Police Free Schools: With M. Adams of Freedom Inc in Madison, Wisconsin

M. Adams, Co-Executive Director of Freedom, Inc, talks with host Max Rameau about Black-Asian solidarity, lessons from multiracial organizing in a mostly white Midwest city, and their recent victory in removing police from schools in Madison, Wisconsin.

M. Adams is a community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Adams has been in Madison since 2003. Adams’s dad has been incarcerated most of her life and she comes from a community that has been the extreme targets of police violence.  In March 2016, Adams’s mother transitioned after fighting cancer and many forms of violence. Adams is also a parent and sees her family as a primary motivator for her work. 

As a queer Black person, Adams has developed and advocated for a strong intersectional approach in numerous important venues. Adams is a leading figure in the Take Back the Land Movement, she presented before the United Nations for the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, she is a co-author of Forward from Ferguson and a paper on Black community control over the police, and she contributed to intersectionality theory in Why Killing Unarmed Black folks is a Queer issue.

Freedom, Inc. (FI) is a Black and Southeast Asian non-profit organization that works with low- to no-income communities of color in Madison, Wisconsin. Their mission is to achieve social justice through coupling direct services with leadership development and community organizing that will bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change resulting in the end of violence against women, gender-non-conforming and transgender folks, and children within communities of color. FI works to challenge the root causes of violence, poverty, racism and discrimination. Their belief is that people who are most affected by these issues must have voice, power, resources and choice, in order for true social change to happen.

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