“We are on the timeline in which everyone loses,” a friend once said. It always felt that way. Even though we always tried, all of us, our victories were always innovations in methods, in discourse. Something is changing. In the forest. Across the city. Even more, it’s as if an astral plane has opened up. This plane, if it exists, seems to spiral outward in every direction. Everything is growing from one simple fact: we really intend to win. We won’t let them take everything from us, to pave over everything with condos and parking lots.

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Today, police attacked protestors in the forest because in the past year and especially in the past week, hundreds of community members and concerned people came to this camp and joined together to apply pressure against this project. The police will attempt to depict this movement as a small group of hardline activists, or “outside agitators.” We are not extremists. We are neighbors of the forest and residents of South Atlanta. Most importantly however this movement simply consists of intelligent people who know that the future of the world is on fire, and who are determined and willing to organize ourselves and act to defend what remains to sustain life in this city and life on this planet.

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Often called “the lungs of Atlanta,” the land borders the South River and is also known by its original Muscogee/Creek name, the Weelanuee Forest. On Monday morning, the bulldozer, marked “Dodd Drilling, LLC.”, destroyed a significant swath of forest, injuring plants and animals in its path. When people nearby learned about this, about 30-40 adults and at least 1 child quickly responded and gathered around the bulldozer, confronting the project managers and police officers on the RC Field. Those gathered shouted “Go home!” and “This is a public park!”

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Run as a city prison farm uninterrupted from 1922 to somewhere around 1990, it is often erroneously referred to as the “Honor Farm.” Honor farm is actually federal penitentiary #2 and any report that refers to it as such will have incorrect and conflicting combined information from 2-3 different prison farms. Multiple counts of rape, beatings, overcrowding, “slave conditions,” lack of healthcare, various strikes, and deaths of disproportionately Black victims have been documented at the site.

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The South River is the northernmost boundary of Soapstone Ridge. Soapstone Ridge is the largest intrusion of mafic-ultramafic rock, a type of igneous rock formed through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava, present in North Georgia. This geological phenomena has educational importance, both in understanding the creation of Earth’s current land surface and the existence of this region’s earliest human settlements.

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Despite widespread public opposition, the Atlanta Police Foundation is pushing forward with its plan to bulldoze acres of trees in the South River Forest to build “Cop City,” a police training center where APF says it will train officers on urban warfare and riot control tactics. Public opposition has included local neighbors, environmentalists, community organizers, and members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. 

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The official histories of the Atlanta Prison Farm paint a rosy picture of “respect,” “trust,” “reform,” and “the dignity of work.” But digging deeper reveals a much darker history that the City has not yet reckoned with. And it’s about to be sold and bulldozed by the same government institutions who caused the untold suffering hidden under the site’s surface.

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