Care Cage: Black Women, Political Symbolism, and 1970s Prison Crisis

Mary Prince Fitzpatrick became the object of national media attention for the relatively brief political moment surrounding Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, but she was remembered ten years later by black radical imprisoned intellectual, Assata Shakur. In her 1987 autobiography Shakur recalled that as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter “brought a Black woman from prison to clean the state house and babysit for Amy,” arguing that it demonstrated how prisons are “a way of legally perpetuating slavery … prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.”1 Writing from exile in Cuba, Assata cast Carter’s imprisoned nanny alongside herself as a black woman subjugated by captivity and exploitation. Black women are often dually featured in the U.S. political imaginary, “as both foreign threats and as harbingers of American democratic promise vis-'a-vis multicultural inclusion.”2 Such representations exist in constellation, as a coterie of black female subjects whose prominence entrench state power. Assata’s commentary on Fitzpatrick recasts a narrative centering black women as the objects of state benevolence and inclusion, instead highlighting state violation, repression, and exploitation. This exploitation included domestic servitude, which Carter offered as Fitzpatrick’s only alternative to confinement in a cage, enforcing daily affective labor for white authority and coerced care for powerful white children as her pathway to “freedom.” Shakur deftly calls attention to the carceral continuum that ensnares black women in a violent, gendered regime—a regime that produces structures of black female subordination reminiscent of antebellum modes of dominance under the guise of white benevolence and American racial progress.

Through her commentary on Fitzpatrick, Shakur disrupted purported carceral benevolence (if Georgia boasted one of the highest per capital imprisonment rates in the world … at least it allowed a few of its prisoners to leave their cells during the day; at least it provided special privileges to those who proved their worthiness through devotion; at least it refrained from overt acts of physical terror against those who simply complied with its demands). Policed for what was, by most accounts, self-defense, then subjected to intimate carceral violence, Mary Fitzpatrick’s historical life reveals how the carceral state was entrenched through intimate violence, the punishment of black women for protecting their bodily autonomy, and the reproduction of racialized and gendered regimes of dominion.3 Gendered captive labor generated political capital. As Jimmy Carter began his presidency in 1977, the media ushered him into office with a grand narrative about the Carter family’s close relationship with Fitzpatrick. Born in Lumpkin, Georgia, she was in her mid-twenties in 1970 when she was convicted of murder stemming from her intervention in a bar fight between her cousin, Annie Maude, and another woman. According to Fitzpatrick, the women were struggling over Annie Maude’s gun, and when Fitzpatrick “tried to take it away,” it discharged, killing Annie Maude’s boyfriend who was standing nearby; she was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.4 In 1971, she began working at the governor’s mansion alongside four other black women who performed general domestic work, another who worked as a cook, and two men who performed maintenance and gardening at the governor’s mansion where the Carter family resided.5 Mary became the primary caretaker for Amy Carter, who was three years old at the time. She would attend to Amy during the day and return to a prison cell each night. After Carter left the governor’s office in 1975, the family visited Mary in prison and she received cards and letters on her birthday, Christmas, and Mother’s Day.6 Rosalynn Carter successfully requested that Fitzpatrick receive a three-day pass from prison to attend Carter’s presidential inauguration, launching a media spectacle.7 Fitzpatrick’s body was cartographic, mapping the terms of Carter’s ascent from Georgia to the White House, its contours drawn to delineate his political affinity for everyday folk, a terrain of black appeasement shrouding white dominion over black female subjects. This was, according to the New York Times, a “modern-day Cinderella tale.”8 She even attended an inaugural ball in a “gown she had sewn from velvet given to her by fellow inmates.”9

As this article will detail, Fitzpatrick and other black female prisoners figured into Jimmy Carter’s political rhetoric, signifying his familiarity with and governance over obsequious black womanhood. This political practice reflects the enduring legacy of Mammy—the archetype of rationalized slavery and black subordination— which has significantly shaped gendered and racial concepts and, as such, influenced American imaginaries of the South and the nation from the 19th century to the 20th.10 The purported bonds of black maternal affection and love ingratiated a president facing organizing campaigns for decarceration, economic transformation, and racial justice in a moment of significant contingency about the future direction of carceral and economic policy. Jimmy Carter was widely known as a master of political symbolism; this article examines the political significance of his deployment of criminalized black women as symbols in the consolidation of political power. This extends a long history in which black women’s bodies performed what Nicole Ivy calls “representational labor,” producing value in various fields of knowledge production (in this case, political knowledge) by evincing white male expertise, authority, prowess, and dominance.11

The public narrative surrounding Fitzpatrick and the Carter family demonstrates the complexities of black female counternormativity, the relationship between cultural narratives and statecraft, and the role of state strategies of incorporation in consolidating nationhood through narratives of racial familial affect and authority. The discourse of concern for the plight of individual black women masked carceral violence and allowed Carter to evade political accountability to the radical feminist social movements that critiqued the racial and gendered regimes of capitalism, impending neoliberalism, and mass incarceration over which he loomed. Presiding over the early and pivotal period of contemporary carceral state formation, Carter individualized social problems and their solutions as activists argued for structural accountability and transformation.

The carceral state’s roots and routes consisted not only of draconian policy and vicious discourses about black inferiority, violation, and state parasitism (i.e., disorderly rioters, violent criminals, and welfare queens) but also through softer, romantic, gendered political narratives that sought to legitimize reform and evade radical calls for decarceration, racial, and economic justice in the midst of the era’s carceral crisis. If, as Stuart Hall et al. and Hazel Carby have demonstrated, “moral panics,” do particular work to index “the disintegration of the social order,” moral salves operate to create the appearance of social and cultural integration, order, and liberal concern about inequality.12 Although her stint in the public eye was short and she held no policy-related governmental position, Fitzpatrick figured in the establishment of a political culture in which Carter could exalt his standing as an everyman with sympathies for the poor, while variously enacting or disregarding policies that subjected disproportionately Black and working-class people to impending carceral doom.

Gendered Carceral Crisis

By 1974 Jimmy Carter had been governor of Georgia for three years and Mary Fitzpatrick had been behind bars in that state for four. She was hardly alone. In 1978 Georgia had the sixth-largest women’s prison population in the country, although it ranked thirteenth in overall national population.13 Georgia had the nation’s “highest per capita prison rate,” which meant it had the highest prison rate of “any industrialized country in the world.”14 Georgia continued to hold that distinction throughout the 1970s, imprisoning 420 people per 100,000, compared with a national rate of 247 per 100,000.15 This was not a response to crime, as the state’s crime rate was lower than the national average each year during the 1970s, and the property crime rate far surpassed that of violent crime.16 Georgia was a battleground for death penalty law, and by the late 1970s it imposed more death sentences per 100,000 residents than any other state.17 At mid-decade, African Americans were sixty percent of Georgia’s prison population, despite comprising only approximately twenty-seven percent of the state’s overall population.18 Black men and women alike faced disproportionate incarceration rates; although women represented only a small percent of the overall prison population, sixty-five percent of women in custody were black; behind prison walls they rebelled against the violence and labor exploitation they faced.19

Despite Carter’s promise that by the time he left office “Georgia will have a prison system and offender rehabilitation system … that will be the best in the United States,” by 1975, his last year in office, Georgia’s prison system was abominable; 20 prisoners were sleeping on the floor, the prisoner population had reached a record high of 10,330 and, according to reporters, the “future looked gloomy.”21 Under Carter, Georgia increased the number of college-educated prison wardens and prison education programs, but did not reduce the prison population.22 Overcrowding exacerbated the inherent brutality of prison. Even Ellis MacDougal, director of the State Board of Corrections, admitted in 1971 that the prisons were filthy.23 In 1973, imprisoned men at Reidsville Prison complained that guards were inciting racial conflict between black and white men by arming white prisoners.24 In that same year activists behind bars brought a class action lawsuit challenging overcrowding, which was not even minimally addressed until 1978 when a court ordered the state to reduce its prison population by 300 people.25 In 1976, only three of sixteen correctional facilities had full-time doctors or dentists and there were no full-time psychiatrists or gynecologists.26 Policies banned conjugal visits and visitation for those held in solitary confinement.27 In short, “slave labor, inadequate food, lack of medical care, and guard harassment and brutality” were “part of everyday life.”28

Uncompensated labor was one of the system’s many abuses and it disproportionately impacted women. Following in Georgia’s long history of black female reproductive labor exploitation, imprisoned women were forced to work without pay in the kitchen and laundry of the Central State Hospital, before they could receive “less strenuous work.”29 Under the so-called work release program established by Carter, hundreds of prisoners “work[ed] in government buildings around Georgia” in the 1970s, and some had to do so “for many years” before being released.30 Men who gardened and maintained public buildings earned a meager wage for their work, while incarcerated women who cooked, cleaned, and cared for the children of Georgia’s governors and first ladies received no pay.31

Instead of quelling prison overcrowding or improving conditions, the Carter administration focused on limited reforms. Alternatives to incarceration were barely implemented; by 1974, “only 5.3% of prisoners performed vocational work, and only 2% earned work release.”32 Work training programs did not provide certification and therefore did not help prisoners obtain jobs after release.33 In 1975, the prison commission touted a projected $450,000 in revenue from the prison labor including the private lumber industry.34 Jimmy Carter attempted to name his way out of the crisis by subsuming the Board of Corrections under the newly titled Department of Offender Rehabilitation as part of a broader program of governmental streamlining and rationalization. Despite a grand name change to create the appearance of a more progressive system, the main mode of state punishment remained captivity.

The next major focus in Carter’s public relations campaign was diversifying corrections staff, establishing an affirmative-action program for prison staff in February 1974.35 E. Laverne Ford briefly served as the first black warden for the women’s detention center. Carter also initiated a program called “Operation Catchup,” which trained women and African Americans to be police officers, providing a $600 scholarship per term to college students under the condition that they would pursue a career in law enforcement. 36 Carter’s initiatives created a neoliberal black carceral management class, legitimating rather than reducing the state’s reliance upon imprisonment.37

Grassroots activists and journalists in the 1970s recognized that an explosion in punishment could be on the horizon. They argued that things were already bad, worse than bad, and protested rising incarceration rates, prison overcrowding and abuse, and political repression, while demanding alternatives to incarceration to thwart impending mass incarceration, a “drastic reduction of the prison population” and “a moratorium on jail and prison construction.38 Such organizing was part of an anti-prison movement that was particularly strong as Carter began his term as governor in the early 1970s.39 In the face of strikes at Folsom in 1970, the 1971 Attica rebellion, and a 1973 San Quentin Strike, Carter was dismissive, observers in the black press noted that San Quentin’s warden Louis Nelson and Carter seemed to have “the same script writer” claiming “incidents at their respective facilities were traceable to militants who had recently been transferred in from other institutions.”40 Carter employed the “outside agitator” rhetoric so prevalent in massive resistance movements against Civil Rights at a moment when imprisoned black men were attempting to desegregate the prison, belying his self-presentation as the enlightened New South governor.

Though hardly remembered this way, Jimmy Carter was a key actor in this period, first as governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975, then as president; in the midst of growing activist concern over the plight of imprisoned radicals and the broader prison population, he occasionally incorporated incarcerated women and men into the narrative fold of those deemed worthy of political concern. Yet this representation of individual prisoners as downtrodden stood in for substantive policy to ameliorate or eradicate the growing crisis. His carceral symbolic politics masked his substantive criminal punishment policy. Carter’s career was marked by the use of representation to shroud the nascent neoliberal carceral buildup.

Laws criminalizing poor women in Georgia contributed to the growth of incarceration. In 1973, the state legislature passed the Welfare Fraud Act, criminalizing aiding and abetting welfare fraud, and increasing the penalty for receiving over $500 in fraudulent public benefits from a misdemeanor to a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.41 One of the first victims of the new Welfare Fraud Act, Evelyn Turner, was sentenced to serve a year in prison for five counts of “theft by deception,” for welfare fraud totaling $2,772.42 This was part of a national trend, as the rate of women’s arrests for fraud increased by 22 percent between 1973 and 1974, nearly double the rate of increase for men.43 As Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has detailed, the late 1970s represented an escalating attempt by law enforcement to enlist the public in prosecuting welfare recipients by establishing and promoting fraud hotlines that people could call to provide tips about welfare fraud crime. Neighbors turned into allies in the neoliberal turn against welfare and poor women.44

As Folsom Prison strikers recognized, gendered regimes of low wage labor on the outside were intimately connected to the struggles of imprisoned people; they contended, “thousands of welfare recipients have to divide their checks to support their imprisoned relatives who without the outside support could not even buy toilet articles or food. Men working on scale wages could support themselves and families while in prison.”45 This analysis elucidated the gendered relationship between economic precarity and exploitation that transcended prison walls, and highlighted the connection between the economic devastation facing the imprisoned and the non-incarcerated, shattering attempts to situate prisoners as separate from broader society.46

Jimmy Carter continued to use political symbolism to veil carceral entrenchment as he assumed the presidency in 1977. He did not check the burgeoning carceral state even in the face of recession-era pressure for austerity. In the coming years, carceral expansion would be the bedrock of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore have called the “‘anti-state state’: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking.”47 In contrast with an overall 3 percent decline in federal employment, federal justice jobs rose by 33 percent between 1971 and 1979, two thirds of which were in policing.48 During the Carter years, spending on police, corrections, and legal personnel slowed compared with 1971–1975 rates, but his administration did not reduce spending to pre-1975 levels, as he might have amid intense budgetary concerns and with Democratic control of both houses of Congress. The Carter administration did not inaugurate the draconian policies that would be introduced and intensified in the Reagan and Clinton regimes that followed him; however, his administration contributed to the rise of mass incarceration precisely through the practice of implementing liberal reformist measures that secured the carceral state. He held law enforcement spending apace and failed to create alternatives to incarceration in a moment of contingency and opportunity. Rather than structurally responding to the nascent imprisonment industrial state—and thereby working to prevent draconian law enforcement policy—Carter focused on the gendered and racial symbolics of punishment, evading structural accountability and change.

The creation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1965 represented a watershed moment in carceral buildup, giving “the federal government an altogether new role in crime control”49 as the “first federal program specifically for the purpose of helping states strengthen their law enforcement capabilities.”50 In a congressional accord that would reorganize and extend the LEAA until 1980, the Carter administration capped spending on high tech police equipment but designated “high crime areas” in which criminal justice spending would be increased and focused, concentrating policing spatially and racially. The reorganization also allocated funds to improve public housing but made those improvements contingent on additional policing and security.51 Under the guise of infrastructural refurbishment, the attorney general intensified disparate policing and police brutality in poor, black, and brown neighborhoods, contributing to the pathologization of public housing. 52 The decision to concentrate crime fighting efforts in public housing and in poor communities of color meant that black women were increasingly surveilled and policed in black domestic space, subject to monitoring and arrest as they conducted their daily lives and raised their families. The long-term impact on women was disastrous. Between 1978 and 1989, the national women’s prison population would more than triple.53 Heightened police encroachment in black domestic space amounted to a gendered regime of policing and a dramatic political irony given that Carter assumed the presidency by positioning himself as an advocate for a particular black woman whose exit from prison was meant to provide order, tranquility, and warmth to the Carter household and signify his empathy for the downtrodden among America’s citizens.

Policed in their homes and brutalized behind prison walls, the toll of carceral repression on black women remains understudied; so does their activism to contest the carceral state.54 In 1973, imprisoned women in Georgia fought back; a group incarcerated at the Georgia Rehabilitation Center for Women (GRCW) intervened as a guard attempted to beat a woman in retribution for an escape attempt. Then, in continued protest against the guard’s brutality they burned rags while carrying out their work assignments in the laundry room of the Central State Hospital.55 These actions reflect a commitment to collective protection and the willingness to use physical means of self-defense to prevent brutality and ameliorate prison conditions.

Tempera Myrick was not the subject of collective protest but her circumstances are likely precisely what imprisoned women feared when they stood together to fend off the guards. Two years later, on June 24, 1975, Tempera Myrick’s body was found hanging in her prison cell at GRCW. Only nineteen years old at the time, Myrick had served six months of her three-year sentence for credit card fraud. After an alleged escape attempt, officials placed Tempera in solitary confinement, where she died. Unanswered questions lingered and answers were demanded. Myrick’s mother, Gertrude Myrick, rejected the notion that her daughter had committed suicide, citing her love for life and her positive spirits during a telephone conversation the day before her death. Myrick’s brother agreed, noting that she was indeed “in a good mood,” just before she died. Questions linger: was Tempera putting on a brave front for her family? Did she return to her cell wondering if she could make it for another two and a half years of solitary? Of stifling cells brimming to the max with other women who looked like her, all of whom faced a world of scraping and surviving upon their release? Could she bear it? Were Willie and Gertrude Myrick accurate about Tempera’s disposition? Was she strung up by guards who wanted to ensure that she would not try to escape again? Did they seize their chance, as she was hidden from view of the women who would have tried to protect her with their own bodies as they had for another girl, only a few months before? Did the guards leave her there to die? The latter question provoked the American Civil Liberties Union to demand a separate independent investigation into her death, especially regarding “discrepancies in reports about … the time to discover the body, open the cell door and get the body down.”56 The investigation request was summarily denied by Carter’s successor, Governor George Busbee.

Reproductive labor was a site of imprisoned and formerly imprisoned black women’s specific economic subordination; this constituted violence in a carceral geography that extended from the GRCW/Central State Hospital to the Carter governor’s mansion, to the White House. As they fought guards and burned rags, women at the GRCW resisted repression and retaliation for escape, and in so doing asserted a claim to freedom, destabilizing the legitimacy of the prison itself. Such refusal represents “the black quotidian as a signature idiom of diasporic culture and black futurity,” a disruptive black feminist futurity grounded in the sense/tense of what has not yet happened but must, “that which is not, but must be.”57 Imprisoned black women have long carried out arson in recognition of being in the position of not: not thought, not protected, not seen, not free.58 From this position, arson enacts refusal futurity by dramatizing both the magnitude of what is not, and the urgency of what must be—the demand for another future materialized in the deterioration of the present to embers. Arson was one form of condemnation; officials in charge of fire in Georgia offered another. In October 1974, overcrowding was so bad at GRCW that “the State Fire Marshall’s office condemned the building.”59 To address overcrowding, the state predictably expanded women’s imprisonment, adding “1,100 new beds” to the department of corrections capacity by 1976 while offering parole to select women whose crimes were especially minor.60

Activists took Carter to task, and highlighted the injustice facing black women under both his gubernatorial and presidential administrations. In 1978 a relatively small but energetic group of protesters marched in Georgia in support of Dessie Woods, who had been sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for killing a white man who attempted to sexually assault her; their banners proclaimed, “Carter’s human rights is a lie—Free Dessie Woods and all political prisoners.”61 They argued that her case exemplified “justice, ‘New South’ style, Jimmy Carter Style,” and his failure to intervene on Woods’s behalf “exposed the hypocrisy of Jimmy Carter’s position on human rights to the world.”62 After consistent organizing and a successful petition by the People’s Law Center, Woods’s conviction was overturned in 1981 based upon the circumstantial nature of the evidence against her. She eventually changed her name and moved to Oakland, California where she became engaged in local political organizing and community building before her death in November 2006.63 As Emily Thuma demonstrates, protests surrounding the imprisonment of women of color defending themselves against violence “influenced the emergence of an expressly anticarceral feminist agenda in the 1970s.”64

Punitive approaches to the daily management of welfare and the increased prosecution of welfare fraud, the denial of guaranteed adequate income, and the escalation of public housing policing drew condemnation from an array of activists, some who held longstanding objections to his gubernatorial policies and others who were disappointed by his failure to enact meaningful change as president. The criminalization of welfare proceeded through both increased fraud prosecutions and pernicious political discourses. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) leadership, including Johnnie Tillmon, vehemently criticized the state for positioning itself as the husband in a “super sexist marriage” and then Governor Ronald Reagan’s characterization of welfare recipients as “lazy parasites.”65 Tillmon’s analysis “points to state violence as not just spectacular incidents but also mundane practices such as home inspections, the denial of a welfare check, bureaucratic obstacles, and the myriad other dehumanizing ways that recipients are always already seen and treated as ‘welfare queens.’”66 In 1975, Tillmon challenged law enforcement spending, arguing that welfare recipients receive “a lot less than people pay police officers to beat them up.”67 Local welfare rights activists protested the inadequacies of Carter’s 1977 “Program for Better Jobs and Income,” which proposed public service jobs but paltry federal grants of $4,200 for a family of four, constituting a decline in benefits in some states. Appropriating the state’s language, Faith Evans, former associate director of the NWRO, called the plan an “outright fraud,” arguing that it cheated “those of us who have fought and struggled over the years for an adequate income program and finally convinced ourselves that Jimmy Carter would provide the poor of this nation with a way out of poverty and degradation that the present welfare system has forced them into, for the last forty-two years.”68 In addition to welfare rights, vibrant urban housing rights campaigns that were led by poor black women took off.69 But as they mobilized to improve public housing they faced Carter’s federal policy, which linked public housing improvements to increased policing.70

Mary Fitzpatrick’s ensnarement in a carceral regime of reproductive labor exploitation represented the intersection of racial, gendered, and economic oppression against which activists were struggling. Fitzpatrick held various jobs through her life, most consistently working as a childcare provider for white families, but sometimes relying upon public assistance when work was not steady.71 Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s historical experiences were emblematic of the political onslaught facing poor, criminalized women in Georgia: the criminalization of welfare, the brutality of imprisonment for black women, and carceral labor exploitation. Yet Carter managed to enact political alchemy. Through self-fashioned benevolence toward Fitzpatrick, she became a representational laborer in the service of his political and professional success; she was instrumental as a political tool that he could use for insulation against the very policies that so circumscribed her life. Though she occupied the precise social position that black feminist and anticarceral feminist organizing sought to highlight and transform, Mary Fitzpatrick, under Carter’s political hand, became a state symbolic gesture.

Symbolic Gestures

Although Carter hailed from the nation’s most carcerally dense state, which under his administration had both failed to improve its prison system and implemented punitive policies toward the poor, especially black women, his election in 1976 appeared to some as an opportunity. James Baldwin published an open letter in the New York Times in the days following his inauguration; appealing to Carter’s professed concern for the poor and commitment to expanding presidential access to ordinary Americans, Baldwin asked “the only president to whom I would have written,” to intervene in cases of unjust imprisonment and racial terror. Linking imprisonment and poverty, he asked the new president to take action because “too many of us are in jail, my friend; too many of us are starving, too many of us can find no door open.”72

Baldwin’s reference to Carter as exceptional in his potential amenability to intervention reflects the potency of a political strategy that the newly elected president described as “the substantive and the symbolic.” His investment in symbolism was so strong in fact that celebrated political cartoonist Garry Trudeau mocked it by writing a sketch that “furnished the Carter administration with a ‘Secretary of Symbolism.’”73 Narratives about black women served Carter’s aim to familiarize himself to America as an average southerner who could manage black subordinates through benevolence. He was skilled in ambiguity and similitude: “conservatives perceived him as a conservative, moderates as moderate, and liberals as liberal.” He was admired for speaking “without embarrassment about deeply personal things—trust, truth, the family, love,” which contributed to his “averageness,” reinforced once he assumed the presidency, by “early symbolic activities (walking ‘home’ after the inauguration … removing the gold braids of the ‘palace guards,’ enrolling Amy in a public school, etc.). Carter, known for being fuzzy on details and policy but waging a “clever campaign of symbol manipulation,” incorporated black women into his repertoire of emblems.74

In 1975 Carter recalled one of his shining gubernatorial achievements: symbolically integrating the seat of state power. In his final year as governor he hung the portraits of three black leaders—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Henry McNeal Turner, and Miss Lucy Craft Laney—in the previously all-white halls of the Georgia State Capitol “as both a substantive and symbolic gesture … a dramatization of the goodwill that has long existed between black and white people of our state, and the realization that no matter what the future holds we must face it together.”75 Lucy Craft Laney is best known as a trailblazer in black education, serving, until her death in 1933, as founder and principle of the renowned Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, which provided classical education to African Americans in Augusta.76 While her impressive accomplishments in the area of black education earned her a spot in the Georgia State Capitol, a seldomacknowledged moment in her esteemed life illuminates the longstanding disproportionate criminalization of black women as well as the erasure of black women’s confrontations with carceral violence in official state narratives.77

In 1907, Lucy Laney was convicted of violating a vaccination ordinance for attempting to comfort her young pupils who were “panic stricken” when white public health physicians visited the Haines School to administer vaccines.78 She risked imprisonment in a convict camp, which she averted by paying a twentyfive-dollar fine.79 In the corridors of the Georgia capitol, the Lucy Laney who challenged white authority, risking brutal incarceration, was erased and exalted as an icon of black excellence and educational aspiration; the portrait commissioned by the Carter administration renders a serene older woman sitting in quietude, reading to a young boy and girl. Gone is the fiery activist whose defense of the young students at Haines made her vulnerable to white supremacist terror. The portrait’s caption reads simply “Miss Lucy Craft Laney, 1855–1933, Teacher, Public Servant.”80 Carter expressed great pride in his substantive-symbolic integration work; under his emergent neoliberal order, which was the emergent carceral order, black female portraiture expressed idealized devotion to the state and the use of “minority difference and culture as positivities” that served state interests.81 Laney, one of a trio that represented a beloved interracial community of Georgians, signaled American progress that countered the inequities and inadequacies of joblessness, housing insecurity, educational disparity, welfare disinvestment, and imprisonment. They were there, as Carter boasted, no matter what the future holds, a cunning if ominous euphemism for the catastrophes of emergent neoliberalism.

Early in his presidential campaigning and in the same year Lucy Laney’s painting was commissioned, Jimmy Carter employed another criminalized black woman for his gain. In 1974, Carter delivered a speech at The University of Georgia Law School in which he cited the influence of Bob Dylan’s song, “Maggie’s Farm,” on his political approach and thinking. The song, which lambasted expropriated agricultural labor and includes the lyrics, “No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s ma no more/Well, when she talks to all the servants/About man and God and law,” led Carter to recall that when he was governor he “had a very fine cook … who was a prisoner—a woman … [who] said ‘Governor I would like to borrow $250.00.’” She needed the money to pay off the remainder of the $750 fine imposed by the court in order to be released from prison and Carter’s service. She cooked for the Carters every day and returned to her cell at night but since this reproductive labor was unremunerated she needed to “borrow” the money, a debt peonage system of carcerally enforced domestic service. Although Carter did not “lend” her the money, which might have been viewed in the eyes of his audience as a form of welfare, he referred her case to his legal aide, providing information rather than compensation in exchange for her labor.82 Although rife with contradiction, his expressed admiration for Dylan’s labor protest song, criticism of his cook’s incarceration, and pride in his position as the manager of uncompensated laborers, fits within Carter’s political performance as folk advocate whose proliferation of expressed sympathy and articulation of personal stories could free him from political accountability and transform mastery into generosity. He critiqued court fines but did not compensate his workers so they, in turn, could pay them; he did not ameliorate (much less eliminate) the economic violence of uncompensated labor or the prosecution of poor black women for economic crimes. Individual folk stories diverted attention from the oppressive infrastructure of imprisonment but also contributed to the broader neoliberal narrative that industriousness would be rewarded with ultimate success, countering the calls for freedom, and income as a right and guarantee, a demand central to the ongoing social movements led by poor black women.

On the presidential campaign trail in 1976 Carter pledged to introduce uniform sentencing and ethics reform, concentrate police in high crime areas, provide adequate pay for police, and emphasize rehabilitation and neighborhood policing.83 He advocated for victims’ rights, arguing “crime and lack of justice are especially cruel to those who are least able to protect themselves,” called for procedural reforms that would effectuate “swift arrest and trial, and fair and uniform punishment.”84 He asserted the need to expand the carceral state while incorporating black women to further convince audiences of his sympathies for the most downtrodden. If “liberals established a law-and-order mandate,” with the right to safety a prerequisite for all rights, Carter was no exception, proclaiming, “It is time for the law to be enforced. We cannot educate children, create harmony among people, or preserve basic human freedom unless we have an orderly society.”85

By proliferating personal stories Carter attempted to reflect his affinity for the poor and incarcerated while also offering a policy framework centered on victims’ rights and minor reforms of sentencing abuses; this agenda positioned him as the antithesis to Republican candidates whose “biggest problem” was their association with “big-business types—against the working people, against poor people, against minorities” in the aftermath of Watergate.86 Carter used his accounts of black female prisoners to prove that he recognized injustice, while evading political responsibility and signifying that political problems could be ameliorated through his personal relationships with subordinate black women. Popular representations of Fitzpatrick intimated that black inclusion and security could be achieved through devotion. The affective register of devotion—to Carter’s own family and, by extension, the nation—was invoked to bring comfort, quietude, and order in the midst of the scandals of Watergate and Vietnam and in the face of radical dissent. Carter was particularly ensconced in the intense 1970s contest over family values that historian Robert Self has elucidated. On the campaign trail, he bemoaned the “loss of stability and the loss of values,” diagnosing the problem as a “steady erosion and weakening of our families.” If America suffered from a broad deterioration of family values, Fitzpatrick restored order and tranquility in the form of the familiar figure of the black female servant who produced white familial stability under a liberal guise.87 Black women’s perceived excessive presence, indeed dominance, within the black home was famously elaborated as a source of the deterioration of black life in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 treatise on black matriarchy, but Fitzpatrick’s carceral transfer to the white home only enhanced its stability.88 Fitzpatrick was useful in circulating a “like one of the family” value that recast carcerally enforced control over black women as racial progress, liberalism, and a stabilizing moral force, positioning dutiful black female affective labor as the antidote for immorality and the idealized mode of black familial life. This discursive violence, which shrouded material state violence in black women’s lives, would receive spectacular attention through the public circulation of Fitzpatrick’s story. This violent “fashioning of obligation” reveals a regime of state carceral violence that is domestic, economic, emotional, and physical in character.89 It was a story that began with care as a technology of punishment and ended with the notion that the very same work could structure, if not define, freedom.90

The Care Cage

After arranging for her temporary reprieve to attend the inaugural festivities, which captured the national imagination, the Carter family requested that Georgia’s parole board grant her an early parole in February 1977, two months before she was to have her first hearing. Her early release was granted and she was able to move out of the penitentiary and into the White House.91 She worked as the full-time governess for Amy, who was nine years old, as well as the newborn child of Carter’s son, Chip; her job also included “helping with household cleaning and laundry.”92 Her only alternative to prison was to be “on call” working “six or seven days a week.”93 Although she lived in the White House, Mary Fitzpatrick still had to support her boys, who were not allowed to live there with her, on a salary of $6,004 ($25,612 in 2018 dollars) when the median income for a woman employed full time was $7,737.94

When Fitzpatrick stepped off the plane to her new permanent home Washington, D.C., she was met with the buzz of “50-odd” reporters.95 Journalists of all stripes were enthralled with the story’s new development, entranced by the novelty of a convicted murderess who would otherwise be serving a life sentence now to be a white house employee; and one who would care for Amy no less. They reported that she was given the “Cinderella Reprieve,” took note of the blue dress and white corsage she was wearing, and commented that she would be living one floor above the president.96 Care was rendered through abundant media accounts of Mary’s affective world and everyday enactments of love and joy between Mary and Amy from their Georgia to Washington, D.C.: how Amy would cry when Mary left her each night when she was her caretaker in Georgia; Mary, so excited she was “unable to sleep” after learning she would be moving to the white house; Mary tucking Amy into bed and leaving the light on for first lady Rosalynn; the two dancing together, doing “the bump and the robot and stuff”; Mary teasing Amy about her freckles and helping as much as she could with homework although Amy was the “better reader”; photographs of Mary carefully placing furniture in Amy’s dollhouse and playing with her on the White House lawn were splashed across newspapers. In vivid detail the longstanding regimes of coerced labor were rendered love, and love normalized racial and familial nationalisms through the production of black female difference. White enjoyment consisted in this case of the production and reproduction of Amy Carter’s affective well-being: the quelling of tears, and the production of safety, joy, contentment, and general pleasure— affective entitlements that Amy could not do without and that only a black woman could provide, her desire so strong that it was said to unlock cell doors and influence prison authorities. It was, in some ways, the perfect political story: both Amy and Mary demonstrated individual determination, belief, patience, and dedication, which of course was rewarded. Mary Fitzpatrick’s own ostensible grand proclamations circulated in the public to erase intimate carceral violence: the relations of exploitation that rendered her coerced, low-wage labor as the only alternative to the cage in which she otherwise would have been forced to remain.

When asked about her relationship with Amy, Mary Fitzpatrick stated simply, “I guess you would call it love.”97 She guessed; her mitigating language reflects the histories of racial, gendered, and economic subjection contained within the dynamic that she described as love. But she was unequivocal about her fondness for the first daughter. In an article that she wrote for the National Enquirer Mary described the first time that she tucked Amy Carter into her bed in the White House as “the most beautiful moment” of her life.98 One Atlanta prison official said she thought that Amy was “directly responsible” for Mary’s freedom; the political power of the emotional attachment between a young white girl and a black domestic worker was a point of fascination as journalists opined that Amy’s love “unlocked [the] door to her nanny’s prison cell.”99 While it is difficult to discern Fitzpatrick’s inner desires and beliefs from an archive meant to affirm Carter’s account, her life and labor raises questions about the degree to which she was able to maneuver to carve out greater reprieve from the violence of her carceral predicament. Was she able to negotiate the prime value of the Carters’ impression of her love for Amy toward her own ends? Did she mobilize the discourses of family and affection to acquire time off with her family? Did she keep notes on her views of the relationship between the home and the prison or on the violence of policing and its disproportionate impact on black women, which was on full display all around her? How did she describe the drudgery of work? In what political moments did Mary Fitzpatrick see possibility and in what contexts did she derive pleasure? After she professed her love for Amy to the public did she retreat to her well-appointed room in the White House to be alone with grief and estrangement from her family? Submerged in an archive of public relations and political symbolism is Mary Fitzpatrick’s interior life, about which little is available.

Their love was a national story; the “violence of affection” was alchemical, transforming racial and gendered structures of power into family romance through a single word: love.100 The ruse of politicized maternal love was a form of seduction, “masking the antagonistic fissures of the social by ascribing to the object of property an ensnaring and criminal agency that acted to dissimulate the barbarous forms of white enjoyment permitted within the law.”101 Economic domination, familial estrangement, coerced care, and the violence of captivity were effaced through representations of affection, a portrait that ascribed ensnaring agency, emotion, and will to Fitzpatrick; her agency was in turn employed to rehabilitate the nation.

Not all observers were so enamored. Some Baltimore Afro-American readers believed that Fitzpatrick was only moving from “one demeaning situation to an only slightly less demeaning one.”102 Reports that Mary Fitzpatrick’s two sons would not be able to live with her prompted one young black female reader to declare succinctly, “they may not want to call it that but what it comes down to is: Amy Carter has herself a mammy.”103 In U.S. cultural history, Mammy crafted a political world in which “white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism seem not to exist at all.”104 Mary Fitzpatrick’s discourse of love spectacularized the national family’s racial, gendered, and economic entitlements and benevolence. The Amy–Mary romance was nationally resonant in a time of leadership transition. If love is “crucial to how individuals become aligned with collectivities through their identification with an ideal,” the Amy–Mary romance narrative was employed toward the collective healing of a nation that was perceived as politically heartbroken.105

Carter described his task as president to offer healing to an electorate that he described as “sick at heart” and others labeled “hopeful, sort of.”106 The political symbolics of hope and care played an especially big role in Carter’s campaign and early presidency as many, including Carter himself, believed he was elected in part to “nurse an ailing nation’s wounds.”107 He pledged to create greater avenues for public input in his presidency and mobilized the iconography of Mary Fitzpatrick as a signifier of optimism and care. Martha Mitchell, Carter’s “special assistant to the President for the black community” and one of four black women whom Carter named to White House positions, asserted that by hiring Fitzpatrick, Rosalynn Carter “brought hope to other prisoners and encouraged prospective employers.”108 Administrative officials positioned Mary Fitzpatrick as an icon for the politics of hope that would possibly trickle down to bosses, and the New York Amsterdam News agreed, claiming Fitzpatrick’s position said “in a loud and clear voice” that formerly incarcerated people “should be given a second chance for the good life.” Framing economic conditions in terms of individual intent and inspiration, the paper opined that if an ex-prisoner could work in the “nation’s most famous home, other employers should have enough confidence in them to give them jobs in offices and industries.”109 In this critical historical moment, a political narrative centering upon a black woman convicted of murder and her early release could be a public relations boon, providing new inaugural shine; although this would be unfathomable in future, more overtly draconian administrations, the deployment of such symbolism to efface carceral buildup was critical to the creation of the late 20th-century carceral state. Reporters argued that Fitzpatrick’s hire was “a clear extension” of the administration’s criminal reform intentions and campaign theme to directly and personally impact social institutions including prisons, schools, and mental institutions.110 Along with sending Amy to public school and forming a people’s committee, reporters noted that Fitzpatrick’s hire evidenced Carter’s purported commitment to “humanize the presidency,” and “broaden presidential access.”111 This was part of a political approach that circulated a rhetoric of moral values and good government even as his administration “carried the Democratic Party to the right in an effort to appease business interests and white suburban voters.”112

By the end of Carter’s term unemployment was at 8.5 percent; the pivotal years of 1976 to 1980, as Judith Stein characterized them, ushered in a new economic orthodoxy and method of running government premised on the notion that the “promotion of capital will eventually benefit labor—trading factories for finance.”113 Although it was not until Reagan’s administration that “further deregulation, tax cuts, budget cuts, and attacks on trade union and professional power” were fully consolidated, the neoliberal tolerance for extremely high levels of unemployment was becoming entrenched and impacting black workers especially hard114; in 1975 “official black unemployment reached 1.5 million, the largest number of blacks out of work since the Great Depression.”115 Despite enjoying a Democratic majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives, the Carter administration did not seize the possibility of alternative solutions to the economic crisis that was increasingly carceral in character, as the 1970s saw the state and federal prison population increase by nearly 100,000, or 48 percent (following a reduction in the corrections population by more than 16,000 in the 1960s).116 The 1970s was an “interregnum, a period of experimentation between state intervention and experimentation in which statist and social democratic alternatives remained on the agenda.”117 With respect to carcerality this was also the case: a period in which law and order politics intensified, yet mass incarceration was not a political certainty.

If the state grew on the promise of shrinking, the carceral state also hardened through a narrative of softening. As Naomi Murakawa argues, the origins of Reagan-era legislation such as the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 lay in older liberal strategies of blending both civil rights and crime control.118 The Carter regime represented a critical, pivotal moment in which politicians crafted a liberal–neoliberal rhetorical concoction, proliferating narratives of official antiracism that employed iconography of black female difference, docility, and industriousness, and configuring coercion as freedom amid intensifying carceral harm and unemployment. Carter’s use of Fitzpatrick was starkly neoliberal, privatizing responsibility for the social problems of poverty and incarceration by situating interpersonal racial benevolence as an antidote. A renovated Mammy discourse made black female subordination and gratitude a mechanism through which to convey the neoliberal message that economic development was the domain of private employers and free markets, and inequality was to be ameliorated through charity, good will, and affective structures of love and care.

Fitzpatrick’s cultural currency was reflected in her depiction in a Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch that aired shortly after Carter’s inauguration. Sissy Spacek hosted the iconic March 12, 1977 episode, which won an Emmy Award for outstanding writing and included a sketch called “Ask Carter.” In it, ordinary people, representing diverse swaths of American cultural life, called in to a mock television show hosted by Walter Cronkite seeking help for pressing life problems from the president. Callers included a postal worker to whom Carter offered detailed advice about fixing clogged mail sorting machinery and a drug user, whom Carter assisted with home remedies for coming down from his high. Satirizing Carter’s self-fashioned intimacy with everyday people, the sketch mocked the newly inaugurated president’s image as a man whose political qualifications consisted of common sense, compassion, and life experience rather than policy expertise. The show ended with Cronkite reminding viewers to enter the “First American I slept at the White House lottery,” playing upon Carter’s promise to expand presidential access to the common citizen.

After the fictional “Ask Carter” show ends, the president meets with Cronkite and beckons Mary Fitzpatrick to look after Amy. Carter introduces Mary (played by male cast member Garrett Morris) to Cronkite who enters with Amy (played by Spacek). Cronkite acknowledges his familiarity with her story— “ah yes, the exconvict from Georgia.” Cronkite and Carter exit and Mary turns to Amy proclaiming in a generic black southern accent, “child your father sure knows how to use the media!” The scene proceeds with Amy sitting on Mary’s lap as she listens to a bedtime story. Mary revises the Goldilocks tale as a Blaxploitation story of a heroine who had been working “a long time” for the state department of agriculture in the summer of 1970 while imprisoned for “killing some lowlife in Gainesville.” Goldilocks “finally got her letters from the parole board” and leaves “the joint” “with nothing but a state-owned pair of jeans.” She heads to Tampa where she steals a car and “pops a supermarket for some free eagles.” Amy carefully and proudly attempts to translates Mary’s slang for clarity, asking if she means “she knocked off a store for some money?” Mary affirms the correctness of the translation and continues with the story; Goldilocks breaks into a shack and eventually falls asleep but she had unwittingly entered the three bears’ residence. She awakes to find Mama Bear, Cleofis Bear, and Winston Bear, who is pointing a sixteengauge shotgun in her face. In mortal danger, Goldilocks realizes that she had been friends with “Winston Bear’s old lady” while in prison and the mock fairy tale ends when the bears decide not to shoot her but instead help refer her to a job as an ambulance dispatcher. Amy, who had been transfixed by the story now expresses some skepticism, telling Mary to stop with the “bull … fairy tale jive, honey” because she knows Goldilocks “don’t go down no place like Florida”—it should have been in Bavaria or Germany, Amy complains. Mary quells her doubt and compliments her, remarking about how streetwise she’s getting for a child of her age.

Mary Fitzpatrick was rendered as both subject and narrator of carceral, distinctly southern, fairy tales. Inextricably linked to Carter’s media savvy, her tale and her ability to narrate her own story were important in the popular understanding of America’s new president. In the SNL sketch black women’s poverty and incarceration is transformed into a heroic story of individual success through Goldilocks’s journey from penal public service laborer to a middle-class ambulance dispatcher, even as SNL mocked the absurdity of the uplift narrative. Amy, America’s most privileged child, is satirically incorporated into the public narrative of the Carters as folk, solidly outside of the corrupting elitism of Washington but instead engaged with the masses at home and at school.

Carter’s southern political fashioning highlighted inclusion: portraits of African Americans in the state capitol, former prisoners in his household; this inclusion was a form of racial neoliberalism, a structure of disavowal that positions “racial and gendered violences as things of the past … by affirming certain modes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized life, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability.” This order is “based on the selective protection and proliferation of minoritized life as the very mechanism for the brutal exacerbation of minoritized death.”119 The promise of protection, and in many cases recognition and legitimizing representation, of black subjects produces and reproduces black precarity, captivity, and death. In Fitzpatrick’s case, representations of carceral modes of care served to deny her the very access to care, sociality, and material life outside of arrangements of force and state control; this predicament refigures older, entrenched regimes of ideological dominance that marked antebellum politics, under which “the restricted stipulation of humanity intensified the pained existence of the enslaved … a complement rather than a corrective to the decriminalization of white violence.”120 Fitzpatrick’s journey from prison to the White House provided a spectacular political stage upon which Carter could practice “official antiracism,” which “organized and placed human beings within worldembracing systems of rule, accumulation, and rationality while naturalizing uneven distributions of power and resources as fair, temporary, or just.”121 Official antiracism mobilized longstanding affective investments in black feminine subservience to consecrate the inaugural moment. Official antiracism was enacted in part through a 1970s discursive shift in which “one heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice.”122 Fitzpatrick’s selective and intimate inclusion within the realm of governmental concern veiled and thereby facilitated broader exclusions; the Cinderella story did not prompt legislative initiatives to provide formerly incarcerated people greater access to jobs but it did presage a later shift toward the centrality of heroic personal accounts in presidential campaigns.123

The Carter family was familiarized and ingratiated into political rule as a through carceral possession and control over black female bodies. In positioning himself as a Washington outsider, even as he entered the White House, Mary Fitzpatrick’s body spatially mapped the newly elected president’s trajectory from America’s southern heartland to Washington, D.C. The common borders of their personal geographies tied Carter to both the downtrodden and white mastery through a narrative of love developed through subservience. As a public figure, Mary Fitzpatrick territorialized Jimmy Carter’s ascent through discourses that situated him as ensconced in an everyday American values system that produced white familiarity exalting black obligation. A national imaginary in which white familiarity cohered a divided nation was produced through discourses of seduction that confused “consent and coercion, feeling and submission, intimacy and domination, violence and reciprocity.”124 Accounts of her story routinely positioned her in geographic relation to Carter, who always emphasized that he was from the small, modest, and aptly named town of Plains, Georgia. Reporters variously recounted that Mary was from “Lumpkin, Ga., near Plains, Georgia” or merely “a small town 52 miles from Plains, Georgia” or “a small town a few miles from Plains.” Mary Fitzpatrick herself was quoted in People magazine indicating that she was from “Richland, Ga., a little town like Plains.” Mary was the terrain upon which Carter reinforced his connection to the masses and his familiarity with black people and the working poor, further entrenching their bond and obscuring relations of power produced through hierarchies of proximity, namely Jim Crow. The landscape of ascent in which Fitzpatrick and the Carters were entangled added meaning to Carter’s electoral success, a complex signification for a highly contentious and divided time. Fitzpatrick’s dramatic journey from rural Georgia to the White House suggested the power of Carter’s concern for the ordinary American, but it also proved that he would not alter the historical cartographic rules of engagement, as gendered, racial, and economic relations of power would remain intact.

Carter positioned his political ascent alongside Mary Fitzpatrick’s journey from a prison in Georgia to the White House. Her black female geography might be understood, then, as a “terrain of political struggle itself,” significant in orienting our conceptions of political histories of violation and the stakes of political futures.125 Carter established himself as a Washington outsider and a man of the people and Fitzpatrick served as an object that reconfigured a geography of domination (segregation, prison crisis, welfare prosecution, domestic worker exploitation) into a landscape of love, protection, and uplift. This geography of domination erased black female subjectivity even as it seemed to produce it, creating a “world that profits from” black women’s “specific displacements of difference.”126 Fitzpatrick-asCinderella produced coerced carceral care as a solution to social problems, enacting a violence that territorialized domestic relations of power as a model for the nation, refiguring public and private, governmental and familial. Representations of her body’s movement from southern prison to capitol of power reinforced “traditional geographic arrangements” that activists had challenged in myriad ways.127 They asserted the right to access to landscapes of material life such as housing that were growing more scarce, rejected the spatial logics of imprisonment, noting that prison expansion took place through the production of misery; they demanded autonomy over domestic life and social reproduction through guaranteed adequate income.

Alongside black feminist opposition to criminalization, the 1970s marks the grassroots activism stage of the broader feminist antiviolence movement, which offered a systemic analysis of male violence, before shifting toward a social service and punitive approach to battering.128 The earlier part of the decade saw the apex of mobilizations over domestic labor, housing, welfare reform, and the plight of black women prisoners; the increasing salience of black feminist thought; local movements against racial and gender violence; and localized movements for economic justice including welfare reform. Despite this critique and activism, by the turn of the century women would be dramatically impacted by mass incarceration and the development of separate gender-responsive prison facilities would, in some sectors, serve as the justification for prison expansion. Although women were a small minority of those incarcerated during the 1970s and beyond, working-class black women were powerful symbolic material for the criminalization of black communities more broadly and the shift toward neoliberal political discourse. Moreover, between the year Mary Fitzpatrick arrived at the White House (1977) and 2004 there was an unprecedented growth in the number of women in U.S. prisons from 10 per 100,00 to 64 per 100,000—an increase of 757 percent.129

The historical reformist, representational approach to carceral crisis haunts our contemporary moment in which the widely acknowledged need for mass incarceration has resulted in the proliferation of demands for better, “gender-responsive” prisons, increased training for carceral administrators, and the racial diversification of police and prosecutors whose incorporation aid in the proliferation of structures of carceral devastation. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has noted, such reformist liberalism constitutes a “tinkering with the system” that “renovates and aggrandizes it for the next generation.”130 Mary Fitzpatrick’s historical life provides a lens through which to rethink intimate state violence. Mary Fitzpatrick’s representation normalized state violence and patriarchal control over black women’s intimate lives through representations of care, care that suggested that the carceral state was in fact soft rather than brutal, compassionate rather than draconian, inclusive and diverse rather than racist—a carceral alchemy that is powerfully exposed through black feminist histories of the present past.

Acknowledgments

I thank Shana L. Redmond, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Kali Gross, and members of the “States of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern U.S. History” seminar at Radcliffe College for their insights as well as Kali N. Gross and Keisha Blain for their important work in Black women’s history and curating this special issue.