Joan Little
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Joan or Jo Ann Little (born 1953) was an African American woman whose trial for the 1974 murder of a white prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, became a cause célèbre of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-death penalty movements.
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[edit] Early life
Little was born in Washington, rural North Carolina. Her mother was a "religious fanatic" who frequently consulted "root workers", or voodoo folk herbalists. Her father was a security guard in Brooklyn, New York. She was the eldest of six blood siblings, and was forced to care for her four half-siblings as well. This life seemed not to please the young girl, who took to running away and hiding. She soon fell in with an older crowd who supported her rebellion. Her social worker, Jean Nelson, who once called her an "escape artist", also noted her intelligence, telling her "some day you could do a lot of good." Little lost her virginity at the age of fourteen, and contracted syphilis at fifteen. As a teenager, she worked in the tobacco industry and as a waitress. In 1973, she went to work with a sheetrock finisher named Julius Rogers, a man 20 years her senior. With Rogers she went to Greenville, and later to Chapel Hill, where she soon became entangled with the law.
[edit] Involvement with the criminal justice system
Little's problems with the law began early, in 1968, when her mother Jessie Williams asked a judge to declare her truant and to commit her to the Dobbs Farm Training School in Kinston, North Carolina. When she went to the hospital to take the school's required Wassermann test, she feigned suicide and later threatened a social worker with a pair of surgical scissors. After a few weeks at Dobbs, Little left, walking to a nearby service station where she and a friend told a motorist that they had been abandoned there by their boyfriends, and asked him for a ride to Washington, which he obliged them. Her mother realized she was not released in accordance with standard procedures, and sought to normalize her daughter's situation by requesting an official release and sending Joan to live with relatives in Philadelphia. There, she enrolled in and graduated from Simon Gratz High School. Three weeks after graduating, she developed a thyroid problem, and had to return to North Carolina for an operation at Duke University Medical Center. At the end of 1973 in Jacksonville, she was charged with the possession of stolen goods and the possession of a sawed-off shotgun belonging to an acquaintance. She was not prosecuted. On January 3, 1974, she was arrested in Washington, North Carolina for shoplifting. The charge was likewise dismissed. Six days later, she was again arrested for shoplifting, a charge for which she was given a suspended six-month sentence. Six days after her release, she was again arrested and charged with three separate counts of felony breaking and entering and larceny. Her trial was set for June 3, when she, Julius Rogers, and two juveniles, Brenda Ann McCray and Mary Snipes, returned to Washington. In an interesting turn of events, the juveniles ended up in official custody during the that same visit, during which time they were sexually harassed by a guard who offered them freedom if one of them would "give him some". Joan Little was convicted on June 4, 1974, and requested to remain in Beaufort County Jail rather than be transferred to the Correctional Facility for Women in Raleigh, as would have been customary. Remaining in Washington, she claimed, would allow her to remain close to home, where she could work on raising her bond.
[edit] The murder
On August 27, 1974, a police officer delivering a drunken prisoner to the jail discovered the body of Clarence Alligood naked from the waist down on Joan Little's bunk. Alligood had suffered stab wounds to the temple and the heart area from an icepick. Semen was discovered on his leg. Little, the only female prisoner at the jail at the time, was missing.
[edit] The case
Little turned herself in to North Carolina authorities more than one week later, claiming that she was defending herself against sexual assault. She was immediately charged with first-degree murder, which, had she been convicted, would have carried an automatic capital sentence. The capital status of the case, and the fact that North Carolina was home to over one third of all the death penalty cases in the United States, brought its attention to anti-death penalty and prisoners' rights advocates. The racial component attracted the attention of civil rights activists, and the gender issues did the same for feminists. The combination of these three factors, along with a sophisticated fundraising tactic, allowed the Joan Little Defense Committee to raise over $350,000, which was enough to hire the experienced defense attorney Jerry Paul. The question of whether or not Blacks truly had equality in Jimmy Carter's New South caught the attention of the national media. Paul played on the mass media's tendency to simplify and stereotype complex issues by playing up the case of a poor Black woman persecuted by an uncompassionate, racist system. He successfully petitioned to have the trial moved to Raleigh, which had a slightly more liberal jury pool, and is reported to have hired an astrologist as a consultant during the jury-selection portion of the trial. He also made liberal use of the jury's Southern Christian sympathies, characterizing his client as a religious woman who found solace in the Bible in times of trouble. The prosecution contended that Little was a lewd woman who seduced Alligood only to murder him to enable her escape. They attempted to play upon the racial prejudices of the jury. At that time the stereotype of the black woman as an immoral woman or prostitute was still common. They introduced Little's medical records as evidence, but the documents were barred from presentation to the jury. The combination of a sympathetic jury, an impressive defense fund, and Little's status as a cause célèbre won her acquittal on August 14, 1975.
[edit] Personality
The nature of Little's personality has never been clear. While it is obvious that she had problems with the law, it is difficult to gauge to what extent those difficulties were related to poverty and racial discrimination, and might have equally affected any of her peers, and the extent to which her individuality played into the development of her story. The defense used this ambiguity to his client's advantage, and Little herself never revealed her personality, the historian of her case describing her contemporary interviews as "always unsatisfying". The same writer argued that the ambiguity of her name: "Joan" on her birth certificate, "Jo Ann" when verbally addressed, was a metaphor for this vague personality. At any rate, she seems to have been quite shrewd, carefully guarding her public image while a public figure, and quietly dropping out of sight after her acquittal, not even making her scheduled Today Show interview.
[edit] Effects
Her trial, occurring at the height of the feminist and black power movements, focussed national attention to the issues of a woman's right to defend herself from rape, the validity of capital punishment (especially in rape cases), racial and sexual inequality in the criminal justice system, and the rights of prisoners in general. It also occasioned the publication of a book by a member of the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wrote a novelistic account of the crime and the trial, with each chapter concentrating on a different "character". Little also authored a poem entitled "I Am Somebody", which was incorporated into a mural in San Diego's Chicano Park by the female muralists of Sacramento's Royal Chicano Air Force.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- Reston, James. Innocence of Joan Little: A Southern Mystery (1977). New York: New York Times Books. ISBN 0-595-15323-2
- The James Reston collection of Joan Little trial materials at the University of North Carolina.
