December 2

Abolitionist Profile

Mariame Kaba was born in 1971 and raised in New York City, a child of immigrant parents from the Ivory Coast and Guinea.  She is a contemporary abolitionist, advocating for collective liberation and the end of the prison industrial complex.  As a child, she was encouraged by her parents to follow her empathetic instincts to be a part of relieving the suffering of others who also rooted her in black radical organizing history. By the time she was 15, she was already involved in protests around racial violence that were happening in her neighborhood.  In 1995 she moved to Chicago where her activism included cofounding We Charge Genocide, an inter-generational effort which documented police brutality and violence in Chicago that sent youth organizers to Geneva, Switzerland to present their report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture.  In 2009 she founded Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration and currently organizes with Survived and Punished, an abolitionist organization that seeks to end incarceration for victims of intimate partner violence who defend themselves. Her books, We Do This Til We Free Us and Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care co-written with Kelly Hayes, are widely considered essential primers for activists, advocates and organizers in the contemporary abolition movement to end the enslaving paradigms of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex.

Prayer

With movements toward freedom, come Emmanuel.
In costly solidarity, come Emmanuel.
With transformative vision, come Emmanuel.
In the daily practice of abolition, come Emmanuel. Amen.