On Cop City and political repression with Rev. Keyanna Jones
(The Rev. Keyanna Jones | Photo from Park Avenue Baptist Church site)
On Monday, November 6, 61 activists were arraigned on racketeering charges for their involvement in protesting the construction of a police and fire training facility in South Atlanta. The facility, colloquially known as Cop City, would transform 300 acres of the Weelaunee Forest.
In 2021, Cop City was announced by then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in April. It was approved in September of that year. Construction plans include a helicopter landing pad, shooting ranges, a mock city, plans for testing bombs, and military-grade training facilities.
These anti-democratic efforts are repressing and censuring any civil disobedience and protests in Atlanta and beyond, by any means necessary. This is happening simultaneously with gentrification displacing Black Atlantans.
Community Movement Builders is a collective of Black activists and community residents fighting against gentrification and police violence in the city. The group focuses on food sustainability, police divestment, and community-centered public safety practices. After Cop City plans were announced, CMB, already protesting against the Atlanta Police Department following the police murder of Rashard Brooks, joined the larger campaigns already occurring against Cop City. They tried to meet with local officials to express how the Black community felt about the facility. They held rallies and teach-ins that police violently shut down.
I talked with one of CMB’s organizers, the Rev. Keyanna Jones, an interfaith pastor at Park Avenue Baptist Church and part of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City, to better understand the history of the land and how gentrification in Atlanta is backed by anti-democratic state repression and police violence.
(Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash)
Jones was born and raised in Atlanta. She moved away for 20 years and began organizing when she lived in New Jersey. Every year she would return to her hometown and see the gradual gentrification of her city. She moved back permanently in 2020. She cared for her father and maternal grandmother, not stepping into community organizing until 2021.
The Atlanta she found was radically different from the city of the early 2000s. “This was not the place where Black people can get on here if they can’t get on anywhere else. This wasn’t the place where Black people were helping each other the way I had talked about for so many years in New Jersey,” Jones tells me. She returned to a city “not only in the midst of mass political chaos but in the midst of rampant political repression.”
She grew up just a mile from Weelaunee Forest and, most recently, lived right behind it. Her relatives attended McNair High School, formerly Walter High, and Barack Obama Elementary, formerly Clifton Elementary. Jones tells me how the forest held a training facility in the 1980s and 90s. Her cousin was part of the original Red Dogs, an anti-drug strike force of the APD founded in 1988 that trained at the facility. The Red Dogs, disbanded in 2011, were involved in heavily policing the Black community in DeKalb County, Georgia’s fourth most populous county, with 760,000 people. Along with heavy policing, there was also a landfill near the facility. Jones describes how Black people avoided the forest growing up.
After the training facility closed, Southeast Atlanta neglected the land, leaving one firing range open. The city did nothing to steward the land.
When she returned during the start of the pandemic, she was surprised to see so much beautification and city resources for the forest. In 2021, she stepped into the forest for the first time. Being in that space and seeing the work organizers were doing to make it sustainable for the Black community galvanized her. She talks about the history of the land, how it went from the Muscogee tribes to plantations to a prison farm to police training facilities in the 1980s and now. “What you have on that land is nothing but the assault and attack on Black bodies from the beginning of time as we know it,” she adds.
She thought deeply about what being displaced from the land does to Black and Indigenous people in the U.S., about the power of learning to live with the land.
Cop City, she tells me, lies within a greater history of disenfranchising Black and Indigenous people economically and physically displacing them from their lands and communities. Gentrification, which the facility’s construction will speed up, is an example of how the state chooses profit over Black people.
The goal, she adds, is to keep us transient and separated.
Taxation without Representation
Choosing profit over people also requires anti-democratic efforts. “We get ourselves into the space of anti-democracy where we are because we see that Mayor Andre Dickens and the Atlanta City Council are beholden to the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is comprised of major corporations.” Jones describes how Dickens, along with the mainstream media, works to undermine organizers against the displacement of Black Atlantans, including using the same rhetoric used in the RICO indictment. This is done, she adds, because politicians serve themselves and corporate interests—regardless of party lines.
Since its announcement, organizers in Atlanta have rallied against Cop City, calling particular attention to the corporate backers of the Atlanta Police Foundation behind the facility’s building, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Delta, Dunkin, Coca-Cola, and Home Depot.
Jones, along with others in the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City, decided to try and use democratic processes in their favor. They turned to the Georgia State Constitution and found the statute that allows citizens to put a question/vote on a ballot when they disagree with a decision made by the local governing body. They started by gathering the necessary signatures for the petition. They went back and forth with the city; Dickens did not want to follow the constitution and argued that signatures for the petition could only be collected by registered voters in DeKalb County.
('Save Weelaunee Forest' and 'LandBack' signs at the Atlanta Forest on February 6, 2023 by Tatsoi via Wikimedia Commons)
Jones and several others decided to sue the city. Dickins and the AG appealed the lawsuit to stop their petition, asking the courts to invalidate their signatures and all referendums going forward. The court ruled in the organizers’ favor, and everyone in the state can collect signatures for any petition as long as the signees are registered voters.
She explains, however, that people in DeKalb County cannot vote against or for the referendum. Because it is unincorporated, the neighborhood has no representation on the City Council, and they are the most impacted by Cop City’s construction. Cop City can exist because there are larger state policies that allow the degradation of the environment in DeKalb County while also suppressing its residents’ voting rights. They are at a stalemate with the referendum, Jones tells me. City Council can choose to add voting on the facility’s construction to the ballot at any moment, but they have yet to.
“This is one of the reasons that we know this land was chosen for Cop City because it’s a perfect storm of people having their hands tied behind their backs, because yes, it’s the city of Atlanta, but it lies within unincorporated Dekalb. So it is under the jurisdiction of Dekalb County. We don’t have a representative on council. We don’t get to vote for the mayor. We don’t get to have a say in the city,” she adds.
The residents in unincorporated DeKalb still pay taxes, though. Jones states: “It is literal taxation without representation.”
People in solidarity with the efforts to Stop Copy City in Atlanta must keep organizing and drawing attention to what is happening there.
What we are seeing in Atlanta is at the intersection of so many issues: reproductive justice, environmental crisis, racism, and censorship. We must, Jones adds, be aware of the insidious ways the environment and land are being used against Black people and how a police state loyal to corporations is used in these efforts.
Jones tells me that political education is critical to CMB’s community events this week. Community Movement Builders organized various teach-ins, rallies, and movie screenings, including a rally supporting the activists facing RICO charges; the Black Family March for Our Futures; and a teach-in about Palestine and the connections between Israeli violence and Cop City. (The last event, co-hosted with the Palestinian Youth Movement, was removed from Eventbrite because “it could contribute to a risk of harm or incite violence.”)
We must understand the violence of settler colonialist violence worldwide, how it censors and violates. We must uplift Black and Indigenous resistance against the state.
“People need to understand what’s at stake when we talk about Cop City and draw the parallel between the oppression from Cop City to the oppression in Palestine to the oppression in Niger to what we are seeing against Cuba,” Jones states.
In solidarity,
-Olga