“No one has a right to tell you how to organize, to free yourself, and to liberate yourself.”
The fight over Cop City was never just about a police training center. In Atlanta, a multiracial, multigenerational movement brought together environmental justice, land conservation, police abolition, and grassroots organizing to challenge the destruction of a forest and expansion of police power.
In this episode of A People’s Climate, Shilpi Chhotray talks with organizer Kamau Franklin about the strategies behind the Stop Cop City movement—and the lessons it offers for fights still to come.
Although the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center was ultimately built, the movement showed how organizers can build power across ideologies, work through decentralized networks, shape the public narrative, and connect struggles that are often treated as separate.
Franklin and Shilpi also discuss the criminalization of protesters, including the killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán. They examine what it means to organize under state repression and ultimately, what the Stop Cop City movement can teach those fighting for justice.
Key Topics
- Climate & the forest: Why protecting Atlanta’s South River Forest was an environmental justice fight
- Movement tactics: The organizing strategies behind Stop Cop City, from town halls and petition drives to direct action, civil disobedience, and decentralized organizing.
- Defining violence: Why organizers challenged the idea that property destruction is equivalent to violence—and who gets to define legitimate protest.
- Organizing across differences: How a decentralized movement brought together people with different ideologies, tactics, and political traditions.
- The power of narrative: How organizers turned “Cop City” into a powerful frame and pushed back against efforts to portray protesters as outsiders or extremists.
- Criminalizing dissent: The killing of forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán and the sweeping RICO charges brought against protesters.
- Building power under repression: How movements can organize when the state is working to divide, intimidate, and silence them.
- Lessons for future fights: What Stop Cop City can teach organizers fighting for climate, racial, and environmental justice beyond Atlanta.
Resources
- Community Movement Builders
- No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement Edited by Micah Herskind Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin
Credits
Presented by Counterstream Media and The Nation
Powered by Wildseeds Fund
Host: Shilpi Chhotray
Executive Producer: Mindy Ramaker
Engineer: Ameeta Ganatra
Project Manager: Asia Simms
Kamau Franklin
Kamau Franklin (he/him) is the founder of Community Movement Builders. He’s been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years. For 18 years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X. He’s spearheaded organizing work in areas, including youth organizing, police misconduct, and developing sustainable urban communities. Kamau has coordinated community cop-watch programs, liberation schools for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. Kamau was an attorney for ten years in New York with his own practice in criminal, civil rights and transactional law. He now lives in Atlanta with his two children.