ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
"Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night."
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
—"Speech to the Young" by Gwendolyn Brooks
Pictured: The Summer 2024 Finale of Abolition School's Walter Rodney "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" Seminar at the Paul Robeson House & Museum, anchored by Malkia Okech (top left).
Geo Maher emailed me a PDF in March 2023 after a text that essentially said “I’m planning to start this thing called The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction. You want in?” A couple years, a couple cohorts, and a couple hundred participants later, we’ve expanded the leadership team and found out we may just be on to something more powerful than we originally imagined. We now require reinforcements. We needed to dream up the freedom space to transform our humble sincere statement of our offering into an authentic, principled, and evolving conversation aimed at reviving the heart of solidarity across our interconnected movement lives in Philadelphia and beyond. I’m saying, like LL, we needed revolutionary love.
“…the renewal of Abolition Journal represents a means for Abolition School to reinforce the steadfastness of our movement lives-in-the-along and win new audiences to claim responsibility within the long, beautiful struggle to transform the world.”
Inherited from the legacy of the Abolition Collective, we carry forward to Abolition Journal our Abolition School principled commitments of internationalist, intersectional, participatory, and abolitionist praxis to be collaboratively showcased, debated, reinterpreted, and reinvigorated throughout the aesthetics, community, and content of the publication. These stories of sincere experience mixed with radical poetic visions culled from our past, present, and prefigurative futures, the renewal of Abolition Journal represents a means for Abolition School to reinforce the steadfastness of our movement lives-in-the-along and win new audiences to claim responsibility within the long, beautiful struggle to transform the world.
As we seek to expand the drum circle of who sees themselves represented as serious, committed, long-haul movement folk, we find sound direction from veteran Black Panther Kim Holder who once shared with me through a Facebook comment:
A revolutionary isn't some mystical superhero which none of us can achieve. A revolutionary is a living breathing human being who can make mistakes and at times be undisciplined but who is dedicated to two things: the well-being of their people and the total destruction of oppressive institutions.
Grounded in Philadelphia yet looking out onto the whole wide world, Abolition Journal aims to reflect the lived complexity that we sure can be messy, self-defeating yet authentic and thurl in how we show up sometimes. And sometimes, in our best Bilal-like performance, we gotta be all that for any one of us to be able to give proper witness to how we’ve been led astray by Empire’s good lies. In centering these moments as opportunities for social reckoning, we trust and believe remembering and recalling our home truths as ultimately necessary to face up to what’s killing us. These are the lessons Toni Cade Bambara passed down to us, the ones she got from her grandmother, unveiling the meditative shaping and ordering of an underlying liberatory design that may just move us all forward together down the revolutionary road.
Nevertheless, Abolition Journal is not a publication that pretends we know it all. It’s rather a platform that has a mustard seed of faith in believing that we need more of us to get into the real work, to stay put in the real work, to fight it out in the real work. Through committed praxis, we intend to figure out some provisional resolutions, some working answers to practice with, some precious opportunities to claim the responsibility to experiment and further recognize what documenting our consistent cycles of reflection and action make possible.
“Our will to fight, our vision of what we are struggling for, our social consciousness and collective responsibility, the very ingredients of our capacity to govern anew must all be systematically nurtured.”
To that end, our multifaceted approach intends to dance that ol’ Philly-bop two-step between radical optimism and truthful pessimism as it genuinely reflects everyday social life in the marathon of movement work. Grace Lee and James Boggs remind us that we the people who are striving for justice must uphold for ourselves to be transformed into new people in the course of our struggle. Our will to fight, our vision of what we are struggling for, our social consciousness and collective responsibility, the very ingredients of our capacity to govern anew must all be systematically nurtured. Uniting under this groove, we dedicate this platform to the pursuit that our beautiful struggle can be an escalating one focused on confronting the problems we and all our comrades can learn from. This must be our first work, simultaneously self-facing and self-effacing.
We flatly refuse the well-intentioned yet insufficient premise of “positive-vibes only” movement storying; we know that the times we exist in, as well as our rebel archive-in-the-making, requires immense, intimate reflections and vulnerable public risk-taking that honors our multidimensional existence. And while remaining super serious about our fight, we must know how to laugh at and with ourselves too. We know we have only to be honest in our assessments of what we are doing and desiring for ourselves, our comrades, and our people.
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…”—Amilcar Cabral
We know, as our Uncle Paul Robeson knew, that we remain the decisive force. This is precisely what they fear the most. We sing a familiar Septima Clark song knowing that the chaos we sense now is certainly painful but also a gift. Here we stand, surfacing wonderful thinking and honest reporting to provide us renewed horizons of urgent global transformation. We already know it all falls down. No matter what they do, our chances for seizing liberation remain inevitable and ever-present.
The grand vision of Abolition Journal, much like our lives, is subject to ongoing planned and unplanned revisions. We invite your criticisms, suggestions, advice or what have you. We need it. We insist that you grow with us. Whatever this becomes, we know the unfinished task of abolition today means doing two things at once: being a menace to our enemies while building revolutionary solidarity with our comrades and communities, tearing down while also building up, working to create the new world emerging from our minds, feet, hearts, and hands as we struggle to upend the dying colonialism that surrounds us.
Abolition Journal is arriving one issue at a time while we recite the Lorde’s praises that none of us simply live single issue lives. This initial offering is not the end-of-the-song; on the way is a reprise for our glorious redemption. We give you all we have and invite you to go on with your thinking. The freedom struggle needs your gifts.
Christopher R. Rogers, @justmaybechris, Project Lead, Abolition Journal Working Group
Christopher R. Rogers is an educator and cultural worker from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting justice-oriented arts, culture, and community in the Greater Philadelphia area. He currently co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized Henry Ossawa Tanner House at the intersection of Black heritage preservation and community cultural organizing. As a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, he supports aspiring movement leaders serving communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.