CDPL Executive Director Shelagh Kenney will join a panel at Duke University on Thursday, January 29 to discuss gender, incarceration and the death penalty. The event marks the anniversary of a landmark case that still offers lessons in the struggle for justice.
In 1974, a twenty-year-old Black woman named Joan Little found herself facing the death penalty for killing a white guard who had tried to rape her in an eastern North Carolina prison. The folks who campaigned on Little’s behalf understood the webs of sexual violence, state violence, and racism that ensnared her, and they linked her trial to Black women’s—and everyone’s—liberation. Her eventual acquittal spoke to the power of their critique and the reach of their organizing.
Shelagh Kenney has represented women on North Carolina’s death row for decades. She will join historian Christina Greene a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment. They will discuss Little’s case and its many themes that still resonate today. Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies at Duke University, will introduce and moderate the discussion.
In addition to the panel, an exhibition of items related to Joan Little, including one of her handwritten, illustrated poems, will be on display in Perkins Library during the month of January 2026.