Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires

Abstract

This article analyzes an interracial women's strike at Wetumpka State Penitentiary in Alabama in 1934. By centering the prison, it challenges southern Black women's long understood absence from factories and their labor movements. As a site of coerced and unpaid labor, the prison represented one of the many places where Black women worked that was unprotected by nascent pro-labor national legislation. And by analyzing Black women's history of industrial labor resistance at Wetumpka, this article calls attention to how incarcerated Black women's labor struggles diverged from but remained an important part of the state's galvanized labor movement. Rather than searching for a similitude of "free world" labor movements, it argues that incarcerated Black women's oppositional politics looked different, because they stemmed from fundamentally different positionalities. Indeed, their refusal to ally with the state, along withthe relationships that theyformed inside, catalyzedaqueer labor politic.