Two years in a row, on the very same day, police descended on the campus of Emory University, an elite private school on the leafy eastern edges of Atlanta. In the spring of 2023, students staked tents on the university’s quad, agitating against the construction of a controversial police training center in a forest south of Atlanta. Opponents had nicknamed the hundred-million-dollar facility “Cop City” for all the amenities that would be built on its sprawling campus: shooting ranges, mock houses and nightclubs and gas stations, a three-thousand-square-foot building designed to resemble a motel or apartment building. The students aimed their message at Emory president Gregory L. Fenves, demanding he denounce the facility and step down from the Atlanta Committee for Progress, an influential mayoral council of business and other local leaders that has provided critical support for the project. Instead, Fenves summoned the police to break up the protest.

In April 2024, students again set up tents on Emory’s quad, and the police responded with force. Cop City was still a subject of protest, only now it was linked with the genocide in Gaza. Organizers from Emory and other Atlanta colleges wrote in a public statement, “The fight against Cop City and for Palestinian liberation are both frontiers in the same struggle against the mechanisms of state-sanctioned violence and repression.” There was a local connection, too: Atlanta police train in Israel under a law enforcement exchange program based at Georgia State University. The program’s founder has said that an extensive network of surveillance cameras operated by the Atlanta Police Department was inspired by a similar system in Jerusalem, though the police department has denied the claim. But The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a reliable tribune of the city’s ruling class, framed the relationship between the two movements differently. In a scolding editorial from May 5, 2024 that combined trite paeans to free speech with pat invocations of Atlanta’s storied history of peaceful civil rights protest, the paper warned students about associating with “outsiders with different agendas” — specifically, Stop Cop City activists. As the editorial board put it, “Especially in and around Atlanta, anti-war protests are susceptible to being co-opted by the activists seeking to prevent the construction of the public safety training center.” This didn’t give much credit to the students’ analytical abilities, but that wasn’t really the point. The point, as it has been since the training center was announced, was to cleave the Stop Cop City movement from Atlanta itself, painting the training center’s opponents as outside agitators. The campus protesters, the editorial explained, should reject outside influence and “follow the Atlanta Way,” which it defined as a “shorthand for people working together across race and class divides to advance the common interest.” 

Disingenuous as it may be, the Journal-Constitution is not wrong to say that the Stop Cop City movement represents a rejection of the Atlanta Way, a self-congratulatory ethos often touted by the city’s establishment. On the Stop Cop City website, organizers call it “a form of backroom dealing between the mostly white business class and the predominantly Black city politic[i]ans that ignores the input of everyday Atlanta residents.” The Atlanta Way — the notion that fundamental decisions about the city’s direction can be made out of sight, with minimal public input, in the name of togetherness and racial comity — may be less than democratic, but to its backers, the upshot is social stability and economic prosperity, at least for a sliver of the population. Since the last century, this mode of power has worked, more or less, to maintain steadiness within the city while presenting a good face to the rest of the world. But it’s not clear how much longer the pantomime of equality will be able to last. While Atlanta’s leaders and their partisans in the media invoke the Atlanta Way as the ideal approach to doing business, protesters have correctly identified it as the narrative engine propelling militarized police projects, racial and economic inequality, and the violence required to maintain this status quo. The protest movement against Cop City, then, doesn’t just threaten a single facility — it threatens an entire philosophy of power, the racialized carving up of space it has entailed, and the style of governance by which Atlanta has long managed its lower classes.

The roots of the Atlanta Way can be traced in part to the almost total destruction of Atlanta during the Civil War. The city’s seal bears a phoenix rising from flames alongside the Latin word “resurgens” (“rising again”) and two years: 1847, when Atlanta was incorporated, and 1865, when it was made anew. After the war, Atlanta embraced a post-Southern worldliness, foregrounding economic growth as it tried to distance itself from the region’s history of racial conflict. In an 1886 speech given at a meeting of the New England Society in New York City, The Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady repudiated the Old South not on the grounds of its inhumanity but because it was inefficient: “slavery and agriculture,” he said, “could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” He sketched a vision of a New South fully incorporated into the nation, leaving the plantation economy behind.

In the twentieth century, businessmen and other well-connected civic actors took on a singular role in upholding the social order. In 1906, white Atlantans — responding to specious reports that black men had been assaulting white women — rampaged through black neighborhoods, killing at least two dozen. Black residents organizing in self-defense were met with another wave of violence, this time in the form of police repression. Attempting to enforce calm, white elites allied with black leaders — ministers, businessmen — who in turn sought to disassociate themselves from the resisting lower classes. “The decision by elite Black community leaders to serve as mediators for white politicians in the immediate aftermath of the massacre laid the template for protecting the city’s reputation and maintaining law and order,” Kayla Edgett and Sarah Abdelaziz wrote in a 2021 Atlanta Studies article. “At the same time it forestalled the immediate racial justice that Black Atlantans demanded, especially working-class and low-income residents.” The bonds formed between community leaders — white and black elites — would prove useful in dealing with violent racial conflict, at the same time as they set an exclusionary precedent: discord in the city could be taken care of behind closed doors. 

It wasn’t just social unrest that elites believed could be managed quietly; it was the city itself — a dynamic that solidified as Atlanta’s economy grew. In the 1920s, former Chamber of Commerce head Ivan Allen Sr. launched a national campaign called Forward Atlanta, taking out ads in publications like The Saturday Evening Post that attracted some 750 companies within the decade. In the same period, the Coca-Cola Company, founded in Atlanta in 1886, grew into an international behemoth under the stewardship of Robert W. Woodruff, who was president of the company from 1923 to 1985. An ultra-influential civic leader, Woodruff used his corporate power — and massive wealth — to put himself at the center of political decision-making in Atlanta. Ivan Allen Jr., who would follow in his father’s footsteps at the Chamber of Commerce before becoming Atlanta’s mayor in 1962, recalled that Woodruff and his cohort “guided Atlanta from behind the scenes for nearly four decades,” bringing the city “from an overgrown country town to a metropolis totaling nearly a million people.” If corporate leaders like Woodruff saw their interests as consonant with those of Atlanta, the city’s politicians felt similarly: William B. Hartsfield, mayor from 1937 to 1961, said that he “always kept in mind that Atlanta was the headquarters of the Coca-Cola Company,” noting, “anything that would reflect unfavorably on Atlanta would hurt the company.” 

A pragmatist conscious of how open bigotry could hurt the city’s finances, and how a sense of stability could benefit them, Hartsfield worked with white businessmen and black community leaders to stage-manage desegregation before the Civil Rights Act. Birmingham emerged from that era with a reputation for fire hoses and police dogs; Atlanta gained the nickname “the city too busy to hate.” As the city integrated, bit by bit, a “familiar pattern unfolded,” Kevin M. Kruse writes in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. “First, black leaders would stage a cautious challenge to the racial status quo,” he explains. “City officials would then wait until they were confronted by court orders to desegregate. Then, claiming an inability to do otherwise, they would carefully orchestrate the actual desegregation.” 

Today, a series of sit-ins organized in spring 1960 by Julian Bond, Lonnie King, and other black student organizers are remembered as an example of the Atlanta Way in action — the Journal-Constitution cited them explicitly in chiding the Emory protesters. In reality, the sit-ins came at the end of a decade that had been characterized by careful backroom compromises by white and black elites — in other words, they represented less an expression of the usual way of doing business in Atlanta than a challenge to it. Students began at public buildings like City Hall before zeroing in on Rich’s, a downtown department store. This escalation from what Bond described as “absolutely safe ground” to actual sites of commerce was condemned not just in the white press but in the black press as well. The older generation of black Atlanta leaders — Martin Luther King Sr.’s cohort — saw the students as “outsiders to the community,” as Kruse writes, “too young to understand how things had ‘worked’ in the past, too transient to have a stake in how things would stand in the future.” King Sr.’s generation initially rallied behind Rich’s, where they felt they had been treated reasonably well. Meanwhile, King’s own son, Martin Jr., was arrested at a sit-in. Finally, the head of the Chamber of Commerce brokered a compromise — not with the students, but with older leaders in the black community: the businessmen would accept integration, but on a relaxed schedule. (Offered this deal, the students hesitated; the old guard, already wary of the young radicals, lost patience. King Sr. exploded at one young organizer: “Boy, I’m tired of you!”) Tactically, the sit-ins worked, but not before being absorbed into the city’s existing power arrangement — and then, later, absorbed into a more streamlined story about how the civil rights movement in Atlanta accomplished its goals.

Desegregation, however gently managed, meant that white people abandoned the city in droves for the suburbs. At the same time, black leaders, emboldened by their recent successes, were no longer content to be the “silent partner” in the ruling coalition (as one mayor described them), and the white establishment grew exasperated at their continued demands. Ultimately, they forged what Kruse calls “yet another Atlanta compromise.” White and black leaders would continue to work closely on decisions about political and economic governance, but “in their day-to-day life,” Kruse writes, “the races would remain as separate as they had been during the Jim Crow era — if not more so.” Atlanta was more segregated in 1970 than it had been in 1940, though the makeup of its leadership class was in flux: 1974, by which time the urban population was majority black, was the last year that a white mayor governed the city. The Atlanta Way had emerged from the civil rights movement intact, and in the seventies and eighties city leadership began laying the groundwork for modern-day Atlanta, embracing a cosmopolitan, post-civil rights urban vision — and disregarding whatever inequalities emerged as byproducts.

Today’s Atlanta is home to the headquarters of more Fortune 500 companies — including UPS, Home Depot, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Delta Air Lines — than any other U.S. city except New York and Houston. Though it’s often called the “Black Mecca,” Atlanta is now less than half black, down from two-thirds in 1990. And the city’s racial wealth gap is enormous: the median wealth of a white household in Atlanta is 46 times greater than the median wealth of a black household. That’s about four times the national average.

After Andrew Young, a hero of the civil rights movement, became mayor in the 1980s, he quipped that his job was “to see that whites get some of the power and blacks get some of the money.” But those goals weren’t particularly consonant: in today’s Atlanta, black residents get less of the money, while white Atlantans’ desires remain central to municipal decision-making. The making of modern Atlanta has unfolded as a series of quests, in the words of urban studies scholar Dan Immergluck, “to identify, promote, and fund the ‘one big project’” — a lavishly expensive development that would broadcast Atlanta’s prosperity to the world while subtly engineering its demographic makeup, pushing the most vulnerable out. In the run-up to the 1996 Olympic Games, the city council passed a suite of ordinances that effectively criminalized homelessness, making it illegal, for instance, to walk across a parking lot if one didn’t have a car parked there, and raising the maximum penalty for violating an ordinance to six years’ incarceration from two. The city opened a new thousand-bed jail, and police preprinted citations with the words “AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE, HOMELESS” to speed up the process of issuing them. They partnered with a nonprofit to give unhoused people one-way bus tickets to Florida and Alabama. So many unhoused people were illegally arrested in 1995 and 1996 — an estimated nine thousand — that a federal court issued a cease-and-desist order. The Olympics also offered a pretext for realizing a dream long held by Atlanta’s white elite: tearing down two public housing developments located downtown, next to the Coca-Cola headquarters. In 1971, several years after the buildings were desegregated, Coke CEO J. Paul Austin wrote a memo proposing to replace them with a new “ultra-modern” apartment complex. His wish finally came true in 1995, when the city razed the buildings — following a campaign funded by money from Robert W. Woodruff’s philanthropies — and erected a mixed income residential development called Centennial Place. 

In the years after the Olympics, plans were circulating for another big project, what an enthusiastic developer called the “most exciting real estate project since Sherman burned Atlanta”: the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile path built on old rail lines around the center of the city. Its first segment opened in 2008 and has already radically refashioned the areas surrounding its finished stretches. In the Old Fourth Ward area, a 1920s-era Sears warehouse the city was using as an administrative building was transformed, by the same firm behind Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, into a $250 million food hall that fully opened in 2014. Directly across the BeltLine, a supermarket once known as “Murder Kroger” reopened in 2019 as the anchor tenant of a building whose other occupants include McKinsey and BlackRock. The neighborhood’s black population dropped from 76 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2017, while the white population grew by 280 percent. Meanwhile, affordable housing and transit, two foundational components of the BeltLine’s proposed contribution to bridging race and class divides in Atlanta, have been slow to get off the ground.

A function of the big civic project has traditionally been not the resolution of thorny racial problems so much as reinforcing the blithe sense that they can be overwritten with a sunnier story. That may have been city leaders’ goal for the police training center, plans for which debuted the year after Black Lives Matter protests convulsed Atlanta and the rest of the country. Cop City has been advertised as furthering the familiar liberal dream of better, more racially sensitive policing, and in Atlanta it was introduced in the usual way: the Atlanta Way, which is to say with virtually no prior consultation of city residents but with ample input from corporate leaders. Its contentiousness, though — especially after Atlantans have reckoned with the fallout of the Olympics and, to a lesser extent, the BeltLine — suggests that the tide of public opinion may be turning against these kinds of megaprojects and the urban politics they represent.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms first previewed the Cop City project in March 2021 at her State of the City address, delivered virtually due to the pandemic. The event was sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company, and the pre-recorded proceedings included an introduction by the company’s North American CEO; a prayer and the national anthem; a handsomely produced video featuring top executives from Chick-fil-A and AT&T touting Bottoms’s accomplishments; and a separate address from the Atlanta president of Bank of America. Nearly 45 minutes elapsed before Bottoms herself spoke, thanking “our friends at the Coca-Cola Company” for their support.

The mayor’s announcement caught even members of her own team — including Tim Keane, the city’s planning commissioner — by surprise. Under a previous administration, Keane’s office had earmarked the forest, which sits among a number of low-income, largely black and brown communities, to become public green space. In an ambitious planning document ratified in 2017 by Atlanta’s city council, the area was described as “our last chance for a massive urban park.” In fact, the plans for Cop City weren’t formulated within the mayor’s administration, or by democratically elected officials at all. They were spearheaded by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), a nonprofit with board members from Delta Air Lines, AT&T, and Inspire Brands, the second-largest restaurant conglomerate in the country. ​​The APF, the country’s second-largest private police foundation, initially claimed it would contribute sixty million dollars in philanthropic money to the training center, with taxpayers kicking in thirty million. (The price tag would later be revised upward on both ends, to a new total of almost $110 million.) 

In the spring of 2021, local newspapers were dominated by headlines about rising crime rates. City boosters were starting to worry that the favorable business climate the city had spent decades cultivating was in jeopardy, disturbed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings. Sensing where the real power in town lay, in 2020 Black Lives Matter marchers had made their way toward the opulent malls of the wealthy, predominantly white enclave of Buckhead, smashing windows and lighting fires and causing an estimated ten to fifteen million dollars of damage in the process — a demonstration condemned, unsurprisingly, by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in an editorial whose first sentence read “The peaceful moat that is the Atlanta Way was forcefully breached.” The unrest fed a growing movement calling for Buckhead — home to many of the corporate leaders who represent the Atlanta Way’s most powerful constituent group — to secede from the city to form an independent municipality. Hilly and forested, its streets lined with gated mansions on acres of land, Buckhead, a former suburb, was only annexed into Atlanta in 1952 in an explicit attempt to stabilize the city’s racial hierarchy by diluting the growing power of black voters. By 2021, Buckhead was responsible for 40 percent of the city’s property tax revenue; its loss would have dealt a devastating financial blow.  

Cop City soon emerged as Atlanta’s unofficial way of forestalling Buckhead’s secession. In a 2021 email to the chief operating officer for Mayor Bottoms, APF president Dave Wilkinson passed along a message he’d received from someone he describes as “a prominent CEO.” Citing “shootings over the past few weeks, parties in the streets this weekend and the water boys running around on scooters” — black kids selling bottled water to drivers in passing cars — the unnamed CEO said that unless crime is brought under control, “I and others will have to turn all of our support toward the Buckhead city movement.” Wilkinson’s takeaway: the mayor needed to press harder on the training center, which polls suggested a majority of Buckhead residents approved. Bottoms could “show real leadership on this critical issue,” he wrote, by pressuring the city council to approve the lease of the land to APF. (Ultimately, the secession movement was doomed by its failure to gain traction among Buckhead’s corporate community, who opposed it for the traditional reason: bad for business.)

The messaging around the training center was remarkably uniform. Cop City was promoted as a way, per the Atlanta Committee for Progress’s endorsement, to “accelerate Atlanta’s competitiveness for attracting residents, businesses and investment, with a high priority on public safety.” As the activist and writer Micah Herskind has argued, the facility would signal “to corporations and those attracted by the influx of tech and other high-paying jobs that Atlanta is a stable, securitized city that will protect their interests.” Or you can take it from the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who said in November 2023: “For Georgia to continue to be the top state for business, to attract talent, jobs and investment, to keep our communities safe and to ensure a brighter future for all who call our state home, we must support the Atlanta Public Safety Center.”

While it’s not unusual for corporate leaders to exercise political influence in city governments, what distinguishes Atlanta is how these machinations are not just publicly acknowledged but openly celebrated: they’re the Atlanta Way. (The Journal-Constitution, one of the prominent celebrants, is owned by Cox Enterprises, a major donor to the training center.) As the fight against Cop City coalesced, bringing together a wide-ranging coalition of environmentalists, prison and police abolitionists, community organizers, and other “forest defenders,” these opponents have called attention to the training center’s corporate backers. Protesters spent about a year occupying the land on which Cop City was planned, focusing on the underwriters themselves: naming contractors and subcontractors, vandalizing construction equipment and offices, and targeting key funders and insurers like Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Home Depot.

In June 2023, hundreds of Atlantans showed up to speak at a fourteen hour city council hearing on the project, which was subsequently approved on an 11-4 vote — despite the overwhelming opposition expressed during the public comment period. (One proponent of the project on the council was Michael Julian Bond, the son of the civil rights activist Julian Bond.) Organizers then moved on to collecting more than a hundred thousand signatures to get a referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to determine the fate of the training center. Bottoms’s successor as mayor, Andre Dickens, has fought the referendum proposal in court — thus far, successfully. Yet in an indication of how badly the city has managed this process, Bernice King — Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, who stood by Mayor Bottoms in 2020 as she tried to quell racial justice protests — came out in 2023 in support of the referendum, saying that Atlanta’s decision to pursue the training center “from the outset did not include sufficient, equitable, nor transparent engagement.” (King stopped short of opposing the center outright, and as of this writing, the case awaits adjudication in federal appeals court.) As the referendum looks increasingly like a failed gambit, organizers nevertheless continue to chain themselves to construction sites, and they are recalibrating their strategy for a longer-term fight, including by recruiting people to run for city council in 2025.

Perhaps because the Stop Cop City movement has gained so much support and national attention, the city and state have become increasingly baroque in their suppression. In January 2023, police conducted a raid on the forest defenders, fatally shooting Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán in what is thought to be the first state killing in the U.S. of an environmental activist. Georgia’s Republican attorney general brought racketeering charges against 61 people accused of participating in a “conspiracy” to defeat the training center, though the charges in the indictment alternated between the illegal (“did damage an Atlanta Police Department vehicle”), the plainly not illegal (“did publish a post on scenes.noblogs.org recruiting more Defend the Atlanta Forest members”), and the downright picayune (“did sign his name as ‘ACAB.’ This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy”). Atlanta police and state officials raided a house to arrest the coordinators of a bail fund; in a statement, Governor Kemp alleged that the three organizers had “facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism.” Activists posting flyers around a neighborhood were charged with felonies under a statute related to the intimidation of law enforcement. In February, police again raided several homes associated with Stop Cop City — the third SWAT-style raid since 2021 — and in this spring’s legislative session the Georgia General Assembly passed a law limiting bail funds, an act that observers interpreted as a response to the activism against the training center. 

For its opponents, Cop City has always represented a dangerous escalation in the state’s willingness — and technical ability — to forcibly pacify dissidents. As one resident of the neighborhood where Cop City is being built said at a city council meeting, the reason the Atlanta elite is building “a giant simulated city in the woods” for police to “train in riot techniques” is “because they’re scared of what will happen the next time they kill someone like George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks” — a black man killed by Atlanta police in the summer of 2020 when he fled following a confrontation in which he grabbed an officer’s Taser.

The police training center is being built; the mayor’s office has indicated it expects construction to wrap up by the end of the year. But the recent uprisings — BLM in 2020, Cop City from 2021 onward, and then Gaza in 2024 — have provoked a vivid demonstration of how much violence is required to maintain this state of affairs, from the carceral to the legislative to the directly physical. Both the pushback against the training center and the intensity of the state’s response suggest that, while the Atlanta Way may have prevailed where Cop City is concerned, the ruling order could otherwise be at an inflection point.

In future decades, the struggle against Cop City may be rewritten as a short-lived series of confrontations that, in the end, made the Atlanta Police Department better, more sensitive, more inclusive. The foundation for this kind of framing is already being laid. One early proposed name for the center was the “Institute for Social Justice and Public Safety Training.” In early 2023, a “community stakeholder advisory committee” reviewing updates on the facility heard a presentation from LS3P, a South Carolina firm involved in the design of the project. An early slide featured a quote attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter most.” (King does not appear to have actually said this.) This was on January 17, two days after King’s birthday and in the middle of a week when various Atlanta politicos were lauding one another for carrying on his legacy; on January 18, police raided the forest and killed Tortuguita. Nobody had a thing to say about that.

Atlanta is practiced in such maneuvers: consider the way the student sit-ins, so profoundly challenging in their own time, have been assimilated into the city’s story of itself, a trick that undermines the students’ radicalism while refiguring their actions into a tool to suppress present — and future — movements for justice. It echoes the gap between Columbia University’s institutional nostalgia for its own student occupation in 1968, now a proud part of the school’s identity, and its brutal 2024 crackdowns on Gaza protesters — though in a city sometimes referred to as the “cradle of the civil rights movement,” the contrast looks especially stark, and especially pernicious. Protest in the abstract is central to Atlanta’s identity, which has the perverse effect of making actual protest something the city can hardly bear to recognize.

But one suspects that the Stop Cop City movement might not be as easily absorbable into the hegemonic discourse of the Atlanta Way, in part because it has escaped the confines of the city. It’s always been in the interest of the proponents to isolate Cop City as strictly a local issue, a matter to be handled internally — the Atlanta Way being an insiders’ project masquerading as a communal one. But the constant escalatory nature of the movement, its tactical flexibility, and the expansiveness of its arguments — all of which have helped sustain it for more than three years — have also worked to render it a national, even an international issue. (Which, of course, it already is: in recent years, construction has begun on similar militarized police training facilities in cities including Nashville, Chicago, and El Paso.) The police repression facing Gaza activists, and the restrictions on speech both formal and informal, puts an exclamation mark on these arguments. Look at the ease with which the students at Emory, Morehouse, Spelman, and campuses across the country have articulated a complex understanding of the struggles they’re engaged in, connecting the Gaza encampments with police violence in the U.S. and specifically with the Atlanta training center. Protesters in Arizona, for instance, chanted “Stop Cop City” as they faced down lines of riot cops. 

Those are the fruits of a movement that has grown in opposition to institutions that are proving themselves increasingly unable to maintain their own narratives. Hence the quick resort to brute violence — the killing of Tortuguita, the attacks on college protesters. That leaders in Atlanta and New York and elsewhere feel pushed into this particular corner is, in the optimistic appraisal, a mark of success. It’s no longer sufficient to simply dismiss pro-Palestinian movements; in Georgia, exhortations to emulate a fairy-tale version of the civil rights movement carry less weight than ever, in part because the present agitators are students of history, learning its lessons more productively than the average op-ed columnist. They understand the Atlanta Way better than anyone: it’s just an unusually compelling articulation of the cynical way that power functions everywhere.