Date of Award

Fall 2013

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2013 Andrea Jácome. All rights reserved. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may only be used for non-commercial, educational, and research purposes. For all other uses, including reproduction and distribution, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

History Department

First Advisor

Bruce Dorsey

Second Advisor

Farid Azfar

Abstract

As an intervention in the limited, male-centric historiography of prisoner organizing in the 1970s, this paper focuses on a weeklong revolt in the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women in 1975 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Developing out of the legacy of North Carolina’s homegrown tradition of Black armed resistance throughout the rise and wane of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the women of the Raleigh Revolt challenged the respectability politics of earlier, dominant forms of Black women’s activism. The women inmates at NCCCW understood and articulated the modern day emergence of mass incarceration as a form of systemic and state-sponsored violence and physically revolted against these conditions in defensive of their livelihoods and dignity. As poor and incarcerated women, their radical public assertion of subjectivity and humanity, documented in their self-produced zine Break de Chains of U$ Slavery, contests the scholarship of prison activism in which incarcerated women are portrayed as passive victims.

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