Loyalty can't wait to host Derecka Purnell and Clint Smith for Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice or you can order the book on our website to be added to the event's registration list. Donations will go to Taller Salud in Puerto Rico. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

"An informed, provocative, astute consideration of salvific alternatives to contemporary policing and imprisonment." 
— Starred Review, Kirkus

"Part memoir, part political and social commentary, the St. Louis native’s genre-bending book demonstrates her road to adopting abolitionist politics and makes the argument for why the new abolitionism — the push to end prisons and policing in the United States — ought to be the future of the country."
— Kovie Biakolo, Essence

For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.

In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.

Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. 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.

Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. 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.

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer, writer, organizer, and author of forthcoming Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework.  She is from St. Louis and lives between the DMV and New York City. She is a currently a columnist at The Guardian, a Margaret Burroughs Fellow for the Social Justice Initiative’s Portal Project at the University of Illinois Chicago, and the Scholar-in-Residence with the Institute for a Just Society at Columbia Law School.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent and the New York Times Bestseller work of nonfiction How the Word Is Passed. The poetry collection won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Derecka Purnell and Clint Smith for BECOMING ABOLITIONISTS