Reimagining the Revolution: Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern Civil Rights Movement Audiobook

These are the architects of the modern civil rights movement: 4 profiles of revolutionary groups making change beyond protest

A radically different approach to sustaining social justice movements—4 strategies for abolition and liberation from the new architects of the modern civil rights movement

Many of us think, I don’t support the police. But what should take their place? Or: Prisons don’t keep us safe. But what new systems could?

A lot of books about racial justice ask us how we got here, but Reimagining the Revolution is different: award-winning journalist and activist Paula Lehman-Ewing presents an inside-access look at the activists redefining where we go from here. Readers will hear from:

• Ivan Kilgore, an incarcerated activist who founded the 501c3 nonprofit United Black Family Scholarship Foundation from behind prison walls
• Critical Resistance, one of the oldest grassroots organizations in the nation working to dismantle the prison-industrial complex
• The co-founders of Greenwood, a Black-owned financial technology institution designed specifically for Black and Latino people and businesses: Michael Render, aka Killer Mike, Amb. Andrew Young and Ryan Glover
• Incarcerated activist Heshima Denham on his grassroots efforts to build a society for Black and Brown people independent of the state 
• The Movement for Black Lives, the Alliance for Safety and Justice, BYP 100, and 8toAbolition
• Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists using art to heal from trauma, connect with other incarcerated people, and amplify abolitionist change

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Reimagining the Revolution is a deeply personal, compellingly passionate, and surprisingly comprehensive take on the horrid state of the American justice system. It is also quite literally an invitation to a revolution. Lehman-Ewing wants nothing less than the total elimination of our current system of incarceration and justice and its replacement with something both effective and humane. As she focuses on an array of ideas around race and justice, Lehman-Ewing presents vignettes from assorted lives—many interrupted by incarceration—that take us beyond the superficial stereotypes that serve as justification for the status quo. In arguing for the abolition of the current system, she advocates a radical rethinking of virtually every commonly held view about the value and actual practice of incarceration. Along the way, she reminds us that the 13th Amendment did not really end slavery and that vengeance is a poor excuse for irrational policies. Whether you agree with her revolutionary solution or not, you will almost certainly find her key arguments impossible to ignore.

— ELLIS COSE, author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America and Race and Reckoning