Paula Lehman-Ewing is an award-winning journalist and social documentarian who has long been a champion for racial and social justice, using her pen to amplify the voices of those often unheard.

Now, with her forthcoming book, Reimagining the Revolution: Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, Lehman-Ewing takes her advocacy to new heights.

Reimagining the Revolution is not just a book; it's a manifesto for the future of social justice. Through four meticulously crafted profiles, Lehman-Ewing introduces us to the architects of the modern civil rights movement—those who are not only challenging the status quo but are also building new systems from the ground up.

From the incarcerated activist Ivan Kilgore, who founded a nonprofit from behind prison walls, to the co-founders of Greenwood, a Black-owned financial technology institution, the stories Lehman-Ewing presents are as diverse as they are inspiring.

Lehman-Ewing’s book delves into the complexities of abolition and liberation, offering readers an inside-access look at organizations like Critical Resistance and The Movement for Black Lives. Her profiles are framed by two fundamental truths: the current system is irreparably broken, and true change requires radical reimagining. Each story is a testament to the power of grassroots activism and the potential for creative solutions to redefine our social landscape.

Lehman-Ewing’s journey as a journalist has been marked by a relentless pursuit of justice. Her work with major publications such as BusinessWeek, Reuters, *Forbes*, and Fortune has earned her widespread acclaim, but it is her commitment to amplifying marginalized voices that truly sets her apart. In 2020, she resurrected the newspaper for All of Us or None, a grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the human and civil rights of incarcerated individuals. This endeavor earned her the 2021 Silver Heart from the Society of Professional Journalists, recognizing her exceptional work in journalism.

We first met Paula at our 2023 workshop in Hawaii, and we're thrilled to discuss her groundbreaking new book, the challenges and triumphs of her career, and her vision for the future of social justice.

As she shares insights from Reimagining the Revolution, Lehman-Ewing offers a powerful reminder that change is possible when we dare to dream and act boldly. Join us as we explore the minds and movements that are reshaping our world, one revolutionary step at a time.

Writing Workshops: Your upcoming book, Reimagining the Revolution: Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, explores the work of various activists and organizations reshaping the civil rights landscape. What drew you to these particular stories and subjects?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: The people I’ve been able to meet through this process have incredible lives, with equal parts joy, determination, passion, and resilience. Ilyasah Shabazz, who wrote the foreword for the book, is a fantastic example. She was two years old when her father, Malcolm X, was killed right in front of her, and not only does she do justice to the work of both her parents, she has carved out a space for herself as an individual with her own contributions to the work of racial justice and liberation.

All the people I profile are complex and dynamic beings. For example, if you ask CDCR, Ivan Kilgore and Heshima Denham, the two incarcerated activists who are profiled in the book, are hardened criminals serving life sentences because of the danger they pose to society. But when you talk to them, that’s not what you get. Ivan is warm, smart, and has a great sense of humor—an incredible trait considering the situation he’s in. Heshima is eloquent, spiritual, and bursting with love for people suffering under systems of oppression. And their ideas are brilliant, so as someone who's trained as a journalist to unveil untold stories, I felt compelled to detail their strategies and introduce them to the world.

I’ve had my eye on Critical Resistance and Greenwood for a while. I very distinctly remember watching Killer Mike’s press conference after George Floyd’s death and his call-in to the 2016 MTV/BET town hall when he first pitched an economic revolution. So much of his activism is about putting in more than lip service so I wanted to see if he had followed through—and, of course, he had. CR is like the OG of grassroots organizing, founded by powerhouses like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Rose Baz. I mean anything Angela touches I’m interested in and I happen to have had the privilege of meeting her, so I had to include her organization in the book.

Writing Workshops: In your book, you delve into the lives and work of individuals like Ivan Kilgore and organizations like Critical Resistance and Greenwood. Could you share your research process and how you gathered information and insights for these profiles?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: I think my own work in grassroots organizing bought me a lot of credibility with the sources I worked with. I also approached each subject with a sense of teachability. I was there to learn from them, pushing back only to reach a deeper understanding of how their ideas would become reality.

I was also really respectful of people’s time and did more prep work than anything else. Everyone profiled in the book—and really anyone in the space of social justice work—is extremely limited on time. Some people like Killer Mike and Amb. Andrew Young are high profile and hard to pin down for an interview in whatever capacity, others are just trying to keep up with a news cycle constantly spitting out more things to be pissed about. Knowing time was limited, I did as much reading as I could before I talked to anyone. In addition to several sources I refer to in the book, I read Ivan’s book Domestic Genocide, I reread Angela Davis’ work, and I read articles about Killer Mike and Amb. Young and had a lengthy background call with the third founder of Greenwood, Ryan Glover. That way, when I went to ask them questions, we could really dig into the specifics of their work and unique angles that hadn’t already been made available.

I did something interesting with Killer Mike. At the time I was scheduling his interview, he was in the middle of recording what eventually became Michael, his Grammy-winning solo album. His agent only gave me 30 minutes—no more!—so I watched a bunch of interviews he’d done on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher and The Breakfast Club to see how many questions people were able to ask in a 30-minute timeslot. Usually, Mike’s answers were so prolific that the average was two (!), so I went over my list of questions and picked out the two I absolutely had to ask him, questions only he could answer. I think I ended up asking more, but I was glad I’d gone through the process of preparing for long answers and prioritizing the right questions.

Writing Workshops: One of the key themes of your book is abolition and autonomy. How do you define these concepts within the context of the modern civil rights movement, and how do the stories you present exemplify these principles?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: I think of abolition as the complete demolishment of oppressive systems. So if you’re looking at the prison system, it’s not just shutting down a facility, it’s wiping that facility off the map and using the space and resources for something that benefits the local community. I think abolition can be practiced on an individual level. A couple of examples in the book are things like removing dehumanizing descriptors or coming up with an emergency plan that doesn’t include the police.

Autonomy within an abolitionist setting could be described as the removal of dependence from various systems, but you’ll find it used in the book on a more individual level. One of the things I love to highlight—in the book and in interviews—is Ivan’s sense of humor. That, to me, is a preservation of mental and physical freedom that lives outside the bounds of confinement. Autonomy is existing in an oppressive system without allowing that system to define who you are and how you think and behave. That could be something as iconic as Rosa sitting in the front of the bus or something as mundane as becoming your own boss.

Writing Workshops: Your background includes extensive journalism experience, including work with major publications like BusinessWeek and Forbes. How did your journalistic background inform your approach to writing this book?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: It’s funny. The publisher just sent me an advanced review copy and my first reaction was, “Where’s the rest of it?” Having written news articles for so long, I felt like I had written an encyclopedia! I do feel like I found my voice in writing this book. Working for major publications is great for credibility, but I often found creativity gives way to conformity when it comes to the way a publication structures stories. When I started writing the book, it felt like I got to tell stories again, but when I first started I literally had to remind myself to tell the whole story.

I did, however, have some amazing teachers as a journalist—Ciro Scotti, who was the managing editor at Business Week when I worked there, Jessi Hempel who has her own memoir out now, and Cynthia Gorney, my thesis advisor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism who writes for National Geographic, just to name a few—whose lessons about centering stories in people really informed my approach to this book. This could have been a book about strategies and statistics. Instead, it’s a book about people and how their experiences inform their paths toward more equitable futures. As a reader, statistics are hard to relate to, but I connect to material easily when I have a person guiding me through it.

Writing Workshops: The book highlights the interconnectedness of various movements and individuals within the civil rights struggle. Could you speak to the importance of collaboration and solidarity in effecting meaningful change?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: I think the strongest argument for solidarity comes from the effort to destroy it. The book talks about COINTELPRO, the covert operation used by the FBI to infiltrate Black power movements in the 1970s by leveraging criminalization to foster infighting and undermine movement leaders, often in violation of constitutional rights. That effort resulted in three assassinations—Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton. That’s how important it was for the FBI to destabilize a united front. And divisive tactics are still very much employed today. Even though COINTELPRO “officially” deactivated in 1971, similar infiltration methods have been used as recently as 2020 when the agency recruited an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests in Denver.

The pivotal difference, according to the people I talked to, is that today we know about things like COINTELPRO (although maybe not the whole story) and freedom fighters are, consequently, more focused on the common oppressor knowing to focus on disagreements within the movement will only detract from progress. It still takes some mental retraining—I think there’s a generational instinctive to throw up defenses when a wedge is made between two groups, even if the defense should be put up against the wedger—but more often, I think, people are saying, “Hold up, who’s the real enemy here?”

Writing Workshops: Reimagining the Revolution has received praise from Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black, Ellis Cose, author of The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America, Race and Reckoning, Democracy if We Can Keep It, The End of Anger, The Rage of a Privileged Class, and others, for its intimate portraits of individuals impacted by America's policies of mass incarceration. How did you balance personal storytelling and broader social analysis in your writing?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: Cynthia Gorney, the thesis advisor I mentioned, had a fantastic saying for a first draft. She called it a “vomit draft.” Basically, I just get everything out without thinking about balance or anything else. And when it comes to mass incarceration, I can get very verbose. We’re talking so many tangents even I got lost. Then I’d scroll up a couple of pages, remember what I was trying to write about, and then start again. Spew, spew, spew until everything was out.

The vomit draft, even after I clean it up a bit, still skews heavily toward analysis, simply because the thoughts in my head are more readily available than the thoughts in other people’s heads that I’d manage to bring out in interviews. To find the right balance. I read out loud a lot, mostly to myself but sometimes to others. I had several writing sessions with my Writing Workshops Hawaii 2023 buddy Jason Masino. Jason (who has a fantastic book of poetry out called Sinner’s Prayer) was great because I could tell when he was getting bored, so I’d mark off where that happened as a way to remind myself to get back into storytelling or dialogue. Sometimes it wasn’t that cut and dry but sometimes it really was.

Writing Workshops: Throughout the book, you present a vision of a more just and equitable future. What do you hope readers will take away from these stories, and what role do you see individuals playing in advancing the goals of the modern civil rights movement?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: Depending on their personal experiences with systems of oppression, readers will have different roles when it comes to the modern civil rights movement. People who’ve been directly impacted by incarceration or exclusionary economic practices may be more qualified to offer insight on how to approach change, while a person with a different socioeconomic background may find they're better suited to amplify and mobilize community involvement.

This is one thing, however, that I hope all readers take away from the book: I want readers to challenge their ways of thinking. In some cases, that will mean thinking beyond marching in the streets as a way to effect change. That could mean engaging with one or more of the organizations I profile, but it could also mean coming up with their own designs for a reimagined world. It might mean making that slight shift in perception that lets you see people in a more dynamic light, rather than just good or bad. I think any revolution is going to start with individual evolutions, and I’m hoping my book has some part in catalyzing that individual change.

Writing Workshops: As an award-winning journalist and activist, you've dedicated much of your career to amplifying marginalized voices and addressing racial and social justice issues. What are the most pressing challenges and opportunities in the ongoing fight for civil rights and abolition?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: One of the arguments against reform (versus total abolition) that I make in the book is that incremental change has allowed space and time for oppressive systems to evolve. A lot of that evolution has been normalizing certain policies that don’t seem, on their face, racist, but have a much more severe impact on non-white residents of this country. Take something like sentencing laws. There is a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine convictions: five grams of crack carries the same 5-year minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine. I’m sure a lot of people reading that will be like, yeah that makes sense, but the difference actually has nothing to do with drugs. When these laws were developed, crack was generally used by people of lower socioeconomic status, while powder cocaine was something big Wall Street guys used. So we watched McConaughey take his lunchtime snort in Wolf of Wall Street and Christian Bale doing coke in a swanky club bathroom in American Psycho and society just sort of adjusted to cocaine being less dangerous than crack when chemically there isn’t any difference. The only real difference is the demographics of the people using them.

The constant evolution of racism and racist policies may seem exhaustive but it actually presents social justice movements with a lot of opportunity. Woods Ervin, who works for Critical Resistance, told me when an oppressive system evolves, not only are more people impacted, and, therefore, more compelled to take action, but more “sites of struggle” open up as well. So maybe you’re not impacted by imprisonment but I bet you’re impacted by surveillance, a quickly advancing arm of the prison industrial complex. Remember that these laws were designed to benefit the few, so the majority of people don’t benefit—in terms of economics, security, and otherwise—from them at all. They simply see them as normal and so they accept the rhetoric that’s fed to them about “tough on crime” and all that garbage.

Writing Workshops: Reimagining the Revolution highlights the role of art and creativity in the fight for racial justice, particularly through the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists. How do you see art as a tool for advocacy and healing, and what insights did you gain from exploring the intersection of art and activism?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: The art coming out of prison—be it drawings, poetry, theater, or any other medium—is truly profound. Not just because of the quality and quantity of work that’s generated but just imagine trying to express yourself in an environment designed to deprive you of any real identity. These individuals are known as “inmates.” They have numbers, not names, and despite that, they retain a sense of their own humanity, dignity, and self. I think prison art is the most unrecognized form of abolitionist protest because it is saying, “There is a part of me that will always be free.”

Writing Workshops: In your exploration of the modern civil rights movement, you discuss the Movement for Black Lives, the Alliance for Safety and Justice, BYP 100, and 8toAbolition, among others. How do these diverse movements intersect and collaborate, and what strategies have you observed that are particularly effective in mobilizing communities and driving systemic change?

Paula Lehman-Ewing: At the end of the book, I have a section on how to maintain forward progress in an exhaustive and long-running fight, and one of the things I mention is “staying in your lane.” Since the battle against oppressive systems has to happen on so many fronts, it makes sense to divide and conquer. So BYP is devoted to galvanizing youth support, 8toAbolition is not about defunding police but absolutely erasing budgets for law enforcement agencies. I think a lot of nonprofits try to be everything all at once, and that leads to some of the biggest burnout of any professional sector in the U.S. The same goes for work on an individual level: find your passion—racial justice? Criminal justice? Immigration? Women’s Rights?—and stay laser-focused on it. Get really good at what you do. Support and amplify other just causes, but when it comes to the bulk of your energy, remain steadfast in your aim.

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Paula attended Writing Workshops Hawaii and we couldn't be more excited for her on the publication of her forthcoming book! You can order Reimagining the Revolution: Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern Civil Rights Movement and let us know what you think!