Resisting the Reform-to-Prison Pipeline: Frances Joseph-Gaudet’s Redemptive Vision for Abolitionist Teaching in Jim Crow New Orleans

• In Event: (Re)membering Trans-Atlantic Creole Pedagogies: Black Fugitive Teachers From the New Orleans Archives

Abstract

As a social worker, prison abolitionist, and missionary, Frances Joseph-Gaudet spent many years in adult prisons ministering to New Orleans’ most discarded, forgotten, and forsaken. She was fueled with religious fervor that they would experience a freedom in Christ that the penal system and society effectively denied. As a teacher, she taught at the Boys’ House of Refuge, a state-run reformatory established for juvenile delinquents. Mrs. Joseph-Gaudet soon became acutely aware of the subjective nature of criminal law, the failure of reforms, and its systemic willingness and tendency to incarcerate Black youth. The House of Refuge, in deplorable condition and considered a “stain upon the character of the city… more suitable for cattle than humans" (Moran, 1971, p. 58), closed after four years. The boys were then indentured to landholders in nearby parishes. In her 1913 memoir, He Leadeth Me, Joseph-Gaudet admonished the system of convict leasing that effectively placed Black people into a brutal labor system that eerily mirrored that of slavery. She wrote, “I would to God every State in the Union would abolish the leasing of its convicts to contractors. No more diabolical plan was ever hatched to punish the erring citizens” (p. 50).
Joseph-Gaudet’s direct engagement with the prison and school systems persisted. She often appeared in court to advocate for defendants who had no representation in an effort to protect them against the state’s violation of their humanity, dignity, and civil rights. Whenever a child was arrested for vagrancy or a petty misdemeanor, instead of being sent to a reformatory, which Joseph-Gaudet considered “resting places on the road to state prison” (p. 136), she brought them to her home. Her radical work continued and in 1902, she established the Colored Industrial Home and School, a boarding school, for vulnerable children. She established this school as an intervention and site of fugitive teaching (Givens, 2021) for youth that dominant institutions effectively rejected and criminalized. Frances Joseph-Gaudet’s lifelong dedication and spiritual commitment to prison abolition and education earned the respect of prison officials, city and state authorities, and the Episcopal Church, where she is honored as a saint.
This paper utilizes digital archival research to highlight the ways in which Joseph-Gaudet created new ways of affirming her humanity, and those with whom she worked, through engaging spiritual activism as central to prison abolitionist work. I address how Black women abolitionists actively participated in the fight to abolish slavery and its pervasive afterlives (Hartman, 2007) and simultaneously, engaged in the struggle for educational equity, bolstered by fierce religious convictions. Black women abolitionist teachers, like Frances Joseph-Gaudet, espoused a liberatory notion of education and regarded it as having the power to construct a new national geography, reshape civil society and realize a true abolition democracy (Davis, 2011) in America. They also injected their work with deeper meaning—namely, that freedom was not only a civil and human right, but a moral, spiritual, God given right. Joseph-Gaudet’s contributions to both education and prison abolition highlight the long, entangled history of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Author

• Amber Neal-Stanley, Purdue University