Abolition April
Abolition April is a national recognition of abolition during the fourth month of the calendar year. In 2023, Abolitionist Sanctuary innovated this special designation with the goal of collecting enough signatures to petition Mayor Karen Bass to make Abolition April an official recognition in the state of California. Since this time, each year we continue to invite national coalitions to join us in programming to raise abolition awareness during the month of April.
A signature event during Abolition April is our Freedom Futures weekend! In 2025, we hosted an in-person Abolition Academy on Friday, a gala on Saturday, and a national Sunday and protest for Palm Sunday.
Join us and bring Abolition April to your community!
Abolition academy
Invitation
Join us as we kick-off our Freedom Futures weekend with an in-person Abolition Academy! This teach-in is led by Abolitionist Sanctuary at Union Theological Seminary. The first 50 registrants are free and will get complimentary access to our online course, Abolition 101, as well as priority enrollment with our June cohort to become certified in Abolition as Social Change.
Theme: Abolition Democracy
The attack on education is alarming. Executive orders have banned keywords including: activism, black, justice, DEI, female, gender, pronoun, identity, discrimination, injustice, prejudice, privilege, racism, stereotype and so many more. The attack on education has sanctioned the elimination of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is designed to revise and erase culture and the muddiness of America’s colonial history.
According to a CNN exit poll for the past US presidential election, largely uneducated white voters and white christian nationalists and evangelicals voted for President Donald Trump. This data suggests that education and religion has an impact on the direction of our democracy.
The theme for our Abolition Academy is Abolition Democracy.
The theoretical lens of “Abolition Democracy” was originally coined by W.E.B. Du Bois and later interpreted by Angela Davis, as a way to think critically about the different struggles for abolition. The ambition of abolition democracy required the construction of new institutions, new practices, new social relations that would have afforded freed Black persons the economic, political, and social capital to live as equal members of society.
The idea of Abolition Democracy is not new, but it very well may inspire us in new ways to respond to the urgency of this moment.
Framing questions are:
- How might we build a viable coalition when the freedom movement is so fragmented?
- What does it look like to create a democracy centering abolition?
- What is one thing each of us can do to move us closer to that possibility?
If this theme and questions interest you and compel you to seek understanding while identifying strategies to catalyze communal action, we invite you to register and join us!
