Why I’m Into the Abolitionists (And You Should be Too)

One of my recurring jokes among me and my friends this semester is that I am “big into the abolitionists.” I even routinely use it as a fun fact about myself. When I was emceeing the annual on-campus talent show, “Amherst Got Talent,” this March, Ben Kasen ’28 asked me in front of 150 people what I am looking for in a romantic partner, and I proceeded to go on an extended tangent about abolitionists instead of answering his question. However, there is a very real and powerful intellectual curiosity that I have in the abolitionists from both the 19th century and today that underlies these jokes.

In history classes, you might hear that the abolitionists were a group of Black and white activists from the late 1700s to the mid-1860s who advocated to abolish slavery. There are the obvious examples, such as fugitive enslaved people like Frederick Douglass, who wrote about his experiences in his famous text “My Bondage and My Freedom,” and then joined the Anti-Slavery Circuit as a speaker. Considering the drastically different world that Douglass lived in, it might seem to us today largely because they are products of the past rather than figures we should learn from today, and my interest in them arises from some sort of strange fascination with Civil War cosplayers and Abraham Lincoln.

However, what defines the abolitionists, to me, is their radical imagination — their capacity to imagine better, kinder, and fairer worlds than they existed in, and to light fires to bring about these worlds. This definition encapsulates the abolitionists of the 1700s and 1800s — everyone from enslaved rebels during the Haitian Revolution to the student participants in Amherst College’s Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s, whom I have been studying. But it also encapsulates a modern day political movement. Scholars and activists like Angela Davis and Dorothy Roberts, responding to what they see as the horrors of mass incarceration, police brutality, and other related issues by proposing that we try to imagine a world without punitive measures as means of control. This is a group of mostly African American scholars and activists who view themselves as the abolitionist heirs to the 18th and 19th century abolitionists, adopting, both by the title of “abolitionists” and a desire to radically re-imagine a better world.

My goal with this article is to argue that we ought to look to the abolitionists, both past and present, as role models. With the 19th century abolitionists, historians in the 20th century often took a substantially negative view of them, with one 1962 historian saying they were willing to “set the house on fire and chuckle as it burned.” Most of the 21st century abolitionists proposals, such as abolishing the prison system, are so unpopular amongst Americans that there is not even opinion polling asking what percentage of Americans support their ideas. I don’t necessarily embrace all the political proposals of modern abolitionists, nor do I see the abolitionists as  perfect human beings. What I do admire, however, is their capacity for “radical imagination” and how they grappled with many of the same questions that remain highly relevant today — how to better support those from less fortunate circumstances.

I will first explain in depth what I mean by the abolitionists’ “radical imagination,” then  how I came to realize the importance of such imagination in one’s life. Finally, I will explain why and how we should all aim to cultivate an abolitionist-style imagination in our own lives.

Exploring the Abolitionists

The older abolitionists’ “radical imaginations” encompassed their ability to imagine a more equal world, despite the immense unpopularity of their arguments at their time. The first one I will discuss is that of William Lloyd Garrison, a white newspaper publisher and abolitionist. After communicating with Black abolitionists, in 1830 Garrison started his own newspaper, The Liberator in Boston. In The Liberator, Garrison proposed a radical vision for the time: Not only did he call for enslaved people to receive their immediate freedom from their owners, he also called for full political and social equality between Black and white people. Garrison’s views were so radical that in 1835 a white mob in Boston attempted to attack him.

Even though Garrison’s vision might seem obviously correct to us today, it was far from popular at his time. Less than 5% of the population in the North on the eve of the Civil War were abolitionists. Furthermore, throughout the Antebellum period, to say that the North’s economy was tied to slavery would be an understatement. Slave-grown cotton powered Northern textile mills during the early Industrial Revolution, and the North exported significant amounts of manufactured goods — such as clothes for enslaved people — to the South to support slavery.

Garrison’s radical political imagination placed him far beyond normalcy for this time in ways that are hard for us to grasp. Imagine if The Amherst Student’s editorial board or the Association of Amherst Students threw out their iPhones and urged the student body to do the same over concerns about Apple benefitting from forced labor in its supply chain. Despite the radical imagination Garrison proposed, his message had a very real influence, even in the 1830s. Just look at Amherst College’s own Anti-Slavery Society, which echoed Garrison’s radical support for full equality between Blacks and whites in as early as 1833. 

To illustrate how radical modern abolitionists’ imaginations continue to be, I will briefly discuss legal scholar and abolitionist Dorothy Roberts. In her 2022 book “Torn Apart,” Roberts makes the argument that the child welfare system — which ostensibly exists to protect children’s wellbeing and keep them away from abusive family members — actually serves to police and tear apart Black families, creating a pipeline between Black poverty and incarceration. Roberts then proposes a radical solution: abolishing child protective services altogether. Arguments like these might be normal in a few seminar rooms at Amherst College, but they are not to the mainstream public. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, both Democrats and Republicans largely agree that child abuse arises from parents’ ill-intent, rather than systemic factors such as financial inequality. I bring up these examples not to say that one should be radical for the sake of being radical. Rather, what leads Garrison and Roberts to earn the “abolitionist” moniker is their willingness to tell the world that other people’s immense suffering is a pressing issue.

Why I am Interested in the Abolitionists

In short, my experience in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange class “Justice” drew me to the abolitionists. The experiences and thoughts I had in that class both provoked me to want to cultivate my own “radical imagination” and helped show me that I have the same limitations as the abolitionists had with being an ally to those with less fortunate circumstances than myself. This was because that class made me feel immensely off-put by the privileges we get by going to Amherst.

Certainly, a radical imagination is not called for when you have a life of privilege and choose not to question; for example, from when you go from a well-funded high school to Amherst College to a well-paying, comfortable job without ever questioning the circumstances or privileges you had that enabled you to get to that point. However, I did learn that radical imaginations are called for, when your whole world and sense of self are shattered by life and you have no idea how to pick them up.  

It is beneficial for Amherst students to feel shattered at times by experiences like “Justice,” because they force us to grapple uncomfortably with both our own privilege and our need to have a radical imagination. During and after the class, I read texts from several modern “abolitionists” like Dorothy Roberts. Though I did not realize it at the time, part of me was looking for role models on how I could turn the guilt and hurt I felt from that class into something productive. To an extent, I found that with the abolitionists, both in their accomplishments and with their struggles.

For instance, I have been grappling with this question: How can one be a good person in a grossly unequal and unjust world? In a previous article, I tried to understand how merely being a student at Amherst College makes us complicit in exploitative practices via Amherst’s financial holdings and related investments. Garrison struggled with a similar question of his own complicity with slavery’s economic reach into the North, and in an 1829 address in Boston, to the shock of his audience, he declared that New England was violently complicit with slavery through its trade with the South.

Another thing to realize is that abolitionists failed many times and also struggled with many similar questions to the ones we do today about how to be a good person. For instance, literary critic Saidiya Hartman, in her 1997 book “Scenes of Subjection,” explains how the abolitionist John Rankin, in a letter to his brother, described in deeply graphic details the horrors of slavery, and intentionally brings himself and his brother as close to the suffering as possible. Rankin, despite his good intentions, ended up describing the enslaved as helpless and white abolitionists as saviors. Grappling with Hartman’s description of Rankin forced me to consider how much, in my own narration, that I had objectified incarcerated students from that class and turned them into background fixtures in my own story. After all, I have the privileged label of being an Amherst College student and the many resources that come with it. The incarcerated students from “Justice” do not have such privileges. Studying the abolitionists and considering my own lived experiences has forced me to be mindful of how I might unintentionally objectify the people that I seek to help.

A Radical Imagination of Our Own

We should adopt the abolitionists’ strategy of thinking radically to imagine how the worlds we inhabit can be better places for everybody, including the most vulnerable, but also with the mindfulness that our own desires to help others can objectify and dehumanize those same people.

How might we do this? I have a few specific suggestions. My main advice is to be willing to ask tough questions about privilege. For instance, why do we at Amherst College get to enjoy certain privileges while other people just like us do not? Then, be willing to run with those big questions with the spirit of a rabid idealist who is madly in love, and follow those questions wherever they might lead you. Do not think about feasibility in your imagination. Instead, be bold, ambitious, and follow your heart just as much as your mind. But while you do this, also consider what your own limitations might be in imagining a better world, and your own conception of a “better world” might be shaped by your own internal biases and prejudices.

I want to reiterate why there is so much value in engaging with the abolitionists’ mindset. They are not perfect, and I do not agree with every proposal they have. But abolitionists, both of today and the past, embody what my friend Phuong Doan ’26 calls “radical optimism.” Abolitionists, from both the 1800s and today, pushed forward even as most of society dismissed their ideas as unrealistic, imagining a better world and beginning to create it. In that sense, the abolitionists are the most “radically optimistic” people around. And I think that is something we can all learn from.