Mariame Kaba
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| Born | 1971
New York City, New York, U.S.
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| Education | McGill University (BA) |
| Occupation | Organizer |
| Notable work | We Do This 'Til We Free Us |
Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police.[1] She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021). The Mariame Kaba Papers are held by the Chicago Public Library Special Collections.[2]
Mariame Kaba was born in New York City to immigrant parents.[3] Her mother emigrated from the Ivory Coast;[3] her father was involved in the independence struggle in Guinea.[4]
Mariame grew up on the Lower East SideofManhattan and attended Lycée Français.[5] As a child, she viewed the world through a black nationalist framework and looked for ways to help others.[6] Kaba received a B.A. in Sociology from McGill University in 1992.[7] In 1995 she moved to Chicago to study sociology at Northwestern University.[3][8] She completed her master's degree in Library and Information ScienceatPratt Institute.[9]
In Chicago, she founded the Chicago Freedom School,[10] the Rogers Park Young Women's Action Team (YWAT),[3] Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women,[11][12] Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander,[13] and We Charge Genocide (WCG).[14] In 2009, Kaba founded the organization Project NIA, which advocates to end youth incarceration.[15][16]
Kaba views prison abolition as the total dismantling of prison and policing while building up community services and opposes the reform of policing.[17][18] Her work has created the framework for current abolitionist organizations including Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and Assata's Daughters.[6] She also helped found the organization Survived and Punished, an abolitionist organization that seeks to end sentencing for victims of intimate partner violence who defend themselves.[19] This project grew out of efforts to free Marissa Alexander.[20]
Kaba maintained a blog, "US Prison Culture," beginning in 2010. She has been active on Twitter under the account @prisonculture.[21][22]
In 2012, she wrote Resisting Police Violence in Harlem, a historical pamphlet detailing the policing and violence in Harlem.[23]
In March 2018, she wrote Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping A History Of Black Women On Chicago’s South Side with Essence McDowell. Started in 2012, the book is written as a guidebook that maps the history of the influential Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago during the 19th and 20th centuries.[24][8]
In 2021, she published We Do This 'Til We Free Us with Haymarket Books. It debuted at number nine on The New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction paperbacks.[25] In a review for the Chicago Reader, Ariel Parrella-Aureli described it as “a collection of talks, interviews, and past work that can serve as an initial primer on the PIC [prison-industrial complex] abolition and community building rooted in transformative justice.”[26] Kaba was reluctant to write the book, but the mass protests in the summer of 2020 persuaded her, in the interests of lending her tools for collective action to newly activated organizers.[26]
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