‘We need to figure out better ways to be in community with each other’: In Conversation with A’Brianna Morgan

How would you define your role as a mass liberator for reclaim?

My role is to help manage, facilitate and lead all of our campaigns related to the criminal legal system. This work doesn't fit neatly into a box. My work involves strategizing around how to defund the Philadelphia Police Department and reinvest in our communities, also having difficult but intentional conversations about community violence as someone directly impacted by gun violence.

What brought you to do this work?

I went on a healing journey for myself as I was grieving and trying to understand it. How is this still happening to so many people, where you get that call that someone you know and love has been shot? And in looking for answers, I was able to realize that locking people up isn't stopping violence in our communities. I think the gut reaction, once you hear that someone you know was involved in a shooting, is to want the perpetrator to go to prison indefinitely, and I was grappling with that gut reaction. While my family was hurting from my brother's murder, I realized after the trial that I didn't feel any different - I didn't feel better knowing that these people were going to be incarcerated for decades. My whole perspective after that experience was that I didn’t agree with causing more violence by locking people up after these crimes happen.

My work is about rooting out violence from our communities and supporting all of the research that exists about the causes of violence and solutions for reducing violence. It's all about community investment. It's all about making sure people have their basic needs met, so they aren't lashing out and competing for scraps in their communities. A lot of times, people have a lot of trauma and feel powerless about their lives, so they exert power over the people closest to them in very violent ways.

What are some of the highlights of your work at Reclaim so far?

I would say the big thing I celebrated last year was definitely a mass liberation school. I think a lot of people were in the streets because they were outraged about what happened to Brianna Taylor and George Floyd, and Walter Wallace, without having a deep understanding of what “defund” actually meant. There was less of an explicit abolitionist focus on a lot of the media coverage of the protests as well. People were outraged and had tons of questions. What do we want to build? What do we hope for our communities? We wanted to be intentional about slowing down and inviting in all of these curious community members who were struggling to understand Defund the Police and other abolitionist ideas, and really hold space to interrogate the things we've internalized about prison culture.

Another big thing we felt excited about was the community expansion grants. We know that people most impacted by gun mounts do not trust the city-run programs to do their job well and not further criminalize them or traumatize them. And so, it was important to us that money from the city is injected into the grassroots community organizations that are led by directly impacted folks. You don't need the city to hold on to this money - they should pass it through to the people already doing better work. As a result, the City expanded the city grant program so that more people would be able to tap into these millions of dollars to expand their staff and services to reach more young and directly impacted people.

Can you talk more about Reclaim’s Mass Liberation school?

I think just even conversations I have with my mom revealed how deep-rooted some of this internalization about policing is. She is someone who's been incarcerated, and many other people in my family have been subjected to police harassment, so they understand what I'm organizing around. But then, I was talking to her about a situation I had with a former roommate that was really not healthy and outright toxic. She suggested that I call the cops and get the toxic person locked up. She doesn't want anyone hurting me. When someone you love is being hurt, you want punitive measures. That conversation made me realize that someone who believes in abolition may still hold on to that punishment mentality.

A big part of Mass Lib school was making people understand that it's not just the courts, the cops, and the prisons. Let's talk about how schools, social workers, hospitals, and news outlets are all part of this broader structure. Let's talk about what we've internalized about responding to conflict and harm in our relationships and neighborhoods. Even if we're not necessarily calling the cops, there are things that we do to punish each other all the time. And as abolitionists, we need to interrogate that and figure out better ways to be in community with each other.

It was a nine-week series focused on political education where we got 30 people together, mostly black and brown folks and about half of them being directly impacted by mass incarceration, in a space together to go on this learning and unlearning journey together. We wanted to move away from the traditional teaching structure where there’s an instructor dumping facts in a Zoom meeting. It was more about facilitating a conversation where we offered definitions of key terms, looked at case studies, and watched media together, but a lot of it was focused on unpacking our own experiences, opinions, and curiosities and our doubts and our fears together.