"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. Far from a brief moment in history, the summer of 2020 was a resurgence of a movement that stretches to the beginning of this country's inception. Defend/Defund presents a sweeping and poignant history of how communities have responded to the violence of white supremacy and carceral systems in the United States--told through interviews, archival reproductions, and narrative--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 100 full-color images, including archival materials produced by Emory Douglas from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Young Lords, CopWatch, the Stolen Lives Project, the Movement for Black Lives, Project NIA, and INCITE! Defend/Defund shows how contemporary organizing against the police and for community safety builds on powerful Black feminist and abolitionist movements from the past and imagines alternatives to policing for our present"--page 4 of cover.

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. Featuring 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).