Derecka Purnell
Contributor
Derecka Purnell is a movement lawyer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, her BA from the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and studied public policy and economics at the University of California–Berkeley as a Public Policy and International Affairs Law Fellow. Her writing has been published widely, including in The Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, the Harvard Journal of African American Policy, the New York Times, the Atlantic, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Teen Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. In 2022 she was selected as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. She is a member of Dream Defenders. Derecka is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School, a columnist at The Guardian, and serves on the editorial board of Hammer and Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture.
