MLK's Vision Lives On in Atlanta's Fight Against New Police Training Facility

[Uncle Joe]

Protesters in Atlanta, Georgia, march against the "Cop City" facility.
VIA STOPCOP.CITY

"Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence & death & conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Protest by non-locals [organizers against Cop City] are inherently terrorism.” — Second-in-command Atlanta Police Department Assistant Chief Carven Tyus

Here in Atlanta, we just marked the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. The day has been turned into a day of “service.” A day to wash away graffiti and sweep sidewalks — and for many, sweep away the radicalism of Dr. King, who, at the time of his assassination, stood opposed to U.S. imperialism, identified as a socialist, and rethought American racism as not just something that could be cured by “love” but as an idea woven into the fabric of the country that only a social revolution could combat.

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The idea of “Cop City” came after the uprisings in 2020 when the police-perpetrated murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and here in Atlanta, Rashad Brooks, began a new call for defunding and/or abolishing the police. While communities wrestled with the idea of alternative forms of public safety, the Black-led city of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Department, corporations and institutions in Atlanta as diverse as Morehouse, Spellman, Coca-Cola, the Atlanta Hawks, AT&T, and others, put down their Black Lives Matter signs and started planning a $90 million complex to demonstrate their commitment to police and to develop a tactical site that could stop mass movements. These institutions worked with corporate media to shift the narrative from police violence to a focus on “crime,” where the police were again centered as the solution to all our problems. Once the plans to build Cop City became known to the public, opposition emerged immediately. Although public opinion surveys have shown that 70 percent of Atlanta is against it, the city and its corporate friends have continued to move forward with construction.

Since June 2021 when the protest began, demonstrators have been pepper-sprayed, attacked, threatened and violently arrested by the police. Whether the tactics were marches or dismantling bulldozers, demonstrations against Cop City have been criminalized. The movement has dubbed the arrestees as the “Forest Defenders,” who at the time of their arrest were committing acts of civil disobedience by sitting in tree huts to prevent the City of Atlanta from cutting down nearly 100 acres of forest adjacent to one of the last intact Black working-class communities left in Atlanta, one that has not been completely gentrified.

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https://truthout.org/articles/mlks-vision-lives-on-in-atlantas-fight-against-new-police-training-facility/