The Innocence of Joan Little

Will Packer ~ ~ ~ Joan Little

Will Packer is getting ready to develop a miniseries adaptation about the landmark case of Joan Little, called The Innocence of Joan Little, reports Shadow and Act.

Little’s case in 1974 drew national attention to a jail in Beaufort County in Washington, North Carolina, after Little was found innocent for killing a jailer who attempted to rape her. It was a landmark case, not only the first in United States history to recognize a woman’s right to kill a potential rapist in self-defense but also a case that acknowledged the rights of prisoners in the United States. She was found not guilty by a jury of six whites and six African-Americans.

Little was the first woman in US history to be acquitted under the defense that she killed 62-year-old Clarence Alligood, her would-be rapist, in self-defense. Her case set off a wave of support from civil rights, feminist, and anti-death penalty movements at the time as well.

Will Packer’s Will Packer Productions as well as Paulist Productions are on board to develop and produce the miniseries, though no network is yet attached, and there has been no word on casting. The series will be based on the book by author James Reston Jr., “The Innocence of Joan Little: A Southern Mystery.”

Madam CJ Walker

From Styleite:

Opportunities for Black people — and especially for Black women — in the years following the abolition of slavery were few and far between. But Madam CJ Walker, who was born to former slaves in 1867 as Sarah Breedlove, found a way to make herself not only a successful beauty industry entrepreneur, but also the first American woman (and the first Black person) to become a millionaire.

Walker’s rags to riches story is so great and unique that it’s been the focus of a study by the Harvard Business School, not to mention a slew of books. She was born in the Louisiana Delta just two years after the end of the Civil War and became an orphan at age 7. She and her older sister picked cotton in Mississippi for years to make ends meet, until Walker married at age 14.

Her husband died two years after her only daughter, Lelia, was born, and Walker moved with Lelia to St. Louis, where her brothers had set up shop as successful barbers. She worked as a laundress and a cook, and managed to send her daughter to the city’s public schools.

Walker succumbed to a scalp condition in the 1890s that caused her to lose most of her hair, and her official biography says she experimented with a variety of treatments until she found a pomade made by another Black entrepreneur, Annie Malone. Malone’s hair products worked so well for Walker that in 1905 she moved to Denver to sell Malone’s products, and shortly after moved back to St. Louis and married Charles James Walker, a journalist. She changed her name to CJ Walker and set out to create her own hair conditioner, which she marketed and sold under the name Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.

Aviatrix Bessie Coleman

From DoD Live:

A young woman from rural east Texas, who grew up in a hardscrabble existence as one of 13 children born to poor sharecropper parents, became an unlikely choice to pave the way for future African-American accomplishments in aviation and the U.S. Air Force.

Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman would go on to be the first female pilot of African-American descent, but more importantly would later influence the accomplishments of others who would continue the evolution of African-American involvement in aviation throughout the 20th century.

William J. Powell, a lieutenant serving in an all-black unit during World War I, penned in his 1934 book, “Black Wings,” “Because of Bessie Coleman, we have overcome that which was much worse than a racial barrier. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.”

Maids In America - The Help

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The Help is already a big success. Having blitzed the US box office, it looks like making more money than the Meryl Streep hit Julie & Julia.

Much of the magic has been worked by its pedigree. It's an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's bestseller about a group of black maids working in the households of Mississippi's middle class in 1963, one of the most volatile years of the civil rights movement - although the clamour and ferocity of the movement's battles with southern racism is heard only as distant thunder. Here, the front line is in the kitchen, the nursery - and the bathroom. Especially the bathroom.

The trouble begins when Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), the bossiest and most brittle of Jackson, Mississippi's, fashionable young matrons, decides her black maid is to have a toilet of her own - or rather, an outhouse - so as to protect the family from any exotic diseases she may be carrying. And since Hilly is a trendsetter, the outhouse becomes a neighbourhood feature.

Sheilah Coley - Newark's New Police Chief

From Baristanet:

Last week, on Tuesday morning at Newark’s communication headquarters, Mayor Cory Booker formally announced Chief Coley as Newark’s first chief of police and the next African American woman to join the ranks of distinguished female accomplishments — in Essex County and the Garden State.

Chief Coley said that she is honored to join this lineage of women, and admits there have been distinct changes in the Newark police department since she became an officer in 1989.

“When I came to the Newark police department there were approximately 15 women, no female supervisors,” says Chief Coley. “Now we have 202 female officers, and we hold every rank, except deputy chief.”

Chief Coley assured those present at the gathering, however, that her appointment was not based on her gender or race.

The Missing 400 Roswell Women

From 11 Alive:

This is the 150th year since the beginning of the American Civil War. So much conflict history surrounds Atlanta and North Georgia.

Just down the road from a myriad of strip shopping centers in Atlanta and Roswell is a story of unimaginable suffering.

The Allenbrook residence in Roswell, owned by the family of Roswell King, served as the home of the Ivy Woolen Mills Superintendant.

In 1864, the mills were churning out 191,000 yards of cloth and 30,000 yards of "Roswell grey" uniforms made by hundreds of white and black women.

General Sherman ordered General Gerrard to arrest the 400 women and their 300 children and charge them with treason, he said " let them foot it."

The Union soldiers rounded up the southern women and quarantined them in Roswell's Square until early August. Then they marched with children in tow 10 miles to Marietta.

In Cobb County, women and children were put on railcars shipped north of the Ohio River with nine days of rations and dumped.

Many died, many were never seen again.

Mysterious Life of Lydia Bryant

From The Daily News Online:

About two years ago Susan Sherwin was indulging in a favorite pastime — looking at headstones at Longview Memorial Park where she works — when a pair of dates made her do a double-take: Lydia Bryant 1845-1972.

To help piece together this mystery, Sherwin turned to Sandy Rountree, whose prodigious volunteer research created the annual Memorial Day page in The Daily News. Rountree began looking into Bryant's background to hopefully learn her true age.

"I didn't think it would be hard," Rountree said. "Little did I know it would take two years."

Book: Women & Slavery In America

From News Wise:

Women and Slavery in America: A Documentary History, edited by Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis has been published by the University of Arkansas Press.

The edited collection offers readers an opportunity to examine the establishment, growth and evolution of slavery in the United States as it impacted women — enslaved and free, African American and white, wealthy and poor, northern and southern. The primary documents — including newspaper articles, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, speeches, photographs, memoirs, and editorials — are organized thematically and represent cultural, political, religious, economic and social perspectives on this dark and complex period in American history.

Remembering Almena Lomax

From Black Star News:

She was a pioneering journalist who founded a newspaper at a most challenging time in the nation's history, especially for a Black woman.

Almena Lomax, 95, who was also a civil rights activists, died on March 25, in Pasadena, California after a brief illness; the family did not disclose details.

Mrs. Lomax became the first black journalist to be accredited by the Motion Picture Academy, and led boycotts of the movies “Porgy and Bess” and “Imitation of Life,” which Mrs. Lomax believed “libeled the Negro race.” Active in the Civil Rights Movement, in 1956 Mrs. Lomax was active in the bus boycott, and stayed with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family in Montgomery, Alabama, producing her highly acclaimed “Mother’s Day in Montgomery: Boycott Leader Serves His Congregation Toynbee, Langston Hughes, Emerson and Jesus Christ, and is Received in Complete Consanguinity.”

Songbird: Barbara Smith Conrad

From the New York Times:

Barbara Smith Conrad, a black child of the segregated South, did not seek to vote or to ride in the front of the bus. She just wanted to sing.

But in 1957, when this mezzo-soprano from a small East Texas town was cast opposite a white male student in a University of Texas, Austin, opera production, that was just as controversial. Suddenly Ms. Conrad was thrust into the drama of the larger struggle for civil rights. Her story is now the subject of “When I Rise,” a documentary scheduled to have its national television premiere on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on Tuesday night.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)

From SheWired.com:

Flamboyant, bold and outrageous were Zora Neale Hurston’s writings, as was her life. As the diva of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was the most prolific black woman writer of her times and a brilliant chronicler of African American life.

A literary ancestor of the contemporary canon of African American women’s writings like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, etc., Hurston helped to create the art of black women’s narrative voices.

Hurston’s genius for storytelling and drama derived from depicting the lives of her subjects in the poetic cadence of black idiom, and her art form won her critical acclaim in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Hurston’s explorations of black female characters, her analysis of women’s concerns, and their romantic quest for personal wholeness and female autonomy influenced a generation of writers.

Historic First as Kamala Harris Sworn In

From Black Voice News:

Kamala Harris, former San Francisco District Attorney became the first woman, first African American, and first Asian Indian to become the Attorney General in California. Hundreds attended the historic occasion. Several history makers were in the audience: former speaker of the House Willie Brown, an Assembly members, law enforcement officers and attorneys, business leaders, union leaders, ministers, elected officials, state leaders, national NAACP board members, Black newspaper publishers, and people who wanted to be a part of history. Excitement was high as a large crowd waited in the courtyard of the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento.

At The Dark End of the Street

From the Washington Post:

In the segregated American South, a white man could rape a black woman with little fear of legal or social recourse, and black women lived in a persistent state of apprehension. Rape was used as a weapon of terror in the subjugation of black women, their families and whole communities.

In "At the Dark End of the Street," Danielle L. McGuire writes that white men raped black women and girls "with alarming regularity and stunning uniformity," with some victims as young as 7. While some readers will rightly be stunned by that assertion, many African American women will recognize a commonly acknowledged danger.

But "At the Dark End of the Street" is a story of courage. The women did tell, again and again. Many went to police before they went to the hospital and were supported by families and friends who corroborated their stories, at great risk. White control of the justice system meant that relatively few men were ever arrested and many fewer were ever convicted. McGuire reports that between 1940 and 1965, only 10 Mississippi white men were convicted of raping black women and girls. Although rape was a capital offense in many Southern states, no white man was ever executed for raping a black woman.