On this day, 27 August 1974, Joan Little, a Black woman, killed a white prison guard in self-defence and escaped from the Beaufort County jail in South Carolina (content note: sexual violence). The guard had threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform a sex act, at which point she managed to grab the pick and kill him. She handed herself in to police the following week, at which point she was charged with first-degree murder, which carried an automatic death sentence. Her case rallied support from civil rights activists, feminists and anti-death penalty activists including such figures as Rosa Parks and Angela Davis, and eventually she became the first woman to successfully use resisting sexual assault as a defence for using deadly force.
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