I believe that we get to decide what that transition looks like, so I had to resist the temptation of writing, “We should start by doing this, and then we should do this, and then we should do this.” Lyra Walsh Fuchs: What, if anything, has surprised you about the conversations you’ve been having about the book? Is there anything you wish that you included that you didn’t?ĭerecka Purnell: I have all these very specific ideas about what a transition could look like, and I went back and forth about including them, because I didn’t want the book to be read as “This is what we need to do to build an abolitionist world.” I really do believe in organizing collectively.

Her book-part memoir, part essay, and part argument-is an organizing tool itself, inviting in skeptics and offering a bridge to committed activists in other movements. When we spoke, she was at Howard University to support the student sit-in against poor housing conditions. She monitored police with the National Lawyers Guild and the Black Movement-Law Project in Baltimore during the protests after Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015 and has joined uprising crowds everywhere from Ferguson to Capetown. Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell charts how she went from calling 911 “for almost everything” to fighting for the end of prisons and police. In this edition, Lyra Walsh Fuchs talks to Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Astra House).

Lyra Walsh Fuchs ▪ November 17, 2021Ī Black Lives Matter rally outside LAPD Headquarters in Los Angeles on (Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)īooked is a series of interviews about new books. An interview with Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists, about what makes communities unsafe-and how she went from calling 911 to fighting for abolition.

Becoming an abolitionist