Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, writer, and organizer. She is best known for her 2021 memoir Becoming Abolitionists, which received positive reviews from Boston Review , PEN America , Kirkus , [1] The Guardian , [2] and others.
Purnell was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. [3] She received her bachelor's degree from University of Missouri-Kansas City. [4]
She became politically active in college after the killing of Trayvon Martin, and at the time advocated for police reform. [5] She also organized during the Ferguson Uprising after the death of Michael Brown. [5] Purnell began to study writers such as Rachel Herzing and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who argue for police abolition. [6] [5] She received her jurisprudence degree from Harvard Law School. [7]
Purnell is a human rights lawyer and writer. [8] She advocates for defunding the police to invest in basic services thought to be the root of crime, such as housing and healthcare. [4] She co-authored the policy proposal #8ToAbolition. [9] [10]
She published her debut book, a memoir called Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom under Astra House in October 2021. [3] She was inspired to write the book after widespread conversation related to prison abolition resulted from the George Floyd protests. [3] The book was selected as a Best Book of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews . [11] Purnell is a columnist for The Guardian, and her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times , Teen Vogue , Harper's Bazaar , Cosmopolitan , and In These Times . [12] Purnell is an editor at Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture. [13]
During the coronavirus pandemic, Purnell co-created the COVID19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability. The Project racks police arrests and harassment through public health orders. [12]
Purnell was recognized for her work in 2017 with a National Lawyers Guild Massachusetts Chapter student award. She has also been awarded a fellowship from the Skadden Foundation. [14]
In 2022, the Marguerite Casey Foundation chose Purnell as a Freedom Scholar. [13]
Purnell has two children. [3]
The Liberator (1831–1865) was a weekly abolitionist newspaper, printed and published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison and, through 1839, by Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves ("immediatism"). It also promoted women's rights, an issue that split the American abolitionist movement. Despite its modest circulation of 3,000, it had prominent and influential readers, including all the abolitionist leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, Beriah Green, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Alfred Niger. It frequently printed or reprinted letters, reports, sermons, and news stories relating to American slavery, becoming a sort of community bulletin board for the new abolitionist movement that Garrison helped foster.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Ella Summer Purnell is an English actress. She began her career as a child actress in West End theatre and films such as Never Let Me Go (2010), Intruders (2011), and Maleficent (2014). Her other films include Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Churchill (2017), and Army of the Dead (2021).
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Julia Ward Williams Garnet was an American abolitionist who was active in Massachusetts and New York.
Lois E. Horton was an American historian, specializing in African American history. She co-authored numerous foundational studies of nineteenth-century African American history and abolitionism.
Angie Thomas is an American young adult author, best known for writing The Hate U Give (2017). Her second young adult novel, On the Come Up, was released on February 25, 2019.
The history of African Americans or Black Philadelphians in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has been documented in various sources. People of African descent are currently the largest ethnic group in Philadelphia. Estimates in 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau documented the total number of people living in Philadelphia who identified as Black or African American at 644,287, or 42.2% of the city's total population.
Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police. She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021). The Mariame Kaba Papers are held by the Chicago Public Library Special Collections.
All American Boys, published in 2015 by Atheneum, is a young adult novel written by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. The book tells the story of two teenage boys, Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins, as they handle racism and police brutality in their community. The novel has gained attention in recent years, becoming the 26th most banned book of 2022, due to its inclusion of anti-police messages, alcohol, drug usage, and profanity.
The police abolition movement is a political movement, mostly active in the United States, that advocates replacing policing with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and thus believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.
In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.
8 to Abolition is a police and prison abolition resource created during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.
Bettina L. Love is an American author and academic. She is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. According to Love, abolitionist teaching refers to restoring humanity for children in schools. Love also advocates eliminating standardized testing.
The End of Policing is a 2017 book by the American sociologist Alex S. Vitale. In it, Vitale argues for the eventual abolition of the police, to be replaced variously by decriminalization or with non-law enforcement approaches, depending on the crime. Vitale argues that the function of police is to uphold inequalities of class, gender, race, or sexuality.
Sandy Hudson is a Jamaican-Canadian political activist, writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement presence in Canada.
We Are Water Protectors is a 2020 picture book written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade. Written in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the book tells the story of an Ojibwe girl who fights against an oil pipeline in an effort to protect the water supply of her people. It was published by Roaring Brook Press on March 17, 2020. The book was well received. Critics praised its message of environmental justice, its depiction of diversity, and the watercolor illustrations, for which Goade won the 2021 Caldecott Medal, becoming the first Indigenous recipient of the award. The book also received the 2021 Jane Addams Children's Book Award winner in the Books for Younger Children category.
The police abolition movement gained momentum in the U.S. city of Minneapolis during protests of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and culminated in the failed Question 2 ballot measure in 2021 to replace the city's police department with a public safety department. The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council. It required the support of 51 percent of voters in order to pass. In the Minneapolis municipal election held on November 2, 2021, the measure failed with 43.8 percent voting for it and 56.2 percent voting against it.
Abolitionist teaching, also known as abolitionist pedagogy, is a set of practices and approaches to teaching that emphasize abolishing educational practices considered by its proponents to be inherently problematic and oppressive. The term was coined by education professor and critical theorist Bettina Love.
Almost Perfect is a young adult novel by Brian Katcher, published October 13, 2009 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers.