Envisioning a New World Through Abolition Geography

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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February 7, 2023

By Sonali Kolhatkar, YES! Magazine

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is an activist for prison abolition (Amaal Said)

For more than 30 years, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has created scholarship on an idea once considered radical: that society can and should abolish prisons and policing.

Today, with greater attention being paid to how people of color, and Black people in particular, are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system and prison industrial complex, Gilmore’s ideas are being taken seriously.

[…]

Gilmore is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and American studies, and she is the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She co-founded several grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, all of which are actively working to abolish prisons.

[Gilmore] spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about her latest book, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022). The book is based on Gilmore’s numerous abolition-themed lectures and papers spanning several decades.

Read the rest of the article, including Gilmore’s full interview, here.

To explore an exhibit concerning mass incarceration, click here.

Read more Breaking News here.

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