Black Women's Anti-Rape Activism

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. As a word of warning before I begin, we will be discussing sexual violence in this episode, and it may not be appropriate for all audiences. In the late 1960s, during the height of the Women's Liberation Movement, a formal feminist movement against sexual violence materialized. It was not the first time that women had challenged sexual violence, but the consciousness raising sessions of this iteration helped women to understand the pervasiveness of the threat and to tie it to the patriarchal structure of society. In addition to speak outs and even anti-rape squads, one key development of this movement was the creation of feminist rape crisis centers. The first of these opened in 1972 in Berkeley, California and in Washington, DC. At the DC Center, Elizabeth Ann O'Sullivan wrote a manual called, "How to Start a Rape Crisis Center," that was distributed around the country. And by 1980, there were nearly 500 such centers around the United States. At the same time, Black feminist organizations were developing around the country, including the Third World Women's Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Collective, and the National Alliance of Black Feminists. Their leaders came out of Black liberation organizations, where they often experienced sexism, but they also found that majority white feminist organizations did not speak to their experiences either. One way in which feminist rape crisis centers did not respond to the needs of Black women was the extent to which they partnered with the criminal justice system. On June 19, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, as part of his War on Crime, signed into law the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, LEAA, within the Department of Justice. The LEAA provided badly needed grants for rape crisis centers, but it did so with the explicit intention of increasing police reporting by victims of sexual violence. One recipient of LEAA money was the Philadelphia Women Organizing Against Rape, WOAR, who noted in their 1975 grant application, "If victims of rape receive legal information, are encouraged to cooperate with police and are offered court accompaniment, an increase in the number of women who prosecute is likely."  At the same time, WOAR used that grant funding to hire Lynn Moncrief as the Outreach Coordinator for the Philadelphia area. Moncrief, a radical Black feminist, did not prioritize increasing reporting rates. Instead, she focused on building trust between the rape crisis centers and Black Philadelphians, arguing that to meet the needs of the terrified women of the city, working on rape prevention was imperative. She supported women who wanted to report their assaults to the police, but she knew that Black victims who were well aware of the abuses they may suffer at the hands of the criminal justice system, often had good reason to avoid reporting. In 1975, over the veto of President Gerald Ford, Congress passed the Health Revenue Sharing and Services Act, which established the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape, NCPCR, as a division within the National Institute of Mental Health. Like the LEAA, the NCPCR allocated grants, but its grants went to individual researchers who were studying the causes and occurrences of sexual violence in the US, and who were then recommending policy changes. In April, 1977, the NCPCR convened a conference to bring together researchers and grassroots anti-rape organizers, with the theme of Special Populations. African Americans, one of the designated special populations, noted at the conference that the few research projects funded by the agency that were actually looking at Black women's experiences were all conducted by white researchers, and that no Black researchers were funded. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was abolished in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned on a promise to reduce the size of the federal government. In 1982, Reagan established a task force on victims of crime. One of the task force's recommendations led to Congress passing the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA in 1984, which created a Crime Victims Fund. VOCA did provide limited funding to rape crisis centers, but only for the purposes of helping victims promptly report their assaults to the police. In order for a victim to be eligible for compensation through the fund, they not only had to report quickly, but they also could not have any contributory misconduct that may have instigated the crime. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Bill Clinton. The 356 page bill was one of the largest crime bills in the history of the country, and it provided $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and additional funding for the hiring of 100,000 new police officers. Title IV of the bill was the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 or VAWA, which provided $1.6 billion over six years toward maintaining services for rape and domestic violence survivors. Again, the law focused on prosecution in conjunction with the increased spending on incarceration. Congress has reauthorized VAWA four times since it initially passed, most recently in March of 2022. There are an estimated 1200 rape crisis centers still operating in the United States today, mostly in partnership with the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, RAINN, the largest nonprofit anti- sexual assault organization in the United States, which also operates a National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner, Assistant Professor of History at Mercy University in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and author of, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women's Anti- Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime."

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:49  
Hi, Caitlin, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  9:52  
Oh, thank you for having me. This is wonderful. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:55  
I want to start by asking just a little bit about how you got into this research. I think this book comes out of your dissertation, so you know sort of what, what got you started on this and motivated you to write this?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  10:07  
Certainly. So like many academics, I took a course that kind of changed my life when I was an undergraduate. And that course was at my alma mater, the College of New Jersey, and it was a course on US women's history, which I was a history major. I wasn't completely sure what I was going to do with that degree at the time that I was taking the course, but within that course, we were led to read what, at the time was a brand new book by Danielle McGuire, "At the Dark End of the Street," which is an absolutely phenomenal, pathbreaking book that really reframes the entire Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Black freedom struggle, arguing that we need to rethink that entire movement with sexual violence, specifically sexual violence committed by white men against Black women in the Jim Crow South at the center of our understanding of the Black freedom struggle and how bodily integrity was really a foundation for citizenship for so many African American women, and remained so through the 20th century. And reading that book completely like rocked my world, completely had me rethinking the ways that I understood the intersection of race, gender and violence in the American past. As an undergraduate student, I was involved in anti- violence organizing on campus, and it got me thinking more broadly about the history of African American women responding to sexual violence, organizing against sexual violence, testifying publicly about that sexual violence. And around the same time that this was going on intellectually for me, we were also starting to see a kind of resurgence of campus activism around Black Lives Matter. I might be dating myself a little bit by the events that I'm pinning to my undergraduate education, but that's all right, not embarrassed, which also brought to that same campus all of these new conversations about the roles of law enforcement as a perpetrator of violence for communities of color and not a reliable arbiter for safety for many women of color, African American women in particular. And those two conversations happening simultaneously in the classroom about this history of Black women's organizing, plus this broader context of BLM, kind of that first crest of BLM really got me thinking about where, where are the, where are the questionable areas, where were the, you know, points of contradiction around Black women's organizing against sexual violence, because we knew, from my research, I knew from what I was reading, that they were there. But it really led me to, how did they navigate that incredibly complicated relationship. How do you fight for Black women's sexual defense and interact with a system that is arrayed to, at best, dismiss violence against your body and at worst, actively endanger the community in which you live? So that got me looking into graduate school where I can apply that question to the archive and to oral histories, and that became the subject of my dissertation, which also happened to be researched and written around the same time, the first crest of "me too," which also added a new sort of context for thinking about the ways in which American society normalizes, not just sexual violence, but also normalizes like, you know, certain formulaic, let's say, responses to sexual violence that many of the women who I was interviewing for the project had a lot to say about. So I began with a real interest in the history of African American women, and it really kind of was cross cut by these larger social and political contexts that I was living through at the time. And I was grateful to find a graduate program that encouraged me really to investigate this question in light of these movements.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:18  
Yeah, you've mentioned now, talking to people, interviewing people. Could you talk a little bit about what types of research went into this book, both methodology and the sources that you were using?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  14:33  
Certainly, so like any graduate student in a history PhD program, I was completing mine at Rutgers University, fantastic place to do any kind of research that relates to the history of race and gender in the United States. The actual research began really in the archive, and particularly in archives that I felt had not been utilized quite as much as they could have been.  So my first step was sort of going into archives that were really centered on women's history, that had a lot of robust collections related to the history of feminist activism in the United States, which would then lead me to feminist organizations who were involved in the movements against gender violence of the 60s and 70s. And that got me in communication with organizations, or at least with their archival traces that were involved in fighting against sexual violence in different locales throughout the United States, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, the Bay Area in California, Chicago, Atlanta, to name a few of the places that pop up in the book. And I employed a kind of reading against the grain tactic to look for, where are the African American women who are involved within these organizations, and oftentimes they did not represent the majority of the organization. There were a few times that they did in the case of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network, that was the case, but in many organizations that I was investigating, like, say, Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape, they were not the majority, and the way that they were really visible to me In the archival record was through looking at smaller caucuses and organizations that like within the organization, kind of sifting for clues of where Black women are within these organizations. So that led me to sort of be able to pinpoint some African American women who were involved in what presented themselves as feminist anti-rape organizations or feminist rape crisis centers, and I was able to begin conversations with them through oral histories, tracking them down in order to expand on the pretty small archival traces that they left behind. So that was the first way to kind of get at these figures who are relatively hidden within the histories of this movement. And in my conversations with those women, I quickly realized that in order to really get at African American Women's anti-rape and anti-violence organizing, I had to look beyond the feminist movement against sexual violence, because, in fact, and we really know this from the robust historical record, from all the literature that's come out for many, many years, that lots of African American women were involved in organizing against rape, though not necessarily under organizations that called themselves rape crisis centers. Many did, but there was still this kind of untapped area where I could get to Black women's anti-rape activism and politics that wouldn't be found in those archival traces. So that's what led me to other organizations like the National Black Women's Health Project. Led me to a couple of different places, even the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network I sort of found as a backward way from other organizations that were in contact with them that were rape crisis centers. So it required kind of a shifting of my terms, and really to order capture all of the Black women's organizing that was going on around sexual violence. And then the third component of how I got to a lot of these women, and as I said, before, oral histories were really necessary and essential for countering some of these archival erasures. Much of it was through word of mouth, going person by person, so to speak. I'd get in contact with one individual, let's say Wadiyah Nelson, who was a Black woman volunteer with Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape. She then had, through her own network of contacts, she could connect me with other Black women who were working in Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape roughly around the same time that she was like Deborah Johnson, like Joan Ashton Fry. And it was through this, almost like a game of hopscotch, I was able to sort of go bit by bit to kind of build out this dispersed network of Black women who were involved in anti-rape organizing, who weren't just kind of sitting at the top of the archival documents that I was looking at. Also sifting through a lot of feminist publications that sort of painstaking work, did turn up a few names of African American women who were and Black women who were involved in the feminist movement. And that was truly some painstaking work of just sometimes you would simply have a name to go off of, and I'd be turning to the internet or turning to Facebook in order to get a sense of who they were and where they were. And sometimes it was successful. Sometimes it wasn't. I did run into some dead ends when it came to identifying some of these women, women who had either passed away, or simply were not online and couldn't really be accessed in any reliable way. So the sum total of the interviews that are in this project is, I would say, a pretty modest fraction of the contacts that I attempted to initiate for this project.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:21  
So as we get into the 60s and 70s, and these organizations that you mentioned start to come about, like Women Organizing Against Rape, things like that, what are the ways in which these organizations, as they are developing, aren't always responding to the needs of Black women, aren't engaging with the kinds of ways that Black women have always been fighting back against sexual and rape?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  20:48  
Particularly within the feminist movement against sexual violence, which is itself an outgrowth of the second wave of the women's liberation movement, as we refer to it in the United States, so we're looking at the late 60s through the 1970s, really the physical kind of backbone of this movement are rape crisis centers, which are still, you know, a permanent feature of our landscape to this day. They still exist and are really just kind of the points of organizing for women who want to advocate for women who have been sexually assaulted, assaulted, get them the services that they need, and also, if they so choose, give them avenues of recourse, whether through the criminal justice system or elsewhere. We're sort of familiar with the story, I think, of how many organizations that are born out of this organizing ferment of the late 60s through the 70s, sometimes the word like declension narrative is used to describe this, but there does seem to be this trajectory whereby as organizations that begin in a pretty radical grassroots place grow, the demands placed upon them mushroom because they're serving a very real need. They have to hunt for funding. They have to be able to, you know, pay people to be present full time, to keep the lights on, to have space in order to meet in. Those costs can mushroom very quickly. And for many such groups, the the obvious defense here is to seek grants that are being offered to support the work that they are doing. And at this time, most notably, in the 1970s the most reliable source of these fundings and grants comes from the state, whether that's from the municipal governments, or whether that's from state or federal level agencies. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration is probably the most famous of these. So on the one hand, this growth of these movements frequently leads to some level of institutionalization based on their seeking of funding, but that funding typically comes with strings attached. That funding typically or often narrows the scope of activism that is permissible or feasible for these organizations. And in the case of the feminist movement against sexual violence, where this really became a rub was the extent to which ensuring the longevity of feminist rape crisis centers typically required them to seek funding that would legitimize them in the eyes of law enforcement, and so their funding typically required or rewarded very close cooperation with criminal justice entities. We see this very clearly in Philadelphia when they are on the receiving end of grants from the Governor's Justice Commission of Pennsylvania, which is the state level representative of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. So we see this kind of clash in which feminist anti-rape organizations who have a very specific framework for approaching sexual violence, one that sees sexual violence as a manifestation of patriarchy and requires a lot of kind of short term amelioration, but in the long term really requires an uprooting of a patriarchally sanctioned rape culture. Their funders, who are very closely connected to law enforcement, are really not interested in that, are really not approaching sexual violence as a manifestation of patriarchy. They're approaching it as a crime, a violent crime, basically like any others that can be solved through the same toolkit as other crimes, or so they think, through more aggressive policing and prosecution and so on. And I think to be clear, for this is initially a problem for many women within the feminist movement against sexual violence, irrespective of their race. Many of them, even white participants, they came out of New Left organizations. They did have a very real sympathy for the Black freedom struggle, and had a very real skepticism of law enforcement that was informed not only by their other activist experiences, but was informed by their notion of law enforcement as being very patriarchal in its orientation and not interested in surrendering the privileges of masculinity. So that is the first component of it, that many, even white women within the feminist movement against sexual violence, acknowledge that this is a contradiction. But as time goes on, as funding sources evaporate, many kind of justify, whether sincerely or out of expediency, that well, we need to forge these partnerships with law enforcement for funding reasons in order to have a real, immediate impact on rates of sexual violence. It's here that many African American women who were involved in the movement who already would take some issue with the extent to which the movement seemed to really be organized around and prioritize a universal woman whose experiences were much closer to that of a white, middle class woman. This is where it really becomes kind of, this tension point of this tipping point where we cannot completely surrender our movements to working hand in glove with law enforcement, because law enforcement is a source of violence to the women we serve. This became really apparent in one anecdote that was shared with me from a woman who I interviewed for the project. This is Phyllis Pennese, who was deeply involved with a group called Rape Victim Advocates in Chicago, and would go on to be a director of the Chicago Sexual Assault Services Network. But before she had arrived at CSASM and she was still working with RVA, she recalls at one point in time she was called to escort, in her capacity as a volunteer, a woman who had been sexually assaulted, African American woman in Chicago. This is in the late 1970s, she didn't provide an exact year, and provided her with an escort to the police station because she wanted to identify her assailant within a police lineup. She was following all the steps filing a police report. In fact, she still had her assailants blood on her clothing. This is how close the actual assault was to her attempts to report and follow through with an investigation. And Phyllis Pennese tells me that she is stunned when officers come into the room in her words, bright eyed and elated because they were going to make an arrest of her, specifically the woman that she was escorting. Why? Because she had an outstanding warrant for prostitution. So that was this kind of flashpoint moment for Phyllis Pennese, when she realized just how untrustworthy and how non-viable law enforcement was as an antidote to the gender violence that Black women experienced. And that sort of realization, that frustration is repeated frequently throughout the text, and there were many attempts by Black women who were involved in the feminist movement against sexual violence to communicate this contradiction to their colleagues with kind of halting success, and that's really what leads many of them to sort of adopt alternative forms of anti-rape advocacy to adapt it to this reality, whether that meant working kind of subversively within the feminist movement against sexual violence or departing from it completely in order to operate in parallel organizations. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:56  
 You were just talking about some of these alternative methods. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on the strategies that the Black women in the movement were using to either create a more supportive environment within one of these systems or to move outside some of these it's moved outside some of like the rape crisis center model.

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  29:21  
There were really three methods that I saw through the course of my research, African American women turning to in order to embark on an anti-rape politics that really centers the experiences of Black women. And I saw it unfold in essentially three ways, or three similar strategies, if we will. So the first was really what I observed within among Black women who remained within the feminist movement against sexual violence, who were active within rape crisis centers, and the word that I would best use to describe their tactics was that of subversion. These were women who looked to the feminist rape crisis centers that they were working within noticing how deep their co-optation had run through funding arrangements that really compelled them to direct the women that they served to the police and essentially deciding that we're not going to abide strictly by what our funders tell us do, this impulse to report or this requirement to report. We are not going to make that the center of our activism here. And this is definitely expressed most clearly by the Third World Caucus of Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape, which represented all non-white women within the organization, but was overwhelmingly African American women who really decide that and speak vocally back to the white leadership of the organization that we are not going to require any woman whom we serve to report her assault. We won't ban her from reporting either, but that should not be the automatic response to a woman who comes to us seeking help, because we may end up putting her in harm's way by accident. And instead, they dedicate much of their energies towards sort of preventative community organization and community education work. And this is not really anything new within the broader history of African American women. Long before there was a National Black Feminist organizations, we see groups of Black women who really take up the mantle of community education to try to mitigate the effects of white supremacy, mitigate the events of inter-communal violence. So they dedicate most of their time and resources to going out into the communities of North and West Philadelphia to really call in communities in a way that was accessible to challenge prevailing myths that allowed sexual violence to flourish, and in the long term, connect women to supportive counseling resources led by Black women that could provide a mode of healing that did not begin and end with we're going to take you to the police station to file a report. So the subversion within an organization that's otherwise very committed to working hand in glove with law enforcement was one way. A second way that I noted within the text is what I would call diversion, meaning that African American women would sort of leave feminist rape crisis centers, or explicitly the physical space of the rape crisis center, and decide we're going to carry out our anti-rape advocacy, our community education, our care work in spaces separate from the feminist rape crisis center. In the case of the DC RCC or the Washington DC Rape Crisis Center, we see this most clearly in the school program in Washington DC, the child sex abuse prevention education that ran for decades in the Washington DC public schools. Another I think, more explicit form of diversion of moving Black women's anti-rape advocacy out of the rape crisis center and into other organizations that are more proximate to Black communities is in Chicago with the Sexual Assault Services Network, where they were going to place Black women social work professionals or mental health care professionals in social work organizations already in Chicago who could be a resource for providing that emotional care, that supportive care for women who came into these organizations having suffered sexual assault, who maybe came to that organization for something else, whether that was a daytime shelter for unhoused people, whether that was a community mental health center. The third real method that I see a sort of outright resistance to national efforts to expand the carceral co-optation of the feminist movement against sexual violence, speaking directly back to efforts to really respond to sexual violence by simply invigorating and expanding law enforcement operations. And we see that most clearly with the National Black Women's Health Project, which would later be known as the Black Women's Health Imperative. They start out with diversion as their tactic. They are not a feminist rape crisis center by any stretch, when they are headquartered in Atlanta, but they are through their self help programming, routinely addressing sexual violence. It comes up over and over again in providing comfort and resources to Black women in Atlanta who have been sexually assaulted, and really approaching it from that perspective of sexual violence is a public health issue for Black women. As Byllye Avery, the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, put it, "When we take our shoes off for self help, the first thing we cry about is violence." So it was abundantly clear to her that violence against Black women is an enormous Black women's health issue. So they begin with diversion, and as the National Black Women's Health Project migrates towards more policy making and commentary, they're one of the few women's organizations that speak in any kind of critical fashion towards the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The reason being, it is Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 which was an enormous contributor to the growth of policing and prisons in the United States in the late 1990s. It has been difficult to find another women's organization that spoke with any critical eye towards the Violence Against Women Act, and explicitly for the reasons that The Violence Against Women Act, although it would provide a fairly reliable conduit of federal funds to organizations that dealt with gender violence, the National Black Women's Health Project knew from their experience that this money is going to solely approach gender violence as an issue of crime in ways that are not responsive to the nuances of Black women's troubled relationship with law enforcement and how unreliable they are as an arbiter of women's safety. So that triad of subversion, diversion and resistance, sort of became this broader arc of my research and the book project, which also coincided with, as I mentioned before, I was doing a lot of this research in the thick of "me too." So that also seems to give me this insight that, in fact, there are women who are speaking, Black women, no less, who are speaking very critically about law enforcement centric approaches to sexual violence well before we kind of arrive at the backlash of "me too," through like 2019, into 2020.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:36  
I've asked guests this before, but it seems relevant for you as well. How do you approach researching issues that are so emotionally difficult, so fraught, you know, there's a lot of trauma that you're experiencing in the archives and in the oral histories. So what, what is your approach, or your your way of sort of protecting yourself as researcher and thinking about that?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  38:03  
Yeah, that is a really important question to cover. One way that I have coped with the enormous amount of trauma that is spilled out through the pages of the archives comes down to a question of methods in some way. And it was something I was deeply wary about when I was working on kind of the archival research portion of this of this book, of his dissertation, and later this book, that to what extent can I tell this story without recapitulating the traumas that the women on these pages have endured? And relatedly, how do I preserve my own well being as I'm kind of wading through these horrific acts of violence day in and day out?. How do you not become desensitized to it? And really it comes down to the oral histories that I was conducting with the women who were involved in these projects. Speaking with them about their lives and activisms, initially, I was quite concerned that because the subject matter was so sensitive and potentially triggering, that I wouldn't be able to get anyone to talk to me, that they would not be interested in living through that again. And while that certainly happened with some, I was blown away by the extent to which the women who I reached out to were very insistent that they wanted to talk to me, even as a cold call researcher. Some of these interviews that I'm doing in the thick of the pandemic are taking place over zoom or over phone. Some of them I'm not able to even meet face to face in order to have these conversations. And, what happened in those conversations is I found myself inspired by their examples, where for them speaking about not just what happened to them and women they know, but what they did about it and how it changed the trajectory of their life. So many of them related to this idea of I found myself within, you know, these movements and these spaces because of what had happened to me and not wanting it to happen to others. And in that way, I was able to make meaning out of this traumatic occurrence. So for me, a priority within the book was to really spotlight those women, their stories, their testimonies, so that the assault of Black women would not just remain a bloody mark on a page. That there's trauma here, no doubt. There's suffering here, absolutely, but there's also it testified to a certain resilience of the human spirit. And I mentioned earlier that many of these conversations were occurring around the time that the first iteration of "me too" was gaining traction. And many of them looked around and because of the backlash to women speaking about the pervasiveness of sexual assault, felt more compelled to tell their stories. So in some ways, I benefited from a social and political context that really compelled many survivors to speak who otherwise may not have, but more broadly, those examples of resistance, of speaking about traumatic lives, of speaking about suffering, provided certainly not a salve or a balm for what I was encountering in the archive, but made me realize how important it was to tell these stories anyway, to make sure that they got out there with that additional human context of what did the person do after they suffered through being assaulted.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:16  
The book is coming out soon, and I would like listeners to know how they can read these really important stories. Can you tell them how they can get a copy of the book?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  42:27  
Absolutely. So the book is, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women's Anti- Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime," and it is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press starting on September 16, 2025. So it can be ordered there or anywhere that you buy books.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:46  
 Is there anything else that you want to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  42:51  
I think it's and it's something that I've been thinking about, the extent to which care is really a major thematic and theoretical through line of this book. At one point, when I was thinking about framing the book and writing it, how I was going to go from a dissertation to a full monograph that somebody might actually want to read, and and I was thinking about, how do I encapsulate the interventions of these women in a single sentence? And I ended up with this sticky note that I still keep on my desk and or near it when I'm thinking about the book project. And that is that care is the opposite of control. It's one thing to tell the stories of the ways in which a state that is increasingly concerned with controlling crime through the violent capacities of law enforcement extend their reach into certain movements, and it's important to spotlight how certain individuals within their organizations push back against these attempts to expand the reach of the carceral state, or force things onto the terrain of the carceral state. But what brought me back to this idea of care is that so many of the Black women who are centered in this book, they're not who you would think of as anti-carceral warriors, right? They are not actively and vocally protesting in public everything that police and prisons are doing, and some of them would not even describe themselves as, say, prison abolitionists. They they kind of bristled at that language when we were discussing it during many of my interviews. But what I realized in my conversations with them is that their way of resisting carceral co-optation was not necessarily just opposing the carceral state, but it was about providing care to people whom the state had deemed unworthy of care. And I found it really necessary and fruitful to think about the ways that very, I don't want to say, basic, but very mundane acts of care can stand athwart violent attempts to enact control. And although these are not as spectacularly visible in the archival record, I think that they're important to bring to the surface. And I think it holds some important lessons for how we deal with all of the crises that are currently befalling just about everybody in the United States in the present day, that as extant systems become increasingly more punitive and violent, I think that the opportunity to care for those deemed unworthy of care is going to become an increasingly profound act. That is something that I learned from the women of this book, and it's something that I hope others can feel moved to do as they read this book and others like it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  46:23  
Thank you so much for writing this book and for speaking with me.

Dr. Caitlin Reed Wiesner  46:28  
Oh, absolutely. The pleasure was all mine. 

Teddy  47:01  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistoryPodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistoryPodcast com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!