After police had shot and killed one forest defender, Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, in January, and arrested and charged 61 others first with domestic terrorism and then additionally with violating the state’s RICO (organized crime) statute, everyone realized that any protest in Atlanta is no joke. Organizers hoped this avowedly nonviolent action – which included two days of training leading up to the march on Nov. 13 – would not be met by violence and would raise the profile of the fight against Cop City.
I decided to go and do support work, not participate in the march, because I have both state and federal charges pending from my arrest along the Mountain Valley methane (fracked gas) pipeline route in West Virginia in September and I didn’t want to add another potential distant case to my rap sheet. I was also glad I had that excuse.
I spent most of Saturday and Sunday cooking for 400 with Seeds of Peace, a collective that has provided meals for many actions I’ve done over the past decade. Great energy, lots of laughs and hours of cutting, chopping, peeling and grating.
I stayed with a dozen others in an AirBnB with a couple of folks from CT and the rest from the Philly area. We all got along well and had a chance to share stories of our work and our concerns about environmental racism, police abuse and climate change represented by Cop City.
The highlight for me was meeting Tortuguita’s mom, Belkis Terán. She lives in Panama but comes to Atlanta frequently to support the work of those fighting Cop City. She said she’s been a healer for 30 years and she certainly generated loving, healing energy. I met her outside the DeKalb County Jail where folks went to support three people who’d been arrested a few days earlier. She set up an altar on a nearby green space, filled it with flowers and candles and photos of Tort and others who have passed. (See photo above.) There was a small ceremony, and at one point Oglala drummers appeared with their big drum and sage, with which they smudged the crowd. (It’s my favorite smell.)
After a few hours, half a dozen cops showed up and told us we were on “private” county property and had to leave. Belkis immediately said she wanted to leave, I think because she wanted to get away from the negative energy, while others wanted to stay and hold the space. Finally a Black woman said, “I think we should listen to Belkis and do what she would like.” Then everybody picked up pieces of the altar and its contents and we moved around the corner to an actual memorial park on the side of a major road with much better visibility for our signs and banners, though farther from the jail and the people we had gone to support. I interviewed her briefly and it ran on this week’s edition of Between the Lines. She has set up an online healing center as Manuel's legacy on Instagram @BelkisTeran27.
We were able to watch the march on Monday in real time, thanks to a livestream from the NDN Collective, an indigenous group from South Dakota. At one point the marchers confronted a phalanx of cops, who used shields to push against the banners and marchers at the front, deployed flashbangs and then a voluminous amount of tear gas. At a press conference later, the police chief used the fact that marchers were wearing hazmat suits and goggles – to protect at least somewhat against a possible use of chemical agents by the cops – to claim the protesters intended violence. He lined up several confiscated spades brought to plant trees as evidence that they had weapons (which of course they could have been).
So, people didn’t make it to the forest, but the march did succeed in putting Stop Cop City back in the headlines, if only briefly.
I picked up a lot of literature written by Anonymous and put out by Crimethinc.com. One summarized the history of nonviolent community action, wondering why, after the city ignored 17 hours of testimony almost unanimous against building the police training facility, residents a year later spoke for another 15 hours at a hearing against the funding of the project, which city leaders also ignored. The zine was written before the effort this past summer to gather signatures on a petition to put the project to an up or down vote in the November election. People gathered an astonishing 116,000 signatures – twice what was required – but Mayor Andre Dickens declined to certify them even after saying earlier he would allow such a vote to move forward.
On this anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I will quote him: ““Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Something to think about.