IN FEBRUARY 1921, Gov. Thomas McRae appointed reformer, educator, and farmer Laura Conner to serve on the Arkansas Penitentiary Commission. During her tenure, she often received clandestine notifications about the sexual and physical abuse incarcerated Black women endured. Conner remembered, “Letters were slipped to me and one girl told me personally of her abuse by free white men working on the farm.”1 The sexual and physical violence these Black women experienced was often tied to their exploitation as sources of labor in the plantation areas near the Tucker Prison Farm in Jefferson County and the Cummins Prison Farm in Lincoln County. Penitentiaries became sites of exploitation and abuse for Black female inmates who were often hired out as domestic servants, even though this practice was forbidden under state law.2
In one particularly egregious situation, a former inmate, Torressia Dancler McDowell, revealed to Conner in a 1921 interview the conditions under which she was forced to serve her sentence as a domestic servant for the Tucker Prison Farm’s physician. Tucker, first opened in 1916, was actually for white prisoners. Most African American prisoners were housed at Cummins Prison Farm, but Black women prisoners were frequently sent to Tucker to cook and perform other domestic duties.3 McDowell labored daily in the physician’s private home from 4:00 in the morning until 11:00 p.m. or midnight. She was also beaten by the Tucker Prison Farm superintendent, Dee Horton, after she protested being accused of theft. Horton often referred to McDowell and other Black women inmates as “bulls,” a racist term meant to defeminize and dehumanize them and to justify their subsequent sexual assault and rape. McDowell resisted by declaring that they were women and not bulls, and for this she and the other women were forced to get up and run when, as she said, “I couldn’t hardly pick myself up . . . was sick nearly all the time with female troubles.” She sought temporary refuge by running away. Unfortunately, she was caught in nearby Wabbaseka and returned to Tucker, where she was taken into a room full of men, forced to undress, and beaten.4 McDowell recalled that her clothing was “torn into shreds” and that she was struck “until the blood came.”5
Black women prisoners were subject to the authority of white prison officials, who inherently possessed what scholar Sarah Haley called “a sovereignty that was enforced by the unfettered power to injure.”6 And injure they did. After Horton raped and impregnated McDowell, he and the prison physician repeatedly attempted to abort her unborn child by opening her womb with forceps and inserting gauze into her cervix. At one point, Horton insisted that he did not “want the curse of a Damn nigger brat on him” before attempting to “mash the child out.” Horton threatened that if she ever told anyone he was the child’s father he would kill her.7 The child was born in December 1920 just after McDowell’s release from Tucker.8
The sexual abuse of Black women inmates was an open secret in Arkansas prisons. In 1921, an investigation at the Tucker Prison Farm, which prompted Laura Conner to call for Horton’s removal, revealed not only the horrendous conditions in which prisoners lived but also “charges of alleged misconduct by wardens and guards with negro women.”9 In a 1922 letter to the Arkansas Democrat, Conner recalled what had happened to McDowell and requested that her charges against Horton be investigated in “the pure name of our citizenship.” She additionally said that this was just “one instance of the abuse of the chastity of these helpless creatures” and recommended to the “good people of Arkansas” that “some of the gold being coined from the backs of the convicts be spent in providing a Negro female camp just as is provided for white women at Jacksonville, Ark.” Arkansas authorities, as historian Ryan Anthony Smith has found, not only ignored Conner’s charges but also silenced her by forcing her to resign from the prison board.10
Sexual and physical violence was pervasive among Black female inmates, and Arkansas prisons were notorious for their deplorable conditions and high inmate mortality rates. Using the story of the African American women prisoners who empowered themselves by offering their testimony to Conner as an important starting point, this essay is a foray into a little-explored topic about Black women, violence, and their presumed criminality in post–World War I Arkansas. It is informed by a deep reading of Talitha LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. This excellent book written by a stellar scholar focuses on African American women’s presence in Georgia’s prison system. Such a study has never been done on Arkansas, a state notorious for having one of the most brutal prison systems in the nation.11 For the most part, authorities (and most white Arkansans) tolerated and even encouraged the abuse of women like McDowell because they saw Black females, especially those convicted of crimes, as deserving of it. White-owned Arkansas newspapers sensationalized Black women’s crimes and portrayed them (and the entire race) as prone to violence, immorality, and in need of policing. But Black women’s lives did not reflect inherent criminality. Rather, they were products of the difficult times in which many African Americans lived after World War I, as opportunities for jobs and land ownership vanished and whites violently reinforced Jim Crow laws to uphold the racial hierarchy and stem the tide of Black assertiveness. Thus, Black women’s attempts at social and economic mobility often got them sent to the penitentiary and placed under the violent authority of people like Superintendent Horton.
Many of these Black women—whose parents may have been enslaved or lived through Reconstruction—were born into lives of struggle and resistance. As LeFlouria has argued, “Freedwomen and their daughters’ lives were broadly circumscribed by racial hostility, violence, terror, poverty, and exclusion. The confluence of these menacing social and economic forces, combined with a predatory legal establishment, fostered a fertile environment for notions of Black female crime to emerge.”12 These Black women lived during an era of heightened concerns about “Black criminality” and along with it an increased dedication to reducing what many whites generally considered a moral defect among African Americans. Although much research remains to be done on this topic, a cursory glance and a gendered analysis reveals much about Black women’s social and economic lives and the reality of their exposure to crime and violence in Arkansas in the aftermath of a major international war. Black women’s criminality and incarceration almost always resulted from the clash between their determination to maintain their independence and move up the economic ladder and white efforts to keep them dependent, poorly paid, and under control.
In May 1919, the Daily Arkansas Gazette recorded the number of convicts in the state penitentiary system as 855: 272 white men, 550 Negro men, and 33 Negro women. No white women were included; in fact, when white women were incarcerated, newspapers noted it as an exception, portrayed them as victims of misfortune, and focused on efforts to pardon or rescue them.13 Mary Dewees, who from 1920 to 1924 was the superintendent of the all-white Arkansas State Farm for Women in Jacksonville, wrote that “the work of the reformatory is one of changing old patterns into new, of reforming new habits of work, of play, of thought, and of developing principles of character which may enable a woman to feel her responsibility as a potential being in the community.”14 Dewees imagined transforming white women prisoners into wholesome citizens—that is, they were considered to be redeemable. Such possibilities, however, were typically not extended to Black women. It remains unclear what crimes the thirty-three Black women were charged with, but they—unlike white women—were incarcerated in a space where the vast majority of inmates were male.15 It is also likely that their numbers were higher than what the newspapers reported. Black women prisoners routinely were inadequately documented and sent to county work farms or jails to serve their sentences.16
Most studies of African Americans in post–World War I Arkansas have emphasized Black men’s experiences. While there exists an ever-growing body of scholarship on African American women’s history, woefully little of it explores Black female criminality and violence.17 Court and prison records bring much to bear in fleshing out the contours and complexities of the lives of those whose voices have been rendered silent. This piece is an important and necessary exploration into how Arkansas newspapers chronicled Black women’s lives within a shifting economic and political milieu. LeFlouria has correctly assessed that most scholarship “elude[s] any in-depth discussion of women’s experiences . . . within the carceral regimes of the post emancipation South,” likely because the sources that could be used to examine their unique positioning during these years were either unavailable or inaccessible. The ever-increasing digitization of newspapers, however, provides a useful tool to help understand the ways that race and gender shaped and complicated Black women’s lives in post–World War I Arkansas.18 They allow us to rescue stories that might otherwise be lost to obscurity. They make Black women visible.
Much of Black women’s “criminality” was rooted in their fight for wages and economic justice for their families. This was clearly the case for the women arrested during the 1919 Elaine Massacre. One Black woman was driven from her home and jailed in Helena, where Black women were routinely “whipped as well as the men.” When she returned to Elaine to collect what was left of her families’ belongings and receive payment for the crops she and her family had harvested, the farm manager told her that if she did not “get out and stay out he would kill her, burn her up and no one would know where she was.” She was later rearrested, incarcerated for eight days, and forced, along with other Black women, to work from three in the morning until nine or ten at night. In another example, a female Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America member was dragged from her home, beaten, and then jailed. Gender clearly did not protect Black women from physical and possibly sexual violence.19 They were rarely perceived as worthy of protection. A racially defined moral weakness was mapped upon them that permitted some whites to assume their actions were always criminal, their bodies deviant and accessible, and their femininity assailable.20
As World War I came to an end, so too did many Black women’s opportunities for lucrative employment beyond spirit-depleting and sexually exploitative labor. As a result, some Black women were forced by the deeply oppressive social environment in which they lived to resort to theft as a way to sustain themselves.21 Pearline Moss, a former employee of Mrs. E. N. Sparks, who resided on State Street in Little Rock, confessed to stealing several sheets and towels from Sparks’s home because she did not have any of her own. She was also accused of taking a watch, a charge she denied, but for this crime she was fined ten dollars and sentenced to fifteen days on the county farm.22 Soldiers with money as a result of their military service were often desperate Black Arkansas women’s best victims. In November 1919, Little Rock police chief Burl C. Rotenberry ordered his officers to arrest two Black women who allegedly had violently robbed Sgt. Garra A. Laster, a soldier at nearby Camp Pike. Rotenberry accused the two women of striking Laster in the head in an alley on Second and Chester Streets and robbing him of $220 in cash and a Liberty Bond worth $100. While the emphasis was on the women’s criminal act, it is less clear what Sergeant Laster was doing in the alley.23
For many people, including some African Americans, women like Pearline Moss and those accused of robbing Sergeant Laster were unworthy of protection because they did not operate within the confines of respectability. That is, their behavior repudiated middle-class notions of racial self-determination and in fact hindered the Black elite’s resolve to prove to white Americans that members of their race were entitled to full citizenship and equal opportunity. But if read against the grain, Black women’s criminal actions actually reflected their own sense of self-help and determination in a social and political context that provided them with few honest opportunities to better their circumstances. This was particularly the case among working-class Black women who, because they were either unemployed or poorly paid when they were employed, resorted to criminal activities.24
Black women’s criminality often resulted from disputes with employers. In the absence of economic opportunity and political power, Black women sometimes exacted revenge to settle their grievances. In October 1921, police arrested Minnie Williams and Alice Jenkins for setting fire to Mrs. J. T. Gillespie’s home at 1217 Louisiana Street in Little Rock. Both had been fired as cooks in the Gillespie home, which was also a boarding house. Henry Clark, a Black employee who lived in the rear of the boarding house, informed police that he saw the women, who were dressed in long black cloaks, pour kerosene on the house and then set it aflame. Clark extinguished the fire before it caused any damage, and fire department employees set bloodhounds on Williams and Jenkins, who were discovered and apprehended. Clark was then arrested as well, although the account does not explain why.25 While what these women had done was a crime, it can also be read as an act of resistance. At a time when the only lawful vocation available to most Black women was domestic service, it was entirely likely that they were underpaid or that their employer had stiffed them on wages. Existing in a system that did not value the back-breaking and soul-crushing labor required to cook and clean while carrying the risk of sexual violation, these Black women upended the system. Unlike white women who could avail themselves of the police or civil court, Williams and Jenkins registered their discontent and animosity with their former employer and settled their score in the only way they could.26
When they were arrested, Black women often attempted to liberate themselves from the horrid conditions of their incarceration in an attempt to preserve their dignity. According to one study of Black prisoners in Alabama, women often courageously professed their own vision of freedom by challenging and defying prison officials. They did so in groups or pairs, which suggests that women prisoners encouraged and supported each other.27 In March 1919, Salina Collins and Laura Sessions escaped from the Pulaski County jail in the chaos following the shooting of another inmate named Guy Craig. The women, who had been convicted of highway robbery, were being held in the jail until they could be transferred to the state penitentiary. They took advantage of the opportunity to escape during the melee surrounding Craig, who had attempted to escape as well.28 Escape was also a necessary act of resistance because, as Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross have noted, Black women spent more time in prison than white women. In fact, they persuasively argue that Black women were overrepresented in the prison system. When they were released, it was often to work under exploitative conditions in white homes. While Berry and Gross speak specifically about Black women in northern urban areas, this appears to have been the case in Arkansas as well.29
The limited economic opportunities afforded Black women in Jim Crow Arkansas often forced them to engage in illegal activities or underground economies, which subjected them to criminal prosecution. In the era of Prohibition, no activity offered Black women a greater chance to make enough money to survive as bootlegging. In one 1920 example, the police chief and the military police detachment from Camp Pike arrested Anna Rodgers and Cora Harrison for bootlegging or transporting whiskey. Each woman allegedly had a pint of moonshine, a small amount usually associated with personal use rather than sale. Nonetheless, they were convicted and fined $200 each, a sum that was prohibitive for the two women, who for that reason were remanded to jail.30 Similarly, Millie Pendleton and Fannie Price were arrested in Pine Bluff in 1921 for transporting five gallons of liquor, which the deputy sheriff found in their homes.31 The arrests of Rodgers, Harrison, Pendleton, and Price clearly reveal how Black women, facing limited economic opportunities, undermined African American respectability politics, middle-class norms, and white patriarchal culture when they resorted to criminal activities in order to survive.32
And indeed, many of these women were not adults at all, but in fact teenagers. Their youth, however, did not protect them from arrest. In 1922, Alberta Forrest, a fifteen-year-old runaway from Georgia, was found guilty and fined $100 for “procuring whiskey.” Forrest, though, had a turn of seemingly good fortune. The jury recommended suspending her sentence if she elected to return home, an option that proved impossible for her and many unhoused young women during these years.33 Forrest had clearly identified a lucrative trade in whiskey because she had been arrested the previous month and charged with “selling liquor,” which landed her in jail with a $1,000 bond.34
Following the Civil War and emancipation, authorities began arresting newly freed African Americans, including women, for vagrancy. Such charges criminalized Black people generally and delimited their agency and autonomy as free people. This was especially true for Black women who were convicted. Saidiya Hartman has described vagrancy as “status criminality” that was “tethered ineradicably to Blackness.” Race defined criminality. The police widely utilized vagrancy as a means to target and control young Black women and others. It did not matter if they had committed a crime; their presence in urban spaces and their free movement was enough to threaten the racial status quo.35
The enforcement of vagrancy laws to police the lives of Black women continued in Arkansas after the Great War. In February 1921, “18 negroes and four negro women” were arrested on vagrancy charges as part of several raids ordered by the police chief to round up all of Little Rock’s unemployed. Some of those caught, including one Black woman, were also arrested for gambling.36 In Pine Bluff, Estelle Smith and Georgia Streeter were arrested in a raid and fined fifty dollars for “running and disorderly rouse.”37 Intentionally vague, these charges were an excuse to justify monitoring Black women’s actions.
Limited economic prospects and the impoverished living conditions resulting from them often led to African American women’s arrests for “disturbing the peace,” another vague charge that often gave authorities the power to keep them marginalized. In most instances, newspaper accounts list the names and races of those arrested but do not describe the disturbance. When articles did provide details, they marked Black women as unfeminine. For example, in Little Rock in May 1920, local police arrested Artie Black and Hattie Griffin, each identified as a “negro woman,” for disturbing the peace after breaking up a fight. The Arkansas Gazette used it as an opportunity to call the women “embattled amazons” and to perpetuate the myth that Black people were impervious to pain by detailing the severe blows inflicted on each woman “with neither showing the effects of the punishment.”38
Black women also got into trouble with the police when they resorted to violence to protect and defend themselves during the domestic disputes that frequently occurred in the unsanitary and unsafe residential spaces where poor Black people with few resources and many frustrations were forced to live. Seventeen-year-old Mable McGraw was arrested and held in the city jail for killing Willie Haynes, twenty-five, who had threatened and beaten her on numerous occasions. McGraw had been living with Haynes as his wife since she was fourteen years old. When he refused to work, McGraw was forced to provide for both of them. Haynes usually spent the pathetically little money she earned shooting craps. Whenever McGraw refused him, Haynes beat her; in fact, when she was arrested, her right eye was badly discolored and her neck bore a mark. McGraw, however, had defended herself as Haynes choked her by grabbing a small pocketknife and stabbing him.39
Arkansas newspapers were rife with articles about Black women’s incarceration for violent crimes in the late 1910s and the 1920s. The stress resulting from extreme poverty and deprivation in the postwar years created a flourishing environment for women to become involved in non-domestic conflicts with each other as they struggled to survive. Talitha LeFlouria has argued that these entanglements were the byproducts of “unintelligible causes” that “escalated from minor skirmishes into lethal altercations.”40 This was especially true when women were fueled by alcohol consumption and verbal sparring that too often devolved into violence. In November 1920, during a drunken confrontation, Beatrice Douglas assaulted Pearl Richardson by hitting her in the head with a bottle because she had unceasingly “nagged her.” Richardson consequently spent several days in the hospital. Douglas, whom Little Rock police arrested in her home, was charged with assault with intent to kill. She remained in jail until Richardson was well enough to testify against her.41
Black women were sometimes arrested for defending other members of their race against white violence. For example, in August 1921, Little Rock authorities arrested a Black man and a Black woman who intervened on behalf of a Black woman, Mary Carter, who was being assaulted by a white man, W. F. Smith. Smith accused Carter of robbing him of twenty-five dollars and chased her down in Little Rock, at which point things became violent. While Carter may have committed a crime, she also defended herself. During the ensuing scuffle, an African American man and woman who lived in nearby servants’ quarters rushed to Carter’s aid. Unfortunately, they were rewarded for their assistance by being arrested for “disturbing the peace.”42
Because they could expect little protection from the police, Black women engaged in criminal acts and violence to regulate behavior in their own communities. In Newport, Arkansas, Black women punished an African American man who deserted his sick wife. He returned a few days later but displayed no remorse for abandoning his partner. A young woman “possessing the powers to beguile” lured him to a secluded spot near the levee where “a half score or more of Negro women” beat him with sticks and whips. After he had been soundly thrashed, he was allowed to “crawl to his feet and stagger away.” It is not clear if these women were prosecuted for their actions, but their readiness to assume such a risk suggests that Black women were willing to engage in criminal activity to protect themselves and each other.43
Sexual violence also defined the lives of many Black women, but authorities only stepped in to protect the extremely young. Authorities in the Clark County town of Gurdon charged Jim Estes, a fifty-year-old white timber company employee, with statutory rape after a mixed-race infant whom he had fathered with a young Black girl was found buried in the woods. The unnamed girl, who claimed Estes was the father and whom the Arkansas Democrat article described as a “half-wit,” was only fourteen years old.44 A Pulaski County grand jury charged African American shoe repair shop owner James Kindle with assaulting fifteen-year-old Bertha Byrd, an orphan living in a boarding house on Broadway Street, after the police found the back door open, the interior in disarray, and blood spots “at various points.” In December 1922, Frank Miller was found guilty of “carnal abuse” for attacking a twelve-year-old Black girl in North Little Rock. The jury, unfortunately, was unable to agree on a sentence and left the decision up to the court.45
Unlike the orphaned, most Black women were presumed to be immoral and, for this reason, their reports of rape or assault were typically not taken seriously. Thus, they were often prosecuted for sex crimes even when they were the victims.46 Willie Lee Johnson, for instance, was charged with immorality and fined ten dollars on Christmas Eve in 1922, then released after serving only three days of her sentence. Although the “Christmas spirit,” as per the title of the article from which this story is taken, may have entered the First Division Municipal Court, it is possible that Johnson either had been sexually assaulted or compelled to engage in prostitution to support herself in the face of extreme deprivation and poverty. It is unlikely that Johnson had the money to pay her fine and probably had no place to go once she left jail.47
Many of the African American women languishing in Arkansas’s carceral system had been arrested for soliciting or prostitution. The prostitution charges were often false and, according to Saidiya Hartman, frequently utilized to “establish the boundaries of what a Black woman could and could not do.”48 In February 1921, two Black women testified that they had been robbed by two white men—a soldier, Pvt. J. M. Collier, and his companion—who had held up a bus at Camp Pike. Collier maintained his innocence, although he was charged with “highway robbery” and held on $1,000 bond. The women were fined ten dollars for soliciting.49 Whether they were actually guilty of this crime is irrelevant. What was clear is that because of their close proximity to white men and soldiers in particular, whom they may have assumed were flush with cash, they were presumed by default to be involved in illicit activity.
The prostitution charges meted out to Black women were often false, but widespread beliefs about Black women’s hypersexuality and criminality made it difficult for those charged to defend themselves.50 In 1920, the aforementioned Beatrice Douglas was arrested and fined ten dollars for soliciting after she and another young woman were seen getting into a car with two white men.51 Noted as “a young negro girl with a long police record,” Douglas was arrested again in 1921, this time for vagrancy. She was sent to the women’s reformatory in Jacksonville, only to be refused because the facility was for white women. The judge before whom Douglas appeared had grown weary of repeatedly seeing her in his courtroom. He fined her again and then said, clearly registering little concern for the young woman’s wellbeing, “I suppose we have to put up with her until an automobile runs over her or someone shoots her.”52 With this declaration the judge had effectively determined Douglas’ life and worth as a human being were inconsequential.
Furthermore, concerns about sexually transmitted disease (STD) resulting from prostitution were racialized, and Black women’s alleged promiscuity was specifically blamed as the culprit. In Little Rock, for instance, white leaders discussed plans to convert state penitentiaries into hospitals and detention homes for women suffering from STDs. Police chief Burl C. Rotenberry deemed this necessary because “99 per cent of all negro women arrested in the city were victims of venereal disease and that some place should be provided where they may receive adequate treatment and at the same time be self-supporting.”53
While Rotenberry could not possibly have known how many Black women suffered from STDs, what is patently demonstrable is that these reports reveal much about how they engaged in sex work to support themselves and their families in the face of limited economic opportunities. But seemingly uncontrolled and unbridled women troubled middle-class sensibilities, even more so if the women were Black because some read their very existence and that of African Americans generally as the source of contagion. During and after World War I, white southerners were particularly concerned about reducing STDs, an anxiety that was exacerbated by boll weevil infestations, a steep fall in cotton prices, and the migration of African Americans seeking improved circumstances.54 What Black migrants found in Delta towns and the nearby cities was chronic unemployment, desperation, food insecurity, and disease. In places like Little Rock, this was especially true for Black women migrants, who regularly disregarded Victorian standards of middle-class respectability as impractical. They did so, however, in the midst of an intensifying nationwide movement to reform indigent and unhoused young women.
Although reformers attempted to assist white women migrants by establishing reformatories throughout the South, they were not as concerned about young Black women. Many white people in general believed that criminal behavior and sexual delinquency were endemic among Black women and hence could not be reformed. In fact, one historian has argued that it was not even considered delinquent behavior.55 Thus when fifteen-year-old Dorothy Anderson, also known as Josephine Harris, was charged with forgery, the court likely would have sentenced her to prison had the victims, the Dubisson brothers, not intervened. The brothers, African American undertakers in Little Rock, likely understood that Anderson/Harris’s youth, race, and gender offered her little protection from the harshness of the carceral system. They took pity on her and asked the judge to send her to the Black industrial school in Memphis instead, because there was “no such institution for negro women in Arkansas.” The brothers even offered to pay her transportation costs.56
The responsibility for creating reformatories or industrial homes for Black women fell to African American organizations like the Arkansas Association of Colored Women (AACW). Founded in 1905 and affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women, the AACW lobbied before and after World War I on behalf of young Black women who, when arrested for crimes, were usually incarcerated with hardened male criminals.57 When Jennie Thomas was arrested in Little Rock in 1922 for leading a group of young African American men in criminal activity and stealing eleven dollars from a store, she was fined ten dollars and sentenced to eleven months on the Pulaski County farm.58 Thomas had previously done time at the farm after being arrested for stealing a revolver from Little Rock police chief Rotenberry while cleaning his office when she was a trusty at city hall. The weapon was recovered but Thomas was charged ten dollars and sentenced to six months at the county farm.59 Unfortunately, young Black women continued to be jailed, instead of being placed in reformatories, for many years to come, despite the AACW’s best efforts. Although a reformatory was established for young Black men by 1922, one was not available for Black women until 1949.60
What does all of this reveal about Black women, violence, and criminality in post–World War I Arkansas? For starters it demands that scholars contest the archives and the ways in which we read such sources as mainstream newspapers to instead view them through a lens that contextualizes the circumstances under which Black women were criminalized and subjected to violence. As Kali Gross asserts, we must combine “archival research with an expansive interpretive analysis,” one that “enables historians to delve more deeply into text and histories that otherwise might be discarded”—or, in the case of Arkansas newspapers, completely overlooked.61 White-owned newspapers routinely vilified Black women arrested for petty crimes by describing them in unflattering and racist language, their crimes considered a product of inherent Black criminality. Absent in these descriptions was any sense of the context—not only Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement but also the lack of access to well-paying jobs and economic mobility—that pushed Black women to engage in “criminal” acts. Moreover, Black women could not expect protection from sexual violence. Public indifference to the rapes of Black female prisoners like Torressia Dancler McDowell, for instance, was another way to maintain white supremacy.
Most crimes ascribed to this era’s Black women—bootlegging being the best example—are evidence of their desire for economic independence and opportunity in post–World War I Arkansas. They deployed these acts as strategies to ensure their survival in the face of extreme racism. When Black women’s criminal activity is understood in this way, incarceration takes on a different meaning. While their seemingly antisocial behavior was an affront to white and often Black people, economically marginalized Black women rejected the burden of middle-class sensibilities in favor of their need to survive the difficult circumstances they endured because of their race and gender. By doing so, they created and accessed the best opportunities available to them in post–World War I Arkansas.