Showing posts with label anti-Klan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Klan. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

August 15, 1975 Joanne Little Acquitted

On August 27, 1974, Joan (Jo-Ann) Little sat in the Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina. The petite, twenty-two year old black woman had been incarcerated for two months while she awaited her court date on a breaking and entering charge. That night, sixty-two year old white jailer Clarence Alligood entered her jail cell, ice pick in hand, intending to coerce Little into sexual acts. In an act of self-defense, Little stabbed Alligood with the ice pick in order to wound him and escape. Little fled as her would-be assailant bled to death.Joan Little
No stranger to the stereotypes about black women, Joan Little knew how the scene would look. Some would label her as a Jezebel and claim she was “asking for it.” Others would suggest that no respectable woman would have been in jail, or in this position, in the first place. Little hid out in the surrounding area for a little more than a week. Meanwhile, the state labeled her a fugitive and a murderer. Officials also issued a warrant for her arrest. In a scene that mirrored the manhunt of Angela Davis just two year earlier, state and federal authorities created a dragnet to capture Little. Local police arrested her on September 7th for first-degree murder. Forty-eight hours later a grand jury indicted her for murder. The following year Little would stand trial. If convicted she faced the gas chamber.

https://www.aaihs.org/free-joan-little/

Friday, September 8, 2017

John Brown Anti-Klan Committee

Fighting white supremacists and fascists in the streets is not new.  As Mark Bray points out in his new book titled Antif: An Anti-Fascist Handbook (JBAKC), there was a group in the 1970s and 1980s called the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee that was but one such group who took it to the streets.  Another was the Communist Worker's party, who lost five of its members when the Klan shot them down in the streets of Greensboro, NC while undercover FBI informers looked on.
Here is a link to some newsletters from the 1970s.  They are archived (along with lots of other material) at the Freedom Archives website.
https://search.freedomarchives.org/search.php?view_collection=7&year=1979