[Pnews] How the Black Misleadership Class Provides Cover to Cop City

[Prisoner News]

 How the Black Misleadership Class Provides Cover to Cop CityThey’re trying
to create a narrative that the movement is composed of white “outside
agitators.”
https://hammerandhope.org/article/andre-dickens-cop-city-black-politicians

Eva Dickerson

Photographs by Megan Varner, Derek White, Elijah Nouvelage, Marcus Ingram,
and Paras Griffin, via Getty Images.

I’ll never forget the day, during the spring of 2016, when I witnessed
Atlanta’s Black misleadership class firsthand. Members of the Housing
Justice League, a resident-led organization borne of the Occupy movement,
delivered public comment on the proposed development of an area surrounding
a football stadium to the Atlanta City Council. City Hall was packed with
students, elders, and families, many of whom had resisted the city’s
callous destruction of their neighborhoods for years. I watched my mentors
Sherise Brown, Alison Johnson, and other elders speak with passion about
their love for their community and the history of extractive so-called
development that they endured. When Bertha Darden, who was in danger of
losing her home to eminent domain, came to the mic and choked up with
tears, the majority-Black City Council looked back at us with careless
expressions of boredom. (Mrs. Darden recently passed away; of the many
brilliant activists I’ve known, she stood apart for her commitment to
getting this city to do right by the people.) Keisha Lance Bottoms, who
would become mayor in 2018, was on her phone when it was my turn to speak.

Far from being a glib insult, the phrase “Black misleadership class,”
popularized
<https://towardfreedom.org/reviews/book-review-the-late-glen-fords-the-black-agenda-lays-out-blueprint-for-honest-journalism/>
by the journalist Glen Ford, is essential to understanding the dynamics
playing out in Atlanta today. “Cop City” is the derisive name local
activists have given the $90 million (that we know of so far), 85-acre
urban warfare practice facility schemed up via a collaboration between the
Atlanta Police Foundation and the city’s business class in the wake of the
2020 uprisings. And who would sell Cop City to the people? First Bottoms
and then her successor, Mayor Andre Dickens, and other Black Democratic
officials who have aligned with corporate interests and Republicans — Brian
Kemp, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Mary Norwood — to wage war against the
multiracial, intergenerational, grassroots struggle to abolish Cop City.
Cop City would not exist without the lie that the Black people who “run”
this city are a part of my community.

But the movement challenges the Black misleadership class and the way it
provides cover to Cop City. The protest technologies we built, borrowed,
and shared among our comrades across the country and around the world in
2020 primed our imaginations for the strategizing required to destroy Cop
City and transform Atlanta.

Atlanta’s Black Democratic elites, committed to the so-called Atlanta Way,
have proved to be an antagonistic, extractive force time and time again,
from the local government’s continued lies about the scope and cost of the
facility to its bad faith “public engagement
<https://www.acluga.org/en/press-releases/press-release-aclu-georgia-leaves-public-safety-training-center-task-force-over>.”
The Atlanta Way describes
<https://atlantastudies.org/2021/10/04/the-atlanta-way-repression-mediation-and-division-of-black-resistance-from-1906-to-the-2020-george-floyd-uprising/>
the destructive collaboration between Black political elites and white
economic elites in service of racial capitalism. In exchange for their
pacification of radical potential from the Black underclass and for
championing projects and policies that harm ordinary Black people, Black
political elites are rewarded with legacy political positions, backroom
deals, and lucrative career advances. This collaboration lends
respectability to racial inequality because Black political leaders are the
face of it, helping endear Atlantans to a political ecosystem they would
otherwise reject. In Atlanta, the phrase “Black faces in high places” takes
on a new meaning.

Kasim Reed, former mayor of Atlanta. Photograph by Marcus Ingram/Getty
Images.

Every Black politician in Atlanta is implicated by the Atlanta Way, because
it is the only path to political success. Former mayor Kasim Reed — whose
tenure was marred by corruption scandals — tweeted
<https://twitter.com/KasimReed/status/943892461738479616?s=20>, “The
Atlanta Way is alive and well,” after the victory of his successor, Keisha
Lance Bottoms, under whom the plans for Cop City would be announced. As
part of this collaboration, the Black misleadership class directs our anger
back into “suitable” (read: ineffective) channels for “expression” — the
voting booth, the entertainment industry, respectable public forums — in
exchange for political and financial success.

After voting in favor of Cop City and against the hundreds of Atlantans who
came to City Hall in June 2023 to oppose the complex, City Council member
Michael Julian Bond (son of civil rights legend Julian Bond) told The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
<https://www.ajc.com/politics/opinion-atlanta-way-long-gone-as-city-leaders-face-death-threats-over-training-center/7Q57D5ND4ZH25BSJ2WOLPYW2D4/>
that the ensuing protest ran “afoul of ‘the Atlanta way’ that people are
used to for protesting.” Whether it’s Andrew Young calling
<https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-way-challenged-after-violent-night-protests/HWsEwkX0ZN6xD4kesoElSO/>
us “unlovable little brats” in 2016 because we took to the streets to
respond to police violence or John Lewis’s “good trouble” identifying
acceptable types of “protest,” the Atlanta Way and the Black misleadership
class’s role in it prop up a city where the working class is under constant
threat of police terror while corporations and upper-middle-class white
communities enjoy the capital and social benefits of “the city too busy to
hate” (a phrase coined in 1955 by Mayor William Hartsfield, an early
proponent of the Atlanta Way).

The Atlanta Way isn’t limited to local politicians; it extends to anyone
who benefits from the power of such a large Black voting bloc. Raphael
Warnock’s 2020 Senate campaign was framed as a monumental opportunity for
Georgia residents to change the trajectory of our country. Warnock called
Atlanta “the city too busy to hate” during his eulogy
<https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/raphael-warnock-eulogy-for-rayshard-brooks/85-dd5d474c-faf3-4e4f-ae06-99d076a1d81a>
at the June 2020 funeral for Rayshard Brooks, who was killed by the police
officer Garrett Rolfe. Warnock suggested that “rather than trying to
destroy one another, maybe God wants us to use Rayshard’s tragic story and
this dark chapter to move us toward turning the page.” Although Atlanta is
no stranger to protest, the uprisings after Brooks’s killing, including the
burning and occupation of a Wendy’s, expressed decades of compounding hurt.

Senator Raphael Warnock. Photograph by Paras Griffin/Getty Images.

Still on the campaign trail, Warnock claimed that protesters wanted “police
reform,” but the demand from the streets was abolition of the Atlanta
Police Department. While he acknowledged that Rayshard Brooks wasn’t just
running from the police but rather “a system that too often makes slaves
out of people,” when it comes to Cop City, we have little more to show than
a statement
<https://rollcall.com/2020/12/07/georgia-senate-race-warnock-says-loeffler-voted-to-defund-police-but-proof-comes-up-short/>
that the senator opposes defunding or abolishing the police and another
criticizing police repression against Stop Cop City activists.

Black Atlantans were told that we “saved” American democracy after grueling
election cycles in 2020 and 2022, securing the U.S. Senate for Democrats.
That feat earned us a proposed police terror complex in a Black community
made possible by the Black misleadership class in a stunningly undemocratic
process.

As the movement against Cop City prepared for another week of action in the
summer of 2022, Stacey Abrams shared her plan to raise pay for law
enforcement
<https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2022/06/23/exclusive-stacey-abrams-wants-fund-the-police>
as she campaigned again to be the Black voice in the governor’s office.
Recently, Abrams has been silent about Black Democrats’ efforts to quash a
referendum on Cop City’s lease, even though Republicans wielded some of
those same suppression tactics against her campaign when she ran for
governor in 2018.

The failure of Abrams, Warnock, Nikema Williams (John Lewis’s successor),
and other Black Georgia Democrats to oppose the facility is a slap in the
face; but as the Black faces lending “respectability” to the Cop City
project, they are simply performing their role in the Atlanta Way bargain.
The fact that many of them fell over themselves to offer “solidarity” when
Tennessee Republicans expelled two Black elected officials from the
Legislature shows they play the game as they have been instructed for
decades: make nominal nods to the importance of justice and democracy, and
no more.

Mayor Andre Dickens of Atlanta. Photograph by Derek White/Getty Images for
Operation HOPE, Inc.

Mayor Andre Dickens positions himself as both the spokesperson and arbiter
of Black culture in the so-called Black Mecca. He and his administration
have worked hard to present the militarization facility as something that
Black Atlantans overwhelmingly desire. The mayor insists that Cop City
answers Black Atlantans’ demands that police stop killing them. To Dickens,
the Atlanta Police Department needs the training facility to learn how to
not murder us. We know that no training can transform the inherent nature
of policing. City Council member Antonio Lewis cheered
<https://twitter.com/ACPC_Live/status/1671265919568584704?s=20> Dickens for
uplifting the Atlanta Way after approving his 2024 budget, which allocated
about 30 percent of the general fund to the Atlanta Police Department,
despite voters’ consistent calls to shrink the police budget.

Through several hijinks — from giving a press conference with a group of
Black men in ill-fitting suits in the background and honoring local elders
with community awards to making videos exclusively featuring Black
residents who claim to favor the training facility — the mayor has spun a
false narrative that Atlanta’s Black residents support Cop City. Most
egregious of all the hijinks were the mass arrests at a music festival on
March 5. Activists on the ground noted that most Black people or people
with Atlanta addresses were released, while many white activists
<https://theintercept.com/2023/03/08/atlanta-cop-city-protesters/> were
charged with domestic terrorism. The mayor and other Black council members
falsely insist that mostly white people oppose the project. At one point,
Antonio Lewis said, “If Black and brown people were out there, I’d be out
there leading them. This is not that. This is anarchy.”

Black people recognize that their presence in this struggle disrupts the
mayor’s attempts to push Cop City through without resistance. That is why
Atlanta University Center Consortium students and alumni, along with
community faith leaders and organizations like Community Movement Builders
and Black Voters Matter, have taken every opportunity to name the ways Cop
City will harm Black Atlantans and describe how our most pressing interests
(housing, food sovereignty, health care, etc.) are being pushed aside.

Michael Julian Bond, member of the Atlanta City Council. Photograph by
Marcus Ingram/Getty Images.

This was best demonstrated at one of the largest Black-led marches in the
protest against Cop City, which Black radicals coordinated on March 10 in
response to the strategically applied domestic terrorism charges; the
murder of Manuel Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita; and the incessant lie
that white “outside agitators” make up this movement, not everyday Black
Atlantans. Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, called
the mayor’s bluff when he said
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/12/atlanta-cop-city-black-community-protest>,
“Mayor Dickens, is this enough Black folks for you?” and added, “Do we have
enough people from Atlanta here for you?” That march and the many other
actions led by Jasmine Burnett, Keyana Jones, Mariah Parker
<https://hammerandhope.org/article/stop-cop-city-parker-atlanta>, Matthew
Johnson, and other Black organizers challenge Dickens’s attempts to
manufacture support for Cop City through false racial narratives about both
the movement and Black voter preferences. We refuse to let him tell a story
where Black Atlanta accepts his smooth gospel.

On July 27, Dickens complained
<https://twitter.com/andreforatlanta/status/1684585610466545665?s=20> about
the “noisy people” who had gathered 30,000 signatures in support of a
referendum to cancel Cop City’s lease (more than the number of votes he
received in the general election that led to him becoming mayor) and
warned, “Atlanta is a group project where government, nonprofits,
businesses, schools, faith-based organizations, and citizens all support
the project or suffer the consequences.” Instead the movement forces Black
politicians to suffer consequences. What 2020 asked us and what the
struggle against Cop City answers is: What if we took the mechanism of
accountability for the Democratic cause into our own hands? Now the tactics
and strategies to stop Cop City can be used to challenge the power of the
Black misleadership class and the Atlanta Way.

Rep. Nikema Williams, Democrat of Georgia. Photograph by Megan Varner/Getty
Images.

The frequency with which Black Democrats of Georgia weaponize the rhetoric
of “the Atlanta Way” and “good trouble” suggests a fear of the legacy of
the 2020 uprisings. It threatened the Black misleadership class’s
comfortable position within the power matrix of this city. The fact that
the fervor of protest from 2020 has flowed into and focused the organizing
against Cop City is an escalation of that threat. The uprisings also
signaled that the era of viral videos and hashtags was coming to an end,
and from those ashes we could usher in a new era of spontaneous, tactical,
and protracted engagements with the state to demand much more than “Hands
up, don’t shoot.”

We got some early practice at a decentralized resistance strategy in 2020,
scattering the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to respond to the number
of disruptions across the city. We developed and strengthened mutual-aid
networks for everything from jail support and bail funds to rideshares and
homeless support that spanned the state, country, and beyond. Collectives
came together to research and then teach strong protest strategy, drawing
on support from comrades in Chicago, Baltimore, Palestine, Chile, and Hong
Kong. Elements of that work have shown up in the many efforts against Cop
City — the result of careful and intentional efforts among our communities
to connect the current moment to all the ones that led up to it.

In the 2022 report “Big Brick Energy
<http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2022/07/big-brick-energy-a-multi-city-study-of-the-2020-george-floyd-uprising/>,”
the communist collective Unity and Struggle argued: “By popularizing
militant tactics, maintaining infrastructures to sustain resistance, and
hampering law enforcement’s ability to coordinate, we set ourselves up for
tactical successes. By keeping factions of the state at odds, cultivating
citywide collaborations across different communities and class layers, and
defending the legitimacy of Black street militancy, we lay the basis for
strategic momentum.”

Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta. Photograph by Elijah
Nouvelage/Getty Images.

Yet the collective also notes that gains have been lost. Most cities failed
to reduce police budgets, much less abolish them. And the liberal
institutions that grandstanded about racial justice have all but walked
back their commitments while attempting to co-opt the energy and fury from
the streets into the Democratic Party machine. In other words, the shift
toward electoral democracy weakened the protests.

It was unbearable to be in Atlanta in the fall of 2020. That October, I got
a text
<https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/50955/1/young-people-across-us-are-not-voting-presidential-election-millennials-gen-z>
from an unfamiliar number: “Hi, I’m a volunteer w Black Lives Matter.
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor can’t vote, but you can. From the protest
to the polls, find where to vote here.” A friend showed me a screenshot of
a text message from another organization that read “Black lives won’t
matter unless we vote.” In Atlanta the institutions that make endless bids
to steal power from us — nonprofits, civic society organizations, and of
course the Georgia Democratic Party — shifted from promises of
transformation to demands that we get out of the streets and fall in line
at the voting booth. (Throughout the hours of impassioned speeches on June
5 of this year demanding that the mayor and the City Council reverse
progress on Cop City, people alluded to the fact that should the people we
elected not bend to our will, they would be replaced. Yet the current City
Council and mayor are already just replacements for the previous City
Council and mayor.)

Now the movement has added another tactic: gathering signatures for a
referendum. While this has made opposition to Cop City more accessible to
those who have yet to find a place for themselves in this struggle, it has
not yet stalled construction. Meanwhile, the talented coalition behind the
referendum has had to jump over hurdles placed in front of them by Black
Democrats who otherwise fetishize the right to vote. When we are closer
than ever to cohering a mass of people who understand that we are at war
with the state, the effectiveness of sabotage over all other tactics cannot
be overemphasized. As my friend Micah Herskind has written, the
constellation of tactics employed by radical Atlantans includes everything
from encampments and agitprop to direct sabotage of the facility. These
tactics are not only in line with a long legacy of strategies
<https://www.kristianwilliams.com/product/confrontations-selected-journalism/>
against environmental destruction; they have also led contractors to drop
out of the project
<https://www.instagram.com/p/CukghiDu89Y/?__coig_restricted=1> and delayed
construction by over two years. The movement against Cop City has forced
the Black misleadership class to push its claim that state-sanctioned
protest is the “true” Atlanta Way while decrying sabotage and direct
confrontation. But how could the destruction of construction equipment or
the occupation of a forest ever compare to the killing of our comrade
Tortuguita? How could confrontation with the police compare to disappearing
our people into the bowels of jails and prisons for indefinite amounts of
time? The struggle against Cop City represents an opportunity for Atlantans
to flex their own power and build mechanisms for reclaiming influence and
social capital from our Black misleaders.

Eva Dickerson has developed mutual-aid projects and supported abolitionist
coalitions on the streets of Atlanta, while working alongside very bright
young people in gardens and farms across the city.
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