Unexpected Connections: Women Political Prisoners in Alderson Federal Prison, 1955-1979

This paper explores how state violence through incarceration inadvertently facilitated dialogue between self-identified women political prisoners held in Alderson Federal Prison from 1955-1979. I focus on 5 women who were incarcerated with Lolita Lebrón at various times during her 25 year sentence for leading the Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on Congress. These women are Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, Assata Shakur, Rita Bo Brown and Marilyn Buck. Their experience in Alderson Prison led them to new connections with one another which they later made public through memoirs, speeches, articles and interviews. These sources, as well as the oral history interviews I have conducted with lesbian activist Rita Bo Brown, form the majority of my primary sources for this paper. Secondary sources include works by Margaret Power and Andrea Friedman. My research shows that prison was a space where women from different political ideologies, ages, races and sexualities forged relationships that affected their individual development as activists. There has been little work on women political prisoners, thus I hope my research will begin more explorations into prison as an important historical space for political women. My research will also enrich the work of scholars who have offered phenomenal accounts of the long development of black feminism such Dayo Gore, Kimberly Springer and Erik McDuffie. I hope to contribute to understandings of how the cultural, political and personal exchanges of political women in prison helped shape the development of black and lesbian feminism by the 1970s.