In Atlanta, the George Floyd demonstrators are being prosecuted as gang members. The activists of today could be next.
In 2018, Tiffany Roberts, a 42-year-old lawyer, joined the Southern Center for Human Rights, a venerable civil-rights organization based in Atlanta. She had been a criminal-defense attorney moonlighting as an organizer for most of the previous ten years and now had a sense, based on a host of overlapping developments and controversies, that something terrible was about to happen.
Eleven months earlier, Georgia lawmakers had expanded the legal definition of domestic terrorism to include damaging certain types of property — deterrence aimed at the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, which had also inspired a wave of state bills that sought to give motorists immunity for hitting protesters with their cars. The backlash from lawmakers came just as the movement for Black lives was getting bolder, setting up a potential confrontation that could be far more explosive than anything Roberts had experienced. “The tactic of floating legislation that would authorize violence was emboldening folks who wanted to harm Black folks,” she says.
That confrontation erupted in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis. Opponents of police brutality in Atlanta and other cities flooded the streets, and their cries for justice, which had mostly gone ignored, suddenly had the support of a majority of Americans and the ears of lawmakers in statehouses across the country and on Capitol Hill. It is estimated that anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people participated in demonstrations that spring and summer, making it the largest protest movement in American history and an uncommonly multiracial one. While some people broke windows and set cop cars on fire and some politicians called for harsher crackdowns in response, the protesters appeared to be winning in the court of public opinion. Despite the underlying rage over Floyd’s death, it was a time of extraordinary hope and promise.
The significance of the uprising was felt acutely in Atlanta, where Black politicians and business leaders have long held sway but a Black underclass was still routinely brutalized by the police. The vaunted Atlanta Way was premised on the notion that a Black ruling class, with the help of white moderates, could make the city a site of stability, growth, and equality — an object of envy for its peers in the South and beyond. Now, Atlanta’s mandarins had to confront reality: Less than three weeks after Floyd’s death, a Black man named Rayshard Brooks who had been drinking fell asleep at a local Wendy’s drive-through and was killed by the cop who tried to arrest him. Brooks’s slaying further undermined Atlanta’s reputation for balancing civil rights with commerce and order. The mayor at the time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, recognized the problem. “The biases are still there,” she lamented at a CNN town hall.
But even amid this reckoning, Roberts saw signs that the city’s tolerance for disruption was limited. “There was already a political push to paint all of the protests as violent,” she says. “I didn’t think there was any way that Georgia was going to escape that.” Atlanta’s response to the George Floyd protests was heavy-handed from the start: nonviolent demonstrators kettled en masse, nearly 600 people arrested in just two weeks in June. The Southern Center was already embroiled in statewide fights against jail overcrowding and the death penalty. Now, it had to help huge numbers of detained protesters connect with defense attorneys. It went surprisingly well at first. The Center helped negotiate amnesty deals — 20 released here, 40 there — and charges were eventually dropped against most of the 2020 demonstrators. Still, Roberts was concerned by how officials were fixated on characterizing the protests as a foreign conspiracy. “That really wasn’t a Black protest,” Bottoms claimed dismissively.
Roberts started to suspect that officials were using these protests as a test. How many people could they criminalize at once? And would the crackdown be met with an outcry? It was not. On the contrary, the city’s response to the unrest was praised on television by soon-to-be-President Joe Biden. Roberts’s suspicions that the protesters had become targets were validated that summer when some demonstrators burned down the Wendy’s where Brooks had been killed and set up an occupation amid the rubble. After an 8-year-old was killed that July near one of the makeshift barriers, the mayor’s political opponents rushed to blame the death on Bottoms’s failure to maintain both order and police morale during the protests.
The central demands of the movement — which ranged from defunding the police entirely to merely reducing the outsize footprint of a draconian criminal-justice system — were quickly forgotten. The whole point of the Floyd uprising was not only to insist on an end to wanton police brutality but also to call attention to the way cops were being asked to address too many glaring social problems, such as poverty and mental health, that could be better handled without guns or jail. When urban crime briefly spiked during the pandemic, panicked officials who had previously expressed sympathy for the Floyd movement quickly shifted to spending even more resources on law enforcement. And no initiative symbolized that pivot more ostentatiously than Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center — what critics refer to as Cop City.
From the get-go, Bottoms’s 2021 announcement that an 85-acre plot of city-owned forest would be converted into a $90 million training facility, including a mock city for policing drills, was met with resistance. Police had already been using this area in unincorporated DeKalb County, seven miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, as a firing range — the pop-pop of live rounds could be heard by people taking walks along the forest trails — but nobody involved with the plan felt obligated to consult residents in neighboring communities. “We don’t want to spend six-to-nine months on hold while we are doing citizen engagement,” said David Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the pro-cop nonprofit that has been coordinating the project.
In September 2021, the city council heard more than 17 hours of mostly negative public comment focusing on both the project’s eye-popping reinvestment in cops and its environmental impact — the forest, one of the largest in any urban area in the U.S., acts as a protective sponge for flooding. The final vote was 10-4 in favor.
Cop City immediately became one of the first major tests of the post-Floyd political order. People had spent 2020 begging for an end to abusive policing. The city responded the next year with a massive expansion of the police state. And the project’s biggest supporters — a slate of power brokers that ranged from the mayor’s office to the corner offices at Home Depot and Delta Airlines — envisioned the facility as a national model and hub where cops from all over could travel to refine their tactics.
Protesters from around the country trickled into the city only to be faced with what had grown to be the most aggressive crackdown on activism the U.S. had seen in decades — a forerunner of the harsh police actions that have featured so prominently in the recent campus protests against the war in Gaza. Mass arrests became commonplace in Atlanta. Criminal penalties for protesting got harsher. Officials smeared dissidents as “violent agitators,” language Jim Crow politicians had used, and let them languish in deadly jails. In the four short years since Floyd’s death, local and state leaders — Black and white, Democrat and Republican — have turned the cradle of the civil-rights movement, where Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach and John Lewis coined the term good trouble, into what one protester described to me as “one of the worst cities in America for activism.”
The main expression of this crackdown has been a spate of charges that equate protesters with some of the country’s most notorious villains — people like John Gotti and Timothy McVeigh. Forty-two have been charged with domestic terrorism and 61 with racketeering and conspiracy. Prosecutors have argued that there is a direct line between the Floyd uprising and the unrest at Cop City, bringing the story of that hopeful summer of 2020 to its dispiriting conclusion and making clear what Roberts and others have suspected all along: that in the state’s eyes, those who took to the streets to demand racial equality and justice were merely criminals who hadn’t yet been punished.
When the Atlanta City Council approved Cop City in 2021, a handful of protesters started camping out in the South River Forest where the facility was slated to be built. They called themselves “forest defenders.” They set up a welcome table, shared food, hosted dance parties, and screened the Japanese environmental fable Princess Mononoke. They gave themselves funny nicknames — Pigweed, Bunny, Slug — and slept in makeshift tree houses. Some were from Georgia, others were not. They could be wary and eccentric yet disarmingly nice. A correspondent from The Daily Show visited one of their encampments, took one look at their bingo-night setup, and called them “Georgia Ewoks.”
Within a year, a coalition of local law-enforcement agencies was trying to evict the forest defenders to make way for construction. Some of the occupants allegedly threw rocks, while others damaged construction equipment. The group had no leader, organization was scattered and haphazard, and if you wanted to set a bulldozer on fire, no one was going to stop you. Rewards of up to $25,000 went up for the capture of certain protesters.
Just before Christmas 2022, cops raided the woods and were greeted with a volley of rocks. They arrested five people and, in the first of several escalations, charged them with domestic terrorism. “None of those people live here,” claimed Carven Tyus, assistant chief of the Atlanta Police Department. “Why is an individual from Los Angeles, California, concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia? And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism.”
Whatever the rationale, the crackdown failed to deter the protesters. Soon the encampment was up and running again. Plans were made for another multiagency raid. On January 18, 2023, a day whose precise sequence of events is still being disputed, cops stormed the woods and opened fire on a protester they later claimed had shot at them first, a 26-year-old Venezuelan named Manuel Paez Terán. Fifty-seven bullets hit home in what is believed to be the first police slaying of an environmental activist in U.S. history.
Forensic evidence, an autopsy, and the testimony of Paez Terán’s fellow defenders have since cast doubt on the official narrative. Paez Terán’s hands did not show any gunpowder residue, according to the DeKalb County medical examiner.
Seven other forest defenders were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism that day, but once again the raid acted as a further incitement. The weekend after Paez Terán’s death, a group of protesters held a vigil on Peachtree Street, one of Atlanta’s high-traffic thoroughfares, where some allegedly broke windows and set police cars on fire. Six were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. “Víva, víva, Tortuguita!” has since become the movement’s rallying cry, a tribute to the nickname chosen by Paez Terán, “Little Turtle.” The inspiration was a military chief who had led Native forces to victory over the U.S. Army in 1791.
After the arrests, Bottoms’s successor as mayor, Andre Dickens, echoed Tyus’s claim. “It should be noted that these individuals were not Atlanta or Georgia residents,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “Most of them traveled into our city to wreak havoc.”
Roberts was surprised to get a call from the mayor’s office around this time. Dickens’s staff wanted her to attend a meeting of local civil-rights activists to discuss Cop City. It seemed like a rare olive branch, but Roberts did not trust the mayor. So she sent another staffer in her place, wanting to avoid any misleading photographs that suggested broad activist support for his agenda. Her colleague reported that the mayor was trying to get everyone on message about how the protests had been orchestrated by outside agitators. Attendees pushed back — plenty of Atlantans were against Cop City too, and some of them were in that room. “There was no press about that meeting,” Roberts says. “It didn’t go the way he thought it was going to go.”
Meanwhile, Roberts needed attorneys to keep the detainees from languishing in jail for months or even years without trial. When her team put out a call for lawyers, Josh Lingsch answered. A few years earlier, he had been a crusader at the Fulton County public defender’s office, objecting when his supervisor tried to “coerce all my clients into taking plea deals,” he says. Lingsch wanted to move forward with the cases that were ready for trial: Let the people have their day in court. He was pushed out and eventually began peddling his services to organizations like the Southern Center. “It just struck me as pretty ridiculous,” he remembers thinking of the domestic-terrorism charges. He was paired with a client, Teresa Shen, who had been arrested in the woods during the January raid in which Paez Terán was shot.
The Southern Center has a list of nearly 80 lawyers like Lingsch who can work on civil-rights-related cases. At the height of the Floyd uprising, there were 250 lawyers on hand, but the number dropped after what Roberts calls “the coolness of 2020” faded away and attorneys wanted less to do with any Black Lives Matter–adjacent rabble-rousing. “One of the implications is this tremendous strain on resources,” she says. “And there’s less money now.”
Back then, Roberts and her colleague Devin Franklin tell me, if you broke a window at a rally, you would be charged with breaking a window at a rally — “criminal damage to property” or something similar. Now, that same behavior was being treated far more seriously, which in turn required a far more sophisticated legal defense. The number of anti–Cop City activists who were charged as terrorists leaped from zero to 18 — and it was about to double.
When Paez Terán was killed, Priscilla Grim, a 50-year-old veteran of Occupy Wall Street, remembers thinking, “You’re literally assassinating activists? ” She wanted to help and booked a flight to Atlanta from New York as soon as she got word of a “week of action” at the site, which involved a rally, a concert under the trees, and press conferences. “I was just like, I’m going to cover this stuff on my Instagram and see where it goes,” she tells me.
On the night of March 5, 2023, Grim was walking to the concert, almost a mile from the construction site, when she heard men’s voices screaming at her from behind. She tripped and fell, startled. The next thing she knew, cops were all over her. Her knee started to balloon — she had torn her ACL in September — so they half-dragged, half-carried her to a nearby parking lot, where she estimates 40 other detainees were being held. “The cops were checking IDs,” she says. “And then they said, ‘You guys are in the go-to-jail crowd.’ And it was everybody who was from out of town.”
Earlier that evening, some protesters had allegedly damaged equipment and launched fireworks at the cops there. It has since been reported that the main piece of evidence against the March 5 arrestees was that many of them had mud on their shoes, which supposedly proved they had been fleeing the construction site. The reason the Georgia residents were allowed to walk free while so many out-of-towners were herded onto buses became obvious to Grim. “It was to set us up as the outside agitator,” she says, a practice that goes back to southern segregationists blaming local protests on interlopers from the North.
Before being booked at DeKalb County Jail, “I was so certain that nothing was going to happen to me,” Grim says. She had been picked up at protests in the past: a few hours in detention, then back on the streets. This was Getting Arrested 101, as many students at Columbia would learn this April when they were detained for protesting the university’s ties to Israel. Grim remembers the inmates who were already there, almost all of them Black, being confused by this sudden influx of mostly white women. “Why are you here?” they asked. When she ultimately discovered she was being charged with domestic terrorism, she was both shocked and confused. “I saw two buildings get taken down,” she says, recalling 9/11. “When you kill 3,000 people at once, that’s terrorism.”
“It’s serious,” she told her daughter’s father over the phone. They had been separated for 13 years, but his was one of the few numbers she still had memorized. The message law enforcement was sending to would-be protesters was clear. In 2019, conditions at DeKalb County Jail were so bad they had sparked protests themselves. One emblematic photo shows an inmate pressing a sign that simply reads MOLD against a window — after receiving her first meal, Grim learned why. Half the toilets weren’t working. Her glasses were confiscated. She was denied bond, and it would take two weeks of pleading by her lawyer to get some Aleve for her knee.
When she was finally granted bond a month later, Grim estimates she had seen only three hours of sunlight in her entire 31 days inside. Back in New York, she discovered that her employer, Fordham University, had rescinded an offer of a permanent position after her arrest. As she began submitting job applications, she realized a Google search of her name brought up the Atlanta Police Department’s press release from when she was arrested, including her mug shot. It describes her and her comrades as “violent agitators.”
The forest defenders were a motley crew of environmental activists, police abolitionists, community organizers, and drifters looking for a purpose. Like Grim, they were there for reasons both urgent and obscure. Luke Harper, 28, is a queer adoptee from the Philippines who grew up with white parents in the placid suburb of South Windsor, Connecticut. Before coming to the South River Forest, he wrote copy for an ad agency in Florida and spent his free time playing his ukulele for Food Not Bombs volunteers, handing out free meals, and participating in clothing drives. He is more than a little embarrassed by how little he knew about the fight he was joining on March 5. “I was in the mindset of I haven’t done anything wrong, so nothing bad is going to happen to me,” he says. “Which, Zak, is fucking naïve.”
Adele MacLean, who goes by the nickname Earthworm, is a 43-year-old grassroots organizer Roberts has long known as someone who helped secure prisoners bail money and resources for navigating the legal system. “To see Earthworm being prosecuted for being part of an organization that says, ‘Okay, well, people don’t have gas, or people don’t …’” Roberts says. “How far removed are we from that sort of accusation?”
On September 5, 2023, Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr announced a RICO indictment in Fulton County naming 61 defendants, including Earthworm, Grim, and Harper. Georgia’s RICO statute, one of the many state-level heirs to the federal “racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations” laws that were used to take down the mob in the 1970s, accomplishes the magic trick of lowering the burden of proof for prosecutors while raising the penalties for defendants. If Carr could show the accused were part of a criminal enterprise, then anything they did to advance its interests — even acts that wouldn’t otherwise be seen as criminal, like Earthworm allegedly reimbursing protesters for $52.22 worth of food — would be punishable with up to 20 years of prison time.
Carr’s 109-page indictment traces the evolution of this alleged criminal enterprise populated with scheming anarchists and violent terrorists who went from the burning streets of downtown Atlanta in 2020 to setting tractors ablaze in the South River Forest in 2023. For Zohra Ahmed, a former public defender in New York who later became a law professor at the University of Georgia, the document “is hard to decipher.” Ahmed’s family is from Pakistan, and she moved to the U.S. two years before 9/11; she knows intimately how terms like terrorist can be contorted for political ends, but she says the state’s theory of the protesters’ criminal enterprise is unclear. “If the basis for the ‘criminal agreement’ is simply that the cops suck,” Ahmed says, “and I don’t like it and I want to do something about it, all of that sounds like First Amendment activity.”
To the best of Ahmed’s knowledge, RICO has never been used against a group like this. By claiming that a diffuse but broadly aligned social movement equals organized crime, prosecutors are saying protesters could find themselves subject to a Mafia-style trial because some random guy broke a window. “If it includes everyone,” Ahmed adds, “then why is it a criminal conspiracy?”
Ahmed and her colleague Elizabeth Taxel have, with the help of their students, been researching due-process issues around conspiracy cases of this magnitude and looking for close-enough analogs to this case that may offer some precedent. Is it more like the prosecutions of anti-pipeline activists at Standing Rock in North Dakota or like when Carr filed that big gang indictment in Georgia a few years back? Without any real clarity, “everyone’s left guessing,” Ahmed says. “And so you have to play a million different combinations in your mind as a defendant, as a defense counsel, and as someone supporting defense counsel.”
This is an overwhelming task, which may be the point. The public-defense system in Atlanta is already strained to the breaking point, and most of the Southern Center’s private lawyers are defending clients in the Cop City RICO case. Add the fact that Fulton County already has two massive RICO trials on the docket — one involving the rapper Young Thug and another Donald Trump’s alleged election interference — and you have a system whose resources are largely consumed. “If the prosecution is able to make this stick,” says Ahmed, “it will rely on sloppiness.”
In November, Harper came back for his RICO arraignment. Three months in jail had wrecked his personal life: His former roommate in Florida had tried to give away his belongings while he was detained, and he was having trouble finding work (Google search results were a problem, as they had been for Grim). He had spent the summer traveling the country, struggling to make sense of where he fit in with this movement. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to him, and the weight of it hit unexpectedly. A few weeks after his release from jail, Harper was with a group of friends at Pride in San Francisco when a sudden terror overcame him — was the crowd too rowdy? Was this too much like a protest? — and he felt sure the cops were going to arrest him again. He started sobbing uncontrollably.
Grim flew out for the arraignment too. It was bittersweet, she says, to see so many of her alleged co-conspirators, women she would not have known had the cops not locked them up together where all of them had hoarded menstrual pads and toilet paper in their bras. Now, each was handed a numbered paddle — there were too many of them to treat as individuals. Grim saw her old cellmate, but were they allowed to talk? “It was like a weird, sad family reunion,” she says.
Grim’s lawyer received an offer from Carr’s office: three to four years in a Georgia state prison in exchange for a guilty plea. The lawyer laughed and dropped the offer back in the envelope it came in. “You don’t have a case,” Grim concluded, echoing a sentiment that has been spreading through the defense camp.
The protests continued despite the RICO charges. On September 7, 26-year-old Ayeola Omolara Kaplan stood in a razed section of the South River Forest, chained to a bulldozer. “My thinking,” she says, “was that if I do a demonstration on the property, trying to stop construction, this will show that there are other people out there who aren’t afraid.” Photos from that day show her in the middle of a field crisscrossed with tread marks, wearing black lipstick and a black Adidas tracksuit with a bundle of multi-colored locs gathered on top of her head. To her right stand three other activists, one holding a hand-painted sign that reads STOP WORK. A fifth protester is sitting on top of the bulldozer.
Kaplan grew up in Atlanta, where you could hardly go a block without seeing some tribute — a street name, a mural — to a Black civil-rights luminary. If civil disobedience had a spiritual home anywhere in America, it was supposed to be here. What she learned as she sat in DeKalb County Jail for three days among the fruit flies, gnats, and roaches, deprived of water, was that Atlanta’s real calling card was as a place uncommonly free from disruption.
The city’s reputation for peaceful desegregation and Black prosperity — while Birmingham and Little Rock were being torn apart in the 1960s and white flight hollowed out urban cores in the 1970s — was another way of saying Atlanta was safe for doing business. The merit of a thriving corporate sector has always been the main subject of agreement between the Black-led city government and the white-run state government. Republican governor Brian Kemp and Mayor Bottoms clashed viciously over COVID restrictions. But when Norfolk Southern established its headquarters in midtown, opening day was a party.
It is easy to imagine the shock waves that rippled through corporate boardrooms and city hall when it turned out that Atlanta was not insulated from the rage boiling over from Minneapolis. “I think what happened in 2020 really scared the Establishment into action,” says Lingsch, the former public defender representing one of the domestic-terrorism defendants. Practically overnight, the orderly reputation on which the city had long prided itself — a place where progress was won with cash and “Kumbaya” and where its first of seven Black mayors was elected back in 1973 — had literal fire licking its heels. It gave the rush to build Cop City an air of desperation; its completion became a monument to reasserting control. “To get released from jail,” Kaplan says, “one of the things I had to say is I wouldn’t go back to the site.”
That aura of control is essential for both parties. It is the Georgia Republican Party’s worst-kept secret that Carr is angling to succeed the term-limited Kemp in 2027. He is prosecuting the Cop City protesters as a law-enforcement official, but as a politician, he has not concealed his support for the Public Safety Training Center. “This is gonna be state of the art,” Carr said admiringly of the project last year.
The city council has absorbed the political lessons of 2020, which led Bottoms to decline a bid for reelection and former councilman Dickens succeed her by running from her right. When residents gathered 116,000 signatures to put the construction of Cop City to a ballot referendum last year, the council saw it not as a democratic way to resolve a dispute previously defined by skirmishes but as another threat to the social order. Councilmembers have since thwarted the process at every turn, including by subjecting it to voter-suppression tactics that their own party has sued Republicans for using. “We’re snuffing out a nonviolent political solution to this,” lamented one pro-referendum advocate during a heated council meeting in January.
But more than a crusade for local politicians, Cop City is the harbinger of a dark future. Since 2020, similar police-training complexes have been either proposed, slated for construction, or opened in cities as disparate as Chicago, Newark, and Corpus Christi, and states as scattered as California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. All reflect a similar attitude toward the protests of 2020. In the wake of that summer’s unprecedented challenge to state brutality, the American political class has declined introspection and instead chosen to rearm itself against the citizenry, very much including pro-Palestinian student protesters who one day might similarly find themselves being accused of conspiracy and worse.
For the Democratic Party, Georgia has become a vital new swing state. It helped secure Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory and is the reason the party still has control of the Senate. Young people are pouring into the region, and Black people are spreading to the suburbs. Atlanta is now one of a handful of metropolitan areas where a savvy ground game can flip a national election — where the minutiae of manning polls and tallying votes have acquired a sense of almost existential importance. It is a place where election season feels like a 365-day affair: Everyone seems to have a petition for you to sign, and everyone is trying to register you to vote. For all its warts, it is the rare place where progressive organizing can triumph and everyday people have begun to sense they can change the world — just as long as they don’t make trouble, good or otherwise.
