“There Is NO Justice in Louisiana”: Crimes against Nature and the Spirit of Black Feminist Resistance

On March 30, 2012, the energy at Women With A Vision (WWAV) was electric. A “small but mighty” community of staff, participants, and volunteers piled into the front meeting room of the Black feminist collective’s offices in Mid-City New Orleans. Down the central hallway, several folding tables for street outreach had been lined up end-to-end to form a long banquet table. The whole expanse was draped in purple cloth and decorated with bright yellow flowers and small baskets of sweets. At the center, a sheet cake proclaimed: “We Won!!!!”

That victory had been years in the making. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the leaders of WWAV took to the streets to find the women for whom they had been the primary safety net for decades: Black women living and working in the city’s street-based economies. With the housing projects set for demolition, the schools dismantled, and the return rates still waning, their city was a shadow of its pre-Katrina self. Still, little could have prepared them for the first time they saw one of their participants with her new license. In the bottom right corner, immediately below her picture, the words “SEX OFFENDER” were stamped in block orange letters. All she knew was that she had been charged with a “crime against nature.” What was a “crime against nature”? Where did the statute come from? What was happening to women in their city? As one story became ten and ten became twenty, the WWAV leaders did what they have always done: they reached out with immediate aid and support; they held space for people to come together; and they rallied behind women’s own visions for social change and healing.

WWAV’s conversations with some of the first women to be placed on the sex offender registry after Hurricane Katrina helped to uncover the criminalization crisis underway. For the simple act of trading sex for money to survive, hundreds of Louisiana cisgender and transgender women, nearly eighty percent of them Black, had been convicted of a felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) and forced to register as sex offenders for periods of fifteen years to life. CANS charges were often piled on top of prostitution charges, and so were the debilitating penalties. As women convicted under the statute saw it, “There Is NO Justice in Louisiana.”[1] Their words became the organizing call. Together, WWAV staff and participants assembled a chorus of local, national, and international allies to mount a challenge of CANS within a comprehensive project to transform the web of injustices that women moved through daily in post-Katrina New Orleans. After a more than five-year fight, this WWAV coalition, led by people directly impacted by the statute, had secured a federal judicial ruling. On March 29, 2012, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman found that nine plaintiffs, all WWAV participants, “have been deprived of equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”[2]

The next day, as slices of cake were passed around the table, Deon Haywood, WWAV’s Executive Director, affirmed for all gathered the truth of the NO Justice Project. “Today, we celebrate with the women and men who courageously stood up to combat the criminalization of their lives—and won. Today, we celebrate a victory for all people who have told their truths that justice might be done. WWAV has always just been a catalyst for women affected by this.”[3] Zina Mitchell, a longtime WWAV participant-turned-staff-member, articulated what so many of the women WWAV provided safe haven for were feeling: “I’ve never been to court and had a judge side with me. We did it. We won. We made history.”

This article brings a fine-grained analysis to WWAV’s process of organizing against the CANS statute in order to trace the making of this criminalization crisis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and to clarify the victory that the organization claimed in March 2012. In so doing, it argues that WWAV organized through a distinct southern Black feminist tradition to successfully disrupt the use of CANS as a technology of predatory policing and targeted criminalization. By refusing their erasure from the city of their birth, WWAV staff and participants not only rendered visible the violence against Black women in the wake of the storm; they also opened new horizons for struggle and for liberation.

The history of WWAV is central to this article; so, too, are the relationships that drive its telling. As the WWAV founding story goes, in 1989 Danita Muse and Catherine Haywood, both Black women raised in multigenerational New Orleans families, linked eyes across a crowded Health Department conference room in the height of the AIDS epidemic. Maps of the city had been inked with proposed routes for a new condom distribution blitz. None of the majority Black neighborhoods in the city—and none of the city’s housing projects—were to be targeted. That day, Ms. Catherine and Danita walked out with boxes of condoms and the zip codes to their uptown neighborhoods and got to work, with the support of Ms. Catherine’s daughter, Deon, and a handful of other Black women in New Orleans. Together, they built a model of community-driven outreach that continues to guide public health research today. By day, they packed harm reduction packets on stoops, and by night, they walked the streets to deliver them. Their presence in and with community meant they had a rare understanding of the institutions that mattered to the people they served. They turned neighborhood bars into underground needle exchanges, so they could keep forgotten and dying Black addicts alive as the AIDS epidemic ravaged their community. And they built a network of gatekeepers, so they could disseminate resources to those they could not touch directly.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this commitment brought WWAV into contact with some of the first people who were forcibly placed on the sex offender registry list because of a CANS conviction. At this time, the organization’s foremothers asked Deon Haywood to become the executive director of the organization in which she had been raised. Over the next decade, Deon would oversee the expansion of WWAV—from the organization her mother, Catherine, and dear friend, Danita, had founded, through to its present as one of the leading national voices on Black women and criminalization in the South. Even with this significant growth in scale, Deon ensured that WWAV remained rooted in the patterns of relational care that drove the organization’s founding. Staff were fully in and of the same communities as WWAV participants; they worked together to provide mutual aid and support so that women with CANS convictions could be at the helm of the organizing. It was during this time of expansion that I became a partner to the WWAV family. Deon and I first began working together closely in 2008, when WWAV was starting to piece together the disaster that the post-Katrina enforcement of CANS had wrought. In 2009, she invited me to New Orleans to facilitate the launch meeting for the WWAV-led coalition that took on the CANS statute. Over the next three years, I journeyed to New Orleans at least every other month. In between, Deon and I debriefed by phone: she would talk; I would type. She used this practice to apprentice me to WWAV’s method of organizing. Since the CANS victory, I have returned to New Orleans as an ethnographer and oral historian, working with WWAV staff and participants to document their decades of labor to craft a legible past and a commonly foreseeable future for their community. This article unfolds in the intimacy of these relationships.

This research brings together a range of sources: the testimonies, policy briefs, educational materials, and legal analysis amassed throughout the NO Justice Project; my own personal notes and reflections transcribed in conversation with Deon; the oral history interviews and ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted with WWAV staff and participants since the 2012 victory; careful work in WWAV’s own organizational archives;[4] and further work in state archives and secondary literature to contextualize the CANS statute and WWAV’s NO Justice Project. By reading across these sources, I work to describe and connect a series of responses—from institutions and from individuals—through which Black cisgender and transgender women were identified as a social and political problem in post-Katrina New Orleans, the incarceration capital of the world.[5] Moreover, by extending the temporal frame of analysis before August 2005, this article also refuses the exceptionalization of the storm. Importantly, for WWAV—and for any post-Katrina researchers worth their salt[6]—decades of divestment predated the event of Hurricane Katrina, facilitated the immediate lack of response to the levee breaches, and prefigured the crisis in the storm’s wake. More than a decade after the storm, the biggest losers have been Black native New Orleanians, and most specifically Black women.

Throughout the fight against CANS, WWAV leaders and participants documented how the fantasy of a new New Orleans was being built through the evisceration of Black women—and they worked to render themselves visible against the violence of their simultaneous invisibilization and hyper-visibilization. This article illuminates how WWAV staff and participants artfully exposed and evaded the interpretive and self-referential framework of this post-Katrina criminalization strategy. Grounded in their own lived experience, WWAV mapped the reinforcing nature of the interlocking systems of oppression that gave the law meaning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Then, they threw the whole of their lives up as the precondition for social change; they countered social death with a defiance of living.[7] Ultimately, WWAV’s longstanding southern Black feminist tradition of relational care, which birthed their grassroots story-driven model of community organizing, not only disrupted the logics of the interlocking systems of oppression that sought their erasure; it also spun into life new possibilities: the horizons of a radical otherwise. As such, this article argues that WWAV’s work provides an invaluable example of the lasting impact and influence of the vision for political movement work outlined in the Combahee River Collective statement—and of the power and potentiality of Black feminist resistance to effect lasting social transformation.

Finally, a brief roadmap: This article begins with an historical exposition of Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature statute. I then complicate this legal history with WWAV’s work in community to map the everyday implications of CANS sex offender registration. This quotidian violence of CANS, I argue, pressed WWAV to reframe CANS criminalization through a Black feminist analysis of carceral control, in which staff and participants connected their struggles to the policing of Black women in the Jim Crow South and Great Migration North. I then show how this historically-informed Black feminist analysis shaped WWAV’s narration of the post-Katrina CANS crisis and their organizing in the NO Justice Project. To conclude, I examine the aftermath of WWAV’s victory and the organization’s ongoing work for Black women’s lives and wellbeing.

Creating a Crime against Nature

Crime Against Nature by Solicitation. The statute had an unmistakably religious ring to it. The subject of “nature,” as well the crimes against it, has prompted centuries of theological and legal argumentation around sex and sexuality, and also around race. WWAV’s own research into the solicitation of “peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nomtnandum [that horrible crime not to be named among Christians]” picked up in the 19th century.[8] In 1805, Louisiana enacted its first criminal code, which included an explicit prohibition of the “abominable and detestable Crime Against Nature, committed with mankind or beast.”[9] The Supreme Court and Legislature refused to specify what conduct constituted a Crime Against Nature until the turn of the century, when the state’s Black Codes were being made law after the violent disassemblage of Radical Reconstruction and these questions of “crime,” “nature,” and “sex” were further inflected with a racialized genealogy.[10] In 1896—the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine into law through Plessy v. Ferguson—Louisiana amended its Crime Against Nature statute to read, “Whoever shall be convicted of the detestable and abominable Crime Against Nature committed with mankind or with beast with the sexual organs, or with the mouth, shall suffer imprisonment at hard labor for not less than two years and not more than ten years.”[11] The Louisiana courts further clarified in 1913 that the statute prohibited anal and oral sex, irrespective of consent, the sex of participants, and their marital status.[12]

In 1942, the Louisiana legislature undertook a comprehensive revision of the state’s criminal code, with specific attention to the raced and gendered boundaries of sex. All previous Miscegenation acts and rulings were consolidated into a single statute in the state’s “criminal neglect of family” articles.[13] Prior statutes around “sexual immorality” were also consolidated, to include a series of articles prohibiting prostitution and related offenses, as well as an additional series of articles aimed at “stamping out” sex work around army camps in Louisiana. The Crime Against Nature statue was amended to read, “Crime Against Nature is the unnatural carnal copulation by a human being with another of the same or opposite sex or with an animal. Emission is not necessary, and, when committed by a human being with another, the use of the genital organ of one of the offenders of whatever sex is sufficient to constitute the crime.”[14] The maximum sentence was reduced from ten years to five, and a fine of up to $2,000. The solicitation of such acts was also explicitly discussed in 1942.[15] The legislature claimed that “the sexual pervert who frequents parks and other public places and solicits abnormal sexual practices” exhibited “a very reprehensible conduct.” They also affirmed that this conduct “had given the police department in New Orleans and other large cities considerable trouble.”[16] However, the legislature deemed that this conduct did not constitute a Crime Against Nature. Instead, it was added as a sub-article of the state’s misdemeanor obscenity statute, which included “the sale or display of any indecent material.” Forty years later, in 1982, the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) advocated again for a felony-level addendum to the state’s Crime Against Nature statute, claiming that they needed a tool to clamp down on a “growing problem in male prostitution.”[17] Nationally, sex workers and gay men were being scapegoated and criminalized in a mounting AIDS panic. There were calls for quarantines, for mandatory testing, for contact tracing, and for public registration of all prostitutes and licensed brothels.[18] Conservative religious leaders such as Donald Wildmon of the Mississippi-based American Family Association famously bolstered his lobbying efforts through direct-mail appeals that warned, “These disease-carrying deviants wander the streets unconcerned, possibly making you their next victim.”[19] In this climate, the NOPD could argue that the solicitation of oral and anal sex had become more than just an obnoxious practice (an “Obscenity” in the state’s own language); it was now a deviance that threatened the moral social order. They presented the expansion of the “Crime Against Nature” statute to include solicitation as a concrete step that the legislature could take to protect the health and wellbeing of its citizens.[20] On July 6, 1982, the Louisiana legislature relented, adding the felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation law to the criminal code, punishable by a term of imprisonment of up to five years, with or without hard labor, and/or a fine of not more than $2,000. Additionally, a single CANS conviction mandated fifteen years sex offender registration; two CANS convictions required lifetime sex offender registration. Nationwide, CANS was exceptional among registerable offenses, as it was “just a talking crime.”[21]

Mapping a Criminalization Crisis[22]

The role of the police in advocating for the adoption of the Solicitation clause in 1942 and again in 1982 is critical for understanding how the CANS statute was quickly extended beyond the “male problem” it was designed to address. Police had sole discretion over whether to charge someone with CANS or prostitution. Through their patrolling and booking practices, they mapped the CANS statute onto the gendered and racialized bodies of Black women working in street-based economies. By 2011, when WWAV’s challenge of the CANS statute was in full force, ninety- seven percent of women registered as sex offenders were mandated to do so because of a CANS conviction.[23] Consistent with the United States Department of Justice’s 2011 finding that “NOPD engages in a pattern or practice of discriminatory policing” that is “so severe and so divergent from nationally reported data” that it constitutes “a violation of constitutional and statutory law,” seventy-nine percent of those registered because of CANS were Black.[24]

That analysis took time to come into focus. In 2008, what Deon and the WWAV foremothers were bearing witness to was the sheer number of people in the WWAV network who had suddenly been placed on the sex offender registry list. That truth raised a lot of questions for WWAV—staff and participants alike. What was going on in their city? Were these new charges? If not, why had women not had to register before? What had changed? How were these women found? Who was next? What was happening in their city? Even while the contours and genesis of this crisis remained uncertain, the need for WWAV to do something was not.

As more of WWAV’s participants were able to return to New Orleans after the storm, the implications of the CANS licenses became clear. WWAV drop-in hours had become a vital time for crafting what would become the strategy to end criminalization under CANS. Sometimes WWAV participants would meet one-on-one with staff.[25] Other times weekly regulars would be joined by as many as ten to fifteen more. Together, women shared stories of the everyday violence of living with a CANS conviction: of completely losing any sense of privacy, of not being able to walk their kids to school or go to their children’s graduations, of having people use the sex offender registry to track them down and harass them at home. “It was like my life just stopped,” one woman explained. Women shared stories of being called “rapist” whenever they got carded while buying cigarettes. Some had stories of being denied access to drug treatment programs because “we don’t serve your kind.” Others started carrying around envelopes stuffed with all of their court paperwork when applying for jobs, so that they could prove that they had histories of drug addiction and sex work, not of child molestation.

Then there were the photos printed in the local paper, and the court-mandated postcards they had to buy and mail to neighbors alerting them that “This violent predator lives in your community.”[26] One WWAV participant explained that when her probation officer told her she had to pay $500 for these postcards, she laughed in his face in disbelief: “Where am I supposed to get that kind of money when I just got out of jail? What are you telling me, I gotta go turn tricks?”[27] The debilitating impacts of CANS sex offender registration hardly stopped with the financial burden. Another WWAV participant explained, “It’s like the Scarlet Letter. I am trying to put that in my past—but it’s not gonna be in my past because it’s in my present, and it’s going to be my future for the next 13 years.”[28] That truth reverberated through the WWAV space as participants assembled a careful framing of how this kind of labeling worked: “Once you been labeled as a convict, or a prostitute, or a drug addict, or some type of criminal. …The minute they find out, they ostracize you. You know what I mean?”[29]

While the everyday terror of being on the sex offender registry was prohibitive, WWAV staff and participants alike were also clear that it was not especially shocking. For the vast majority of people with CANS convictions, this modern-day “Scarlet Letter” was but the latest in a long line of small and great injustices to be weathered. Indeed, the CANS crisis after Hurricane Katrina followed the neoliberal violence against Black women playbook to a tee: first, Black women were isolated from necessary social services, then they were blamed for the abuse they survived, and then they were criminalized for this victimization.[30] As women with CANS convictions saw it, “There Is NO Justice in Louisiana.” Their words became the organizing call.

Policing Black Womanhood

To frame the complexities of CANS enforcement in the NO Justice Project, WWAV relied on a longstanding Black feminist hermeneutic fashioned at the intersections of art, protest, and scholarship: the excavation of Black women’s simultaneous invisibility and hyper-visibility.[31] Doing so brought into focus a very different historical genealogy than that of the Crime Against Nature statue’s own genesis. In the long and unbroken state of emergency in the United States, it is impossible to understand the contours of anti-Black violence and of Black people’s resistance without reckoning with the history of how Black womanhood has been produced as a “paradox of non-being.”[32] WWAV staff and participants each had their own way of explaining the effects of being both “out of the frame” and “in the spotlight.” When invisible, no one saw the work Black women did, the violence they endured, and what it took to survive that violence every day. And when Black women were not seen, it was easy for them to be devalued, to never get the support they needed, to never get credit for work they did. But when hyper-visible, those very same things that went unseen become reasons to stigmatize Black women—and identify them as objects of fear or targets of further violence. WWAV staff and participants saw it every day: “Do you know how many times women call the cops because they’re being beaten by their partners and there are no services, no nothing in their communities, and then they’re the ones who end up in the back of the cop car?”

This was the analysis that WWAV staff and participants used to render the intimate, communal, and state violence in the quotidian terror of CANS criminalization visible. The intimate and reinforcing nature of different systems of gendered and racialized oppression alternately made Black women invisible in the public eye, or hyper-visible and in need of hyper-control. This analysis gave shape and language to WWAV’s everyday political work; it also placed WWAV’s fight against CANS in the post-Katrina moment in conversation with a whole body of literature on the history of Black women’s criminalization before imprisonment became “mass incarceration.”[33] For these scholars, too, invisibility and hypervisibility provided an unparalleled analytical tool for naming and tracking a story of Black life and anti-Black violence under slavery and after emancipation that was at once racialized and gendered.

Recent work on the postbellum South, much of which was still being written while the NO Justice Project was underway, has shone a vital spotlight on how Black women’s bodies became the invisible, unnamed grist for the mill of criminalization.[34] As the system of modern state racism crystalized under Jim Crow, the southern criminal justice system was fully Black-washed. White women became a protected class; Black women (and men) filled the courts.[35] The few white women who did stand trial were most often charged with Miscegenation. Black women, however, were assembled in droves, booked mostly for petty crimes such as larceny and selling whiskey. At sentencing, they were steadily funneled into the convict lease system (and then later into chain gangs and the domestic carceral sphere after the convict lease system was outlawed state-by-state), often as the sole woman among a band of a hundred male convicts, forced to live with the mining boss or prison manager.[36] In her work on Jim Crow Georgia, historian Sarah Haley argues that this carceral complex became a key infrastructure for producing and reinforcing the impossibility of the postbellum Black female subject.[37] Even when state law specifically prohibited sending women to work on chain gangs after the convict lease system was outlawed in 1908, white women were diverted, while Black women were sent by the thousands. If the Jim Crow carceral sphere was the site in which Black women became invisible in the new South, then the street-based economies of survival sex work were the sites in which their hyper-visibility demanded disciplining. One year after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, with the Civil War still raging on, white female northern missionaries increasingly made places for themselves in prison-like encampments for redirecting Black prostitutes to “the paths of virtues.”[38] In the postbellum South, even this so-called “maternalism” was suspended.[39] Black women were depicted as naturally licentious and prone to prostitution, and irredeemably criminal should they be convicted of any number of gendered crimes.[40]

As more Black people fled the racialized terror of the South during the decades of the 20th century now known as the Great Migration, a not dissimilar idea began to take root in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.[41] In her field-defining essay, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Hazel V. Carby argues that it was precisely this movement of Black female bodies— between rural and urban areas and between southern and northern cities—that made Black womanhood a hyper-visible threat, capable of generating “a series of moral panics.”[42] To build this argument, Carby looks both at the agents of white maternalism and the self-appointed saviors within the churched Black middle class and the Black bourgeoisie. In these communities, Carby finds people who were alarmed by the changes afoot in their cities, and who identified Black women migrants’ definitions of and searches for freedom as innately criminal and sexually deviant.[43] From their posts at various institutions and agencies, they manufactured reams of reports and retraining programs. In concert, this corpus of work produced an interpretive framework that seemed to explain poor Black women’s behavior in cities for all time. Because of the emphasis placed on poor Black women’s so-called vulnerability to vice and failing moral character, this work also dramatically expanded the surveillance and criminalization of Black women and girls.[44]

Decades and miles separated these southern migrants from their post-Katrina kin. Nonetheless, an enduring Black feminist commonsense about how movement triggered the policing of Black women’s bodies also undergirded WWAV’s analysis of the CANS crisis in post-Katrina New Orleans. People were displaced, homes were lost, businesses had not reopened, and services were gone. All of this made the women that WWAV had long worked with even more vulnerable to violence, to poverty, and to having to make ends meet however they knew how. Those survival strategies put them in the streets; they also put them in the crosshairs of local and federal surveillance—formal kinds like New Orleans Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as informal kinds like white rescue missions and Black pastors’ associations. There was, for example, the judge, who ran a diversion program out of her court for young women and girls, in which she court-mandated them to things like etiquette classes and beauty pageants. Or, there were the hundreds of Black pastors citywide who banded together when the local jail was on the verge of going into federal receivership; they held a pray-in outside the Orleans Parish Prison asking God to give Sheriff Marlin Gusman eight million dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money so he could build another new jail, because “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And there were the good white ladies with all their money and their big house for “victims of human trafficking” and not a single trafficked person inside.

These were the webs that the women that WWAV stood with were entrapped in. Criminalization was the constant background noise. More jail beds were being built, which meant these beds would be filled. Meanwhile, the options for staying out of jail required women to perform narratives of their own moral failing in order to be worthy of something other than imprisonment. If they were young enough, they could choose the finishing school and manners route. If they were not, they would have to spin a fantastical tale of violation that hit the notes of the trafficking script. In these ways, WWAV knew that CANS was but one tool being used to control nearly every aspect of Black women’s lives. The work of the NO Justice Project, thus, was to continually make visible not only the violence women were enduring, but also the framework of discipline and the strategies of policing that made CANS make sense.

Making a Post-Katrina Criminalization Crisis

Doing so helped to put the curiosities of CANS policing and enforcement into place. The pre-Katrina enforcement of the statute emerged within a social and political climate in which Black women had long been defined as inherently criminal and sexually deviant. The everyday policing of Black cisgender and transgender women working in the street-based sex trades, thus, was unremarkable. So, too, were the coercive strategies that police officers used to arrest women. As one of the Black women who would become a leader in WWAV’s challenge of the CANS statute explained:

I have been selling sex since I was 13 years and the police are always stopping me.
…I have done had the police tell me: “If you give me head I’ll let you go.” So I do it and they still bring me to jail.[45]

After being entrapped into selling oral sex at the behest of their arresting officers, Black women were increasingly charged with both prostitution and CANS, an over-booking practice that police use nationally to strong-arm arrestees into entering guilty pleas in exchange for sentencing leniency. In this way, Black women were being erased through a project of stringent gendered and racialized criminalization, much like in the days of Jim Crow terror.

However, there had been an ironic loophole in this system of justice by expulsion. In the absence of an integrated electronic database that could facilitate cross- reporting among the various branches of the New Orleans criminal justice system, the sex offender registration requirement had often been, in practice, too tedious to enforce. In fact, many women in the WWAV network who were placed on the registry after the storm did not even know that they had to register. For them, CANS had become just another charge accumulated in the course of everyday survival. And then suddenly survival itself became uncertain. It was late August 2005. Tropical Storm Katrina had strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane. Black women were on the move—gathering their families, finding shelter, making ends meet by whatever means they could.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with tens of thousands of people still displaced, Black cisgender and transgender women became the hyper-visible threat to be rectified in order to restore moral social order in the city. Immediately after the storm, the Department of Justice made more than twenty million dollars available to New Orleans to rebuild the city’s criminal justice system, which included a mandate for targeting and apprehending “violent felony fugitives” such as registered sex offenders.[46] In the state of Louisiana at this time, those charged with CANS comprised nearly half of the people required to register as sex offenders and nearly all of the people who had failed to do so. And so, in the wake of the storm, with the assistance of the United States Marshals Service, CANS “fugitives” were tracked down and placed on the sex offender registry list, often with increased penalties for failure to register previously.[47] By 2011, ninety-seven percent of the women on New Orleans’ sex offender registry had a CANS conviction; seventy-nine percent of these women were Black.[48]

Thus, it was the post-Katrina enforcement of CANS—made possible with federal dollars and a federal mandate—that gave this draconian AIDS-era relic new life and new moral urgency. Black women had been the invisible targets of New Orleans policing since the CANS statute was made law in 1982. After the storm, Black women became a hyper-visible threat to be rectified if New Orleans was to have, in developer Joseph Canizaro’s words, “a clean sheet to start again.”[49]

Organizing to Win

Ending criminalization, for WWAV, did not simply mean challenging the police or the new New Orleans developers. It meant tackling the interlocking systems of racial, sexual, gendered, and class oppression that gave these particular actors license to orchestrate their expulsion.[50] It meant uprooting the framework of discipline and the strategies of policing that made CANS make sense. For that reason, the WWAV staff and participants affirmed that any challenge of CANS needed to unfold within a comprehensive project to transform the web of injustices that women moved through daily in New Orleans. Striking down the law would not matter if they could not also change the climate that made their criminalization thinkable. The police would just find another tool, another tactic, and the complicity of parole officers, job interviewers, and store clerks would remain unchecked. However, if WWAV could disrupt the totalizing surveillance of Black women, even in small ways, then they could begin to frame and actualize a vision for Black women’s survival.

Doing so changed the horizon of struggle for the NO Justice Project. This was no campaign, in which the repeal of the CANS statue was lingering as a lofty goal on the horizon. Rather, the work of NO Justice was stitched in the everyday fabric of social life. Women with CANS convictions needed immediate relief. And so, WWAV staff and participants called on (and dropped in on) local service providers and advocates in health, housing, and legal aid fields to help them build an emergency response and referral network for people on the sex offender registry.[51] The referral network gave women with CANS convictions a bit of breathing room. What becomes possible when you can catch your breath? And when you can catch it again and again? What happens the first time you can safely let out a long and deep sigh? For the women of NO Justice, they began to dream about—and then to strategize towards—more lasting transformation beyond their immediate survival. They talked about campaigns for combating the drug testing of welfare recipients; about microfinance projects for expanding their employment possibilities; about health education courses for addressing disease disparities in their communities; and about trauma healing circles for sustaining their community with one another.[52] In so doing, they began to articulate (and live into) the conditions and contours of justice in the future, even while this justice felt impossible to realize in the present.[53]

From this visioning space, WWAV staff and participants began the hard work of building community consensus around CANS. They reached out to grassroots organizers, health care advocates, public defenders, reporters, community-based researchers, funders, and people of faith across the city of New Orleans. On July 22, 2009, WWAV gathered these stakeholders for a daylong strategy meeting on the NO Justice Project, which successfully launched a citywide coalition to buttress WWAV’s efforts. After the meeting, WWAV staff and participants agreed that they needed to systematize drop-in hours into a regularly scheduled “Women’s Empowerment Meeting” for cisgender and transgender sex workers in New Orleans. In this meeting, participants worked together to document stories of CANS-related hardships, especially legal and police abuse. These stories, in turn, further grounded and guided WWAV’s own work to raise awareness of the CANS crisis through independent media, national movement circles, and community leaders closer to home.[54] WWAV then provided their coalition partners with tried and tested organizing materials and talking points to expand community education throughout their own networks.

In individual meetings, community teach-ins, conference keynotes, and media interviews, WWAV’s outreach approach began by explaining plainly and simply the paths that led women with CANS convictions into sex work, as well as the futures they were prohibited from realizing during their sex offender registration periods. The challenge in every conversation and every presentation, however, was to make people feel those paths and feel those prohibitions. And so, WWAV staff and participants would ask the audience members to think about how many times people have to show their photo identification in the course of a day. Sometimes people would call out the places they had gotten carded already that day. Then, WWAV would show a mock-up of CANS licenses with the “SEX OFFENDER” label. They would recount stories of being denied jobs, of being excluded from drug treatment, of being kicked out of emergency housing. They would explain what it felt like to have to carry stacks of paperwork with them at all times in order to clarify the real circumstances of their arrests to store clerks and housing gatekeepers alike. It was a rare meeting that did not end in a collective expression of shock and outrage. And that mattered to the WWAV staff and participants. In one of the most conservative states in the country, they were actively crafting a messaging strategy that could mobilize broad-based community support for striking down the CANS statute and for advancing Black women’s health and wellbeing.

Heartened by this mounting community consensus, WWAV staff and participants began to explore the viability of bringing a constitutional challenge of the CANS statute. In Spring 2010, they recruited and vetted multiple local and national attorneys, ultimately deciding on a consortium of Andrea J. Ritchie, Esq., the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic & Center for Social Justice at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.[55] This network of attorneys was selected because of their deep commitment to the practices of “social change lawyering,” through which lawyers take their direction from activists because they “start with the idea that history shows us that systemic social change comes not from the courts or heroic lawyers or law reform or impact litigation, but from social movements.”[56] While the legal team was being assembled, WWAV staff and participants also organized meetings with New Orleans political candidates, the city’s new police chief, and potential allies throughout the state of Louisiana.

This multi-layered relationship-building work was essential for envisioning a pathway for undertaking a constitutional challenge of the CANS statute within the broader transformative vision of the NO Justice Project.[57] It also helped to clarify the legal argument the case would use. Based, in part, on WWAV’s success in building community outrage around the everyday impacts of having to register as sex offenders, the NO Justice legal team proposed filing an Equal Protection Claim: had arrests for sex work been prosecuted under the state’s Prostitution statute, those convicted would not have been required to register as sex offenders.[58] It was a legal argument that could be proven in court. More importantly, it was a strategy that would bolster, not detract from, the work WWAV was already doing to expose the violence of CANS criminalization and control in order to posit the possibility of a different way of doing justice. That transformative, community-building work needed to be intensified and supported, even and especially while the NO Justice Project shifted into a more public, legalistic mode. And so WWAV doubled down on the four-part model that had gotten the NO Justice Project thus far: building power with women directly affected, reaching out to strategic allies citywide for relief and support, carefully cultivating stories through national networks, and maintaining WWAV’s own online archive of the project.

On February 15, 2011, WWAV and the legal team filed a case in the Eastern District of Louisiana Court on behalf of nine of the more than 800 people who had been forcibly placed on the sex offender registry because of a CANS conviction.[59] The next day, WWAV was back on outreach and strategy-crafting. WWAV knew that if they had any hope of winning the case, they would have to continue to build a climate in which the judge could safely rule against the state of Louisiana. And so the state itself became the next target of advocacy efforts. Barely a month later, the NO Justice team persuaded Rep. Charmaine Marchand-Stiaes—who represented the most flood-battered district in Louisiana, the New Orleans 9th Ward and Lower 9th Ward—to introduce a bill, which would make CANS penalties equal to those for prostitution. On May 24, 2011, the Louisiana House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice unanimously approved HB 141 following testimony from WWAV and the legal team.[60] One month later, the bill had passed the House, the Senate, and the Governor’s desk. No one convicted of CANS would ever have to register as a sex offender again. However, the bill was not retroactive.

In the wake of what had only been a partial victory at the state level, WWAV and the legal team redoubled efforts on the federal lawsuit.[61] The legislative change made a favorable ruling in the lawsuit seem obvious: if people would not have to register as sex offenders for new CANS convictions, why should those previously convicted remain on the registry? WWAV staff and participants were concerned, however, that without ongoing community pressure the urgency of this lawsuit might not be obvious. They needed to again build community awareness and outrage about the women still on the sex offender registry; they had to ask their community of supporters to insist that the CANS statute itself be declared unconstitutional and every person on the registry be removed.

“Our Win”

Nine months later, on March 28, 2012—before a courtroom filled with WWAV staff and participants, local community activists, New Orleans faith leaders, and legal allies from across the Deep South—U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman heard oral arguments on the Louisiana state’s reasoning for the CANS/Prostitution distinction. The next day he concluded that Governor Bobby Jindal and his co-defendants “fail[ed] to credibly serve up even one unique legitimating governmental interest that can rationally explain the registration requirement imposed on those convicted of Crime Against Nature by Solicitation. The court is left with no other conclusion but that the relationship between the classification is so shallow as to render the distinction wholly arbitrary.”[62]

The next morning, on March 30, 2012, a letter entitled “OUR WIN” began to make its way through social media networks before the Friday morning East Coast commute was underway. In it, Deon Haywood centered the stories of the cisgender and transgender women who led fight against CANS and the southern Black feminist organizing tradition of which they are a part.

At a time in this country right now when we feel like justice is not on the side of the people, the people most affected spoke their truths—not some abstract “speak truth to power,” but their truths from their hearts—and that is what made the difference…

This was not a legal fight or a legislative fight. This was a fight for women’s lives and wellbeing. This was a fight, simply put, about everything. …Especially in the South, most people feel like we come in last. But this is where the Civil Rights Movement started. And today it continues in the South.[63]

Later that day, the WWAV office was a mess of open eyes, tear-streaked eyes, and eyes that could not look up.[64] Most women had not believed that they would see their sex offender registration periods end so abruptly. Indeed, many had never been to court and had a judge side with them.[65] Ms. Michelle expressed what so many of the women with CANS convictions experienced: “I can taste my FREEDOM!”[66] All at WWAV were also clear that this victory was but one step in realizing the transformative healing they had envisioned in the context of the NO Justice Project. And so, they concluded, “Today we celebrate. And still we rise.”[67]

Over the coming days and weeks, WWAV staff and participants were consumed in almost constant conversation about how they had been able to win. Some insisted that they won because the people most affected spoke their truths from their hearts. For others, what mattered most was that no one had been left out: they organized from the experiences of the people most marginalized under CANS so no one could be left out or picked off. Still others waxed prophetic about the history of the long Black freedom struggle. Amid all of these interpretations, Deon insisted that WWAV needed to do more than just claim “Our Win.” WWAV needed work with every person who had been part of the NO Justice Project to document the steps in the organizing process.[68] As Deon and I talked more about the how of “Our Win,” it became clear just how important it was to specify what victory was being claimed. The federal ruling in the CANS case was far from an unfettered pronouncement of justice. In the name of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, Judge Feldman limited the degree of criminalization that women arrested in Louisiana’s street-based sex trades could legally be subjected to: women had the “right” to be treated as no more (and no less) than prostitutes. It was significant, then, that WWAV claimed the NO Justice Project “was not a legal fight or a legislative fight”; it “was a fight for women’s lives and wellbeing.”[69] The decision to counter social death with a defiance of living had grown out of a wholesale rejection of both the logic of organized expulsion enacted through CANS and the strategies advocates typically used to effect piecemeal policy change. Grounded in their own lived experience, WWAV staff and participants arrived at a novel strategy for challenging this criminalization crisis. Their approach, with its own rich historical consciousness and Black feminist analysis, exposed and disrupted the interlocking systems of oppression that produced the post-Katrina crisis. Moreover, it enabled WWAV staff and participants to distinguish their victory from the legal reinscription of their contingent equality. While the federal ruling on CANS was a moment to be celebrated, it was also a moment that only made sense in community—in a process of becoming—through which women began to heal, to rebuild, and to renew with one another. The victory being claimed was WWAV’s refusal to shoehorn their struggle into the neatness of individual rights claims and to, instead, throw the whole of their lives up as the precondition for social change. How did that victory become possible? As Deon explained, “We just stayed the course and fought the fight.”[70]

Like a Phoenix

Women With A Vision was never supposed to win a victory on this scale. The WWAV staff and participants knew it. Governor Jindal knew it. Even the federal government knew it. Those afforded first-class citizenship within the United States’ own borders were supposed to emerge as saviors after the storm. Black women were supposed to fade into the background, criminalized further as state capacity expanded. That, of course, is not what happened. However, that is how the local media chose to tell the story. In their reporting, CANS was “pinkwashed” and reframed as a threat to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights.[71] Judge Feldman was championed as a visionary; the NO Justice attorneys were lauded for their determination.[72] WWAV staff and participants were not even mentioned. They were written out of the story of their own win, their struggles again made invisible, their humanity again rendered illegible.

Two months later, this narrative violence turned physical. On May 24, 2012, as the clock approached midnight, WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed by unknown arsonists.[73] First, they whittled the deadbolt off the backdoor. Then they moved through the space, setting small fires in the meditation alcove, singeing the faces off Black women in posters, and tossing WWAV’s awards into the alleyway. Inside the outreach office, they stacked WWAV’s educational breast models threehigh, covered them in accelerant, and ignited a blaze strong enough to melt the blades off the ceiling fan fifteen feet overhead. Decades of client files, harm reduction supplies, and outreach materials were reduced to ashes. It was a vile act of hate intended to exterminate WWAV’s efforts once and for all. The pain of walking through the charred rubble was gut-wrenching. No one, of course, was ever charged. Days later, at a local fundraiser, Deon Haywood addressed WWAV’s community for the first time. She affirmed that everyone was deeply shaken, but recovering. Most of all, WWAV founders and staff were worried about how they were going to provide for their participants during the rebuilding. WWAV was still so far from realizing the transformative healing that had been envisioned in the context of the NO Justice Project. To make matters worse, women with CANS convictions had recently been dealt yet another blow. The state decided to interpret Judge Feldman’s ruling as conservatively as possible: only the nine people directly named in the lawsuit were removed from the sex offender registry. For several weeks, women with CANS convictions had been meeting at WWAV to teach each other how to file petitions for being removed from the sex offender registry list one-by-one. With the arson attack, they had lost more than a meeting space; they lost their home, filled with memories of the slow conversations and pained exchanges and joyful celebrations they shared with women who had come together through grassroots organizing to change the conditions of their lives. The coming weeks would bring much uncertainty. And WWAV’s work would continue. “Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South,” Deon explained, “but it can also be a powerful force for rebirth.” That night Deon spoke WWAV’s rebirth into existence.

Methodically, WWAV turned the NO Justice victory into a systematic challenge of the criminalization of poor Black women and girls. On October 28, 2013, WWAV and the legal team secured the removal of every person still on the sex offender registry due to a “Crime Against Nature by Solicitation” charge.[74] With City Council support, WWAV then established a multipronged racial justice partnership to redirect people arrested for street-based sex work out of the criminal justice system and into the WWAV organizing community. Inside the Orleans Parish Prison, staff further worked to support the release of hundreds of women who were locked up because they were too poor to make bail. In so doing, they amassed rare and intimate testimonies, observations, and glimpses of a system in crisis. On the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2015, they began unveiling their analysis of how the new New Orleans has been built through the evisceration of Black women, including themselves. Two months later, WWAV walked into their first home since the arson attack.

The site is still temporary, but it is a home nonetheless. It is near impossible to overstate the significance of reopening this home for Black feminist survival, struggle, and renewal, and the labor that made it possible. The new New Orleans is actively being built through the organized abandonment and expulsion of Black New Orleanians. But the end has not been written yet. After an arson attack that could have been fatal, at a time when 92,348 Black New Orleanians have not been able to return, the WWAV community rose to take space and have a place.[75] On this contested land, the futures they have seeded are just beginning to come into bloom.

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Appendix

OUR WIN—Letter from Executive Director Deon Haywood

Dear friends and allies,

There are few times in our work when are truly brought to the point of being speechless. For all of us at Women With A Vision, today is one of those days. Today, we celebrate with the women and men who courageously stood up to combat the criminalization of their lives—and won. Today, we celebrate a victory for all people who have told their truths that justice might be done. WWAV has always just been a catalyst for women affected by this.

So many times, people tried to tell us not to do it. They didn’t believe that poor, uneducated women could win a victory on this scale. They didn’t think that our women were important enough, or that they had the ability to change their own lives. Let this be an example of people standing together through grassroots organizing to change their lives. We didn’t back down even when we lacked the funding to do this. We did not back down when person after person said that they were unsure about standing by us. We knew what we were doing was right. We did not waver. We did not compromise what needed to happen. We just stayed the course and fought the fight.

At a time in this country right now when we feel like justice is not on the side of the people, the people most affected spoke their truths—not some abstract “speak truth to power,” but their truths from their hearts—and that is what made the difference.

This was not a legal fight or a legislative fight. This was a fight for women’s lives and wellbeing. This was a fight, simply put, about everything. This was about the freedom of people to make choices for themselves. This was about public health. This was about sex worker rights. This was about human rights. This was and is about everything. Which is why we cannot pick apart injustice. We can’t decide that something is wrong for one group and right for another. We can’t decide we don’t like this law for women, but it’s okay for gay people or trans people.

Especially in the South, most people feel like we come in last. But this is where the Civil Rights Movement started. And today it continues in the South.

We have seen too often that the way problems are solved in Louisiana is through incarceration. But over-incarceration is not going to solve things. It’s not going to make our communities safer. It’s not going to make our communities better. The issue here is poverty. Over-incarceration is not going to solve that.

For once, women and men won. And we believe that this is not just a win for us. This is a win for every group that has ever been criminalized. Our win today proves that when we stand with folks who have been wrongly charged, we can make a difference.

With this win, the women of NO Justice can begin to heal. With this win, we can begin to renew and rebuild our lives.

And the struggle continues,

The women we stand with, Deon Haywood, the staff of WWAV, and our Board of Directors.