On the evening of June 15, 1975, 150 people incarcerated in the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women (NCCCW), a prison situated at the southeastern edge of Raleigh’s downtown core, refused to return to their cells at the eight o’clock lock-in time. Gathering in the prison yard, they instead engaged in a sit-in protest focused on three demands: the closure of the prison’s main industry, the laundry; proper medical care; and an end to their treatment as “slaves of the state.”
The women chronicled this protest, and their daily fight against the facility’s brutalization, in a self-produced zine from 1976, titled Break de Chains of Legalized U.$ Slavery. At NCCCW, work in the laundry was compulsory, unpaid, hot, heavy, and routinely dangerous. The laundry’s workers handled an immense daily load of linens and clothing from state-run facilities across North Carolina, including Central Prison, the main men’s penitentiary located a few miles from NCCCW’s wire-fenced perimeter; several chain-gang road camps in surrounding counties; local hospitals; and the nearby North Carolina Sanatorium for the Treatment of Tuberculosis. During working hours, temperatures inside the laundry could reach 120 degrees. In sweltering heat, the women handled, without gloves or other protective gear, incoming soiled linens laden with bodily fluids, chemicals, and the possibility of infection. One worker reported that she was forced to handle “infested clothing” with “no protection whatsoever.” She worked in the laundry a mere nine months, she wrote, “before the germs consumed my body.”
It was in resistance to these conditions, resulting as they did in the carceral consumption of bodies, that the women’s evening protest evolved into a five-day-long work stoppage. Laundry work ground to a halt. In the words of Marjorie Marsh, one of the organizers, such a strike was nothing short of a demand for incarcerated women’s lives: “In short we stood so that we could and may continue to live—we stood for life itself.”
On the fifth day of the laundry workers’ strike, prison administrators forced its end in a shower of state violence and administrative reprisals: 125 armed guards attacked the striking women with batons and tear gas, leaving seventeen injured. Prison administrators transferred Marsh and at least thirty others identified as “ringleaders” to other prison facilities in the state. There, the women reported enduring prolonged solitary confinement, threats and violence from guards, and containment in “cold, dismal, rat-infested” cells in which they were served “murky” water and “food too cold to consume.”