Forever, I Love(d) Atlanta

Introduction to A Week of Writing: Stop Cop City

How do we Atlantans let go of fear of the "race massacre"—or the idea of a non-cosmopolitan Black Mecca and a white supremacist City Too Busy to Hate—inhibiting the long overdue rebellion married to no cause?

This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City

Why Cop City? Why here? Why now?

The struggle today around Cop City is the result of a decades-long fight over who Atlanta belongs to, who is run for, and who it stands against. Making sense of it requires understanding the city's history of shifting dynamics of class and racial domination.


Making State Enemies

Reflections on abolition, carcerality, and our #StopCopCity movement from justice-impacted Black revolutionaries.

Justice-impacted organizers know well the stakes of expanded policing. In this interview, Julian Rose talks with longtime organizer Bridgette Simpson about how Atlanta's persistent carcerality creates state enemies by criminalizing resistance.

The Taking of Peachtree-Pine and the Dawning of Cop City

The simultaneity of the increased criminalization of homelessness and the Peachtree-Pine closure engendered the public emergence of Cop City. It's emblematic of Atlanta's cycle of state abandonment that exploits and reproduces the homeless population.

31 Days in Dekalb County Hell

A Personal Account of Atlanta's Carceral Nightmare.

The struggles I heard about and experienced convinced me that the state of Georgia does not run county jails—it runs concentration camps that it calls county jails.


'Please Keep Playing.' An open letter to my son, Remix

An Atlanta mother contends with the limitations of safety and Cop City's false promises of protection in a letter to her two-year-old son.

"With all the generational paranoia of a Black mother raising her Black son in a militarized police state," one mom's plea for Black playing, collective problem-solving, and joy as the keys to her child's future safety and liberation.

To Save the Soul of Weelaunee

Lessons from the religious leaders driving Atlanta's faith-based resistance to Cop City.

Cop City or Beloved Community? Meet the interfaith organizers and Forest Defenders mobilizing their congregations in the tradition of Atlanta's Black churches to imagine a world of community care over one of violence and policing.


An artistic interpretation of a crowd of Black people successfully having organized at the end of the world. Leftist organizing in the Black Radical Tradition.

How to Build the End of the World

In defense of the Chaotic Protester.

In the Black Radical Tradition, chaos and experimentation are required to challenge the state and build a reality worth defending. In the Cop City movement and beyond, Chaotic Protesters create meaningful resistance by disrupting the state's order.


For decades, Atlanta Politicians and mainstream media have controlled the narrative around Cop City.
Scalawag's Week of Writing gives on-the-ground organizers space to reconstruct the popular narrative.
CONTRIBUTE TO THE ATLANTA SOLIDARITY FUND TO SUPPORT THE LEGAL DEFENSE OF FOREST DEFENDERS FACING DOMESTIC TERRORISM CHARGES AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ONGOING FIGHT TO #STOPCOPCITY AND DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST.

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