This morning, Georgia attorney general Christoper M. Carr filed indictments against 61 people on RICO charges for their participation in the #StopCopCity movement The #StopCopCity movement seeks to end the construction of a military training facility built to suppress Atlanta area’s minoritized communities and end mass protest.
The #StopCopCity movement has received international support and attention, and was last week successful in collecting over 100,000 signatures from Atlanta residents demanding that the decision to continue construction be put on the November ballot.
Despite this overwhelming support, organizers are being targeted by the state (meaning county, city, Georgia state, and federal governments spanning legal, police, military and elected entities), prosecuted by the same laws that are being used against a former united states president.
The indictment spends over 20 pages of 109 connecting conspiracy and at times equating it to “anarchism” and “mutual aid”. What is this demonic and destructive specter of “anarchism” that is haunting the forests of Atlanta?
To get at an answer, I’m leaning on Christina Sharpe and Saiidiya Hartman. Both are Black women writers whose work is said to evoke and bring into being a kind of Black Anarchism. It seems fitting to start there given that CopCity itself was created to counter and end Atlanta’s uprisings of 2020 that were sparked by police murders of Black folk. In Ordinary Notes, Sharpe writes:
Saiidiya Hartman expands the registers of what can be thought, imagined, declared in relation to Black life. To read her work is to get a sense of the breadth of the the hold, the barracoon, and the prison and to glimpse and expand your knowing of what might escape that enclosure and confinement and at what cost, and what might be made in it and in spite of it. It is to witness how life happens.
Sharpe goes on,
Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a narration, meditation of Black women surviving in northeastern cities of early twentieth century united states. Queer folk transgressing what was considered to be worthy and human. The incompatibility of their lives and unrelenting attempts by patriarchy, cis-hetero supremacy — all the constitutive elements of Whiteness — to end them.
Simply put, a Black Anarchism is a rejection of the kinds of control and policing and violence that mandate that only one kind of Blackness is possible; that there are hole swaths of Black life that are not worth preserving, that in fact must be ended. The ending of those lives, the ending of those worlds is the intent of projects like CopCity. The ending of those worlds has always been the mission of settler colonialism in Georgia – from the removal of Muscogee and Cherokee peoples, to the gentrification that is erasing and dismantling the Black communities of Atlanta. Black Anarchism is the reaction against the dispossession and erasure, it is the assertion that the act of preserving Black life happens outside of the the state boundaries (it is illegal), because a full notion of Black life is itself in contradiction with the state.
In his Anarchism and the Black Revolution, Kom’Boa Ervin states:
The reality is Anarchists are social revolutionaries, who seek a stateless, classless, voluntary, cooperative federation of decentralized communes based on social ownership, individual liberty and autonomous self-management of social and economic life.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, from Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Ervin goes on to write
We created what was essentially a Black Anarchist collective first in Atlanta in 1994. You know, myself, and I think there were seven other community organizers, and seven or eight students from Clark College and Morehouse University. They became part of this collective at that time. Eventually the group built a ten city national federation and a group in London
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, from Anarchism and the Black Revolution
then speaking on the formation of Black Autonomy which grew from that effort
So Black Autonomy also started organizing and trying to create a dual power political structure trying to create ideas that can reach the youth and trying to combat prisons as an entity. Not just combatting judges and all this other garbage, but actually dealing with the prisons being used as a tool of oppression of Black and poor people.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, from Anarchism and the Black Revolution
That is, Black Anarchism as a mode of sustaining communities that have been systematically deprived of life-sustaining resources by their governments, communities that have been targeted by their governments for repression and removal. Mutual aid: community gardens, the distribution of food, services for the elders. The building of structures that provide hope in the face of sustained abandonment. The unrelenting opposition to police violence. Anarchism de-mystified.
The work of projects like Ervin’s Black Autonomy is continued by organizations like Community Movement Builders, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and others. In light of the charges — which include “money laundering” for purchase of routine organizational supplies and “domestic terrorism” for property damage (BJS reports medial sentence of 13 months) — it becomes clear that the state intends to repress any level of dissent. That is, it intends to reify the criminalization of resistance to injustice. Please consider a donation to these and other organizations in light of the persistent threats they face.
The cover photo for this post includes these and other books that explicate Black Anarchism:
- Dionne Brand, Nomenclature
- William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
- Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
- Akira Drake Rodriguez, Diverging Space for Deviants
- Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
I’ve listed as a source for most of the books, Firestorm Coop, a radical bookstore in Asheville, N.C. that supports “grassroots movements in Southern Appalachia while developing a workplace on the basis of cooperation, empowerment and equity.”
Here’s a link to defense funds for those targeted. Please contribute as you’re able.
Charles write here 