Throughout slavery and Jim Crow, hoodoo practitioners provided their communities with protective amulets, love spells, medicinal tinctures, and ancestral wisdom.
Hoodoo practitioners were some of the original abolitionists. On plantations, hoodoo women created charms that protected the carrier from violent corporal punishments inflicted by enslavers.
After emancipation, numerous anti-Black laws were enforced to police and incarcerate our people. Spiritual practitioners, like the famed Marie Laveau, specialized in “courthouse spells” and other forms of justice magic.
These spells shielded our community from vindictive white juries, corrupt judges, and bloodthirsty lynch mobs.
While these spells helped to protect our people battling the court systems, true justice can be achieved through abolition. Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes “abolition is not simply about getting rid of the prisons, police or systems of surveillance and punishment; abolition is about what we build in their place.”
One of the biggest ways we can resist anti-Black violence is to believe in an abolitionist future, not as a possibility, but as our only option. This work begins with community care.
We know deeply that it’s community that keeps us safe. Every protective amulet, charm, tincture, and root that hoodoo practitioners provided their communities were forms of resistance through community care.
Abolitionist futures are possible, and they start within our communities.