Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell

'Derecka Purnell has one of the most exciting minds of a generation, and Becoming Abolitionists gives us all an excuse to praise her. If you've been curious about the modern abolitionist movement, this book is a must read!' - Mariame Kaba, bestselling author of We Do This Til We Free Us As a member of the 'Trayvon Generation, ' Derecka offers us invaluable insights into how young activists are navigating and challenging current injustices. Beautifully written, the book takes the reader on a personal journey from the Midwest to South Africa with a pit stop in New England. 'Becoming Abolitionists is part memoir & part manifesto for our times. Becoming Abolitionists is essential reading for our times.' - Michelle Alexander, bestselling author of The New Jim Crow 'With deep insight and moral clarity, Purnell shares her compelling journey of political education and personal transformation, inviting us not only to imagine a world without police, but to muster the courage to fight for the more just world we know is possible.

Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place. Here, Purnell invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. In her critically acclaimed first book Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these solutions do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.

Now in paperback and with new material, a 2021 Kirkus Best Book of the year in both Nonfiction and Current Events, the book Naomi Klein called: 'a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation.'įor more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police.

Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell