A new documentary short chronicles Little’s groundbreaking case—and her historic victory as the first U.S. woman acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.
In August 1974, a hunt began near the Beaufort County jail in North Carolina. A female inmate had escaped, and a prison guard was dead. Police went after her on foot, and helicopters searched from overhead. One local judge suggested labeling her an “outlaw” so citizens could legally shoot her on sight within state lines.
The woman they were looking for was 20-year-old Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) Little. Clarence Alligood, a 62-year-old corrections officer, had been found in her cell naked from the waist down with semen on his body, having been stabbed multiple times with an ice pick.
When Little turned herself in, she was charged with first-degree murder; if convicted, she faced a death sentence. The press claimed Alligood had been killed “in the line of duty,” but Little insisted he sexually assaulted her and that she had attacked him in self-defense.
Little was harbored by an older Black man in her community after her escape—but she came forward to demand justice.“Somebody has to make the sacrifice in order for there to be a change in the system,” she remarked to the press. “It may as well be me.”
In 1975, she became the first woman in U.S. history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.
There was a bounty on [Little’s] head. She was up against the death penalty. She was a poor Black woman from North Carolina in 1974. All the forces were aligned against her. … Even in those moments … we can fight for justice… and we can come together.”
Yoruba Richen, director of Free Joan Little
This incredible history comes to life in Free Joan Little, a new documentary short from Peabody Award-winning director Yoruba Richen, who was deeply affected by Little’s case when she was working on The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, based on the book by Jeanne Theoharis.
“We knew that an important part of Rosa’s story was her work around sexual violence against Black women,” Richen told Ms. “The Recy Taylor case is one of the more famous cases that she worked on in the 1940s. … Thirty years later [it was] the case of Joan Little.”
Richen was struck by the archival footage Theoharis found from Little’s case. She recalls, “I always knew, from that moment, that I wanted to find out more about this story and bring [it] to the screen.”
In partnership with the nonprofit documentary newsroom Retro Report, Richen created a short sizzle reel and pitched Free Joan Little to journalists and news executives at the 2023 DOC NYC festival. Although the film didn’t win the competition, funding from the Catapult Film Fund, Southern Documentary Fund, InMaat Foundation, Jonathan Logan Foundation and Economic Hardship Reporting Project—and a continued partnership with Retro Report—led Free Joan Little to a full-circle moment when it premiered at DOC NYC this week.
This retelling of Little’s story comes during a crisis point in the expansion of the police state: National Guard troops are being sent to U.S. cities, federal masked ICE agents are kidnapping immigrants and U.S. citizens without due process and police violence too often goes without accountability.
In 1970, three-quarters of counties in the U.S. weren’t holding a single female prisoner; by 2016, women were being held in almost all of them. Between 1973 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. grew seven-fold. The U.S. now has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. People of color make up a disproportionate nearly 70 percent of the prison population, and women are the fastest-growing segment of that population.
Incarcerated women face systematic sexual violence. A 2022 Senate report found that the Bureau of Prisons had opened more than 5,400 cases of sexual abuse over an eight-year span, and that female inmates had been abused in at least 19 of the 29 federal facilities holding women prisoners.
Widespread sexual assault was also reported in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities from 2010 to 2016. This year in Louisiana, queer immigrants alleged being harassed, stalked and assaulted by a warden. Across the country, men are even posing as ICE agents in order to attack and sexually assault women.
“Many of us do not remember the days when a rape victim, a rape survivor, speaking out really did not happen—and, as you see in the film, [Little] was stigmatized, and she was blamed,” Richen says. “But she had the courage and the support to tell her story, and I do think that laid a groundwork for women and other survivors to tell their story and to speak out.”
That we even have data on sexual violence against incarcerated women is also part of Little’s legacy, but under the Trump administration, support for these survivors is under attack. According to nonprofit news outlet The Appeal, the Department of Justice this year terminated all funding for the Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center, which tracked investigations and provided incarcerated survivors with resources.
The only force powerful enough to reverse the normal, repressive course of events is the might of great numbers of people.
Angela Davis, in her 1975 piece for Ms. on Joan Little’s case
Little’s case, Richen says, “put on the map this understanding that this was a problem … in these spaces where women are locked away—where women are thrown away.”
Free Joan Little explores the power of confronting that problem through interviews with activist and scholar Angela Davis, who famously wrote about Little’s case for Ms.; Larry Little (no relation), chair of the Free Joan Little Defense Committee; attorney Karen Bethea-Shields, who worked alongside Jerry Paul on Little’s defense team; and historian Christina Greene, author of Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment. Parts of Little’s own court testimony are read by Grammy Award-winning actor Danielle Brooks.
“Jerry [Paul] felt that we could not win this case through strategists in the courtroom, but that a movement had to be built around the country to heighten the profile of this case,” Larry Little recalls. He and the Free Joan Little Defense Committee heeded that call—uniting activists from the Black Power, feminist and carceral justice movements in common cause around Little’s case, and making her a household name.
In the June 1975 issue of Ms., Davis published her essay calling on feminists to rise up in solidarity with “Sister Joan” and join the movement in her defense.
“The only force powerful enough to reverse the normal, repressive course of events,” she wrote, “is the might of great numbers of people.”
Massive mobilizations were organized in Little’s defense in North Carolina. Civil rights leader Julian Bond, then head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Organization for Women publicly pledged her their support, as did Parks. NOW’s Rape Task Force leader, Mary Ann Largen, took up the cause. Bernice Johnson Reagon, from the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, even released a song about Little’s case—remarking in the lyrics “Joan is you and Joan is me.”
Outside the courtroom, Free Joan Little focuses on the activists gathered in solidarity. When she is acquitted, they erupt into cheers from the sidewalk. “It wasn’t the system that set me free,” Little announces in archival footage after the groundbreaking decision. “It was the people that set me free.”
Richen marvels, “There was a bounty on [Little’s] head. She was up against the death penalty. She was a poor Black woman from North Carolina in 1974. All the forces were aligned against her.” What she says she learned from Little’s story is that “even in those moments, … we can fight for justice and … we can come together.”
Free Joan Little is a direct challenge, Richen says, to “the erasure of a history that’s hard, that’s difficult, and that often is about racial justice” that has become de facto Trump policy. “We can’t let these forces take away our history,” she asserts. “Our history is so important to understanding our present.”
In the case of Little, our history can also change how we understand our own power. “Joan was always more than just a victim-survivor,” author Greene told the filmmakers. “She was a person that had dignity and integrity and believed that her life was worth something.”
Richen adds, “We’re seeing this happen with the Jeffrey Epstein case—that women are not being silenced, and these are incredible forces that are aligning against them, that want them to just shut up. Joan really laid the groundwork for that.”
Little’s legacy, as Richen sees it, is “that you fight—because you are going to tell your story, and you know that you are on the right side of history.”