Save the Date: “Freeing Joan Little: Gender, Incarceration, and Struggles for Justice”

Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2026
Time: 5:00 – 6:30pm
Location: Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4; 114 S Buchanan Blvd, Durham, NC

In 1974, a twenty-year-old Black woman named Joan Little found herself facing the death penalty for killing a white guard who had tried to rape her in an eastern North Carolina prison. The folks who campaigned on Little’s behalf understood the webs of sexual violence, state violence, and racialized carcerality that ensnared her, and they linked her trial to other sites of existential concern for Black women’s—and everyone’s—liberation. Her August 1975 acquittal spoke to the power of their critique and the reach of their organizing. 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark case that still offers lessons in the struggle for justice. Join historian Christina Greene, Ph.D. ’96, and death penalty lawyer Shelagh Kenney to discuss what Joan Little tells us about gender, incarceration, and state violence then and now.

Christina Greene is professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment; Shelagh Kenney, is Interim Director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies at Duke University, will introduce and moderate the discussion.

In addition to the panel, an exhibition of items related to Joan Little, including one of her handwritten, illustrated poems, will be on display in Perkins Library during the month of January 2026.

Header image: “Abolish Women’s Prisons” photograph of protestors outside of the NC Correctional Institution for Women, The News and Observer – Raleigh Times, November 1974. Nancy Blood Papers, Box 3, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.