Searching for Jane Crow

A Ms. Magazine "Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026" Pick

Gives voice to the Black women whose lives were devastated by the carceral system and sheds powerful light on its slavery-based roots to transform how we think about mass incarceration

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 LeFlouria has written a brilliant and original book. She has dared to courageously uncover the past and tell the truth about this nation’s cruel history of incarcerating Black women, revealing that mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs but with slavery. Searching for Jane Crow makes us grapple with the fact that little has changed through the centuries. This book is must-read.”
—Susan Burton, author of the NAACP Image Award-winner Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“By searching for Jane Crow, Talitha LeFlouria finds the deep roots of an American ‘prison nation,’ one that still daily condemns Black women to fates that should shock the conscience. Like the early abolitionists who confronted the public with stories about American slavery as it was, LeFlouria urges us to look, without flinching, at incarcerations then and now, side by side. The reader who does so will be changed.”
—W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America

“Searching for Jane Crow is an eloquent, long-overdue corrective to the many histories of mass incarceration in America that relegate Black women to the margins. If you yearn to understand how our penal system became what it is today and where Black women fit in that story, this is the book for you.”
—Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American SouthTalitha 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.