Original letter available as a living document here

February 22, 2023

Dear Reader,                                                                              

The undersigned members of the Spelman College faculty join our students, our colleagues at Morehouse College, and community activists to publicly denounce Atlanta’s initiative to build a $90 million police training facility, popularly known as “Cop City.” The potential site for Cop City is the Old Atlanta Prison Farm which was once a slave labor camp and, before that, the Weelaunee Forest of the Muscogee Creek people. The violent histories of settler colonialism and slavery abound in this project which will contribute to militarization, deforestation and gentrification, making the lives of Atlanta’s Black population infinitely more difficult. The cancellation of Cop City would thus be a profound act of abolition and a step toward letting the world know that, in Atlanta, Black lives truly matter.

As Morehouse faculty point out, the most famous alumnus of the Atlanta University Center, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., repeatedly spoke against police violence. In his often quoted “I Have a Dream” (1963) speech, he clearly stated: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” It’s ironic, then, that Georgia, the state from which MLK hailed, has the highest rates of correctional control in the nation, twice as many as almost every state — and the city in which he was born is not rectifying, but compounding the state’s tendency toward militarization. Indeed, history has shown that the systemic violence of “law enforcement” has not eased since the 1960s; rather, it has escalated. NBC and other news outlets have reported that, after all the attention the Black Lives Matter-led racial justice movement generated after George Floyd’s death, the number of Black people killed by police has actually increased over the last two years. Latinx environmental activist and Cop City protestor Manuel Terán, known lovingly as Tortuguita, has already been tragically murdered — shot at least 13 times — by authorities on the potential site.

We commiserate with our Morehouse colleagues. Time and again, we have held the hands of our saddened and frustrated students who regularly confront the dehumanizing horrors of policing. As Black feminists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Che Gossett, and our very own students remind us, Black cis and trans women are not shielded from the violence of law enforcement. Though their names are not always amplified in the same ways as their male counterparts, Black cis and trans women are brutalized and killed by the police. As such, abolition has always been a touchstone of Black feminism. Angela Davis has been protesting the prison industrial complex since the 1960s, reminding us that, “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery” and “just as we hear calls today for more humane policing, people then called for more humane slavery.”

Following rich and radical Black feminist thought, the undersigned Spelman faculty say, loudly,  STOP COP CITY — before it becomes a national hub, attracting police from all over the country for law enforcement “training” that has no evidence of assuaging violence. We urge our civil leaders to heed history, engage a Black feminist praxis, listen to the people, and cancel the project. We urge Spelman’s president and the college’s board to use their prestigious platforms and join us in the denunciation of Cop City.

As teachers and mentors, we link arms with our students who — energized by the organizing legacy of the AUC and motivated by their own hostile encounters with the police — offer an alternative vision for the city of Atlanta. Their hope is ours: that the city, as the country’s historic “Black mecca,” becomes a global model not for militarization and fear, but for robustly loving and fostering Black life.

In solidarity,

1	Rebecca ‘Reb’ Kumar, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, English
2	Deanna P. Koretsky, Ph.D.	Associate Professor, English
3	Erica L. Williams, Ph.D.	Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
4	Fernando Esquivel-Suarez, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, English
5	Luis González-Barrios, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Spanish
6	Cocoa M. Williams, Ph.D.	Senior Lecturer, English
7	Sequoia Maner, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, English
8	Mathew RudeWalker, Ph. D.	Lecturer, English
9	Pushpa Parekh, PhD	Professor, English; Chair, ADW
10	Julie B. Johnson, PhD	Assistant Professor; Chair, Dance Performance & Choreography
11	Kelly Piggott	Lecturer, English
12	Al-Yasha	Associate Professor of Philosophy
13	R. Nicole Smith, Ph.D.	Senior Lecturer, English
14	Katie Schaag, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance
15	Sharan Strange	Senior Lecturer, English
16	Stephen Knadler	Professor and Chair of English
17	Nami Kim	Professor, Religious Studies
19	Richard Lu	Associate Professor, World Languages & Cultures
20	Patricia Ventura	Associate Professor, English
21	Maira Goytia	Assistant Professor, Biology
22	Alexandria Ree Hadd	Assistant Professor, Psychology
23	Michael McGinnis	Associate Professor, Biology
24	Anna Powolny Ventura	Senior Lecturer, Biology
25	Bailey Brown Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Sociology
26	Banah Ghadbian, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Comparative Women’s Studies
27	Robert Brown	Associate Professor, Political Science
28	Romie Tribble	Professor of Economics
29	James Daria, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Anthropology
30	Aku Kadogo	Chair, Dept. of Theatre & Performance
31	Adesi Canaglia-Brown	Associate Professor, Education
32	shady Radical, Ph.D.	Visiting Assistant Professor, Art and Visual Culture
33	M. Bahati Kuumba, Ph.D.	Professor, Comparative Women’s Studies
34	Nicole Johnston	Lecturer, Biology
35	Ouida Washington	Lecturer, Documentary Filmmaking
36	Kathleen Phillips Lewis	Assoc.Prof,. History
37	Esther O. Ajayi-Lowo it	Assistant Professor, Comparative Women’s Studies
38	Celeste N. Lee	Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
39	Chad Dawkins	Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History and Curatorial Studies
40	Moon Charania	Associate Professor, International Studies
41	Sara Busdiecker	Associate Professor, International Studies
42	Daniel Ashley	Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
43	Davita Camp	Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
44	Félix M. Rosario-Ortiz, Ph.D.	Assistant Professor, Spanish
45	Melanie McKie	Senior Instructor, English
46	Luisa Arrieta	Assistant Professor, History
47	Janike Ruginis Gross	Senior Lecturer, Spanish
48	Peter Chen	Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
49	Noah MacDonald	Instructor, Economics
50	Francisco Chen-López	Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
51	Evelynn M. Hammonds	Visiting Professor
52	Trina Gould Williams	Faculty Reader, Braven@Spelman
53	Rosetta E. Ross	Professor, Religious Studies
54	Jacqueline Alvarez-Rosales	Associate Professor, World Languages and Cultures
55	Joan McCarty	Lecturer, Theatre and Performance
56	Suneye Rae Holmes	Senior Lecturer, Economics
57	Gustavo Segura	Lecturer, World Languages and Cultures
58	Fernanda Guida	Assistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures
59	P. Kimberleigh Jordan	Lecturer, Humanities & Fine Arts Divisions
60	Amber Reed	Assistant Professor, International Studies
61	kwame-osagyefo kalimara	ADW Lecturer
62	John Givens	Associate Professor, International Studies
63	Anastasia Valecce	Associate Professor, World Languages and Cultures
64	Alexxiss Jackson	Instructor, Arts & Visual Culture
65	Beverly Guy-Sheftall	Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies; Director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center
66	Jaycee Hermida Holmes	Co-Director of the Spelman Innovation Lab