The Life and Tragic Death of Eleanor Rush

More than 70 years ago, Eleanor Rush wouldn’t stop screaming. Officials at the Women’s Prison, where she was serving a six-month sentence, put her in a restraining belt, using painful mechanical cuffs known as “iron claws” on her wrists and gagging her with towels. 

She was later found dead from a crushed spine caused by a dislocated neck. 

Her death sparked a nearly four-hour rebellion among 350 Black and white inmates, the first major protest at the all-women’s prison established in the 1930s. State and federal probes followed, including one called by the state coroner. In September 1954, a nearly all-white jury declined to hold state prison officials accountable and blamed Rush for her own death, calling her “incorrigible.” 

Her mother sued state officials and won $3,000. And in response to Rush’s death, state prison officials permanently banned the practice of gagging. 

Rush was an example of the unrelenting sexist and racist treatment thousands of Black women endured in prisons in North Carolina and across the country in the 1950s. But over the years, her name has been largely forgotten. The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board hopes to change that. 

The national board, a nonpartisan panel of private citizens appointed by the president, is empowered to release records of federal investigations into unresolved cases from the Civil Rights era. Those cases cover the period between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1979, and deal with incidents of anti-Black violence. Since October 2024, the board has released records in 44 cases, including files on Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black Chicago boy abducted and lynched in Mississippi during the summer of 1955. 

In January, the board released 63 pages of federal records stemming from the FBI’s investigation into the Rush case, including newspaper clippings, correspondence, and case files. 

Congress created the board through legislation it passed in late 2018, which President Donald Trump signed into law in early 2019. The board expires in 2027, but pending legislation in Congress would extend its work for another four years. 

The board has released records in three North Carolina cases, including Rush. 

Margaret Burnham, the board’s former chair, is also the founder of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law. That project has the most comprehensive archive of anti-Black killings in the country, including Rush. 

Her story is important for a number of reasons, Burnham said. When most people think of the Civil Rights movement, they think of the “marches, the civil disobedience, the ‘good trouble,’” Burnham said.

“But the flame of protest was also lit in prisons and jails, where there were no TV cameras,” she said. “We can’t grasp the fuller legacy of the Movement without taking on the Eleanor Rushes, for she and all the women who protested her death were making larger claims about Black humanity and women’s rights.”

‘She Was My Baby’

Search newspaper clippings and you won’t find an image of Eleanor Rush. In fact, you won’t find much about her life before prison. 

But you will find clues. 

Rush was born on July 4, 1936, in Stanly County. According to her death certificate, her parents were Waddell Rush and Geneva Winchester (her mother would later change her last name to Gould after she married another man). 

Eleanor dropped out of school and worked as a domestic servant. She spent most of her life with her mother, but at times lived with her grandmother and a man named Jessie Clark, her father’s cousin. Waddell Rush died before Eleanor reached her teenage years. 

At a hearing involving her lawsuit, Gould said Eleanor told her she had married but there don’t seem to be any records of the marriage. She never had children. 

Rush reportedly told an interviewer at the prison that she was dependent on welfare, lacked food and clothing, and was ashamed of being poor, according to an August 23, 1954 Raleigh News & Observer article. Rush also said Gould’s new husband made passes at her. 

Rush had her first brush with the law at 16, charged with fornication and adultery, according to the article. She was jailed, but it is not clear for how long. 

In September 1953, 17-year-old Rush was sent for the first time to Women’s Prison on a conviction of public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. She was sentenced to six months.

Within a week, prison officials transported her to Caledonia Prison Farm in Halifax County, which had been built on a former slave plantation. The prison farm didn’t have a good reputation. A Black prisoner lost both legs after being locked in one of the “heatless shacks,” according to an August 28, 1954 article in the New Journal & Guide, a Black weekly in Norfolk, Virginia. 

These prison farms were more akin to slave plantations, said Robert Chase, associate history professor at Stony Brook University and author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America. And at these prison farms, Black women were subjected to hard labor and severe punishment, he said. 

While at Caledonia, Rush allegedly tried to kill a prison matron who supervised female prisoners. 

In December 1953, she was taken to the state psychiatric hospital in Goldsboro for evaluation. Hospital officials there concluded “hers was not a mental but a disciplinary problem.” In February 1954, she was back at Women’s Prison in Raleigh, where she served out the rest of her sentence. Two months later, though, she returned to serve another six-month sentence for forcible trespassing. 

Gould testified that when she last saw her daughter alive before her second stint at Women’s Prison, she was healthy. “She was my baby and last child,” she said. 

The Isolation Ward

Women’s Prison was the only all-female correctional facility in the state, located on 30 acres in Raleigh. Today, the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women is on that same site on Bragg Street, with the capacity to house 1,776 women. A second, smaller facility for women is in Buncombe County. 

As a Black woman, Rush faced the brutal double whammy of racism and sexism in the Jim Crow era. Like other Southern states, the North Carolina prison system was set up to keep Black people separate, unequal, and oppressed, Chase said. 

And though Black women made up a small portion of the total prison population, they were on the receiving end of the most egregious punishment. Chase said that Rush’s treatment was typical of what Black women experienced in southern prisons. 

Black women also had little to no legal means to protest the conditions or their treatment, he said. They couldn’t file federal lawsuits and had little chance of successfully filing legal challenges in state courts.

A month after Rush started her second sentence, she was placed in the isolation ward for 57 days for what state prison officials said was disruptive behavior, including using profanity, destroying property, and assaulting inmates and prison officers, according to court and FBI records and news articles. She lasted eight days in the general population before state prison officials threw her back in isolation on August 14. 

And on August 20, Rush’s seventh day in solitary confirment, state prison officials alleged that she wouldn’t stop screaming and cursing. 

Mabel Wright, a Black inmate confined to a cell across from Rush, later told authorities that she and Rush were screaming because prison officials had not fed them since at least 7 a.m. that day. 

Rush was in a 7-by-9-foot cell, with a floor mattress, a toilet, and a reinforced window. Prison officials said they gave her sparse furnishings because Rush had previously destroyed property. 

At 9 p.m., Hazel Anderson, the on-duty nurse, called Prison Superintendent Ivan Hinton, who was at home across the street. He arrived at the prison an hour later. Hinton, Anderson, and four guards went to the isolation ward and told Wright and Rush to quiet down. 

Hinton tried to contact the prison physician to see if the doctor could give the women something to sleep, though he later said he never reached the doctor. At the recommendation of Assistant Superintendent Helen Reinhardt, he decided to gag Wright and Rush. 

Hinton, Anderson, and the four guards returned to the isolation ward. Hinton later said two of the guards placed an “iron claw,” or mechanical cuff, on Rush. Hinton put her in a restraining belt and then inserted a towel in her mouth while a guard tied the belt around her back. 

They left and went to Wright’s cell to administer the same punishment. After they finished, they saw that Rush had managed to remove the gag. 

“You ain’t done a goddamn thing to me,” Rush reportedly said, according to a summary by the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. 

They opened Rush’s cell. Hinton asked for a second towel, and while two guards held her arms, a third wedged in two gags, one between her teeth and another on top of her teeth, “just like a bit in a mule’s mouth.” Hinton said later that Rush was “backing up and twisting and shaking her head every way.” The guard who gagged Rush insisted that he never touched Rush’s head. 

At 11:30 p.m., Rush was found unresponsive, her face on the floor and her legs on the mattress, according to news accounts. 

A medical student declared her dead. Her death certificate said she died at midnight on August 21, following an “accident.” The certificate said she “apparently bumped head against [the] wall.” 

Rex Hospital pathologist Rene Hardre did the autopsy and determined that the guards and Hinton had dislocated Rush’s neck while gagging her. He said in the report, and later testified in court, that there were two possibilities: the dislocation of the neck and compression of the spinal cord happened at the same time, or that the spinal cord compression happened soon after. If the dislocation and compression happened at the same time, prison officials would have immediately noticed, he added. 

Regardless, once her spinal cord was crushed, Rush would have quickly gone limp and died, he said. 

One thing was clear, he said. Rush’s fatal injuries were not self-inflicted. 

Inmate Uprising

News of Rush’s death spread quickly within the prison. The morning of August 21, Wright called out to other female inmates, many of whom were playing softball and relaxing outside, that Rush had been “cruelly treated” by prison officials before her death. 

The prison’s 350 inmates—200 Black and 150 white—rebelled. 

At least 30 inmates confronted a prison supervisor demanding answers. The prison matron—apparently Reinhardt, the assistant superintendent—barricaded herself in a building. She told the inmates Rush had a heart attack. She later said at a hearing that she didn’t know that, but said she was merely repeating what she heard from someone else. Reinhardt said she ran into a building and called Hinton. 

Then the uprising began in earnest. 

“The women merged into one large group, yelling and screaming and pressed against the wire fence near the front gate,” News & Observer reporter Jim Rankin wrote. Many of the women shouted, “They killed Eleanor.” 

Guards from the nearby all-male Central Prison arrived and got the inmates into their cell-blocks. Eight women, four Black and four white, were identified as the ringleaders, and they acted as spokespersons when Prisons Director William F. Bailey arrived. 

One of the women, Elease Jackson, had jumped over a back fence and run down three city blocks before prison officials captured her. “They killed my cousin,” she told the director, according to the article. 

Jackson and three other Black inmates were taken to Caledonia Prison Farm. It wasn’t clear what happened to the white women who were also identified as ringleaders. 

As Jackson sat between two guards, waiting to be transported, she said the Woman’s Prison was a “nice place but the people ain’t nice,” according to the News & Observer article. 

A former inmate told the New Journal and Guide, a Black newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, that Rush’s death wasn’t the only reason why inmates rebelled. 

“What those women did out there in the yard and in the cell houses was just their way of showing that they were fed up with the entire mess,” she said. “The girl’s death was just a cap to set off the charges already buried deep in the souls of the inmates.” 

Gagging Banned

Newspaper editorials condemned Rush’s death. While a column in the Asheville Citizen-Times called her a “worthless person,” the writer concluded that “Eleanor did not deserve to die.” 

Less than a month later, the Wake County coroner ordered an investigation into the circumstances of Rush’s death. A jury of five white men, including two former Raleigh mayors and one Black man, was convened. 

Forty-five inmates testified at the hearing. Mabel Wright told the jurors that she saw what happened through a crack under her cell door. She said she saw prison officials gag Rush and then tie her to the mattress. She also claimed she heard a slapping sound. FBI investigators said in a report that it would have been impossible for Wright to see into another isolation cell through the door crack. 

Several inmates testified that they had not heard Rush screaming or making any excessive noise from the isolation ward the night she died, according to hearing transcripts. Some also testified that state prison officials appeared to have moved Rush’s mattress out of her cell and near the boiler room and that they saw blood on it. Others said they didn’t know where the mattress came from, according to a September 9, 1954 article in the Atlanta Daily World. 

Elease Jackson testified she was placed in Rush’s cell hours after Rush had died, and that she saw blood on the floor. 

The jury’s verdict blamed Rush for her death, calling her “incorrigible and very difficult to control.” Rush had died “due to her violent efforts against necessary restraint while they were being applied and in her subsequent struggle to remove them,” they ruled after 40 minutes of deliberation. 

Hinton and the four guards were never criminally charged, but the State Bureau of Investigation launched a probe and found that state prison officials were negligent. 

The FBI also became involved after the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, sent along a Daily Worker article about the case to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The FBI’s Charlotte field office began its investigation on September 23, 1954, interviewing State Prison Superintendent William F. Bailey and the coroner, and reviewing Rush’s prison records and autopsy. 

The FBI then forwarded its report to Julian T. Gaskill, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Gaskill concluded there was no civil rights violation. 

An FBI office memorandum says in pencilled handwriting that the facts of the case “are just as consistent with innocence as with guilt of a civil rights violation.” 

Gould, Rush’s mother, filed legal claims against state prison officials, alleging their negligence led to her daughter’s death. She sought $58,000 in damages. The North Carolina Industrial Commission, which adjudicates claims of negligence against state officials, took up the case. 

In the end, the Industrial Commission awarded Gould $3,000, ruling that Hinton and other state prison officials were negligent and had violated prison regulations by gagging Rush. Deputy Hearing Commissioner Hugh M. Currin wrote that Hinton had “failed to give Eleanor Rush the protection and care required by law.” 

The state appealed, but the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the decision. 

Several months after Rush’s death, state prison leaders changed their policies to explicitly ban the practice of gagging. Hinton resigned the following summer. 

‘Failed at Every Turn’

Rush’s name was splashed across front pages of newspapers around the country in the mid-1950s. The Black press, including Baltimore’s Afro American and Norfolk’s The New Journal & Guide, covered her case extensively. 

Then her name faded from headlines—until recently. Sara Merlo, a North Carolina native, discovered Rush about two years ago while working as an education consultant for Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

Merlo, who is white, became invested in the project after learning more about her own family’s history and entanglement with racism. She learned that her great-grandfather, who had been a justice of the peace in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow, had exonerated another justice of the peace who had murdered a Black man in 1953. 

She looked through the project’s archive, which includes information on more than 50 incidents of anti-Black violence in North Carolina. She narrowed her research to nine cases, one of which was Rush. 

Her case stood out for two reasons—Rush was young and she was a woman. Her death and the aftermath also followed the predictable patterns of Jim Crow violence, particularly in the South, Merlo said. That included the lack of accountability.

In Rush’s case, the state legislature authorized paying state prison officials’ legal bills, Merlo said. A News & Observer article from May 26, 1955, said the General Assembly had initially considered reimbursing Hinton and the four guards $1,500 in legal expenses, but ultimately agreed to only $500. 

Chase, the history professor, said that in the years following Rush’s death, prison rebellions grew as inmates across the country became increasingly frustrated with the conditions. That held true in North Carolina. 

In 1956, 18 of the 450 inmates at Women’s Prison protested their living conditions and the lack of hot food. During the uprising, they freed a fellow inmate, Zora Farrow, from the prison hospital, smashing a glass door and pushing a prison nurse out of the way, according to an article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

Nationally, prison uprisings increased steadily through the late 1960s and early ‘70s, reaching a peak of 48 in 1972, Chase said. Women staged a five-day rebellion at the prison in 1975 over living conditions. With new legal protections, Joan Little, a Black woman, won acquittal that same year for killing a Beaufort County jail guard. She said she stabbed the guard after he tried to rape her. 

Burnham, the former chair of the cold case records review board, said the records on Rush are significant beyond reporting the details of her death. They also show the extent to which people sought to condemn Rush and blame her for her death, as well as the efforts of her fellow inmates and her mother to find a “larger meaning in her life and tragic death.” 

“The records remind us of the multiple vulnerabilities of young Black women,” she said. “We’re left to question what went wrong with a system that failed her at every turn.”