The campaign to Stop Cop City is continuing on many fronts in Atlanta, Georgia. If construction is completed, this militarized police training facility, on what was once a large forest considered to be the “fourth lung” of the city, would be the largest training center of its kind in the U.S. It’s expected that the facility will be utilized by police departments from around the country.
Among the tactics being used by Cop City opponents, are visits to the home of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens to pressure him to drop the city’s court appeal against a referendum that would put the project up for a citywide vote. On “Forest Fridays,” young people protest the project outside the training center construction site. And city residents are offering financial and moral support for the 61 “Stop Cop City” activists who were arrested and charged with serious crimes under Georgia’s RICO law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with the Rev. Keyanna Jones, co-pastor of Atlanta’s Park Avenue Baptist Church and a member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City. Here she talks about the successful effort to collect 116,000 petition signatures to put cop city’s future on the ballot and Mayor Dickens’ refusal to do so.
REV. KEYANNA JONES: Because of the fact that the mayor at every step has opposed direct democracy and is showing us a side of voter suppression that we haven’t quite seen before, people are really emphatic about pressuring him to drop this appeal so that the people can decide. I absolutely believe that this will make it to a ballot. But the question is, will Cop City be built by then? And then we have to go back and tear it down because the people don’t want it.
MELINDA TUHUS: Have they actually started building the facility itself?
REV. KEYANNA JONES: They have not started building the facility itself and they actually have cut down way more than 85 acres of trees. They have cut down all of what was there in the South River Forest. They did begin to start to put the foundations for infrastructure, like you said, different roads and stuff that they were trying to pave. And they are still really behind schedule, but they’re trying to rush things along as quickly as they can.
But what it also has shown is the enormous effect that taking down those trees has here in South DeKalb County. What we see is major flooding around the area where they wan to build Cop City and an enormous amount of silt running into the watershed. What we see is exactly what we have predicted. The media doesn’t like to show it, the mayor doesn’t like to talk about it, but all of these environmental effects that we were warning about are happening and we’re seeing them in real time, especially the more rain we get, the more we see how vital the South River Forest really was to this area.
MELINDA TUHUS: Since so many Atlantans signed the petition to get the referendum on the ballot, do you have a sense that many people are against it as well or do some people just sign it because they thought it should have a chance to be voted on?
REV. KEYANNA JONES: The majority of people are against it. And I can say that because we had people canvassing door to door. We had people out in different shopping districts canvassing, doing street canvases and other locales around the city, and the vast majority of people are against it. But there were quite a few people who said, “Hey, I actually do believe they need a facility. But I also believe that people should have a right to vote because it’s just not right to come and tear down that much forest land and totally disrupt a residential community without people having a vote.”
There are also people who are really afraid about the crime stats, but crime in Atlanta has been consistently going down since 2020.
MELINDA TUHUS: The leadership of Atlanta, I know it’s not 100 percent African American, but the mayor’s African American and several of the people on the city council like the son of Julian Bond has been an outspoken supporter of Cop City. What do people there think about the fact that these people who as a result of the successes of the civil rights movement are now in elected office, the positions that they’re taking are against the people?
REV. KEYANNA JONES: Yeah. We definitely don’t look at them as leadership. We call them the black misleadership class because it’s exactly what they are. They are black faces in high places who have the names of people who others have looked up to for many, many decades from the civil rights movement. If you’re talking about Michael Julian Bond, you have people on the council, like you said, who are majority black. They are many of them been born and raised here and know the history of the city. But what they also know is that there is something called the “Atlanta Way” that has been this type of silent agreement between black leadership in Atlanta and the white supremacist infrastructure of the city.
And that agreement held that as long as certain black people were afforded positions of authority, then they would ensure that they would lead the black people of the city in a certain path that would not lead to dissent against the state.
And what that has begun to look like now is a clash between the citizens and the people who are supposed to represent them. The citizens of Atlanta, by and large, do not feel represented by those people who are on city council. And you can see that in that the people of Atlanta have shown up many, many times for public comment at different City Hall, city council meetings and we have shown up for 17 hours at the height of the pandemic on Zoom. We’ve shown up for 21 hours. And those very same council members who were elected by the people turned their backs on the people and didn’t stand for the people. People are beginning to see that just because there are black people in leadership in a majority black locale, they don’t necessarily have the best interest of the people at heart.
Learn more about how to support 61 Stop Cop City activists arrested under Georgia’s RICO law by visiting Stop Cop City at stopcop.city, Stop Cop City Solidarity at stopcopcitysolidarity.org and Cop City Vote at copcityvote.com.
For the best listening experience and to never miss an episode, subscribe to Between The Lines on your favorite podcast app or platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castro, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, Tunein+ Alexa, Castbox, Overcast, Podfriend, RSS Feed.
Or subscribe to our Between The Lines and Counterpoint Weekly Summary.
