Immense gratitude for the generative and multidimensional feedback that I received on this article from Micah Jones, Teona Williams, Garrett Felber, Emma Calabrese, and the peer reviewers. I am also thankful for Crystal Feimster’s support and incisive questions about the petitions written by incarcerated women. This work was funded by the Center for Engaged Scholarship; the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
- “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934,” box SG17647, folder “Correspondence with Warden 1934,” Alabama Department of Corrections and Institutions Administrative Correspondence, 1909–1947, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama (hereafter cited as Administrative Correspondence).
- “Letter from L. D. Carlton to Hamp Draper, January 25, 1928,” box SG17646, folder “Escapes and Recaptures, 1923–1931,” Administrative Correspondence; “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934”; “Letter from George P. Walls, Paul King, and [?] to W. M. Feagin, July 20, 1934,” box SG17647, folder “Correspondence with Warden 1934,” Administrative Correspondence. For segregation of prison labor assignments, see “Report of Prison Labor Assignment, Creditable to Operations at this Prison for November 1931,” box SG17646, folder “Correspondence with Warden, 1931,” Administrative Correspondence.
- Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis, “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880–1940,” American Historical Review91, no. 2 (April 1986): 245–286; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 54–55, 69–70.
- “Letter from George P. Walls”; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (September 1986): 366. For literature on prison organizing traditions, see Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996); Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 15–45; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage Books, 2016); Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, “Organized Inside and Out: The Angola Special Civics Project and the Crisis of Mass Incarceration,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 15, no. 3 (2013): 199–217; Mike Elk, “The Next Step for Organized Labor? People in Prison,” Nation, July 11, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-next-step-for-organized-labor-people-in-prison/ ; Kim Kelly, “How the Ongoing Prison Strike Is Connected to the Labor Movement,” TeenVogue, September 4, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/labor-day-2018-how-the-ongoing-prison-strike-is-connected-to-the-labor-movement ; and Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement (New York: Routledge, 2018). Much of the field has focused predominately, if not exclusively, on incarcerated men. For a notable exception, see Emily L. Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019). Mary Ellen Curtin writes about nineteenth-century Alabamian incarcerated male coal miners as imbricated in and central to labor organizing during and after their incarcerations. Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
- Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Tera W. Hunter, “Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta,” Labor History 34, no. 2/3 (1993): 205–220; Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
- Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World; Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kali N. Gross and Cheryl D. Hicks, “Introduction to Gendering the Carceral State,” The Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015). For prison factory development and Black women in the American West, see Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
- AFC 1935/002, AFS 00225 A02, Disc Jacket “B” from John Lomax’s Recordings at Wetumpka Penitentiary, 1934, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. In 1930, for example, three white women were whipped for fighting and trying to “break into the men’s department.” Box SG016427, pp. 41, 47, Records of Punishment, 1928–1951, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama (hereafter cited as Records of Punishment). See also Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” Signs 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 53–77.
- Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 78.
- “Letter from Mary Osborn to Governor W. W. Brandon, July 12, 1923,” box SG17570, folder “O 1920–1924,” Administrative Correspondence; “Letter from J. H. Bonner to Mr. H. C. Flowers, May 27, 1943,” box SCG17650, folder “Escapes and Recaptures, 1943–1947,” Administrative Correspondence; Irons, Testing the New Deal.
- Hall, “Disorderly Women,” 381; “Feagin Report Shows Profit on Convict Operations in 1933–1934,” Wetumpka Herald, December 13, 1934. Unless otherwise noted, all newspaper articles cited in this essay were digitized and downloaded from Newspapers.com. For southern Black women’s exclusion from industrial work, see Hall, Korstad, and Leloudis, “Cotton Mill People”; Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 120; and LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 62–63. On Black garment workers and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. p. 48; Janette Gayle, “Sewing Change: Black Dressmakers and Garment Workers and the Struggle for Rights in Early Twentieth Century New York City” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015); and Julia J. Oestreich, “They Saw Themselves as Workers: Interracial Unionism in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Development of Black Labor Organizations, 1933–1940” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2011).
- Hunter, “Domination and Resistance,” 214; “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934.” In the carceral context, see LeFlouria, Chained in Silence; and Haley, No Mercy Here.
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), esp. 263–286. The analysis of the porosity of prison walls is informed by the wisdom of my friend, eae benioff. I attend to what existed at the precipice of violence in line with Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
- Archival Description, Correspondence Concerning the Hawes-Cooper Act, 1926–1933, box SG008557, Administrative Correspondence; “Feagin Report Shows Profit”; “Benton Appointed to State Position,” Montgomery Advertiser, February 21, 1923; “The Hawes-Cooper Act and Alabama Convict Goods,” Birmingham News, March 5, 1936; “State Little Affected by Rule on Prison Goods,” Evergreen Courant, January 7, 1937. Alabama also had the “most profitable prisons in the nation” in the nineteenth century. Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, 2. The continuation of factory work is corroborated by box SG016429, p. 66, Records of Punishment.
- “History of the ADOC,” Alabama Department of Corrections, accessed May 20, 2021, http://www.doc.state.al.us/history#:~:text=When%20the%20territory%20of%20Alabama,not%20want%20a%20prison%20system ; Fifteenth Census of the United States, Wetumpka State Penitentiary, Population Schedule, Precinct 8 Wetumpka, Elmore County, Alabama, 1930. All censuses cited in this essay were digitized and downloaded by Ancestry.com.
- Box SG008557, folder “Essential 1932–1933 (Questionnaires and Answers Concerning H. C. Federal Act),” Administrative Correspondence; State Penitentiary, City of Columbia, Richmond County, South Carolina, Fifteen Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Sheet 1A–6B; West Virginia Penitentiary, Moundsville City, Marshall County, West Virginia, Fifteen Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Sheet 1A–23B; Virginia State Penitentiary, Richmond City, Henrico County, Virginia Fifteen Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Sheet 1A–8B; State Penitentiary, 8th District Township, Davidson County, Tennessee, Fifteen Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Sheet 1A–20A.
- “Prison for Women at Wetumpka Is Apparently Justifying Itself,” Birmingham News, January 21, 1923; “State Penitentiary Prepares for Women,”Montgomery Advertiser, November 9, 1922; “Letter from J. F. Sewell, Physician Inspector to G. M. Taylor, Physician Inspector and Surgeon, October 6, 1933,” box SG17647, Administrative Correspondence.
- “Report of Prison Labor Assignment.” Reports of prison demographics, for instance, suggested that in October 1933, there were 143 Black women and sixty white women. This challenged officials’ earlier supposition that white women’s numbers in the prison would not increase far beyond the numbers in the early 1920s, which were somewhere around ten white women. “Letter from J. A. Howle to Roy L. Nolen, January 26, 1924,” box SG17646, folder “Correspondence with Warden 1924,” Administrative Correspondence; and “Letter from J. F. Sewell to G. M. Taylor, October 13, 1933,” box SG17649, folder “Correspondence with Physician, 1931–1934,” Administrative Correspondence.
- “Letter from the Entire Women Department at Wetumpka Prison Walls to Governor William W. Brandon, December 20, 1923,” box SG17646, folder “Correspondence with Warden 1923,” Administrative Correspondence; “Letter from the Entire Women Department.” Information regarding age, incarceration dates, and race were determined by cross-referencing names on the petition with information collected at intake and recorded in the Alabama Convict Records digitized by Ancestry.com.
- Box SG16427, pp. 3, 5, 20, 43, Records of Punishment; “Letter from ‘Inmates of Wetumpka Prison’ to Governor Bibb Graves, July 16, 1929,” box SG17646, folder, “Correspondence with Warden 1929,” Administrative Correspondence.
- Box SG016427, pp. 1, 6, 16, 19, 40, 42, 60, Records of Punishment. See Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, for an earlier history of Black women’s reclamation of free time after Emancipation.
- “Jokes Keep 562 Convicts from Panic as 92-Year-Old Alabama Prison Burns,” New York Times, January 25, 1931, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
- “Jokes Keep 562 Convicts from Panic.”
- Box SG016427, pp. 60, 77, 80, Records of Punishment.
- “Statement of Sentence: Clara Jackson, April 4, 1934,” box SG17653, folder “J,” Administrative Correspondence; “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, April 3, 1934,” box SG17653, folder “J,” Administrative Correspondence. It was a well-established practice to have doctors present and justify punishments. See, for example, “Letter from F. E. Prickett to William F. Feagin, June 21, 1922,” box SG17578, folder “Y 1920–1926,” Administrative Correspondence. I discuss the presence of doctors during torture in prison elsewhere in my dissertation: Micah Khater, “‘Unable to Find Any Trace of Her’: Black Women, Genealogies of Escape, and Alabama Prisons, 1920–1950.”
- Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 143. “She screamed at a white woman whose husband was an overseer in the factory” refers to Herman C. McKemie and his spouse, Ida B. McKemie. See “Herman C. McKemie,” Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Wetumpka Precinct 8, Elmore County, Alabama. For newspaper articles that reference the racial makeup of busing in the early 1930s in Elmore County, see “School Bus Drivers,” Wetumpka Herald, September 6, 1934; “School Bus Routes to Be Let, Notice,” Wetumpka Herald, June 19, 1930; “Minutes of the Meeting of the Elmore County Board of Education Held Friday, September 22, 1933,” Wetumpka Herald, November 16, 1933; and “Minutes of County Board of Education,” Wetumpka Herald, November 12, 1931.
- “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934”; “The Weather,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 18, 1934.
- “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934.”
- “Daily Task for Manufacturing Underwear at Wetumpka Prison, May 7, 1931,” box SG17646, folder “Correspondence with Warden, 1931,” Administrative Correspondence.
- “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, July 19, 1934”; “Letter from George P. Walls”; “Letter from J. E. Brock to Wm. F. Feagin, July 19, 1934,” box SG17550, folder “Aa–Ar, 1933–1935,” Administrative Correspondence.
- “Letter from George P. Walls”; Box SG016427, p. 52, Records of Punishment; “Letter from J. E. Brock to Wm. F. Feagin, July 19, 1934,” box SG17550, folder “Aa–Ar, 1933–1935”; “Entry for Lucinda Allison,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 17: 1933–1934, pp. 356, 642. There is no mention of any men during the events of July 19, 1934. In 1930, many did work in the factory, but by 1934, it is less clear whether this was still the case; see Fifteenth Census of the United States, Population Schedule, Precinct 8 Wetumpka, Elmore County, Alabama, 1930; and collated data derived from Records of Punishment, box SG016427. For information regarding the leadership of the strike, see Alabama Convict Records. See collated data derived from box SG016428, Records of Punishment. For information regarding the leadership of the strike, see Alabama Convict Records.
- “Letter from G. M. Taylor and J. D. Reese to Wm. F. Feagin, January 23, 1934”; “Letter from J. E. Brock to Wm. F. Feagin, December 22, 1933,” box SG017576, folder “Wi 1934,” Administrative Correspondence. Collated data derived from box SG016427-8, Records of Punishment. For more information on Marie Gunter, see “Entry for Marie Gunter,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 16: 1932–1933, p. 620; and “Letter from J. E. Brock to William F. Feagin, March 18, 1934,” box SG17647, folder “Escapes and Recaptures, 1932–1934,” Administrative Correspondence.
- Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 44–55. See also, “Entry for Julia Floyd,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 16: 1932–1933, p. 462.
- Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 48–49, 55.
- Irons, Testing the New Deal; Hall, Korstad, and Leloudis, “Cotton Mill People”; “Prison for Women at Wetumpka.”
- “Letter from George P. Walls.” See also, Alabama Convict Records and Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Nauvoo, Alabama; Fairfax, Alabama; Florence, Alabama; and Limestone County. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population Schedule, Precinct 34, Walker County, Alabama; Iris Singleton McAvoy, Images of America: Walker County Coal Mines (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2016), 8; Irons, Testing the New Deal, 124. For women’s attempts to smuggle out mail, see box SG016427–8, Records of Punishment.
- Hall, “Disorderly Women,” 364.
- “Letter from J. A. Howle to Roy L. Nolen”; “Alabama State Board of Health, State Laboratory and Pasteur Institute, Montgomery, Alabama, September 23 and 28, 1925 Inspection,” box SG17646, folder “Correspondence Re: Water Supply, 1925–1932,” Administrative Correspondence; Records of Punishment, box SG016428, p. 22, Administrative Correspondence; “Prison for Women at Wetumpka.”
- “Entry for Oscie Pearl Toney” and “Entry for Lucinda Davis,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 17: 1933–1934, p. 517 and vol. 16: 1932–1933, p. 2; “State of Alabama Convict Department, Preliminary Report of Accident, Wetumpka, June 10, 1934,” box SG17647, folder “Accident Reports, 1931–1934,” Administrative Correspondence.
- Stephen Dillon, Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 142. For interracial and queer relationships in carceral settings in the North, see Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
- “Letter from Henry Jones to Hamp Draper, May 28, 1935,” box SG17566, folder “La-Ll 1935,” Administrative Correspondence; “Entry for Evelyn Lindsay,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 17: 1933–1934, p. 920; “Entry for Bertha Youngblood,” Alabama Convict Records, vol. 17: 1933–1934, p. 127. While all Lindsay’s information matches the letter dated May 28, 1935, including the state-issued number during her incarceration, she is listed as being from Jefferson County in one place and Mobile in another. This may have been a discrepancy, as was sometimes the misspelling of names, but it may have also indicated confused nativity. She may have been arrested in Mobile, as her intake suggests in the convict record, but been from Jefferson.
- Regina Kunzel has written extensively about the confused discourse surrounding interracial sexual relationships; see Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Estelle B. Freedman, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915–1965,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 397–423. See also, Cookie Woolner, “‘Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl’: African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North, 1920–1929,” The Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015).
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: Random House, 2007), 57; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives , 143. I theorized resistive desires from conversations with Aimee Meredith Cox.
- Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (March 2004): 30.
- Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance”; Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ vol. 3, no. 4 (May 1997): 437–465; Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81; Haley, No Mercy Here; Treva Carrie Ellison, “Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender,” Black Scholar 49, no. 1 (2019); Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy . Jacquelyn Dowd Hall brought attention to sexual deviance in labor organizing in the context of Appalachian white women; see Hall, “Disorderly Women,” 374–376.