Red Emma’s

“Talitha L. LeFlouria delivers a paradigm-shifting account of American incarceration, tracing its roots to the domestic slave trade and the long history of racialized confinement that has shaped Black women’s lives for centuries. With extraordinary archival rigor and narrative power, she reveals mass incarceration not as a modern aberration but as a central throughline of our nation’s history. This book ought to change forever how the history of mass incarceration is told.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.

For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s.

Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today.

• Using archival sources and personal testimonies, LeFlouria tells a new origin story of mass incarceration with the stories of numerous Black women throughout history, including:Delia Garlic, who was incarcerated in a slave jail and later sold to a sheriff at the height of the domestic slave trade
• Eliza Purdy, who was jailed and sold to the highest bidder a year after the Civil War ended, and
• Susan Burton, who was commodified and trafficked through a 20th-century cell block, much like an enslaved person on the auction block 200 years prior.

Talitha L. LeFlouria is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She is an associate professor of history, and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book, Chained in Silence. Dr. LeFlouria has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Root, and Vox.

Dr. Khalilah M. Harris is the Executive Director of the Public Justice Center, which she joined after over two decades in policy and justice. She recently served as Executive Vice President of Program Strategy at the Center for Policing Equity and as a campaign advisor for a mayoral campaign in New York City. Dr. Harris brings a unique perspective to her work from an extensive career fighting to expand access to opportunity through a racial equity lens. Over the course of her career she has organized and been an advocate on a range of issues including access to quality K-12 public education, economic development, policing reform, women’s rights, Black maternal health and building an inclusive workforce. Dr. Harris serves as a Commissioner on the inaugural Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission for Baltimore City and was recently elected Vice Chair for grantmaking. She is also an appointee to Maryland’s Police Training and Standards Commission and president of the board of the Charm City Pearls Foundation, Inc. Dr. Harris previously served as the first Deputy Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans in the Obama administration and later served in the Biden administration as chief of staff at the US Office of Personnel Management. Between the two administrations she served as managing director of the K-12 education policy team at the Center for American Progress. Khalilah has been a contributor on news networks such as Black News Channel, MSNBC, and, The Real News. She’s published research and opinion pieces and been sought after as a reputable and knowledgeable source in a variety of news outlets including the Washington Post, Education Week, The 74 Million, the Baltimore Sun, the Hill and others.