Mariame Kaba: My name is Mariame Kaba. I am the founder and director of an organization called Project Nia, which is a prison industrial complex abolitionist organization with a long-term vision to end youth incarceration.
A lot of current prison-industrial complex abolitionists look back to the work of previous generations of abolitionists to continue to undo the afterlife of slavery in its multiple incarnations and iterations.
The current site of the African Society of Mutual Relief, there is no trace at all of what stood there before. It's gone. And it's gone on purpose. And it's not lost on me that the criminal court is sitting there on that same land where an autonomous organization built by Black people, who had themselves been enslaved people and also some of whom were still enslaved when they were members, that the criminal court sits there, that racist death-making institution that exists today to disappear so many Black people. It's not, you know, it's not lost on me, that, that irony.
Tourmaline: It was here that people like Marsha P. Johnson in the 1970s had big freedom dreams filled with desires for care and support for other trans people facing incarceration.
Marsha was a poet. She was a singer. She was a performer. She was the original founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—STAR. She was in the forefront of what was then called the gay liberation movement. She was one of the people to fight back in 1969 during the Stonewall Rebellion that every year is celebrated in what we now know as Pride.
In this place, in 1973 or '72, Marsha P Johnson was frequently having court cases. There was a Black judge, Bruce Wright, who frequently was at odds with the state around bail, which was something that was used to keep people of color, Black people, poor people in captivity. And Marsha appeared in front of him and he asked, “What's, what's the P in Marsha P Johnson?” And she said, “It stands for ‘pay it no mind.’" And, and the judge responded, "Well, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to pay it no mind.” And let her go.
Here’s historian Robin D. G. Kelley:
Robin D. G. Kelley: So much of our oppressions begin at the level of the body. Think about the bodies of women and femmes and trans people, you're talking about bodies that have experienced probably the oldest war of all, bodies that are policed, are subject to violence, to silencing. So imagine freeing the body from the constraints of all the imposed normativities of gender and sexuality. So queer liberation—liberation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer-gender, trans, two-spirit people—we can't have any liberation without liberating our bodies and our sexualities.
Tourmaline: There was an early '70s interview with Marsha P Johnson, and she was talking about how Black trans people are frequently going into this specific institution, literally right here, and being held largely because people couldn't afford to pay bail, right? So, she said, what we're going to do is start a bail fund for incarcerated members of our community.
That launching of a freedom dream of mutual relief and mutual aid, Marsha was then being the realizer of that dream, even in a place that exists as limiting freedom. Marsha was so able to tune into freedom dreams that came before from the African Society for Mutual Relief that she said, "Aha, I know what to do. I'm going to tune my tuner to that frequency of freedom by starting a bail fund."