It’s highly unlikely that when Eliza was sent to work at the saw mill camp in 1889 she was aware that Southern lawmakers a were “institutionalizing gendered racial terror as a technology of white supremacist control.” This “institutionalization” was a way of exploiting gendered forms of labor to help create the “New South” following the destruction wrought by the Civil War. Reproductive bodies have literally become the state’s business. And while this idealism is certainly compelling, it’s also far from the lived reality that untold numbers of predominantly Black and Brown women have experienced since the moment the photo of Eliza Cobb was taken.* Indeed, throughout the twentieth century pregnancy, maternal health, and reproduction have become increasingly intertwined with state policies that are dictated not by public health and social welfare, but instead by power, violence, and the criminalization of non-normative pregnancies and families. Most people tend to think of pregnancy and motherhood as special, sacred even. Courtesy of the Georgia Archives, Morrow, Georgia.

Photograph of Eliza Cobb printed in No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016), 19. Sadly, these crossings would not end at the turn of the twentieth century, but instead have continued to haunt the evolution of the American prison system and state-led violence against maternal health and reproduction. After working at the sawmill camp for a few years, Eliza was transferred to Milledgeville State Prison Farm in Georgia where she, along with hundreds of other imprisoned Black women, once again experienced the horrifying intersection between pregnancy, race, violence, and criminalization. At the age of twenty-two Eliza was raped, became pregnant, and later that year was arrested by police and sentenced to work at the Du Bois sawmill camp on the unproven charge of infanticide. Her name was Eliza Cobb, and even though she was born at the onset of emancipation in 1866 her life was composed of very little that resembled anything close to freedom.

Just mercy annotations