Category: Uncategorized
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Talking Back: A Preemptive Response to Media Attacks on Defend the Atlanta Forest
“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.…
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“On Many Fronts”: Why One Atlanta Resident Is Fighting to Stop Cop City
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…
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Atlanta-area park carelessly destroyed: bulldozer & cops escorted out of the Atlanta forest
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…
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Brief Historical Timeline of the “Prison Farm” Land – Part 2
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,…
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Brief Historical Timeline of the “Prison Farm” Land – Part 1
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…
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No Permit? “Cop City” Project Doesn’t Seem to Care
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,…
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Slave Labor, Overcrowding, and Unmarked Graves — The Buried History of Atlanta City Prison Farm from the 1950s to 1990s Shows It’s No Place of Honorra
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…