Community Movement Builders (CMB) was formed in 2015 as a mass-based Black organization, advancing radical politics with a build-and-fight strategy. By “build,” we mean we must examine history to determine what is needed for our survival and create models based on our politics that begin to meet some of our needs, such as mutual-aid/liberation programs, cooperatives that employ people from the community, sustainability funds for both community and organizational members, and land trusts.

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By “fight,” we mean to lead with resistance. We must challenge the oppressive systems of the state as we build power with Black poor and working-class communities.

CMB-Atlanta is based in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of southwest Atlanta, a community founded in 1883 by formerly enslaved Africans. Pittsburgh is where our struggle against police violence and Cop City began—where CMB’s political and community grounding allowed us to play a leading role in the streets and in fighting against the narrative of the Black misleadership class as we sought to revive the Black radical tradition and grow the movement in Atlanta and beyond.

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The Rayshard Brooks Peace Center

The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, ended the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, CMB created mutual-aid programs to provide food and toiletries to community members, but physical contact was limited.

After the murder of Floyd, we went from quarantine to a petri dish. Thousands of people hit the streets to take part in the uprisings against police murders. In Atlanta, as elsewhere, these generally nonviolent but militant demonstrations with minor property destruction were often met with an extreme police response. The outsized police response demonstrated once again that the role of the police was to terrorize Black and working-class people and to safeguard the property of the rich.

The outsized police response demonstrated once again that the role of the police was to terrorize Black and working-class people and to safeguard the property of the rich.

Within three weeks of Floyd’s murder, the police in Atlanta added to the violent streak of murders of Black people across the nation. On June 12, 2020, Atlanta police shot Rayshard Brooks in the back at a Wendy’s parking lot that was less than a mile away from the CMB organizing house.

The next night, the Wendy’s restaurant was burned to the ground in a militant protest. By June 14, an organic takeover of the Wendy’s site began, as people who lived in the community joined forces to create a liberated space on the grounds where Rayshard’s blood was spilled.

It was not an activist takeover, but a neighborhood takeover. The local community wanted to preserve the scene of the crime so that others could come and bear witness to where Brooks was gunned down, and Brooks’ sister and others called for the creation of the Rayshard Brooks Peace Center at the Wendy’s site. People immediately set up tents for sleeping, places to cook, and guard posts to keep the area open and to stop valuable pieces of evidence from being destroyed.

CMB members were asked to come to the site by those already working with the community. We offered resources and support for those holding down the area, joined in the struggle to create the Rayshard Brooks Peace Center, and participated in an organizing campaign to win public support.

The stated goal was community control of the space to support youth projects rather than the pouring of more resources into violent policing. We engaged in canvassing, petitions, rallies, and marches to demand that Wendy’s negotiate in good faith with the community to turn over the land. This campaign served as a training ground for many community members and activists, and it also set the framework of the community determining where and how resources are allocated, centering the community’s voice, and solidifying our narrative regarding the role of police in Black communities.

However, after weeks of negotiations, the tragic killing of eight-year-old Secoreia Turner outside the Wendy’s was used as an excuse to halt negotiations. As time passed, the community’s demands remained unmet, unrest continued to grow, and city leaders openly called for more policing. The scene was set for a larger struggle.

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The Early Fight Against Cop City

In March 2021, then mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in her State of the City address announced the building of a new police training center. Soon after, details of the size and scope of the project and of the military-style training and tactics to be practiced on-site emerged.

After a May 2021 rally in downtown Atlanta protesting the continued forced evictions and bombings used to advance Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, CMB and others took the opportunity to begin a conversation about the proposed plans for the Cop City site. We understood immediately (as others did) that this center was not about training to fight crime, but rather about further militarizing against Black working-class and poor communities to prevent and squash resistance movements.

CMB members and other organizers jumped into action and began organizing demonstrations against Cop City. The movement against Cop City started as an activist and organizer movement. It was mostly led by politicized groupings and did not originate in a single specific community. We jumped into the fight with anarchists, socialists, environmentalists, a variety of social justice leaders, and others.

The organizations, collectives, and individuals were hyper-local organizers who had been a part of the city for years. We were one of the few organizations or collectives that had a legal structure, and at the time the first explicitly Black organization taking on this fight.

Between late summer and early fall of 2021, CMB and allies organized some of the earliest protests at City Hall against Cop City, and we began canvassing in south DeKalb County and southwest Atlanta to inform the community of the proposed threat of Cop City that would continue to over-police Black residents. This work developed the skills of the diverse multi-tendency organizers and activists and the communities in which we worked.

Organizers developed stronger relationships, processes, and structures as issues of race, tactics, decision-making, hierarchy, and class emerged and were navigated throughout the campaign. Students at various institutions began to participate and organize on their campuses, reviving the historical role of students in Black liberation movements. Some collectives and organizations were created, some were revived, and some grew, and a movement infrastructure emerged.

The burgeoning movement against Cop City was not without its challenges for us. In the Pittsburgh community where CMB is based, we ran up against roadblocks from the neighborhood association, whose membership included Black homeowners pushing for more police. Some of the community associations enjoyed having the police come to their meetings to run off crime statistics with the pretense of being “guardians” of the community.

It is no coincidence that even in a working-class community like Pittsburgh, there were property owners who saw the police as protectors of their real estate, even if it meant supporting the people who pushed our neighbors out in support of gentrification. Joyce Sheperd, the City Councilmember who sponsored the Cop City legislation, was a Black woman who represented the Pittsburgh community. Atlanta’s Black Democratic misleadership has perpetuated the same scare tactics that white Republican politicians have used to manufacture support for police and jails.

In response, we worked in the community to shift the position of those we could and mobilize those who already were clear that they never asked for Cop City and that they wanted a neighborhood to live in where cops and developers would not push them out. Individual members of CMB engaged with larger coalitions on a targeted online and canvassing movement that highlighted Sheperd’s support for Cop City and the continued over-policing of our community.

Joyce Sheperd’s defeat in the next City Council election was a small but mighty victory for CMB and the Stop Cop City movement.

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Fighting a Black Democratic Narrative

Part of our role was to communicate that Cop City was a danger to the Black community no matter where it was built. We knew that projects like this usually get built in poor and working-class Black communities. In this case, the neighborhood adjacent to the Weelaunee Forest is seventy-four percent Black and Latino. The fact that the only new city funding to be poured into this community would “train” the police was a slap in the face to the real needs of the community.

Black politicians continually put out media messaging that more police and more police training are needed to increase safety. This narrative is used over and over again to justify spending upwards of twenty-five to forty percent of municipal budgets on policing, while also funding developers who come into working-class and poor Black communities to gentrify them. This is why the so-called Black Mecca is no longer majority-Black.

Part of our role was to communicate that Cop City was a danger to the Black community no matter where it was built.

CMB had to make sure that the larger public, particularly the Black public, understood that more police does not mean a crime reduction but instead an increase in incarceration rates, more stops, more arrests, more fines, and more Black deaths. CMB had to serve as a counterpoint to Black politicians telling our people that more training would solve the problem of over-policing, when we know that the Atlanta police already receive ninety percent more training hours than required by the state of Georgia.

We had to make sure people understood that although we represent less than fifty percent of the population in Atlanta, our people still account for nearly ninety percent of the arrests. One of CMB’s and other Black organizers’ most important contributions to the struggle against Cop City was making sure that our central narrative emphasized the dangerous role that police and Cop City played as an occupying force in Black communities.

Furthermore, CMB worked with our allies by canvassing and door-knocking to continually counter the city’s countless lies about what Cop City was, how much it would cost, and who it was being built for: The truth was that Cop City was going to be a privately owned military training ground and playground for police to boost morale and increase recruitment.

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The Struggle for the Hearts and Minds of the People

Throughout the struggle, the city’s Black Democratic leadership, white media, and state Republican leadership attempted to paint protesters as white “outside agitators” coming to Atlanta to unleash anarchy. Although many on the ground were indeed white, we did not see that as an issue. The lack of participation from the Black community given the legacy of Jim Crow and ongoing police terror, socioeconomic factors, and the fact that many Blacks have been appeased by Black faces serving white power was something we had to acknowledge and struggle against.

The issue was how were we going to bring more Black organizations and community members into the struggle. From our view, this was our role in the struggle, not anyone else’s. If there was a lack of participation from the larger Black community, and sometimes there was, then we should be critiquing our organizing methods as a Black organization—not pushing against non-Black support.

We increased the level of canvassing in Black communities to bring more people into the struggle. As we increased our canvassing and organized town halls and speak-outs, we also began to challenge more mainstream Black organizations to be more vocal in their stance against Cop City. We reached out to our personal contacts and engaged in public shaming and information sessions to make sure more mainstream Black organizations took a public stance against Cop City.

While we were not able to bring out the numbers that we desired, we succeeded in visibly increasing the participation of the community and Black organizations, bringing them to the forefront of the struggle. Though our mobilizations were never equal in size to those taking place after police murders of unarmed Black people, we kept going because we understood that even if the turnout within Black communities was not as large, it would still help spread the word that the purpose of Cop City was to continue targeting Black communities for over policing.

Black organizing against Cop City reached its apex in March of 2023 when we organized a Black-led rally and march from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center to the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) offices. Most major social justice and voting rights groups, many of whom had previously stayed out of the struggle, sponsored the rally.

Noticeably, the Atlanta NAACP decided not to endorse the march because it claimed that “violence” might take place, pointing to past occurrences of property destruction and the possibility of white nationalist counter-protesters. The rally was a high point for participation by Black organizers and groups from across the city.

We were conducting a careful dance with the hundreds of Atlanta police in attendance looking for any reason to break up our march. It was an electric evening of cat and mouse—we would occasionally take the streets but then go back on the sidewalk to avoid arrest. We ended up at APF’s offices in high winds and intermittent heavy rain, but with a joyful spirit of resistance as we surrounded the entrance and blocked people from entering or exiting for several more hours.

The police surrounded us on the sidewalk in front of the building as some in the crowd spilled into a lane of traffic in the streets. Cars honked in support as they drove by, further lifting the spirits of the protesters. Black students, community people, and fellow Black organizers took turns at the mic chastising APF, Atlanta police, and the mayor. The idea that Cop City was not an issue that the larger Black community and Black organizations cared about was put to rest.

At one point, Kamau directly called out the mayor, who had claimed that the movement was made up mainly of white people, asking, “Is this enough Black people for you, Andre?” Apparently, it was, because on the way home from the march, Kamau got a call from a mayor’s aid, who yelled, “Why are you protesting us? You have access! You have access!” But something that Black elected officials fail to understand is that access means little—what the community demands is power.

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The Role of Black Organizations

In response to our action, Mayor Dickens put together a shameful press conference filled with the Black bourgeois. Former and current Black elected officials, clergy, and business leaders stood outside City Hall to praise the police, claiming that those gathered were tired of crime, and to denounce organizers as outside agitators. They felt compelled to respond because every day, more Black people and organizations were joining the movement.

As a Black organization on the ground, we were positioned to push back against the myth that Black mayors or Black preachers were the only voice of the community. Instead, we were able to center the Black organizer and their counter-narrative, which articulated the real desires of the larger working class and poor Black community.

We ridiculed the prevailing notion that the Black elite were the inheritors of the civil rights mantle or the Black struggle. The hypocrisy of invoking Dr. King while employing the language of southern segregationists in calling organizers “outside agitators,” along with supporting voter suppression tactics against the referendum, exposed their alignment with white conservatives in wanting the same thing: the supremacy of Cops and Capitalism.

Proof of our success in fighting against Cop City emerged in a 2023 study by Emory University, which found that a majority of Black residents did not support Cop City. Without an organization like CMB at its center, the movement against Cop City would not have been successful in countering the white conservative and Black misleadership class’s “outside agitator” narrative, and it would not have convinced the majority of Black residents that Cop City was a danger to the Black community.

Without an organization like CMB at its center, the movement against Cop City would not have been successful in countering the white conservative and Black misleadership class’s “outside agitator” narrative, and it would not have convinced the majority of Black residents that Cop City was a danger to the Black community.

The movement collectively supported the leadership of Black organizers and organizations like CMB, and as the movement grew, so did the participation of Black organizations. By 2023, most local Black-led, voter rights, and civil rights organizations had come out against Cop City. National Black organizations began to get involved by providing resources and developing the threadbare infrastructure that the movement had survived on for two years.

Capacity and know-how moved the struggle forward in unexpected ways, including initiating a referendum process in which the Movement for Black Lives played a pivotal role. Through the referendum process, we succeeded in collecting 116,000 signatures from Atlanta residents demanding to vote on Cop City directly.

By the end of 2023, the “white outside agitator” narrative had almost completely disappeared, as Black organizations’ opposition to Cop City became undeniable. What started as a small movement had grown into one where there could be no question that Black organizing was now at the center of the struggle against Cop City, uplifting the Black radical tradition in Atlanta.

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No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement edited by Kamau Franklin, Micah Herskind, and Mariah Parker is available via Haymarket.