When most people think of Atlanta, they conjure up images of Black excellence, Tyler Perry, the civil rights movements, hip hop, and numerous images of Black leadership. Atlanta has carefully constructed this image to mask the harsh realities of city life. Here are some of those realities
Atlanta has the worst income inequality in the nation.
Atlanta is the leader in gentrification and the city has gone from 70 percent black to 48 percent in less than 30 years.
Atlanta has a stark racial wealth gap. White Atlanta families have a median household income of $83,722 which is three times higher than Black families’ median income of $28,105. When you look at total wealth, the gap widens enormously. White Atlanta households have a staggering 46 times more wealth than Black households–$238,355 for white families, compared to just $5,180 for Black ones.
Nearly 28 percent of black folks in Atlanta are poor
On top of that, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the world and oddly enough has the most Confederate monuments of any city in the country.
The History of Racist Terror in the City
Atlanta used to be a major slave trading hub and after the Civil War, became a major hub for formerly enslaved black people to come to. Those people set up communities like Pittsburgh and built political and economic power despite Jim Crow. The ruling elites and white working class were outraged at this power which led to the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906. Whites attacked Black people and burned their businesses in a three-day siege of terror. Black people organized to fight back. As documented by WEB Dubois who was a teacher at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), he was standing on his porch with a shotgun ready to fire at any white who came onto his property. Particularly in the Black enclave known as Brownsville, Black organized for self-defense and were ready when white mobs attacked the area. A shootout occurred and a white policeman was killed. The race massacre eventually came to an end due to the intervention of state officials but the damage was immense. Countless blacks fled the city, numerous people died, and billions of Black property and homes were destroyed. In the aftermath of this, white elites sought the support of black elites to quell any future black uprisings. These elites formed an unofficial agreement known as the Atlanta Way where black elites would operate as a buffer in the black community for the white elites to quell any uprisings. White supremacy in Atlanta was not eliminated but this new unelected Black bourgeois would work to quell any black radical responses to terror and marginalization that Blacks experienced during Jim Crow to prevent future disturbances.
In the 1970s, Atlanta elected its first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. This was only possible due to the radical organizing of Atlanta activists which included not Dr. King but students who formed the Atlanta Student Movement to desegregate Atlanta. At the time, there was a widespread backlash against civil rights gains which led to the resurgence of white supremacist groups. The surrounding area has always been a hub of Klan activity given that the state had constructed the world’s largest white supremacy monument at Stone Mountain as backlash to the civil rights movements. White supremacist groups were particularly outraged at busing to reverse school desegregation and announced that they would kill one black child a month in opposition. Thus became known as the Atlanta Child Murders which occurred from 1979 to 1983 where officially nearly 26 black children were murdered. This incident provoked outrage in the black community and again the community organized for self-defense in the form of the bat brigades. These efforts were criminalized yet the murders continued unabated for years. While APD and GBI had solid information that it was the Klan carrying out this operation, they were not arrested. Instead, white elites i.e. newly elected Vice President George Bush came to Atlanta to meet with black elites i.e. Maynard Jackson and it was decided to pin the crime on an innocent black man, Wayne Williams to prevent any black uprising. With major FBI investment and shoddy evidence, Wayne Williams was convicted of two murders of adult men and the city pinned the remaining 24 child murders on him without zero evidence or a trial. This case was one of the biggest travesties of justice to cover up the biggest act of white terrorism in US history. Atlanta went on to become the host of the 1996 Olympics which facilitated rapid gentrification, the destruction of the Atlanta housing projects and the continued criminalization of Black folks by the Atlanta police under the notorious "Red Dog" unit. This was done while Atlanta continued to project a sense of Black power. That all came to be challenged in 2020.
In 2020, the world shut down due to COVID and the murder of George Floyd shocked the world. Atlanta experienced a major uprising which led to the vandalism of the CNN building and Lenox Mall. White elites called upon Black elites i.e. rappers to urge calm. However, that message was ignored by the Atlanta police who two weeks later murdered Rayshard Brooks. In response, the Wendy’s where he was murdered was burned down and Black people turned the area into a liberated zone where unhoused people could sleep, mutual aid was given, and no police were allowed. This liberated zone was eventually taken back by the city after a suspicious and tragic murder of a young child. These series of events threw off the veil of black progress and exposed the numerous injustices that organizations like Community Movement Builders had been organizing against for years. Gentrification, police terror, and the collaboration of black elites with white elites at the expense of the black community. The city proposed piecemeal reforms i.e. Juneteenth, the adoption of pro-police reforms i.e. 8 can't wait but its biggest reform, Cop City would garner an international movement.
Cop City and The Emergence of Stop Cop Movement
Cop City was first announced in 2021 by Mayor Bottoms who was in power during the 2020 uprisings. The city tried to shroud the details of the nearly 381-acre plan but Community Movements Builders and other organizers immediately raised red flags. Cop City was going to be a police training facility featuring a mock city, firing range, bomb testing site, gymnasium, and bar. The city would be giving the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation which is one of the largest police foundations in the country and they would build the facility as a revenue generator to train officers from all across the country in “urban warfare”. The city originally said that only 30 million dollars of tax dollars would be spent and the remaining amount would be funded by the Atlanta Police Foundation. Immediately our organization asked why now and why so much money into policing when the has so many other pressing needs i.e. housing insecurity. We immediately saw this for what it was, a backlash against the 2020 uprisings. The 2020 uprisings saw record numbers of people in the streets demanding defunding, abolishing, and accountability for police. The protests were sustained and often destructive of elite property. For the first time in years, police felt bad and many quit their jobs since the oppressive nature was being decried. Thus the ruling elites decided that they needed to boost the morale of the police and have them better prepared for future uprisings. History was indeed repeating itself since the federal government set up mock cities in the 60s in response to the civil rights movement to train on how to repress urban rebellions. Cop City was not about fighting crime or addressing a deficiency in training when the police already receive countless hours of training, it was about being better equipped to repress black and left-wing movements. Furthermore, the militarized tactics being taught would only be used to further terrorize the black population of the city since all officers would be taught these tactics. Thus we organized a resistance to this project.
At first, we held rallies and demanded people call their city council. The city council did approve the lease in August 2021 but the movement continued to grow. Immediately after the lease approval, forest defenders took up space in the area to prevent the project from moving forward. Where the city decided to locate this facility was telling. The area witnessed the violent expulsion of the Muscogee people in the 1800s and then it became a plantation. After that, it was a city prison farm where black people were sent to be worked in slave-like conditions and were frequently tortured. That jail eventually closed in the 1990s and a burgeoning ecosystem developed around the area known as the Atlanta forest. It was the largest intact urban forest and acted as an important protector against climate change. The land itself is in Dekalb County which is the blackest county in America percentage. However, the city owned the land thus leaving Dekalb County residents no say in how the land was developed. The exact neighborhood was which is a working-class black community and this project was right near the South River which is the one of most endangered rivers in the country. Thus black people would be bearing the burden and massive pollution i.e. lead and noise from this project without having any say in the matter. The more details came out about this project the more outrage it provoked. We continued to organize rallies against the project and supported the efforts of the forest defenders. The forest defenders were almost there for a year until the first raid occurred in December of 2022. A SWAT raid of FBI and local police arrested those forest defenders who were doing nothing more than sitting in trees while labeling them domestic terrorists. It was predicted by organizers that someone was going to die. Then in January 2023, Tortuguita a brave forest defender was brutally murdered with their hands up. The state’s story changed more than a Hollywood set and eyewitnesses exposed that this was indeed a political assassination to crush the resistance to this project. It was devasting to those in the movement to lose such a brave and fierce environmentalist. However, the movement continued to grow. We organized sit-ins at the city council, ballot referendums which got nearly 116,000 signatures, and countless rallies but the city still refused to budge. Instead, the resort to the same violent tactics would be taught at cop city including collective punishment through mass arrests, swat raids of bail organizers, and the broad use of domestic terror and RICO charges. This was again devasting to the movement but it did not falter. The movement continues and gained even more momentum given the genocide in Gaza. Georgia law enforcement has a training program known as GILEE where officers go to Israel and learn their terroristic tactics and where IDF and Israeli police come to the US and learn how police terrorize black people. Cop City would certainly be a training site for Israeli forces and Community Movement Builders immediately stood in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement and were able to tie the struggles together.
No Cop City here or elsewhere
Once the movement of Cop City in Atlanta took off, people from around the country began to see that there were similar plans all across the country. Thus this local movement became something that inspired people from around the country to resist other efforts to further militarize the police and divest from local communities. I was proud of the movement I contributed to. As someone who loves the environment and Black people, it was some of the most meaningful activism I have done in my life. I experienced many heartaches and I remember those hot days in the sun talking to black folks in the city about the state of the city through the petition drive, but it was all worth it. Atlanta has a long history of racial terrorism but also a rich history of those who challenged that terror. I hope that narrative will one day be included in the long history of freedom fighters who stood up for justice amid broad attacks. Stop Cop City and Black Power!
References
How Does Atlanta address its enormous racial wealth gap? (atlantaciviccircle.org)
(re)Defining History: Uncovering the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (youtube.com)
None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators by Shani Robinson, Anna Simonton
List of Confederate monuments and memorials in Georgia - Wikipedia
We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Umoja
ESO_2200050 1..16 (cambridge.org)
Stone Mountain: A Monumental Dilemma | Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org)
Remembering the Atlanta Student Movement’s fight for desegregation – WABE
Formation of a 'bat patrol' to protect black children... - UPI Archives
George Floyd protests in Atlanta - Wikipedia
CrimethInc. : We Are Now: The Story of an Armed No-Cop Zone in Atlanta : A Documentary Film
In Atlanta, Proposed 'Cop City' Stirs Environmental Justice Concerns - Inside Climate News
Stop Cop City activists link GILEE program to Palestinian genocide (prismreports.org)
Despite 116,000 Signatures, Atlanta Won’t Validate Stop Cop City Petition | Truthout