Despite the conclusion of Cop City’s $120-million construction on 170 acres of stolen Mvskogee land, the Stop Cop City movement and contributors of No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement have given us as many perennial gifts in local organizing history, police-prison abolition, and direct action inspiration as there have been multifoliate members and tactics in and beyond the Atlanta movement. But these words aren’t just meant for Atlantans and activists. The work to halt construction on the largest militarized police training facility in North America reminds us that Atlanta constitutes but one battle in the war against the combined forces of police and prisons, privilege and property, and neoliberal austerity and fascism marching in lockstep together into the Anthropocene. As such, one might suspect a book compiling years of the Atlanta movement to slip into organizing nostalgia or romantic gloss, engage in retrospective or abstract analysis, or even rest on its laurels, such as the 116,000 signatures achieved on the people’s referendum to put the facility’s unpopular construction on the ballot. However, this is far from the case for organizers Mariah Parker, Kamau Franklin, Micah Herskind, and the dozens of contributors to this concise yet vast volume of groundedly optimistic and information-packed stories of local-to-global organizing power.

Accordingly, a key takeaway from the Lessons from the Movement remains practical hope in the grassroots abolition and mutual aid work being done and still to come – that is, to draw on Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will, a philosophy oft invoked and embodied by Black liberation bellringer Angela Y. Davis. In Dr. Davis’ own contribution to this book, she reminds us “the movement for the abolition of police and prisons and the urgent and growing movement for environmental justice are two key pillars of a collective vision for a more hopeful, egalitarian future.” (Herskind et al. 301) That world isn’t easy to work towards, much less envision, today.

A just Green New Deal – not only economically feasible but existentially necessary for human survival in the decades to come – remains anathema to politicians, both left and right. Concomitantly, the US has experienced an acceleration in deadly policing policies. Since the 1990s, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program trains American police chiefs and sheriffs in military tactics in collaboration with the Israeli army, while the 80+ proposed cop cities across the US in the half decade following the 2020 BLM mobilizations have brought American militarized foreign policy home to roost. Indeed, “Atlanta was named by Money as the best place to live and was identified by Realtor Magazine as the top real estate market in the country. The same year [2022], Atlanta was proclaimed the most unequal city in the country. At the same time, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the US” (Herskind et al. 15), thanks in large part to APD’s Operation Shield and its formation of a 20,000 camera network modeled on the Israeli army’s surveillance network in Jerusalem.

But in response to growing police state surrealities, No Cop City, No Cop World’s ultimate strength derives from the truth that Stop Cop City isn’t the result any one person’s, organization’s, or even network’s standalone endeavor. Herskind, Parker, and Franklin recognize this is the story of a people united:

“Through struggle, the Stop Cop City movement has peeled off contractors, delayed construction of the project, raised the cost of the project, and forced the reduction of its total acreage. Activists have continually unearthed the city’s backroom dealings with APF [Atlanta Police Foundation] and exposed its corporate power structure, highlighting the deadly harmony between Atlanta’s Democratic leadership, Georgia’s Republican officials, and multinational corporations. The movement has revealed time and again that the ruling class, regardless of any individual’s race, party, or politics, supports Cop City. / The Stop Cop City movement has also illustrated the power of a true diversity of tactics, strategies, and formations to fight back against local and global capital and white supremacy.” (Herskind et al. 311)

In this diversity of tactics and formations, “grassroots” only begins to describe action networks as enmeshed and sustained as the nature it defends – composed of forest defenders, professionals, artists, referendum canvassers, mutual aid volunteers, bail fund organizers, university students and faculty, lawyers and journalists, community leaders and clergy, youth and families and neighbors in coalition with one another without center or circumference save the city of Atlanta and the Mvskogee-reclaimed woods of Weelaunee themselves.

To draw from a memory of the movement in March 2023, nearly a thousand Atlantans marched from the Martin Luther King Center to the Atlanta Police Foundation and faced down three lines of armed, armored, and masked police. The young speaker standing in the narrow lacuna between protesters and police called out with such eloquence and unvarnished honesty that his words remained enshrined in my mind ever since – “Support one another! Use your gifts! If you organize, make them fear your unity! If you write, make them fear that pen!”

And communities in Atlanta and far beyond have answered this call for collective service, for mutual aid, for Land Back, for supporting people’s needs over property, police, and prisons. The answers have taken the ever-evolving and perennially powerful forms of the Weelaunee Coalition, Atlanta Solidarity Fund, Food4Life, South River Watershed Alliance, Highlander School, Community Movement Builders, Showing Up For Racial Justice, Atlanta Alliance, Atlanta Radical Book Fair, Resistance Cinema, Atlanta Community Press Collective, Mainline, Scalawag, Truthout, and now in the communal love found between the covers of No Cop City, No Cop World. In the words of the forest defenders, we are nature defending itself. “For Tortuguita, for Palestine, for the forest defenders and the land defenders, for all struggling for liberation locally and globally, we must continue to fight and to say: No Cop City, No Cop World!” (Herskind et al. 312)Email