"The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people"
About this Quote
There’s a quiet provocation in Davis’s phrasing: she grants the abolitionist movement its moral force, then immediately punctures any comforting sense of scale. “Powerful campaign” is the compliment you expect from a movement elder; “those who attend all of the vigils” is the tell. She’s not just describing turnout. She’s naming a political culture where commitment is measured by ritual presence, and where the same dedicated few can end up carrying a cause like a permanent second job.
The line works because it’s both affectionate and unsparing. Vigils are the movement’s public conscience - grief made visible, solidarity staged in the open. But by specifying “all of the vigils,” Davis highlights how activism can become self-selecting: the people most likely to show up are already converted, already networked, already practiced in the language of urgency. The subtext is organizational, almost strategic: abolition has become something you can “participate” in without it becoming a mass political alignment, a voting bloc, a broad civic consensus.
Context matters. Davis has spent decades connecting prisons, policing, and capital punishment to racial capitalism and state power. From that vantage, the death penalty isn’t just a policy to repeal; it’s an instrument in a larger carceral system that survives by normalizing punishment. So her critique isn’t that vigils are futile - it’s that moral witness, left to a small cadre, can be safely ignored. The intent is a challenge: widen the circle, translate mourning into durable power, or the state will keep executing people while the faithful keep keeping watch.
The line works because it’s both affectionate and unsparing. Vigils are the movement’s public conscience - grief made visible, solidarity staged in the open. But by specifying “all of the vigils,” Davis highlights how activism can become self-selecting: the people most likely to show up are already converted, already networked, already practiced in the language of urgency. The subtext is organizational, almost strategic: abolition has become something you can “participate” in without it becoming a mass political alignment, a voting bloc, a broad civic consensus.
Context matters. Davis has spent decades connecting prisons, policing, and capital punishment to racial capitalism and state power. From that vantage, the death penalty isn’t just a policy to repeal; it’s an instrument in a larger carceral system that survives by normalizing punishment. So her critique isn’t that vigils are futile - it’s that moral witness, left to a small cadre, can be safely ignored. The intent is a challenge: widen the circle, translate mourning into durable power, or the state will keep executing people while the faithful keep keeping watch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Angela
Add to List
