The reading list below is organized broadly by topic and should be considered representative, not definitive.
Have a suggestion for the list? Email us at copcitysyllabus@protonmail.com.
The South River (Weelaunee) Forest
“Our Future City: The Atlanta City Design.” Department of City Planning, 2017. Calls for the creation of a new park encompassing the South River Forest, to become one of the four “lungs” of Atlanta.
“South River Forest: A Big Idea for Atlanta.” The Nature Conservancy, February 25, 2019.
Some communities along the South River struggle. Residents of Thomasville Heights, for example, are faced with high crime rates and chronic poverty. Rising rent and the risk of displacement are ever-present concerns. In fact, a 2017 study identified the South River area of southeast Atlanta as a place where collaborative, community-based conservation could meet social equity and environmental objectives.
“Our River: Overview.” South River Watershed Alliance, 2020.
The South River is one of only two urban-origin rivers in the state of Georgia. Its watershed comprises approximately 544 square miles of creeks and streams that drain large sections of Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Henry, Rockdale, Newton, and Butts Counties. The river is a headwater of Georgia’s largest freshwater system, the Ocmulgee and Altamaha River basins, which feed the Atlantic Ocean.
“Urban Green Jobs: Building Skills and Pride along Atlanta's South River.” The Nature Conservancy, August 30, 2020.
“South River Forest: A Big Green Dream Starts to Come True” by John Ruch. Saporta Report, June 8, 2021.
Located in an area of historic racial segregation, many industrial uses, prison sites and limited economic opportunity, the river and its communities also have suffered from pollution. For decades, the area has literally been a toilet and garbage pail for much of the city and county, with landfills aplenty and raw sewage pouring into the waterways by accident or on purpose as emergency overflows. In April, the nonprofit American Rivers named the South River No. 4 on its annual list of the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers.
“We call it the dumping ground. It was a set of communities that I think felt like they were thrown away…,” says [Deron] Davis.
Community activists and nonprofits have responded. The SRWA formed 20 years ago to combat the sewage and other pollution. HABESHA, a nonprofit with a Pan-African focus, teaches gardening and urban forestry. Davis said that TNC, which has long worked with those and other local groups, intended to form some umbrella organization for the South River Forest plan — but the community beat them to it with the 2018 founding of the South River Forest Coalition.
“In Search of the ‘Weelaunee’ (South River, Georgia)” by Mark Auslander. March 31, 2022.
“Songs of the Forest: A ‘Rematriation’ Gathering in Weelaunee (South River) Forest” by Mark Auslander. April 26, 2022.
Creek ceremonialists in November 2021 gathered in this same space, the Intrenchment Creek Trailhead, around a sacred fire, to perform a stomp dance that reproduced rhythms heard and sensed in these forest land centuries ago. Now, Creek and allied scholars and community organizers joined with the forest defenders to consider what a better world might look like, in the forest and beyond, and to re-establish bonds with this sacred space.
“A Walk Through Weelaunee Forest” by Alexandra Edwards. The Xylom, March 29, 2023.
The Atlanta City Prison Farm
“A brief history of the Atlanta City Prison Farm.” Atlanta Community Press Collective, August 14, 2021.
Archival research into the Key Road site reveals that… it was run as a city prison farm uninterrupted from about 1920 to nearly 1990, and doing considerable harm to those it incarcerated throughout, despite claims of reform at every stage. Newspaper articles, letters from nurses, legislative and inspection records, and folk stories tell tales of overcrowding, “slave conditions,” lack of healthcare, labor strikes, deaths, and unmarked “pauper’s” graves.
“The Atlanta City Prison Farm from the Archaic to Now,” transcript of narrative written by Lily Ponitz. September 2021.
Cop City
For more news coverage of Cop City, see our page of further reading.
2021
“Atlanta mayor touts plans to open new police training center” by Wilborn P. Nobles III. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 1, 2021.
“Opposition grows to police training center at Atlanta Prison Farm” by Maria Saporta. Saporta Report, June 14, 2021.
For decades, the vision for the historic Atlanta Prison Farm has been to transform it into a green jewel for the region.
The Atlanta City Design, incorporated into the official city charter in December 2017, called for the prison farm to be the centerpiece of a grand South River Forest Park. That vision was unanimously adopted by the Atlanta City Council.
But now the Atlanta Police Foundation and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms have proposed turning 150 acres of the Prison Farm’s 348 acres into a massive public safety training campus complete with indoor and outdoor shooting ranges, bomb detonation and explosion tests, burning buildings for fire training, a road course to practice car chases, pastureland for the city’s mounted patrol among other training facilities.
“Public safety training center plan heads to City Council with a chorus of opposition” by John Ruch. Saporta Report, August 13, 2021.
The East Atlanta Community Association last month also issued a statement of opposition, saying the Prison Farm site should be preserved for green space, natural habitat and public recreation. It also called for a “qualified and transparent feasibility study” of what kind of public safety training center is needed and where it should go.
“Why Atlantans are pushing to stop ‘Cop City’” by Aja Arnold. The Appeal, December 8, 2021.
Beyond the basic objections to such a major expansion of the city’s policing footprint, environmentalists are also up in arms, since the site’s proposed location lies within the South River Forest, which is the Atlanta area’s largest remaining green space and, scientists say, one of the city’s greatest defenses against worsening climate change.
2022
“Abolitionists and Environmentalists in Atlanta Band Together to ‘Stop Cop City’” by Mira Sydow. Yes!, March 22, 2022.
“The City in the Forest: Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization.” Crimethinc, April 11, 2022.
“Native Americans Share Concerns of Over Fate of Forest” by Gloria Tatum. Streets of Atlanta, May 2, 2022.
“We don’t live among resources; we live among relatives. The trees, water, land, plants, and animals are our relatives, and we respect them; we don’t destroy them,” [Daniel] Wildcat said.
The forest [our relative] is a teacher, a healer, and an elder that can make us better human beings. We have a right to have relationships with some of our other [more-than-human] relatives. We have a responsibility to be good relatives in this world to our other relatives in this forest.
“Atlanta community members warn of environmental damage from ‘Cop City’” by Ray Levy Uyeda. Prism, June 15, 2022.
The South River Forest is what Kathryn Kolb, an Atlanta-based naturalist, photographer, and founder of the environmental organization Eco Addendum, would call a recovering native forest home to a scattering of old-growth trees. Kolb says that “from an ecological perspective, it would kind of be a shame” to place the proposed facility at the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The forest is recovering from decades of logging, farming, and construction, and is on the verge of flourishing again. It would be an incredible loss to squander the forest’s potential recovery and what that would mean for Atlanta residents. […]
In the neighborhoods surrounding the South River Forest, 71-88% of residents are Black, with asthma rates in the 94th percentile and diabetes in the 80th percentile nationally. The vast majority of residents live at or below the federal poverty level, and the neighborhoods rank in the 96th percentile nationally for toxic water pollution. Cutting down trees, leaching construction materials into soil, and polluting waterways with heavy metal toxins found in bullets and grenades, which would be used in police training, would further place the neighborhoods’ residents at risk.
“The New Fight Over an Old Forest” by Charles Bethea. New Yorker, August 3, 2022.
“Beneath the Concrete, the Forest: Accounts from the Defense of the Atlanta Forest.” Crimethinc, August 9, 2022.
“The Battle for ‘Cop City’” by Jack Crosbie. Rolling Stone, September 3, 2022.
“Forest for the Trees” by David Peisner. The Bitter Southerner, December 13, 2022.
The land became a dumping ground for businesses and residents, evidence of which remains scattered throughout the property. In places, knotty tree trunks and leafy vines grow up, around, and through disused auto parts, rusting steel drums, and crumbling cinder blocks. Mountains of old tires dot the property. It’s common to find spent ammunition left by the Atlanta Police Department, which uses an area around the forest as a gun and explosives range. There’s more surprising detritus, too. The stately marble façade from the Carnegie Library, Atlanta’s first public library, was discarded in a section of the woods in large stone pieces sometime after it was demolished in 1977. The Atlanta Zoo buried several elephants on the property. More troublingly, some inmates who died at the prison farm are widely believed to be buried in unmarked graves, though none have yet been found.
2023
“Little Turtle’s War” by David Peisner. The Bitter Southerner, January 20, 2023.
The situation in the South River Forest has deteriorated markedly. There were massive raids by law enforcement in mid-December that attempted to clear all of the forest defenders off the land in Intrenchment Creek Park and across the creek, on the site where the city intends to build the training facility for police and firefighters. The police reportedly used tear gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets to help dislodge activists from tree-sits. I visited the forest immediately after these raids, and the encampments had been trashed, structures built by forest defenders had been dismantled, and a community garden had been trampled. Most of the activists had fled the forest, though several were arrested on a host of charges, including, most controversially, domestic terrorism.
“‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’” by Timothy Pratt. Guardian, January 21, 2023.
“Killings of environmental activists by the state are depressingly common in other countries, like Brazil, Honduras, Nigeria,” said [Keith] Woodhouse. “But this has never happened in the US.”
“Over 40% of Anticipated Cop City Trainees Would Come From Out of State.” Atlanta Community Press Collective, January 24, 2023.
“Satellite Signals for the Atlanta Forest” by Frédéric Neyrat. Ill Will , January 30, 2023.
Cutting down trees, killing activists, producing a void in order to fill it with images: such is the aesthetic-political program of the forest-clearers, the depopulators of the world.
“Cop City, Gentrification, and Young Thug: Atlanta’s uneven war over greenspace in ‘The City of the Forest’” by Justin A. Davis. Scalawag, February 9, 2023.
If you buy the Police Foundation's pitch, then demolishing trees for "Cop City" becomes a way to make better cops—and by proxy, a way of attacking Atlanta's gang problem. It's a subtle rhetorical move that preys on current sensationalism around violent Black crime, and ignores the reality that policing often reproduces the same violence it's supposed to stop. Nevertheless, rhetoric like this keeps a chokehold on urban policymaking: the idea that lasting solutions to gun violence depend on making police departments the first stop for public funding and resources.
“Who Is ‘Cop City’ For? Residents Living Near the Site Aren’t So Sure” by Madeline Thigpen. Capital B Atlanta, February 9, 2023.
“HBCUs: ‘We Do Not Want Cop City’” by Sara Weissman. Inside Higher Ed, February 14, 2023.
“Fact-checking the City of Atlanta’s Claims on ‘Cop City’” by Alex Ip. The Xylom, February 16, 2023.
It appears that APF [Atlanta Police Foundation] or the City of Atlanta have not laid out plans to maintain compliance with federal, state, and local environmental standards, which they have frequently violated in the past three decades, lack the proper paperwork to proceed with any land disturbance, nor have they considered the complete environmental impacts “Cop City” has on the surrounding watershed and potential future users of the site.
“The Forest in the City.” Crimethinc, February 22, 2023.
The movement to defend the Weelaunee Forest has drawn together a wide range of groups and strategies. Legal defense organizations like the South River Forest Coalition, which is bringing a lawsuit against the Dekalb County government, work parallel to groups like the SRY Campaign, an anonymous collective of researchers who publicize the home and office addresses of those who seek to destroy the forest. While abolitionists and radical environmentalists have established encampments and tree houses in the forest, a network of pre-schools and parents has built community gardens and hosted public outreach events. Still others have organized raves and cultural events in the forest, connecting the most ambitious artists with the irrepressible spirit of the movement.
“Forest Defenders Vow Resistance After Court Green-Lights Phase I of ‘Cop City’” by Candice Bernd. Truthout, February 22, 2023.
“Clergy & Faith Leaders Call for a Stop to Cop City and in Defense of the Atlanta Forest.” Open letter, February 28, 2023.
“Defending Abundance Everywhere.” Crimethinc, March 2, 2023.
In our view, the concept of radical stewardship stems from the recognition of the millennia of knowledge and work of the Indigenous people of any given land, the land’s first stewards. Radical stewardship is in alignment with the rights and interests of the first stewards of the land, whether they choose to demand the land back, move to “rematriate” it, or exercise their right to keep taking care of it. In our case here in Atlanta, these first stewards are the Mvskoke people.
“Tortuguita’s Playlist" by David Rovics. Counterpunch, March 3, 2023.
“‘The Amount of Solidarity is Incredible Here’: Voices on the Frontlines of the Fight to Stop Cop City.” It’s Going Down, March 6, 2023.
“Faith Leaders Weigh in on Clashes at ‘Cop City.’” Time, March 6, 2023.
“‘This is how I’m going to die’: police swarm activists protesting ‘Cop City’ in ‘week of action’” by Timothy Pratt. Guardian, March 7, 2023.
“Cop City is a real threat to Spelman College” by Eva Dickerson and Spelman alumni. Scalawag, March 7, 2023.
“The fight to Stop Cop City has decades-old roots” by Micah Herskind. Prism, March 8, 2023.
“Resistance to Atlanta’s Cop City Ramps Up” by Sonali Kolhatkar. Yes!, March 9, 2023.
“Yes, Black People are Protesting Cop City Too” by Madeline Thigpen. Capital B Atlanta, March 9, 2023.
“There are lots of people local to Atlanta who are organizing against Cop City,” said Jasmine Burnett, a southwest Atlanta resident and organizer with Community Movement Builders.
Burnett said this movement is a continuation of the fight against state violence that Black Americans have been fighting for centuries.
“The mayor is trying to paint this picture that Black people want Cop City, so it’s important now more than ever for us to be in the streets, for us to be linked into these movements to demonstrate that that’s a lie,” she said.
“Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens flees from Mvskoke Ceremonial leaders trying to deliver eviction notice, call for end to Cop City project on Mvskoke land.” ICT News, March 9, 2023.
Mvskoke ceremonial leaders are demanding an end to the Cop City project, an independent investigation into the police assassination of Tortugita, and the dismissal of all charges against forest defenders. "Cop City cannot be built in the Weelaunee forest, in the city of Atlanta, in the state of Georgia or anywhere in the Mvskoke homelands," the letter reads.
“How ‘Cop City’ Trumped Justice” by Zak Cheney-Rice. NY Mag, March 9, 2023.
“Cops And Donuts Go Together More Than You Thought: The Corporations Funding Cop City In Atlanta” by Morgan Simon. Forbes, March 14, 2023.
Corporations loudly made billions of dollars in commitments to racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police officers, often seeking the associated “halo effect” with an increasingly diverse consumer population in the US. What is less well-known, ironically, is their equal support of the expansion and increased militarization of police departments this past decade through organizations called police foundations in cities such as Atlanta, New York, Louisville and Los Angeles.
“An Historic Direct Action in a Forest Outside Atlanta.” Unicorn Riot, March 18, 2023.
“One Rabbi’s Purim in the Forest” by Nate DeGroot. Atlanta Community Press Collective, March 18, 2023.
“‘We are not in the least afraid of ruins’: Food Autonomy in the Weelaunee Forest.” Atlanta Community Press Collective, March 19, 2023.
“Private Equity [PE] Profits from Destroying the Atlanta Forest” by K Agbebiyi, Azani Creeks, Amanda Mendoza. Private Equity Stakeholder Project, March 22, 2023.
“The Health Risks Behind ‘Cop City’” by Akilah Wise, PhD. Capital B Atlanta, March 23, 2023.
Public health experts who spoke with Capital B Atlanta said the evidence does not support the idea that training facilities alleviate police violence and trauma. With the preponderance of reports and footage of police violence against Black citizens, the facility and increased police presence in the community may be “repeating sources of trauma,” according to Keon Gilbert, a public health professor at Saint Louis University and co-director of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity.
“Officers in ‘Cop City’ raid shot pepperball gun into activist’s tent first” by Hilary Beaumont. Guardian, March 25, 2023.
A Black Abolitionist View on Cop City with Dr. Angela Davis. Black Power Media, May 8, 2023.
Atlanta, Georgia
Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) Program. Georgia State University.
Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta by Ronald H. Bayor. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion by Larry Keating. Temple University Press, 2001.
Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vail. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
City on the Verge: Atlanta and the Fight for America’s Urban Future by Mark Pendergrast. Basic Books, 2017.
“Atlanta Households’ Willingness to Increase Urban Forests to Mitigate Climate Change” by Yenie Tran, Jacek Siry, J. M. Bowker, and Neelam Poudyal. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 22, February 2017.
“From Atlanta to Palestine: Our Struggles are Intertwined” by Da’Shaun Harrison, Eva, Bisan, and Osama. Wear Your Voice, June 18, 2020.
“Climate change is making the whole city hotter—but rising temps may put some Atlantans in more danger than others” by Sam Worley. Atlanta Magazine, July 29, 2021.
“The Atlanta Way: Repression, Mediation, and Division of Black Resistance from 1906 to the 2020 George Floyd Uprising” by Kayla Edgett and Sarah Abdelaziz. Atlanta Studies, October 4, 2021.
Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta by Dan Immergluck. University of California Press, 2022.
Rayshard Brooks
“Rayshard Brooks remembered as a hard-working father kept down by a racist legal system” by Eric Levenson and Erica Henry. CNN, June 24, 2020.
“Atlanta Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed has been demolished” by Ray Sanchez. CNN, July 14, 2020.
“No charges for Atlanta officers in shooting death of Rayshard Brooks.” WSB-TV, August 23, 2022.
Policing, Prisons, and Abolition
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis. Seven Stories Press, 2003. [PDF]
The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas by Lesley Gill. Duke University Press, 2004.
Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (soa) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. University of California Press, 2007. [PDF]
“In Defense of Looting” by Vicky Osterweil. The New Inquiry, August 21, 2014.
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. Verso Books, 2017. [PDF]
“Broken Ground: Why America Keeps Building More Jails and What It Can Do Instead.” Vera Institute of Justice, 2019.
“What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Good Cop’?” by Alec Karakatsanis. Slate, June 8, 2020.
“Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” by Mariame Kaba. New York Times, June 12, 2020.
“Trees and Other Abolitionist Allies” by Amelie Daigle. Protean Magazine, December 6, 2021.
While they are not a panacea, trees are multidisciplinary specialists in preventing slow violence. Trees cool and soothe. Trees drink carbon dioxide and floodwater. And in the instant that someone is about to make the worst decision they have ever made, irrevocably altering the lives of everyone around them, trees offer an extra fraction of a second, a moment of grace and the potential for something better.
Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. Haymarket Books, 2022.
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell. Penguin RandomHouse, 2022. [PDF]
Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage by Jarrod Shanahan. Verso Books, 2022.
No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie. The New Press, 2022.
“Abolition Requires Struggle” by Micah Herskind. Defector, February 15, 2023.
Killing on the street is criminal when it’s between civilians (unless you’re, for example, Kyle Rittenhouse); it is justified as necessary for public safety when it’s done by a cop; it’s celebrated as national security when it’s done by a soldier overseas; and it rarely even registers as killing when it happens in workplaces with consistently unsafe conditions. A focus on crime draws our attention to the first example; an abolitionist framework highlights all four, and looks at how the latter three and their foundational infrastructures of violence at home and abroad contribute to the first.
“We Got Us: A Case Study and Reflections on Supporting an Arrestee from the 2020 Uprisings” by the Richard Hunsinger Defense Committee. Atlanta Community Press Collective, March 6, 2023.
Environmental Justice and Direct Action
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West by Rebecca Solnit. University of California Press, 1994.
“Green Scared? Lessons from the FBI Crackdown on Eco-Activists.” Crimethinc, 2008.
Those who are considering risky direct action should start from the assumption that they will be caught and prosecuted; before doing anything, before even talking about it, they should ask themselves whether they could accept the worst possible consequences. At the same time, as the government may target anyone at any time regardless of what they have actually done, it is important for even the most law-abiding activists—not to mention their friends and relatives—to think through how to handle being investigated, subpoenaed, or charged.
Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes. Verso Books, 2019.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm. Verso Books, 2021.
Climate Change as Class War by Matthew T. Huber. Verso Books, 2022.
Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore by Nicole Fabricant. University of California Press, 2022.
The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos. Pluto Press, 2022.
Ecology and Nature
A Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests by John Kricher. HarperCollins, 1998.
Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Little, Brown Spark, 2011.
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion. Chelsea Green, 2015.
The Accidental Ecosystem: People and Wildlife in American Cities by Peter S. Alagona. University of California Press, 2022.
Related Fiction
“Justice” by Mariame Kaba. Published in The Feminist Utopia Project, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015.
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist by Sunil Yapa. Little, Brown, 2016.
The Overstory by Richard Powers. W.W. Norton, 2018. Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.