July 7, 2021 • 44 mins
The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.
The true crime genre is one of the fastest growing, but it is incredibly telling who’s stories are told. This has become yet another space where the stories of Black women who are victims are largely ignored, particularly those of darker skinned Black women. This erasure perpetuates the myth that Black women are not targets of serial violence, leaving cases unsolved and communities shattered. To share about the important work she’s done to shed light on Black women victims of serial violence, today we’re joined by Dr. Terrion Williamson. Dr. Williamson and I chatted about how she began to research in this area, why Black women, particularly sex workers, are often targets for serial murder, the inequalities with which Black women victims are covered in the media, and the impact that these crimes have on communities.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M h. Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast,
a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all
the small decisions we can make to become the best
(00:21):
possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr Joy hard
and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more
information or to find a therapist in your area, visit
our website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. While
I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast,
(00:42):
it is not meant to be a substitute for relationship
with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, thanks so
much for joining me for Session to fIF of the
Therapy for Like Girls Podcast. We'll get into the episode
right after a word from our sponsors. The true crime
(01:15):
genre is one of the fastest growing, but it is
incredibly telling whose stories are told. This has become yet
another space where the stories of Black women who are
victims are largely ignored, particularly those of doctor skin black women.
This eraser perpetuates the myth that black women are not
targets of serial violence, leaving cases unsolved and Black women
(01:37):
further marginalized. To share about the important work sheets done
to shed light on black women victims of serial violence.
Today we're joined by Dr Terry On Williamson. Dr Williamson
is an assistant professor of African American and African studies
with appointments in gender, women in Sexuality Studies, and American Studies.
(01:58):
Her research and teaching specialist stations include Black feminist theory,
twenty and twenty first century African American literature, Black cultural studies,
media studies, and racialized gender violence. She and I chatted
about how she began to research in this area, why
black women, particularly sex workers, are often targets for serial murder,
(02:21):
the inequalities with which black women victims are covered in
the media, and the impact that these crimes have on
our communities. If there's something that resonates with you while
enjoying our conversation, please share it with us on social
media using the hashtag tv G in Session. Here's our conversation.
(02:42):
Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr Williamson,
thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah,
I wonder if you could start by telling us a
little bit about how you begin your area of research.
So can you share a little bit about how you
found yourself studying violence against black women in specifically serialized murders.
Certainly so. I am from a little city called Peoria, Illinois.
(03:05):
It's not a suburb of Chicago. It's about two two
and a half hours south of Chicago. And between two
thousand three and two thousand four, nine black women were
murdered in my hometown. So by the time I got
to grad school in two thousand five, the person who
(03:25):
was doing the killing had been called and had confessed
to murdering eight of those nine black women. He would
eventually be convicted in two thousand six for murdering eight
of those nine women. The one woman whose murder he
did not confess to. That is still considered an open case,
although many people think that he was also involved in
(03:47):
that murder. So, although I hadn't been deeply involved in
the case, as it was happening in my hometown, I
had become increasingly concerned about it. It was just sitting
with me, how does this thing happen in my hometown,
particularly once we found out who the killer was. I
grew up at a time, in a moment and in
(04:09):
a place where the sort of cultural common sense was
that serial murder was not something that happened to black folks.
It wasn't something that black communities had to be concerned about,
and certainly there was no such thing as a black
serial killer. There's a bunch of things black folks do,
but this is not um one of them. That was
the kind of understanding I had grown up with, so
(04:29):
at the time that these murders we're happening, part of
what I was dealing with was how do I make
sense of what has happened in my hometown? What are
sort of the conditions under which this happens. And that's
what led me to start researching violence against the women
and serial murder more generally. I certainly did not go
to grad school thinking that that's what I would do,
(04:50):
and my dissertation I do include a chapter about what
happened in Peoria. But when I started doing my research
into the Peoria case, I went into it with all
of this anger and frustration and concern. One of the
things I was concerned about was the fact that it
seemed like no one outside of Peoria I knew anything
(05:13):
about it. I thought, how does something like this happen
nine black women in a city that has fewer than
a hundred and sixteen thousand people in the span of
fifteen months. It's a huge number. How is it that
this is not a thing everyone is talking about? And
I thought it was a bit of an anomaly. It
seems strange to me at this point in my career,
in my life to have thought that, but I really
(05:35):
did only to find out as I started doing my
research that what had happened in Peoria was not an
anomally it was in fact something that had happened over
and over and over again throughout the country where black
women who are the soul or primary targets of serial killers.
In most cases we're talking about black women who have
(05:55):
been killed by the killer is a black man. The
Peoria case, it was a nomalous about the Peoria case
was that in that case, which is pretty rare, the
killer ended up being a white man. But that is
a typical. So otherwise, what I'm seeing are these cases
in which communities of black folks, in which black women
and girls in particular especially have been the targets of
(06:19):
serial murder. And so I have been doing research and
collecting stories is about serial murder for a number of years.
Now that I have my first book done, I published
an anthology a couple of years ago. Now I'm in
a place where I'm really diving down into the work
and writing a book that specifically about black women and
serial murder, especially within the Midwest. M Yeah, I'm glad
(06:42):
you touched on that because my next question to you
was going to be in your research, has you found
that this was an anomaly? And it sounds like that
is not at all the case. No, it's not. I
mean I know at this point, I know of more
than eighty discrete cases of serial murder that specifically involved
as black women as victims throughout the country since about
(07:03):
the mid to late nineteen seventies. There are a few
cases that people in the audience may know a little
bit about, may have heard about Lonnie David Franklin, for instance,
who gets talked about as the Grim Sleeper. But otherwise
these cases by and large go by without people knowing
very much at all. And so that was the thing
that as I began my research though all those years ago,
(07:26):
that was really striking for me. And I'm wondering, if
your research isn't covered why that might be. I mean,
I think we both can suspect a lot of why
that is is that Black women, of course, as victims
are not given much humanity even as victims, right, And
so it is very likely that when we are the
victims of crime, we are overlooked. But I wonder if
there are some larger things that you've kind of uncovered
(07:48):
in your research. I definitely think that part of the
reason we don't know about these cases, we don't hear
about them, is absolutely because of who the victims are
and who the killers are. Um. So what I should
also say is often in these cases, not every time,
but most often we're talking about black women who are
(08:09):
involved in street level prostitution and sex work. We are
also often talking about black women who are involved in
other kinds of underground economies and or are drug addicted.
So take those things together, I think you know you
and I understand why it is that there's not much
(08:30):
attention that gets given to these cases, because the idea
is that, you know, part of what I've heard folks say,
right is like, well, this is sort of just what
comes with the territory you're gonna be involved in kind
of quote unquote lifestyle. Then this is just what happens
to you. The idea being that we shouldn't spend a
lot of our time or resources or energy or care
(08:51):
on women such as these, because essentially they sort of
asked for it. The other piece of this is that
the ones who do the killing are very often involved
in the same kinds of underground economies as the women are.
They are also very often drug addicted. We're talking about
people who come from low income black communities, so you
(09:15):
have this sort of double whammy of both victims and
the offenders who are the kinds of folks who don't
show up as people who get national news stories written
about them um often. So I think that that's a
big part of it, and I think also part of them.
The sort of narrative around this also has to do
(09:36):
with how black communities talk about these cases. So what
I have found, certainly it was the case in Peoria
and it tends to be the case most of the time,
is that local black communities where these murders happening are
very much involved in trying to find who the killer is.
They will rally around family members, they will try to
(09:59):
get the tension of law enforcement, they will press on
government officials to do something right. But there is also
this sort of element that sneaks into these cases of
you know, what you're talking about basically intra racial violence, right,
and that can be hard to approach. Right. So the
(10:23):
idea that what you're often talking about is black women
and girls who have been the victims of violence against
black men can also be hard to talk about. Often
can be hard to think through. And part of what
I'm trying to do in my work is not talk
about this in terms of something like quote unquote black
(10:44):
on black crime, which I don't even believe in, but
to talk about what's happening to black women as an
extension of the kinds of violence that we talk about
when we name what happened to, say George Floyd, all right,
which is to say that the violence that at black
men are subject to in the streets that we talk
(11:04):
about so often, that the various forms of violence that
they are subject to like comes home to ruth and
that the sort of conditions the possibility that lead to
the murders of not just black men, but we talk
about in particular black men, also result in harm two
people across the gender spectrum, especially black women and girls,
(11:28):
and that the way it shows up, it's very often
in the form of sexualized violence. I was wondering if
you could say more about, like why black women who
are engaging in sex work tend to be targets for
serial killers. Well, for one thing, they're more vulnerable because
they're just easier to gain access to um. So we're
talking about people who's just the nature of some of them.
(11:53):
They call work, sometimes the sex for drugs transactions, sometimes
the survival sex. They're more likely to come mental contact
with the people who do the killing. Right, So, the
privilege of certain kinds of inclome class privilege, educational privileges,
the various kinds of privileges that we have even as
(12:13):
people of color, sort of affords us more protection because
as a consequence of how they live their lives, the
ways they mobilize, or the forms of violence that they
have been subject to in the past, etcetera, they end
up in situations in which they are much more likely
to be vulnerable to these kinds of harm. And also,
(12:34):
as a consequence of that, they're much less likely to
be taken seriously as victims of any form of crime
or violence. So I'm still researching this, but part of
what is becoming clear is that women and girls who
are victims of this kind of harm often have been
victims of other kinds of sexualized harm prior to their death. Yeah,
(12:57):
I would love to get more of your thoughts about
this whole idea at the true crime genre. I mean,
if we're thinking about, like just in podcasting is one
of the most popular kinds of genres, but of course
it all tends to be very white focused, and so
I love to hear your thoughts about like why that
is and how that has come to be. You're absolutely
right like the true crime podcast, I'll be straight up,
(13:19):
I listened to a lot of it myself because part
of it is I'm trying to understand how people narrate stories, um,
and I'm trying to see what it is people are
interested in and engaged with. And I think true crime
as a genre, for better or worse, the places where
the work that I'm doing gets most often taken up
is within the realm of true crime, and so I've
(13:40):
been interested in thinking about that genre. So what do
we see in the true crime genre up to and
including podcast fascination with the killer, why the killer does
what they do, where they come from, their psychology, etcetera. Etcetera.
What we're seeing within the realm of podcast and more
contemporary forms of media. I would say you are seeing
(14:04):
more attention being paid to victims. But I think from
what I've been able to tell is that those victims,
like so much of media from the beginnings of time
where we're talking about stuff like this, is that it
is often a focus on white women, focus on younger
white women, focus on younger, more attractive, more middle class
(14:26):
white women, often but not always what you see to
be sort of the central narrative and true crime. So again,
what's different about what I'm trying to do Less attention
to the person who does the killing, more attention to victims,
and more attention to a diverse range of victims, and
trying to do with the work of destigmatizing how we
(14:47):
talk about and think about sex work and prostitution, because
so many of the victims we're talking about, that's what
they are engaged in or have some relationship to what
you also see happening in true crime as a fascination
and with the who done it. I think this thing
about like solving the crime or figuring out who the
person is who did it is something that attracts a
(15:10):
lot of people for reasons, you know, I understand. Um. However,
in my work, I'm less concerned about the who done
it aspect. I'm concerned to the extent that I don't
want any more people to be harmed, and so we
have to know who was doing the harm so that
they can stop doing the harm. But I'm less interested
(15:31):
in this sort of mystery element of it again, because
what I want to do is think about how this
hard that's being done, it's connected up to all these
other intersecting systems of oppression, which include incarceration, which include poverty,
which include, particularly in the context of my work I'm
doing on the Midwest, sort of industrial decline, economic decline, Right,
(15:55):
I want to think about these cases as being connected
up to that. All Right, So some people will have heard,
especially now, because there's a podcast about this. There's a
podcast about what gets talked about as the Atlanta child murders.
So that series of cases that happened in which you
had something like twenty plus people who were killed. Most
(16:16):
of them were young boys, but we're also talking about
young men. So between nineteen seventy nine and I think
ninety one, and so that case at the time got
a lot of attention. It's gotten more attention in recent
years because there have been a couple of documentaries and
television shows and also a podcast that was done not
too long ago. And so during that case, James Baldwin
(16:40):
has a book as a sort of a long form
estay called The Evidence of Things Not Seen, And one
of the things he says, he's reflecting on that series
of murders, and he says something like, it's sort of
an act of cowardice to blame all of these murders
on one person. So what those of us who know
something about this case knows that there is someone who
has been incarcerated for that series and murders, Wayne Williams.
(17:02):
He was convicted of killing two of the male victims,
young men victims in that case, but has been suspected
of doing all of the murders. And basically what James
Baldwin is saying is, whether or not one thinks that
Wayne Williams did it, it's an act of cowardice to
try to put this on any one particular person, even
if one person did it, because the fact of the
(17:23):
matter is, what is it that enables Wayne Williams to exist.
What is it in our own society and our own
culture that has allowed for the development of a person
who may or may not be Wayne Williams, whoever it is,
whatever person or people are praying on these victims. And
so part of what he does in evidence of Things
(17:44):
not Seen is he's putting that series of murders into
this larger social and economic context of the moment to say,
there's all kinds of fingers that can be pointed, but
it's not enough to just say, you know, point the
finger at the monster and then say there there, We're done.
And so in my work, I think it's really important
to think about that as one of the sort of
(18:06):
grounding elements of the work that I do. I'm not
interested in just pointing the finger at a person so
much as I am, and it's larger context. That sounds
incredibly spot on. Thank you for that. More from my
conversation with Dr Williamson right after the break. So, as
(18:30):
you think about the ways that the stories are told,
what kinds of language are you kind of finding that's
used for victims And does some of this overlap with
the ways that, like black people aren't afforded innocent. Oh,
that's a good question. You know, this question of language
has been one that I've had to deal with and
think through quite a bit, and I'm still wrestling with.
(18:51):
There's still language that I think will evolve. Even in
the work that I'm doing currently, I have to constantly
think about this. One reason is a lot of the
case that I'm looking at happened with them saying seventies
and eighties and that kind of thing. There's often a
lot of talk of prostitutes, sometimes without any names being
attached to who they were, and I thought a lot
(19:12):
about how to deal with that. So the work that
I do in my books canalyzed my name. And that
last chapter is called in the Life because I found
in the Life to be a term that was more
useful for talking about the people who I was talking about.
So in the Life is a term that gets used
in several different contexts, so it gets it gets used
(19:33):
by black queer folks, for instance, but it also gets
used in the context of these underground economies people who
are involved in sex work. Was sometimes talking about being
in the life, and I found that to be a
more useful way of talking about the people I talked
about so I often will talk about them as being
in the life or I talked about them as being
involved in prostitution, not sort of using them now now
(19:56):
as a descriptor. They are prostitutes, right and eve in
the language of sex work, for instance, can become become difficult.
So one of the families that I talked to in
the Peoria case, two of the daughters of Brenda Irving,
who was the last victim in that case, talk about
their frustration with the way their mother was talked about
(20:19):
as a prostitute or even a sex worker, as if
they're like, this was not her job, this was not
what she did as a job. There were various things
that she did for work, including at one point in
time she owned a restaurant. So there are many things
she did for work. But they were like, this is
something she did off to the side. She was still
(20:41):
a mother to us, she was still a grandmother to
our children. She was still very actively involved in our lives,
all right, And so the way that their mother got
reduced to a prostitute was really difficult continued even, you know,
nine years after their murders. Was just when I initially
(21:02):
sat down and talk with them was still something that
I think was really painful, and I think in a
lot of cases you see that that pushing back against that.
The other thing that happened in the Peoria case, and
I think I know has happened in other cases, is
the use of mud shots as the only sort of
visual that you have of who the victims work. So
in the Peoria case, the women I talked to said, listen,
(21:24):
we tried to give the newspapers other kinds of images
that they can use, but they continue to produce and
reproduce these mug shots. So there's a way that the
victims become as consequently become criminal, criminalized. Right, referring to
them only as prostitutes. Even the language of sex worker
can do it, right, even though that's a language that
(21:45):
is we find more acceptable. And I sort of talk
about prostitution, I just want to say this as distinct.
Prostitution is a form of sex work. Sex work is
the sort of umbrella turn and I do talk about
street level prostitution because I want to be clear what
we're talking about. We're not talking about someone who is
an escort or a call girl or who's a dancer.
(22:08):
And I want to be clear about that, because there
are varying forms of vulnerabilities to harm based upon where
one works. So that's why I talk about street level prostitution.
I want to be clear about what we're talking about
because I think there are definitely people within sex work
who will talk about the agency they have as sex workers.
But when we're talking about street level prostitution, we're often
(22:29):
talking about sex for drugs, were often talking about survival sex.
So we're talking about something distinctive. And so the language
of prostitution without some other context, the use of the
mud shots, all of those things do the work even
without saying anything else, of criminalizing victims, and so what happens, well,
it doesn't matter as much what happened to them, right.
(22:50):
The other thing I wanted to mention about my work
and where it emerges from that is related to this
question you've asked about language. So Dr Branford maybe will
remember in two thousand and seven there was this whole
dust up around this radio host don Imus. So this
is after the offender in the Peoria case has been convicted.
(23:11):
I am at the early stages of my graduate work
and just starting to like formulate a project involving what
happened in my hometown. Don Imus, the quote unquote shot job,
comes onto the radio after the Rutgers Tennessee women's basketball
game and says, talking about the Rutgers team, he says,
those girls are some quote nappy headed holes, and that
(23:34):
causes an understandable uproar. He temporarily loses his job, has
to apologize because you know, he uses this term to
refer to these black women on the air. Okay, what
happens as part of that fallout is you hear all
of this, the way that people run to the defense
(23:55):
of the Rutgers women, and I want to be really,
really really clear, there is no problem with defending the
Rutgers women. They deserve to be defended, and what don
Imus said about them was not okay and needed to
have been taken down. I remember I was working on
this project and what I kept sitting with was the
ways that people kept saying, well, you know, it's a
(24:17):
disgrace for him to talk about this women in this
way because they're not nappy headed holes. That's not what
they are. They are college educated, they are successful, they
are athletes, they get the grades, all of these things
that they have done, which none of which I think
was wrong or unfair to say, but in the they're
not that. So, like, I'm sitting there at this moment
(24:39):
where you have all of the people on sort of
cable news and all the different editorials who are speaking
out against don Imus and using this language of in
order to sort of defend the women who are talking
about all the ways in which they are not nappy
headed holes. At the moment that I'm sitting with the
deaths of all of these black women, none of whom
(24:59):
are nappy headed homes. Let's be very clear about that.
But if there is any sort of um population of
women who is gets more closely related to that jacked
up term, it is women who have been involved in
sex work and who have and the pictures that get
used to identify them in the newspaper and the media
(25:19):
is mud shots. So I'm sitting with all of this
death and all of this violence against all of these
black women, including women who come from my own community,
including a woman who I knew personally, who I understand
in terms that have nothing to do with that thing
that don Eima said. Yet this sort of pushed back
against there not that seems to do this other kind
(25:41):
of work. It's not intentional, of course, but it's what
made me start thinking about even the discourse that we use. Right,
even in cases you think about, you know, the young
person gets shot and killed in the neighborhood, Well, they
were an honorable student, and they were. But what if
they were an honorable students, right, does that mean the
you care less about them? Does that mean that we
(26:02):
love them less? And so as a consequence of that
moment and thinking about how we talk about the people
we talk about is also trying to like think about
how to destigmatize. I don't try to spend a lot
of time saying, well, these women weren't actually prostitutes, they
were X, Y and Z. I try to enlargen the picture, right,
(26:22):
I try to give a fuller context for their lives,
because no, none of them were just one thing. But
I also want to destigmatize how we talk about prostitution, sex, word,
drug use, and all of those kinds of things, so
that we understand that they are also part of the
beloved community, or less they should be. And we're really
serious about talking about freedom and liberation and care for
(26:43):
black folks, they must also be part of the beloved community.
And so it's not enough to just say, well, you know,
these women are not that, and so we care about
these women, but the women who are maybe we don't
pay as much as much attention to them. So your
question of language, I think it's deeply, deeply important to
how we think about these cases. It's deeply important to
(27:04):
the work that I'm doing, and I think even in
the ways in which we use language, it's critically important
for us, even on individual basis, to be thinking about
how we use language and their relationship to the people
who ought to be part of our communities. Yes, thank
you so much for that. And I'm wondering if you
have seen a difference in how white victims are covered.
(27:24):
You know, so even white women maybe who are engaging
in sex work and may have concerns with drug abuse
or drug use, is there the same issue of you know,
using their mug shots and talking about them, you know,
specifically as okay prostitution or sex work, or is it
different even then? You know. One of the reasons I'm
(27:45):
hesitating is because I just in terms of like the
research I've done, I have really focused on black women, right,
so there's not a whole lot I can say about
folks who are not black women, because I haven't attended
to that as my But what I will say, just
for now thinking about this and what I've seen, is
that any people who are involved in prostitution, sex work, etcetera,
(28:10):
there's a particular kind of stigma that attaches to them
and to their cases. But what happens when you're talking
about white women is that there's a fuller I mean,
this is the case in so many things, right, there's
a fuller there's a fuller picture of who white women are.
So yes, there are white women who are also involved
in sex work and prostitution who are murdered a matter
(28:31):
of fact, serial murder in general, that is typically who
we're talking about, whether we're talking about black women or
non black women. Were often talking about people who are
involved who have been trafficked and are involved in sex work.
So and again it's the reasons that I talked about before.
They're just much more vulnerable because of where they're located,
the things that they get involved in, etcetera. But when
(28:52):
we're talking about white women, like, yes, there are those
cases that get some coverage, and even then I don't
think it an Ugh coverage. I don't think we attend
carefully enough to the lives of women who are most
vulnerable to serial murder in general, across gender, across race.
But you also have John and a Ramsey, right like,
(29:13):
you also have these other cases, right Like, you have
a richer sort of picture of who white women are
in general, but who white women are as victims as well.
So I think it hits differently and as a consequence,
like the sort of the attention from what I've been
able to tell, the attention that's a paid to serial killers.
(29:35):
A lot of the cases I've seen have involved, say,
you know, white women who are college students, you know
that kind of thing. So so there's a sort of
wider sense of who the victims are. But to be clear,
I think all of these cases need to be attended
to more carefully. And my focus on black women and
girls as victims is not meant to say that these
(29:56):
are the only victims, only to say that there has
been so little attend and play to these victims that
I think it's really important for that to be the
focus of what I do. More from my conversation with
Dr Williamson right after the break, Dr Williamson. You have
(30:23):
talked about community quite a bit throughout this interview, and
I just wanted to kind of go back to that
and talk about one, like the personal impact this has
had on you as a researcher, given that you know
you were tied and when you knew one of the victims.
But also you talked about like how this has a
ripple effect in the community because a lot of times
the community is really involved in like figuring out who
(30:45):
did it. In the families that are left to grieve,
you know, like are they even afforded any space to
grieve in all of this. Part of the reason I'm
so invested in this project is because of how essential,
how essential community is. And you know, part of what
these cases have shown me is that it really calls
(31:06):
out the lie that black folks don't care about other
forms of harm other than police violence. Right Like, anytime
there's another police killing, it's like, we're mad about this,
but what about you know, what's happening in black communities.
And the fact of the matter is Black communities have
always cared about to multiple things. You have always been
(31:28):
concerned about forms of violence that happened within their communities
and that is absolutely the case here as well, So
to speak to the question about the personal impact, this
is not what I thought years later I would be doing.
I went to grad school at a moment when like
reality TV was really on the rise. I wanted to
(31:49):
write about like black reality television, and actually I do
write about reality television a little bit, but this became
the work for me. This became the really some part
of the work that I do, because attending to the
case of those nine black women who were killed in
my hometown meant attending to my hometown. So when I
(32:11):
was in grad school, one of my professors was someone
some folks will know, this really dynamic, amazing scholar named
Robin Kelly was my professor who was a historian, and
one of the things he said to me I'll never
ever forget him saying as I started working on this project,
was you know, what are the things that you're never
supposed to know about Peoria? What are the things that
as a consequence of your being there, things that are
(32:33):
sort of hidden from you from you? And so what
it meant for me to talk about these women meant
talking about the place I come from, a place that
I honestly I hadn't really seriously thought about. You know,
I'm from one of these cities. It's like, there's not
a whole lot going on there. It's been named multiple
times as like one of the worst cities for Black American.
(32:55):
There are all kinds of disparities of different forms, and
so when I went away to college, it was like,
let me go and be gone. And it took this
happening for me to really start to understand my city,
more understand where I come from, and then reconnect to
the really deep passionate love I have for that place
(33:17):
and those people, because it forced me to go back
and attend to all of the conditions of life that
were happening there. Why is it that most of these
women who are victims come from the same side of town,
the you know, the black side of town and southside
where I come from. Why have all of us been
touched in some way by poverty? Why have all of
(33:39):
us been touched in some way by quote unquote failing schools.
Why have all of us been touched in some way
by over policing and under policing. You know, what are
the sort of commonalities there? What makes the differences in
our lives, how are our lives shaped? And so it
(34:00):
also meant going back and talking to people from my
hometown and getting a different feel for what it means
to be there. There's different ways on what's doing. Research
on your own community can be tricky, but it has
also given me such a deep and abiding sense of
care because I've been able to see the kinds of
connections are the ways that communities come together in the
(34:20):
aftermath of cases like this. But but but also all
of the sort of complex things that happened, because it's
all not you know, we all come together where a
unified front. No, no, there's all kinds of fissures that
also happened. There are people who are frustrated because you
know X person stood in as the expert, but they
really weren't around when things were happening, or certain families
(34:43):
got to stand in and have a voice and other
families did not. There are still lots of ways in
which the communities are complex and for all as well.
But that is part of telling a more complete story
of a place, which is part of what I'm trying
to do through this work. And so the other part
to the other piece of your question about community that
I also want to mention is that there are various
(35:06):
groups that have come together, some of them very unofficial.
So one or two groups came together in the aftermath
that would happen in my hometown. I'm not sure if
any of them ever had official titles, but in some
places they did have titles. So in the case of
Lonnie David Franklin, who the person who gets named the
Graham Sleeper, who might be the case that more people
(35:27):
are familiar with. There was a group called Black Coalist
and Finding Back Serial Murders, which are started by the
activists and radio host Marcot Prescott and Los Angeles and
emerged as those murders were happening within the eighties, but
continues to exist today. And when Lonnie Franklin came to
police attention and ended up being convicted in they did
(35:51):
a lot of advocacy um around that case, and I
was able to go out during one of the actions
that they had and be part of just trying to
raise attention. And even all these years later, as you're
talking about people who were largely killed, most of them
were killed in the nineteen eighties, there's still so much
healing that needs to occur, and so the kinds of
(36:13):
actions that they've been involved in our work that they've
been involved in in terms of thinking about memorialization and
healing that that organization has done. And there are other
kinds of organizations like that. And one of the organizations
that I really want to talk about is the Comedy
he River Collective is an organization that was founded in
Boston and they wrote this statement which has been at
(36:35):
this point is known as basically the Black Feminist Manifesto.
UM that's largely what they're known for is writing that
Black Feminist statement. But there was a series of murders
at the beginning of nineteen seventy nine. Twelve black women
and one white women were murdered, mainly in the Roxbury
and Dorchester areas of Boston in the first five months
of nineteen seventy nine, and Comedy River Collective was one
(36:58):
of a number of organizations that did an extensive amount
of advocacy around those murders. And one of the really
critical things for me that came out of that work
is that they refused to make those murders just be
a consequence of say racial harm. So one of the
ways that it was being talked about initially was you
(37:20):
had community leaders who were talking about this sort of
as as a racial crime, and now it seems bananas
that we would think about it in that kind of way.
But Community River Collective was like, oh, no, no, no,
this is not just about race. We must understand that
this is also about gender and that these intersecting things
and we have to talk about them as related. And
one of the things that they say they put together
(37:41):
this pamphlet in order to get out information about what
was happening in the cases, but also information about how
women could be safer, and then information about how they
talked about that series and murders being a thread in
the fabric of violence against women, which is to say,
this is not a one off case, which is what
some of law enforcement was saying. They were like, listen,
(38:03):
these women are being killed by people they know this
is what happens in black communities. Would you expect us
to do? And they were like, no, what's happening to
these women in Boston is a threat in the fabric
of violence against women, which is to say, so. Then
in that pamphlet they give all of these statistics about
domestic violence rates, for instance, and other forms of harm,
to say, if we're gonna talk about harm against women,
(38:26):
we have to think about how this is also an
extension of those kinds of harm. That is to say, one,
this is an intersectional issue. This is not just race,
but it's race and its gender, and its class and
and and and we have to think about these things
that's related, but also to think about this as connected
to other forms of harm, other forms of violence, and
(38:48):
how the work that we're going to do as a
community and as an organization is to say that we
are committed to uplifting our entire community, and thinking about
this slate of murders that has happened here means that
we have to think about all of these things together.
And that's critically important, and that's become really important to
my work. And so I wanted to shout out Compay
(39:08):
River Collective because the work that they did in nineteen
seventy nine continues to be instrumental on how I think
about my own work in the current moment. Thank you
for that. I wonder if there are any other resources
that you'd like to share that might be helpful for
people wanting to kind of learn more about this kind
of work or that have been helpful for you. So
(39:28):
I mentioned James Baldwins The Evidence of Things Not Seeing.
It's about the Atlanta case, but it also I think
the way that he narrates what happened in Atlanta it's
critically important for how we might think about these cases
in a deeper context. Another really important text to come
out of what happened in Atlanta is Tony Kate Bambara's
(39:49):
novel Those Bones Are Not My Child, Tony k. Bambar's
Black woman writer. This is like her magnum opens and
it's a novel, but it's a novel that's based in
reality to and I think is another way of getting
a picture. I don't think there's any other text I've
read that better gets at the kinds of trauma, the
(40:11):
kind of hurt, the kind of fear and terror that
occurs in a community when something like this is happening.
All right, So I think of that as a resource
and I go to something like a novel in literature
because one of the questions I often get asked, how
I do this work? How I sustained myself through this work?
And I have found literature touches me and speaks to
(40:32):
me in a particular kind of way. And there's also
an essay that Audrey Lord wrote. Audrey Lord was involved
in some of the sort of commemorative events in Boston
in that case that I was talking about earlier that
the Comedy River Collective was involved in, and she wrote
this long form poem, caught Me a corral for Black
women voices. I've recently written about my own sort of
(40:54):
coming to that poem. It's a brutal poem, like it's
really getting at the sort of visceral, a painful way
effect of these cases on black women and black communities.
But at the same time, it was a place where
I saw somebody putting into language what it feels like
(41:14):
to do this work, what it feels like to hear
these stories of the really brutal ways that black women
and girls are violated and come to harm. That is
something that I have found has been a sort of
useful and useful text for me to engage with. There's
a podcast called Through the Cracks. I'm really sorry I
(41:36):
can't remember right at this moment the name of the
It's a black woman who was the host of that podcast.
Very often podcasts that engage with these kinds of cases
aren't by black people, and so I think this was
an important for that reason. And so it tells the
story of this one young girl who went missing in
(41:57):
I believe the DC area. And it is not a
resource that's exactly about what I do. Part of the
issues is there's not a lot of resources that's about
what I do. But it's also a way of understanding
how people can narrate these kinds of stories. And I
think one of the things that podcast does well it
gets at telling a sort of larger narrative of what
(42:17):
happens how a young black girl sensibly comes to harm
in the way that she does. So those are some
of the things that I attend to on my work.
Thank you. Will definitely make sure to share those with
the audience. So where can we stay connected to you?
What is your website as well as any social media
handles you'd like to share. I am not a great
social media person. I'm working on it. Hopefully i'll do
(42:41):
better in the futures. However, the website Black mid West
Initiative is where you can find some of the things
that I do. I'm really interested in the collective work
and so the Black mid West Initiative. You can find
them at the Black mid West dot com. It's me
and a bunch of other people who are invested in
telling these underreported, understudy car the stories and narratives, so
(43:01):
you can also see some work there. I would also
like to say if there are people listening to this
who have been touched by these kinds of cases, who
have a story to tell about being a family member
or a community member who has been involved in a
serial murder case or know something about these serial murder cases.
I am definitely looking for people to talk to. I
(43:23):
want to hear your story, so I do hope people
will reach out. I can leave my work email address
so people can reach me that way. But I definitely
know that there are many many more stories out there
to be told, and I would love to be able
to be part of telling those stories. And if anybody
wants to email us at podcasts at Therapy for Black
Girls dot com if you want to be connected to
Dr Williams and we can definitely what would those to you?
(43:45):
Please do perfect well. Thank you so much for spending
some time with us today, Dr Williamson. I really appreciate it.
I really appreciate being here, and I really appreciate you
for shining a light on these cases. It's so important. Absolutely,
thank you. I'm so glad that Dr Williamson was able
to share her expertise with us today. To learn more
about her and her work, or to check out the
(44:07):
resources that she shared, be sure to visit the show
notes at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash session
to and don't forget to text two of your girls
and tell them to check out the episode as well.
If you're looking for a therapist in your area, be
sure to check out our therapist directory at Therapy for
Black Girls dot com slash directory. And if you want
(44:28):
to continue digging into this topic or just be in
community with other sisters, come on over and join us
in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the
Internet design just for black women. You can join us
at community dot Therapy for Black Girls dot com. Thank
you all so much for joining me again this week.
I look forward to continue in this conversation with you
(44:48):
all real soon. Take good care,
M h. Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast,
a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all
the small decisions we can make to become the best
(00:21):
possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr Joy hard
and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more
information or to find a therapist in your area, visit
our website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. While
I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast,
(00:42):
it is not meant to be a substitute for relationship
with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, thanks so
much for joining me for Session to fIF of the
Therapy for Like Girls Podcast. We'll get into the episode
right after a word from our sponsors. The true crime
(01:15):
genre is one of the fastest growing, but it is
incredibly telling whose stories are told. This has become yet
another space where the stories of Black women who are
victims are largely ignored, particularly those of doctor skin black women.
This eraser perpetuates the myth that black women are not
targets of serial violence, leaving cases unsolved and Black women
(01:37):
further marginalized. To share about the important work sheets done
to shed light on black women victims of serial violence.
Today we're joined by Dr Terry On Williamson. Dr Williamson
is an assistant professor of African American and African studies
with appointments in gender, women in Sexuality Studies, and American Studies.
(01:58):
Her research and teaching specialist stations include Black feminist theory,
twenty and twenty first century African American literature, Black cultural studies,
media studies, and racialized gender violence. She and I chatted
about how she began to research in this area, why
black women, particularly sex workers, are often targets for serial murder,
(02:21):
the inequalities with which black women victims are covered in
the media, and the impact that these crimes have on
our communities. If there's something that resonates with you while
enjoying our conversation, please share it with us on social
media using the hashtag tv G in Session. Here's our conversation.
(02:42):
Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr Williamson,
thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah,
I wonder if you could start by telling us a
little bit about how you begin your area of research.
So can you share a little bit about how you
found yourself studying violence against black women in specifically serialized murders.
Certainly so. I am from a little city called Peoria, Illinois.
(03:05):
It's not a suburb of Chicago. It's about two two
and a half hours south of Chicago. And between two
thousand three and two thousand four, nine black women were
murdered in my hometown. So by the time I got
to grad school in two thousand five, the person who
(03:25):
was doing the killing had been called and had confessed
to murdering eight of those nine black women. He would
eventually be convicted in two thousand six for murdering eight
of those nine women. The one woman whose murder he
did not confess to. That is still considered an open case,
although many people think that he was also involved in
(03:47):
that murder. So, although I hadn't been deeply involved in
the case, as it was happening in my hometown, I
had become increasingly concerned about it. It was just sitting
with me, how does this thing happen in my hometown,
particularly once we found out who the killer was. I
grew up at a time, in a moment and in
(04:09):
a place where the sort of cultural common sense was
that serial murder was not something that happened to black folks.
It wasn't something that black communities had to be concerned about,
and certainly there was no such thing as a black
serial killer. There's a bunch of things black folks do,
but this is not um one of them. That was
the kind of understanding I had grown up with, so
(04:29):
at the time that these murders we're happening, part of
what I was dealing with was how do I make
sense of what has happened in my hometown? What are
sort of the conditions under which this happens. And that's
what led me to start researching violence against the women
and serial murder more generally. I certainly did not go
to grad school thinking that that's what I would do,
(04:50):
and my dissertation I do include a chapter about what
happened in Peoria. But when I started doing my research
into the Peoria case, I went into it with all
of this anger and frustration and concern. One of the
things I was concerned about was the fact that it
seemed like no one outside of Peoria I knew anything
(05:13):
about it. I thought, how does something like this happen
nine black women in a city that has fewer than
a hundred and sixteen thousand people in the span of
fifteen months. It's a huge number. How is it that
this is not a thing everyone is talking about? And
I thought it was a bit of an anomaly. It
seems strange to me at this point in my career,
in my life to have thought that, but I really
(05:35):
did only to find out as I started doing my
research that what had happened in Peoria was not an
anomally it was in fact something that had happened over
and over and over again throughout the country where black
women who are the soul or primary targets of serial killers.
In most cases we're talking about black women who have
(05:55):
been killed by the killer is a black man. The
Peoria case, it was a nomalous about the Peoria case
was that in that case, which is pretty rare, the
killer ended up being a white man. But that is
a typical. So otherwise, what I'm seeing are these cases
in which communities of black folks, in which black women
and girls in particular especially have been the targets of
(06:19):
serial murder. And so I have been doing research and
collecting stories is about serial murder for a number of years.
Now that I have my first book done, I published
an anthology a couple of years ago. Now I'm in
a place where I'm really diving down into the work
and writing a book that specifically about black women and
serial murder, especially within the Midwest. M Yeah, I'm glad
(06:42):
you touched on that because my next question to you
was going to be in your research, has you found
that this was an anomaly? And it sounds like that
is not at all the case. No, it's not. I
mean I know at this point, I know of more
than eighty discrete cases of serial murder that specifically involved
as black women as victims throughout the country since about
(07:03):
the mid to late nineteen seventies. There are a few
cases that people in the audience may know a little
bit about, may have heard about Lonnie David Franklin, for instance,
who gets talked about as the Grim Sleeper. But otherwise
these cases by and large go by without people knowing
very much at all. And so that was the thing
that as I began my research though all those years ago,
(07:26):
that was really striking for me. And I'm wondering, if
your research isn't covered why that might be. I mean,
I think we both can suspect a lot of why
that is is that Black women, of course, as victims
are not given much humanity even as victims, right, And
so it is very likely that when we are the
victims of crime, we are overlooked. But I wonder if
there are some larger things that you've kind of uncovered
(07:48):
in your research. I definitely think that part of the
reason we don't know about these cases, we don't hear
about them, is absolutely because of who the victims are
and who the killers are. Um. So what I should
also say is often in these cases, not every time,
but most often we're talking about black women who are
(08:09):
involved in street level prostitution and sex work. We are
also often talking about black women who are involved in
other kinds of underground economies and or are drug addicted.
So take those things together, I think you know you
and I understand why it is that there's not much
(08:30):
attention that gets given to these cases, because the idea
is that, you know, part of what I've heard folks say,
right is like, well, this is sort of just what
comes with the territory you're gonna be involved in kind
of quote unquote lifestyle. Then this is just what happens
to you. The idea being that we shouldn't spend a
lot of our time or resources or energy or care
(08:51):
on women such as these, because essentially they sort of
asked for it. The other piece of this is that
the ones who do the killing are very often involved
in the same kinds of underground economies as the women are.
They are also very often drug addicted. We're talking about
people who come from low income black communities, so you
(09:15):
have this sort of double whammy of both victims and
the offenders who are the kinds of folks who don't
show up as people who get national news stories written
about them um often. So I think that that's a
big part of it, and I think also part of them.
The sort of narrative around this also has to do
(09:36):
with how black communities talk about these cases. So what
I have found, certainly it was the case in Peoria
and it tends to be the case most of the time,
is that local black communities where these murders happening are
very much involved in trying to find who the killer is.
They will rally around family members, they will try to
(09:59):
get the tension of law enforcement, they will press on
government officials to do something right. But there is also
this sort of element that sneaks into these cases of
you know, what you're talking about basically intra racial violence, right,
and that can be hard to approach. Right. So the
(10:23):
idea that what you're often talking about is black women
and girls who have been the victims of violence against
black men can also be hard to talk about. Often
can be hard to think through. And part of what
I'm trying to do in my work is not talk
about this in terms of something like quote unquote black
(10:44):
on black crime, which I don't even believe in, but
to talk about what's happening to black women as an
extension of the kinds of violence that we talk about
when we name what happened to, say George Floyd, all right,
which is to say that the violence that at black
men are subject to in the streets that we talk
(11:04):
about so often, that the various forms of violence that
they are subject to like comes home to ruth and
that the sort of conditions the possibility that lead to
the murders of not just black men, but we talk
about in particular black men, also result in harm two
people across the gender spectrum, especially black women and girls,
(11:28):
and that the way it shows up, it's very often
in the form of sexualized violence. I was wondering if
you could say more about, like why black women who
are engaging in sex work tend to be targets for
serial killers. Well, for one thing, they're more vulnerable because
they're just easier to gain access to um. So we're
talking about people who's just the nature of some of them.
(11:53):
They call work, sometimes the sex for drugs transactions, sometimes
the survival sex. They're more likely to come mental contact
with the people who do the killing. Right, So, the
privilege of certain kinds of inclome class privilege, educational privileges,
the various kinds of privileges that we have even as
(12:13):
people of color, sort of affords us more protection because
as a consequence of how they live their lives, the
ways they mobilize, or the forms of violence that they
have been subject to in the past, etcetera, they end
up in situations in which they are much more likely
to be vulnerable to these kinds of harm. And also,
(12:34):
as a consequence of that, they're much less likely to
be taken seriously as victims of any form of crime
or violence. So I'm still researching this, but part of
what is becoming clear is that women and girls who
are victims of this kind of harm often have been
victims of other kinds of sexualized harm prior to their death. Yeah,
(12:57):
I would love to get more of your thoughts about
this whole idea at the true crime genre. I mean,
if we're thinking about, like just in podcasting is one
of the most popular kinds of genres, but of course
it all tends to be very white focused, and so
I love to hear your thoughts about like why that
is and how that has come to be. You're absolutely
right like the true crime podcast, I'll be straight up,
(13:19):
I listened to a lot of it myself because part
of it is I'm trying to understand how people narrate stories, um,
and I'm trying to see what it is people are
interested in and engaged with. And I think true crime
as a genre, for better or worse, the places where
the work that I'm doing gets most often taken up
is within the realm of true crime, and so I've
(13:40):
been interested in thinking about that genre. So what do
we see in the true crime genre up to and
including podcast fascination with the killer, why the killer does
what they do, where they come from, their psychology, etcetera. Etcetera.
What we're seeing within the realm of podcast and more
contemporary forms of media. I would say you are seeing
(14:04):
more attention being paid to victims. But I think from
what I've been able to tell is that those victims,
like so much of media from the beginnings of time
where we're talking about stuff like this, is that it
is often a focus on white women, focus on younger
white women, focus on younger, more attractive, more middle class
(14:26):
white women, often but not always what you see to
be sort of the central narrative and true crime. So again,
what's different about what I'm trying to do Less attention
to the person who does the killing, more attention to victims,
and more attention to a diverse range of victims, and
trying to do with the work of destigmatizing how we
(14:47):
talk about and think about sex work and prostitution, because
so many of the victims we're talking about, that's what
they are engaged in or have some relationship to what
you also see happening in true crime as a fascination
and with the who done it. I think this thing
about like solving the crime or figuring out who the
person is who did it is something that attracts a
(15:10):
lot of people for reasons, you know, I understand. Um. However,
in my work, I'm less concerned about the who done
it aspect. I'm concerned to the extent that I don't
want any more people to be harmed, and so we
have to know who was doing the harm so that
they can stop doing the harm. But I'm less interested
(15:31):
in this sort of mystery element of it again, because
what I want to do is think about how this
hard that's being done, it's connected up to all these
other intersecting systems of oppression, which include incarceration, which include poverty,
which include, particularly in the context of my work I'm
doing on the Midwest, sort of industrial decline, economic decline, Right,
(15:55):
I want to think about these cases as being connected
up to that. All Right, So some people will have heard,
especially now, because there's a podcast about this. There's a
podcast about what gets talked about as the Atlanta child murders.
So that series of cases that happened in which you
had something like twenty plus people who were killed. Most
(16:16):
of them were young boys, but we're also talking about
young men. So between nineteen seventy nine and I think
ninety one, and so that case at the time got
a lot of attention. It's gotten more attention in recent
years because there have been a couple of documentaries and
television shows and also a podcast that was done not
too long ago. And so during that case, James Baldwin
(16:40):
has a book as a sort of a long form
estay called The Evidence of Things Not Seen, And one
of the things he says, he's reflecting on that series
of murders, and he says something like, it's sort of
an act of cowardice to blame all of these murders
on one person. So what those of us who know
something about this case knows that there is someone who
has been incarcerated for that series and murders, Wayne Williams.
(17:02):
He was convicted of killing two of the male victims,
young men victims in that case, but has been suspected
of doing all of the murders. And basically what James
Baldwin is saying is, whether or not one thinks that
Wayne Williams did it, it's an act of cowardice to
try to put this on any one particular person, even
if one person did it, because the fact of the
(17:23):
matter is, what is it that enables Wayne Williams to exist.
What is it in our own society and our own
culture that has allowed for the development of a person
who may or may not be Wayne Williams, whoever it is,
whatever person or people are praying on these victims. And
so part of what he does in evidence of Things
(17:44):
not Seen is he's putting that series of murders into
this larger social and economic context of the moment to say,
there's all kinds of fingers that can be pointed, but
it's not enough to just say, you know, point the
finger at the monster and then say there there, We're done.
And so in my work, I think it's really important
to think about that as one of the sort of
(18:06):
grounding elements of the work that I do. I'm not
interested in just pointing the finger at a person so
much as I am, and it's larger context. That sounds
incredibly spot on. Thank you for that. More from my
conversation with Dr Williamson right after the break. So, as
(18:30):
you think about the ways that the stories are told,
what kinds of language are you kind of finding that's
used for victims And does some of this overlap with
the ways that, like black people aren't afforded innocent. Oh,
that's a good question. You know, this question of language
has been one that I've had to deal with and
think through quite a bit, and I'm still wrestling with.
(18:51):
There's still language that I think will evolve. Even in
the work that I'm doing currently, I have to constantly
think about this. One reason is a lot of the
case that I'm looking at happened with them saying seventies
and eighties and that kind of thing. There's often a
lot of talk of prostitutes, sometimes without any names being
attached to who they were, and I thought a lot
(19:12):
about how to deal with that. So the work that
I do in my books canalyzed my name. And that
last chapter is called in the Life because I found
in the Life to be a term that was more
useful for talking about the people who I was talking about.
So in the Life is a term that gets used
in several different contexts, so it gets it gets used
(19:33):
by black queer folks, for instance, but it also gets
used in the context of these underground economies people who
are involved in sex work. Was sometimes talking about being
in the life, and I found that to be a
more useful way of talking about the people I talked
about so I often will talk about them as being
in the life or I talked about them as being
involved in prostitution, not sort of using them now now
(19:56):
as a descriptor. They are prostitutes, right and eve in
the language of sex work, for instance, can become become difficult.
So one of the families that I talked to in
the Peoria case, two of the daughters of Brenda Irving,
who was the last victim in that case, talk about
their frustration with the way their mother was talked about
(20:19):
as a prostitute or even a sex worker, as if
they're like, this was not her job, this was not
what she did as a job. There were various things
that she did for work, including at one point in
time she owned a restaurant. So there are many things
she did for work. But they were like, this is
something she did off to the side. She was still
(20:41):
a mother to us, she was still a grandmother to
our children. She was still very actively involved in our lives,
all right, And so the way that their mother got
reduced to a prostitute was really difficult continued even, you know,
nine years after their murders. Was just when I initially
(21:02):
sat down and talk with them was still something that
I think was really painful, and I think in a
lot of cases you see that that pushing back against that.
The other thing that happened in the Peoria case, and
I think I know has happened in other cases, is
the use of mud shots as the only sort of
visual that you have of who the victims work. So
in the Peoria case, the women I talked to said, listen,
(21:24):
we tried to give the newspapers other kinds of images
that they can use, but they continue to produce and
reproduce these mug shots. So there's a way that the
victims become as consequently become criminal, criminalized. Right, referring to
them only as prostitutes. Even the language of sex worker
can do it, right, even though that's a language that
(21:45):
is we find more acceptable. And I sort of talk
about prostitution, I just want to say this as distinct.
Prostitution is a form of sex work. Sex work is
the sort of umbrella turn and I do talk about
street level prostitution because I want to be clear what
we're talking about. We're not talking about someone who is
an escort or a call girl or who's a dancer.
(22:08):
And I want to be clear about that, because there
are varying forms of vulnerabilities to harm based upon where
one works. So that's why I talk about street level prostitution.
I want to be clear about what we're talking about
because I think there are definitely people within sex work
who will talk about the agency they have as sex workers.
But when we're talking about street level prostitution, we're often
(22:29):
talking about sex for drugs, were often talking about survival sex.
So we're talking about something distinctive. And so the language
of prostitution without some other context, the use of the
mud shots, all of those things do the work even
without saying anything else, of criminalizing victims, and so what happens, well,
it doesn't matter as much what happened to them, right.
(22:50):
The other thing I wanted to mention about my work
and where it emerges from that is related to this
question you've asked about language. So Dr Branford maybe will
remember in two thousand and seven there was this whole
dust up around this radio host don Imus. So this
is after the offender in the Peoria case has been convicted.
(23:11):
I am at the early stages of my graduate work
and just starting to like formulate a project involving what
happened in my hometown. Don Imus, the quote unquote shot job,
comes onto the radio after the Rutgers Tennessee women's basketball
game and says, talking about the Rutgers team, he says,
those girls are some quote nappy headed holes, and that
(23:34):
causes an understandable uproar. He temporarily loses his job, has
to apologize because you know, he uses this term to
refer to these black women on the air. Okay, what
happens as part of that fallout is you hear all
of this, the way that people run to the defense
(23:55):
of the Rutgers women, and I want to be really,
really really clear, there is no problem with defending the
Rutgers women. They deserve to be defended, and what don
Imus said about them was not okay and needed to
have been taken down. I remember I was working on
this project and what I kept sitting with was the
ways that people kept saying, well, you know, it's a
(24:17):
disgrace for him to talk about this women in this
way because they're not nappy headed holes. That's not what
they are. They are college educated, they are successful, they
are athletes, they get the grades, all of these things
that they have done, which none of which I think
was wrong or unfair to say, but in the they're
not that. So, like, I'm sitting there at this moment
(24:39):
where you have all of the people on sort of
cable news and all the different editorials who are speaking
out against don Imus and using this language of in
order to sort of defend the women who are talking
about all the ways in which they are not nappy
headed holes. At the moment that I'm sitting with the
deaths of all of these black women, none of whom
(24:59):
are nappy headed homes. Let's be very clear about that.
But if there is any sort of um population of
women who is gets more closely related to that jacked
up term, it is women who have been involved in
sex work and who have and the pictures that get
used to identify them in the newspaper and the media
(25:19):
is mud shots. So I'm sitting with all of this
death and all of this violence against all of these
black women, including women who come from my own community,
including a woman who I knew personally, who I understand
in terms that have nothing to do with that thing
that don Eima said. Yet this sort of pushed back
against there not that seems to do this other kind
(25:41):
of work. It's not intentional, of course, but it's what
made me start thinking about even the discourse that we use. Right,
even in cases you think about, you know, the young
person gets shot and killed in the neighborhood, Well, they
were an honorable student, and they were. But what if
they were an honorable students, right, does that mean the
you care less about them? Does that mean that we
(26:02):
love them less? And so as a consequence of that
moment and thinking about how we talk about the people
we talk about is also trying to like think about
how to destigmatize. I don't try to spend a lot
of time saying, well, these women weren't actually prostitutes, they
were X, Y and Z. I try to enlargen the picture, right,
(26:22):
I try to give a fuller context for their lives,
because no, none of them were just one thing. But
I also want to destigmatize how we talk about prostitution, sex, word,
drug use, and all of those kinds of things, so
that we understand that they are also part of the
beloved community, or less they should be. And we're really
serious about talking about freedom and liberation and care for
(26:43):
black folks, they must also be part of the beloved community.
And so it's not enough to just say, well, you know,
these women are not that, and so we care about
these women, but the women who are maybe we don't
pay as much as much attention to them. So your
question of language, I think it's deeply, deeply important to
how we think about these cases. It's deeply important to
(27:04):
the work that I'm doing, and I think even in
the ways in which we use language, it's critically important
for us, even on individual basis, to be thinking about
how we use language and their relationship to the people
who ought to be part of our communities. Yes, thank
you so much for that. And I'm wondering if you
have seen a difference in how white victims are covered.
(27:24):
You know, so even white women maybe who are engaging
in sex work and may have concerns with drug abuse
or drug use, is there the same issue of you know,
using their mug shots and talking about them, you know,
specifically as okay prostitution or sex work, or is it
different even then? You know. One of the reasons I'm
(27:45):
hesitating is because I just in terms of like the
research I've done, I have really focused on black women, right,
so there's not a whole lot I can say about
folks who are not black women, because I haven't attended
to that as my But what I will say, just
for now thinking about this and what I've seen, is
that any people who are involved in prostitution, sex work, etcetera,
(28:10):
there's a particular kind of stigma that attaches to them
and to their cases. But what happens when you're talking
about white women is that there's a fuller I mean,
this is the case in so many things, right, there's
a fuller there's a fuller picture of who white women are.
So yes, there are white women who are also involved
in sex work and prostitution who are murdered a matter
(28:31):
of fact, serial murder in general, that is typically who
we're talking about, whether we're talking about black women or
non black women. Were often talking about people who are
involved who have been trafficked and are involved in sex work.
So and again it's the reasons that I talked about before.
They're just much more vulnerable because of where they're located,
the things that they get involved in, etcetera. But when
(28:52):
we're talking about white women, like, yes, there are those
cases that get some coverage, and even then I don't
think it an Ugh coverage. I don't think we attend
carefully enough to the lives of women who are most
vulnerable to serial murder in general, across gender, across race.
But you also have John and a Ramsey, right like,
(29:13):
you also have these other cases, right Like, you have
a richer sort of picture of who white women are
in general, but who white women are as victims as well.
So I think it hits differently and as a consequence,
like the sort of the attention from what I've been
able to tell, the attention that's a paid to serial killers.
(29:35):
A lot of the cases I've seen have involved, say,
you know, white women who are college students, you know
that kind of thing. So so there's a sort of
wider sense of who the victims are. But to be clear,
I think all of these cases need to be attended
to more carefully. And my focus on black women and
girls as victims is not meant to say that these
(29:56):
are the only victims, only to say that there has
been so little attend and play to these victims that
I think it's really important for that to be the
focus of what I do. More from my conversation with
Dr Williamson right after the break, Dr Williamson. You have
(30:23):
talked about community quite a bit throughout this interview, and
I just wanted to kind of go back to that
and talk about one, like the personal impact this has
had on you as a researcher, given that you know
you were tied and when you knew one of the victims.
But also you talked about like how this has a
ripple effect in the community because a lot of times
the community is really involved in like figuring out who
(30:45):
did it. In the families that are left to grieve,
you know, like are they even afforded any space to
grieve in all of this. Part of the reason I'm
so invested in this project is because of how essential,
how essential community is. And you know, part of what
these cases have shown me is that it really calls
(31:06):
out the lie that black folks don't care about other
forms of harm other than police violence. Right Like, anytime
there's another police killing, it's like, we're mad about this,
but what about you know, what's happening in black communities.
And the fact of the matter is Black communities have
always cared about to multiple things. You have always been
(31:28):
concerned about forms of violence that happened within their communities
and that is absolutely the case here as well, So
to speak to the question about the personal impact, this
is not what I thought years later I would be doing.
I went to grad school at a moment when like
reality TV was really on the rise. I wanted to
(31:49):
write about like black reality television, and actually I do
write about reality television a little bit, but this became
the work for me. This became the really some part
of the work that I do, because attending to the
case of those nine black women who were killed in
my hometown meant attending to my hometown. So when I
(32:11):
was in grad school, one of my professors was someone
some folks will know, this really dynamic, amazing scholar named
Robin Kelly was my professor who was a historian, and
one of the things he said to me I'll never
ever forget him saying as I started working on this project,
was you know, what are the things that you're never
supposed to know about Peoria? What are the things that
as a consequence of your being there, things that are
(32:33):
sort of hidden from you from you? And so what
it meant for me to talk about these women meant
talking about the place I come from, a place that
I honestly I hadn't really seriously thought about. You know,
I'm from one of these cities. It's like, there's not
a whole lot going on there. It's been named multiple
times as like one of the worst cities for Black American.
(32:55):
There are all kinds of disparities of different forms, and
so when I went away to college, it was like,
let me go and be gone. And it took this
happening for me to really start to understand my city,
more understand where I come from, and then reconnect to
the really deep passionate love I have for that place
(33:17):
and those people, because it forced me to go back
and attend to all of the conditions of life that
were happening there. Why is it that most of these
women who are victims come from the same side of town,
the you know, the black side of town and southside
where I come from. Why have all of us been
touched in some way by poverty? Why have all of
(33:39):
us been touched in some way by quote unquote failing schools.
Why have all of us been touched in some way
by over policing and under policing. You know, what are
the sort of commonalities there? What makes the differences in
our lives, how are our lives shaped? And so it
(34:00):
also meant going back and talking to people from my
hometown and getting a different feel for what it means
to be there. There's different ways on what's doing. Research
on your own community can be tricky, but it has
also given me such a deep and abiding sense of
care because I've been able to see the kinds of
connections are the ways that communities come together in the
(34:20):
aftermath of cases like this. But but but also all
of the sort of complex things that happened, because it's
all not you know, we all come together where a
unified front. No, no, there's all kinds of fissures that
also happened. There are people who are frustrated because you
know X person stood in as the expert, but they
really weren't around when things were happening, or certain families
(34:43):
got to stand in and have a voice and other
families did not. There are still lots of ways in
which the communities are complex and for all as well.
But that is part of telling a more complete story
of a place, which is part of what I'm trying
to do through this work. And so the other part
to the other piece of your question about community that
I also want to mention is that there are various
(35:06):
groups that have come together, some of them very unofficial.
So one or two groups came together in the aftermath
that would happen in my hometown. I'm not sure if
any of them ever had official titles, but in some
places they did have titles. So in the case of
Lonnie David Franklin, who the person who gets named the
Graham Sleeper, who might be the case that more people
(35:27):
are familiar with. There was a group called Black Coalist
and Finding Back Serial Murders, which are started by the
activists and radio host Marcot Prescott and Los Angeles and
emerged as those murders were happening within the eighties, but
continues to exist today. And when Lonnie Franklin came to
police attention and ended up being convicted in they did
(35:51):
a lot of advocacy um around that case, and I
was able to go out during one of the actions
that they had and be part of just trying to
raise attention. And even all these years later, as you're
talking about people who were largely killed, most of them
were killed in the nineteen eighties, there's still so much
healing that needs to occur, and so the kinds of
(36:13):
actions that they've been involved in our work that they've
been involved in in terms of thinking about memorialization and
healing that that organization has done. And there are other
kinds of organizations like that. And one of the organizations
that I really want to talk about is the Comedy
he River Collective is an organization that was founded in
Boston and they wrote this statement which has been at
(36:35):
this point is known as basically the Black Feminist Manifesto.
UM that's largely what they're known for is writing that
Black Feminist statement. But there was a series of murders
at the beginning of nineteen seventy nine. Twelve black women
and one white women were murdered, mainly in the Roxbury
and Dorchester areas of Boston in the first five months
of nineteen seventy nine, and Comedy River Collective was one
(36:58):
of a number of organizations that did an extensive amount
of advocacy around those murders. And one of the really
critical things for me that came out of that work
is that they refused to make those murders just be
a consequence of say racial harm. So one of the
ways that it was being talked about initially was you
(37:20):
had community leaders who were talking about this sort of
as as a racial crime, and now it seems bananas
that we would think about it in that kind of way.
But Community River Collective was like, oh, no, no, no,
this is not just about race. We must understand that
this is also about gender and that these intersecting things
and we have to talk about them as related. And
one of the things that they say they put together
(37:41):
this pamphlet in order to get out information about what
was happening in the cases, but also information about how
women could be safer, and then information about how they
talked about that series and murders being a thread in
the fabric of violence against women, which is to say,
this is not a one off case, which is what
some of law enforcement was saying. They were like, listen,
(38:03):
these women are being killed by people they know this
is what happens in black communities. Would you expect us
to do? And they were like, no, what's happening to
these women in Boston is a threat in the fabric
of violence against women, which is to say, so. Then
in that pamphlet they give all of these statistics about
domestic violence rates, for instance, and other forms of harm,
to say, if we're gonna talk about harm against women,
(38:26):
we have to think about how this is also an
extension of those kinds of harm. That is to say, one,
this is an intersectional issue. This is not just race,
but it's race and its gender, and its class and
and and and we have to think about these things
that's related, but also to think about this as connected
to other forms of harm, other forms of violence, and
(38:48):
how the work that we're going to do as a
community and as an organization is to say that we
are committed to uplifting our entire community, and thinking about
this slate of murders that has happened here means that
we have to think about all of these things together.
And that's critically important, and that's become really important to
my work. And so I wanted to shout out Compay
(39:08):
River Collective because the work that they did in nineteen
seventy nine continues to be instrumental on how I think
about my own work in the current moment. Thank you
for that. I wonder if there are any other resources
that you'd like to share that might be helpful for
people wanting to kind of learn more about this kind
of work or that have been helpful for you. So
(39:28):
I mentioned James Baldwins The Evidence of Things Not Seeing.
It's about the Atlanta case, but it also I think
the way that he narrates what happened in Atlanta it's
critically important for how we might think about these cases
in a deeper context. Another really important text to come
out of what happened in Atlanta is Tony Kate Bambara's
(39:49):
novel Those Bones Are Not My Child, Tony k. Bambar's
Black woman writer. This is like her magnum opens and
it's a novel, but it's a novel that's based in
reality to and I think is another way of getting
a picture. I don't think there's any other text I've
read that better gets at the kinds of trauma, the
(40:11):
kind of hurt, the kind of fear and terror that
occurs in a community when something like this is happening.
All right, So I think of that as a resource
and I go to something like a novel in literature
because one of the questions I often get asked, how
I do this work? How I sustained myself through this work?
And I have found literature touches me and speaks to
(40:32):
me in a particular kind of way. And there's also
an essay that Audrey Lord wrote. Audrey Lord was involved
in some of the sort of commemorative events in Boston
in that case that I was talking about earlier that
the Comedy River Collective was involved in, and she wrote
this long form poem, caught Me a corral for Black
women voices. I've recently written about my own sort of
(40:54):
coming to that poem. It's a brutal poem, like it's
really getting at the sort of visceral, a painful way
effect of these cases on black women and black communities.
But at the same time, it was a place where
I saw somebody putting into language what it feels like
(41:14):
to do this work, what it feels like to hear
these stories of the really brutal ways that black women
and girls are violated and come to harm. That is
something that I have found has been a sort of
useful and useful text for me to engage with. There's
a podcast called Through the Cracks. I'm really sorry I
(41:36):
can't remember right at this moment the name of the
It's a black woman who was the host of that podcast.
Very often podcasts that engage with these kinds of cases
aren't by black people, and so I think this was
an important for that reason. And so it tells the
story of this one young girl who went missing in
(41:57):
I believe the DC area. And it is not a
resource that's exactly about what I do. Part of the
issues is there's not a lot of resources that's about
what I do. But it's also a way of understanding
how people can narrate these kinds of stories. And I
think one of the things that podcast does well it
gets at telling a sort of larger narrative of what
(42:17):
happens how a young black girl sensibly comes to harm
in the way that she does. So those are some
of the things that I attend to on my work.
Thank you. Will definitely make sure to share those with
the audience. So where can we stay connected to you?
What is your website as well as any social media
handles you'd like to share. I am not a great
social media person. I'm working on it. Hopefully i'll do
(42:41):
better in the futures. However, the website Black mid West
Initiative is where you can find some of the things
that I do. I'm really interested in the collective work
and so the Black mid West Initiative. You can find
them at the Black mid West dot com. It's me
and a bunch of other people who are invested in
telling these underreported, understudy car the stories and narratives, so
(43:01):
you can also see some work there. I would also
like to say if there are people listening to this
who have been touched by these kinds of cases, who
have a story to tell about being a family member
or a community member who has been involved in a
serial murder case or know something about these serial murder cases.
I am definitely looking for people to talk to. I
(43:23):
want to hear your story, so I do hope people
will reach out. I can leave my work email address
so people can reach me that way. But I definitely
know that there are many many more stories out there
to be told, and I would love to be able
to be part of telling those stories. And if anybody
wants to email us at podcasts at Therapy for Black
Girls dot com if you want to be connected to
Dr Williams and we can definitely what would those to you?
(43:45):
Please do perfect well. Thank you so much for spending
some time with us today, Dr Williamson. I really appreciate it.
I really appreciate being here, and I really appreciate you
for shining a light on these cases. It's so important. Absolutely,
thank you. I'm so glad that Dr Williamson was able
to share her expertise with us today. To learn more
about her and her work, or to check out the
(44:07):
resources that she shared, be sure to visit the show
notes at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash session
to and don't forget to text two of your girls
and tell them to check out the episode as well.
If you're looking for a therapist in your area, be
sure to check out our therapist directory at Therapy for
Black Girls dot com slash directory. And if you want
(44:28):
to continue digging into this topic or just be in
community with other sisters, come on over and join us
in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the
Internet design just for black women. You can join us
at community dot Therapy for Black Girls dot com. Thank
you all so much for joining me again this week.
I look forward to continue in this conversation with you
(44:48):
all real soon. Take good care,
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