Ash-Lee Henderson, Highlander Co-Director, Imani Perry, Andrea Ritchie

Authors/organizers Ash-Lee Henderson, Imani Perry, and Andrea Ritchie have a conversation about freedom, vision, and our abolitionist future. Drawing on stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, unsung heroes, ancestors, and their own lived experience, these three Black women give us visions for a future where abolition has happened.

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.

Andrea Ritchie is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She currently supports dozens of organizations across the US working to divest from policing and invest in community safety. She has authored numerous research reports, articles, and opinion pieces on policing, criminalization, mass incarceration and immigration enforcement.