Civil Rights/The South
"...it was symbolic of the late 1970s: now civil rights was not enough to command the public’s interest. There had to be more."
1960's student activists at UNC, Chapel Hill.
In all I would live thirteen years in North Carolina. Between 1959 when I came as a student and 1981 when I left as teacher and an author of five books, I witnessed a remarkable transformation. My nine years as a teacher was bittersweet. I loved my students, but I was teaching in order to write. Early in the 1970s I connected well in the class room when the passions of the 1960s were still fresh. But when those memories began to fade and teaching became more of a classroom performance, I grew impatient and began to think about leaving. Still these were productive years. I floated, with grace, I thought, between fiction and non-fiction. My second novel, The Knock at Midnight, was published in 1975. Its backdrop was the racial turmoil in Cincinnati after a sensational murder trail and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Its hero is a white Appalachian leader, a product of the Kentucky coal country, who tries to keep his community together against tremendous odds. I was happily engaged in my second obsession.
And then in 1975 a remarkable event happened in a little town in eastern North Carolina. A black teenage girl named Joan Little was in jail in Washington, N.C. for petty larceny when a gross, fat, white jailer entered her cell late at night with an ice pick and the intention to rape her. In the ensuing struggle the prisoner rested the ice pick away from her attacker, killed him, and escaped. The trial of Joan Little for first degree murder was a national sensation. In some ways, it was symbolic of the late 1970s: now civil rights was not enough to command the public’s interest. There had to be more. This case involved four fundamental issues wrapped up in a dramatic bundle: civil rights, prisoners rights, women’s rights, and capital punishment. If she were convicted, she risked the death penalty.
"A prodigious piece of journalistic reconstruction."
New York Times Book Review about The Innocence of Joan Little: a Southern Mystery
With two novels under my belt, I was now in the company of wonderful southern writers: Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Doris Betts, and Allan Gurganus. And so, after I wrote the articles below about the case and did a little television work, I plunged into a book about the case. Beyond accuracy, beyond breaking news, beyond balance, I wanted the book to have literary merit. The case was novelistic. How to make an accurate rendition of this rich story read like a novel? In the end I wrote it as a series of narratives, starting with the sheriff (named, irresistibly, Red Davis) who discovered the body the morning after in his open cell. The form for the book was inspired by what I regarded then, and still regard, the greatest detective story of all time, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Innocence of Joan Little: a Southern Mystery was published in 1977 and led to the first interest in my work in Hollywood.
Four years later I would write about another sensational case involving racial violence and an agent provocateur named Eddie Dawson. He led a Ku Klux Klan caravan to interrupt a civil rights protest and kill three protesters. That gruesome case resulted in my first PBS Frontline documentary called “88 Seconds in Greensboro.” But the Joan Little case, for a writer about the modern south, was hard to top. As black, a woman, and a prisoner, she was a victim, but charged with first degree murder, had she been convicted, she could also have been a victim of the death penalty. Fortunately, through a fascinating defense, managed by a good ole southern white boy, attorney Jerry Paul, she was acquitted. Had it gone otherwise, the process of the capital punishment is described below in my piece, “Invitation to a Poisoning” where Velma Barfield became the only woman executed in North Carolina in modern times. By her very acquittal, the Joan Little case established the principle that in cases of attempted rape, a woman has the right to defend herself any way she can, up to and including killing her attacker.
And then in 1975 a remarkable event happened in a little town in eastern North Carolina. A black teenage girl named Joan Little was in jail in Washington, N.C. for petty larceny when a gross, fat, white jailer entered her cell late at night with an ice pick and the intention to rape her. In the ensuing struggle the prisoner rested the ice pick away from her attacker, killed him, and escaped. The trial of Joan Little for first degree murder was a national sensation. In some ways, it was symbolic of the late 1970s: now civil rights was not enough to command the public’s interest. There had to be more. This case involved four fundamental issues wrapped up in a dramatic bundle: civil rights, prisoners rights, women’s rights, and capital punishment. If she were convicted, she risked the death penalty.
"A prodigious piece of journalistic reconstruction."
New York Times Book Review about The Innocence of Joan Little: a Southern Mystery
With two novels under my belt, I was now in the company of wonderful southern writers: Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Doris Betts, and Allan Gurganus. And so, after I wrote the articles below about the case and did a little television work, I plunged into a book about the case. Beyond accuracy, beyond breaking news, beyond balance, I wanted the book to have literary merit. The case was novelistic. How to make an accurate rendition of this rich story read like a novel? In the end I wrote it as a series of narratives, starting with the sheriff (named, irresistibly, Red Davis) who discovered the body the morning after in his open cell. The form for the book was inspired by what I regarded then, and still regard, the greatest detective story of all time, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Innocence of Joan Little: a Southern Mystery was published in 1977 and led to the first interest in my work in Hollywood.
Four years later I would write about another sensational case involving racial violence and an agent provocateur named Eddie Dawson. He led a Ku Klux Klan caravan to interrupt a civil rights protest and kill three protesters. That gruesome case resulted in my first PBS Frontline documentary called “88 Seconds in Greensboro.” But the Joan Little case, for a writer about the modern south, was hard to top. As black, a woman, and a prisoner, she was a victim, but charged with first degree murder, had she been convicted, she could also have been a victim of the death penalty. Fortunately, through a fascinating defense, managed by a good ole southern white boy, attorney Jerry Paul, she was acquitted. Had it gone otherwise, the process of the capital punishment is described below in my piece, “Invitation to a Poisoning” where Velma Barfield became the only woman executed in North Carolina in modern times. By her very acquittal, the Joan Little case established the principle that in cases of attempted rape, a woman has the right to defend herself any way she can, up to and including killing her attacker.
Articles:
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"THE JOAN LITTLE CASE"
Appeared in New York Times Magazine April 6, 1975 pg. 240 (found in ProQuest Historical Newspapers)view PDF "N.C. Shouldn't Disbar Joan Little Lawyer" Appeared in Raleigh News and Observer, 1977 view PDF “Southern Justice and the Case of Joan Little” Appeared in New York Times Jan. 6, 1978 the same day and same page that James Reston Sr.'s column was on, occasioning the letter from Harrison Salisbury: “Eyebrows raised around here. Unless you provide something absolutely compelling we will not print your op. ed's...” view PDF “Whatever Happened to the Southern Villains” Transcript, late 1970s view PDF Shortened version appeared in Newsweek February 15, 2015: view PDF "On Heroes and Villains" Commencement Address, West Georgia State College, Summer 1984: view PDF |
"The Second Greensboro Verdict"
Appeared in Southern Regional Council Atlanta. vol. 6 no. 3 June July 1984 view PDF “Invitation to a Poisoning” Appeared in Vanity Fair in Feb. 1985 view PDF “Spring Hill, Tennessee” Unpublished transcript Spring 1986 view PDF "Competing Dreams of Liberation do Battle Against Tradition" Appeared in The Age, Australia May 28, 2008 view PDF "Clark and Pritchett: A Comparison of Two Notorious Southern Lawmen" Appeared in Southern Cultures, Winter 2016 view PDF |