Abolition for the People

Breonna Taylor and Bearing Witness to Black Women’s Expendability

Why #SayHerName is crucial to the struggle for Black freedom

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

September 23, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron delivered the much-anticipated decision on whether Breonna Taylor’s killers would be prosecuted. Guided by Cameron’s judgment of the legality of the officers’ actions, a grand jury decided that none of the officers involved in killing Breonna Taylor would stand trial for her death.

Cameron’s gut-wrenching announcement came on the 65th anniversary of another jury decision that absolved white men for a murder that transformed the nation: On September 23, 1955, 12 white jurors took less than two hours to acquit two white men of torturing and killing 14-year-old Chicago native Emmett…