement, the hour-and-a-half inside the classroom, however, felt incredibly human. This is not to say I could or should forget that I was inside a prison. The group of mostly brown and Black men dressed in identical khaki and white sneakers (or Timberlands, in the colder months), the lack of technology, the windowless rooms, and the Correctional Officers that walked down the halls and yelled at the men if they lingered in class a moment too long acted as reminders of the violent institution within which we are strove to learn. I had to follow rules with which I did not agree so that I did not get the program or the incarcerated students in trouble. The program told me to withhold personal information, but I wanted to share openly about myself to gain trust. I walked the incredibly fine line of creating authentic, mutually respectful relationships while acknowledging the real barriers that existed between the students and me - the power dynamics created by the walls and by society. Underneath these negotiations was my understanding that, at the end of the day, I could leave. I was not the one with the most on the line if a “boundary was breached.” The men inside knew this way better than I.

In the midst of all of this disturbing complexity, however, we laughed and learned. There is nothing more human and humanizing than talking, thinking and learning collectively. Within the space of the classroom we could critique the institution that surrounded us. In discussions about the reading we could challenge each other to think deeply and build new understandings. In interpersonal conversations, we could share information about the organizing we did on each side of the prison walls.4 These interactions were small acts of resistance against the prison-industrial-

4 I want to recognize that my experience in this class was not reflective of all, or even most, educational environments within prisons. I tutored in a College Unbound course. College Unbound is rooted in personalized, individualized learning that honors students’ passions, so the courses give students space to share their experience and to take ownership over their knowledge. In these ways College Unbound is different from the majority of other classes in the prison, which focus on rote memorization and act more as a means to an end of getting a GED or an Associates Degree, than spaces that prioritize the learning process.

complex.5 I witnessed some of the most engaged, insightful, thought provoking intellectual work in classes in the prison. Each time, I left energized by the intellectual rigor and inspired by their resistance.

+ + +

Based on these experiences, the description of Prisoners Against Rape intrigued me. Beyond the brief mention in Thuma’s article, I could not find any secondary sources that focused on PAR’s work. So, for my final paper in “Consent: Race, Sex and the Law,” I attempted to piece together a history of their work, drawing mainly from articles in feminist newsletters from the 1970s and early

1980s. I finished the paper with more questions than answers and the feeling that I would return to the project.

One year later, when it came time to write my thesis prospectus, I decided to continue my research about PAR in a more thoughtful and dedicated manner. I returned to the questions I posed at the end of my final paper: “For how long did PAR last? Did PAR extend to other prisons or inspire similar programs? Was PAR successful on the micro-level of preventing men from reoffending? What happened to Fuller and the other men involved in PAR?” Considering PAR is a relatively recent history, I decided to try to conduct oral histories with people in the group to fill the gaps in the archives and to center the voices of those who were a part of PAR in doing so. First, I needed to find people who were involved in the group, which brings me to the letter.

+ + +

After fruitless google searches of the names of people that I knew were involved in PAR, I clicked a link to an online directory. I had a list of names of people involved in PAR, many of which

5 Abolitionist organization Critical Resistance defines the prison-industrial-complex as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” “What is the PIC? What is Abolition?,” Critical Resistance, Critical Resistance, November 26, 2019, http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.

were relatively common, a general sense of their ages, and a hope that they still lived in the D.C.,

Maryland and Virginia area. I found a list of possible addresses in the mid-Atlantic for each person with the name “William Fuller,” “Larry Cannon,” “Nelson Bostic,” and “Samuel Paige,” aged 60-85.

With nothing to lose, I drafted a letter and went to the post office. I sent letters to all the addresses, thinking they would end up in a recycling bin or returned to my apartment.

A week or so later, I got out of class and saw that I had a missed call and a text from a

Washington, D.C. area code. I felt a nervous excitement as I clicked to open the text:

April 16, 2019 5:51PM: Good evening Sophie. This is Sam Paige. received your letter yesterday. I may say it caught me by surprise. Unable to talk with you today, get back with you on Wednesday. Oh, by the way check your voicemail box it’s full. Ttyl

I could not believe it. The letter not only made it to Sam Paige, but it was the Sam Paige involved in

PAR. The next day, we talked on the phone. I could hear the surprise and excitement in his voice.

We set up a time for me to come to D.C. to meet him. Sam (he preferred me to use his first name) sent me a picture of himself, so that I could identify him when we met at a coffee shop a month and a half later. Connecting with Sam, I felt a newfound sense of responsibility: beyond my own curiosity about and admiration for PAR, I now had someone to whom I was accountable. Sam’s words, stories, wisdom, and friendship are at the root of this project.

I invited Sam to come to Providence to present the thesis with me, to share his experience in

PAR, and to be in conversation about the climate of anti-violence organizing today. He said yes and asked that I mail him an official invitation, the plane ticket, and other logistical information. I asked him for his address, and he reminded me that I already had it. After all, it all started with a letter.

- Sophie

Map displays Lorton, Virginia’s (the location of the Lorton Reformatory) relation to Washington D.C. (From Catharine Hamm, “In 1917, the ‘Night of Terror’ at a Virginia prison changed history. Now it’s a site of beauty,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2017.)

Introduction: Within and Beyond Lorton Reformatory

“While I was on the outside I raped women. Now, on the inside, I rape men. I want to stop raping. Can you help me?” Loretta Ross read this unusual plea in a letter she received one morning in 1979 while at work at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center (DCRCC).6 Almost thirty years later, in an interview with Joyce Follet for the “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project,” Ross recalled receiving the letter, calling it “one of the more interesting things that happened” during her tenure as

Executive Director of the DCRCC.7 William Fuller, a man incarcerated at the Lorton Reformatory, in Lorton, Virginia, wrote the letter.

Fuller had spent the previous fifteen years in various prisons throughout the United States.

His letter, written on behalf of a group of Black men at Lorton that called themselves “Prisoners

Against Rape,” reflects the group’s critical self-reflection and contains a call for help. Fuller’s request, “I want to stop raping. Can you help me?” makes a profound statement: the prison did not stop him from perpetrating violence. He recognized that he acted violently, but did not completely understand the cause of his behavior. Through the letter, Fuller extended his hand, unlocked the gates of the prison, and reached into the public realm. He searched for a spark that could ignite the flame that he recognized inside him and many others at Lorton, but one that the prison worked to extinguish. Ross and the DCRCC responded to Fuller’s call, forming a seemingly unusual partnership between anti-violence activists and survivors of sexual violence and a group of convicted or self-admitted rapists.

6Loretta Ross recalled the letter from memory. The quote represents Ross’s recollection of Fuller’s words. Loretta Ross, “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project," interview by Joyce Follet, November 3-5, 2004, December 1- 3, 2004, February 4, 2005, in Northampton, Massachusetts, transcript Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA, available online at https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Ross.pdf, 8. Hereafter referred to as “Ross, interview by Follet.” 7 Ross, interview by Follet.

This thesis focuses on Loretta Ross and the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, on Prisoners Against

Rape’s work and writing, and on the unique relationship formed between the two groups - a story that thus far, has been relegated to newsletter clippings found scattered across various online and physical archives and in the memories of those involved in the group. Though this story is not confined to Lorton Reformatory, Lorton acted as the space of physical convergence, where Ross and DCRCC met Fuller and PAR. Lorton physically constricted the incarcerated members of PAR, making it the background against which they lived, learned and organized.8

+++

From 1914 to 2001, the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections sent people convicted in its jurisdiction to the Lorton Reformatory in Lorton, Virginia. Originally called the “District of

Columbia Workhouse,” Lorton first gained public notoriety in 1917, when it imprisoned 72 suffragettes for protesting for the right to vote.9 Over the next fifty years, Lorton went through numerous transformations, from a work farm built to “rehabilitate” lower class “misdemeanants” through intense labor, to an overcrowded, multi-facility, “modern” prison complex that contained and punished mostly Black and brown men.10 Though physically separate from the nation’s capital, the political, social, and cultural environment of the country very much affected the prison. During the Cold War, from the 1950s through 1974, the U.S. Army built a Nike missile site on vacant land

8The history of Prisoners Against Rape is grounded in place. Prisoners Against Rape was only one group in one prison in the 1970s United States. However, as Françoise Hamlin argues, local histories provide “a window for analyzing the complexity of movements even within locales.” Understanding the DCRCC and PAR’s work within the context of Lorton and the D.C. metropolitan area illustrates the complexities of the anti-violence movement on the local scale and in doing so, intervenes in dominant anti-violence movement histories that homogenize the movement. Françoise Hamlin, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed, The Story is Not Finished:’ Coahoma County, Mississippi, Civil Rights, and the Recovery of a History,” Sound Historian, 37-60. 9“History of the Workhouse Arts Center,” Workhouse Arts Center, November 29, 2019, http://www.workhousearts.org/about/history/. 10 The original “misdemeanants” at Lorton were men arrested and jailed for the likes of public drunkenness, petty theft, and simple assault. The first women incarcerated at Lorton were sentenced for solicitation, prostitution, disorderly conduct, vagrancy and intoxication. “History of the Workhouse Arts Center,” Workhouse Arts Center, accessed November 29, 2019, http://www.workhousearts.org/about/history/.

that was part of the prison complex.11 In 1965, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, Ella

Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Count Basie transformed Lorton’s baseball diamond into a stage and performed for those incarcerated in Lorton’s own Jazz Festival.12

However, Fitzgerald’s powerful vocals disguised a less uplifting reality. In the midst of his

“War on Poverty” Johnson also called for his less often discussed “War on Crime.” As historian

Elizabeth Hinton argues, the conservative administrations of Nixon or Reagan did not start the war on crime; it began with Johnson “during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights movement.”13 With his Safe Streets Act of 1968, Johnson created the Law Enforcement Assistance

Administration (LEAA). Johnson and Nixon put billions of dollars into LEAA in the following decade, making it the fastest growing federal agency and ushering in a rapid expansion of the carceral state.

D.C., as the nation’s capital, was uniquely positioned in this broader history. Soon after he took office, Nixon declared a separate “War on Crime” specifically targeted at Washington D.C., a majority Black city that had one of the highest crime rates in the country at the time.14 In 1970,

Nixon introduced the District of Columbia Court Reorganization Act as a potential model for the nation. The Act scaled back Johnson’s “War on Poverty” efforts while bolstering his “War on

Crime,” rejecting the notion that poverty was the root of crime and implementing mandatory minimum sentences, sanctioning the practice of holding people in jail “without formal charges,” and

11Joanne Tang, The old Lorton, Virginia prison is being turned into homes. Here’s its fascinating story, Greater Greater Washington, September 21, 2019, https://ggwash.org/view/69004/this-old-lorton-virginia-prison-has-now-become- housing; D.C. Department of Corrections Facility at Lorton Prison Complex Time Line,” Workhouse Prison Museum at Lorton, accessed November 29, 2019, http://workhousemuseums.org/history/d-c-department-of-corrections-facility- at-lorton-prison-complex-time-line/. 12Mary Hostetler Oakey, Journey from the Gallows: Historical Evolution of the Penal Philosophies and Practices in the Nation’s Capital, (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988). 13Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1. 14Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 156.

increasing racial profiling.15 By 1969, D.C. had the largest number of police per capita. The Court

Reorganization Act dramatically increased the incarceration rate of young, urban Black men.16 The courts sent the majority of these men to Lorton.

Though only twenty miles south of D.C., the demographics of Fairfax County, which contained Lorton, differed greatly from the nation’s capital. In 1971, excluding those housed at

Lorton Reformatory, Fairfax County’s population of 455,021 people was 93% white, while D.C. was

71.1% Black. Since D.C. was predominantly Black, and the criminal legal system targeted people of color and low income people, Black people made up 89% of the incarcerated population at Lorton in 1969.17 This percentage continued to increase into the 1970s. In contrast, 74% of the Correctional

Officers were white and many of them lived in the area surrounding the prison.18 Lorton’s intense overcrowding exacerbated pre-existing tensions between the incarcerated population and the correctional officers. In the 1970s, Lorton’s overcrowding led the administration to house people in retired passenger trains.19

Lorton connected to D.C. in numerous ways. The hyper-policing of Black communities, aggravated by Johnson’s “War on Crime” and Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” drove a constant movement of people, mostly Black men, from D.C. to Lorton and back again. Letters, relatives visiting loved ones, and even drugs, flowed between what Reginald Payne, incarcerated at Lorton from 1970-1976, called the two “cities.”20 During this time, the Black Panther Party organized free

15 Hinton, 138. 16 Hinton, 152 & 156. 17Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,” Population Division, Working Paper No. 2, (Washington, D.C.: US Census Bureau, 2005), https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.pdf. 18 Oakey, Journey from the Gallows, 235. 19Sidney Davis, interview by Nancy Shia, Lorton Prison Stories Project, August 9, 2013, transcript and recording. Hereafter referred to as “Davis interview.” 20Reginald “Ramsey” Payne, interview by Nancy Shia, Lorton Prison Stories Project, June, 28, 2013, transcript and recording. Hereafter referred to as “Payne interview.”

busses from D.C. to Lorton, so that people could visit and stay connected with their incarcerated family and friends.21 As incarceration dramatically increased, the federal government instituted changes that made prisons appear more pleasant.22

The federal government and D.C. Department of Directions implemented numerous reforms at Lorton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including a furlough program that allowed some incarcerated men to leave the prison temporarily and under specific circumstances for events and classes and a more diverse Department of Corrections administration.23 John L. Boone, became the

Superintendent of Lorton in 1969.24 Tyrone Powers, incarcerated at Lorton during Boone’s tenure, describes Boome as “really progressive,” comparing him to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Boone had the corrections piece,” Powers stated, “and Martin had the community piece.” Powers equated

Boone’s work within prisons to Dr. King’s work in the “free world.”25 According to Sidney Davis, also incarcerated at Lorton during Boone’s tenure, Boone believed that “there’d be no fences”

The entanglement of “the Black urban experience” in D.C. with the “Black experience of confinement” at Lorton exemplifies what historian Dan Berger calls the broader “carceral landscape” that contained Black people. Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Justice, Power, and Politics), (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina, 2016), 51. 21Anne M. Valk Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Women in American History), (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 123. 22 Johnson’s policies exemplified “Cold War Liberalism.” The prison hosted Jazz Festivals and other events that made the facility appear to be pleasurable, while failing to address larger structural issues or call into question the way prisons acted as a system of control of Black and brown people. In her book, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Dudziak argues that, “Although the Cold War helped motivate civil rights reform, it limited the field of vision to formal equality, to opening the doors of opportunity, and away from a broader critique of the American economic and political system.” (Dudziak, 252) Such framing affected the reforms the government implemented. The use of incarceration as a tool for suppression fit within the ideology of Cold War Liberalism. The government could justify their subjugation of Black people while upholding the optics and rhetoric of democracy at stake during the Cold War by deeming Black people “criminals” deserving of punishment. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America), (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000). 23 Between 1969-1973, Lorton’s superintendents had six superintendents, multiple of whom were Black. The superindentends included Dr. DJ Sheehy, Allen Avery, Claude Burgin, John O. Boone, James Freeman, Delbert C. Jackson, Lawrence Swain,and Marion and D. Strickland (1973-1980). Oakey, Journey from the Gallows, 235. 24 Davis interview; Payne interview. 25 Tyrone Powers, interview by Nancy Shia, Lorton Prison Stories Project, July 5, 2013, transcript and recording. Hereafter referred to as “Powers interview.” Reginald “Ramsey” Payne, interview by Nancy Shia, Lorton Prison Stories Project, June 28, 2013, transcript and recording. Hereafter referred to as “Payne interview.”

separating the prison from the rest of the world. Boone supported and expanded Lorton’s furlough program.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw a rise in the number of educational programs and political organizations at Lorton and in prisons overall.26 While they increased opportunities for incarcerated people, neither the furlough program nor the expanded educational opportunities challenged the logic of the prison. In fact, in some instances, they bolstered underlying oppressive structures.

Prison-sponsored education programs rested on the goal of “changing behaviors” of incarcerated people, so they could become “fully functioning” members of society, perpetuating the liberal notion that bad individuals, and not oppressive systems, led to violence.27 The late 1960s and early

1970s were a unique moment in the history of incarceration in the United States; paradoxically, the carceral state expanded during a period of increased prison reforms. It was in this context that the

D.C. Rape Crisis Center debated how to address violence and that Prisoners Against Rape emerged.

In the Overlaps & the Cracks: Placing the Story of Prisoners Against Rape in the Historiography

PAR’s work and thus, the story of their work, lies at the intersection of numerous fields of scholarship: anti-carceral feminism, Black feminism, the Third World Feminist movement, carceral studies, and Black Studies, among others. During the past decade, scholars such as Aya Gruber,

Emily Thuma, Kristen Bumiller, and Mimi Kim disrupted anti-violence scholarship. They critique

“certain liberal and dominance feminist legal devices” that undermine the progressive agenda of feminism and the anti-violence movement by relying on the racist and oppressive criminal legal

26Lee Bernstein, America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 77. 27Bernstein, 60. T.A. Ryan, “Correctional Education: Past is Prologue to the Future,” Journal of Correctional Education (1974–), 46. no. 2 (June 1995), 61.

system as a response to gender subordination.28 Their work shows that it is possible to uphold feminist values while critiquing gender crime reforms, and provides a history of anti-carceral feminism. While Thuma makes a passing reference to PAR in her article “Lessons in Self Defense,”

PAR’s work remains otherwise absent from these scholars’ analyses.

Historians Sarah Haley and Danielle McGuire have shown how the criminal legal system constructed Black women as deviant and “unrapeable.”29 They reposition Black women’s fight against sexual violence as central to the Black freedom struggle. By arguing that policy makers never intended for rape laws to protect Black women, Haley and McGuire’s works support an anti-carceral response to sexual violence. Further, their work makes clear that, throughout history, Black women have advocated for a right to protect their bodies. Loretta Ross and the other women at the D.C.

Rape Crisis Center are part of this tradition.

Activist-scholars Angela Y. Davis and Loretta J. Ross write specifically about Black women’s experience of sexual violence in the 1970s and the emergence of the Third World Women’s anti- violence movement. Public historian Anne Valk provides a nuanced description of the feminist and anti-violence movement in Washington D.C. in her book Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and

Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. Historian Ashley Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women

Transformed an Era, depicts the numerous ways that Black Panther women contributed to and transformed the Black Power movement and asks readers to think critically about the meaning and label of “feminist.” These works contextualize the DCRCC and PAR, and connect them with the

28 Aya Gruber, “A ‘Neo-Feminist’ Assessment of Rape and Domestic Violence Law Reform,” 15, no. 583, Gender Race & Justice (2012), 40; Kim, “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice;” Emily Thuma, "Lessons in Self- Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism." Women's Studies Quarterly, 43, no. 3/4 (2015), 59. 29 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 2016); Danielle McGuire, “A Black Woman’s Body was Never Hers Alone,” in At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Chapter 6, (New York City, New York, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011).

larger anti-violence movement and Black freedom struggle of the 1970s. Further, I draw from influential Black feminist scholars bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, the

Combahee River Collective, and Kimberleé Crenshaw to analyze and understand PAR’s writings.

Also relevant to the story of PAR is scholarship that focuses on prisons and carcerality in the

1970s. Heather Ann Thomason, Dan Berger, Lisa Corrigan, and Lee Bernstein think about the prison of the 1970s as a political space, placing prisons as central to the Black freedom struggle. In doing so, they focus on influential, famous figures like George Jackson and Angela Davis, and large scale acts and protests, such as the Attica Uprising, while failing to analyze or recognize the work of lesser known groups and quotidian acts. This work hopes to draw attention to individuals and groups who worked to resist the prison in their smaller daily acts and conversations. Mary Oakey’s history of Lorton provides important context for the ways in which Lorton changed over its 100 year history, but does not delve into the stories of specific groups, nor make any mention of

Prisoners Against Rape. Studies of prisons often focus on numbers and demographics. This project goes beyond the numbers to ask questions and tell stories about some of the men at Lorton, specifically those who created PAR.

The history of PAR seeps into the crevices of the aforementioned scholarship - into the gaps left by stories untold and people unconsidered in writings about anti-violence activism. The story of

PAR counters, and in some instances, directly challenges, the dominant narrative of the anti-violence movement - that white women created and advocated for changes to rape legislation to take (white) women’s experience of assault more seriously and convict and incarcerate (Black, male) rapists.

Perhaps, this is why historians and scholars have not told the story of PAR. To use anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s language, PAR’s story is in some ways “impossible.” If we only view the men in PAR in conventional terms - as rapists and criminals - they cannot also be scholars, victims of violence, and activists working to stop the very violence they perpetrated. The

history of PAR challenges the narrative of the victim-perpetrator binary and the power structures such a conception upholds. Trouillot teaches that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.”30 This work will not eradicate all the silences about Prisoners Against Rape. This project seeks to highlight their important role in the anti-violence movement’s historiography and will look to the voices of those involved to do so.

“In Their Own Words:” Oral History & Close Reading as Methodology

“Only the voices of the people speaking in their own words can counteract the white archival sources and histories.” - Françoise Hamlin, “The Book Hasn’t Closed”31

Though the stories of PAR, and their work with the DCRCC and influence of the broader anti-violence movement have been left out of the historiography, they remain in the writings and the memories of those involved. This project turns to and relies on those writings and memories. It is premised on the notion that only these voices, “the voices of people speaking in their own words,” can counteract - or, at the very least, begin to infiltrate - the power represented and reproduced in dominant tellings of history.

If anything comes up when googling the men involved in PAR, a court case appears first. If history includes these men, they are included as convicts and felons, defined solely by their crime.

Scrolling down a bit farther, one may find a short Wikipedia article about the documentary Rape

Culture, and a mention of Prisoners Against Rape. The story ends there. Through their own words, however, these men become holistic people - people with relationships, commitments, goals, struggles; people who made mistakes and caused great harm, and also people who tried to be better.

30Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 2nd Revised ed (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2012), 27. 31Hamlin, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed,” 42.

This project centers the voices of those involved in PAR in an attempt to “fill the gaps in institutional archives.”32

Speaking to the power of oral history, Historian Françoise Hamlin argues that it gives scholars, especially those who study marginalized groups, the opportunity “to excavate the local,” to gain an intimate understanding of peoples’ strategies of resistance and survival. Memory is history making, just one that most often remains in private spheres, whether it be the mind, the household, or maybe, the community center or church.33 Through talking to Loretta Ross, Nkenge Touré,

Nancy Shia, Samuel Paige, Margaret Lazarus, Freada Kapor-Klein, Ricki Brown and Roach Brown, this project gave me the privilege and responsibility to bring their memories into the public sphere.

Due to time and geographic restraints, I conducted most of my interviews on the phone, though I had the opportunity to meet Samuel Paige, Nancy Shia, Ricki Brown and Karen Ruckman in person. The oral histories range from thirty minutes to two hours. I came to each interview prepared with a list of questions, but also left room for the narrator to share and discuss what they chose. Nancy Shia gave me seven oral histories that she conducted with men who were incarcerated at Lorton during the 1970s. Having received a grant from D.C. Humanities, Shia interviewed the men in 2013, but did not finish the project. She generously sent the interviews to me, with the request that I make the transcriptions public, a project currently in process. I also draw from a multi- day oral history Joyce Follet conducted with Loretta Ross as part of the Voices of Feminism Oral

History Project. The narrators of these histories are at the center of this project, not only as “subjects” of this history, but as “agents in the recovery” of this story and how it is told.34

32Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Introduction,” in The Injustice Never Leaves You, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 25. 33Hamlin, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed,” 50. 34Hamlin, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed,” 49.

Oral history is premised on the notion that the way people tell their stories - the language they choose to use, the details they emphasize, is as important as the content itself. Thus, I have chosen not to edit the words of the narrators.35 I do not “standardize” or edit transcriptions, in hopes of honoring the ways each narrator speaks, recognizing voice as central to their telling of their stories and challenging the racist and classist notion that there is one correct or respectable way of speaking.36 I chose to respect the words that people in PAR and the DCRCC used to describe their work and experiences. For example, those in PAR described themselves and others at Lorton as

“men.” I recognize that there likely were non-binary and transgender people at Lorton, who may not have identified as men. I do not use the language of “men” to erase or silence these individuals or communities, but to honor PAR’s understanding and analysis of their environment and to recognize that gender segregated prisons limit an individual’s ability to express their gender identity freely.

Oral history asks historians to grapple with emotions and to read emotions as a source, as opposed to adopting the false notion that emotions and facts are separate.37 Both what is included in memory and what is left out of memory tell us - the friend, the reader, the sister, the listener, the daughter, the scholar, the great, great, granddaughter - about the significance of the event, about how an individual experienced the past, and about how they understand and make sense of their

35 Editing peoples’ ways of speaking has been used by those in power as a tool to suppress and discredit the words and thoughts of marginalized people throughout history. By editing grammar and word choice that differ from “proper” English, editors take power away from the narrators and legitimize existing prejudices around the “correct” way of speaking. By making language more “comprehensible” to the academy, we not only isolate other people, but lose the nuances of what each individual is saying. Amanda Ong, “We Speak the Same Language, We See Through Different Tongues,” OHMA Columbia, October 20, 2019, http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/blog-posts/same-language-different- tongues. 36 Inspired by: Ong, “We Speak the Same Language,” http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/blog-posts/same-language- different-tongues. & Linda Shopes, “To Revise is to Create: Reflections on Editing and Translation for OHMA and Voice of Witness,” OHMA Columbia, June 9, 2016, http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/blog-posts/People/to-revise-is-to-create-reflections- on-editing-and-translation-for-ohma-and-voice-of-witness. 37Memory, like more traditional histories that draw from written records, is selective; however it is authentic emotion, and not the desire to tell a history that conforms to, or upholds dominant modes of thinking, that influences memory. Hamlin, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed,” 43; As Trouillot argues, the traditional archive is not objective, but a compilation of choices, influenced by systems of power and the dominant culture, of what to record. Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Introduction,” 27.

experiences. The process of remembering brings the past in conversation with the present. Follet conducted her interview with Ross in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 election. During the interview, Ross stated that the experience of recounting her past felt especially hard in the context of knowing “we’ve got four more years of Bush.”38 Ross explained that it is always challenging to recount and re-confront her “scabbed-over pain,” and all the more challenging in a political and social context that furthers such pain. The narrators I spoke with recounted their stories as the

Senate swore Brett Kavanaugh into Supreme Court, as Black women are the fastest growing population in prison, and as the media and general public view the current President of the United

States as both a “criminal justice reformer” and someone who makes light of sexual violence. I recognize that asking people to recount their past, and especially pasts that include violence and struggle, is a tiring and challenging process. I also recognize that white women have and continue to drive carceral feminism, treating police as our personal security force, and that “ally” is not an identity but a verb that must be continually practiced. I feel immensely grateful that the narrators trusted me with their stories and experiences and I am committed to continuing to earn their trust and to learn and work harder when I fail.

Secondly, this project draws on the practice of close reading to engage with PAR’s writings.

In the final section, I interact with PAR’s writings as one would with any other scholarly work - I look closely at their arguments and put them into conversation with other anti-violence scholarship.

This practice is imperfect; I bring my perspective into my reading of PAR’s work. However, I do so not as an authority on their writing but as an attempt to elevate their writing, acknowledge their cutting-edge contributions to the movement, and urge others to interact with their words.

38 Ross, interview by Follet.

A Practice of Quilting

The narrative that follows is not seamless or linear. When discussing how to assemble all the pieces of this story, my advisor, Professor Hamlin, suggested that I think of it as a quilt. Quilting forms a whole out of smaller parts of different textures and materials, sometimes telling a story.

Quilting does not require a large piece of one material - or a cohesive narrative - but instead pulls together grandma’s blanket, a cool piece of fabric, and some extra burlap to create something useful, and perhaps even beautiful. This project unites different stories- those of Loretta Ross, William

Fuller, and the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and draws from different methods - oral history, biography, close reading - to piece together a history of Prisoners Against Rape. The goal is not to mask the stitches between pieces of the story, but to embrace them, to both acknowledge gaps in the archive and to build around them.

The project starts with Fuller’s letter to Ross, in 1979. The first chapter, or square, if you will, moves to 1953 to follow Ross’s early life and her journey to becoming an anti-violence activist.

Through examining Ross’s early years, “Enter[ing] the Movement:” Loretta Ross, the D.C. Rape

Crisis Center, and Third World Women Against Violence” gounds the narrative in the political, social, and cultural moment of the late 1960s and 1970s and analyzes Ross and the D.C. Rape Crisis

Center’s place within the broader anti-violence and the Third World Women’s movement in D.C.

The second square tells the somewhat simultaneous narrative of the formation of Prisoner’s

Against Rape, starting in 1973 and leaving off in 1979. While the DC Rape Crisis Center transformed into a locus of Black feminist anti-violence organizing, a group of men in Lorton turned the prison into a radical educational space for learning about and combatting rape. The third chapter unites Ross’s narrative with that of Prisoner’s Against Rape, as the two groups meet at

Lorton prison to form a study group in 1979.

The fourth and final chapter strays from the narrative into a close reading of PAR’s political writing to analyze their understanding of sexual violence and their contributions to the larger conversation about rape and violence prevention. The conclusion highlights PAR’s major impacts, the questions left unanswered, and the lessons anti-violence activists today can draw from PAR.

These parts come together to tell the story of how a group of men incarcerated at Lorton Prison created an anti-violence group rooted in community education and formed a partnership with the

D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and in doing so, resisted both the prison and broader society that confined them.

I. “Enter[ing] the Movement:” Loretta Ross, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and Third World Women Against Violence

In 1979, Loretta Ross became the Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.

Though only 26 years old, Ross’s studies, activism and personal experiences positioned her well for the role. While her journey and choices were unique, Ross’s life provides a lens into the cultural, social, and political climates of the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s and the ways such climates impacted the experiences of a young person, gendered female and racialized Black, in the United

States. From a girl growing up on military bases in the 1950s to a young mother engaged in political activism in the nation’s capital in the 1970s, the anti-violence movement and the Third World

Women’s Movement impacted Ross’s trajectory, and her life impacted these movements. These experiences shaped how she reacted to William Fuller’s letter in 1979. When Ross got in her car to drive to Lorton, she was not only responding to Fuller’s letter, but to over three decades of her own experiences, activism, relationships, trauma and resistance.

“We just didn’t talk about those things:” Ross’s Early Years

Ross was born to Alexander Ross and Lorene Dolores Burton in Temple, Texas, on August

16, 1953. She grew up in what she calls a “blended family”; her father’s family immigrated from

Jamaica and her mother’s family descended from enslaved people forcibly brought to the land now known as the United States.39 As a “military brat,” Ross spent her first ten years moving from base to base, which shaped her upbringing. Her father served in the army and her mother found domestic work in the various places they lived.

Growing up, Ross did not feel connected to any Black communities beyond her immediate family. Her father, Alexander, increased his military rank, eventually becoming a master sergeant.

39Loretta Ross, interview by Joyce Follet, 2.

With his promotions, the military moved the Ross family into fancier, whiter neighborhoods.40 Ross remembered the first time she was called the n-word. She was eight or nine years old and playing on the army base with her white friend Debby. They were fighting over a doll, as kids do, but when

Ross pulled the doll away, Debby called her the n-word. She did not know what Debby was talking about and went back to playing. Later that night, Ross asked her mother the meaning of the word.

She explains that her mom “went ballistic.” “Where did you hear that word? Who called you that?” her mother asked. Not wanting to get Debby in trouble, Ross kept her mouth shut. Lorene told her that it “was a bad word,” and that was the end of the conversation.41

Ross perceived that, for military children, one’s father’s rank mattered much more than race.

Her parents wanted to know who called her the n-word, so her father, “a master sergeant in a neighborhood full of sergeants” could punish the other father. Recalling this incident, Ross acknowledged that she did not know the intricacies of her father’s experience, as a black man in the newly desegregated Army. White kids whose fathers were of lower ranks, however, would not bother her. She felt like she grew up in “a less racialized world,” speaking to the power of the military to insulate people from concurrent social movements in which conversations about race, racism, and racial inequality took center stage.

This is not to say that race did not impact Ross’s life at all. She had clear memories of when she was made aware of and experienced blatant racism. On the drive from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to

San Antonio, Texas, Ross, her parents, and five of her eight siblings stopped at a gas station in

Mississippi. While the attendant pumped the gas, her father, Alexander Ross went to the bathroom.

Coming out of the bathroom, a white man yelled “you used the wrong bathroom.” Confused,

Alexander Ross responded stating, “No, I used the men’s room.” The Jamaica-born Alexander Ross

40Ross, interview by Follet, 16. 41Ross, interview by Follet, 16.

did not realize that he used the white bathroom; he did not realize that there was a separate bathroom for “colored people.” Alexander Ross got into a shouting match with the man. Ross’s mom, Lorene Dolores Burton, who grew up in the South panicked, because she knew that it could be deadly for a Black man to have a shouting match with a white man in Mississippi in 1963. The

Ross family got back into their station wagon. A few miles down the road a car full of white boys fired a shot at the Ross’s car. As the family screamed, Alexander Ross stopped the car, went to the trunk, grabbed his gun and fired at the car of boys. According to Loretta Ross, it was not until years later that the significance of this event - of her Black father shooting at white men in 1963 rural

Mississippi - sunk in. Her father grew up in Jamaica and Baltimore, unfamiliar with the segregated

South and, as a weapons specialist with a trunk full of guns, he felt confident in his ability to shoot back.42

Ross did not deem this event an act of resistance. Her parents were not political. Her father was what she described as a “hyper-patriot,” who flew the American flag on Memorial Day and took his kids to gun shows. He wanted to assimilate. Ross also perceived her mother as apolitical. She recalled that, after the murder of Malcolm X in 1965, her mother said she thought it was a good thing, because, as a Black militant, Malcolm X was embarrassing. Laughing, Ross mentioned that she is not sure if her mother even liked Dr. King. However, decades later, when talking to her mom about her work with the National Council of Negro Women, Lorene Dolores Burton told her daughter that she was a member of the Council in the 1930s. Asking her mother why she did not share this information with her earlier, Dolores Burton replied, “Oh, we just didn’t talk about those things.”43 Ross believed that the “economic cocoon of the military” deeply impacted her family’s

42Ross, interview by Follet, 20. 43Ross, interview by Follet, 21.

political views. Her parents decided to gain access to housing, quality schools, and healthcare through the military, not through fighting for social change.

Black families in the 1960s United States had varying understandings of and ways to respond to racism and took different routes to advocate for and ensure the safety and security of their families. Ross’s family shows that even within these different paths - joining the military versus marching in the Civil Rights movement, for example - there was nuance: an “apolitical” military sergeant could assert his humanity to a white man in the South and a military wife could join the

National Council of Negro Women. Ross grew up amidst these tensions and complexities.

+ + +

Growing up, Ross’s family not only kept quiet about race, but also did not talk about sex. As an adult, Ross learned that someone sexually abused her mother during her mother’s youth and realized that may have caused her mother’s sexual repression.44 Like her mother, Loretta Ross’s first encounter with sex was one of violence. While lost on a Girl Scout trip at age eleven, a stranger raped her. Ross explained that her recollections of the years after she was first raped, from age eleven to thirteen, blurred. She remembered that she was an honors student and a prodigious reader while at Confederate honoring Jefferson Davis Junior High School, but, in an effort to block out the trauma she experienced, she forgot much else that occurred.

Ross did not confront her early sexual trauma until she was raped again three years later.

Ross spent the summer she turned fifteen with her aunt and uncle in Los Angeles. While there,

Ross’s twenty-seven year old distant cousin sexually assaulted her numerous times, leaving her pregnant. These assaults triggered her memory of her previous assault, bringing Ross out of her fog.

She returned home to Texas knowing her life had changed dramatically, hiding her pregnancy from

44Ross, interview by Follet, 33.

her family and attempting to convince herself that it was just a bad dream.45 Waking up one night in what she thought was premature labor, she told her mother, because she thought she needed to go to hospital. Ross told her mother about being raped, both at age eleven and the previous summer.

Furious and upset, Ross’ mother beat her. It was not until later, when Ross learned about her mother’s sexual assault, that she understood the root of Lorene’s rage.46

Together, mother and daughter weighed Ross’s options. It was 1968 and she did not intend to keep the baby. Lorene Ross first made Loretta Ross go to church to “confess for her sin.” Ross confessed that she was pregnant and asked for forgiveness. In turn, the congregation stared at her with hostility.47 Though she had been raped, the church positioned Ross as the sinner rather than the one sinned against. Ross, like other young women, and especially young Black women, had to navigate a world that was not built to protect their bodies, but instead, deemed them deviant and criminal.48

“Falling from Grace:” Growing up Gendered Female and Racialized Black

During the 1960s and 1970s, many states based their rape laws on the traditional common law understanding of rape written in the 11th Century, which defined rape as something along the lines of “intercourse with a female not his wife, without her consent.”49 The U.S. legal system conceived rape as vaginal penetration, in which the perpetrator was a man and the victim a woman.

However, courts commonly required physical resistance as proof that women did not consent. Such

45Ross, interview by Follet, 43. 46Ross, interview by Follet, 49. 47Ross, interview by Follet, 45. 48As historian Sarah Haley argues in her book No Mercy Here, those in power have used the criminal legal system to depict Black women as monstrous and criminal and thus position them as undeserving of the law’s protection. (Haley, 25-26 and 214). Haley explains that this “inviolability of Black women,” worked to “reinforce the exceptional status of white women,” as the emblems of true womanhood, and thus, the symbol of white supremacy. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 2016), 81 and 108. 49 Nebraska became the first state to criminalize spousal rape in 1976. Holly Hogan, “Law Reform Efforts: Rape and Sexual Assault in United States of America,” International Models Project on Women’s Rights, 2013 http://www.impowr.org/content/law-reform-effortsrape-and-sexual-assault-united-states-america.

legal framework reflected and perpetuated a culture that questioned or blamed women for being too promiscuous or “easy” as opposed to blaming men for violence.

Ross and her mother, like many other women, particularly women of color, trying to protect their bodies in a world not built to do so, considered their options. Ross thought about crossing the border to have an abortion in Mexico but, they decided against it, because many women went and never returned. Ultimately, Lorene Ross decided to place her daughter in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers. Ross would have the baby while at the home, give the baby up for adoption, and then “reintegrate into society.”50 The rape and pregnancy would be forgotten, and Ross would accept the scholarship she received to attend Radcliffe College51

The Salvation Army house, however, harmed Ross, the only Black girl held in what she described as a “prison-like environment.”52 Those who ran the house forced the young women to labor and pray and restricted them from leaving the premises. During the afternoon of April 8, 1968,

Ross went into labor. She gave birth to her son in the early morning on April 9.53 While in labor, scared and overwhelmed, the Salvation Army officials had Ross sign the adoption papers.

Unexpectedly, the doctors brought Ross her son to be breastfed. Holding him in her arms, she recalled thinking, “He’s got my face.” In that moment, Ross decided she could not give him up for adoption. With the help of her sister, Ross convinced her furious mother. She asserted control over her body while her mother, the Salvation Army officials, and society at large attempted to strip her of that power. Leaving the hospital with her son, Howard Michael in her arms, Ross’s life changed dramatically once again.

50Ross, interview by Follet, 36. 51Ross received a scholarship to Radcliffe, because she was a semifinalist in the National Minority Scholarship Qualifying tests. As a result, Ivy League schools trying to recruit minority students sought out Ross. Ross, interview by Follet, 35. 52Ross, interview by Follet, 36. 53 Ross, interview by Follet, 37.

Ross’s high school refused to readmit her. While they could feign ignorance of a pregnancy, they believed that having a child was proof that “you’ve fallen from grace.”54 Ross’s white, Southern guidance counselor told her to transfer to a high school for “problem children.” An alumna of

Radcliffe, the counselor had worked with Ross for two years to help her apply to the College. As

Ross describes, her guidance counselor thought she had “found a great black girl” that would be

“good for her alma mater.”55 The guidance counselor policed Ross’s style and habits in order to

“prepare” her for the Ivy League. One day, when Ross wore a dashiki and Afro to school, the guidance counselor sent her home because she thought her clothing was too “militant.” Ross explained that while her white classmates wore crotch lengthed mini-skirts, the guidance counselor deemed her knee length dashiki inappropriate for school. This was all before Ross gave birth to her son. Once Ross had Howard Michael, the counselor did all she could to strip Ross of her accomplishments. She told Ross that she needed to transfer schools; that she could no longer command the drill team she founded; and that she had to leave the honor society, because she lacked “moral character.” To her predominantly white school, Sam Houston High School, Ross was no longer the angelic Black student that could set an example for other Black students. They viewed

Ross as deserving of support only so long as she conformed to white standards of respectability and assimilated into whiteness, characteristic of white liberalism.56

54 Ross, interview by Follet, 37. 55Ross, interview by Follet, 39. 56 As Ibram X. Kendi argues, “Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas.” By positioning a racial group, most often, white people, as the superior standard, assimilationists place them as the “benchmark” that all other racial groups should try to reach. Kendi outlines the ways in which assimilationist ideas and segregationist ideas are “the duel within racist thought.” Unlike segregationists who believe people of color are incapable of reaching the superior standard of whiteness, assimilationists believe that people of color can develop, “become fully human,” like white people. Assimilationists, like Ross’s guidance counselor, her High School, and Radcliffe university, treat Black people as “children needing instruction on how to act.” In doing so, they perpetuate the racist ideology that certain racial groups (people of color) are inferior to others (whiteness), showing the ways that Ross’s guidance counselor’s actions were racist.Ibram X Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist (London, United Kingdom: One World; 2019), 29-31.

Ross’s personal experiences fighting pregnancy discrimination and advocating for her right to education brought her into activism. The theoretical analysis of race and gender discrimination came later.57 After threatening to sue Sam Houston High School, the school let Ross re-enroll.58

However, juggling parenting, rejection from the school, and isolation from her classmates, Ross’s senior year was one of “unmitigated misery.”59 The support of her family, even her mother, and a neighbor, Mrs. Jingles, whom Ross saw a second mother, helped her get through this challenging time.

Radcliffe revoked Ross’s scholarship, and while they did not revoke her admission, they were likely aware that Ross could not attend the school without the scholarship. Since she had planned on attending Radcliffe on scholarship, Ross did not apply to many other schools. 60 Her best friend and one of the two other Black kids in her honors classes, Lillian Martin, got accepted to Howard

University. A testament to her dedication, Ross wrote Howard University in the summer of 1970 and pleaded for admission. Though it was long after the application deadline, Howard gave Ross a full scholarship. Pushing past many setbacks and turning down two marriage proposals, Ross took her almost two year old son in hand and moved to Washington, D.C. to study Chemistry at Howard in the Fall of 1970.61

With Malcolm X and Toni Cade Bambara In Hand: Ross’s Politicization

Thinking back to her first year at Howard, Ross explained, “There were two books that were put into my hands, almost simultaneously.” These books were Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of

Malcolm X and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman. The books identified racism for her. With

57 Ross, interview by Follet, 63. 58Ross, interview by Follet, 63. 59Ross, interview by Follet, 63. 60Ross, interview by Follet, 41. 61Ross, interview by Follet, 63.

them in hand, she learned what it meant to be a Black woman.62 Ross became political. She joined the student government and got involved with student organizing on campus, participating in the rich culture of student activism in the late 60s and early 70s.63 Ross woke up every day in a city and a country where marches for Black power and anti-Vietnam War rallies were met with criminalization.

However, Ross did not need to turn on the T.V. or to attend a protest on the National Mall to feel the violence and the resistance occurring in the country. It was intimately personal.

Ross, like many Black women had to relentlessly fight to protect her body. During her first year at Howard, Ross tried to get birth control. She was under the age of eighteen at the time, and needed parental consent. Her mother refused to sign the permission slip, and Loretta ended up pregnant by the end of her first semester. Fortunately, abortion was legal in D.C. in 1970. Ross had a traumatic third trimester abortion followed by a shocking passing of a second fetus. Further, a group of men who also went to Howard raped Ross, subjecting her to yet another instance of sexual assault. Experiencing shame and blaming herself for the violence she experienced, Ross tried to pretend the assault did not happen. Gender based violence was a real part of Ross’s daily experience in college, and she did not have access to counseling or general support. While there were stirrings of an emerging anti-violence movement, it was not yet widespread. This would soon change.

+ + +

Attending college in the midst of the second wave feminist movement, the political and social conversation about reproductive rights and sexual violence changed rapidly. As more and more women spoke out about their experiences of sexual violence, a grassroots movement formed.

The feminist movement adopted anti-violence activism as central to their cause. They advocated for better treatment of rape victims, campaigned for the recognition that most rapists are not strangers,

62Ross, interview by Follet, 66. 63Ross, interview by Follet, 70.

but people the victim knows well, and strove to change laws surrounding rape.64 White women dominated second wave feminism, and the anti-violence movement was no exception.65 White, middle class women entered into politics through starting and volunteering at rape crisis centers, spaces with counseling and services for women who had been raped. Though Ross did not know it at the time, a group of white women were starting one of the first rape crisis centers in the country just around the corner from her, which they named the D.C. Rape Crisis Center and opened in 1972.

“Not a Good Case:” Black Women and Sexual Violence

Ross’s personal experiences brought her into the anti-violence movement. Due to the Nixon administration’s changes to student loan policies, Ross felt pressured to drop out of school.66

Around the same time, she decided to try the Dalkon Shield, a new birth control method discovered to be dangerously flawed.67 For the first few years, Ross however, did not have any issues. By 1974, she contracted a constant, low-grade fever and by 1975, she was very sick. The head OB/GYN at

George Washington University Hospital diagnosed Ross as having a rare venereal disease. For six months, the doctor had her trying various treatments and antibiotics, none of which worked.

Laying in bed one night, Ross had horrible stomach pains that she describes as worse than labor. She called an ambulance, but passed out before the ambulance arrived. She woke up at the

64 Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, (New York: Basic Books 1994), 432. 65Martha Rampton, “Four Waves of Feminism,” Pacific Magazine, 2008. 66Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a platform of small, non-regulatory government; an unfaltering trust in free markets; and a belief in “individual responsibility.” His student loan policies were one of his numerous “reforms.” President Nixon changed policies around student loans, requiring students get loans from banks in the state of their school. Ross attended Howard with loans from a Texas bank. The barriers to get another loan in D.C. while she was raising a child felt insurmountable. She felt forced by the circumstances to drop out of school. Ross, interview by Follet, 74. Mimi E. Kim, “From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 27, no. 3 (May 2018): 233. 67 Gina Kolata, “The Sad Legacy of the Dalkon Shield.” The New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/06/magazine/the-sad-legacy-of-the-dalkon-shield.html.; HJ Tatum, FH Schmidt, D Phillips, M McCarty, WM O'Leary, “The Dalkon Shield Controversy: Structural and Bacteriological Studies of IUD Tails,” JAMA 7, 231(1975):711–717. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1975.03240190015009; Mark Dowie, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Stephen Minkin, “The Charge: Gynocide,” Mother Jones, 1979 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1979/11/charge-gynocide/2/.

hospital to find out that both of her fallopian tubes ruptured and the doctor had done an emergency subtotal hysterectomy to save her life. Ross learned that this did not occur overnight, but had developed for six months. Though Ross believed that by this point, the hysterectomy was necessary, she knew that medical malpractice got her there.68 Had her first doctor been attentive and responsible, he would have removed the Dalkon Shield when Ross first had health complications69

Always one to advocate for herself, Ross hired lawyers and sued A.H. Robins, the company that manufactured the Shield. Early on in the case, her lawyer told her that she should settle. He said that, as a single mother with a child out of wedlock, Ross did not have a good case. Such rationale reflected a common practice - courts would evaluate women’s sexual past to determine their respectability and trustworthiness, both in rape cases and in general.70 As a Black, working class, single mother, Ross fit the image of the “welfare queen” crafted by Cold War liberal policies and the media and deviated from white femininity.

However, since Ross did not sign any confidentiality agreements, a large class-action suit came out against A.H. Robbins. It was in this moment, that Ross became a conscious reproductive rights activist. She reflected: “I entered the movement, feeling that I’d been the victim of sterilization abuse, but not the classic sterilization abuse where you go in the hospital and you’re sterilized without your consent.” The flawed Dalkon Shield and the doctor’s medical negligence led to Ross’s sterilization. In her anger, she turned to the Black women around her - to her sister, Carol, and her mother, Lorene, to find that they too had been sterilized.71 Ross, her sister, and her mother were part of the 700,000 Black women who had been involuntarily sterilized by eugenicist physicians

68Ross, interview by Follet, 78. 69Ross, interview by Follet, 78. 70 In 1974, Michigan became the first state to adopt a rape shield law, which eliminated “the admissibility of a rape survivor’s sexual history during the accused rapist’s court trial.” Alison Garsh and Ryan Harding, “#MeToo? Legal Discourse and Everyday Responses to Sexual Violence,” Laws 7, no 21 (2018), do:10.3390/laws7020021. 71Ross, “Voices of Feminism," interview by Follet, 80.

- or less explicitly racist physicians who nonetheless treated Black women’s bodies without care - between 1970 and 1980.72 The mainstream second wave feminist movement failed to recognize or address the ways in which racism and sexism compounded to create unique experiences for Black women and women of color.

Whose “Our:” Creating a Responsive Rape Crisis Center in the Era of Against Our Will

While Ross began to recognize the number of Black women in her community who were victims of state sponsored gender based violence, the DCRCC started to evaluate how they could become more responsive to such communities. Black women rarely had financial and political power in mainstream feminist organizations, and many Rape Crisis Centers perpetuated classist and racist stereotypes such as that of the Black Male Rapist and the Unrapable Black Woman.73 Susan

Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men Women, and Rape, published in 1975, garnered critical acclaim as the first text that defined rape as a crime rooted in the desire for power, and not the desire for sex.

She argued that “men use rape to enforce their power over women.”74 In her “groundbreaking” analysis, however, Brownmiller homogenizes all men and fails to analyze the interconnectedness of

72Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist, 189. 73The myth of the Black Male Rapist and the Unrapeable Black Woman have their roots in antebellum slavery. As Historian Estelle B Freedman explains, the definition of “rapist” depends upon class, race and other social positions. Under the institution of slavery, white elite men had the privilege of sexual access to all women. The rapist was racialized as a Black man, a myth that escalated after emancipation as a “justification” for lynching. According to Dorothy Roberts, “the law reinforced the sexual exploitation of slave women” during antebellum slavery, by failing to recognize the rape of enslaved women as a crime and incentivizing masters’ rape of enslaved women by deeming children of enslaved women slaves. In her book No Mercy Here, Sarah Haley makes clear that after the abolition of slavery “Black female labor continued to be conscripted for both production and reproduction, and their bodies were terrain for the consolidation of white supremacist ideology.” (Haley, 68) White men used rape as a tool of racial terror that challenged Black men’s ability to protect Black women and thus their masculinity and Black women’s control over their bodies. Thus, as Freedman argues, over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, “popular and legal constructions of rape” narrowed to promote the notion of a “chaste white female victim and a nonwhite male perpetrator.” By deeming Black women unrapeable under the law, society placed Black women in “opposition to normative femininity” of white womanhood - as an unprotected other. (Haley, No Mercy Here.) Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, (New York City, New York: Random House, 1997); Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013); Haley, No Mercy Here, 32 & 87. 74 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 14–15.

racism and rape. She equates Emmett Till, brutally murdered in 1955 for the “crime” of whistling at a married white woman with his killer, describing them both as sharing power over white woman.75

Activist and academic Angela Davis and novelist, poet, and activist Alice Walker critiqued

Brownmiller for supporting racist tropes that associate hyper-sexuality with blackness.76 Time

Magazine, however named Brownmiller one of its “women of the year,” in 1976, displaying that the political mainstream adopted the analysis of prominent white feminists like Brownmiller, and did not sufficiently acknowledge the critiques of women of color like Davis.

Further, in the Cold War liberal environment of the 1970s, Rape Crisis Centers started recognizing that their campaigns would gain public support and resources if branded as an issue of crime control. In attempt to get the state to recognize violence against women as a serious issue, anti-violence activists worked closely with police, courts, probation, and prisons.77 By 1974, two years after the DCRCC opened, rape crisis centers started to accept public funds that required them to become more hierarchical and professionalized.78 The antiviolence movement began to look

“more like social service agencies than social movement organizations,” focusing on individualized direct service for victims and imprisonment for perpetrators.79 Such collaboration with the police further alienated communities of color. Angela Davis critiqued Brownmiller’s analysis that men rape

75 Brownmiller, 272 & 247. 76 In her 1981 essay, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” Davis looks to history to show how white supremacy has used rape as a tool for racial suppression. She argues that many influential feminist texts, including Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Diana Russell’s Politics of Rape, and Jean MacKellar’s Rape: The Bait and the Trap, “ressurect” the myth of the Black rapist. Through associating blackness with hyper-sexuality, such influential feminist texts also depict Black women as promiscuous, thus delegitimizing their claims of rape. Angela Y Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting” The Black Scholar, 12, no. 6 (November/December 1981): 43. 77Kim, “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice, 222; Mimi E. Kim, “Alternative Interventions to Intimate Violence: Defining Political and Pragmatic Challenges,” in Ptacek, J. (Ed.) Feminism and Restorative Justice, (NY: Oxford Press, 2010), 193 – 217. 78Thuma, "Lessons in Self-Defense,” 59. 79This approach is now known as “carceral feminism.” Thuma “Lessons in self-defense,” 53; Kim, “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice, 220-222.

“because they are men,” for defining rape as a natural or biological problem only stopped through imprisonment, as opposed to a social problem that requires structural changes.80

As most Rape Crisis Centers professionalized and worked more closely with law enforcement, the DCRCC reflected on their work and chose a different path. Recognizing that D.C. was 70% Black, the white women who started the center decided that as soon as they received funding to transition from an all-volunteer operation to paid staff, they would employ Black women from the community who could best represent the population the Center served.81 In 1975, the board hired Michelle Hudson as the Center’s first Black staff member. Later that year, they hired

Nkenge Touré, a member of the Black Panther Party, as the Community Education Coordinator.82

A survivor of rape herself, Touré brought her personal experiences, which impacted her political perspectives, to the role.83

When the DCRCC appointed Michelle Hudson as the Executive Director in 1976, they became the first Rape Crisis Center in the country to have a Black administrator.84 Touré succeeded

Hudson as Executive Director. During their tenures at the DCRCC, the Center established strong relationships with community-based organizations in the Black community and adopted a more nuanced, political understanding of sexual violence that centered the unique experiences of Black women and other Third World women. Hudson, and Touré followed in the tradition of women like

Maria Steward, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, who called the public to pay attention to the specific oppression of Black women and the way racism relied on and

80Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 39. 81Loretta J. Ross, “Before #Me Too: Black Women in the Anti-Rape Movement in Washington, DC in the 1970s,” October 2018; Loretta Ross, interview by author, via phone, February 3, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Ross interview.” 82Ross interview. 83Valk, Radical Sisters, 159. 84 Loretta J. Ross, “Black Women: Why Feminism.” D.C., 1981. Loretta J. Ross, “Rape & Third World Women,” Aegis mag on Ending Violence Against Women, August 12, 1982. Loretta Ross; Loretta J. Ross, “Before #Me Too,” 2.

shaped understandings of sexual violence.85 Ross would soon join this legacy, but she did not yet know about the DCRCC. As Hudson, Touré and other women gathered at the DCRCC to discuss sexual violence and their approach to combatting it, a group of men gathered inside Lorton prison to do the same.

85 Kendi, How To Be an Antiracist, 29-31; Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 192; McGuire, “A Black Woman’s Body was Never Hers Alone.”

II. “In All of Their Complexity:” Building and Being Prisoners Against Rape

“Prisoners Against Rape is composed of prisoners and ex-prisoners who have committed rape and women who are active in anti-rape groups. The purpose is to better understand the causes of rape and the preventative measures that must be taken before this crime can be eliminated.”

- Prisoners Against Rape description from 1975 Off Our Backs86

In 1973, 29 year old William Fuller and a 21 or 22 year old Larry Cannon, sat in Lorton

Reformatory and wrote down their thoughts about rape.87 Fuller and Cannon refused to accept the carceral logic that told them that, as incarcerated men convicted for violent acts, they were disposable. Both men identified as perpetrators of sexual violence and both men rejected the notion that imprisonment stopped rape. In fact, they knew from personal experiences that it did not.

For some feminist, anti-violence activists, Fuller and Cannon, as two men incarcerated for rape or attempted rape, were the success story. The state took seriously the violence they perpetrated and punished them with incarceration. For others, Loretta Ross, Michelle Hudson, Nkenge Touré and other women at the DCRCC, Fuller and Cannon’s experiences illustrated the risks of using the carceral state to respond to sexual violence - they were two poor, Black men funneled into a system built to house them. While feminist activists and scholars debated the degree to which they should or should not cooperate with the carceral state, Fuller and Cannon lived the oppressive realities of carcerality. They did not, however, let imprisonment fully confine them.

Recognizing that incarceration did not stop them and others they knew from raping nor from being raped, Fuller and Cannon searched for help. They did not find it within the fences or in the guards around them and knew they had to look within themselves and beyond the prison for

86Gary L. Alston, et al., "Prison Letters," Off Our Backs 5, no. 1 (1975): 25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25772089. 87Without the month in which this occurred, Cannon’s exact age is unclear.

support. Their search led them to found Prisoners Against Rape (PAR) on September 9, 1973 and ultimately bring them in contact with the DCRCC.88

+ + +

By September 1973, William Fuller was serving his ninth year in prison. He had spent almost one third of his life behind bars.89 Born on August 8, 1943 in Chatham, Virginia, he grew up with his mother and grandparents in his grandparents’ home. Fuller dropped out of school at age fifteen, because his family needed his labor on their farm. During the late 1950s, Fuller’s mother moved to

Washington D.C and a few years later, a teenage Fuller joined her. He supported himself by working as a truck driver, janitor and laborer at the Washington Sanitation Commission.90 Little else is known about Fuller’s life, until he appeared in the legal records.

In August 1964, the Washington D.C. Police Department arrested Fuller for raping and murdering a 57-year old Black woman. After finding a notebook with Fuller’s name on it near the scene of the crime, the police went to the Washington Sanitation Commission and told Fuller to come with them. At the station, the police interrogated Fuller, and perhaps, coerced him into confessing to the violent act.91 Fuller admitted to the rape and murder and asked the police “if his mother would have to know.” Though he was only a rapist and murderer in the eyes of the law,

88 "Prisoners Against Rape," Crime and Social Justice, no. 3 (1975), http://www.jstor.org/stable/29765937. 89Sally Quinn, "‘Prisoners Against Rape:’ Trying to Unlock Myths and Images,” Washington Post, June 16, 1975, paragraph 1. 90 Deb Friedman and Sue Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed? The Case of William Fuller,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women, (July/August 1979), 19. 91 Fuller’s case was brought to a higher court due to concerns of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Though not the focus of this paper, Fuller’s case exemplifies how the state intended to convict Fuller, not to presume his innocence and give him a just trial. The case was brought to the United States Court of Appeals in February 1966 and again in January of 1968 because of questionable police conduct during his arrest. While the court ultimately denied his certiorari in March, 1969, the case and the dissenting opinion make clear that the respect of due process in Fuller’s case was lacking at best. In the dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge Fahy argues that the police only informed Fuller of his right to a lawyer after he had confessed twice. Fuller explained that he thought he was already under arrest when he had confessed and only later learned he was just being questioned. Once Fuller was informed of his right to counsel, he refused to sign a written confession statement, because he wanted to talk to a lawyer. Judge Fahy argues this implies that Fuller was previously tricked into self-incrimination in violation of the 5th amendment. William H. Fuller, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee, 407 F.2d 1199 (D.C. Cir. 1969).

Fuller reasserted his humanity through this simple question - he was also somebody’s son and a son that felt shameful about his actions and did not want to disappoint his mother.92

Convicted for first degree felony-murder and rape, the court sentenced Fuller to life, with an addition of 5-to-15 and 10-to-30 years for manslaughter and rape, respectively.93 In other words, the court sentenced Fuller to die in prison. In an interview for Aegis magazine at Lorton, Fuller explained that the illegality of rape and the threat of a harsh sentence did not deter him from raping.

For reasons he did not articulate, Fuller did not think he would be caught. Fuller also made clear that his arrest did not “teach him a lesson.” Once locked in prison, Fuller continued to rape. “I became a prison rapist,” Fuller explained. Once incarcerated, Fuller started raping men. He quickly made a name for himself, known throughout Lorton as a “prison bully,” “trouble maker,”

“aggressive homosexual” and “bad n****r.”94

The prison administration deemed Fuller a threat and transferred him to different federal institutions, as their “solution” to his aggression. The effect these transfers had on Fuller, however, was likely not what the prison had intended or wanted.95 In 1969, after five or six months at the

Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Fuller joined the Nation of Islam. The Nation appealed to Black incarcerated people, because it offered a political explanation for their imprisonment.96 Founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammed, argued that “the black prisoner symbolized white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant.”97 Further, the Nation of Islam

92This is not to absolve Fuller of responsibility for the violence he committed, but to depict Fuller as a holistic person. Fuller v. United States. 93William H. Fuller, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee. 94 Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?”, 19-20. 95Friedman and Lenaerts, 19. 96Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Justice, Power, and Politics), (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina, 2016), 57. 97 Elijah Muhammad as quoted in Dan Berger, Captive Nation, 57.

advised adherents in how to respond to confinement, which included “a personal rebirth” rooted in discipline and pride, thus politicizing and guiding many incarcerated Black men.98

Further, Fuller became “involved” with someone he describes as “a conscious and intelligent individual,” who exposed him to “Black culture books” and other literature.99 From these readings and engagements, Fuller developed a new perspective about himself and the people around him. He started to understand the harm he had caused. By the end of 1972, the Department of Corrections returned Fuller to Lorton. This time his experience would be different. He became involved in numerous self help groups; attended community visits, including one by a feminist activist; and engaged in self study. 100 Inspired by these experiences, Fuller committed himself to reflecting on his past, learning about rape, and working to address the issue. Some months later, Fuller sat with

Cannon to write down their thoughts about sexual violence.

“Off the ground:” Forming Prisoners Against Rape

It is unclear how William Fuller met Larry Cannon. Perhaps they were in the same dormitory at Lorton. Or perhaps a mutual friend introduced them. Or, maybe, they knew each other growing up in D.C. However it happened, Fuller connected with the eight or nine year younger Cannon. The state convicted Cannon for robbery and assault “with intent to commit rape” when he was a juvenile.101 Convicted without the protection of the Youth Corrections Act, Cannon received an eight-to-fifteen year sentence.102 Federal prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Atlanta, Georgia held

98 Berger, Captive Nation, 57. 99 Fuller used the word “involved” to describe his relationship with this man. It is unclear whether the relationship was platonic or sexual. The goal of this project is not to interrogate the men’s sexualities, but to honor the ways in which they described their own relationships; Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?” 100 Ross, “Before #Me Too;” Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?” 101“Lorton Inmate Told to Sue D.C. Not U.S,” The Washington Star, April 2, 1981, p 6. 102 Like Fuller, Cannon’s case contained questionable due process and legal protocols. While incarcerated at Lorton, Cannon appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the judge who sentenced him failed to sentence him under the Youth Corrections Act. His appeal was denied. Such experience, however, may have influenced the way he understood the legal system as failing to protect Black youth and men. Larry Cannon v. United States, 645 F.2d 1128 (D.C. Cir. 1981)

Cannon before he asked for a transfer to Lorton in 1972 when he was 20 or 21 years old.103

Cannon’s life experiences prior to his arrival at Lorton Prison are absent from the public archive. It is clear, however, that the court robbed Cannon of his childhood by viewing him not as a struggling

Black adolescent, but as a fully grown criminal. Further, it is clear that, while the state did not convict Cannon for rape, he recognized the prevalence of sexual violence and saw himself as part of the problem.

Together, William Fuller and Larry Cannon established what Loretta Ross deemed “the oldest inmate program against violence on women.”104 The archives and interviews do not show why exactly Cannon and Fuller decided to address rape at Lorton through forming a community education group, or who came up with the idea to name this group “Prisoners Against Rape.” Fuller and Cannon clearly articulate the goals of their work, however, in the 1974 edition of the Feminist

Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, stating:105

“We intend to combat some essential avenues of RAPE from a political perspective as former RAPIST who have experienced and know the intricate behavior patterns that induced us to participate in these activities, hence we are about total involvement in helping to alleviate the causes which create the effect (social conditions).”106

In this sentence, Fuller and Cannon highlight three essential aspects of PAR’s work and scholarships: 1) they adopted a political analysis of rape, (2) they identified as and were working from the perspective of “former rapists,” (3) they understood that in order to truly address rape, society had to focus on the underlying social and political conditions that fostered rape. By founding

PAR, Fuller and Cannon joined other Black activists of the 1960s and 1970s in transforming prisons

103“Lorton Inmate Told to Sue D.C. Not U.S,” p 6. 104Loretta J. Ross, “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence: Working with Minority Men Committing Violence Against Women,” (Washington, D.C.: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980), 8. 105In 1974, a group of white women at the DCRCC founded the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter with the intention that it would serve as a platform for activists fearful of the government’s cooptation of rape and the anti- violence movement to spread feminist theory around the United States. Valk, Radical Sisters. 106Larry Cannon and William Fuller, “Prisoners Against Rape,” Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, (Sep/Oct 1974).

into “schools of liberation,” where they trained each other to fight, not only against prison violence, but against larger systems of oppression that the prison embodied.107

“Made to understand:” The Prison as a Radical Political Site

Incarcerated in the era of George Jackson, amidst calls to “Free Angela,” and under smoke still settling from the Attica Uprising, PAR members participated in the Black freedom struggle that connected the prison and the outside world - a world that could not be called “free” for Black people. Just two years before Fuller and Cannon founded PAR, San Quentin prison guards murdered imprisoned intellectual, activist and author of Soledad Brothers George Jackson.108 Jackson, who called for social movements to incorporate prisoners and help them understand that “they are victims of social injustice,” inspired a generation of incarcerated people to become intellectuals and writers.109

As Fuller and Cannon planned PAR, the prison still felt the aftermath of the November 8,

1968 Guards Riot. People incarcerated at Lorton organized a work stoppage in response to the prison’s Reverend Donald Sheehy’s abuse. Prison guards responded violently, shooting at and torturing those involved in the work stoppage.110 The protesters did gain some concessions, including the creation of family day and the Office of Residents Concerns (ORC), a board of people incarcerated at Lorton whose job was to represent the needs of the prison population.111

When Fuller and Cannon founded PAR the excitement from the November 24, 1971

Rahway State Prison uprising was still in the air, and the 1971 Attica uprising was not just recent

107 Berger, Captive Nations, 7 and 23. 108George Jackson, “Toward the United Front” in Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 89. 109Bernstein, America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s, 53-54. 110Roach Brown, interview by author, Washington, D.C. June 5, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Roach Brown interview.” 111Rickey Brown, interview by author, via phone, June 19, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Rickey Brown interview.”

history, but a reality that continued to shape criminal legal policies in states’ across the nation.112;113

Though policy responses varied drastically in the aftermath of Attica, with some states passing reforms to improve prison conditions while others pledged to make the system more punitive,

Attica showed the country that even the most marginalized could and would continue to resist and demand to be respected as human beings. Attica set an example for other incarcerated people.114

PAR emerged out of a prison system more explicitly political than ever before.115

By creating PAR and thinking, talking, and writing about rape, Fuller and Cannon countered the dominant culture at Lorton and the society beyond the barbed wire. The prison population at large stigmatized those incarcerated for, or known to have perpetrated, rape or pedophilia.116

Though a known issue, rape was not a public topic of conversation at Lorton.117 On the outside, victims of assault had only recently spoke publicly about their rapes. Starting in 1971, feminists groups such as the New York Radical Feminists organized “Speak Outs” during which women came

112During an event that became known as the Rahway Uprising, 500 incarcerated people held six hostages, including the warden, for 24 hours in demand of better food, improved educational opportunities and vocational training, better treatment from officers and access to more medical supplies. Greg Hatala, “Glimpse of History: Uprising in Rahway,” New Jersey.com, November 04, 2016, https://www.nj.com/union/2016/11/glimpse_of_history_uprising_in_rahway.html. 113In September, 1971, almost 1,300 people incarcerated at Attica, a maximum security prison near Buffalo, New York, took control of the prison for five days, seizing 39 hostages. As articulated in their 27 point demands, the incarcerated people called for an end to the inadequate medical care, overcrowding, racially discriminate treatment and other abuses they faced at Attica. The state of New York violently re-took control of the prison, depicting the incarcerated men as savages to justify their unnecessarily brutal undertaking, during which they shot 118 people and killed 39 people. Lauren- Brooke Eisen, “Book Review: Blood in the Water,” Brennan Center, August 24, 2016, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/book-review-blood-water. 114Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (New York City, New York: Pantheon 2016), 570. 115 Asata Shakur, Angela Davis, George Jackson and other intellectuals understood the prison to be a “vital space for organizing,” thinking through and resisting against race, gender, and class based oppression. ( Corrigan, 17) While some, such as Huey Newton and Angela Davis entered the prison as leftists and were, in fact, incarcerated for their politics, the majority of people did not enter prison as radicals. In her anthology “Imprisoned Intellectuals,” political scientist Joy James argues that “neither crime nor violence is inherently revolutionary.” Only when they are “caged in penal sites,” spaces in which state power and violence are so explicitly expressed and legitimized, do most prisoners become revolutionaries. Joy James, introduction to Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), xiv; Berger, Captive Nation, 4; Lisa M. Corrigan, Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation, (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 17. 116Rickey Brown, interview. 117Rickey Brown, interview.

together in public to talk about their experiences with rape, and in doing so call attention to the issue.118 In their own sort of “Speak Out,” Fuller and Cannon began to talk to others in the prison about the issue of rape; however, they spoke from the perspective of perpetrators - and for some, also as victims. They challenged the notion that sexual violence was a private matter not to be discussed with others.

Fuller, Cannon, and other early PAR members started the group without any help or support from the prison administration. It took months of struggle for them to get “approved” as a self help group, a status they needed to expand their weekly classes to include other people at Lorton and to invite people from D.C.119 Once they did, Fuller and Cannon found other people who were willing to join the group and talk about the “taboo” topic. They talked to Samuel Paige, who became one of the group’s first members.

Paige grew up in D.C. and Virginia. His mother passed away when he was young. Describing his early years, Paige stated that he was “in the streets, using drugs, hustling stealing.”120 He ended up caught in the criminal legal system around age 23. Convicted for rape and armed robbery in 1973,

Paige learned of PAR at the start of his sentence of twelve years to life. At first, he felt skeptical of the group, because he did not understand PAR’s goals. He was unsure of what the group would talk about, and felt wary of how the outside world, especially women, would view their work. Realizing that rape was a serious issue at Lorton, he decided to give the group a try.121 When Paige first attended the meetings, the group consisted of only Cannon, Fuller and another man named James C.

Long, but over time more people joined. Paige explained that it took some time and multiple

118 Valk, Radical Sisters, 162. 119 "Prisoners Against Rape," Crime and Social Justice. 120Samuel Paige, interview by author, via phone, November 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Paige interview, November 2019.” 121Samuel Paige, interview by author, Washington, D.C. June 6, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Paige interview, June 2019.”

meetings for the four of them to get the group “off the ground.” They remained committed. Each

Friday afternoon, Fuller, Cannon, Long, Paige, and eventually others would meet in the prison school for an hour-and-a-half to two hours to educate themselves and each other and lay the foundations for the group.

“Revolutionary from the heart:” Consciousness Raising

In a prison classroom, Fuller, Cannon, Paige, Long and the other members of PAR worked as a unified collective.122 Drawing from the likes of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army,

Assata Shakur, Mao Zedong, Angela Davis, and George Jackson, PAR critiqued liberal society.

Operating in a space that epitomized racist and classist state violence, PAR took inspiration from leading anti-racist and anti-capitalist thinkers of the time. These activists, thinkers, and revolutionaries helped them make sense of their own experience. Though surrounded by the walls of the prison, a tradition of radical activists, many of whom had been or were incarcerated, also held

Prisoners Against Rape.

These activists and their fights for radical social change impacted Sam Paige, who did not become political until his imprisonment. He picked up George Jackson’s books and devoured them all, setting his mind in the Black Radical tradition. “I got real into what I believed in,” he states,

“Revolutionary from the heart.” Once he began to read and to listen, Paige decided he wanted to make a difference, and according to PAR, to do so, one had to start with themselves.123

PAR rooted their approach in critical self reflection. During the group’s first year, the incarcerated members of PAR focused on consciousness-raising, on addressing their motivations for rape and educating themselves on rape in general.124 In an interview for a July/August 1979 article in

122Paige interview, June 2019. The people I spoke with had varying recollections of the number of people who attended PAR’s meetings. The membership likely varied overtime, so the exact number of participants is unclear. 123Paige interview, June 2019. 124 "Prisoners Against Rape," Crime and Social Justice.

Aegis Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women, entitled “Can Rapists be Changed?” Fuller explained that his motivation for rape stemmed from “a sexual-inadequacy complex.” The “competitive and demanding society” influenced his understanding of sexual relations, teaching him that “‘you ain’t a man until you had a-little-bit.”125 The language of “have” alludes to force, to taking for oneself, to satiating a desire, rather than to an act of mutual desire or pleasure.

Growing up as a Black young person in a low-income, underserved community, Fuller felt powerless. In response, he developed aggressive and hostile behaviors. The people around him, the media, and popular culture taught him that women “wanted to be raped” and that “if she screamed,

‘you put a powerful screwing on her,” which again, framed sex as something done to and not with women.126 Fuller internalized patriarchal understandings of pleasure and sex that defined women as

“always want[ing] it” and thus unrapable, that ignored women’s calls for help and turned their screams into affirmations. While Fuller does not use the language of “patriarchy” to describe his experiences growing up, his reflection makes clear that he learned that manhood meant power, strength and violence.127

Writing from inside Lorton, Fuller explained: “Here, I felt more powerless due to imprisonment and I became more dominant and harder.”128 Designed to strip individuals of their already limited autonomy and power, the prison exacerbated Fuller’s hatred toward society.129 So,

125Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?” 126Friedman and Lenaerts. 127 Author, activist, and feminist bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain the dominance through various forms of psychological terror and violence.” ( bell hooks, understanding patriarchy, 1) Reflecting on her own upbringing, hooks argues that her brother “was taught that his value would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate settings)” and to deny his feelings. Most often, boys “brutalized and victimized by patriarchy” adopt and conform to such patriarchal masculinity that they once opposed. bell hooks, “Understanding Patriarchy, (Louisville Anarchist Federation Federation, 2010), 1. 128Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?” 129 Berger, Captive Nation, 10.

Fuller used his “penis as a weapon to strike back.”130 In the extreme confines of the prison, he felt he had no other options to exert his dominance. He also felt he had nothing to lose.

According to Paige, most who joined PAR had experienced abuse in some form - whether the victim of child abuse, sexual abuse, or state violence - and took their trauma out on women.

Reflecting on his own story, Paige explained:

Mine was more so of hatred… because my mother got raped. We used to live over there in Georgetown. This is what you’d call “the white section.” And she got raped by three white men and my father never believed her. The police never even arrested the people and I was young. I was about seven or eight years old and I held on to that feeling, ya know. So as my mother passed, my father passed, as I grew up, I started going out in the community, acting out… I used to take stuff, break into peoples houses, and ya know, all of a sudden this behavior occurred, ya know, and it occurred one time and I got away with it. I felt some type of gratification and then the behavior continued…131

Paige’s anger manifested in sexual violence. He was angry that his father did not believe his mother and he was angry that the police did not care about his mother’s rape. He felt his mother’s pain and did not have “an outlet to express” his feelings. He wanted to retaliate. While in therapy and in PAR years later, Paige understood that it was his anger and hurt that led him to rape. Paige avoided the word rape, explaining it as “this behavior” or “what I did,” highlighting the difficulty of talking about his past.132

Speaking to the group in a clip from the documentary Rape Culture, Donald D. Luckett, another PAR member, explained his experience with rape and his process of coming to terms with the fact that he raped others. Clad in a black beret, scarf, and aviators, Luckett looked at the group and stated, “When I was coming up, we never did view ourselves as rapists. We used to view it as

130Friedman and Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed?” Susan Brownmiller conceptualizes the penis as weapon. In her book, Against Our Will, Brownmiller writes, “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries in prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe.” Against Our Will is one of the books the men in PAR read in their study group. Brownmiller, Against Our Will. 131 Paige, interview, June 6, 2019. 132 Sam Paige, interview by author, November 2019.

‘bogarting’ of women. It wasn’t the sex, it was the dominant thing about it.” The language of

“bogarting” shows that, as Luckett articulates, he was motivated by a desire for domination, not for sex, and also reflects a refusal to recognize the act as rape. Through working with PAR, Luckett acknowledged that what he once viewed as “selfishly keeping” for himself, could have more accurately called “rape.”133 In this same conversation, PAR member LaVance Green-Bey reflected on his upbringing and on the relationships between men and women around him, explaining that he learned to take advantage of and “use and abuse” women.134 In PAR, men could recognize the dominant narratives they internalized and begin the process of unlearning.

“What’s really going on:” Community & Vulnerability

PAR expected vulnerability from participants. The men in the group worked to create a space for men to be honest with themselves and each other. When new members showed up to the meetings, group leaders like Fuller, Cannon and Paige would explain to them that the group did not talk about superficial things - that if they attended meetings and, especially, if the group invited guests to visit their meetings, they expected members to “talk about what’s really going on - why you did the things you did.”135 PAR created a counter-hegemonic space that challenged patriarchal values of stoicism and secrecy. At PAR meetings, they viewed expressing emotion not as a weak,

“feminine” quality, but as a sign of strength.136 Further, through fostering interpersonal relationships

133Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, Rape Culture, Documentary (1975; Cambridge: Cambridge Documentary Films, 1983), VHS. 134Lazarus and Wunderlich. 135 Paige, interviewed by author, June 2019. 136 The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a rise of all men conscious raising groups in the U.S. The groups were mostly composed of or started by college educated, new left activists, some of whom were involved in the radical, anti-war movement. As an all-men conscious raising group, PAR resembled other such groups. However, as a group of incarcerated men, with limited formal education, they were different from other groups. R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society, 19, no. 6 (Dec, 2005): 829-859, www.jstor.org/stable/27640863

and community building, PAR resisted the logic of the prison, premised on and sustained through isolation and individualism.137

Overtime, PAR’s community grew, as Robree Earle, Mahonney Kassmia, Gary L. Alston,

Frankie Allen, Aubrey Pierson, Nelson Bostic, and Donald Luckett joined Fuller, Cannon, Paige and

Long in PAR meetings.138 When they gathered in the prison classroom, the group resembled a Black

Panther meeting on the outside. They wore their street clothes, channeling the radical Black style of the time - black berets, afros, dark sunglasses, manicured facial hair. Zooming out a bit, it becomes clear that, despite their ability to flaunt their personal style, the men organized within the extreme confines of the prison.

Lorton Reformatory, the medium security facility, housed the majority of incarcerated members of PAR. However, the neighboring Occoquan workhouse (part of the same larger compound) held one member and a Washington, D.C. jail held another. A 1975 article in the Crime and Social Justice newsletter stated that PAR membership began expanding to include people incarcerated in other states, such as Wisconsin and Oklahoma, but it is unclear to what extent this occurred.139 Only some men in PAR held rape convictions, but the majority of men in the group admitted to rape. For the most part, PAR members lacked traditional education, only completing school through the seventh or eighth grade. PAR’s nuanced and insightful writings, discussed in the final section, illustrates that despite their lack of a traditional education, the members of PAR were incredibly intelligent, thoughtful individuals, who gained knowledge through life experiences and self education.

137 Berger, Captive Nation, 168. 138 There is not a comprehensive list of all the incarcerated and non-incarcerated members of PAR. The names listed here are those of the men who signed the 1975 letter in support of Joann Little published in Off Our Backs, showing that they were members of PAR at the time. Gary L. Alston, et al., "Prison Letters." Sally Quinn’s article "’Prisoners Against Rape:’ Trying to Unlock Myths and Images” provides general demographic information about the group’s incarcerated members. 139 "Prisoners Against Rape," Crime and Social Justice, 45.

In their publication “Capitalist Economics Breeds All Crimes” Cannon and Fuller declare that PAR “will work with anyone, black, white, gay,” similarly interested in combating rape from a political perspective.140 However, most, if not all men in PAR were Black, reflecting the demographics of Lorton and the disproportionate rate at which society arrested and convicted Black men for rape and other crimes. This is not because Black men were more violent or more likely to commit crimes, but because, as scholar Joy James argues, “criminality is considered to be nonconformity; nonconformity is often determined not merely by behavior but also by biology or appearance.” In other words, as elucidated in the introduction, Blackness itself is criminalized in the

United States.141 This is not to absolve the men in PAR from the violence they committed, but to recognize that the racial demographics of PAR do not reflect or indicate the overall demographics of rapists.142

PAR acted as a “collective,” and strove to speak as a unified group. Fuller and Cannon spearheaded most of the group’s writing, but all members contributed their opinions and feedback.

PAR made decisions collectively.143 Thus, it is likely that the members of PAR made a joint decision to reach out to women doing anti-violence work in D.C. to ask them to visit and speak with the

140 William Fuller and Larry Cannon, "Capitalist Economics Breeds Rape, Robbery, Murder and All Other Crimes,” (Lorton Prison, Lorton, Virginia: Prisoners Against Rape 1974), 9. 141Joy James expands upon this point in Imprisoned Intellectuals, arguing that in the United States “‘criminals’ are racially invented in the public mind.” The state and police views bodies that “fail to conform to ‘whiteness’” as criminal and deviant. Thus, Black people are subject to “racially driven policing and sentencing” which means Black people are held to a higher standard of obedience and punished with more violence than white counterparts. Joy James, introduction to Imprisoned Intellectuals, xiv. 142For example, 405 of the 455 men that the state executed between 1930 and 1967 for rape convictions were Black. Angela Davis argues that while the state has rarely tried and convicted rapists, those who have have been disproportionately Black, some guilty and others innocent. Davis explains that this is in part because white supremacy constructed the myth of the Black male rapist “whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications.” White men who raped women of color were effectively immune from prosecution. Angela Y Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” in The Black Scholar, 12, no. 6, (November/December 1981), pp. 39-45. 143 Paige, interviewed by author, June 2019.

group. Sam Paige explained that PAR would meet as a “core group” to discuss decisions and brainstorm how to ensure guests would feel comfortable when they invited them.144

Before they could invite guests, however, Fuller, Cannon and the other early members of

PAR had to persuade the prison administration to allow them to do so. Many of the Correctional

Officers opposed PAR’s work, viewing it as “too radical.” The Correctional Officers tried to sabotage PAR, claiming they could not find the key to the classroom, or that they never received a memo that PAR could have a meeting on a given night. Paige explained that, in order to avoid such issues, PAR did their best to remain one step ahead. “If we were gonna have a group on Friday,” he said, “we’d be up in administration Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, to make sure that someone would carry it out.”145

PAR, however, found sympathy in Superintendents Delbert C. Jackson and Marion D.

Strickland, but their sympathy had its limits.146 The administrators would not give the men in PAR the opportunity to leave the prison on furlough. As aforementioned, Lorton had a robust furlough program at the time, and the prison let people involved in many other groups, including the acting group Inner Voices and the singing group Confined Sounds, and those attending college classes, out of prison for classes, performances or events. Paige guessed that PAR’s name and topic of focus made the difference. The administration did not want PAR’s conversations about rape or critiques of the prison to move too far outside of Lorton’s walls or to attract too much attention.

While they were not allowed out of the prison, they did successfully convince the prison administration to allow guests to join them inside the prison.147 Using the mode of communication

144Paige interview, June 2019. According to Berger, such connections between “politically and culturally engaged people” on both sides of the prison walls built and sustained much prison programming in the 1970s. Berger, Captive Nation, 179. 145 Paige, interview, June 2019. 146Paige interview, June 2019. 147Paige interview, June 2019.

with the “outside world” that they had available to them, the men in PAR sent outreach letters and connected with various anti-violence organizations and advocates. PAR sent one of these letters to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.

“Carrying it Out:” Building Connections Beyond the Prison

Freada Kapor-Klein had not been at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center for long when the Center received a letter from PAR. She had moved to D.C. in August of 1974, after getting her degree in criminology from U.C. Berkeley. While there, Kapor-Klein volunteered with Bay Area Women

Against Rape and wrote a paper on the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case, investigating the ways that rape and racism intersected in the case. She also worked with the Prisoners Union and the California

Youth Authority. She wanted to continue her anti-violence activism when she moved east to attend the United States’ first interdisciplinary Women’s Studies master’s program at George Washington

University. So, she contacted the DCRCC.

As part of her volunteer work at the DCRCC, Kapor-Klein took shifts on the hotline, discussed the Center’s governance structure, helped link rape crisis centers to battered women’s shelters, and co-founded the Feminist Alliance Against Rape newsletter. One day, while at the

Center, a letter from PAR arrived in the mail. To her memory, William Fuller signed the letter.

Considering her background in criminology and prisoner rights work, Kapor-Klein was one of the few people at the Center interested in Fuller’s letter. She explains, “My perspective was that rape crisis centers were great at helping victims but if we were going to stop rape, we had to understand its causes in all of their complexity.” To do so, she believed they needed to understand the

“perspectives of the rapists themselves.”148 Kapor-Klein’s views paralleled those of PAR, who believed that, through uniting victims and perpetrators of rape - and individuals whom were both

148 Kapor Klein, interviewed by author, via email, September 15, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Klein interview.”

victims and perpetrators of rape - they could better understand the causes of rape and work to fight against the violence.149 Kapor-Klein started attending PAR meetings.

According to Sam Paige’s reflection, the men in PAR noticed the DCRCC’s overall hesitancy about joining the group. From Paige’s perspective, out of all the groups they reached out to, the

DCRCC was among those that presented the most opposition. Paige guessed that the DCRCC’s hesitancy stemmed from the fact that many of the men in PAR were guilty of the same violence the

Center strove to fight against. As Klein’s comment illustrates, most of the Center’s majority white staff did not have an understanding of the criminal legal system or the social and structural factors that could lead people to perpetrate violence. According to Paige, the DCRCC agreed to send a representative to visit PAR. After a presumably positive experience, the DCRCC sent more members to visit the group and continued their partnership.

There are conflicting accounts regarding how many women from the DCRCC and other feminist groups joined PAR’s meetings at the start of their collaboration. Kapor-Klein explained that at times, she was “the only woman in the room” and does not remember “active, ongoing participation” from other D.C. women during her involvement with PAR. Paige, however, remembers the relationship with the DCRCC having helped them gain the support of other women.

The short documentary Rape Culture, which features scenes of PAR meetings in 1975, shows two or three women sitting in the circle with the men in PAR. Perhaps, this occurred after Kapor-Klein had left the group.150

By 1975, two years after Fuller and Cannon founded PAR, the group reported a composition of “persons who have committed rape, women who are active in anti-rape groups, task-forces of feminist organizations and individuals in combating rape.” Aside from a few women from the

149 "Prisoners Against Rape," Crime and Social Justice, 45. 150 Lazarus and Wunderlich, Rape Culture.

DCRCC, it is unclear what feminist organizations and activists worked with PAR in their early years.

Paige remembers a representative from the American Civil Liberties Union coming to Lorton to visit the group. PAR’s article in the 1975 Crime and Justice calls PAR a “non-profit corporation” and directs people to contact William Fuller or Mary Sparrow, another woman presumably involved with PAR, if they would like to learn more or support the group. Kapor-Klein remembers a white woman from Rahway, New Jersey, who she described as “a bit of a provocateur,” attending some of the meetings as well.151

Some women, like Nancy Shia, became involved with PAR by chance. Shia initially visited

Lorton during her first year at Antioch Law School. A school practicum assigned her a case at

Lorton prison, working with none other than PAR’s Larry Cannon. After dropping out of law school, Shia remained involved at Lorton. Following her true passion of photography, she connected with Breezy, the prison photographer and visited Lorton to take pictures and work in the dark room with him. While at Lorton, she heard about PAR, and attended meetings throughout

1975.152 It appears that the first group of women that partnered with PAR were predominately white, reflecting the demographics of the DCRCC at the time. The early years of PAR do not lend to a streamlined narrative - neither in the memories of those involved, nor in the articles that represent PAR’s work in the archive. Who exactly attended the meetings? How did they structure these meetings? Did they ground their conversations in readings? In personal experience?

Kapor-Klein lived in D.C. for only a year and a half, deciding to drop out of her Master’s program because it lacked the academic rigor and political sophistication for which she had hoped.

During her time at the DCRCC, she met Cambridge based documentary filmmakers Margaret

Lazarus and her partner, Renner, making the documentary Rape Culture and followed them to

151 Klein interview. 152Nancy Shia, interviewed by author, via phone, February 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Shia interview.”

Cambridge to work on Our Bodies, Ourselves. After this, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center’s first partnership appears to have ended.

+ + +

PAR’s work essentially disappears from the written archives from 1976-1979. Paige, however, does not remember any distinct break in the group’s work, suggesting that Prisoners

Against Rape may have continued their work inside the prison or that the act of forgetting (whether intentionally or unintentionally) created a more cohesive narrative than actually occurred. The narrative of Prisoners Against Rape becomes clearer once again in 1979 when the group re-kindled their relationship with the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. To get to this moment, the story returns to

Loretta Ross, and eventually, the letter that Ross received from Fuller.

III. An Unconventional “Book Group:” The Collaboration Between Ross and the D.C. Rape Crisis Center and Prisoners Against Rape

In 1976, Loretta Ross lived in D.C.’s Adams Morgan area with her son and worked two jobs.

One day, she returned to her apartment to find an eviction notice on the door. The notice told all those living in the building that they had to leave, because the owner sold the apartment and it would soon be converted into condominiums. Below the eviction notice was a smaller note calling building residents to meet in the laundry room to discuss the injustice.153 Responding to the call and attending the laundry room meeting, Ross stumbled into housing activism. She joined City Wide

Housing Coalition, a tenant organizing group founded by Howard University Professor Dr. Jimmy

Garrett.154 In City Wide Housing Coalition, Ross learned about the MarxistLeninist D.C. Study

Group that Garrett organized.

The study group quickly became Ross’s church.155 The ten to twelve person group read a book each week to discuss together on Sunday mornings. Garrett would lecture and the group would talk about political economy and attempt to make sense of the world around them. They read

George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkruman, Sekou Toure, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Friere, and Walter Rodney. Reflecting on her experience in the study group and her introduction to

Marxism, Ross stated, “[I] actually thought a revolution was going on in my brain.”156 When the

Combahee River Collective released their groundbreaking statement in April, 1977, the study group read it.157 The Combahee River Collective explicitly articulated the ways the interlocking oppressions of sexism, heterosexism, racism, and classism, shaped Black women’s experiences before others did

153 Ross, interview by Follet, 80. 154Loretta J. Ross, “Before #Me Too,” 2. 155Ross, interview by Follet, 86. 156Ross, interview by Follet, 81. 157 The Combahee River Collective was a non-hierarchical group of Black, lesbian, socialist, feminists based in Boston.

and was one of the few works written by women that the group read.158 Ross perceived this to be due to the fact that texts by Black women were not as widely available. With the likes of the Third

World Women’s alliance “Black Woman's Manifesto” (1970), Toni Cade Bambara’s Black Women:

An Anthology (1970), Ntozake Shange For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is

Enuf (1976), however, the lack of texts by Black women may more accurately reflect hat radical, activist spaces still privileged male voices.

Nkenge Touré, the National Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, also attended the study groups. She told Ross about the DCRCC and Ross started volunteering at the Center in 1978, returning to the commitment to reproductive rights activism she made following her sterilization. By the time Loretta Ross joined the DCRCC community, it had become “the locus for Black feminist activism,” bringing their work and analysis more closely in line with PAR’s.159 Thus, when PAR wrote to the DCRCC for the second time, Ross and the Center were better positioned to establish a meaningful partnership and collectively strengthen PAR’s community based violence prevention program.

“The Locus of Black Feminist Organizing:” Ross and the DCRCC

Only a year after she began volunteering at the Center, Ross succeeded Touré as the third

Black Executive Director of the DCRCC. Applying her personal experiences as a Black woman raped and forcibly sterilized, she helped transform the Center’s understanding of sexual violence.160

Ross explained that at the DCRCC, they “were doing a lot of Black Feminist stuff,” but did not have access to theory that would describe their work until some years later.161 Their work came from their lived experiences. With Ross at the helm, the DCRCC worked to redefine the dominant

158“Combahee River Collective, Collective Statement,” reproduced in Taylor, ed, How We Get Free, 19. 159 Loretta J. Ross, “Before #Me Too,” 3. 160Ross, interview by Follet, 305. 161Ross, interview by Follet, 91.

understanding of sexual violence. In the second edition of their publication “How to Start a Rape

Crisis Center,” the DCRCC explains that, while the law defines rape as “forced vaginal penetration...,” the Center more broadly conceptualizes rape as “any unwanted act of sex.” While recognizing that “a man may ‘forcibly sodomize’ another man,” they argued that women are the

“primary victims of rape” and that rape is “almost exclusively committed by men against women.”162

However, in a 1977 article in the Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, Touré made clear that while men usually raped women, anyone - regardless of gender - could be subject to rape. 163

The Center understood rape as not a sexually motivated act, but a political act that targeted and suppressed all women.164 The DCRCC stressed the narrative that “all women can be rape victims.” While in some ways this colorblind argument did not take into account how compounding oppressions of racism and sexism made the experience of women of color unique, such rhetoric challenged the aforementioned racist trope of the unrapeable Black woman. In order for society to recognize the impact of sexual violence on Black women, they first had to acknowledge that Black women could be raped.

Ross argued that scholarship about rape lacked an analysis of the specific ways it affected

Third World Women because: (1) society does not prioritize the issue and thus fails to fund research; (2) Third World women rarely report sexual violence because of distrust for the criminal legal system (which may extend to government-like agencies such as Rape Crisis Centers) (3) the lack of Third World activists in the anti-violence movement.165 Through their work at the Center, Touré

162“How to Start a Rape Crisis Center,” edition 2, Washington, DC, September 3, 1974. 163 While the DCRCC challenged the limited dominant understanding of sexual violence, their critique still very much relied on a gender binary, reflective of the time period. 164“How to Start a Rape Crisis Center,” edition 2. 165 Loretta J Ross, “Rape and Third World Women,” Washington, D.C., August 1980, 5-6. Loretta Ross and the DCRCC choose to use the language of “Third World Women’s movement” not “Black feminism” or “Women of Color feminism” to describe their work. In their Report on the Conference, Nkenge Touré, the DCRCC’s Director of Community Education, DCRCC Director Loretta Ross and DCRCC Community Education Specialist Kathy R Powell defined their use of third world, stating: “Third World was originally a phrase coined primarily to describe a state of economic dependency and the lack of technological advances, these same characteristics of

and Ross strove to fill this gap, writing articles and giving speeches that articulated the ways that rape impacted Third World women and exposing both the feminist movement and the Black liberation movement as failing to account for the experiences of Black women.166 By providing nuanced historical analysis, they illustrated that throughout history, racism informed the construction of rape and rape laws. As Deb Friedman articulates in her article “Rape, Racism, and

Reality,” “rape laws were designed to maintain the property rights of white men and to control blacks.”167 By disproportionately prosecuting Black men for rape, while failing to punish people - especially white men - who raped Black women, the criminal legal system furthers stereotypes of the

Black Male Rapist and Unrapeable Black Woman.168

Ross and the DCRCC countered such myths, explaining that over 90% of rapes were intra- racial. Patriarchal members of the Black community critiqued the DCRCC for “sabotaging” the

Black freedom struggle by publicizing such information. In her article “Black Women: Why Rape,”

Ross argues that Third World people themselves have internalized racism and oppression, affecting the relationship between Black men and Black women.169 The DCRCC’s more nuanced, understanding of rape shaped their ideas of how to address such violence. According to Ross, the

DCRCC did not want to be an “apolitical” service provider. Instead, they adopted a model of peer support and “non-professional self-help counseling,” that integrated services with feminist advocacy, education, and organizing.170

underdevelopment tragically describe the condition of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native America women worldwide. Third Word women share a collective history of violence, oppression, and exploitation and this has resulted in the emergence of women struggling under the triple oppression of race, class and sex.” Loretta J. Ross, Kathy R. Powell, and I Nkenge Touré, “Report on First Third World Conference on Women and Violence,” (Washington D.C.: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980), 2. 166Ross, “Black Women: Why Feminism.” 167Deb Friedman, “Rape, Racism and Reality,” FAAR & NCN, Washington, D.C., July/August 1978, 17. 168Friedman, “Rape, Racism and Reality,” 17. 169 Ross, “Black Women: Why Feminism.” 170 Ross, “Before #Me Too.”

“Not the Saviors of the Black Community:” Turning away from the Police

Considering the ways the criminal legal system relentlessly failed and disproportionately targeted communities of color, the DCRCC continued to struggle with the question of whether to report instances of rape to the police. They wanted society to take issues of sexual violence seriously, to persuade medical and legal institutions that violence against woman was an issue that deserved attention, and to hold perpetrators accountable. However, they did not want to rely on nor bolster the racist criminal legal system.171 Ultimately, the Center chose to leave it up to the victim to decide whether they wanted to report their experiences of violence. The DCRCC provided women with information about all formal organizations that dealt with rape victims, such as hospitals, the police, and the courts and would also provide women information about services and alternatives that existed outside the traditional criminal legal system.172 If a woman chose to report, the Center would accompany her to the hospital or police station for support. The Center tried to maintain positive relationships with law enforcement, so that the police would treat their clients with respect.

They also recognized that the legal process often traumatized and humiliated those who had experienced sexual violence. Ross and other women at the DRCC had seen the ways the legal system targeted and tore up their communities. Ross explained that at the time, their vocabulary did not include “anti-carceral,” but they understood that law enforcement did “more harm than good” in

171The cases of Inez Garcia, Joan Little, Yvonne Wanrow and Dessie Woods garnered media attention between 1974 and 1976 and illustrated the many ways that the criminal legal system failed to protect victims of sexual violence, especially women of color. García, a Puerto Rican-Cuban Latina who lived in California; Little, a Black woman who lived in North Carolina; Wanrow, a Native American woman of the Confederated Tribes who lived in Washington state; and Woods, a Black woman who lived in Georgia, were each arrested and put on trial for acting in self defense and killing men who sexually abused them or their child/ren. Through defending themselves physically and in their trials, Garcia, Little, Wanrow and Woods declared that women of color had a right to protect their bodies from sexual violence. In the case of Little, Garcia in her retrial, and Wanrow in to the Washington Supreme Court, the court recognized this right. The arrest and trials of these four women called on the anti-violence movement to acknowledge women of color and the specific nature of “sexualized racial violence.” Further, these cases spurred the development of anti-carceral anti-violence politics and helped connect activist efforts on the inside and outside of prisons. Thuma “Lessons in self-defense,” 54. 172 Valk, Radical Sisters, 163.

their communities. “Specifically, one of the reasons for the underreporting of rape in the black community,” she stated, “was because people simply didn’t want to turn people over to the police.”173 They understood that police would not solve harm in their community.174

Federal funds mandated that Rape Crisis Centers become increasingly hierarchical organizations that focused more exclusively on direct service provision as opposed to advocacy.175

The DCRCC feared that the government used rape to justify expanding the police force. The state presented the police as the protectors of women. Not only did the DCRCC believe that police expansion would further oppress people of color, but they doubted that putting people in prison effectively addressed the crimes they committed. The experiences of the men in Prisoners Against

Rape confirmed this doubt.

“All the Right Language:” Re-creating a Partnership wit the DCRCC

While the DCRCC struggled with how to address sexual violence without relying on or perpetuating the racist criminal legal system, Ross received the aforementioned letter from William

Fuller. Ross paraphrased Fuller’s request in the letter: “Outside I’m raping women, inside I’m raping men. I’d like not to be a rapist anymore” validated this very concern.176 The letter implies that PAR’s initial work with the DCRCC did not stop Fuller, and perhaps some of the other men in PAR, from raping. However, Fuller remained committed to unlearning his behaviors and to addressing rape, both personally and systemically. Despite her own concerns about incarceration as the response to rape, Fuller’s letter took Ross aback.

Ross and the other staff members worked for little pay. The Center lacked resources to fully support their clients: victims of rape. She could not imagine working with perpetrators.177 Nkenge

173 Ross interview. 174Ross, “Voices of Feminism," interview by Follet, 53. 175Ross, interview by Follet, 53. 176Loretta Ross interview., via phone, February 3, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Ross interview.” 177Ross interview.

Touré, the previous Director, explained that she felt even more resistant than Ross and “worr[ied] her way through” the possibilities and problems that could arise from a partnership with Prisoners

Against Rape.178 The letter sat on Ross’s desk for days. She could not decide what to do or how to respond.

One day, unsure of what came over her, Ross got into her car and drove southeast out of

D.C. About forty minutes later, she arrived at Lorton prison. Before she could enter, the guards invasively searched her to ensure she was not “smuggling” anything. It was Ross’s first time in a prison and such “indignities” surprised her - a small example of the dehumanization those incarcerated at Lorton faced on a daily basis. Ultimately, the guards allowed Ross to enter the prison and talk with Fuller and a few other men in PAR.

According to Ross, Fuller used “all the right language,” to grab her attention.179 She could tell that he had read many radical, political texts and had studied Black feminist writing - the same sources that the DCRCC used to ground their work. Ross quickly acknowledged Prisoners Against

Rape’s seriousness. Impressed by their ability to educate themselves without access to many books,

Ross agreed to form a partnership with the group. Together, they decided to meet for two-to-three hours every Friday afternoon. Inspired by her experience in Dr. Garrett’s group, Ross suggested the study group format to PAR. The model resembled PAR’s prior structure, which centered education rooted in community and shared knowledge. This time, however, Ross and other women who worked at the DCRCC would bring the men texts - from Black and feminist readings to historical analyses to works focusing on sexual violence. These texts served as the foundation for their discussions.

178 Nkenge Touré, interview by author, via phone, May, 9, 2019. Hereafter referred to as “Touré interview” 179Ross interview.

Building the study group was a joint effort. Ross chose and purchased the books including:

Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller; The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams, which was one of the group’s favorite; and bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman, which acted as their “Black

Feminist manifesto.”180 Ain’t I a Woman resonated deeply with Ross. She explained that reading Ain’t

I a Woman for the first time felt “liberating,” as it provided a theory that explained the work they did at the DCRCC. She brought the text to PAR.181 The incarcerated members of the group had their own roles: they recruited other members to join, and ensured the dedication of everyone who participated to the group’s mission, to respecting their privileges, and to fairly sharing the books.182

Ross and Fuller were the constant presence, both attending every meeting. Ross described

Fuller as the “alpha-male” of the group - the clear leader who provided direction for other participants. The volatile nature of the prison made it so participation fluctuated. If one had a poor standing with a Correctional Officer, the C.O. would likely forbid them from attending.183 The prison viewed participation in classes and groups as a privilege, and thus if someone “violated” prison rules, the prison administration stripped them of their ability to participate. Sometimes, other people involved in the DCRCC, such as Touré or Board of Directors member Yulanda Ward would join Ross. The people in the DCRCC and in PAR worked against the odds - the DCRCC women transported extra copies of books and withstood the prison guard’s invasive searches and the men in

PAR made sure to be “one step ahead” of the prison administration and to engage with a serious sense of purpose - so that this unlikely group could meet together each week for their book club.184

180 Ross interview. 181 Ross interview. 182 Ross interview. 183 Ross interview. 184 Ross interview.

“Attentive to Our Needs:” Building Relationships

Within a perpetrator-victim binary, PAR and the DCRCC participants fall on opposing sides: men and women; incarcerated people and those living in the “free world;” rapists and those fighting to end sexual violence. Ross and some of the other women from the DCRCC were themselves, survivors of sexual violence. Recently reflecting on her anti-violence work, Ross recognized that she had her own healing to do. She noted that she lacked a practice of self-care, especially necessary when engaging in such challenging work. Ross’s realization makes clear that not only the men in

PAR needed space to learn, grow and work with and through their trauma. All those in the group were healing.

Ross carefully insisted that the men in PAR did not cause her further trauma. “Never at any point did they make us feel unsafe, as survivors,” explained Ross. “I mean they were very, very attentive to our needs, in a very sensitive way. I mean we were never propositioned, nobody ever tried to cross boundaries with us.”185 Ross, however, chose not to share her own survivor story with them. She felt it was not the goal of the group, and also said she would not have felt comfortable doing so.186 In addition, Ross mused that while she may have been oblivious to cues, she never learned about the men’s romantic and interpersonal relationships. The DCRCC women intentionally avoided discussing the dynamics of people in the group. They kept their work largely abstract, focusing the structures that fostered violence and the ways the men’s personal stories of perpetrating and surviving violence fit into these larger systems.187 This seemed to shift from PAR’s earlier work, during which the men made a concerted attempt to understand their personal experiences. Ross’s framing can be read both as a way the women drew boundaries and as an attempt to transform the

185 Ross interview. 186Ross interview. 187 Ross interview.

conversation about sexual violence from one that focused on “bad individuals” to one that centered harmful and oppressive systems.

The DCRCC established other boundaries and criteria for their work with PAR. According to Ross, the study group was only open to men “incarcerated for life.” She felt safer knowing that the people she worked with would not walk the streets again.188 Such a “requirement” seems counter to the group’s emphasis on education as a tool for change and their central belief that rapists were not inherently bad people, but attempting to exert power and control. However, it also speaks to

Ross’s humanity and trauma. Perhaps, Ross feared that their work would be unsuccessful and the possibility that the men would commit future acts of violence. Ross’s perspective highlights the nuance and complexity of her work - she strove to challenge dominant narratives about abusers and punishment, yet these narratives also impacted her deeply. As a victim of state and interpersonal gender based violence, she learned that, in order to protect of herself and her family, she had to be wary of who she trusted. Paige, however, does not remember this life sentence requirement, though he explained that most participants served long sentences. Many of the men in PAR, including Paige and Fuller, did get out of prison.189

From the start of the second iteration of their partnership, the DCRCC limited the extent of their relationship with the men in PAR to public education. They made clear they would not write parole letters for the men in the group nor bring them supplies from the outside world.190 The boundaries, however, were not impermeable. When the men in PAR invited the women from the

DCRCC to attend social activities at the prison, so they could deepen their understanding of the mens’ life in prison, Ross accepted. The DCRCC women faced a complicated tension: how to engage the men in PAR as people, while working within a system built to dehumanize them; how to

188 Ross interview. 189Paige, interview by author, November 2019. 190Ross interview.

counter the carceral, racist logics of disposability, while protecting themselves, their hurt and their needs as survivors and people. The women in the DCRCC and the men in PAR did not have a model to follow. They had to learn and build as they went, all the while healing as individuals.

Ross and the DCRCC contributed immensely to PAR’s work, both materially and philosophically. She not only transported books to the men in PAR, but guided discussions and helped the men develop a more nuanced understanding of sexual violence in a way that must have impacted their writings and analyses. The work of women, like Ross “enabled the rise for a national movement among prisoners.” As Dan Berger argues, while men received public attention for leading prison rebellions and resistance, women’s guidance and support enabled such action and warrants recognition.191

The women in the study group also learned and grew from their work with PAR. The relationship centered on a mutual exchange of knowledge. Though unclear at what point during the trajectory of PAR’s work with the DCRCC, Paige explained that the men in PAR became involved with the DCRCC’s hotline. Women at the DCRCC encouraged some people who called the 24-hour hotline to contact PAR. The incarcerated men worked with the prison administration to establish a system through which people could call the prison office and leave a message. A member of PAR would then return their call. According to Paige, people who called the hotline shared their feelings of experiencing rape with the incarcerated members of PAR and asked them why men raped women. The callers attempted to understood what motivated people to rape.192 The men in PAR brought a new perspective to the anti-violence movement.

Ross spoke to the ways she personally grew from her work with PAR. She had not thought much about sexual violence against adult men and felt naive about the “predatory nature of sexual

191 Berger, Captive Nation, 46. 192 Paige interview June 2019; Paige interview November 2019.

violence within the prison.”193 Ross’s experience with PAR disrupted the victim-perpetrator binary.

During one of her first PAR meetings, Ross recognized the men’s physiques, passing time in the prisons’ weight room. After admiring their build, Ross learned the reason behind them - the men in

PAR worked out so they could be physically strong enough to become “the rapist, instead of the victim” - to protect themselves from assault.194 They had been, and could be, both the perpetrator and the victim of rape. Ross reflected that, after spending time with PAR, “that neat, angel-devil theory was no longer useful [to her].”195

“Making Noise?:” An Outsider’s View on PAR

PAR appears to have deeply impacted those involved with the group. However, Ricky

Brown, who was not in PAR, but was incarcerated at the Lorton Reformatory during the group’s operation, explained that PAR did not “make a lot of noise” amidst the hundreds of groups at

Lorton in the mid-to-late 1970s.196 According to Brown, PAR did not have a strong external presence, because the men knew other prisoners would not respond positively. The general population at Lorton stigmatized rapists.197 Paige viewed the situation differently. He felt that, for the most part, other people did not have a problem with PAR’s work: “they were doing their thing, and we was doing ours,” he explained.198 Both Brown and Paige’s reactions highlight that at the prison, PAR focused their work internally, on building community with and educating those in the group, as opposed to targeting the prison population at large.

As someone who was not involved in PAR, but knew of its existence, Ricky Brown felt skeptical og PAR. He believed some of the men, especially those not convicted for rape, only

193Ross interview. 194 Ross interview. 195 Ross interview. 196Rickey Brown interview. 197Ross interview. 198 Ross interview.

attended PAR meetings to meet women. He made this claim without judgement, explaining that it is the only reason he would have attended PAR meetings. Men in the reformatory, particularly those who did not have regular visits, felt excited to have women express interest in their work and ideas.

According to Brown, they thought that they could perhaps develop a romantic or sexual relationship with the women that joined PAR. Brown does not suggest that these relationships were (or would be, as he does not confirm they occured) non-consensual. Instead, he argued that many women who attended PAR also wanted romantic relationships. Nancy Shia, who attended PAR meetings in 1975, explained that cynically, the thought the men used PAR to have visitors.199

The suggestion that men joined PAR to interact with women does not account for why the men chose PAR, as opposed to the numerous other groups that existed at Lorton at the time. This is especially confusing, considering many of the other groups allowed men the opportunity to leave

Lorton on furlough, where they had more freedom - a privilege not afforded to those in PAR. Ricky

Brown noted that “everybody in Lorton was trying to get out.” Those in PAR did all they could to leverage their limited power and expand their access to freedom. They thought creatively about how they could make the prison environment somewhat less confining. This, in itself, was a form of resistance. Brown’s analysis does not discredit PAR’s work as disingenuous. Instead, it shows that the men in PAR, like all people, may have had multiple goals, which does not necessarily negate their belief in the importance of anti-rape advocacy.

+ + +

While the men in PAR read, talked, and learned with each other and the women who joined the group, they also focused on another important component of their work - writing down and publishing their analysis of sexual violence, an analysis that was both nuanced and ahead of its time.

From at least as early as 1974 to as late as 1981, PAR submitted their writing to feminist newsletters

199Shia interview.

and even a conference. Through their writing, the men in PAR engaged in a subversive act. They refused to allow the prison to cage their ideas. They looked to the limited relationships and technologies available to them to transgress the extreme physical, emotional and mental confines of the prison. It is through their political writing that the men in PAR communicated with the outside world. It is through their political writing that PAR wrote themselves into the archive and communicate with people, today. Thus, it is to their writing, that this narrative now turns.

Images from the Loretta Ross papers at the Sophia Smith Collection and the Schlesinger Library. Photograph of Loretta Ross (top right), the D.C. Rape Crisis Center office (middle right) and Yulanda Ward and Nkenge Touré (bottom right) collaged with graphics from newsletters Aegis, Crime & Social Justice, and FAAR.

Photographs taken by Nancy Shia at Lorton Prison ~1974-1975. Larry Cannon (middle left) and Cannon with his family during Family Day (middle right); scenes of Lorton prison.

IV. “Rape is a social disease and requires a social antidote:” Learning from the Writings of Prisoners Against Rape

RAPE is:

an “act”,” a “syndrome,” “a cancer,” a “critical issue,” an “oppressive phenomenon,” a “product of patriarchal culture,” “an anti-self determination act,” “an act of aggression, of violence, and domination,” “not an incident... not an episode,” -“Rape is a social disease and requires a social antidote.”200

This is how Prisoners Against Rape defined rape in their various writings. They defined rape as a pervasive form of violence rooted in systems of oppression and the desire for power. In addition to their work as a community education group, PAR produced insightful political writings about sexual violence and how to combat it.

Political scientist Joy James’s concept of the “prison intellectual” provides helpful reference when examining PAR’s work. Drawing from Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the “organic intellectual,” James argues that the “‘public intellectual’ encompasses the oft-forgotten

‘prison intellectual.’”201 According to James “the imprisoned intellectual is a public intellectual who, like his or her highly visible and celebrated counterparts, reflects upon social meaning, discord, development, ethics and justice.” The members of PAR were prison intellectuals, public intellectuals, organic intellectuals, intellectuals. Through their writing, PAR’s ideas and theories entered into the anti-violence conversation occurring in D.C. and the country at large.

PAR turned Lorton into a classroom, transforming a sterile room surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards into a school for radical thought and personal growth. To do so, the imprisoned intellectuals in PAR had to resist dominant narratives within a space that epitomized of

200 Cannon and Fuller, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 2 - 3; Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 3; Sally Quinn, "‘Prisoners Against Rape,’” paragraph 1; Alston, et al., "Prison Letters;" Gary L. Alston, “Introduction” in William Fuller and Larry Cannon, "Capitalist Economics Breeds Rape, Robbery, Murder and All Other Crimes,” (Lorton Prison, Lorton, Virginia: Prisoners Against Rape 1974), 9. 201James, Imprisoned Intellectuals, 3.

state control and violence. Such work shows what James describes as the irony in the “captive/free dichotomy” - that imprisoned intellectuals, those most intensely monitored and repressed by the state, may actually be “those most free from state conditioning.”202 By unlearning and resisting dominant ideologies, imprisoned intellectuals like those in PAR freed themselves intellectually while held captive physically. In the introduction to Fuller and Cannon’s pamphlet, Capitalist Economics

Breeds Rape, Murder, and All Other Crimes, PAR member Gary L. Alston writes:

[D]espite the wretched failure of this country’s prisons… a few individuals struggle to emerge from these demonic institutions as whole human beings, with an insight and with empathy and candor as to shake the very foundations of this decadent society… these few, after having seen inhumanity at its worst, after having tasted America’s bitter reality, spring forth from these tombs of darkness to reveal new dimensions of truth.

He speaks to the challenge of becoming and remaining political while in prison, and claims that

Fuller and Cannon are two individuals who had done so, and whose words “are well worth listening to.”203 Joining in the tradition of many imprisoned intellectuals, Fuller, Cannon and other members of PAR, turned to writing as a means to share their political theories and forge connections beyond the prison gates.204

Further, writing provided a means through which Fuller, Cannon, Paige and the other PAR members could take a degree of agency over their narratives. Aside from his written work through

PAR, William Fuller’s appearance in the public record - a few newspaper articles about his crime and the judges’ statement denying his Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the D.C. Circuit Court - defined him as a criminal. His work as a Prison intellectual allowed Fuller to transform himself and assert his value as a human being. When Fuller signed a letter he wrote to the First National Conference on

Third World Women and Violence (August 1980), “William Fuller #146423,” he reclaimed his

202James, Imprisoned Intellectuals, 8; Alston, et al., "Prison Letters.” 203Alston, “Introduction,” 1-2. 204 In Captive Nations, Dan Berger speaks to the importance of writing and other tools of communication for incarcerated people. Considering they had limited mobility, incarcerated people turned to “diverse means” such as riots, writing, and collective rituals to “make the prison and especially its captives visible to people around the world.” 6

prison number as he redefined himself and reasserted his humanity. Through their cutting edge political writings on sexual violence, Fuller and the other members of PAR wrote themselves into the public archive as more than just a number and a criminal.

PAR published letters and articles in radical feminist newsletters and journals such as

“Feminist Alliance Against Rape,” “Off Our Backs,” and “Crime and Social Justice.” The documentary “Rape Culture” also highlighted their work.205 Nonetheless, PAR’s work never received widespread recognition and has been left out of the historiography. Scholars and activists rarely, if ever, cite their writing. This section draws on close reading to engage with and elevate PAR’s words.

“Living the truths they now reveal:” Grounding Analysis in Personal Experience

Given the group’s makeup of incarcerated Black men, PAR’s work focused specifically on the experience of Black men. PAR’s work recognizes, however, that all men perpetuate sexual violence and argues that Black men are, in part motivated to rape in response to the history of white men raping Black women--their sisters, mothers, daughters, and female ancestors-- as a display of power. PAR’s scholarship reflects the accepted conception of rape during the 1970s, which defined men as the aggressors and women as the victims (or, in the case of the prison, other men as the victims).

The incarcerated men in PAR began their individual and collective work by critically interrogating their sexual behaviors and their motivations behind committing acts of violence.206

According to Gary Alston, although never convicted of rape, he “would venture to say that there have been occasions when [he] raped [his] wife, probably [his] girlfriends, and so forth.”207 Alston’s

205 Started in 1960, Off Our Backs was a monthly feminist newspaper that attempted to “translate feminist ideals into practice” and disseminate feminist knowledge. Contributors rotated responsibility for writing, layout and other production tasks. Off Our Backs offered a feminist perspective and reported on events often ignored or left out of mainstream media. Valk, Radical Sisters, 71. 206 Prisoners Against Rape, "Prisoners Against Rape," 45. 207Qtd. in Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, Rape Culture, (Documentary 1975; Cambridge: Cambridge Documentary Films, 1983).

statement may reflect PAR’s belief that all men rape women. Or, perhaps he meant that he failed to take into account the wants, desires, and pleasure of his partners. Or maybe, he could remember specific moments when he had sex with his partners without their consent. Alston’s reflection displays how the members of PAR’s personal experiences shaped their theories. Based on his own experiences, Alston knew that not only those convicted for rape committed acts of sexual violence.208 He understood that marriage and long term partnerships did not mean rape could not occur, a cutting edge statement for the time, considering the federal government did not criminalize spousal rape until the Federal Sexual Abuse Act of 1986.209

In the introduction to their short independently published booklet, Capitalist Economics Breeds

Rape, Robbery, Murder and All Other Crimes (1974), Alston presents Fuller and Cannon as “the real experts” on rape, having theoretical knowledge, but more importantly, “having lived these truths that they now reveal.210 PAR echoes this sentiment in a 1975 Crime and Social Justice article, stating that several people claim to be authorities about rape, but have “neither a meaningful theory, the practical experience, nor the political consciousness” to effectively prevent or solve issues of rape.

PAR asserted their position as former rapists. In a society that disposed of incarcerated people, they needed to defend their knowledge in order to be taken seriously. They used their experience to call on other men to engage in anti-violence work.

“Inseparably Connected:” Calling for Women & Men to Work Together in the Fight Against Sexual Violence

208 Such scholarship exemplifies what the Combahee River Collective defined in their “Collective Statement” (released in 1974, within a year after PAR formed), as “identity politics,” politics rooted not in abstraction, but in real life oppression one experiences on the basis of identity. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 8-9. 209Jennifer A. Bennice and Patricia A. Resick, “Marital Rape: History, Research, and Practice,” Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 4, no. 3, (July 2003), abstract. 210 Alston, “Introduction,” 2. In the context of their other scholarship, their critique was likely aimed at scholars and white feminist activists who lacked an analysis of the ways racism and classism impacted sexual violence.

I am the son of woman and the brother of women I know that this is their cause But I feel that it is mine also Their happiness is my happiness Their misery, my misery The interests of the sexes are inseparably connected And in the election of the one lies the salvation of the other. - Prisoners Against Rape211

The January 1975 Off Our Backs newsletter includes a letter signed by members of PAR in support of the “Free Joanne Little campaign.” Fuller, Cannon, Alston, Jenkins, Allen, Pierson, Earle,

Long, Luckett, Bostic and Paige conclude their letter with the assertion: “Unite to give power to oppressed people! Down sexism! Free sister Joanne Little!”212 PAR understood that sexual violence was both “a sexist and racist phenomena,” and that in order to address racism, they too needed to address sexism.213 Though it is unclear whether PAR read the Combahee River Collective

Statement, PAR’s philosophy resembled Combahee’s belief that freedom for the most oppressed people - Black women - meant freedom for everyone.214

PAR called for women and men to work together to combat violence, and they actively did so by creating a partnership with the DCRCC. In January 1975, someone named “Rainbow” wrote a letter to Off Our Backs responding to PAR’s statement in support of Joanne Little. Rainbow found

PAR’s work to be encouraging and moving. Replying to Rainbow, Fuller stated that since “politically

211 Prisoners Against Rape, "Prisoners Against Rape," 45. 212Alston, et al., "Prison Letters,” 25. 213 Prisoners Against Rape, "Prisoners Against Rape," 45. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a name to the understanding that different forms of oppression build on top of each other, creating new forms of violence when she coined “intersectionality” fifteen years later. In 1889, Crenshaw coined intersectionality to explain the experience of Black women who suffer at the hands of not just racism and sexism, but the compounding of the two systems of oppression. Groups like The Combahee River Collective and PAR spoke of this phenomenon before it was explicitly theorized. In their Collective Statement, the CRC writes, “we believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.” Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement, in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed, How We Get Free, 4. 214Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” 5.

conscious persons” were few in number, they must come together to overcome the imperialist attempt to “divide and conquer.” “Though strong individually,” Fuller replied, “We are strongest together.”215 PAR believed that by uniting persons “affected by or effecting rape,” they could best address the root of sexual violence and collectively envision ways to prevent such violence.

In claiming that it was “imperative” that women work with men who have committed violence, PAR’s analysis sometimes resembled, albeit unwittingly, the patriarchal demands they attempted to combat. PAR did not articulate an understanding of why some women may have wanted to organize against violence separate from men. They did, however, lighten their demand, by specifying that women must be “in the majority of any decision making process,” that all decisions must be rooted in “feminist principles” and that those involved in such activism must have a political and personal understanding of the struggle against “racism, sexism and other oppressive ideologies.”216

Further, PAR’s calls for the collaboration across sexes to combat sexual violence and sexism mirror similar calls made by women of color who rejected the separatist politics of some white feminist groups. The Combahee River Collective statement proclaims: “Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand.” The CRC explained that as Black women, they needed to build racial solidarity with men. “We struggle together with Black men against racism,” they declared, “while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”217 bell hooks echoes this sentiment, challenging what she calls the “misguided notion” that men are the enemy.

Her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center has a chapter entitled “Men: Comrades in

215William Fuller. "To Rainbow." Off Our Backs 5, no. 3 (1975): 1. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25772194. 216William Fuller, “Working with Men Who Have Committed Violence,” First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence, August 17, 1980, 1. 217Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” 3.

Struggle,” dedicated to cross gender fights against sexism. Similarly, Audre Lorde also, in her 1988 essay “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” Lorde argued that “it would be shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege.” However, she also calls for “Black male consciousness” to be raised to recognize that sexism is dysfunctional to racial liberation.218

In their words, at least if not in their deeds, PAR attempted to do just this. Fourteen years before Lorde called for Black men to recognize that their “interests were tied to the liberation” of women, and Black women in particular, PAR wrote that “the interests of the sexes, are inseparably connected.”219 Using religious language of “election” and “salvation,” PAR argues that only through fighting sexism and sexual violence, could men be saved. Perhaps, this language stemmed from their position as former rapists. They strove to eradicate rape and in so doing, both “save” women from being raped, and also “save” men from raping. Or perhaps, this acknowledgement stems from their position as Black men who recognized that white supremacy fostered both sexual violence and racism and they could not eradicate one without the other. PAR challenged the notion that Black men could counter white supremacy through an assertion of their masculinity. In the decades following the 1965 Moynihan report, some Black men attempted to restore their masculinity “from damage done by white supremacy,” and to refute the notion that the white man was the only true

218Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, Reprint ed., (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press), 2007, 65. 219Lorde.

man.220 As historian Ashley Farmer argues, such men understood patriarchy as a remedy to, as opposed to a manifestation of, white oppression.221

Literary critic and Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers argues that the captive male suffers two assaults in the household: (1) castration from the white male patriarch, and (2) loss of fatherhood as the slave master replaces the father.222 In the case of incarceration, the state replaces the literal slave master, stripping Black men of the restricted freedom they possess on the outside, and thus exacerbating the notion that Black men need to restore their humanity through the assertion of manhood.223 As an all powerful institution, the prison has reduced the captive body to what Spillers calls “flesh,” unable to defend itself against touch, rather than a “person, citizen, or social subject” with presumed freedom. The act of rape attempts to turn oneself from flesh to body, to position oneself as the “toucher” and not the touched.224 In the extreme confinement of the prison, incarcerated men turned to “heroic masculinity” as a tool to resist the states’ violence and assert some semblance of control.225

220 The Moynihan report, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under Lyndon Baines Johnson at the time, blamed female-headed households for poverty in Black communities, and argued that a “reassertion of patriarchy” would cure Black communities of their pathology. In his book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi writes, “For too many Black men, the Black Power movement that emerged after the Moynihan report became a struggle against White men for Black power over Black women.” Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 190; Dan Berger, Captive Nations, 72. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (D.C, Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor: March, 1965), https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Moynihan's%20The%20Negro%20Family.pdf. 221 Farmer, Remaking Black Power, 182. 222 Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, "Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture" (Lecture, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Future, Providence, RI, February 7, 2019). 223Berger, Captive Nation, 72-73.; Haley, No Mercy, 95; Toni Morrison, Beloved. Reprint ed. New York City, NY: Vintage, 2004. 224 U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning, William Fuller’s Statement Before the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning, 95th Congress 2nd session, 1978, 676.; Hortense J Spillers. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 225 Dan Berger, Captive Nation, 73.

Speaking to the group of men and a few women at a PAR meeting, Fuller stated, “men have to go through the process of rejecting [the] masculinity that is imposed on him.”226 Fuller called on the men in PAR to reject masculinity and to recognize women as human beings. Through their work and scholarship, PAR critiqued the masculinity of the prison environment, the Black Power movement, and society as a whole. PAR placed themselves as part of what Alston calls a “cosmic revolution” - a spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economical revolution that fought not only against the prison and against sexual violence, but against the oppressive society that gave rise to and sustained such violence.227

“About Power:” Reframing the Conversation about Rape

RAPE, like all other crimes, arises out of our social environment, from ideas we learn from our relations with institutions and from people as we grow into adults. In other words, RAPE is culturally American, that is, RAPE is the product of the racist and repressive ills tied to the American way of life which is ingrained into the masses from the cradle. - William Fuller and Larry Cannon, Capitalist Economics228

Fuller and Cannon’s capitalization of RAPE and RAPIST act as a visual representation of the power of rape and the power underlying rape. In the introduction to Capitalist Economics Breeds

Rape, Murder and All Other Crimes, Alston argues that Fuller and Cannon talk about more than the physical act of rape, “they are talking about the rape of millions of mind.” Through capitalizing the words, Fuller and Cannon may be attempting to make clear that they are not talking about “rape” as a singular act or “rapist” as an individual, but as broader manifestations and articulations of power.

RAPE, according to Fuller and Cannon, is a manifestation of the “racist and repressive ills” of

American society.229 PAR examined the historical, political, social, and economic roots of rape.230

226 Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich, Rape Culture, Documentary (1975; Cambridge: Cambridge Documentary Films, 1983), VHS. 227 Alston, et al, “Introduction.” 228 Fuller and Cannon, Capitalist Economics, 5. 229Cannon and Fuller, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 1. 230Alston, et al., “Prison Letters.”

The primary emotion behind rape, according to PAR, “is hate—hate of self and others, particularly women.”231 Underlying this hatred is two centuries of violent oppression of Black people. Further, PAR argues that rape is a learned behavior. By growing up in a racist, sexist, classist society, children learn from a young age that women are objects. In the film Rape Culture, Lazarus and Wunderlich intersperse scenes of popular movies with clips of men in PAR talking. They flash between their interviews with prominent anti-violence activists and excerpts from Alfred

Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Victor

Flemings Gone with the Wind, and George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance King, that glorify, make light of, or normalize sexual violence. By doing so, Lazarus and Wunderlich expose sources that instill a message that rape is normal and thus not rape at all.

PAR argues that media representations of women as “docile, passive, sex symbols, personal property” instilled in them a toxic understanding of relationships, sex and female desire, and “a myth of male superiority.232 Rooted in their own experiences, PAR’s philosophy does not, however, account for those who received alternative messages about women but nonetheless commit sexual violence. Nor does it account for those who – despite these dominant messages - do not perpetrate violence. PAR’s work to educate themselves and each other recognizes that given the space to unlearn societal messages about women and learn healthier modes of relating to them, men could change their behavior.

PAR’s goal, however, is not simply the “re-education of offenders, but the re-education of society.”233 Recognizing rape as a systemic issue rooted in the desire to display and enact power,

PAR understands that educating individuals and/or locking up certain individuals does not solve the problem of sexual violence. To honor that rape is the product and not the root of what they hope to

231Prisoners Against Rape, "Prisoners Against Rape," 1. 232 Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 1. 233Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape.’

challenge, PAR changed its name to “People Against Sexism, Racism, and Rape,” in an unknown year.

Not the “Cure:” Critiquing the Prison System

“We do not subscribe to the theory of born criminals (bad seeds) . . . .” wrote Fuller and

Cannon in Capitalist Economics Breed Robbery, Murder, and All Other Crimes. “We do, however, assume full responsibility as the effect, but disclaim any legitimate invention of its causes.” Fuller, Cannon and the other men in PAR understood their perpetration of rape to be an effect of a deeply violent and oppressive society. By targeting individuals - the so called “bad seeds” - imprisonment attacks the effect, not the cause, of the problem.

Fuller takes responsibility for the manifestation of such culture in their acts of violence.

Their writings do not address exactly what “assuming responsibility” looks like, but their attempt to educate themselves and others to help stop sexual violence from occurring in the first place can be read as their way of accepting responsibility. They understand their work in PAR to be more than a therapeutic exercise or an expression of remorse; they understand it as a “commitment to understand[ing] and prevent[ing] the causes of rape.”234 PAR recognizes that punitive punishment is not the answer to violence. In fact, PAR asserts that incarceration breeds more violence.

PAR member James CX Long argues that prisons “only tend to perpetuate rape,” because prison exacerbate a man’s “desire to dominate or his desire to take advantage of the lesser individual.”235 This is what happened to Fuller, who stated, “Imprisonment turned me into another kind of rapist -- I raped men.”236 Prisons, according to Fuller and Cannon, created the conditions for what they describe as “forceful homosexuality.”237 Fuller and Cannon argue that force or

234Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 46. 235 Lazarus and Wunderlich, Rape Culture. 236Fuller, “Working With Men Who Have Committed Violence,” 1. 237Fuller and Cannon, Capitalist Economics Breeds, 4

circumstances of sexual frustration, tension, and loneliness turn men (or women, in the case of women’s prisons) into “passive and/or aggressive homosexuals.”

They understand “homosexual RAPE” as similar to the rape of women, stemming from the same social conditions of “racism, sexism, myths, [and] chauvinism.” Professor of Criminology Ian

O’Donnell argues that within the all-male, authoritarian environment of the prison, rape is an

“acting out of power roles.” He explains that a man raping another man in prison does not hold the same stigma as the event would have outside the prison walls. In other words, a man who has sex with another man in prison is not considered homosexual. Instead, the aggressive act of penetration served to prove the heterosexual norm of dominance.238 Only when men showed romantic affection towards other men did other incarcerated people consider them gay.239 In her analysis of the impact of Black Panther women on the Black Power movement, Farmer argues that while women in the

Black Panthers effectively pushed organizations to rethink their “commitment to patriarchal practices,” they were less successful in “reimagining Black identity beyond hegemonic gender pairings and sexual identifications.”240 The same can be said for PAR. While PAR challenged patriarchy, they did so in a way that at times reified the gender binary and heteronormativity; however, it is important to remember that PAR wrote within an institution structured around the gender binary.

238Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 287. 239Ian O’Donnell, "Prison Rape in Context," The British Journal of Criminology 44, no. 2 (2004): 241-55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23638614. O’Donnell’s article problematically and inaccurately perpetuates the myth of the Black male rapist. Though Fuller and Cannon make a point to mention that gay people deserved equal treatment, and recognize what they call the “orthodox male mentality” view of homosexuals as hypersexual and acknowledge words used to degrede and promote stereotypes about gay people, their work failed to take into account the possibility of consensual homosexual sex within the prison. Further, by arguing that men turn to homosexual rape once they get to prison, they do not leave space for people who may have had or wanted to have sex with men outside of the prison environment. 240Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, (Durham, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 196.

PAR’s critique of imprisonment as a response to rape moved beyond the fact that rape can and does continue inside they prison. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that societies explain that imprisonment can “control” crime based on four theories: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation. These tactics all focus on the individual which directly contrasts

PAR’s belief of how to address rape.241 PAR argued that society “cannot cure rape by focusing on the individual rapist.”242 Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines power as “not a thing but rather a capacity composed of active and changing relationships enabling a person, group, or institution to compel others to do things they would not do on their own (such as be happy, or pay taxes, or go to war).”

She argues that activists often attempt to “take” power, assuming a political system of “‘it’

(structure) versus ‘us’ (agency).” Wilson Gilmore calls for a more complicated understanding of politics that leaves room for people to “make power” and then combine such power towards a greater goal. Through the act of rape, Fuller and other men at Lorton attempted to take power.

Through creating PAR, however, they made power. It is through this making and aligning of new power, that “movement happens.”

“A Social Antidote:” PAR’s Suggested Approaches

As Lorde argued in 1987, “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy” only the most limited changes are possible.243 According to Alston, the United States has never made a real attempt to understand or eliminate rape. Prison, as Alston makes clear, does not stop violence, but instead act as human warehouses that “teach crime, dehumanize and/or destroy the vast majority of its victims.” Alston argues that the United States fails to put any attention into the causes of crime, because, “RAPE is a major source of political and

241Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 13-14. 242Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape," 45. 243Lorde, Sister Outsider, 110-111.

economical revenue or capital.” Society is invested in upholding rape as a political and economic tool used to oppress women, incarcerate Black men, and bolster white male supremacy.244 Fuller and

Cannon argue that the issue is not that RAPE’s complexity is “so perplexing as to be devoid of a meaningful remedy;” the issue is that society refuses to put resources into actually addressing rape.

PAR called for an “in-depth national conference” and symposiums about rape, for a concerted effort to expose the public to the issue of rape, for a total “re-education” of society about gender roles. They called for the creation of “broad based treatment centers” staffed with medical personnel trained in “radical theory” who could help people address the issue, not through

“tranquilizers or drugs,” but through “disciplined political education.” They called for broader, systemic change, not just to prisons, but to United States society and to institutions that promote patriarchy and women’s subordination.245 Writing in 1975, PAR recognized that only once inequality and capitalist competitiveness are eradicated, “can rape begin to be eliminated.”246;247

As men who were convicted off rape or other crimes, PAR’s members contributed an important perspective to the anti-violence conversation. PAR’s work moved beyond theory - through creating a community education group, they put their beliefs to practice and created one of the needed imaginative alternatives to address sexual violence and its root causes.248 Through their experiences, their theories and their practice, PAR argues that:

“RAPE is a social disease and requires a social antidote.”249

244Cannon and Fuller, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 2. 245 In her anthology Imprisoned Intellectuals, Joy James argues that imprisoned intellectuals politics are rooted in the conviction that it is “not just penal sites rife with human rights abuses,” but the United States and its governing institutions at large that need to be transformed.” James, Imprisoned Intellectuals, xiv. 246Prisoners Against Rape, “Prisoners Against Rape,” 45. 247Fuller, “To Rainbow.” 248 Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, "da Silva, Douglass, Wynter,” (Lecture, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Future, Providence, RI, March 7, 2019). 249 Fuller and Cannon, “Capitalist economics breeds,” 9.

William Fuller’s Address

My sisters and brothers at the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence:

I greatly appreciate this opportunity to express my ideas and feelings with you, and hopefully what I have to say will be helpful to this workshop and the fight against oppression. I also wish to extend my gratitude to Loretta Ross, Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. I wanted very much to appear before you personally, but my keepers and their discriminatory practices denied me the privilege, so I come to you via the written word…250

William Fuller addressed the First National Conference on Third World Women and

Violence from within the confines of Lorton. To culminate their August 1980 “anti-rape week,”

Loretta Ross and Nkenge Touré called Third World anti-violence activists from around the country together to “examine rape from the perspective of third world women and her political and social reality.”251 The conference served as a space for people of color involved in the anti-violence movement to envision “a praxis of anti-violence” that, as the Santa Cruz Women Against Rape stated, “stop[ed] supporting the criminal justice system because no mater what our intentions are, the system is racist through and through.”252 Fuller, who was in the midst 16th year in prison at the time, spoke to the the crowd as a self identified “reformed violent and aggressive individual.”253

Though not physically present, Fuller joined the one hundred plus women and men who convened in D.C. through his writing. Conference participants defined a set of short-term goals, which included “to work with men to combat anti-women violence in terms of outreach, public education,

250Fuller, “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence: Working with Men Who Committed,” (Lorton, Virginia: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980), 1. 251 The three-day conference, which ran from August 21-23 1980 included workshops, panels and “technical seminars,” on topics ranging from domestic violence to “third world women and family” to “working with men committing violence.” At the time, the DCRCC was still the only Black woman led RCC in the country. White women who worked at the DCRCC supported with the conference by providing logistical support, child care, and transformation. D.C. Rape Crisis Center, “First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence,” Washington, D.C. August 1980; Valk, Radical Sisters, 183; Loretta J. Ross, Kathy R. Powell, and I Nkenge Touré, “Report on First Third World Conference on Women and Violence,” (Washington D.C.: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980). 252Robin McDuff, Deanne Pernell, and Karen Saunders, Feminists Critique Anti-Rape Movement, Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women, (Washington, D.C.: National Communications Network & Feminist Alliance Against Rape, Summer 1981), 10. 253Fuller, “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence,” 2.

and community organizing.” Seven years before the First National Conference on Third World

Women and Violence, Prisoners Against Rape jump started this conversation through reflecting on their roles in combatting rape and reaching out to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center to do so.254

254Fuller, “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence,” 2.

A Call to Remember Prisoners Against Rape

Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movement pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or powers of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations they sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet, it is precisely these alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change. - Robin D.G. Kelly, Freedom Dreams255

Robin D.G. Kelley’s statement acts as a warning not to judge PAR’s value based on whether they stopped all participants from raping. PAR, like all radical movements, cannot be expected to single handedly destroy the deeply rooted power relations they set out to challenge. There is no way of knowing which, if any, participants in PAR continued to rape, and there are numerous factors beyond the group - including that Prisoners Against Rape worked within the confines of a violent institution - that would impact whether they did. Thus, I do not attempt to analyze whether PAR stopped all members from raping, but instead chose to uplift the impact we know the group had, both for the members and through their intellectual contributions to the anti-violence movement.256

PAR’s work was ahead of its time in numerous ways. Scholars and activists commonly credit

Susan Brownmiller as the first to define rape as a political problem. Brownmiller gained international recognition for changing the way that we, as a society, talk about rape through her 1975 book

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.257 Two years earlier, in a prison in the Virginia suburbs of

D.C., a group of former rapists were talking about rape as a political problem. It was not through reading Brownmiller’s book, but through attending PAR meetings that Nancy Shia learned that rape is not a sex crime, but a power crime, a lesson that has remained with her ever since.258 PAR made profound intellectual contributions that ought to be recognized as such.

255Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2002), ix. 256 It is worth noting, however that Nkenge Touré does believe that Prisoners Against Rape helped educate other people incarcerated at Lorton and gained respect for their work throughout the prisoner. Touré interview. 257Sascha Cohen, “How a Book Changed the Way We Talk About Rape,” Time, October 7, 2015. 258Shia interview.

Honoring Tensions & Sitting with Uncertainty

Neither PAR’s project, nor this recounting of their work are complete. The narrative in these pages, like those in the memories of the people I spoke to, contains gaps, contradictions, and questions unanswered. In her discussion of microhistory, historian Caroline Castiglione argues that fragmentary evidence, such as the evidence that exists about PAR, tempts historians to tell “a story we ourselves wish to hear.”259 However, Castiglione calls historians to resist this urge, to honor the tensions and sit with the uncertainties. Perhaps one day, someone will find answers to the remaining questions. Or, perhaps readers, listeners, activists, scholars, and students can learn to embrace all that there is to learn about and from PAR, even without the comfort of closure. To do so challenges the logic of the academy that pressures academics to create a “totalizing single narrative” - to combine different and divergent stories in a way that privileges the narratives of a few. At times, the the narrators’ stories of PAR diverged from one another, just as their experiences in the group did. I chose to present the different narratives, as opposed to prioritizing one over another, because they show how each individual understood their experiences.

I do not know what happened to Prisoners Against Rape nor to all of the participants in the group. Rolling text at the beginning of Rape Culture proclaims that “since the filming, two of [the] men have been killed, victims of prison violence.” We know that, as early as 1975 when the documentary came out, two men in PAR had died. Despite their efforts to resist the prisons’ oppression, those in PAR could not completely overcome the state sanctioned, institutionalized violence. According to Ricki Brown’s knowledge, James Jenkins is now a pastor in a D.C. church,

Robree Earle died last year from cancer, Donald Luckett passed away, and Aubree Pierson, who he

259Caroline Castiglione, “Cultures of Peoples,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350- 1750: Volume I: Peoples and Place ed. Hamish Scott, (Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2015), 713.

called “Smiley” is a barber in D.C. The fates of Larry Cannon and William Fuller and some of the other men whose writing and work fills these pages remain unknown.

When Loretta Ross left the DCRCC in 1982, Prisoners Against Rape still existed. However, the group of Black women that succeeded Ross and Touré at the DCRCC were much more conservative. They transformed the Center from a space of radical political education into a social service agency. Perhaps this shift impacted the DCRCC’s relationship with PAR. Ross heard a rumor that the relationship between PAR and the DCRCC ended, because a white woman volunteer broke the program rules and boundaries by smuggling goods, like tennis shoes and cigarettes, to the men in prison. Perhaps this story is true and led to the downfall of the program.260

Sam Paige, who survived the violence of the prison, finished his sentence in 1991 and got off of parole in 2010, has a different understanding of the end of Prisoners Against Rape. The group had existed for “a long time” when the prison transferred Paige “behind the wall,” or in other words, put Paige in Maximum Security where he lost access to PAR and other programming. Paige believed that PAR ended, because the Department of Corrections transferred people to different institutions, dividing the group. This correlated with a change in prison administration and a transformation in penal reform policies from one that supported programming to one that favored retribution. According to Paige, the combination of the dispersal of PAR members across the country and the shift in prison administration made Prisoners Against Rape “fade” away. Both

Ross’s and Paige’s theories of PAR’s ending - which are not mutually exclusive - highlight the volatility of the prison and the challenges to sustaining programming in such an environment.261

It is also unclear whether PAR spread to other prisons. In her 1980 “Report on the First

National Conference of Third World Women and Violence,” Loretta Ross states that PAR received

260Ross interview. 261 Paige interview, June 6.

national publicity and that people in other institutions modeled programs after PAR. A group of men incarcerated in Walla Walla Washington founded the group “Let’s Work Together Against

Rape,” but no information explicitly links their work to that of Prisoners Against Rape. Paige explained that people in other prisons wrote to PAR to ask how they could start similar groups.262

Whether these groups materialized is unknown.

What we know for certain, is that from at least 1973-1982, a group incarcerated men at

Lorton prison envisioned and created a model for understanding and addressing sexual violence through radical community education and this, in it of itself, must be recognized.

+ + +

Sam Paige evaluated PAR’s impact by looking to his own experiences, stating: “I’m living proof. I’ve been home since ‘91.” After joining PAR and becoming educated and more honest with himself, Paige learned to view women differently and to engage in struggles for justice. Gary L.

Alston proclaims his “indebtedness” to Cannon and Fuller, for helping him recognize the ways he was “part of the problem and not part of the solution.” PAR allowed Alston to embark on a journey of self-evaluation that led to what he describes as “great, if painful, growth.”263

Neither during nor after her work with PAR did Loretta Ross investigate whether Fuller continued to rape. Fuller showed up to PAR’s meetings each Friday, intellectually thirsty and engaged. While recognizing the possibility that Fuller conned Ross, she did not believe this would make sense. Many other groups in the prison had food and wrote letters to the parole board on behalf of the men, which the DCRCC refused to do. Had he not cared about the subject of PAR,

Fuller could have joined any of these groups. Thus, the most logical answer was that Fuller and the other men chose PAR because they wanted to learn and change.264

262Paige interview, June 6. 263Alston, “Introduction,” 3. 264 Ross interview.

When walking down a street in D.C. about five years after she left the D.C. Rape Crisis, Ross heard a “big booming voice” calling her name. She turned around and saw none other than William

Fuller. Shocked to see him, she did not know whether to run away, but instead chose to stay and talk with him. Fuller told Ross that he received parole and had a job in construction. He thanked her for all of the knowledge she had shared with him and stated that he was “committed to doing the straight and narrow with his life.”265

Her initial fear exemplified that even for Ross, who had worked with Fuller and seen his humanity, the situation remained complicated. As a woman, an anti-violence activist and a survivor,

Ross felt the weight of the violence Fuller committed. She also recognized that he made a bad mistake when he was 17 or 18, for which he felt much remorse. She walked away viewing Fuller as an “example of how we can’t make anybody a disposable person,” as a reminder “that there is a possibility of redemption and restoration.”266

A Call to Remember

When we are not allowed to know the stories of those who came before us, we are forced to labor in the dark. We are forced to re-learn lessons the hard way, stumbling into roadblocks our foremothers, unbeknownst to us, have already mapped. And we are denied the practical hope that comes from knowing that the work we are attempting is possible, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. - Loretta Ross, “Before #Me Too”267

PAR’s work provides a light for current anti-violence struggles. Their story encourages us to ask “how many other groups like PAR existed?;” to consider all of the instances in which individuals and collectives have created liberatory educational spaces in the midst of extreme violence that is

265Ross interview. 266Ross interview. 267 Ross, “Before #Me Too,” 1.

absent from the historiography; to imagine the wealth of knowledge and innovative ideas for how to address violence that exist in our communities, in our memories, and even in our histories.268

PAR’s work teaches us that the trajectory of the antiviolence movement was not inevitable, but constructed. PAR emerged in a unique moment in the history of prisons in the United States. In the aftermath of the 1971 Attica uprising, politicians had two main responses: (1) to push forward a wave of reform bills to “improve” prison conditions or (2) to make sure such an uprising could not happen again through increasingly repressive measures.269 Politicians and the media spread lies about the Black and brown men who participated in the uprising, depicting them and other incarcerated people as “barbarians” who needed to be under the most extreme control and in the long term, the second tactic prevailed.270 By the 1980s, politicians across the political spectrum adopted a “law and order” stance, withdrew support for rehabilitative programming, like education, and passed scores of punitive measures that gave rise to the modern prison-industrial-complex.271

PAR emerged in the fleeting moment of the early 1970s, when education in prison programs were at their height, correctional authorities were more diverse and sympathetic to the needs of incarcerated people, and though flawed and limited, there was a general belief in the framework of rehabilitation. While these reforms likely masked the more deeply rooted punitive changes that were to come, they created a crack through which groups like PAR could emerge. Lorton in the early

1970s looked very different from prisons today - men wore their street clothing, people could leave

268 Contrasting microhistory and biography, historian Jill Lepore argues, “If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual's life and his contribution to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person's life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual's life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture.” Microhistory encourages the writer or reader to think not only about the subject, but about the culture. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History, 88, no. 1 (Jun., 2001), 129-144 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674921. 269 Thompson, Blood in the Water, 561-562. 270Thompson, Blood in the Water, 562. 271According to Heather Ann Thomas, by examining New York prisons three decades after the uprising, we can “just how much worse things became.” Thompson, Blood in the Water, 563 and 565. T.A. Ryan, “Correctional Education,” 61.

the prison on furlough, Loretta Ross could walk into the prison unannounced. This is not to say that

Lorton of the early 1970s was a pleasant or non-repressive place, but to make clear that Prisoners

Against Rape could not exist in the same form in todays’ prisons. In the decades since 1980, the government and corporations have deliberately transformed the prison and the anti-violence movement.

The expanding carceral state brought the anti-violence movement closer into its grasp. By the mid 1980s, the anti-violence movement professionalized, and like the DCRCC, many rape crisis centers transitioned from political centers to “apolitical” service providers. The anti-violence movement further relied on the criminal legal system for financial support and to push forward policies. For example, the watershed Violence Against Women Act of 1994, the first federal legislation focused on violence against women, passed as an addendum to Clinton’s omnibus

Violence Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.272 This very act eliminated the provision of the

1965 Higher Education Act that made incarcerated people eligible for Pell Grants, leading to a dramatic decrease in education programs in prisons. As anti-carceral feminist Mimi E Kim powerfully argues, the anti-violence movement failed to expand options for women, but instead perpetuated a narrowing vision of safety that relies on the state.273 The dominance of white women in the anti-violence movement overpowered the more radical strategies of women of color, including responses to violence that did not rely on the state.274

+ + +

By failing to tell the histories of alternative strategies and groups like Prisoners Against

Rape, we reproduce the power structures that existed in the white women led anti-violence

272Kim, “From carceral feminism to transformative justice,” 223. 273Kim, “From carceral feminism to transformative justice,” 224. 274Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, (New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2012).

100

movement. The work of PAR reminds us that people have always rejected the legal system as the best response to violence and searched for community-based alternatives. PAR teaches us that incarceration is not and never has been the only way to address harm. PAR urges us, like they did to anti-violence activists in the 1970s, to look to alternative ways to address violence, to imagine the role that radical education and consciousness raising can play so that we do not only respond to violence, but prevent it from occurring in the first place.

101

PAR’s Words Resound: “Courts serve neither the victim nor the offender”

In a 1975 Crime and Social Justice article, Prisoners Against Rape proclaimed that “courts serve neither the victim, nor the offender.”275 Over forty years later, conversations about prison abolition have begun to enter into the mainstream, discussed in a New York Times Magazine article featuring

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and recently alluded to in a tweet by sitting congresswoman Representative

Ilhan Omar.276 Often, the first question people ask in response to the idea of prison abolition is,

“but what about the rapists and murders?” PAR’s work is a response to this question and one of the many examples that our movements can and should look to today.

+ + +

In March, 2015, INCITE! Women of Color against Violence celebrated their 50th

Anniversary with a conference in Chicago themed “Beyond State Violence: Inciting Transformative

Possibilities.” Over thirty years after the “First National Conference on Third World Women and

Violence,” more than 2000 people gathered in Chicago to discuss how to end “end colonial, racial and gender based violence” without relying on violent systems of control such as policing and incarceration. The conference began with an opening plenary, during which Yvonne Swan (formerly

Yvonne Wanrow), a native woman incarcerated in 1972 for killing her a man who tried to molest her son was in conversation with Marisa Alexander, Cece McDoland, and Renata Hill, three Black women incarcerated for defending themselves against partners or strangers between 2006-2012.277

For decades, the experiences of women of color, like Wanrow, Alexander, Mcdonald and Hill have

275"Prisoners Against Rape" Crime and Social Justice, (1975), 45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29765937. 276 Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, April 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition- ruth-wilson-gilmore.html; Ilhan Omar, Twitter Post, November 19, 2019, 12:48 p.m, https://twitter.com/Ilhan/status/1196847767764815872. 277 Mimi E. Kim, “From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 27, no. 3, (May 2018), 229.

102

showed that when the state is responsible for “safety,” women of color are not protected. Calling for alternate responses to intimate violence, they discussed the ways that, “courts serve neither the victim nor the offender.”

+ + +

In May 2016, Palo Alto judge Aaron Persky sentenced white Stanford swimmer Brock

Turner to six months in prison for raping Chinese-American Stanford student Chanel Miller. Three months later, the prison released Turner.278 Turner’s experience displays how the United States criminal legal system works to uphold and protect whiteness, all the while criminalizing blackness.

However, Cultural Studies scholar Ashley Noel Mack and and Communication Studies scholar

Bryan J. McCann warn against calls for harsher sentences for Turner or for the impeachment of

Judge Aaron Persky. Mack and McCann argue that such a response is a “White paternalistic impulse” that allows white people present themselves as invested in the experiences of marginalized communities.279 However, such mobilization ultimately emboldens the very carceral system that targets “racialized others and victims of gendered violence” and contributes to the understanding that state violence is the “desirable response to social injustice.”280 Though Turner’s lenient sentencing was very much a function of his privilege and the desire for harsher punishment is understandable, they urge the public to channel rage into thinking of new solutions to violence because, “courts serve neither the victim, nor the offender.”

278 Marcos Barbery, “Op-Ed: Brock Turner’s Sentence Proves Again the Advantage of Being White, Well-off and Educated,” The Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-barbery-stanford-rape- sentence-20160612-snap-story.html; Lisa Ko, “Why it Matters that ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case is Asian- American,” The New York Times, September 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/opinion/chanel-miller- know-my-name.html. 279Ashley Noel Mach and Bryan J McCann, “Recalling Persky: White Rage and Intimate Publicity After Brock Turner,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43 no. 4 (2019), 374. 280Mash & McCann, 378.

103

+ + +

In January of 2017, the same month that proud perpetrator Donald Trump was sworn into office as President of the United States, the state finally released Marissa Alexander from their control after she spent seven years in jail and on house arrest. In 2010, the state arrested Alexander for firing one warning shot after her then estranged husband attacked her. After twelve minutes of deliberation, the state charged Alexander for “aggravated assault,” and sentenced her to twenty years in prison, due Florida’s mandatory minimum sentencing.281 Alexander, like Cyntonia Brown and

Renata Hill, are among the many women of color incarcerated in the past ten years for defending themselves against sexual violence or harassment. 282

From 2013-2017, people throughout the United States mobilized to “Free Marissa Now.” In

2016, Marissa Alexander founded the “Marissa Alexander Justice Project” to provide services that promote unity through the collaboration of social justice, criminal reform and anti-domestic violence movements. In 2015, at the INCITE!’s “Color of Violence” conference, members of the national and Chicago based “Free Marissa” campaign met activists working on other defense campaigns to free incarcerated women, such as “Stand with Nan-Hui” and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Discussing the intersections of “criminalization and surviving domestic and sexual violence,” they decided to form a national organization, which they named “Survived &

Punished.” For the past three years, Survived & Punished has worked to defend criminalized

281 “About Marisa Alexander,” Marissa Alexander Justice Project, Marissa Alexander Justice Project, 2017, https://marissaalexander.org/about/. 282Christine Hauser, “Cyntonia Brown Is Freed From Prison in Tennessee,” The New York Times, August 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/cyntoia-brown-release.html; Nicole Pasulka, "How 4 Gay Black Women Fought Back Against Sexual Harassment — And Landed In Jail,” Code Switch: Race and Identity Remixed, National Public Radio, June 30, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/30/418634390/how-4-gay-black-women- fought-back-against-a-sexual-harasser-and-landed-in-jail.

104

survivors and support efforts to abolish “anti-survivor systems” and build alternate approaches to harm that “prioritize accountable, community-based responses to domestic and sexual violence.”283

Survived & Punished, like Communities Against Rape and Abuse, INCITE!, Northwest Network of

Bi, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse, the Audre Lorde Project, Critical Resistance, Sists II

Sista, and other organizations, search for solutions to gender-based violence that do not bolster the individualism, separation and patriarchy inherent in responses that rely on the prison industrial complex because they recognize that “courts serve neither the victim, nor the offender.”284

+ + +

In 2019, women are the fastest growing populations in jails and in state and federal prisons.

Between 1980 and 2016 the number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by over

700%.285 While constituting only 13% of the United States population, Black women represent 30% of incarcerated women and Latinx women, who comprise 11% of U.S. women, account for 16% of incarcerated women.286 Further, almost 60% of women in state prisons across the country and as many as 94% of certain female prison populations report a history of sexual or physical abuse.287

PAR’s words that “courts serve neither the victim, nor the offender” remain relevant.

+ + +

283“About,” Survived and Punished: Free the Criminalization of Survivors, Allied Media Project, https://survivedandpunished.org/about/. 284Mimi E. Kim, “From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 27, no. 3, May 2018): 219-233. 285“Women in the Criminal Justices System,” Briefing Sheets, Sentencing Project, May 2007 www.sentencingproject.org . 286 “Facts About the Overincarceration of Women in the United States,” ACLU (2017), https://www.aclu.org/other/facts-about-over-incarceration-women-united-states. 287“The Issue,” Still She Rises, 2019, https://www.stillsherises.org/the-issue.

105

Historian Monica Martinez argues that to responsibly attend to histories of violence, the conversation must move beyond “recovery” to acknowledging the “ongoing need for redress.”288

History is important - the histories we know inform what we, as individuals, organizations, and a society view as possible and appropriate responses to violence today. Thus, it is essential that the collective memory of anti-violence activism moves beyond the mainstream “carceral feminism.”

However, the work cannot end with amplifying stories. When conducting interviews for this project,

I asked the narrators if there was anything they wanted to see happen with this research and project.

Sam Paige stated that in the event that someone gets out of prison and commits another violent offense, the response is always “why did the prison let him out?” Paige urges us to instead think of the question, “why didn’t the prison address the problem in the first place?” reframing the conversation from a “bad individual,” to one about a deeply flawed and oppressive society.289 In response to my question, Loretta Ross stated, I’d really like for other people who are doing anti-PIC work to really look at restorative justice models, specifically for rapists and people who commit crimes against women.”

Though they did not use the language of restorative or transformative justice at the time,

Loretta Ross believed that Prisoners Against rape is an early example of such an approach.290

Prisoners Against Rape, serves as an example for activists today to learn from, critique, and follow.

As we listen to and support women of color led organizations like Survived & Punished doing this work, resist the urge to call for stricter punishments that rely on racist criminal legal system and

288Martinez, Monica Muñoz, “Introduction,” in The Injustice Never Leaves You (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), 27. 289 Paige interview. 290Abolitionist activist Mariame Kaba defines transformative justice as “a framework for people to get on a path toward healing and an organizing strategy to get to the root of violence.” Autumn Brown, Mariame Kaba, and adrienne maree brown. “How to Survive the End of the World.” Edited by Zak Rosen. How to Survive the End of the World (blog), November 7, 2018. https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2018/11/7/the-practices-we-need-metoo-and-transformative-justice-part-2. Ross interview.

106

imagine alternative responses to harm that are rooted in community and education, we can hear

PAR’s words that “courts served neither the victim, nor the offender.”

107

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Alston, Gary L. “Introduction.” In William Fuller and Larry Cannon, Capitalist Economics Breeds Rape, Robbery, Murder and All Other Crimes. Lorton Prison, Lorton, Virginia: Prisoners Against Rape 1974.

Brown, Rickey. Interview by author. Via phone. June 19, 2019.

Brown, Roach. Interview by author. Washington, D.C., June 5, 2019.

Cannon, Larry and William Fuller. “Prisoners Against Rape.” Feminist Alliance Against Rape Newsletter, (Sep/Oct 1974).

D.C. Rape Crisis Center, First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence, Washington, D.C., August 1980.

Farmer, Ashley D. Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era. Durham, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Friedman, Deb. “Rape, Racism and Reality.” FAAR & NCN. Washington, D.C., July/August 1978.

Friedman, Deb and Sue Lenaerts, "Can Rapists Be Changed? The Case of William Fuller.” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women. July/August 1979: 18-22.

Fuller, William. “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence: Working with Men Who Committed.” Lorton, Virginia: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980.

Fuller, William. "To Rainbow." Off Our Backs 5, no. 3 (1975): 24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25772194.

Fuller, William and Larry Cannon, "Capitalist Economics Breeds Rape, Robbery, Murder and All Other Crimes,” (Lorton Prison, Lorton, Virginia: Prisoners Against Rape 1974): 1-10

Fuller, William, Larry D. Cannon, Gary L. Alston, James Jenkins, Frankie Allen, Aubrey Pierson, Robree Earle, James Long, Donald Luckett, Nelson Bostic, and Samuel Paige. "Prison Letters." Off Our Backs 5, no. 1 (1975): 25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25772089.

“How to Start a Rape Crisis Center.” Edition 2. Washington, D.C., September 3, 1974.

Kapor Klein, Freada. Interviewed by author. Via email. September 15, 2019.

Larry Cannon v. United States, 645 F.2d 1128 (D.C. Cir. 1981)

Lazarus, Margaret and Renner Wunderlich, Rape Culture, Documentary (1975; Cambridge: Cambridge Documentary Films, 1983), VHS.

“Lorton Inmate Told to Sue D.C. Not U.S,” The Washington Star, Thursday April 2, 1981.

108

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (D.C, Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor): March, 1965, https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Moynihan's%20The%20Negro%20Family.pdf.

Martinez, Monica Muñoz. “Introduction.” In The Injustice Never Leaves You (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Paige, Sam. Interview by author. Via phone. November 2019.

Payne, Reginald “Ramsey.” Interview by Nancy Shia. Lorton Prison Stories Project. June 28, 2013. Transcript and recording.

Powers, Tyrone. Interview by Nancy Shia. Lorton Prison Stories Project. July 5, 2013. Transcript and recording.

"Prisoners Against Rape." Crime and Social Justice, no. 3 (1975): 45-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29765937.

Quinn, Sally. "‘Prisoners Against Rape:’ Trying to Unlock Myths and Images.” Washington Post. June 16, 1975.

Ross, Loretta J. “Black Women: Why Feminism.” D.C., 1981.

Ross, Loretta J., Kathy R. Powell, and I Nkenge Touré, “Report on First Third World Conference on Women and Violence,” (Washington D.C.: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980).

Ross, Loretta. Interview by author. Via phone. February 3, 2019.

Ross, Loretta J. “Rape and Third World Women.” Washington, D.C., August 1980.

Ross, Loretta J. “Rape & Third World Women.” Aegis Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women. August 12, 1982.

Ross, Loretta J “Report From the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence: Working with Minority Men Committing Violence Against Women,” (Washington, D.C.: D.C. Rape Crisis Center, August 1980), 8.

Ross, Loretta. “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project." Interview by Joyce Follet, November 3-5, 2004, December 1-3, 2004, February 4, 2005, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Transcript. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/Ross.pdf (accessed November 23, 2019).

Ruckman, Karen. Interview by Author. Washington, D.C. June 5, 2019.

Shia, Nancy. Interviewed by author. Via phone. February 2019.

Touré, Nkenge. Interview by author. Via phone. May, 9, 2019.

109

William H. Fuller, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee, 407 F.2d 1199 (D.C. Cir. 1969)

Secondary Sources

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. "da Silva, Douglass, Wynter.” Lecture, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Future, Providence, RI, March 7, 2019. Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. "Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture," Lecture, Black Feminism: Roots, Routes, Future, Providence, RI, February 7, 2019.

“About Marisa Alexander.” Marissa Alexander Justice Project. Marissa Alexander Justice Project, 2017. https://marissaalexander.org/about/.

“About.” Survived and Punished: Free the Criminalization of Survivors. Allied Media Project, https://survivedandpunished.org/about/.

Barbery, Marcos. “Op-Ed: Brock Turner’s Sentence Proves Again the Advantage of Being White, Well-off and Educated.” The Los Angeles Times . June 12, 2016. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la- oe-barbery-stanford-rape-sentence-20160612-snap-story.html.

Bennice, Jennifer A. and Patricia A. Resick, “Marital Rape: History, Research, and Practice,” Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 4, no. 3, (July 2003): 228-246.

Berger, Dan. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Justice, Power, and Politics). University of North Carolina, 2016.

Bernstein, Lee. America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York City, New York: Ballantine, 1993.

Campbell Gibson, and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Population Division, Working Paper No. 2, (Washington, D.C.: US Census Bureau, 2005), https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.pdf.

Castiglione, Caroline. “Cultures of Peoples.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350- 1750: Volume I: Peoples and Place ed. Hamish Scott. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2015, 694-719.

Cohen, Sascha. “How a Book Changed the Way We Talk About Rape.” Time, October 7, 2015.

Connel, R.W.l and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masclinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society, 19, no. 6 (Dec, 2005): 829-859, www.jstor.org/stable/27640863

Corrigan, Lisa M. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation.University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

110

D.C. Department of Corrections Facility at Lorton Prison Complex Time Line,” Workhouse Prison Museum at Lorton, accessed November 29, 2019, http://workhousemuseums.org/history/d-c- department-of-corrections-facility-at-lorton-prison-complex-time-line/.

Davis, Angela Y. “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting.” The Black Scholar. 12, no. 6, November/December 1981.

Davis, Sidney. Interview by Nancy Shia. Lorton Prison Stories Project. August 9, 2013. Transcript and recording.

Dowie, Mark, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Stephen Minkin. “The Charge: Gynocide.” Mother Jones, 1979. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1979/11/charge-gynocide/2/.

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. “Book Review: Blood in the Water.” Brennan Center. August 24, 2016, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/book-review-blood-water.

E. Kim, Mimi. “Alternative Interventions to Intimate Violence: Defining Political and Pragmatic Challenges.” In Ptacek, J. (Ed.) Feminism and Restorative Justice. New York City, New York: Oxford Press, 2010, 193 – 217.

E. Kim, Mimi. “From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration,” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 27, no. 3, May 2018): 219-233.

“Facts About the Overincarceration of Women in the United States,” ACLU (2017), https://www.aclu.org/other/facts-about-over-incarceration-women-united-states.

Freedman, Estelle B. Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Garsh, Alison and Ryan Harding. “#MeToo? Legal Discourse and Everyday Responses to Sexual Violence.” Laws 7, no 21 (2018), do:10.3390/laws7020021.

Gruber, Aya. “A ‘Neo-Feminist’ Assessment of Rape and Domestic Violence Law Reform.” Gender Race & Justice, 15, no. 583. (2012), 1-40.

Halberstam, Judith. “An Introduction to Female Masculinity.” In Female Masculinity. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998: 1-43.

Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Hamlin, Françoise. “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed, The Story is Not Finished:’ Coahoma County, Mississippi, Civil Rights, and the Recovery of a History,” Sound Historian, 37-60.

111

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe. 12, no. .2 (June, 2008), 1-14

Hatala, Greg. “Glimpse of History: Uprising in Rahway.” New Jersey.com. November 04, 2016, https://www.nj.com/union/2016/11/glimpse_of_history_uprising_in_rahway.html.

Hauser, Christine. “Cyntonia Brown Is Freed From Prison in Tennessee.” The New York Times. August 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/cyntoia-brown-release.html.

Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016.

“History of the Workhouse Arts Center,” Workhouse Arts Center, November 29, 2019, http://www.workhousearts.org/about/history/.

Hogan, Holly. “Law Reform Efforts: Rape and Sexual Assault in United States of America.” International Models Project on Women’s Rights, 2013. http://www.impowr.org/content/law-reform-effortsrape-and- sexual-assault-united-states-america. hooks, bell. “Understanding Patriarchy. Louisville Anarchist Federation Federation, 2010.

Jackson, George “Toward the United Front” in Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

James, Joy. “Introduction,” Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2002).

Kendi, Ibram X. How To Be an Antiracist. First ed. London, United Kingdom: One World, 2019.

Kilmartin, Christopher. “Multiple Masculinities.” In The Masculine Self, Los Angeles, CA: Sloan Publishing, 2009.

Ko, Lisa. “Why it Matters that ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case is Asian-American.” The New York Times. September 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/opinion/chanel-miller-know- my-name.html.

Kolata, Gina. “The Sad Legacy of the Dalkon Shield.” The New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1987. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/06/magazine/the-sad-legacy-of-the-dalkon-shield.html.

Kushner, Rachel. “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times, April 17, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.

112

Lepore, Jill. “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography.” The Journal of American History. 88, no. 1 (Jun., 2001), 129-144 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674921.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Reprint ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007.

Mach, Ashley Noel and Bryan J McCann. “Recalling Persky: White Rage and Intimate Publicity After Brock Turner.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43, no. 4 (2019), 372-393, doi./doi/10.1177/0196859919867265, 373.

McGuire, Danielle. “A Black Woman’s Body was Never Hers Alone.” In At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Chapter 6. New York City, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011, 191-211.

McDuff, Robin, Deanne Pernell, and Karen Saunders. “Feminists Critique Anti-Rape Movement.” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women. Washington, D.C.: National Communications Network & Feminist Alliance Against Rape, Summer 1981.

Oakey, Mary Hostetler. Journey from the Gallows: Historical Evolution of the Penal Philosophies and Practices in the Nation’s Capital, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988.

O'Donnell, Ian. "PRISON RAPE IN CONTEXT." The British Journal of Criminology 44, no. 2 (2004): 241-55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23638614.

Ong, Amanda. “We Speak the Same Language, We See Through Different Tongues.” OHMA Columbia. October 20, 2019, http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/blog-posts/same-language-different-tongues.

Omar, Ilhan. Twitter Post. November 19, 2019, 12:48 p.m. https://twitter.com/Ilhan/status/1196847767764815872.

Pasulka, Nicole. "How 4 Gay Black Women Fought Back Against Sexual Harassment — And Landed In Jail.” Code Switch: Race and Identity Remixed. National Public Radio. June 30, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/30/418634390/how-4-gay-black-women- fought-back-against-a-sexual-harasser-and-landed-in-jail.

Rampton, Martha. “Four Waves of Feminism.” Pacific Magazine, 2008.

Richie, Beth E. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York City, NY: NYU Press, 2012.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body:Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York City, New York: Random House, 1997.

Ross, Loretta J. Before #Me Too: Black Women in the Anti-Rape Movement in Washington, DC in the 1970s. October 2018.

113

Rothman, Lily. “When Spousal Rape First Became a Crime in the U.S.” Time. July, 28, 2015 https://time.com/3975175/spousal-rape-case-history/.

Ryan, T.A. “Correctional Education: Past is Prologue to the Future.” Journal of Correctional Education (1974–). 46. no. 2 (June 1995), 60-65.

Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Tang, Joanne. “The old Lorton, Virginia prison is being turned into homes. Here’s its fascinating story.” Greater Greater Washington. September 21, 2019, https://ggwash.org/view/69004/this-old-lorton- virginia-prison-has-now-become-housing

Tatum, HJ, FH Schmidt, D Phillips, M McCarty, and WM O'Leary, “The Dalkon Shield Controversy: Structural and Bacteriological Studies of IUD Tails,” JAMA 7, 231(1975): 711–717. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1975.03240190015009

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. New York City, New York: Pantheon 2016.

Thuma, Emily. "Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism." Women's Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3/4 (2015): 52-71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43958549.

Trouillot, Michel-Ralph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. 2nd Revised ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2012.

U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning, William Fuller’s Statement Before the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning, 95th Congress 2nd session, 1978.

Valk, Anne M. Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Women in American History). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

“What is the PIC? What is Abolition?,” Critical Resistance, Critical Resistance. November 26, 2019. http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.

Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

“Women in the Criminal Justices System,” Briefing Sheets, Sentencing Project, May 2007 www.sentencingproject.org .

114