From Chains to Cells: The Unbroken Thread of Black Women’s Pain and Resistance in Prisons

In her book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the

In her book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise Danielle L. McGuire writes about the brutal attacks by men Fannie Lou Hamer suffered when she was jailed for registering Black people to vote.

Let’s be clear, —what we’re witnessing in prisons in the United States, where Black women are being thrown into cells with male prisoners, is not an anomaly. It’s a continuation of a brutal history one that dates back centuries.

It is a truth we know but dare not speak aloud—our bodies, our sacred, divine bodies, have always been treated as terrain to be dominated, confined, and used.

THIS IS NOT PROGRESS

A system that, with cold efficiency, places Black women into cells with male prisoners. It is a grotesque, violent reality that harms not just the body but the very essence of who we are.

Now, let’s be clear about something. We, as Black women, have long understood that the prisons of this world were never made for us. They were not created to protect us or to treat us with the dignity we are owed.

No, these prisons were designed to imprison our potential, to strip us of our power, to break our spirits. From the moment we stepped onto this soil, as enslaved women, we’ve been confined—first in plantations, then in jails and prisons, and now in the institutions that claim to “rehabilitate” us.

Let’s pause for a moment. Think about this—imagine being a Black woman who, for any number of reasons, has ended up within the walls of a prison. The brutal reality is that there is no true protection.

For too many women, there is no separation between themselves and the men they share cells with. No space to breathe, no place to feel safe. In a system that was never designed with their humanity in mind, how can we expect to keep them from the violence that lurks within the cells?

The very notion that Black women should be housed with men, let alone be the ones to suffer the violence of such an arrangement, speaks to the way Black women’s pain is always invisible. Too often, we are seen as expendable; too often, our suffering is erased from the narrative.

The question we must ask is not just about what is happening behind those prison walls, but why this is happening at all. Why do we allow Black women to be treated as less than human? Why do we stand by and allow these systems of oppression to continue to victimize us?

To use the same old, tired, ignorant, day care-level, escape hatches when we speak out: