We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

The Chicago City Council authorized the payment of reparations, along with a formal city apology, to victims of Jon Burge, a police captain who subjected hundreds of Black people in his custody to gruesome tortures over a period of many years. Chicago was the first city to endorse such a motion, but it came after a long period of silence from the city’s leadership and judicial system. There were organizers at that time who helped lay the groundwork for the eventual victory, even if change came about very gradually. Kaba shares that she helped to organize events where survivors spoke about their experiences, and while these harrowing accounts can be very distressing, it opens up opportunities for “incredible kindness, selflessness, and compassion” to express itself (108). By keeping these memories alive and eventually receiving some measure of justice, the city of Chicago won a small but noteworthy victory.

Collective organizing is the only way to bring about the eventual abolition of the carceral state. This abolition can begin with more moderate measures like bail reform and easing the process of release from prison, because freeing individuals is a critical first step in ultimately discrediting the very concept of imprisonment. It is important that reforms do not inadvertently reproduce the underlying structures of violence and state control that the reforms seek to curb.

According to Kaba, defense campaigns that focus on the injustice of a particular case must make that case “emblematic of the conditions faced by thousands or millions who should also be free” (111). When done correctly, these campaigns allow many people to connect around a tangible cause, and one person’s example can come to represent the brutalities of the overall system. Kaba notes that many such cases involve Black women, who are often treated as criminals in their attempts to defend themselves. “Women and gender nonconforming people of color seem, under the law and in popular consciousness, to have no selves to defend” (113). In other cases, women are punished for refusing to play the part assigned to them within the criminal justice narrative, such as the perfect victim or the vengeful accuser.

Kaba cites the example a woman named Joan Little, who in 1974 killed a prison guard who was trying to rape her, only for Little to be charged with first-degree murder. Her acquittal, the first of its kind for a Black woman, was “a testament to Black women’s resistance to subjugation and sexual predation” (114). The movement around this case, and the subsequent movements it has inspired, has helped show how the focus should be on the primary perpetrator of violence, not a defender against violence.

For many feminists, fighting sexual violence is closely tied with efforts to abolish the carceral state, where sexual abuse of female prisoners is rampant. There is an urgent need to inform the public regarding these cases and how they complicate simple narratives of victims and perpetrators. These cases also draw attention to the role of the state in perpetuating violence, to the racial and gendered aspects to incarceration, to the fact that marginalized people in particular need to assert the right to self-defense, and to the fact that solutions must lie outside the carceral model. Victims of the prison system have gained strength from learning each other’s stories, and together they make a powerful example to the public at large.

Kaba writes about the case of Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old Black Chicagoan who was shot in the head by a police officer. Kaba observes that Boyd’s case did not receive as much attention as prominent male victims of police violence. When Boyd’s killer was acquitted and returned to the police, there was minimal public outcry.

Nevertheless, Kaba states that complaints about the lack of attention also ignore the intense efforts of the activists who did work on her case, even if they were relatively few in number. After the officer, Dante Servin, was acquitted, activists from various ideological groups came together in support of Black women and girls. They are focusing their efforts on having Servin fired, not because it will end structural disparities, but because it is a way to demonstrate the potency of community action and also because it is one of the rare ways to organize around gender and race at the same time.

In an amendment to the original essay, written a year later in March 2016, Kaba notes that justice still has not been served, that Servin has not been held accountable for murdering an unarmed woman with an unregistered firearm. There has been intense and persistent activism in Chicago, and so even in death, Rekia “has a community of thousands fighting against [the] violence in her name and memory” (126).

Kaba addresses activists who worked to prevent the police from building a training facility on the West Side of Chicago. The City Council ultimately approved it, and so Kaba wishes to remind them that “organizing is mostly about defeats” (127). While they did not get the result they wanted, she notes that their actions made the proposal a worldwide issue, exhibiting a model of how to center young people of color in a protest movement. They helped spread the message regarding the inherent violence of policing, and exposed the defenders of the status quo as “uninformed, corrupt, and craven” (128). They proved that their community will not sit back and do nothing when their government discovers new means of oppressing them, and, according to Kaba, that in and of itself is a cause for celebration.