Defend / Defund: A Visual History of Organizing against the Police

By Josh MacPhee, Mariame Kaba, Dread Scott and 5 more

A sweeping and poignant history of community response to the violence of white supremacy and carceral systems in the US, told through interviews, archival reproductions, and narrative.

In the summer of 2020, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade ignited a movement that led to the largest street protests in American history. Abolitionist grassroots organizers around the country unified around a clear demand: defund the police and refund our communities. While the majority of the country supported the call to reform the police, what followed was a backlash from mainstream politicians and the press, all but defeating the movement to end the continued violence against Black Americans. 

Defend / Defund examines the history of how communities have responded to the violence of white supremacy and carceral systems in the United States and asks what lessons the modern abolitionist movement can draw from this past. Organized in a series of thematic sections from the use of self-defense by Black organizers, to queer resistance in urban spaces, the narrative is accompanied by over one hundred full-color images including archival materials produced by Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Young Lords in the 1960s and 70s, CopWatch and the Stolen Lives Project in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary material from the Movement for Black Lives, Project NIA, and INCITE!, Defend / Defund shows how deep the struggles for abolition go and how urgent they remain.  

In addition to full-color reproduction of archival materials, the narrative includes transcripts of interviews with activists, scholars, and artists such as Mariame Kaba, Dread Scott, Dennis Flores, Dr. Joshua Myers, Jawanza Williams (VOCAL-NY and Free Black Radicals), Cheryl Rivera (NYC-DSA Racial Justice Working Group and Abolition Action), and Bianca Cunningham (Free Black Radicals). Each conversation dives into the history of specific struggles with, and organizing against, police and police brutality. 

In total, the publication shows how the modern Defund movement builds on powerful Black feminist and abolitionist movements past and imagines alternatives to policing for community safety for our present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Common Notions
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781945335013

Mariame Kaba

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Press 2021), Missing Daddy (Haymarket 2019), Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Faciltators with Shira Hassan (Project NIA, 2019), See You Soon (Haymarket, March 2022) and No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie (The New Press, Aug 2022).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The history of policing in the United States is inextricably tied to the control and punishment of communities of color, in particular Black communities. Since colonial settlers arrived in the Americas, and throughout the nearly 250 years of chattel slavery, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous communities formed autonomous self-defense groups to protect themselves from the violence of white supremacy. In the 1960s and 1970s, groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Young Lords formalized these activities, and in the 1980s and 1990s, organizations like CopWatch and the Stolen Lives Project began recording, monitoring, and reporting on police misconduct and memorializing victims of police violence that the press and the courts ignored. Families have publicly mourned the death of loved ones at the hands of the police; communities have rioted to take back their streets in the face of injustice. The modern Defund movement, rooted in abolition philosophy and popularized by the Movement for Black Lives after the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, demands economic justice by allocating funds from police budgets to underfunded schools, hospitals, and public housing as well as reparations for victims of police violence. This movement imagines alternatives to police, that address harm while being accountable to the people.

The history of the movement to resist police violence and defund the police is part of a larger struggle to end violence against Black lives, and this work necessarily overlaps with resistance to the larger carceral system in America, from the school-to-prison pipeline to mass incarceration of Black Americans. The goal of this project is to situate today’s movement to defund the police within this long history of imagining other forms of community safety and dignity, and constructing an abolitionist future. That said, incarceration in the US demands its own dedicated project, so we will touch on it but it won’t be the focus here.

This is a starting point. While we have not intentionally omitted any parts of the history of communities fighting police violence, this history is so expansive that we cannot be exhaustive. The geographic scope is limited to the United States, and much of the archival material we share is from New York City. We hope you will ask questions that point to the gaps you find in this short narrative, that explore the ways this history has impacted the communities where you live, and that help this become, in turn, a resource for others to learn with and organize with.

After Anthony was killed, they retrained police. After Eric Garner was killed, they retrained police. We don’t want to hear about any more trainings—trainings don’t hold police accountable, trainings don’t lead to firings, trainings only give the police more money. The Mayor and NYPD’s process is fake and will make no change. The only way to make change is to have other people—not the NYPD and not de Blasio—have control of the process and families like mine need to help lead that.

Iris Baez, the mother of Anthony Baez, killed by an officer with an illegal chokehold in 1994, in her 2021 testimony to City Council about police reform.

Resistant Strains, Caution!! Colored People of Boston, 1998 reprint of poster from 1851. This poster shows a notice created by abolitionist Thomas Parker in 1851 following the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

LEGACIES OF VIOLENCE

(Left) Blue By Day White By Night, Stop Killer Cops

(Middle) Ban the Klan, button, n.d.

(Right) United We Stand Anti-Klan, button, n.d.

The earliest police forces in the US grew out of colonial armies and militias formed to wage war against and dispossess Indigenous people. In the early eighteenth century, slave patrols were created in slaveholding states to quell resistance and pursue enslaved people who had run away from plantations. The Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 gave license to law enforcement in non-slaveholding states to focus their attention on kidnapping Black people and returning them to the South (whether they were actually escaped, freed, or even born free often made little difference).

After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation this oppression continued, through Reconstruction and beyond. It was notably perpetuated by armed white groups such as the Ku Klux Klan—whose membership often overlapped with local police forces—but also systematized through Jim Crow laws (in the 19th century, Jim Crow was a racial slur used against Black people). Other state- and city-funded law enforcement and paramilitary formations were created in the 19th century to crack down on labor organizing, quell unrest in immigrant ghettos, enforce gender binaries and sexual norms, and police people of color.

Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns, (New York, NY: Marzani & Munsell), book, 1962.

SELF-DEFENSE

One of the most influential thinkers in armed self-defense for communities of color was Robert F. Williams. Williams and his wife Mabel formed and led the chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Monroe, North Carolina in the late 1950s. The chapter fought housing and economic discrimination and worked to protect the city’s Black community from both the Ku Klux Klan and the white establishment. But every one of their victories was met with increased terrorism from the KKK; when they successfully integrated the local library, the Klan staged mass rallies and sent nightly armed motorcades to terrorize the community. When they attempted to integrate the community swimming pools, the Klan created a petition signed by 6,000 residents demanding that Williams and his Communist members should be driven from town.

Williams’s NAACP pleaded for the city to protect Black families from the escalating violence, but law enforcement did not intervene. In fact, the members of the Klan and local police forces were often one-and-the-same. It was then that Robert Williams decided to make their chapter the first fully armed branch of the NAACP. He later wrote, when an oppressed people show a willingness to defend themselves, the enemy, who is a moral weakling and coward, is more willing to grant concessions and work for a respectable compromise. Robert Williams’s book Negroes with Guns, and later his radio program Radio Free Dixie—broadcast from his exile in Cuba—inspired self-defense movements of the 1960s and 1970s from the Deacons of Defense to the Black Panther Party.

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, and I Wor Kuen all created planks in their party platforms to address policing. The Black Panthers and Young Lords established their own armed citizens’ patrols. For the Panthers, item seven of their 10 Point Program states: We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people. This is clarified further in their later What We Believe statement: We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.

The Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization—which grew out of a street gang in Chicago in 1968—addressed police abuse through armed self-defense as one of its first organized activities, and this work continued when the group spread to New York City and became the Young Lords Party. That same year, the American Indian Movement created the AIM Patrol in Minneapolis to monitor and resist police abuse and respond to conflict in the community without violence. I Wor Kuen, formed in 1969, produced a 12 Point Program and Platform that states, We want to improve the living conditions of our people and are preparing to defend our communities against oppression and for revolutionary armed war against the gangsters, businessmen, politicians, and police. The Young Lords, Black Panthers, I Wor Kuen and AIM were all targeted by the FBI with extensive police violence, infiltration, and assassinations through COINTELPRO (COvert INTelligence PROgram), which had shifted its attention in 1967 from the Civil Rights Movement to these newer, more militant organizations.

(Left) Support Indian Resistance, button, button, 1970.

(Right) Native American Support Network, Free Skyhorse & Mohawk: Stop All FBI Attacks, button, 1975.

Committee to Defend the Black Panther 21, Serve the People: Black Panther Party Platform and Program, printed in The Black Panther (Oakland, CA), newspaper, 1969/1970.