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

There is a long history of Black people being subjected to disproportionate and especially brutal treatment at the hands of police in the United States. As Kaba and others have pointed out, policing in the US largely began as armed patrols capturing fugitives from slavery, and then as posses designed to terrorize newly emancipated people into acquiescence. During the civil rights movement, police forces often worked hand in glove with terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan to harass and even murder activists and other Black people who violated the strictures of Jim Crow. The most famous uprisings in American cities, such as the Detroit riot of 1967 (memorialized in the 2017 film Detroit) or the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, all stemmed from instances of police brutality that epitomized systemic practices.

But while every modern story has an older parallel, the 2010s marked a significant change in how stories of state-sanctioned violence against Black people shaped public discourse. In 2012, a 17-year-old Black boy named Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when a neighborhood watchman approached him and then shot him to death, claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which permits the use of deadly force when one feels threatened.