Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 46

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

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So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about fighting your bosses. This is your host, Christopher Wong. And with me today to talk about fighting bosses and bosses doing incredibly illegal stuff, bosses doing incredibly shady stuff, and why you should fight them more is

Tori Tambolini, who was a partner organizer from Pittsburgh, Starbucks Workers United, and was fired from Starbucks like very illegally under very sketchy circumstances. Tori, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really, really happy to have you here. Okay, so I guess we should start with the whole, you were denied your legal rights and then fired presumably for a union organizing thing. Yes, absolutely. So starting from the beginning, there was like, so a month ago my store manager sat me down and he asked me to come downstairs for a conversation.

So I brought a witness with me and we went downstairs and I found out that I was being investigated because there was one day that I had written down my weekday start time instead of my weekend start time. They just recently changed things at my store so that we open at, we start opening shifts at 5.30 on the weekends and five on the weekdays. And this is a recent change. I've been there for three years. So I out of habit one day had written five in the book instead of 5.30. A couple months later, it seems like everything has blown over. They accepted the fact that it was just an innocent mistake. I really wasn't trying to steal 30 minutes of time, which comes out to like, what, $6? Yeah, like, yeah, I was really desperate for that $6. So I figured they just, they knew it was an innocent mistake and it wasn't going to be a further issue until I saw two managers in my store. One of them was my store manager. The other one was her name is Brittany.

And what Starbucks has done recently is that they've created this new position in the company from my understanding. It's called support manager and they're basically like an assistant district manager and they go around to stores where there's any sort of union activity. And they try to talk about strategies to squash it. So it's like basically the store manager that did the most harsh union busting at their own store gets promoted to this position. So in my district, the person's name is Brittany. And I saw her in my store, which is always a bad sign. And at one point they asked me to have a seat for a conversation. So I sit down and I, well, before I sit down, I say, is this a disciplinary conversation? And the manager said, the one manager said to me, yes, this is solely a disciplinary conversation. And I said, I would like to invoke my wine garden rights. I'm going to go out to the floor and bring somebody back as a witness. And they said, you can't do that today. And basically what they did is they like held up a piece of paper like with a wall of text on it, like this far from my face.

They're like, it says right here that we can't, we don't have to do that for you. And I was like, that's really illegal. And I'm not comfortable having this conversation right now at all. And they said, well, we're going to hand this to you anyway and handed me a notice of termination. Jesus. Yeah. So I walked out and walked back to the front of house. And I said a little bit loudly, definitely not like shouting, but kind of loudly. I said, I just got fired. And is it okay if I swear to quote my friend? Please. Okay, cool. So my best friend Kim was working at the time.

And she loudly said right in front of our new store manager, what the fuck? And I just kept walking because I was so upset. I didn't want the managers to see me cry. So I walked to the front of house or walk outside and Kim follows me and she was like, we're going to fix this. I'm going to go ask to leave early and I'll drive you home and we'll talk about this. Kim goes back inside, looks at my assistant manager and says, I'm requesting permission to leave early. And the assistant manager literally couldn't even look her in the eye and told her Kim, go have a seat in the back. And they fired Kim as well. Jesus.

Yeah. And I think when everything about the story I think is worth talking about is that like when it comes to union busting, it literally does not matter how good of an employee you are, unless like you not being there will literally cause everything to collapse. But yeah, don't talk about like, you were really good at this and they were still just like, no fuck you. Yeah. So I was voted by everybody at my store. I was voted partner of the quarter in spring of 2021. I was also promoted to shift supervisor within that same week. And later that year, I participated in a barista competition for my store and I won barista champion for my store level and I also tied at the district level for barista champion for the district. So then in addition to that, I had dealt with a situation where somebody like leaning against the front of my store had overdosed on heroin and I gave him an arcane and basically saved the guy's life. And then like a month or two later, they fired me. Yeah, which like, I'm trying to think of if like any other way you can possibly go like above and beyond what anyone could reasonably require you that is more than I saved a dude's life.

It's like, okay. Like, you're welcome guys, someone would have died inside your store if I wasn't there, but okay, bye, I guess. Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about that specifically and about sort of the conditions of the store because one of the things that seems really clear from listening to you talk about it and from reading stuff about it is that it's not just I mean, even if you were just like, you know, doing kind of regular ish service like service workers stuff, this would be unacceptable, but it's also like there's there's this way in which you and your coworkers have sort of been turned into social workers and are being sort of are being forced to like deal with just all of the people who sort of capitalism to say I just like spat out. Absolutely. Yeah, and sort of like fill in the gaps of just the collapse of American social services. And yeah, I wonder, yeah, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the stuff that you've been having to do and what that's like. Yeah, absolutely. So something I've noticed in Market Square is that it feels like there were some sort of resources for the unhoused community that existed before the pandemic that straight up just don't exist anymore.

So a lot of that that work to be done like falls on the Starbucks employees. Most of us are completely unqualified for that. Like, I have a degree in psychology, but sometimes that's just not really enough. Yeah, most of us are film students at Point Park. So none of us are at all equipped to deal with any situations where somebody is under the influence of something, and maybe becoming aggressive or somebody's having a mental health crisis. Or there are people that are sleeping in the cafe and we're asked to pick them out if they're sleeping. That feels really, really bad. There's not a ton of other resources, especially during the day. I know the shelter is closed. So when it's like winter, or it's like 90 degrees outside and someone is just trying to get like a tiny little bit of sleep feels really bad to kick them out. So we dealt with a lot of situations that we are just completely unequipped to handle. And Starbucks would send us de-escalation training. But most of the de-escalation training revolved around if a customer isn't happy with their drink and they're shouting at you. Yeah. So it doesn't even begin to cover like any of the stuff that we deal with at Market Square. We've seen a lot of customers having mental health crises in the cafe. What do you do? Don't want to call the police. That's definitely not going to help. In the situation where I had to Narcan somebody, we had called for an ambulance.

And 20 minutes later, the ambulance still wasn't there. And there were even managers at the surrounding businesses calling and calling and calling, trying to get an ambulance to Market Square. And it ended up being me that had to give them an Narcan. And overall, like something that we were pushing for with Union, the main thing that we were pushing for was better training. Like we want Narcan to keep in the stores and we want all the shifts to be trained on how to use that. And that doesn't have to be through Starbucks. I know of a lot of organizations throughout Pittsburgh that would be happy to train our staff on that. We need like better resources. I know at one point we were falsely promised a social worker that would sit in our cafe for at least one day every two weeks. Never got that. And yeah, I feel like my staff just deserves better. The community deserves better. And it shouldn't be Starbucks's job. But until we have something better, I think that we should be a little bit more equipped to handle situations that, frankly, we do have to deal with at some point, just by the nature of our work and our location. I also think something really funny to mention here is that we got a new store manager at the, I want to say the beginning, like mid June, we got this new store manager.

Her name was Sarah and she has already transferred to a different store because she felt so unsafe working at Market Square. She got her first Market Square death threat and was like I'm out. So even the store manager can't deny that our working conditions are bad. So the fact that they're still fighting against the union, even though management is well aware of how terrible our conditions are, just like baffles me. Yeah. Okay. I want to take a second to go back to something that you said, which is your first Market Square death threat. How common is this? I think I received a total of four to five. And then I received my very last one the day that my store went on strike and I was sitting at the picket line and I was like, wow, it's just like the good old days before I was fired. Yeah. Yeah. Market Square is a lawless land. Yeah. And I mean, like, I don't know, like I feel like this is like every time I do, this is like a recurring thing. Every time I do a labor story, it's like, oh, this is a labor service.

Oh, but it's also the story of a bunch of like a bunch of people whose job this like isn't who just wind up having to deal with all of the shit that the state doesn't want to do that corporations don't want to do. And it's like the fact that Starbucks employees have to be the like the Starbucks union has to be the group in like in this place that is trying to get people to get dark hand training is nuts. It's just just on a like just on a like sort of just macro taking a step back level like what on earth is going on in the society. I've been thinking a lot about lately, like, I think a lot of journalists and reporters have asked me like, why do you think that the younger generation is the one like leading this like why are unions making a comeback now. Why is this younger generations like so ready to lead this. I think it's because we've spent our entire lives watching politicians on TV, make all these promises and continuing to do absolutely nothing and we're all sick and tired of it. We are all ready to take it into our own hands and fix it in any way that we see that we can. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, like I, you know, my first ball case, my first political member was the Iraq war, but like I was like a little baby child. But like, like, you know, like I remember like the thing I grew up on was like, yeah, it was Obama. It was it was hope. It was change. And then it was like, you look at the world now and it's like, oh, it's even bleaker than it was in 2008, which is like.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely crazy. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think also just like, like the last two years have been so brutal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I was wondering. Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about like what effects the what effect the pandemic had on y'all's workers and what effect that had on union organizing. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that it really pulled the mask off the company, which ironically, while everyone was putting their mask on, the mask off was coming on for Starbucks. They always really pretended to be this really awesome, progressive company.

Yeah. And it really revealed how performative the company is because they gave us all these COVID benefits for like two, three months and then took them right away from us. Obviously, the pandemic is even over now. It definitely wasn't over back in, I think it was October they took away like our Jesus. Yeah, that's right. Like the spikes too. Exactly. And right around that time, we were also watching our CEO, our now former CEO, Kevin Johnson get like a $40 million raise while they had just taken away our hazard pay and our free food benefits, even though we were all still struggling. So then I think that us seeing those benefits being taken away and realizing that the company doesn't care about us in that sense made us start looking harder at everything. Like the company doesn't want to increase our pay. They don't want to give us credit card tipping. They don't want to make our stores safer.

And every other reason that any store could see to unionize, like it really highlighted all those reasons and all the ways the company doesn't care about us as much as they should and how they really do just see us as a number. So I think that's what really, really pushed us all towards unionizing. It's like if the company doesn't care about us and the people in our stores, then we're going to rely on each other to care about us and push for unions so that we can take matters into our own hands. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about that highlights how important that is, which is that like, you know, you have this combination of management either like the management immediately above you understanding what's happening and being like, we'll just throw you guys at it and we'll just literally bail and run away from how bad it is. And then you have the layer of management like above you, which is it's a bunch of bureaucrats who like couldn't find their ass if you drew a map and you know, or like, oh, hey, here's your de-escalation training. It's about person mad about drink. And it's like, I am getting multiple death threats. It's like, it's, I don't know. You literally had a like someone from I think you're either regional management or maybe a level higher than that like area management came into our store the other day like as a customer. And there was something going on. I'm not sure if it was like somebody shouting in the cafe or like two customers were fighting. But this like upper level manager who should know about our store said to one of my briefs does. So is this like a high incident store. And we were like, I don't know.

Isn't it your job? Like really? Wow. Yikes. Yeah, that's something that like, you know, something I learned like something like you learn intellectually and then you just see like, and then yeah, it's something you learn intellectually and then you just sort of viscerally begin to understand when you know you're doing work and you're watching what your managers do. It is it's that like, yeah, like the people who actually knows how the production process works and how the stuff actually goes and what's happening on the shop floor, like are the people are the workers there. And it's like, everyone above them is just doing some other shit that is making everyone's lives worse. And it's just literally infuriating the start that nobody the reason we need a union and I tell people this all the time whenever I'm going into new stores. Nobody knows your store better than you. Nobody knows like the inner workings of it, how busy you are with the needs of the store are better than the people that are there 40 hours a week. And so another thing we talk about a lot in like our, like our citywide meetings is like, what do the managers even do all day? Like what is their job? What are they working on? Like what does Michelle, the manager do all day in her cushy little corporate office? I mean, I guess she's just union busting now. Even that they're delegating to another manager below them. So yeah, apparently. Yeah. Did you ever see the fake tweets, the fake workers United tweets that Starbucks published? No. Oh, I missed this. I'll have to email you a copy of them.

But they literally made this handout with a list of fake tweets from workers United and like the company's responses to them. But if you look up their company's Twitter account, it just doesn't exist. And the tweets from workers United that they printed out on these handouts also don't exist. And I think maybe three copies of that got handed out to my store. Oh my God. We all made so much fun of my boss that he stopped. I guess that's my boss's job. I will. I can show these to you. I keep them on hand. Oh my God. Amazing. This is like, it's the biggest energy of like, oh, I thought of the perfect argument seven hours later, except they didn't even, the arguments aren't even real. Like they're just making up a guide argument. Yeah. And they didn't even try that hard because these were handed to me back in April. It says that all of these tweets were posted on June 1st. So the data they claimed that this was tweeted hadn't even happened whenever I received the handout.

I mean, hey, if you all have access to a time machine, I have some work I need to do. Yeah. Yeah, they say things like in collective bargaining, you start with everything you have and negotiate for more from there. Starbucks workers united right there. And then the company's response was, I know. And then the we are one Starbucks account said in collective bargaining, everything is up for negotiations if you get more, the same or less. And once you negotiate a contract, you're locked in. Which is also funny because it's like, like, okay, you are looking at that, like you think that that is actually like a thing that makes you look good and not like a super villain. No, no, no. If you try to negotiate with us, we will make everything worse for you. It was like, really? It just makes you look good.

I know. They try so hard to union, but they just kind of suck at it. Yeah. So it's been, it's been comical to watch. It's very funny. Which is really funny because like, I remember like, I didn't know it was super boil, but like, I remember I knew some people who were doing Starbucks union organizing like, way about like, like 2006 or something. Yeah. And they were like, you know, it was like, they were kind of better at it. Like they were willing to just like, throw resources at it in a way that like, they don't seem to be able to now.

I think maybe just because like, there's so many organization, so many organizing efforts happening at once that it's harder to sort of just like, throw all of their stuff at one store. But yeah, it's just, it's like incredibly funny watching them just sort of like, flail and like, you know, I guess like, all corporations that you need bus to eventually resort to breaking the law because, you know, the law. Yeah. Yeah. It's designed for rich people. My district manager came into my store screwdriver in hand to personally make repairs at my store. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. It's probably my favorite union busting story that she was like, yeah, I'm here to cover up the electrical outlets in your bathroom. We were like, cool, why? And she was like, so that the homeless people can't like plug in their electric shavers and shave in there.

We were like, wow, we've seen, we've seen people do a lot of weird things in the bathroom. And that's like, not even one of them. Yeah. You are so out of touch. Oh my gosh. It's been hilarious to watch. Like, wow, that was really some effort, but you really know, absolutely not immediately now. There's another thing I wanted to talk about that Starbucks is you talked a bit about earlier about Starbucks sort of like having this image as like, like progressive organization. And okay, like one of the things they've been big on sort of recently is like portraying themselves as this like pro LGBTQIA plus like thing.

And I think like, okay, so there's something that like traditional media has finally discovered because they haven't covered labor organizing in 40 years and they suddenly started doing it again. And they were like, oh my God, all of the union organizers are queer and it was like anyone who's ever organized a union or anyone who knows anyone who's ever been in a union could have told you this like 30 years. It's incredible stuff. It's like, wow, congratulations, you've discovered this. But yeah, I wanted to ask about sort of, I don't know, this kind of binds that like, I feel like queer people doing organizing or in right now, which is that like, okay, so on the one hand you have like in, you know, in the last sort of year or so. This like incredible increase in sort of rampant homophobia. But then simultaneously, like, so, you know, you have to fight that fight. And then simultaneously you have these corporations who are trying to, you know, like, yeah, they're like nominally on our side and that they're not.

Well, I mean, they are funding the rampant homophobes, but like publicly they don't, you know, publicly they're supportive, but also, you know, like they're supportive because they're trying to sell our identity as a brand. And then, you know, when queer people are like, hey, can we like have stuff that lets us live? They're like, no, and I was wondering how you've been sort of navigating that. Yeah, so that's been really tough because a lot of our queer partners in Pittsburgh get their health insurance through Starbucks and get gender affirming care through Starbucks. And one of the biggest union busting tactics is hour cuts. And if you cut someone's hours, then they're not eligible for healthcare. So they're really just like dangling the carrot on the stick in front of our faces, like, oh, if you unionize, then we're going to cut your hours and then you can't get your gender affirming healthcare. So that's like, that's really, really sucked.

In addition to that, there have been now four people about to be five. We think one person is going to be fired once back from vacation. But out of all of us that are fired or about to be fired, we are all queer people. So I think that really shows how much Starbucks cares about their partners. And since I've started organizing, in addition to like homophobia and like discrimination against like the queer community, I've also heard just rampant stories about microaggressions and racism. I actually met a partner that was fired from a store in Virginia, I want to say. She was, I believe, from my understanding, she was the only black woman that worked at her store and she was fired for aggressive behavior. And when I heard that, I was like, Jesus.

So just like, and also that support manager that I was talking about. I've heard rumors that like she was transferred from one store to another because she was like caught being racist at the first store. So instead of being fired, she was transferred and now she got she was promoted to store manager and then she fired a trans partner at her store. And now she's our support manager and fired me. So it's like it's it's the kind of homophobia. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's the Catholic Church for racist homophobes. Well, OK, the Catholic Church for racist homophobes, but corporate and well, OK, I am not going to make a claim on the air that they're not also doing this with sexual assault.

Because I they like there's no way that they're not. Right. But yeah, that is yeah, that's incredibly bleak. And I want to go back a second to sort of the gender affirming care stuff because like that stuff, it's like. Like, OK, the thing that they are doing is just like we are holding the genocide button over you. And it's like, yeah, if you if you don't comply with us and you don't like accept the like absolute shit and scraps that we give you, we are going to try to kill you. And that is just indescribably horrific. Absolutely.

Yeah. I know it's something that partners up. There's at least one partner at my store that's dealing with that right now. She's 25 about to be 26 and she is trans. And I know that she's on her parents insurance at the moment, but in less than a year, she'll have to find insurance. Elsewhere was like the through Starbucks and it's something that really got her into organizing. I know that for sure. Yeah, it's it's been a really scary moment for her.

Definitely something she's worried about. Yeah. Yeah, just the risk of being fired, the risk of having your hours cut and not being eligible for benefits. It's awful. And like just feel like she can get a job like anywhere else just because Starbucks is one of the like Starbucks offers like decent health insurance. So it's like I'm kind of trapped here until I can get out until I can get another job with insurance benefits. Yeah. And you know, that's incredibly that's incredibly hard, especially right now.

I mean, yeah, I don't know. It's I mean, it's not really surprising that they're doing this, but it's yeah, it's it's really depressing and it sucks. And the fact that they're, you know, like sending sending racist to do homophobia is like it's yeah, it's like dystopian. Yeah. Watch this happen and been like, is this real life? Like this is crazy. And they just fired another black queer organizer in Pittsburgh just yesterday and they're trying to make it look like he resigned. But really, they gave him like a couple like options like you need to have at least one weekend day available or you need to demote yourself or you need to transfer to a different store.

And they were like, I can't really do any of those options. Like none of those work for me. And then the company said like, oh yeah, Jimmy resigned. Like we totally didn't fire them. But they just resigned and sorry you get to feel it because you resigned by. Yeah, it's a real we didn't fire you. We simply forced you out by making an utterly impossible demands. Yep.

It's like it really reminds me of like it's the kind of stuff a country does when they want to go to war where it's like, yeah, we're going to we're going to give you a bunch of demands that it is literally physically impossible for you to comply with and then because you don't comply with and we're going to invade. Yep, exactly. Oh, although I did just find out some good news today. So there's this one bar where most of the union organizers hang out all the time. And they messaged us on Twitter today and they want to throw a queer dance party fundraiser for like our solidarity and strike. And I was like, it's literally the most us thing I can possibly think of like a queer dance party fundraiser at our favorite bar. That rules.

The bathroom attendant from the bar like showed up to our strike at my store and friends with like the bartender there. It was like the best Twitter DMs ever. It was like, that's so funny. I'm literally going there with the other person that got fired from my store like tonight. Nice. So we're very excited for that. Yeah. And I guess that brings us to something else I want to talk about, which is, um, yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about like what happened after you got fired and the support you've been getting and the like the backing from other unions that you've been getting?

Oh, totally. Yeah. So my store is actually just like a block away from the United Steel Workers headquarters, which is incredible because anytime we have any sort of direct action, we get like 40 steel workers. Hell yeah. It rules. Yeah. The day after I was fired, I have this very funny picture that's on my Twitter of me just standing like with like 40 steel workers sitting behind me. They found like the two biggest dudes. Yeah.

Like wearing my Starbucks apron in protest. This is my new favorite picture of myself. So good. So that was day one. We had a rally. We had a really good turnout with all the steel workers and a bunch of other community allies are Symphony, Symphony musicians have a labor union. Oh, that's so cool. They're the library workers.

They all came out for the first day of the rally at Market Square and my citywide organizing committee was actually able to pull together a total of four strikes. Wow. What happened within the course of two days? The planning happened in like basically under 24 hours. Jesus, that's incredible. Wow. So, yeah, I got fired Wednesday. Thursday was the rally at my store with all the steel workers.

Friday, the East Carson store in the south side of Pittsburgh went on strike. The East side store in the Bloomfield store all went on strike for the full day. The south side store continued their strike into Saturday. And then Sunday, my store went on strike finally. It was incredible. We had, we have a labor choir in Pittsburgh, which is like a dude with a guitar. He's my favorite person ever. So we had the labor choir out at all of our events and we had, like I said, the library workers, the steel workers, the symphony union.

We have Huey. We have DSA, which is Democratic Socialists of America. We have the party for socialism and liberation or really strong allies to us. And we had like a lot of the regular, my favorite customer showed up at my store, of course, which made me cry. One of my customers, one of my favorite customers who comes in multiple times a day said, you shouldn't be standing out here on the sidewalk. You should be back there behind the counter making coffee. And I was like, I know, thank you.

We had a couple of our regulars change their mobile order name to Tori and Kim so that every time he orders a drink to my store, they have to call out the name Tori and Kim. Amazing. That's great. And we set up a GoFundMe and we received way more donations than we thought that we would get. So for all the workers at my store that went on strike, in addition to the 70% pay that we received from the union for the day, we were able to pledge $20 to each of them to try to make their paychecks whole and cover some of their lost tips. That was incredible and really just a demonstration of how much support we have in our area. You know, they say Pittsburgh is a union town.

Yeah. It really is, turns out. Yeah, and it's really cool to see. I don't know. One of the things that I keep seeing is this sort of like one of the sort of right-wing tactics that I've been like just inundated with in the last like couple of years has been like trying to separate out like, oh, here are these people who are workers, but like, oh, they're not workers because they're like, oh, they're like doing cultural stuff or they're like, oh, they just like serve drinks and like, you know, you look at actual labor and it's like, that's no. None of this, none of this, none of these divisions are real. Like people show up for each other.

It's all bullshit. I always get worried that people will be like judgmental about that. Like I'm always kind of like surprised when the steel workers show up. I'm like, I know I'm not a steel worker. I don't make steel. I don't work in a factory or anything. I just make coffee, but everyone's so supportive and they are always so willing to stand in solidarity with us, which is really cool. But it's something I'm always like worried about.

Like, I know it doesn't feel like I'm a real worker, but like we're a union too. I mean, I'm in a podcast union. So I can't talk about that. Yeah, like I have like arguably, like if you're going to use the really silly like, I don't know, sort of like cultural analysis of what a worker is, like a podcast union is like the silliest union ever. And it's great. No, it rules. It turns out we're workers. We go fight for other people too.

Other people fight for like the, when we were trying to get union recognition, like, the NFL Players Association was like, hey, you guys need to recognize this. We were like, yeah. Hell yeah. That is awesome. Yeah. We just, we've been going to a lot of rallies for the Planned Parenthood Union in Pittsburgh. Hell yeah.

I didn't, I didn't actually know that they existed. That was cool. Yeah. I actually, well, it wasn't Pittsburgh, but I was just talking, actually probably, well, I don't know what order these are going to air in. But like, yeah, I just talked to two people from that union. Oh my gosh. That's sick. Yeah, they were cool.

Got to see the labor choir there again. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Solidarity all around. Love to see it. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, lots of unions in Pittsburgh. It's been a good time.

I met a lot of really cool people. I feel like all the people I've met since I've been involved with union stuff have been like really cool. Yeah. And then I like talked anywhere it was at the Pennsylvania AFL CIO convention and whatever. I was told that whenever I talk, my speech was supposed to end with brothers and sisters. Can I count on your support because they were passing a resolution for us. But one of my baristas told me it would be funnier if I said, can I get a hell yeah. So I said some very serious words to this room full of serious looking people.

And then I said, on behalf of all of our partners at the market square Starbucks, can I get a hell yeah. And they all said hell yeah. They were all so happy because they all thought for me and I was like, cool. I found my people. That was like the first time I talked to anywhere. That was funny. That's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, this is another reason to unionize. You get to meet a bunch of really cool people and then they show up for you and it's just incredible experience. Yeah. On my last kid missing trip, we went out in teams of two. When we reconvened at the end of the night for dinner, we were like, oh, we should stop at our one store that we visited again. Like all four of us. And I was like, yeah, we should like go in and be like, look guys, I joined a union and I made three whole friends with them. Yeah.

I was also just talking at the, I was on a panel at a women's labor school, which was really awesome. I was at Penn State University and that was a really, really cool experience. I met all the female union leaders. It was a really great event. Overall, it's really cool people involved here. Hell yeah. Love unions. Good stuff.

Absolutely. I got a cool pin that says labor women get in good trouble. And I was like, yeah, that's what I'm doing. Hell yeah. Absolutely. Hell yeah. So these days I'm just working with some other stores in the greater Pittsburgh area, helping get them filed. I won't be too specific about this, but we are going to see some stores picking up in DC, which is really exciting.

We've been doing some canvassing trips out there. Well, at Starbucks workers united, we call it a clean play because in Starbucks, what a clean play is, is that one day a week, all the closing crew is scheduled for an extra two hours at the end of their shift. Deep clean the store and they call that a clean play. So we like to take Starbucks language and throw it like that. Nice. So we call it your little canvassing blitzes clean plays. So for the DC clean play, we've been, I've been out there twice. We visited a ton of stores. Definitely some interests there.

Seems like the union busting has been really tough, but we have one store that's making us and you'll see it in the news soon. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I'm very proud. It was like one of, it was one of my DC leads. They'd reached out to us on our website for an organizing request and they've just been like super strong leaders and they've been incredible and union busting really hasn't faced them at all and they're going to be. That's awesome. Very proud of them.

A little bit proud of myself, but they take, they can have all the credit for that. They really like stay strong for the union busting. It was good stuff. It's scary to be the first store in your area to, to actually make moves. Like my friend Jake Welsh, he was the first store in Pittsburgh. His store was the first in Pittsburgh and I know that's like really scary and I'm glad that it's happening because it feels like once the one store goes, then the dominos start to fall. So once we see that one store in DC filed for the union election, we're going to see a lot more go down there. Are you able to talk at all about what the sort of organizing process has been like and you know, if you can't talk about like what it's been like as an organizer, just like like what it was like at your store and what it's been like going to other stores.

Totally. So at my store, we started, we had heard a little bit about what Buffalo was doing and we started very casually talking about it at my store. Like, yeah, if any store needs a union, it is like we are this absolute shit show here. So we could definitely unionize. That would be awesome. Really had no idea how to get started though. Until a couple weeks later, I get a panicked phone call from one of my baristas and she was like, sorry, this weird guy came into the store when I was on register today. He started asking me questions about unions and I know he wasn't a barista and I think he was a corporate spy and we were like, oh, okay, so we Google the guy, start to like, like get some information we found like his LinkedIn or his coworkers LinkedIn account. And we were like, okay, they seem trustworthy.

We're still not sure. So we emailed the guy from a burner email account. I think the fake name was like Darren or something, you know, like our names are like Tory and Kelly and Kayla. So we emailed them from a fake name and a burner account and eventually got in contact with Daisy Pickens, who is now our national campaign director. But at the time she was working mainly in Pittsburgh. And from there she she taught us everything we know about organizing. We built an organizing committee consisting of me, Kelly and Kayla, because like three of us were pretty good friends. And we got card signed, we were able to get 100% of the people at my store to sign a card incredible filed unanimously. Wow. Yeah. So, something that stores do right before they file is they write a dear Howard letter. And you might have seen these on Twitter, if you haven't you can find them on the Starbucks workers United like national, like official Twitter, they always post those there.

So we wrote our dear Howard, we turned in our cards to the NLRB office. And right after I finished turning in the cards to the NLRB I walked right back to my store, and I'd printed out a physical copy of our dear Howard and I handed it to my store manager. Joe, I, Joe, I wanted you to hear it from me. And he was like, okay. From there the investing started we had captive audience meetings which I believe, to my understanding the company has stopped doing because they were kind of declared illegal, or maybe it was just that the information they were sharing was so misleading that it was declared illegal. And they handed us like a bunch of really, really misleading handouts saying things like withdrawn petitions if workers United thinks that you're going to lose your union election, they will withdraw your petition and abandon you, which is crazy. The other thing was that like, if, if the union thinks that you're going to vote no they're going to try to talk you out of voting, but Starbucks is one that really cares about your voice and we want to make sure everyone has a voice, we're like literally you can look objectively at this. You can see what Starbucks has done to try to prevent you from voting like they were pushing for in person stores, or in person elections in stores where most of the partners don't have cars are busy with other things have second jobs and just couldn't feasibly vote in person. They challenge ballots left and right, they think I think they challenge a little of nine ballots at my store, including Kelly's ballot, even though Kelly was literally like working at the time of our ballot count she was literally behind the counter and like, you can see her

in the zoom call when she came out to watch the ballot count on her break. They try to challenge her ballot claiming that she didn't work there. So there's just like hard evidence that the company is the one that doesn't want people to vote. So we got through all the union busting. It was it was tough it was an uphill battle. And eventually we won our election eight to one on May 26. So, after that, I became an intern with workers United for the summer solidarity internship program. And that's when I started really getting into helping other stores file. So there was one out in the Pittsburgh suburbs like greater Pittsburgh area, Peter's Township was the first store, like my first really solid lead that I ever took on. They filed I helped them write their dear Howard letter. We were interviewed by the Washington Post. Super cool. So they have their ballot count on August 18 very excited for them. I have my stores in DC that I'm working with and a lot of other stores throughout Pittsburgh. And going on a lot of Queen's Day trips, whether it's a big one to Washington DC or smaller local one, but we'll go out in teams of two visit as many stores as we can possibly get to in one day. And we wear our Starbucks workers United shirts so immediately people know why we're there. And basically just go up as if we're going to order a drink and be like, Hey, so like, we heard about what we're doing in like downtown Pittsburgh, we're like the stores in Buffalo that unionized. Yeah, so like what do you guys think of that. And typically our approach is to find the gayest looking person. We got trying to find like the young, like, maybe like 20 something person with like dyed hair and it's up to piercing. It's always the piercings. Let me tell you, they're always the leaders, the ring leaders at their store. I don't know why. It's been funny. So yeah, try to find the gayest person and be like, Hey, so what do you think about unions. And that's how we brought in new stores.

Yeah. And we've been pretty successful with it. A lot of people either don't know what a union is, or they really like their boss and that seems to be the company's best union tactic union busting tactic is by having good bosses because we always say that sometimes the best organizer is the boss so sometimes the stores where they're like, we love our boss, our boss takes such good care of us. I'm like, darn it. Like good for you guys, but you should unionize anyway. Yeah, which yeah, I would also yeah, like, like I would say this like I really like my boss and I am also still in a union because sometimes those stores where they say that they're hard to talk into it. But I always tell them what happened at my store. And what happened is that we had the same store manager for I believe like five years. He was great. We loved him. He was cool. And when we unionized it wasn't about him. It was about the working conditions at our store and that upper management had been giving us false promises. And the things that needed to be changed at our store was kind of out of my store manager's hands like that was like above his hands. So he couldn't do much about it. We made it clear like Joe was not about you. You're great. We love you. Got to do it do you though. Sorry, buddy. Then we got even though we love Joe we got a new store manager in mid June. And she was a little bit less awesome. You know, you never know when things that your store can change. And even if you love the store manager you have now they could they could leave tomorrow. So you got to like the only thing that's guaranteed your store manager isn't guaranteed to be at your store forever. But is guaranteed is a contract. And that's something that's really important. Sometimes it's hard to get people to see the long term though. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we're normally pretty successful. We typically try to get like phone numbers at every store, reach out to them within the next two days and then we'll hold like an intake meeting.

So whenever we have an intake meeting we tell them, make a spreadsheet of every partner at your store, what shift they work, what their job is like if they're a ship supervisor or barista, and assign one person on your organizing committee to talk to that person. So every person at your store should have an organizing committee member assigned to them from there. Once they have a plan for who's going to talk to who we get cards to them and they can be either physical cards like my store did or digital cards. And then they start getting signatures having little conversations like, Hey, here's what a union is. Here's why we're doing this. If you agree, find this card. Once they have 70% of cards signed, then we take it to the NLRB and say hello, we would like to do a union please. And then hopefully they get a ballot count date. And the company always pushes for in-person elections. We always push back. We pretty much always win. And we always want mail-in ballots because we do like really genuinely want everybody to be able to vote. Whenever I was organizing at my store, I told everyone my best possible outcome, best case scenario, is that every single person here votes and votes yes. My second best possible outcome is that everyone here votes and some of you vote no. Like, I want everyone to vote. I want every single person here to vote.

I don't want to be like, there is one store in my district that did end up winning their union election, but out of their, I think, 50 to 60 partners, only 12 people voted. And although they won, that is not the way we wanted to get there. I want everyone to have a say. Yeah, which I think is interesting on sort of two levels. One, it's like, you can see the exact moment at which corporations start pretending to care about democracy, which is like, oh, wait, hold on, our workers are doing stuff. Oh, no, we have to care about, yeah, suddenly we're like this incredible pro-democratic force. We want everyone to have to say it. It's like, that, okay. Yeah, it's funny. They actually just came out with, this happened after I got fired. This happened in the past two weeks. But they came out with, I believe it's an app where partners can share their feedback and share their experiences. So they, they're trying to be so democratic, like look at them really listening to us. Wow.

Yeah, they also did this really fun thing where even though hours are being cut across the company, people are having their hours drastically cut because this poor little billion dollar corporation can't afford to schedule us any more hours or properly staff their stores. We were all scheduled an extra hour for one of our shifts during the week so that we could sit down and watch an hour long speech by Howard Schultz and do a survey about how much we like our jobs, which was funny. That, wow, that was like a kind of a new low for Starbucks, like, wow, there's two people working on the floor right now, one person like making drinks and one person on register and they're getting slammed out there. But so glad you guys had the, had the labor hours to be able to schedule me to sit here and watch this Howard Schultz speech. Yep. Great. Thanks. Very frustrating. And like, I think like just the scheduling stuff, everyone being consistently understaffed, it's like, this is something I was talking to the Planned Parenthood people about too, which is that like, like there too, it's like, you get these managers who are like, well, okay, we're going to do cost cutting, we're doing, you know, the price of cost cutting is we're going to just make all of our people work

impossibly hard because we refuse to put enough people in the store and then, you know, we're not going to let you work long enough, like, we're not going to let you work long enough to actually get benefits and then Yeah, it's like the worst combination. Yeah, but it's like, you know, okay, you know, like, like they have the money, they can schedule you. It's like, yeah, I mean, like, like, you know, I think like, in ideally in a society that wasn't just like, but not even not even like a perfect society in a society that was not like entirely based on cruelty and violence, they wouldn't even be able to do this at all. Everyone would just have a fixed schedule. Yeah, exactly. And so it sucks so much because it's like, I barely get to go to work, even though I asked for full time I'm scheduled 17 hours a week. I am there. I'm like so freaking stressed because there's just not enough people to make the number of drinks that need made and all the customers are super pissed off, because they've been waiting 10 minutes for their drink. And like, corporates just watching this happen. I'm sure they have to be getting bad reviews. Like, there's no way people aren't calling corporate to complain about the wait times, because there's only two of us working on a Sunday morning. And like, they're really just shooting themselves in the foot just all around, all around shooting themselves on the foot.

Yeah, but I think also like there's a part of this, which is just like, like they are insulated from this, like, you know, I don't know, it's like the managers don't have to fucking deal with this shit. And it's like, yeah, they're gonna they're just gonna throw all of the angry customers, like people who are angry because of decisions of management do they throw at you. And it's like, this is this is fucking bullshit. Like, yeah, like, here's a coupon for a free drink go bully the baristas again. Yeah. It's like Michelle, my district manager doesn't have to come in and deal with like 40 angry customers staring at her while she tries to frantically make drinks. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, like, there is definitely a part of me that is like, I mean, okay, like I know on the one hand this isn't true, because there have been a lot of terrible corporate people there, but a lot of like, I don't know, like terrible world leaders who actually had to work real jobs. But like, okay, like, like some part of my soul still holds on to the belief that if like these people actually had to work in these conditions, like consistently, that it wouldn't be like this because they wouldn't be completely insulated from just the absolute horror they're inflicting on everyone. And it's yeah, you can see whenever my store manager is scheduled to like be on the floor like scheduled for a coverage shift, which means that they're like required to be out on the floor making drinks and doing register. And they were always very fully staffed whenever when a manager is scheduled for coverage.

Yeah, there's always at least five other people on the floor. But whenever it's like me on a Sunday morning opening the store, and there's like a Steelers game and a convention in town on it and everyone like the city is packed and all the hotels around, around my store pack, everyone's going to want coffee. There's like three of us. Which is just like, it's really frustrating to sort of like on a political level, it's like every job that I've ever worked, it's like, if it was literally just us running this and there was no management, everything would work 100 times better. Yeah, and it's like, yeah, it's like, okay, like, at a certain point, you have to just be like, get rid of these people like what, why, why, why are we doing this? Yeah, our new new store manager, since our recent new one quit because working visions are so bad. Our new new one is an outside hire who doesn't know how to ring in drinks, know how to make drinks, doesn't know anything. And they just put him in my store as a store manager.

And my roommate is also a barista. And she's been like having to coach him every day, which is a really awkward situation because she's not even a supervisor. She's like a barista and she has to be like, hey, there's a difference between nitro cold brew and regular cold brew. Like, keep hitting the wrong button. Very frustrating. And they sent this guy in to run my store. Meanwhile, like, he probably knows less than everybody else that works there. Yeah, he definitely knows less than you do.

Like, yeah, definitely knows less than me. It's so funny, since I've been fired, I still like every time there's an emergency at my store, my baristas call me. It's wild. Like, I got a call at five in the morning the other day from one of my favorite baristas and he was like, hey, Tori, I know you don't work here anymore. But Sal was supposed to open and he's not here yet and I'm locked out of the store. What do I do? Or like another barista called me when I was in DC and he was like, Tori, I just showed up for work and the store is closed. What do I do?

I was like, I don't know. I can do my best to help you. But I, there's not much I can physically do. I don't have keys anymore. Sorry. Yeah. It's really like, you know, one of the things that, I mean, I guess you get this in both sort of like, like when I was like, so I went to the University of Chicago and, you know, it's like, okay, so these are the people who infamously produced all of the terrible economics to make the world suck. Right.

And it's like, okay, well, you take econ classes there and it's like, everything is about sort of like, I, like, you're doing all these things. You're doing all of this because I like, okay. So like the, you're doing all of this under the assumption that if you let corporations run in a free market, they will do everything optimally and they will produce the lowest prices and they will produce everything as efficiently as possible. And it's funny because like, you see this in like Marxist theory too. And then it's like, you look at like any store place and it's like, no, no, no, they're firing their most competent workers and hiring people who are incompetent because like the, because the thing that they actually like care the most about even more than efficiency, even more than like making more money is maintaining their power. And it's like, it's something that like is really obvious when you're working, but somehow like the people who write about this stuff has like deluded themselves into not being able to understand. Yeah, they have no idea. It's like, it feels like they almost don't want the experienced workers to stay.

I've seen like, so part of my internship project is keeping a database of the fired partners and the anti union firings, which is kind of ironic because I was like, well, gotta add myself to this spreadsheet now. But I've seen, I see people in this spreadsheet who worked in the company for five years. There's one person on there who worked for the company for 17 years, but we don't get raises or anything for seniority or anything like that. There's actually a cap on how much you can make in each state from Starbucks because they don't, they don't want you to work there forever because then the frustrations start to come through. And then you, then you unionize and it feels like they, the high turnover feels really intentional sometimes. I think it is like, I think that that's, that's like a pretty common like Amazon does this too. It's like, like their whole, their whole business strategy is intentionally on working everyone so hard that they quit so they can get a new group of people in so that people can organize. And it's, yeah, yeah, it's really brutal and horrific.

And I hate these people. Yeah, same. It's like, if I keep this person here for 10 years and make this look like it's a sustainable career, then, oh, then we have to make it a sustainable career and don't want to do that. So of course people out after like two or three. So very frustrating. Which I think I guess also helps them with the sort of like, like the way that people look at like, I mean minimum wage workers and also just service workers in general, where they're like, oh, well, yeah, we don't need to raise minimum wage. It's a bunch of teenagers. Like these people don't need like good wages because this is like, you know, you're not actually supposed to be doing this.

This is like a transition thing. It's like, that's not how any of this works. Like it's just not that's just you're making excuses for corporations doing exploitation. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And it also seems like another thing they're doing is that we've seen a lot of really high manager turnover too. And I think that also is really intentional because they had to even though the store manager that ultimately fired me was new, like she could she didn't even have the heart to like do that.

She had to bring it they had to bring in a support manager to like actually say the words, like you're fired. Here's your termination notice. And it feels like the reason they're making the manager turnover so high is so that the managers don't like form those relationships with staff at their store. Yeah, because it doesn't feel as bad to fire them. Like I don't think this ever would have happened to me if my original store manager who had been there for five years and like knew me personally was still at my store. I don't think this would have happened. And I think that's why they're doing this big manager shuffle right now. At least, I mean, I'm sure it's happening in other places.

It's definitely happening a lot in Pittsburgh. I think there are very few stores in my district that have the same manager that they had three months ago. It feels like they're intentionally shuffling them around so they don't form like personal relationships or any sort of emotional tie to the partners at their store. And they don't feel guilty firing them. Yeah, it's like it's community is really dangerous to them. Absolutely. I think I talked about this like some number of episodes ago. But like, yeah, like this is this is the thing that's really common with like, you know, I'm just going to straight up call Starbucks a dictatorial organization because it is like it is just a dictatorship.

It's like the day to do this a lot where like, yeah, like communities are really dangerous to them. Communities with any kind of strong bonds with each other are really dangerous because people will fight for each other. And, you know, you can't, for example, like, I don't know, it's really, really hard to deport someone who has a strong community around them that will fight back. But if you can isolate those people, if you can like, like physically isolate them, if you can like socially isolate them, if you can make sure that they don't have these support networks, then you can then you can, you know, do whatever you want to them. And absolutely. That seems, yeah, it seems like it's very deliberate. Like, and everything was like, you know, this also like this just makes everyone's life worse. Right. Like, yeah. Did you see what happened in Seattle with the new Starbucks heritage district?

I think I vaguely heard about it. But yeah. So in Seattle, the three like origin, I believe it's the three original Starbucks stores like first ever Starbucks stores to open the three in Seattle. They've made it so that you don't the partners there don't have a specific store that they're assigned to. They're assigned to the district and can be scheduled at any store at any time. So you're not working with the same people all the time. And you're not forming those relationships. And if you were to somehow form enough relationships to start organizing, you wouldn't be able to vote as a store, you'd have to vote as a district, which is just a lot more logistically difficult. And there was a lot of pushback that happened.

But unfortunately, those stores hadn't filed for an election yet and weren't really able to do much about it. But we're definitely scared of that happening like in Pittsburgh and like at other Starbucks stores around the country that they're going to make it so that you work for the district Thomas was a big store. And that's kind of terrifying. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's not everything where it's like, okay, they have to have to weigh efficiency versus like their own power and they're going to choose their own power every time. And it's also like, there's just like an aspect of that too where it's like the just incredible dehumanization of it. Yeah. Totally. It's like really careless.

Like you don't know what someone's transportation situation looks like. You don't know like if they feel comfortable working with like different groups of people. Like, I don't know. I know that like a lot of people at so this is just reminding me of something that happened at a store in my area. So at Penn Center East, the Penn Center East Starbucks, they're a union store. They decided they were closing and center East for like a for an entire week and gave them the option to work at three stores that were like an hour away from them. And of course, like they were only given the option to work at other stores that were unionized. They weren't going to send the union people into the non unionized stores and potentially influence them.

So one of the partners, the one that was actually fired yesterday was like, I do not feel comfortable working at this store because I worked at the store one time. And I faced a lot of discrimination from the from the manager there from the partners there. And I don't want to put in that situation again. There was like a customer at this other store that said that called me a racial slur and I don't want to be in this area. I don't I don't want to go out to these stores and just like exposes partners like a lot more like situations that they're potentially not comfortable with. They're with new managers that they don't have like a good rapport with yet and it makes everything just a lot more difficult. Like just let everyone work at their own store. Like we all have friends, all the partners at like my store, at least we're very, very close.

I know a lot of the stores are the same way. It just makes work worse to not be working with your friends. I don't think anyone would work in Market Square if we weren't all really close with each other. Yeah, overall just worse situation. Yeah. And I don't know, hopefully they're not able to do that on a large scale because yeah. Yeah, that would be it just feels like a disaster. Yeah, especially since I mean, there's a lot of Starbucks stores like concentrated in cities. But I know like the Penn Center East Starbucks was kind of out there in the suburbs.

And another big issue that they faced was that like, we don't have some of us don't have cars. And we just can't get to like the city Starbucks stores because our parents drive us to work. Our parents drive us to work every day because we're in high school and we just don't have like a means of transportation. There's nowhere to park there. And it just puts them, it just makes them face a lot of issues that they weren't really planning on dealing with and aren't really prepared to. And they probably chose the store that they currently work at because of like they didn't just pick it at random. They picked it because it was convenient to get to they like vibes there. And it was like a good fit for them and forcing them to work at other other stores where they're a lot less comfortable.

Not a good decision. This feels shady, very dehumanizing for sure. Yeah. And so I guess I do have one last thing to ask which is if people want to support you and if people want to find you in places, where can they do that? Oh, yeah. So my Twitter is Tori underscore Timbalini. And that's my personal Twitter. We also have a Pittsburgh Starbucks workers United Twitter account. If you want to support me and Kim specifically, there is a link to our go fund me there. There's a link in my bio and somewhere in the Pittsburgh account as well. We also just released a national solidarity fund through co worker, but I'm actually not quite clear on how people can donate to that yet.

I think it's very new. So I can send you an email with a link to that. Yeah, cool. Yeah, we'll put all the links in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, it was really good. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing my story. I feel like there's a lot of fired partners, fired partners across the country and like we all kind of need to stand together. And I like, you will hear my story and hear about how like the union has supported us and there's been a lot of community support.

And you know, as soon as I was fired, I was immediately hired by workers United, you know, they're really willing to take care of us. And if I had like anything to kind of like, like any advice to give the partners who are trying to organize like the union has your back. Don't worry too much about losing your job. Probably won't happen if it does. The union has your back and all the other fired partners have your back as well. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah, and on that note, yeah, fight your bosses together. You can beat them.

Yeah, go out into the world and make havoc for people who do bad stuff. Cause problems on purpose. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I've cooed and yeah, welcome to the inaugural podcast where it's just Christopher and Andrew. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and I got, I got Andrew with with me today to cast the pod. Okay, yes. I have a ton of nature. Thank you for that. I had to sacrifice you for that one because I was not going to do it myself.

Welcome to the first in a two part exploration of the new African Revolutionary, known as Kowasi Balakoon. He's one of the most recognizable black and archeocraticals of the whole black and archeocratical tradition, recognized for his constant struggle for his political journey. And for his insights in the cause of, you know, black freedom in the US. And so I think his very layered journey is one I believe that more people should explore. And I hope that more people would come away with this episode and the following episode, the second part with a recognition of what an inspiring person he is and what we can, can learn from his life. Hell yeah, I'm excited. He's super cool. Yeah, yeah, for many reasons.

And so I think we will start at the very beginning, as most humans do, I don't think we know of anybody who just kind of plopped onto the earth fully formed. His Kowasi Balakoon was not his original name, it was his chosen name. He was born Donald Weems in the majority black community of Lakeland in Prince George's County, Maryland, on December 22nd, 1946. So I'm sure he got like his Christmas presents and his birthday presents like combined. You're allowed to laugh. I was thinking my one of my, oh, I think it's my my uncle or something has his birthday is the 20th is yeah, December 23rd. Yeah, one of my uncle's birthday is the 26th, I think, and my girlfriend's birthday is the 20th. Yeah, that's that's some that is some rip stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I try not to like add to that. So I try and get two separate gifts. But um, you know, it's a it's a challenge. Yeah. And then talk about like you can't really do much for your birthday because everybody's always been like last minute stuff. Yep, yep. Thankfully, I was born in the best month.

So anyway, the experiences prepared the young Donald Weems to become an activist who would militantly resist white supremacy and unjust authority. He was particularly inspired by his own parents struggle. And during the Cambridge protests of 1963, you see his dad had worked in a U.S. printing office and his mom had worked at Fort Meade in Maryland. And so they, he and his sister were very much cared for. He and his two sisters rather were very much cared for. He was the youngest of the family and loved and they really showed that sort of drive to provide and care for their children. In those work environments, they would have seen. He observed and he watched it.

He observed his parents observing the effort that they put in. And the fact that they surpassed the skill and experience of a lot of the white folks who came into their type of work. But then there was said white folks who just go on ahead and climb the ladder and, you know, get these promotions and get these raises while they themselves had to like slowly and painfully drag themselves forward and fight to get ahead. Also that their children could have their food and clothes and everything that they needed. So the Cambridge riots of 1963 were led by a young woman by the name of Gloria Richardson, who was a key figure in the civil rights movement. Their struggle had emerged as part of the civil rights movement and the local chapter of the student nonviolent coordinated committee that was fighting against segregation in the area organizing sit-ins and so on and so forth. But after they had organized against a movie theater that was expanding its discriminatory practices. The movement started to push back and they marched and the demands were unmet and the police were called and Richardson and others were arrested for disorderly conduct.

And there was a whole pattern of protests and arrests and boycotts and harassment that just went on and on and on. After some youths, both 15 years old were charged with disorderly conduct for being arrested and were arrested for preying peacefully outside of a segregated facility. Even more marches were organized and eventually the protests escalated and some white owned businesses were set on fire. Then gunfire was being exchanged between whites and African Americans. And of course, martial law was declared and National Guard was deployed. And eventually a treaty had to be negotiated between Gloria Richardson and the white power structure. The Cambridge movement is recognized by the nation of Islam as one of the, and by Malcolm X as one of the examples of a developing black revolution. And so that militancy in that movement is what inspired and impressed the young Donald Weems who later become quasi-public.

Another formative point in his life was when he had joined the US Army after graduating high school and was stationed in Germany after receiving some basic training. Of course, like most black people in the military, he experienced a lot of racism and physical attacks from white officers. And eventually he and others formed an association known as the legislators, basically based on like messing up racists and making sure that they couldn't like interfere with them any longer. Yeah, he prided himself in his ability to exact revenge on racist war soldiers. While in Europe, he was in London at one point and he connected with Africans and African descendants. And he saw his experience in London that is basically like a natural tonic, like it's something that clicked in his head and he realized the interconnections between African descendants across the globe. As he grounded himself more in black consciousness and culture, he stopped processing his hair, wore out his natural hairstyle and became basically more committed to black liberation than he had been before. After being honorably discharged in 1967, after three years of serving primarily in Germany, he returned home to Lakeland.

And then he moved to New York City, where his sister Diana lived. And in New York, he got involved in rent strikes and became part of a tenant organizing movement for the Community Council of Housing. One of the principal leaders of this, of this movement was a Harlem rent strike organizer called Jesse Gray, and he used the rhetoric of like militant black nationalism to recruit the tenants for his activist campaigns. His militancy, when he, you know, pulled it back and he connected with the militancy that Donald was already feeling drawn to is what really pushed him to get into that cause. And so I think it makes me think as I'm, you know, going through his journey about like, I mean, his commitment to the struggle began from very early on, from seeing his parents and the things they had to do with from seeing the Cambridge riots from seeing his experience in the army, from connecting with, with black folks in London, with his tenant organizing. And it makes me think of the political journeys of people today, and how all these little points and larger points in a person's life kind of combine to create the sort of tapestry of a person that they are. And a tapestry of political beliefs that they hold. I think a lot more people have been drawn to like militant radical politics, left radical politics than, than we give them credit for.

And when people have that basis, then we necessarily want to accept the issues we just won't have the outreach in place to, you know, help them get across the finish line and get to a place where they are actively, you know, working for these courses. Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of, I mean, partially burnout and partially just sort of, I don't know, you get these, you get periods where sort of just like, specific movements ends and a bunch of people just kind of fall out. And it's like, it's not that they haven't done this stuff, it's that they just sort of, I don't know, the movement to the thing they were in is over and now they're sort of just off doing something else. And yeah, and that reminds me of well around to have a script that I was working on the other day about demands. And one of the arguments people had made against making demands, you know, as a movement is that once demands are met, it's sort of what concessions even made. It's saps the momentum out of a movement and it saps its potential, because a few, you know, accept concessions, you accept that, you know, whatever you receive. And, you know, you go back in your laurels, you don't reach the climax of what you could have achieved as a movement compared to if you just kept going. Of course, I have critiques of the anti demand position, but it's something that I frequently consider when I look at a lot of the social movements that have based on specific projects based on specific focuses.

And what happens when these movements get, you know, co-opted, when these movements get compromised, and the way that the potential, the sheer manpower of some of these movements compared to like what they've actually achieved is a massive discrepancy, you know. Yeah, and I was thinking about, I did it, it was something in a bastard's episode a long time ago about, I think the name of the treaty was Ampo, there was this huge mobilization in Japan in the 60s to stop this treaty with the U.S. It was a military treaty, they had a whole bunch of stuff in it, like, I think there was a clause that let the U.S. like invade Japan if there was like a civil disturbance or something, stuff like that. And they had this huge movement, like people, people stormed the parliament like multiple times, like, you know, I think afterwards the historians determined that like a third of the total population of Japan had been involved in this movement. And then they lost, because the whole movement had been about stopping this treaty and the treaty gets signed and they can't do anything about it. And then it just sort of like fizzles, it kind of becomes the Japanese New Left, but like, you know, you have this like incredible high water mark of like, like you have so many people. Didn't even the Japanese New Left like dissipate? Yeah, yeah, and it implodes, like, yeah, you go from like, like Nixon, like, was it Nixon who tried to visit? I think there have been a couple of U.S. presidents who tried to visit Japan and couldn't leave the airport because the mob was too large outside of it.

And he's like, I went from that to, you know, everything sort of once there's sort of like immediate rallying, like here is our demand, here is our goal, like disappears. Everything just sort of splinters into these like weird fragment groups and you get like a bunch of Japanese Marxists just like shooting each other over nothing in the mountains. And the whole thing sort of just implodes. And yeah, I mean, even if you look at like, like say Fridays for Futures, another example, like Extension Rebellion or George Floyd protests, and you consider, you just sit and you think about the shant numbers involved in those movements, the potential of that large mobilization effort compared to what comes out of them. You know, like what other than a few minor policy changes, what has, you know, say, Extension Rebellion or Fridays for Future achieved when, you know, these massive corporations are still actively fighting every step of the way. And these movements are not yet willing to do what it takes to, you know, accomplish what needs to be accomplished. I'm not even talking about violence. I am not talking about violence. I am not talking about violence. What I'm talking about is the efforts involved, the work that goes into social revolution that goes beyond the sort of flashy, easily recognizable march and the street kind of activities.

Because there's a lot of stuff that goes behind the scenes, a lot of institutions need to be built from the bottom up, a lot of institutions need to be transformed from the inside out. And, you know, without that basis in place, we're just spinning on top of mud, but back to weems. Like many in his generation, he was ready to join an uncompromising movement for black freedom and human rights. He joined Jesse Gray in protesting the conditions in New York housing, particularly the infestation of rats in public housing. In fact, and this is probably one of my favorite stories of his entire, you know, like, lifetime as an activist, as an organizer. In 1967, Jesse Gray, Donald Weems, his sister, Diane, and two other tenant artists were arrested for disorderly conduct in Washington, D.C. When they unannounced and uninvited attended a session of Congress and brought the cage of rats to the assembly to highlight the urban housing condition. Hell yeah.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall or something to have witnessed that. Yeah. I mean, it's such an impressive thing, even just on a sort of like, just like on a logistical level of where did they get this cage of rats from? I mean, clearly they got the rats from the housing. The housing was so bad, they had rats running around everywhere. Imagining like, oh, we're not going to use kill trap. We're going to use like capture trap specifically so we can drop these rats on Congress. This rules. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's that sort of energy that, you know, helped him to create that group, the legislators while he was in the army, you know. But anyway, because they, you know, drop some rats in Congress, and they got arrested. The CCH lost its fun.

The Community Council on Housing lost its funding and Jesse Gray lost his ability to pay his organizers. And just that line alone just kind of stood out to me at movement that is because these movements, you know, back in the day, they were serious about getting changed on and they recognize that to get changed on, you need to have people who are full time involved in getting that change done. It can be a part time thing. And so, you know, these movements had these groups, they had like staff that, you know, paid to like put in the work who could focus all the efforts and energy in it. And of course that took fundraise and that took donations that took support from their local communities to get that sort of support that they needed to get things done. I think right now what we have is a lot of groups that often fizzle out of burnout before they could even get started because

they don't have the resources to support the kind of effort that they will need to get things done. When everybody is working one, two, three jobs, everybody's burnt out, everybody's stressed out. And this was my organizing experience at least. It's very hard to get stuff done when everybody's tired all the time. Yeah. It's very hard to get things off the ground when everybody's busy all the time. I think there's another kind of interesting thing here too, which is like, it's like, well, because like now we do have organizations where you can get paid to be full time staff, but it's...

It's NGO-ified. Yeah, it's NGO stuff. And the thing I think is it's... It became this question of sort of, I mean, a partially it's about legal structures of how you could have like... Part of it I think is, yeah, it's about the sort of legal requirements about who can actually have, and what kinds of organizations and what you have to do to like have an organization that has a bank account, for example. And then also I think there's this kind of trap that people fill into where... Okay, so you need funding, right?

And the places you can get funding from usually tend to be either you're spending your entire time doing donation drives, or you're doing these grant stuff and it's like, well, okay, the problem with both of these basically have giant strings attached to them. And so it sort of falls away from the like, hey, we're sort of like paid revolutionary organizers and just degrades into more NGO stuff. Exactly, exactly. And then the incentive structure completely changes. And of course, there are also power dynamics involved in paid versus unpaid organizers and that sort of thing. But I mean, if these liberal organizations are getting all this funding and getting all this support, they're able to sustain themselves and keep pushing their cause.

And all radical movements and militant movements are floundering. Again, where are we going with this, you know? Yeah. But afterwards, with the loss of funding, Weems left the CCH and then he joined the Central Harlem Committee for Self-Defense in solidarity with the student protests in Columbia University. That committee would bring food and water to the students who occupy the buildings in the Columbia campus. And that's another important thing to point out when I was talking about the less flashy work that goes into it, because people are talking about a general strike because they have this vision of this general strike. Everybody is, you know, standing out in the street and this big crowd's out in the streets and we all refuse to work and it's, ooh, and it's wonderful.

But a general strike can only be pulled off if there's a strike funding place, if there's a strike bank in place where resources are available for people to draw from. There's a strike, contrary to some perspectives or, I guess, some misled approaches. It's not when you tell your boss, hey, let me get a day off so I can go and strike real quick. A strike is a refusal to work. It is unpaid. It is a risky endeavor. You don't just walk out without organized support from your fellow co-workers, at the very least. And part of what makes a strike successful, part of what makes a protest or a sit-in or any kind of movement successful is having a network of care work instituted. So you see that the Central Holland Community for Self-Defence in solidarity with another movement brought food and water to the students who occupy the buildings.

And because they brought food and water, those students are able to continue occupying those buildings and continue struggling for the causes they were struggling for. I don't think there are enough people, and not to just count people that are, if it doesn't fall in your garden, you don't have to water it. I think there needs to be more people who are going into that care work, which is marginalized because it's associated with women and non-men, really. But it's something that we need to account for. So there needs to be one of the principle arms of our strategy. Yeah. When I was doing tenant organizing, I was like, what did I do as a tenant organizer? So I went around and put signs up and moved chairs around. I took care of people's kids. That was really most of it. Like, is a vital part of any political movement that's actually going to succeed that you're trying to run and nobody wants to talk about it or do it because it's not the exciting, like, we're throwing a brick at a cop or whatever stuff. Yeah, exactly. And so on a more personal note, and this is the part where he changes his name, Lano Wims were associated with himself with the Yoruba temple in Harlem, which was organized by Nana Osir Ziman Adifumi.

The Detroit born Adifumi was initiated in Cuba in the Likumi right to the Yoruba region. And he saw the West African religious and cultural heritage as a means of cultural self determination and peoplehood for African descendants United States. Recently, there was a Netflix documentary about the ways that Yoruba traditions have been kept alive across the quote unquote new world. And he, in Cuba and in Brazil and in trying to be going in the US, Yoruba practices and cultural components have just been sustained. And so when Adifumi established the Yoruba temple in New York, sorry, in Detroit, was it Detroit in New York? In Detroit. In Detroit. He saw it as an institution to a nationalistic institution, meant to advance the cause of the civil rights movements and liberation black liberation movement.

African names, names and hats and clothes and clubs and churches. And so a lot of people in Wims generation. So you see people like like Malcolm X adopting a new moniker. They rejected, you know, these European names and adopted African or Arabic names. So when Wims got associated with the Yoruba temple, he would no longer be Donald Wims. He took an everyday name, quasi, meaning male born on a Sunday, and the Yoruba name Balgun meaning warlord. And so that again ties into his whole passion for militancy, because he is basically a warlord born on a Sunday. I don't know what you would ask a kind of a metal. Yeah. It's like now great to fight.

Fresh out the womb all kind of thing. It's pretty sick. Exactly. Exactly. But, you know, along with finding his cultural beer in the Yoruba temple, he got his black power politics of in revolution black nationalism from the black power movement. The 1960s black power movement. They realized that, you know, black liberation is not possible without the overthrow of the US constitutional order and capitalist economic system. And they also recognized a significant number of black militants in 1960s black power movement recognized that the classical Marxism Leninism was not a framework that they identified with. And it's something that all of them did adopt and adapt, but it's not something that they just consumed wholesale.

And I think that's honestly some nuance that is often obscured when people take this sort of blindly nostalgic approach to to past, you know, movements, because even even back then, even in the early stages of black power movement, there was, you know, political diversity in terms of the aims and intentions and beliefs, different perspectives, even within the same political philosophy, different approaches. The West Coast Black Panthers and the East Coast Black Panthers, so different approaches. The West Coast Black Panthers were more class focused, whereas the East Coast Black Panthers were more pan African in their approach and that honestly caused a lot of tension between the two of them. Many of them were inspired, you know, across the board by the influence of Marxism, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions by other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Because this was a time, of course, where a lot of movements, a lot of countries were getting independence from Britain and France and all the other colonizers. This is also a time where more and more people were, you know, building their criticisms of the racism present in the old left. And so they wanted a theoretical vehicle that gave them the self determination, the ideological self determination that they needed.

Like, they were with the whole civil rights movement, they were fighting with them. But they wanted more than what the civil rights movement was offering, they wanted more than just civil rights between within a settler colonial state. And they were not going to sit back and just be satisfied with non violence as a way of life. All of them so it's a rights movement as well as something integrationist or something pro assimilationist, whereas they wanted something more insurgent, more revolutionary. And so, you know, they brought together all these different things, black nationalism and self determination, Marxian critiques of capitalism and a direct action approach that was, you know, in the civil rights movement from the beginning. And so, by Lagoon, became a revolutionary. He began to read literature by the autobiography of Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams book Negroes with Guns and he also learned from the leaders that surrounded him, like the leader of the SNCC and the leaders of, of, of, you know, the black Panthers. What he recognized as someone long inspired by militancy is that black liberation only come about through protracted guerrilla warfare. I don't think I have to go over like the origins of black Panthers in detail. But just to summarize, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in response to the abuses of the police upon, you know, residents of Oakland.

And so after Huey Newton, when the founders of Black Panther Party, and one of his comrades got in a shootout with the Oakland Police Department and survived. And one of the officers actually got fatally wounded. Newton basically became a national hero to the only urban black youth who, you know, like, couldn't even conceive that this guy fought the state and won. He had like a small win, but he won. And so that's when you see like the whole free Huey movement kick off, because, you know, he was charged for his murder for his name to cop. He shot and free Huey was the rallying cry, black power and left circles. Eventually BPP came to New York in summer of 1968. I mean, people had tried to kick off a Black Panther Party in New York beforehand in 1966, but it didn't work out. So this new Black Panther Party in New York kicked off and began to build support in the hundreds. The same month that Dr. King was assassinated, he had a lot of the members of the BPP coming together to sort of figure out a direction because although they may have been critical of the civil rights movement,

the last Dr. King was a major blow to everyone because even if they disagreed with him, he was still an inspiration. So Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver came to New York and they appointed 18-year-old, 18-year-old SNCC member, Judon Ford, as acting captain of the defense of the BPP. And that's another thing a lot of people forget, like these people were young, like real young. Fred Hampton died when he was 21, assassinated, of course. And so it's like an inspiration, honestly. And also like a rallying cry for all young people who feel disimportant, disenchanted, disheartened by all the different aspects of collapse that are surrounding us. You know, like we can stand up and fight back. But anyway, so Judon Ford became the acting captain defense of the BPP of the East Coast and he was soon joined by David Brothers and they founded the BPP in Brooklyn in 1968. National leadership of the BPP also sent Ron Pennywell to give directions to New York chapter. And so Pennywell was there and he was involved and he became a captain in the ranks and he was very grassroots in his approach.

The Harlem branch of the New York chapter will be founded by Lumumba Shakur, who was the son of Malcolm X associate Saladin Shakur. And that same Saladin Shakur was, he served as a mentor and a surrogate father for many of the members of the New York, of New York's Black Panther Party. And to know all these different people and all these different groups and stuff were mixing, molding and melding and getting together. And eventually the New York chapter, the BPP would grow to become among the largest, if not the largest in the entire organization, but approximately 500 members. So when Balagoon found out that BPP was organizing New York, he went and he joined. He felt, you know, like empowered by the Black Panther Party's 10 point program. And for those who don't know, the 10 point program was, you know, pretty straightforward. One, we want freedom.

Two, we want full employment. Three, we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community. Four, we want decent housing. Five, we want education that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. It teaches us our true history and our role in present day society. Six, we want Black men to be exempt from military service. Seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people. Eight, we want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

Nine, we want all Black people to be brought to child to be tried in a court by a jury of their peers from Black communities. Because at the time, and I mean, still exists today. And even affected during the urban, you're being tried for these things. It's not a single Black face in the entire jury. It's entirely white, middle class, upper class, true members. And lastly, 10, we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And so Balagun was drawn to this, he's identified with the organization's Maoist axiom that political power comes from the barrel of the gun. And was inspired by, you know, the ways that the Chinese Revolution inspired the Black Panther Party.

However, the structure from the beginning, the structure of the Black Panther Party did pose some challenges for Balagun. And it really only got worse from there. So the Black Panther Party was structured with the National Central Committee, the NCC, as the highest decision making body in the entire organization across the entire country. Even though the New York chapter was the largest in the entire party, the NCC was concentrated in Auckland, which is where, you know, the party was founded. And so most of the body was associated with people who knew Huey Newton. There was a whole chain of command and, like I said, that whole style and structure of governance, speaking of a factor in Balagun's attraction to anti-authoritarian politics. And of course, he was not alone in being critical of the structure of the party. Don Cox, Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Cumbola-Uvid and many others, would also develop similar critiques, drawing them from a similar direction.

Because Balagun had this experience organized beforehand and he recognized the good that, you know, the party was doing, but he also had taken this with how the party was structured. So when he got involved, you know, he was ready to participate and work with oppressed Black communities and run these basic issues. For example, in September 1968, the Black Panther Party members participated in a community takeover of Lincoln Hospital, which at the time was dilapidated and disinvested, and was not able to serve the predominantly Black and Latino residents of South Bronx. And so the BPP in New York would work with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa to take over and reform the detox program at Lincoln Hospital. And that boldness, again, so inspirational, because how many of us are willing today to just like so boldly just walk in and take over these broken institutions to put them in the hands of the community to make them whole, powerful institutions for the people. I think we need more of that boldness. So New York Panthers were very much involved in tenant organizing as well, which is right up Balagun's alley.

I guess we could call them rat catcher, and they were also involved in fights for community control over the school system and the police. Actually, Balagun and another Panther, Richard Harris, would be arrested in February 1969 on bank robbery charges in New York, New Jersey. On April 2, 1969, less than one year after the founding of the New York chapter of the BPP, 21 Panther leaders and organizers, including Balagun and Harris, were indicted. 12 arrested and conspiracy charges and a 30 count indictment. And of course, this case became known as New York Panther 21. The charges included conspiracy to bomb the New York Botanical Gardens and police stations and to assassinate police officers. And after the arrest, most of the defendants were released on $100,000 bill, but Balagun was held without bail. They charged for this, like, claim that they were going to ambush New York police based on the testimony of one 19 year old Panther member, Joan Bird, who had been beaten by the police in order to, you know, make a statement that was favorable to the prosecution.

She was beaten as a mom pulled up to the police station to hear her daughter screaming, visibly beaten with her black eye, swollen lip bruises on her face, everything. And so Balagun and well, the other person who was being charged with this attempt to ambush the police was a guy named Odinga. And he had escaped and went underground, but Balagun did not. Odinga ended up going fleeing the United States, settling down in Algeria and all that jazz. But Balagun, not only was he charged with what the others were charged with, but he was separated from the others and face charges in New Jersey while the others were in New York. And he was put in behind bars for two years. The other defendants were acquitted. And as a result of, you know, all this legal battling and maneuvering.

Since a lot of the key organizers and leaders of the New York Panther Party were incarcerated. The organization was pretty badly crippled and as with activities and general momentum. I think that's something that the Panther Party had to struggle with very often, having its key members, its leaders and members incarcerated and charged and facing trial. And so as a result, the Panther Party was almost, its entire existence was basically fighting charges and trying to get its members out of jail and this and the other. And so a lot of its efforts ended up draining towards that. And so I think seeing the other New York Panther Party was crippled. I think it highlights the importance of distribution and decentralization when it comes to organizing. And it highlights the importance of, as the Afrofuturist abolitionists of the Americas say, moving like Micorazae.

Micorazae are basically a mutual relationship between fungi and plant roots. So they move nutrients between plants they're connected to and they basically create this kind of fungal network that spreads across an ecosystem. And it prevents researchers from basically able to see where they begin or where they end. You know, they grow slowly. Sometimes they pop up above ground as like mushrooms and stuff, but primarily they exist underground. And so what the Afrofuturist abolitionists are talking about is basically creating a movement that is primarily underground that spreads and is interconnected and cannot be pinned down with such a clear, pinned down or easily infiltrated like how the party was able to with such a clear, you know, structure and chain of command. So basically move like Micorazae, work from the ground or underground and work for the roots, work from the roots.

Eventually after most of his comrades were acquitted, Balguin pleaded guilty to the charges that he and somebody else did attempt to shoot the police officers. So then he became the only one of 21 original defendants who was actually convicted. So all that was going on, you know, while the New York Panther 21 case was being played out, Balguin's politics was starting to shift. Revolutionary nationalism and democratic and the democratic centralism of the party were beginning to be viewed healthy critique, I'd say, and Balguin was starting to shift more towards anti authoritarian politics. At the same time, Balguin was going through that political journey. More generally speaking, the New York Black Panther Party was getting to feel disenchanted with how the national leadership was handling things. Like the tension had already existed because of the differences in focus, you know, with the New York Panthers being more pan-African and the Oakland Panthers being more class focused. But after one of the leaders of the Panther Party, Geronimo Pratt had been purged from leadership for his quote unquote counter-revolutionary behavior.

The tension started to build because Pratt was seen as a hero to a lot of the members of the New York Party because he had been very much parliamentary. He had been very much paramilitary organized and he had taken it upon himself to train Panther members in paramilitary tactics. And so after he was, you know, purged from the leadership and a few other leaders were also purged. The New York Panthers began to feel disconnected from the from the national because the whole reason they were attracted to the Panther Party is because of this this image of armed Panthers patrolling against the police of, you know, underground guerrilla warfare. And so, you know, the New York Panther movement was very much associated with that. But once they saw the sort of purges that were taking place, some of which they looked up to, when they saw that the national leadership sent these other guys, Robert Bay and Thomas Jolly to New York to assume leadership of the chapter. To basically import leaders from outside movement rather than sort of bring up new ones, you know, from within the local community.

It basically worked to destabilize what the New York Panthers were working for. Because when these guys rolled up, they had a very autocratic hierarchical style of leadership, unlike, you know, the Pennywell guy who was very much grassroots in his approach. And I mean, even a satyr Shakur had like, basically critiqued the quality of the West Coast leaders sent to New York, when she spoke about how Robert Bay and and Jolly, who are from the West Coast, had a very aggressive and as she said, belligerent way of talking and dealing with people. And so that really is what builds up towards from simple initial differences of opinions and misunderstanding, leading towards the disillusion of the connection between the national leadership and the New York chapter. The New York chapter wanted to focus on things of a more national orientation. They wanted to work on the tenant issues that they had started with in the first place. But the nationally appointed leadership was not interested in tenant issues and did not want to play so much focus on on, you know, nationalist oriented issues, Pan-African issues.

And so when, you know, these groups were reassigned from their tenant organizing to the sale of the people programs that were working in the West Coast, that was also resented by the New York Panthers. Because New York Panthers, they were, you know, working on certain things. They had like tenant organizing behind the belt and they had like these different mutual aid projects and stuff going on, these, you know, sort of support and solidarity things going on. And to be told from the outside, hey, stop doing this tenant organizing stuff. Do these things that is working where we are coming from? It didn't play out well. Yeah, I mean, the last time in Oregon told me to do that, I left. I literally had this happen to me, but it's just like, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't work out. Not to mention, and I mean, this was a criticism I mentioned earlier, how a whole lot of the focus ended up being toward getting people out of jail and, you know, dealing with legal defense. One thing about we're going to criticize was the fact that the national leadership selects a leader too, and who would be released from bail. Like it didn't matter, you know, what the rank and file or fellow prisoners of war or who had the lowest bail or whatever. The fact that it was what the leadership, who the leadership wanted to be chosen to bail out. And of course, it should also be noted that part of what was building these tensions and building these divisions was quite until pro and you know, the FBI working at every step of the way to foment divisions and to fire up divisions within the national leadership within New York chapter, even within the New York Panther 21 defendants.

There's not any recent aspect of it. Like, yes, we can we can criticize these organizations and these movements for their missteps. We also to keep in mind the context that they were in the tensions they were facing and the fact that they were being openly assaulted and clandestinely assaulted by the US government on all, you know, angles at all corners. I think in some sense it's like they both kind of fit together in that, like, if you look at what the US intelligence services were good at, right, the very specific thing they'd become incredibly good at because they've been doing it for, you know, like basically since the end of World War Two is that they were really, really good at hammering down these like these sort of like centralized party apparatuses. Like that's how they basically turned CP USA from like a genuinely really powerful political movement in the 30s to like by the 50s. It's entirely run by like the FBI. And so yeah, it's like this is this is kind of mismatch here because it's like on the one hand you're suffering incredibly heavy repression, but then also it's like the political form that you're taking is a form that the US state has gotten really, really good at fighting. So the two issues sort of like compound each other. Exactly. Exactly.

So, of course, like, it's not like the rank and file were necessarily just going to roll over and that these things happen. Right. So they were trying their best to like submit these criticisms to the national leadership through the like Black Panther newspaper. But eventually, the New York Panther 21 defendants took a public position that was seen as critical of the national leadership. And they sent an open letter to the weather underground, which they published on the 19th of January 1971. Those who don't know the weather underground is basically a bunch of white radicals who basically were trying to fight the US government by doing a bunch of ballins and fighting solidarity with national liberation movements like in Vietnam. So the stuff ranges from like, pretty funny, like they kept blowing up the statue for the Haymarket cops to like, what are you guys doing? It's a very weird organization. Yeah. Yeah. Quite quite quite the characters. And so the open letter applauded the insertion actions because keep my New York party was very much intact militant sort of stuff. So the open letter applauded the insertion actions of the weather underground and acknowledge them as part of the Vanguard of the Revolutionary

movement in the United States. They never mentioned the national leadership of the BPP, but they also critiqued like kind of like a subtle sort of unspoken kind of thing shady. They kind of threw shade basically. They were like critical of self-proclaimed Vanguard parties that abandoned the actions of the radical underground struggle and the political prisoners. I mean, that's as open as you could be without actually saying. But yeah, so of course, and Balakoon was, you know, he agreed with his criticism. And so because the national leadership had, you know, wasn't, you know, actually attacking the occupational forces of the central colonial state anymore. And because, you know, a lot of the money being collected was going towards bail. And a lot of people were criticizing the fact that some of the leaders were beginning to live pretty comfortably while a lot of the rank and file was based. We were sitting all in jail. Once the letter went out, Newton basically expelled the Panther 21 and basically declared the Panther 21 enemies of the people.

Jesus. Yeah. A lot of them and not just Panther 21, but also the New York BPP leaders in general, just all of them branded enemies of the people. Some of the defendants like Richard DeRuba Moore and Setawayo Tabor and a few others also ended up going to Algeria. Later in the month, members of the New York Black Panther Party would hold a press conference and basically call for the purge of Huey Newton and the Panther Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard and the formation of a new National Central Committee. And basically, like I said, officially split from the National Organization. And I find interesting about that approach to it is they basically fought fire with fire for one. So you're like, oh, you want to call us enemies of the people, we're going to call you enemies of the people. And then on top of that, you also have to deal with the fact that their solution to the problem of the National Central Committee being too big for their britches and interfering with their grassroots politics was like, we need a new National Central Committee. You know what this reminds me of a lot?

It reminds me of a lot of the stuff that happens in the sort of early culture revolution where it's like you have a bunch of people. Well, I mean, okay, the big difference is the early culture revolutions that like every single group is like claiming that they're loyal to Mao. And I think a lot of these things where, you know, people people will be like, hey, the party has been becoming incredibly overbearing, and then you get like most of them are just like, okay, like our solution to this is we are now the party. But then you get these sort of like ultra left groups who are making sort of like not exactly anarchist but are making sort of structural critiques of it and those guys just get like purged and killed. The dynamics and the critiques remind me of it. Yeah, I think it's something that we see just in general in politics, honestly, it's a sort of limitation of the imagination. People aren't conceiving of things like outside of what has already been done. I mean, I myself am guilty of this because a lot of my inspirations are like pre colonial cultures and, you know, societies and stuff but still I try to like bring those into a new context and think of ways that can be applied differently.

I just, when you think about this approach here where you have the issues of the National Central Committee, your solution is to create a new central committee rather than consider an approach that does not involve a National Central Committee. I think it's something we see all too, all too often, or even like just nostalgia politics in general, where people's whole approach to politics is trying to replicate past movements. Yeah. But anyway, so, as you've seen by Lagoon's involvement, you know, as a child with his parents, you know, with the Cambridge protests with the army and his involvement in that with the New York tenant organizing with the Panther Party with the Yoruba Temple, all these things how to inform his political development. It inspired him to be part of a dynamic revolutionary movements that he respected and he loved and trusted, but it also helped him to question the decision making the nature of organizations and how the structure of organizations relates to state repression. In jail, you tend to have a lot of time to think and consider. And so Balagoon wanted to sit and think and basically correct all these ideological weaknesses that are just stirring in his head, that basically compromised the militant liberation movements that he wanted to see liberate his people. So, I conclude by saying that we must learn from the past.

In this, you know, short story into Balagoon's life, we've ended up coming to a lot of different conversations about the nature of movements today. And I think that's sort of critical approach to, you know, people's history, something we should be doing more often in our modern discussions of the past, the good, the bad and the ugly. Anyway, join us for part two of Balagoon's journey as we explore his path toward new African anarchism. You can find me, Andrew, on youtube.com slash Andrewism and on Twitter at underscore St. Drew. This has been the crap in here. Chris was here too. Yeah, you can find us at happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram. It follows at the cool zone. Yeah, see you next time. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about stuff falling apart and how we can maybe put some of it back together. Today, I'm your host, Garrison Davis. Though this episode is going to be more of an It Did Happen Here sort of thing, as this is part one of a special three part series made in collaboration with the Atlantic Community Press about the history of the old Atlanta prison farm.

If you haven't listened to my supersized three hour two part series on the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement from last May, I'd recommend you check that out just for, you know, extra context, but it's not strictly necessary as we'll be mostly going over history for these next few episodes. Although I will sprinkle in updates about what's been happening in Atlanta related to the stop cop city movement throughout this series. At the end of this episode, there will be a summary about the most recent week of action. Now, for this series, not only did the Atlantic Community Press provide the vast majority of the historical research and format for these episodes, I was also able to record with two members of the collective, Sam and Laura. So you'll hear snippets of our conversations over the course of these next few episodes as well. Last year in the lead up to the Atlanta City Council signing over hundreds of acres of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation to build a state of the art militarized police training facility complete with a large mock city. Around that same time, a group of people decided to look into the history of the land in question, famed for being the site of an old federal prison honor farm. This was also around the same time last year when more atrocities of the residential school systems were being unearthed. And with the Atlanta Police Foundation's plans to build those large sections of forest that were once used as an old labor prison, the possibility of disturbing forgotten grave sites seemed to be worth considering.

Hi, I'm Sam I help out with I do research for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. So that means I file open records requests. I accidentally, I helped accidentally write 17 pages to report in the summer of 2021. And I listened to fun things like community stakeholders committee meetings and city council meetings. What is the inception for the Atlantic Community Press Collective. So, at the beginning, it was me, Laura and another friend of ours, and we were all just kind of involved on the periphery of the movement. Laura, please feel free to correct me if you're directing me also but just as part of the general movement and resistance to cop city. One of us raised the question I based on when the prison farm was an operation. One of us asked, I wonder if there are unmarked graves there, because given the era in which the prison farm was an operation. It's not unrealistic that people were just buried on site, especially poor prisoners who didn't have families to claim them.

There you go. That was sort of the genesis of our history report. And then I guess naturally as an extension of that, we started asking questions of city government and county government about the, I guess, construction process of cop city. But the development of cop city concerns regarding environmental racism, police violence and land stewardship in era of climate change have all been discussed, if not by local government or the Atlanta police foundation, but at least by community members, some local press and national media. And this very little is actually publicly known about the actual history of the land that Atlanta police foundation wants to build cop city on and the history of the prison farm itself. The most often cited histories suggest the land was the site of a federal prison farm that was later taken over by the city and then soon abandoned. Research into the site on Key Road, conducted by volunteers with the Atlanta community press, tell a different story. Months of archival research revealed that not only was it never run federally, it was run as a city prison farm uninterrupted from about 1920 to the early 1990s and doing considerable harm to those incarcerated throughout, despite claims of reform made at every stage. Through the gathering of old legal notices, old newspaper articles, letters from nurses, legislative and inspection records and oral histories, a forgotten legacy of torture, overcrowding, slave conditions, quote unquote, the lack of health care, labor strikes, death and unmarked poppers graves have slowly been rediscovered through Atlanta's radical scene. And this just barely scratches the surface. As the Atlanta community press conducted their research to conflicting surprises arose.

One being that there was just so much available historical documentation that seemingly very few people had dug into and put together correctly in the past. And two, that there was so much information that was just missing entirely, records that were either just missing, destroyed, misfiled, or possibly were never kept in the first place. The nature of this kind of archival research is pulling on one question and then finding dozens more. With limited time and resources, you can find yourself with more questions than definitive answers. These episodes are meant to just be a brief overview of the broad strokes of this history, while also serving as a survey of the possible directions that further research can take. Many people, including an individual on the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, aka COP City, have advocated that there must be responsible in-depth investigations into the history of this land and many of its current physical attributes before any further development could take place. Catherine Nichols already laid the groundwork for such research in her 2015 thesis on the unmarked graves and burial grounds of the Brandon Indian Residential School System and the history of what took place during its operation. A three-pronged approach includes archival research, field research, and qualitative interviews with effective members of community. This type of research will be discussed more in the third episode. However, this research would take time, and with construction and deforestation attempts proceeding at an increasing rate, the opportunity to do further on-the-ground historical research is quickly vanishing.

The same policing institutions that caused so much harm are increasingly trying to physically bulldoze away centuries of history. We did not set out to write this report. We did not know, literally when we started writing this, that the Wilton Report and the Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm campaigns proved an incorrect history. We didn't know there were two more than two, frankly, prison farms. No one's wrong for not knowing about this, but we've emailed this to City Council repeatedly. Laura has done amazing tenacious work at just making sure that every single government official involved in this project knows exactly what kind of violence they're perpetuating. The cop city is bad enough on its own, but when you have an accurate historical understanding of not just what they are building, but where they are building it, it's beyond the pale. It's beyond belief. It's disgusting. They want to build this on stolen indigenous land. They want to build this on a slave land plantation. Are you kidding me? What were we out in the streets for? What are people still out in the streets for? I know they know what we're saying. I know they know who we are. I know they're listening. It's just disgusting. It's disgusting to me. Before we continue, let's talk a little bit about the idea of history. I think for a lot of people, especially white people, our engagement with history is often so distant.

We keep ourselves othered, conceptualizing history as some abstract narrative. Instead of the direct flesh and blood, we ourselves and our systemic relations grew out of. History should be the tales and songs of joy and sorrow and pain, generational wisdom and trauma told by the people who lived it. Not just a list of names and the numerical record-keeping of the structures that caused ongoing suffering, which still benefit from this abstraction. Preserving history for its own sake is all fine and good, but doing preservation with an explicit ecological and intersectional drive can be much more insightful, not to mention respectful for those who it literally happened to in the past. This perspective argues for the preservation on the basis of its material effects on people, both past and present, and to demonstrate the direct continuity of control of these structures over the people they affect and the repeating patterns of rhetoric used to justify it. Similarly, Catherine Nichols points out in her residential school thesis that it's essential to view this type of history and these records within a full living context. Obviously, a complete consideration of context is outside the small scope of this podcast and could probably make up multiple volumes of books. The time period we'll be diving into, roughly the 1920s to present day, has been home to an unceasing trend of the criminalization of many marginalized peoples,

especially black, indigenous, poor, disabled, and mentally ill people, which we'll see demonstrated throughout the story told here and on into the present. This criminalization of marginalized peoples coincides with institutions of power engaging in what Lauren Burlant calls the slow death. The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence. It's like a mass phenomenon of material and metaphysical restriction that typically already marginalized people face when living under capitalist or authoritative governing structures. The slow death manifests by intentionally and repeatedly subjugating people to events and conditions known to contribute to suffering, in an early death of those deemed less valuable by capital interests, sometimes even at their own expense, other times for the sake of profit. All that gets passed down through generations with the corresponding generational trauma that becomes a defining feature of personal and cultural identity. In the case of the prison farm, we see the slow death and living history in many forms.

A swastika found in one of the bedrooms, white inmates going on strike shortly after the prison farm is racially integrated. Stokely Carmichael is held at the farm for several days on the charge of loitering at the height of the civil rights era. After Martin Luther King's assassination, donkeys from the prison farm pull his casket through town. Nurses beg for more tuberculosis tests for overcrowded prisoners. Homeless alcoholics are repeatedly cycled in and out of the system. All of these instances are similar to others, both at the time and now in present day, and reflect the racial and class dynamics at the heart of the carceral system. The same socio-political forces continue to shape the social landscape of Atlanta, whether that be through the criminalization of Atlanta's water boys,

black teenagers who sell ice cold drinks to motorists. We also see it in the ongoing eviction and housing crisis, the lack of resources in the midst of a pandemic, the continued cycling of homeless people through the prison system instead of providing humane housing, the squashing of anti-state protests but allowance of white supremacists and anti-vax protests. All these highlight the further need for this history to be told by the people it affects, rather than the institutions responsible, which are already seeking to take hold and control the narrative surrounding this piece of land and their own history. The police foundation has announced its intention to build separate museums on the site dedicated to police officers, firefighters, and the labor prison that was once located there.

The museum idea has been framed as a concession to last year's anti-cop city calling campaigns, a concession that will result in land being paved over and a sanitized police approved history to be built over top. The offending institutions like the Atlanta police department, the Atlanta police foundation, city council and the mayor's office and the media organizations which support them, try to pay lip service to the atrocities of the past as quickly as possible while retaining all the power and then bulldozing over the forgotten history. As we'll discuss, vague gestures towards the harms of the past without material accountability for the harm done have been used throughout the prison farms history to justify continued control of physical and narrative space and is simply vapid virtue signaling. Now, before we deep dive into the prison farm itself, as a part of the intent to place the history in its full living context,

it's necessary to state the land the prison farm was built on was a thriving trade hub for Native Americans throughout the continent. A free story that takes place in quote-unquote America has grown from genocide, colonialism, broken treaties and the division of interconnected land into individual parcels for ownership. This is part of the history and needs to be reckoned with and fully reconciled before anyone can truly be free. That extensive history is outside the scope of this episode, but we are trying to get such topics discussed on this platform with more qualified people. The most frequently cited history about this piece of land is a historical analysis of the Atlanta prison farm by Gillian Wooten of the city planning department written in 1999. In it, we are told that the Key Road property was purchased in 1918 by the Bureau of Prisons and the United States federal government. It was called the Honor Farm, and federal presidents grew crops and raised livestock to feed the population of the nearby federal penitentiary. The piece claims that the site operated until 1965 when it was then purchased by the Atlanta city government and shut down soon after.

At which point the history becomes murky as a single report of a labor strike on the land seems to contradict claims of the 1960s closing. If you just Google old Atlanta prison farm, there's two things that are going to come up. There's a campaign called Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, and this website tells you the story of how in the early to mid 20th century, the federal government operated a prison farm in Atlanta. And then sometime in the 50s, the city of Atlanta took it over, and it links to a document written in 1999 by a person named Gillian Wooten, who I think was probably doing the best she could in 1999, given the difficulty we had in researching this in 2021. And what this commonly cited folk history, the Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm campaign, and this more official report written by Gillian Wooten tell you is, again, that sometime in the 50s, the city bought this prison farm territory. We found nothing to support that. Our initial question was where are the graves, where are the bodies buried. And the question we ended up asking was, well, when did the city take over the prison farm from the federal government. And we kept going back and back and back further into the historical record, until we eventually got to around 1911. The city itself bought the property that would become cop city and operated their own prison farm. And long story short, the conclusion we came to was the federal prison farm was a completely separate property, a completely separate prison system.

And sometime, even though this prison farm really only shut down sometime around the early 1990s, in the course of just a few decades, we've forgotten the story of the people who were incarcerated there and the story of the prison farm to the point where we don't even understand that it was its own thing, which is, it just makes me angry. Every abuse possible, you can imagine, happened at the prison farm, and we can't even, we've just completed it with another prison farm where horrible things happened. That's how poor custodians have been of this history. A lot of people don't know that there were actually three prison farms running. All in Atlanta, essentially, once technically, technically two of them are into Cal. There was the US prison farm number one, federally run. That's the one that most people know now as an apartment complex. Sorry, I don't remember it off the top of my head. Then there's number two, which is what people know as the quote unquote on our farm out near Poundthurchville. Then we have the city of Atlanta prison farm. So there are three running at the exact same time, all within a fairly short distance from each other.

This isn't something that was unique to Georgia by any means, but the history of it is largely ignored. Convict lease labor was incredibly common. The Archive Atlanta, sorry, did a podcast specifically on the convict lease labor that was done to build the Atlanta streets. Basically every street in Atlanta was built by convict lease labor. And a lot of that labor came from the Atlanta prison farm, as well as some of the other prison farms around. There's also the Chattahoochee Brickworks company that was recently turned into a public park. And it was historically acknowledged by our mayor, Mayor Dickens, for its horrific atrocities of slave labor or building or creating these bricks at the company where many people died. So there's just this hypocrisy of, hey, we're using slave labor at this location and it is horrific and we are going to acknowledge that. And we are going to put a plaque out there and do a ribbon cutting ceremony and truly acknowledge this atrocity.

Whereas here, because they want the land, they're just going to cover it up and, oh, hey, our acknowledgement from this is we're going to utilize some marble library stones in our Copaganda entrance to the horse barracks. That's pretty much what they're going to do. The Atlanta community press research found that the Wooten History Report actually conflates three different properties. Property number one, a prison farm on the property of the federal penitentiary, where the penitentiary still exists today. Another property, number two, was a second prison farm on Panthersville Road that was purchased from farmers in 1920 and was used to supplement the production of the first federal prison farm. But the third property, and the one that we're focused on here today, is the one on Key Road in unincorporated DeKalb County. This one was only ever owned and operated by the city government and was used to produce food for city prisons. It operated from 1920 up until the early 90s before shutting down and being abandoned and then used as a dumping ground for the city, until now where they have plans to turn it into a militarized police training facility.

After serving as a slave plantation, the Key Road property operated as a municipal dairy farm. But accusations that the farm was losing the city money coupled with the ongoing scandals at the city jail stockade in Glenwood opened up debates within the city government ranging from 1915 to 1920 about closing the old stockade and moving prisoners to the municipal dairy farm. The stockade was overcrowded and unprofitable and expanding it would cost the city too much money. Meanwhile, the area it was in was developing quickly and quote, filling up with small property owners and the presence of the stockade is an hindrance to further development, unquote. They proposed building a park or a golf course or a school or all three on the land to cater to new residents. Meanwhile, the superintendent of prisons, T. B. Langford, who had also inexplicably be put in control of the municipal dairy in 1918, was the subject of a 1920 Atlanta Constitution piece that examined Atlanta Humane Society claims of women stockade prisoners being tied to a chair known as the Bucking Chair and whipped with a strap for disobedience. He at first denied these claims saying that white women at the stockade were never whipped to his knowledge and quote, Negro women only seldom so unquote.

An investigation apparently disproved this and he was ordered to stop the corporal punishment, which he argued was both good and necessary and should not be stopped because changing the course would be an admission of having done something wrong. He argued that work shy prisoners would need to be motivated somehow. So by the end of January 1920, Atlanta City Council passed a law banning whippings and offering a new form of punishment instead, quote, solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water, unquote. Complaints of the stockade losing money continued into April 1920 and T. B. Langford suggested moving the whole operation to the dairy farm, which he also controlled. Conveniently, prohibition had started earlier that year, so it was suggested that the city could save a lot of money by making a new influx of prisoners work the city dairy. Moving prisoners to the dairy farm had one problem. It was not legal to build prison facilities on land outside city limits and the key road property was located in unincorporated DeKalb County, despite being owned by the city of Atlanta. This problem was easily solved by City Council, who simply passed a bill making it legal to build city prison facilities on land outside the city, even outside of Fulton County.

By November, the proposal to close the stockade and move the prisoners to the dairy farm was agreed upon. And from that point forward, the Key Road Municipal Dairy Farm became the Atlanta City Prison and Dairy Farm, later simplified to the Atlanta City Prison Farm. By 1925, council members were being praised for bringing in the, quote, largest number of prisoners at any one time in the past 10 years, including the city $20 a day on the cost of feeding prisoners and increasing dairy production by 250 gallons a week, unquote. It was seen as a win-win-win for the new property owners, city government, and police. But it was a huge loss for the most vulnerable citizens of the city and for the residents of the surrounding DeKalb County area, who had no way of consenting to this deal. Just like how modern-day DeKalb County residents have no say whatsoever in Atlanta's goals of building a militarized police training compound with a gun range and explosives testing section in what would formerly be their forested backyard. I mean, building Cops City here is just a continuation of the violence that has been done to this land since the earliest, since time immemorial. Like, this was, first of all, this was stolen Muscovy land.

Then it was a plantation. Then it was a prison farm, which is just an extension of being a plantation. When it stopped being a prison farm and just started being mostly a prison, horrible, horrible things were done to people and the solitary confinement cells. This mostly happened in the 80s. Then the prison and the farming stopped. It just became a commercial dumping ground in an area of the city that already has some of the worst water quality and air quality standards in the whole metro area. The South River Forest Coalition and the South River Watershed Alliance are the best sources for that. But this was stolen land from the beginning. The story was stolen land. And I guess the last historical record is social and environmental injustice. And now you want to give it to the police in this day and age. I guess you could say like, it's just compounding violence upon violence upon violence. Okay, now it's time for the update that I promised on the week of action that recently took place in Atlanta. Near the end of this past July, from the 23rd to the 30th, there was another week of action as a part of the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest and stop Cop City.

Before things even kicked off. Ryan Millsap of Black Hole Movie Studios just days before the July week of action put up concrete barricades around the section of forest that currently operates as a public park that protests had previously gathered in. He later made an appearance alongside some bulldozers in Entrenchment Creek Park, where then said bulldozers seemingly accidentally, question mark, damaged a park gazebo. So great work, Ryan. We just wrapped up our week of action. Obviously we did a whole bunch of really awesome events, writers workshops, we had multiple music festivals, daily a meetings, medic trainings, we did Narcan training and distribution daily meals. I personally had the fortune to attend a talk by John Lash, who was incarcerated at what is now called Metro reentry center, but at the time was called Metro State Prison, which is just across the street from the south end of the child prison. That's on the south end of the prison farm property. This was the most well attended week of action there has been so far, especially on the first Saturday with the first music festival like as some as folks were leaving like people, not at all affiliated with the forest movement beforehand or like heard about the music like this cool music festival in the woods. They were brought in by the music festival, but then we were able to educate them on the fight to defend this forest in their neighborhood, which is like that is the goal. That was an amazing experience.

There were three different instances of arrests during this most recent week of action on July 28 in Cobb County on the north end of the Metro Atlanta area. For people were arrested at a noise demo outside of a contractors residence. Police scanner audio has cops discussing charges for the people who are standing outside on public property to include criminal trespass and also discussed was quote with the eco terrorists happening in the county possible domestic terrorist charges. That last cop there called a negative on domestic terrorism. This was not the first instance of law enforcement referring to defend the Atlanta forest protesters as eco terrorists on July 26. Six people were arrested near the ruins of the old prison farm for criminal trespassing, seemingly just for hanging out in the prison farm area, which has been a well known urban exploration hangout spot for decades. These people were just taken to jail for being there. In the bail hearing, the judge said that he didn't even know why they got arrested. They were soon released with signature bonds for all.

And then on Friday, July 29, seven people were arrested at a noise demo at a Brassfield and Gore construction site. Currently, Brassfield and Gore is the lead contractor for the Cops City project. The site was on Georgia State University property, though Atlanta Police Department responded as well. Unicorn riot footage shows people making a loop through the building and chanting before a construction worker aggressively shoves one protester out of the doorway. Here's some police scanner audio. Unit three, they're saying that no one's in the building now. Protester wise, but they were inside the building, so they all need to be ID's and CT's. Can you advise on a number?

Approximately 15. Okay. Seven, three, four, nine. Go ahead. If you still got eyes on the people walking away, can you snap some pictures? I'm on the way up there in case they're gone before I hit them. They're inside the building, so, I mean, that's grounds for CT's, so we can stop if that would just take pictures. Unit three, that's affirmative, but we can stop and just say and please copy. APD Homeland and Zone Three is en route to provide support of that location.

Coming up on the location now. Atlanta Police stated that no property damage was done beyond a bucket being kicked. And yet seven people are facing a slate of felony charges. Yeah, the major says Homeland's en route, so no property destruction, nobody assaulted nothing. That's a problem, but they walked in and kicked over a bucket. But that was it. I hope they kicked the bucket. Thank you, sir.

One person was hospitalized due to broken ribs sustained during their arrest. For the first nine hours after the arrests, police refused to give jail support the location or contact info for where the arrestees were being sent. The following Tuesday night, everyone was finally released on posted bond. And with that, that wraps up part one of the three part series for the history of the old Atlanta prison farm. Before I close out, I do want to plug the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at ATLSolidarity.org. That helps protesters with bail and legal stuff. So donate to that if you have the means. Also in the description, I'm going to leave that link.

Also the link for the Atlanta Community Press History Report that they published last year. That will also be in the description below. Thanks for listening. Check out Atlanta Community Press on Twitter or their website. See you on the other side. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today, I'm your host, Garrison Davis. This is part two of our three part series on the history of the old Atlanta prison farm,

made in collaboration with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. Last episode, I talked about how one of the initial motivations for running a city prison farm was to save money on the project of incarceration, or perhaps even start generating money. This remained the case throughout its existence, though exactly how well it performed at that was often questioned. Use of prison or slave labor for government projects was not a new concept in Atlanta, though. Around the time of its incorporation in the mid-19th century, the city of Atlanta's population was around one-fifth enslaved persons. City Hall itself, along with many other iconic buildings and roads,

was built using convict police labor from the Chattahoochee Brickworks, notorious for its brutal conditions and was owned by a former Atlanta mayor. The city prison farm produced various crops, livestock, and dairy, but it also provided workers for other city projects. In 1946, Superintendent H. H. Gibson bragged that he was cutting the city prison food budget in half, as well as, quote, furnishing the city 11,961 man days of work on city streets by prisoners, unquote, within a six-month period. In 1939, they began saving further money on incarceration

by getting the women prisoners to make the new uniforms, adding that, quote, the city can buy better materials because the labor is free, unquote. They attempted to incentivize overtime work by offering, quote, extra credit for each hour of overtime work for reduced sentences. The prisoners were forced to build some of their own cages as well. In 1944, one of the older prison buildings was designated for use as a hospital for people with venereal diseases. That meant that prisoners would need a new building, and they had to build it themselves,

quote, most of the work was done with prison labor, with the city providing the materials, unquote. They were also responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of the buildings in order to pass health inspection, according to an Atlantic Constitution article, quote, the dormitory, scrubbed daily by men and women whose drunkenness and traffic violations placed them behind a mop or tractor for an average 15-day stay, won a 94 health rating. In 1958, prisoners were even made to rescue a guard's furniture from a fire. By the 1970s, the farm provided more than half the food and dairy products for inmates in city detention centers.

By the 1980s, the prison farm had stopped growing crops, but still provided 42% of the pork and beef eaten by the prisoners, both at the farm and at the city jail. The work heavily subsidized city operations and was considered crucial. H.H. Gibson, the head of the prison farm in 1945, said, quote, idleness is the root of all evil in prison management. To be completely exempt from work, a prisoner should be minus both arms and both legs, unquote. In the Courier Journal article where he makes those claims,

the publication also accepts Gibson's claims that he, quote, took care to see the guards do not overwork prisoners and that the guards are not permitted to strike or even curse prisoners, unquote. And this would, of course, be later proven very much untrue. White guards were known to send black women to a less occupied area, supposedly to do extra work, but upon arrival, the prisoners would be raped by the guards. If they refused, they were, quote, given a hard way to go, unquote. These same guards had the power to assign extra work to prisoners.

This was supposed to have been fixed several years earlier with the hiring of a black woman guard, but according to the Pittsburgh Courier, she was, quote, only a matron in name. The white guards continued to supervise the colored women inmates, unquote. The same statement details a beating with a broom handle. It claims that black women were forced to farm in the rain, while white women were allowed to stay inside and read newspapers and called for further investigations. Since the banning of the bucking chair used for whippings,

solitary confinement, unquote, the whole, unquote, was the official punishment for not working at the standards set by the prison guards and wardens. We know little about the conditions of the whole in earlier years, but in 1965, a new administrator named Ralph Holsey took over operations of the prison farm. A scathing report from journalist Dick Herbert, who went undercover as a prisoner, alleged, among many other things, that the whole was, quote, where men were starved and degraded, unquote. His report drew much negative attention to the conditions on the farm, the whole being one of them.

At the time, Holsey said that he was, quote, not happy with it as it is, but it is necessary for discipline, unquote. The whole was described as an eight foot by four foot windowless room where troublesome inmates are kept in solitary confinement. It's described as, quote, furnishings now include a pail and two buckets, no bed, no mattress, or plumbing. Holsey allegedly planned to fit such cells with an iron lattice bunk and toilet facilities, but we have no indication that this was ever followed through on and the whole continued to be used regularly up until the mid-80s. Leadership of the prison farm changed hands many times throughout its history, and at each passing of the torch, there were claims of improvement, the dawn of a new, better era.

Bleak and cruel conditions remained no matter who was in charge. Archival research shows that for over half a century, life on the farm was subject to hard labor, long days, harsh punishments, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and constantly lacking healthcare. J.D. Hudson, the superintendent of the prison farm in later years, who was hyped up by press as a sort of humanitarian reformer, described the previous conditions of the prison farm as slave labor. He bragged frequently of his intention to give prisoners, quote, a measure of self-respect so they could lead decent lives again. Upon being instated, he announced his intention to empty solitary confinement and forbid guards from hitting or abusing inmates, something which, we must point out, had been declared many times before already.

He also made statements saying that inmates are, quote, ridden with guilt about their lives, and they want to be mistreated and abused, and they want to be denigrated as some sort of atonement for their sins, unquote. So this might explain why the great reformer himself was still in charge when the ACLU sued the city in 1982 for conditions on the farm, citing, quote, illegal and unconstitutional punishments such as leg irons and excessive time in solitary confinement, unquote, along with the long track record of unsanitary conditions. Mayor Andrew Young said of the suit, quote, it's simply a problem the city hasn't gotten around to handling yet, unquote. At that point, the whole was still in use as solitary confinement and described as

a room seven feet long by four feet wide that is virtually without heat in the winter and without cooling in the summer. Prisoners were held there 23 hours a day with an hour out for baths, often held for many days at a time. The suit was settled in 1985 with a $4,500 settlement split between three former prisoners, but the city never actually admitted guilt. Prison farm staff were also ordered to avoid using isolation cells like the whole and told to build 20 new individual cells. The ACLU and those supporting the suit hoped that this lawsuit would push the city to make changes, but in 1987, just two years later, the city tried to build 20 more solitary confinement cells at the prison farm. And this project only fell through because white contractors they hired were caught taking job contracts slated for minority run businesses by using a front.

And hopefully you don't need me to tell you that solitary confinement is still used as punishment in most prisons today. It's been ages since I looked at this newspaper quotes document and just there's so much. Atlanta may well take pride in the fact that its city prison farm has won such recognition as a model, progressive institution that is cited as a model in other metropolitan areas for municipal penal systems need improvement. I mean, that's the same thing they're trying to do with cough city. Yeah, this is from 1945. That that was one of the surprising things that that we found was that so many aspects of like the specific fights that are being had about cough city have happened 5060 years ago, like they were trying to expand the prison farm.

I think eastward more into the cab county in the 40s and the the cab county residents were like, No, you can't do this to our county. Yeah, but it was because they didn't want the black prisoners near the white elementary school. And like night that was in 1944 that like wasn't long after when they like formally disallowed whipping. Yeah, like that's like it's there's like obviously it's they're still doing brutal stuff in terms of like solitary and other forms of torture and rape. But like posing it as this like model facility is like you just got in trouble like a few years previous for like whipping all of your prisoners, tying people down to a chair like. Then one of my favorites guards shoot two women prisoners while firing vainly at each other. I can't remember if we put that one in the article or not but two prison guards were shooting at each other because they were cranky or whatever.

And it ended up just like shooting two prisoners since then. Inside the report from last year on the history of the prison farm, there's like almost like 100 citations and a whole bunch of background stuff. How once you kind of had this question of like, is there unmarked graves at this site? How can we go about researching it? What were the kind of techniques and things you used to gather all of this information and then let alone like how do you start sorting through all that to pick out, you know, which which seems more credible than others, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of conflicting history in in in some regard. So how what was like the whole entire research process like because looking at just the list of citations, it is a little overwhelming. Yes, it's very overwhelming. So our other co-author and Laura, they did so much of the research.

Like, I have to give enormous props to them, like they even made a couple trips to things like the state archives, which are slightly south of the city, I think, kind of snuck into a university library because a lot of a lot of these like in person resources were still closed at the time due to COVID restrictions. A lot of them are open now, unfortunately. So like, we have a huge document of just like newspaper quotes. A big, big source for us were historical newspaper articles, mostly because because we initially started looking for official documents. Yeah. So this is a pub. This was a public entity. The city is required to keep records. And what we found was just a huge depth of them. And most of the articles that are not articles, but like official documents that are still around are housed in a really great collection at Georgia State University in downtown. But a lot of those things are, they're just fairly limited or if they're like year to year reports.

It's like, there's one from the 50s, there's one from the 60s, there's no consistent documentation available. So then we went to public record, which was newspaper articles. And, oh my God, there are so many newspaper articles about the prison farm. I never want to read a newspaper again. And we kind of used things that happened at the prison farm that were not worthy enough to make it into the newspaper to, I guess you could say guide what the biggest beats in the history of the prison and that kind of led us to what was something that we didn't know when we started our research, which was just how poorly or just how mangled the history of the prison farm has become. This land at approximately 1975 started becoming a police training academy so there has been some sort of police training facility on this land, since approximately 1975. There was even a slight version of a mock city in the 80, they had an intersection that was for training for urban encounters, if you will. So this is the kind of information that we're digging to try to find the history, we're literally seeing legal notices in the newspaper, so advertisements.

And this is how we're piecing this information together. When the pandemic hit in 2020, for the first time in recent memory, there was a large scale public discussion on how the structure of the prison system is detrimental to the health of incarcerated persons. Public health experts advocated that the best way to limit the spread of disease is simply to have less people in prison. We'll talk more about COVID's impact on prison populations in a bit, but first let's note how overcrowding and lack of medical treatment in prisons, leading to disastrous and deadly health outcomes, is no new issue. When Dick Herbert went into the Atlanta prison farm undercover for the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1965, one of his main findings was quote, non-existent medical treatment. He reported quote, tubercular, coughing, sickly men waiting to die, society's discards herded into an unwashed stockade, only to be turned out again without even a smattering of help, unquote. This was the case from the early days of the prison farm and remained the case for long after. Already by 1938, the prison farm was described by Mayor Harzfield as an ungodly mess and was likely facing issues with communicable diseases as evidenced by a call for, quote, separate hospital wards for diseased prisoners, unquote. But it took city council until 1941 to even quote, study a proposal to equip the new building nearing completion for a 500 bed emergency hospital, unquote.

The completed building was still not furnished by 1943 and in 1944, instead of making the new building into a health facility, they moved the prisoners into the new building and fitted the 20 year old prison building out to be a city detention hospital for treatment of those infected with venereal disease. And then rather than be used as a hospital ward for the prison farm, it was then used to treat venereal disease patients from throughout the city. This was expected to, quote, meet demand for years to come, but by 1945, there were already calls to close the entire prison farm and convert the whole thing into a venereal disease quarantine clinic due to an increasing load. Obviously, those calls were never adopted and the prison farm remained in operation. In a grossly recursive mirror of the present, in an October 1st, 1957 edition of the Atlantic Constitution, a quote, Asian flu outbreak prompted the immediate release of, quote, any person who is ill and who has a home to return to, unquote. Even this was qualified, though. H. H. Gibson, who was heading the prison at the time, said that only some of those who had been convicted of just light infractions would be released. He also said that older men with a history of tuberculosis would be released due to the risk of their contracting pneumonia, quoting Gibson, quote, none of the men who had temperatures of 101 or more were released. Some of these older men have no places to go, and if we released them with a possible case of flu and higher temperature, chances are we would find them dead in the woods or somewhere a day later, unquote.

There was no mention of efforts to mitigate spread within the prison farm facility, and the fate of those who were forced to stay is unknown to us at the present moment. In December of 1957, the DeKalb County grand jury presented findings from an investigation that found that the prison farm was severely lacking in health care. They advised that a building should be provided so that prisoners who are ill can be held aside from the ones who are not sick, meaning that in the 20 years since this was first proposed, it had still not been implemented. They recommended that prisoners who were sick be given examinations and a record to be kept of those prisoners, and the prison farm should, quote, employ a proper nursing staff, unquote. Their final recommendation was that, quote, some sort of sick quarter should be put into effect so prisoners who are ill can be held aside from the ones who are not sick, unquote. The implication from these recommendations, of course, is that none of these practices were in place at the time of investigation. A year later, in November of 1958, a second DeKalb grand jury, quote, found fault with its medical facilities along with the lack of fire safeguards in the prison farm. Of course, thanks to Dick Herbert's undercover investigation for the Atlanta Journal Constitution,

we now know that by 1965, nearly 10 years later, medical treatment was still found to be non-existent at the prison farm. And by 1967, a prisoner, quote, with a record of hospitalization for tuberculosis and heart trouble, collapsed and died, unquote. Despite the order that medical records for sick patients be kept, there was no record on file that this patient had ever seen the doctor. Recorded sections from a meeting between the prison farm and the Department of Prisons indicate that they planned to hire a full-time registered nurse in 1972 to assist the on-site doctor. Other plans included tests for tuberculosis, pap tests for female prisoners, and basic height, weight, and blood tests. They also indicated that they were not currently providing vision, hearing, or dental care. An Atlanta voice article from 1973 claims there are, quote, unquote, new improvements in this area with the, quote, employment of a physician and two nurses, a detoxification program for alcoholics, health tests, and a humane approach to prisoner problems, unquote.

But by 1976, we still see such things being raised as simply proposals. An inter-office communication at Grady Memorial Hospital states the need for, quote, a nurse clinician to be hired by Grady and paid by the state under contract to provide screening and triage services on site, and referral when appropriate to Grady Hospital. One of them suggests entering this contract for reasons that it will generate $125,000 in income, and, quote, minimize public criticisms of inadequate health care for prisoners, unquote. It also states that currently prisoners, quote, get only crisis-oriented emergency care. A May 1976 Community Relations Commission report indicates that many of the health care issues are caused by the reluctance of guards

to respond to prisoner complaints and, quote, brutality at Grady Hospital by Atlanta police officers, unquote. Another proposal from Grady, one month later, suggests that rather than hiring a nurse specifically for the prison farm, they use a nurse from the central referral office to act as a liaison with non-clinical personnel at each of the eight detention centers in the city and give recommendations over the phone. They note that this would save the prison thousands of dollars a year. A 1977 letter from Shirley Millwood, and her set Grady Hospital, indicates that prisoners were still being transported to Grady for the administration of medication, and that even that was not often done.

One of her patients was supposed to be brought in every day for medication, but Millwood claimed, quote, the jail personnel have not complied. The patient had been experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath all afternoon, but was not brought in until 10.30 p.m. Quote, I feel that this is negligent on their part, and it is certainly detrimental to our patients. If something happens to this patient, will the jail be liable for the problems that result from him not being properly medicated? Unquote. In an undated document entitled Health Program, City of Atlanta Prison Farm, pulled from the same archival collection as the other Grady Hospital records,

does indicate that since 1971, a doctor is on site five days a week for one hour each day, and a nurse is on duty 24 hours a day. It states that wherever feasible treatment should be done on the prison farm property, but lays out several procedures to follow for serious medical emergencies, usually involving transportation to Grady Hospital. However, it points out that, quote, unattended heart attacks, poison, or suicide, overdose cases, and heroin withdrawal in jail frequently occur. The report also says that in the case of public intoxication, quote, minor medical skill and routine capacity

in easing interpersonal tensions can reduce difficulty for arresting officers, reduce the arrests needed, and initiate more constructive rooting than directly to jail, unquote. The report points out that in diabetic patients their convulsions and the similar smell of their breath to acetone can lead to incorrect conclusions with permanent health effects. It also mentions that delirium treatments, a condition associated with withdrawal of alcohol and other substances, can, quote, endanger an inmate's life and more than one has died, unquote. Without proper health care or separation of sick and healthy prisoners, and in the midst of a decades-long tuberculosis epidemic,

overcrowding would certainly be a major contributing factor to sickness and death in prison scenarios. Archival research found that overcrowding was a recurring complaint throughout the over half-century of the prison farm's existence, despite frequent expansions often motivated by the overcrowding in the first place. Overcrowding is a common occurrence in prisons and jails throughout the country, a longitudinal study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that, quote, as jail populations have exceeded capacity, county policy makers have turned to jail expansion rather than alternatives to incarceration. In some cases, decision makers also argue that replacing older facilities will provide safer living and working conditions

for the increasing numbers of people in the jail, unquote. However, institute researchers note that, quote, larger jails built to accommodate an overcrowded population often see their populations continue to increase. This is because expansion alone fails to address the root causes of overcrowding, leaving in place the very policies and practices that drove the jail's population increase in the first place. Indeed, there is a risk that the existence of a larger jail with more beds may reduce the incentive to make policy changes that address the factors driving overcrowding due to the temporary relief expansion provides, unquote. This is precisely what we see play out here in the case of the old prison farm

and in fact is still an ongoing issue in Atlanta area incarceration systems today. Since early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, it's been made clear that the most effective way to mitigate the devastation of endemic COVID-19 in prisons and jails is to reduce the number of people behind bars. And, wow, perhaps that would be a good idea in general, not even related to this specific pandemic. The United States locks up a larger portion of its population than any other nation in the world and just the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world if you compare individual U.S. states to all other entire countries.

Throughout 2020, only three states, New Jersey, California, and North Carolina, released a significant number of incarcerated people from prisons. Parole boards also approved fewer releases in the first year of the pandemic compared to the year prior. The response of governments was so bad that in total, 10% fewer people were released in prisons and jails in 2020 compared to 2019. As a result, at the end of the first year of the pandemic, 19 state prison systems were at 90% capacity or higher. Incarcerated people are infected by the coronavirus at a rate more than five times higher than the nation's overall rate, according to research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association from July of 2020.

The reported death rate of inmates, 39 deaths per 100,000, is also much higher than the national rate of 29 deaths per 100,000. As of April 16, 2021, more than 661,000 incarcerated people and staff have been infected with coronavirus, and at least 2,990 have died, according to the New York Times. And getting data more recent than that is actually almost impossible, because many carceral agencies have simply stopped collecting and releasing information. The number of infections and deaths is likely even higher than the reported number, because jails and prisons are conducting limited testing on incarcerated people. Many facilities won't test incarcerated people who die after showing symptoms of COVID-19.

A lack of data reporting by carceral agencies has prevented the public from being able to understand the full impact of the pandemic on incarcerated persons. Organizations like the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Project, the Marshall Project, and the COVID Prison Project have been working to collect data and information as there's been a lack of transparency from agencies in providing adequate or correct data on the number of cases, safety protocols, and deaths within their jails and prisons. Many states' Department of Corrections ruled back or stopped reporting their COVID-19 data altogether in the summer of 2021, during the Delta variant surge and way before the Omnicron wave that hit last winter. For example, in Georgia, the Georgia Department of Corrections has not reported any new COVID deaths since March 14, 2021, and last year halted all public reporting data.

Among all the correctional systems in the United States, the Georgia Department of Corrections has the second highest case fatality rate, or percentage of those people who have reported infections and later die. So this has been a problem in Georgia for a long time, whether that be with the old Atlanta prison farm or the current day jails, prisons, and penitentiaries. I'm going to close out this episode with this little tidbit from one of the conversations I had with members of the Atlanta Community Press Collective. I think just something that's continuously not addressed. I know a lot of people like to focus on positive things or more inspiring things, I guess, as far as prison stuff goes, because I know I've had people repeatedly ask, like, hey, were there strikes, were there uprisings, which is really inspirational, I agree. But there's also a really, really sad history that a lot of people aren't addressing and how many people died by suicide here or attempted to die by suicide.

And it's really sad that no one seems to care about that aspect. That there were horrific atrocities, there were frequent rapes and beatings. There's a photo from the AJC that literally says, black woman, I think it's like from the 40s. And they are moving around chemically infused sludge, it literally says sludge as fertilizer. We have proof of these atrocities. And people just like to focus on things of like, oh, hey, there was arsenic in a lake. I've never been able to find anything about that. I have no idea where that came from. I'm not saying it didn't happen. But there are so many concrete examples of horrific things that happened here.

We don't need to make up stories. They exist and they're here. You just have to pay attention and read about it. There's literally a woman who attempted suicide six times because she hated being in the hole so bad the isolated confinement cell labeled the hole, like six times. And nobody addresses this kind of stuff. Even as forest defenders, like we owe it to ourselves to educate our community about exactly what happened here. Even the worst of it. And then we'll go fucking raven the woods because you got to take care of yourself too. But even as we acknowledge this land, we need to know the history of it too. That does it for us today. In the next episode, we'll be going over the details of possible grave sites and how further research into the prison farm could be done.

As well as more updates on the happenings in the fight to defend the Atlanta Forest. See you on the other side. Welcome. This is it could happen here, the podcast about how it feels like everything is kind of falling apart and maybe what we can do to put stuff back together. I'm Garrison Davis, your host for this episode. And this is the third and final part of our miniseries on the history of the old Atlanta prison farm, produced in collaboration with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. We're actually going to start this episode with a little update on what's been going on in Atlanta as a part of the defend the Atlanta Forest and stop cop city movement. Considering the Atlanta Police Foundation's cop city project is very much a direct continuation of the authoritarian and carceral oppression of the prison farm that occupied the very same section of land. Here's an audio clip of one of my conversations with members of the Atlanta Community Press Collective from right before the recent July 2022 week of action.

And this is about the status of construction on the South River or Wilani Forest. So, for the past month or so. It's kind of been a waiting game like if you refer to the construction timeline of one of our open records request revealed like construction really should have started in earnest by now like they last time I saw a figure they want to have this open by fall of next year. And they are not on that timeline. And that's not all necessarily due to the movement. So I think between just the general supply chain havoc that's happening across different industries right now definitely the construction industry. I think they did mention this during one of the recent community stakeholders community meetings where they're like oh yeah by the way we are kind of having some supply chain issues. In addition to, I don't think a PD and the police foundation really expected to have any kind of continued resistance on the ground.

Or any kind of continued public that press I don't think they think they thought they passed the legislation on the public would kind of move on. So that's frankly what usually happens when people when people when movements that criticize the police happen they usually get repressed or people's attention turns turns to other things pretty quickly. We know that they have a permit for it's what exactly is it is a permit for is kind of complicated but one way or another it enables the police foundation their contractors and their vendors to construct a basically like a temporary construction site like you would see around the construction site, but in that permit I believe expires in August of this year, because that's a temporary permit, but that fence does not seem to have gone up. So it's it's kind of a stalemate right now. Just five days after the July week of action wrapped on early Wednesday morning on August 3 dozens of work vehicles and police amassed around the forest staging heavy machinery setting up roadblocks and started dismantling barricades in the forest. Sounds of tree cutting could be heard near the occupied stop Cops City tree sits. Police were initially stalled by the burning of tire barricades near Rhodes, but around 7am heavy machinery breached the proposed site for Cops City and entered on the north side of the forest. Excavators cleared barricades and trees were felled near trails, making wider paths into the forest.

DeKalb County police officers accompanied gas pipeline workers who were on the ground adjacent to Entrenchment Creek Park. One arrest was reported. The arrestee was originally being taken straight to jail and then got diverted to police headquarters for questioning, and it was confirmed that FBI was also on the scene. There were no attempts at extraction of tree sitters and no additional arrests reported that day. The Atlanta Police Foundation's contract workers did substantial forest clearing in an area of the woods near the entrance gate on Key Road, directly adjacent to the existing power line clearing. Much of the surrounding neighborhood was blocked off by the Atlanta Police Department for most of the day, with no warning given to local residents, many of whom have stop Cops City yard signs. The work being done along the power line cut is assumed to be either for installing sewer lines and or drilling holes. The presence of Georgia Power suggests that they could have been trying to bore holes to install power lines. The next morning, around 20 cops, some mounted on ATVs, patrolled throughout the forest, possibly looking for rebuilt barricades or to snatch up anyone they found in the area. Ever since then, there's been cops, sometimes on ATVs, spotted multiple times a week in the forest, usually during early in the morning. How much grounds clearing and pre-construction work was done recently in the forest was slightly surprising, considering the land disturbance permit has not yet been issued. Though it is possible that the recent work was covered by existing utility easements or the temporary construction permit that expires later this month that was mainly issued around the goal of putting up a security fence around the forest.

And with that, now let's get back to the history of the prison farm. As discussed last episode, overcrowding was one of the initial motivations for proposing to move the Glenwood Stockade prisoners to the dairy farm site, though it was not the final decisive factor, because at the time, populations there were dwindling. Several years later, though, Councilman Choswood was being praised for increasing the incarcerated population because it brought in more revenue. And several years after that, in 1929, overcrowding at the second stockade on Decatur and Hillard prompted discussions on expanding the prison farm by bringing in portable buildings from the school board and expanding the woman's prison by 100 feet. A police report from 1936 says, quote, we find that all prisoners have separate quarters, which are in sanitary condition, but overcrowded. We recommend that another unit be constructed for white female prisoners as well as white male prisoners, unquote. And by 1938, a new wing was completed, housing 75 more prisoners. And another edition of the same size was expected to be added to the main building.

But only five months later, the prison farm's own superintendent again described the conditions there as overcrowded and recommended another expansion and separate ward for, quote, unquote, diseased prisoners. In 1939, a proposal to extend the land by 184 acres was protested by Decab residents on the basis that it was directly next to a white school. And that, quote, further development of penal institutions in that section would destroy the value of surrounding property and preclude the development of a civic center, which citizens seek near the west side school grounds, unquote. The plan was abandoned, but later brought up with a compromise in that they would instead only take 134 acres, leaving a 50 acre buffer between the prison farm and the school. In 1944, a new building originally slated to be a medical ward was built. And as we saw in the healthcare section, this ended up becoming a new prison building. And the old building became the venereal disease hospital. The new building could, quote, house 725 prisoners without crowding them, unquote, and was said to be able to, quote, eliminate longstanding criticism of nearby residents because of escapes from the old overcrowded and ill arranged structure.

In 1946, the city took possession of an additional 89 acres of land for the prison farm, but still overcrowding was again raised as an issue in 1952. But this time, certain sentences were reduced from 20 days to 10 days to address this problem, constituting the first time a slightly decarceral approach was used. But despite this and yet another new wing being built in 1958, a grand jury in 1960 found that the prison farm was, quote, unquote, exceedingly overcrowded, and, quote, as a result, the health of prisoners is jeopardized, unquote. They suggested building a, quote, unquote, work camp to alleviate crowding. Dick Herbert's undercover investigation in 1965 found that men were sleeping on the floor and tables because there was still not enough beds. A quote from Herbert says, so closely packed are the 300 bunks that they are alternated head to foot. In 1967, Atlanta started talking about chronic alcoholism as a health problem rather than one of criminality. However, the assumption was that this was still to be treated by those in charge of the prisons, quote, the prison is already crowded up against its 600 person capacity, said the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But according to Superintendent Halsey, the conversion to a rehabilitation center would mean longer stays and thus higher populations, stating, quote, they likely will have to build a whole new city prison farm, unquote.

A 1976 article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution says that in 1970, a thousand prisoners were packed in the old building inmates slept in rickety beds three high health inspectors and judges cut the population for humanity's sake. It further claimed that the facility was now, quote, well below its comfortable capacity of 400 prisoners, unquote. In 1974, the Uniform Alcohol Treatment Act was passed, although never fully funded, which effectively decriminalized alcoholism. This act was said to reduce the population of the prison farm from 500 in 1972 to 200 in 1983. Although new laws were passed, further criminalizing certain actions while intoxicated at the behest of the business community, who, quote, demanded drunks and winos be removed from the streets, unquote. This era marks the last time the Atlanta community press research found complaints of overcrowding. The lack of further complaints strongly suggests that decriminalization is a better answer to the problem of overcrowding rather than prison expansion. It's also necessary to mention that alleviating the problem 50 years into the project does not make up for the unnecessary harm and death likely caused by these conditions over the years.

As we went over last episode, overcrowding of jails remains a problem in our modern jails and prisons. Currently, the Fulton County Sheriff wants the Atlanta City government to abandon their promise of closing a city jail and instead rent the jail to Fulton County to alleviate overcrowding in their system. This is billed as a humanitarian move, but as we've discussed in the past few episodes, history suggests otherwise, and the most successful way at reducing harm was decarceral approaches. Complaints about poor sanitation and malnutrition also span the prison farm's history. Combined with the previously detailed conditions, these would further increase the likelihood of sickness and death within the prison farm walls. Prisoners in 1938 complained that, quote, a silver dollar would cover each particle of food given to prisoners and asked for, quote, more vegetables and less sorghum, unquote. In 1941, during a tense meeting in which Dicab tried unsuccessfully to prevent Atlanta from expanding the prison farm, a Dicab resident said that the farm was without sanitary facilities, despite frequent assurances that the facility was clean. However, work was temporarily abandoned on that expansion after Dicab County citizens sought and obtained an injunction against the city of Atlanta for dumping untreated sewage into Entrenchment Creek.

There is a large gap in reporting on these particular conditions, but there's evidence that they persisted, because in 1960, the Dicab ground jury found that, quote, restrooms were deplorable in both white and negro wards, unquote. And that the kitchen floor was, quote, in a deplorable state and should be replaced. The Atlanta Journal of Constitution's own inspection curiously concluded that the farm was, quote, operated very efficiently and with good sanitary conditions, unquote. But just two years later, Dic Herbert's undercover work as a prisoner showed quite the contrary. He found puddles of spit at drainage grills. Wondered if many of the men had tuberculosis and said that, quote, it was not uncommon to find dead bugs or hair in food. The rusty, dirty tins we drank out of should be replaced, unquote. Herbert also mentioned that, quote, the food was almost entirely a thin and liquid diet, and also said that inmates often complained that the best of the farms produce and meats are reserved for the guards and hired help. And just a reminder that they themselves worked to grow all that produce. A prisoner named Carl H sent to the prison farm in 1968 on a public drunkenness charge said after five days at the facility, quote, I've had one half of a meal since I've been here, unquote.

Apparently by this time local court rulings had determined that chronic alcoholics could no longer be arrested on these charges. But the judge claimed, quote, I'm doing it from a humanitarian standpoint, whether it's legal or not, unquote. Carl said of that matter that the judge, quote, told me that he was going to save my life. I told him he can't save my life out there at the stockade. I told him he can send me anywhere, but not the stockade. He can't save my life out there, unquote. This was three years after Superintendent Holsey was praised for his reforms and interviewed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution saying, quote, I'm just trying to make this place sanitary and livable for these people, unquote. On two occasions in 1969, the vast majority of prisoners went on strike due to poor food. The first time they demanded a raise for the cook and the hiring of a new cook. But four months later, these conditions, which were agreed to, to end the strike, had still not been met. Prison farm administrators once again promised to raise cook wages and hire a new cook to end the strike, but we have no indication that they ever followed through on that.

An Atlanta Journal Constitution article from 1970 states that prisoners were working in the kitchen while infected with tuberculosis, quote, one man was sent to Batty State Hospital after it was found his tuberculosis was so advanced that he started hemorrhaging. He had worked in the kitchen the night before, unquote. When asked about this, the prison farm administrator RF Jordan said that some prisoners do have tuberculosis and, yes, quote, some of them work in the kitchen, but only if their case is arrested, unquote. Employees protesting discrimination against black employees at the farm and unfair and illegal incarceration of alcoholics also said that, quote, there are rats and roaches and filth that you wouldn't believe, unquote. In 1971, the prison farm was found to be serving food illegally without a license, but health officials complained that there were only two of them for the entire multi-county district and they had no means of actually enforcing licenses or food safety. Just one month later, prisoners again went on strike due to being served watered down gravy and being unjustly incarcerated for alcoholism. Reports on conditions are few and far between after this period, but the 1982 ACLU lawsuit claimed, among other things, that the conditions at the facility are unsanitary. There is most likely more information to find between these years, as one prison farm worker said, quote, we used to have strikes out here about every month, sometimes two or three a month, unquote.

In 1983, Superintendent Hudson, once hailed as the great humanitarian reformer, was replaced after, quote, complaints from employees and city politicians about his handling of the city jail, its employees and prisoners. Hudson said of the criticism, quote, I get bored when there aren't any problems, serenities not my thing, unquote. A big focus of the research that the Atlantic Community Press did was on the question of unmarked graves at the prison farm site. There are persistent folk stories about these that may be tempting for some to write off as unfounded rumors. However, oral histories and qualitative interviews need to be taken seriously and considered alongside other forms of evidence. Some stories have already been substantiated, and for others, the evidence found so far certainly places them within the realm of possibility. This episode, I'm not going to try to prove without a shadow of a doubt that there are unmarked graves on the property that is slated to become a cop city. But I will discuss documentation that shows that there is a strong possibility that needs to be carefully and fully investigated, regardless of how long it takes to do so properly.

To start, there is this quote from an Atlanta Journal Constitution piece from 1976, quote, mod the deceased elephant and 280 inmates rest in peace at the city of Atlanta prison farm, unquote. Now, I'm going to unpack that one at a time, because there's a lot there. The elephant, mod, was the former zoo elephant that died and whose corpse was dumped at the prison farm property by the city. And as for the line about 280 buried inmates, there's no other details given in the article. And some researchers suspect that this is some kind of sick sarcastic joke on the newspaper's part, as the rest of the article attempts to paint life at the prison farm as one of leisure and respite. According to local folk historian Scott Peterson, there is, however, a known burial ground off of Boulder Crest and Key Road that contains both marked and unmarked graves that was once owned and operated by the prison farm. Now, to be perfectly clear, this burial ground is not on the current property slated to become cop city. The section of land that was originally the prison farm has been divided up into many smaller pieces, a few hundred acres of which the Atlanta police foundation is trying to turn into the new militarized police training compound.

However, the burial site that Scott Peterson talks about does tell us that, A, that there is some truth behind at least some of the folk stories and B, the prison farm as a whole contained at least some unmarked graves, which leads us to believe that there could be others throughout the property and that other claims are at least worth taking seriously. When the Atlanta community press was doing the bulk of their historical research last year, they attempted to find death and burial records for inmates that died while incarcerated at the prison farm. Through archival digging, select inmate death and burial records were found. Simply via public reporting, we know for certain that at least several deaths occurred in very close time spans. One man was sprayed with an insecticide, which the warden denies, but which the attending nurse and those who sprayed the man corroborate. Samuel Bayon's 36 year old black man, quote unquote, dropped dead shortly after a patrolman woke him up to get dressed. Mark Isaiah Willem died after, quote unquote, becoming sick. An Atlanta Daily World headline reads, quote, coroner's jury will probe death of prisoner. Brown urges full investigation. And that's dated from 1953 on April 14.

Robert Reynolds, a 49 year old black man died from head injuries prompting an investigation. And in reference to Reynolds, Charlie Brown, a 1953 mayoral candidate, declared quote, approximately 10 prisoners have died in the jail in the last four years under mysterious circumstances, unquote. Despite these known deaths, finding official records listing either deaths or burials at the site was much more difficult. On top of searching through several archives, researchers sent Georgia Open Records Act requests to the police department, the Department of Corrections, and the Atlanta City Council. The police department said that the records would be in the custody of the Department of Corrections. However, the Department of Corrections stated that they are not and never were the custodians of such records. The Atlanta City Council replied to requests by sending the inaccurate Gillian Wooten history report, but also connected researchers with a historian. Serena McCracken of the Atlanta History Center has said that there's a possibility such records simply do not exist.

Either that they were never kept in the first place due to laws at the time, or that they were destroyed at some point, either due to negligence or an expiring period of retention. There is also the possibility that these records do exist and simply have not been yet found. They could have been misfiled, or requests could have been sent to the wrong agency, or they could just be sitting in a box of mill doing records still on the land today, as so many other records were when the city finally shut down the site, many of which are now lost forever in the ensuing fires and other ravages of time. In the Georgia Archives file on the prison farm, a memo was discovered describing procedures for the death of inmates. The memo says that upon a prisoner's death, their nearest kin should be notified. If the body is not claimed, quote, then the body shall be given a popper's burial not to exceed $50, unquote. Such burials don't always include a headstone, but rather a marker or a burial flag which can easily erode away or become invisible over time.

Not all unmarked graves on the site necessarily exist within a traditional grave plot. According to Scott Peterson, who's collected folk stories and oral histories about the land for 20 years, there is another plot next to an old oak tree and sunken in structure that was once used to shade the warden during lynchings. This would, of course, be not legal, but as we've talked about, legality does not always dictate the behaviors of prison farm wardens, and there are records of cases of runaways at other prison farms that were later discovered to have been killed and buried on site. As such, these claims are not outside the bounds of possibility, and if anything, are highly likely. There are also many similarities between the conditions at the prison farm and those of the Brandon Indian residential school that would lead to the need to bury many bodies without necessarily keeping tight records.

Catherine Nichols' thesis details a history of airborne diseases aggravated by factors such as poor sanitation and ventilation, lack of medical attention, malnutrition, violence and abuse, overwork and accidents, and harsh punishment of runaways, all of which are also seen throughout the prison farm's history. I don't want to draw too tight a comparison between the prison farm and other places and other events. It is worth looking at other similar situations as something that shows that the question of unmarked graves is not unfounded nor uncharacteristic of the institutions of the time. There have been several other instances where institutions with similar conditions were later found to have unmarked graves, burial grounds, or other human remains. Human remains in Sugar Land, Texas, near the old Imperial Prison Farm there, were found to have, quote, belong to prisoners who worked on the land once used as a sugar plantation, unquote.

An article from the Tyler Morning Telegraph describes life of physical abuse, forced labor, and poor nutrition, much like the prison farm in Atlanta. Similarly to Atlanta, quote, it wasn't until it became clear that these abuses were widespread and affecting white prisoners that public opinion started to shift, unquote. In Arkansas in 1968, a reformist superintendent of Cummins Prison Farm discovered the remains of three former prisoners. His discovery, quote, made international news embarrassed Governor Winthrop Rockefeller and infuriated conservative politicians. It also led to Martin's firing and banishment from the field of prison management, unquote. Finally, although the Brandon Indian Residential School was not a prison farm, archival research points to conditions for the prisoners held at the Atlanta Prison Farm that are not dissimilar from the conditions of the children held at the Brandon Indian Residential School. We see lacking healthcare, poor sanitation and ventilation, malnutrition, violence and abuse, a heavy workload, accidents, and harsh punishments all contributed to the deaths there.

And each of those factors has been demonstrated via archival research to have existed on the prison farm in Atlanta. As mentioned at the beginning of the first episode, this is not an exhaustive or comprehensive history. Further research is necessary and hopefully, as explained by the past few episodes, is extremely warranted. However, what's laid out here and in the Atlanta Community Press' other work already changes our fundamental understanding of the Atlanta Prison Farm. Far from a federal program ending in the 60s before being essentially abandoned, we saw that the Atlanta Prison Farm on Key Road was city run from the very beginning, and the direct continuation of the already cruel stockade. Contrary to popular belief, it was run continuously from the early 20s up into the 1990s. It was a completely different property than the honor farm, despite many, including the Atlanta Police Foundation, continuing to use that phrase when referring to the site.

At the city run prison farm, atrocious conditions persisted across the better part of a century and ongoing into what we would consider the modern era, despite claims at each stage that the bad times were behind us and a new era lay ahead. There is a documented history of the city prioritizing its ability to cut costs with prison labor, essentially extending slavery. Extensive records of physical and emotional abuse, torture, forced labor, overwork, a lack of healthcare, poor sanitation, overcrowding, and poor nutrition, ranging throughout the entire history of the site. Nearly every stage of leadership has gotten caught breaking rules and laws while avoiding the same carceral fate as the prisoners, as well as a reluctance by city officials to enact policies that would truly alleviate these harms and attempt to make up for them, rather ensuring that power remains continuous.

As is the case with Cop City, this history demonstrates how Atlantic City government is perfectly fine with overruling rights of the residents of DeKalb County who are disenfranchised from the city. With the Atlanta Police Foundation and the city getting closer and closer to deforestation and facility construction, the window of opportunity is shrinking for further on-the-ground historical research. The fact that they've yet to meet the requirements for the full environmental assessments, let alone the careful historical analysis necessary, considering the history of the land, means that the city is not only physically erasing the history of the lives it's destroyed, but also risking the possibility of desecrating their graves in the process. A guest column in the Supporter Report by Lily Ponance, an environmental engineer and now former member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, aka Cop City,

gave us an inside look at how the development of Cop City is knowingly and willingly refusing to do their due diligence assessments and pave over decades of carceral history. Quote, since joining the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, I've observed the developers from DaVinci Development Collaborative, along with the Atlanta Police Foundation, mislead the community into believing that they are following legitimate, regulated environmental due diligence process. In reality, they are doing less than the minimum to meet the legally defined standards for environmental site assessment reporting and are breaking the trust of stakeholders and the terms of their ground lease agreement with the city of Atlanta. Given the historical operation as a prison farm and plantation prior to that, conditions, violence, abuse, accidents, and harsh punishments, it is reasonable to believe that areas of the property could contain human remains in unmarked graves.

This was never investigated. Comments and professional input from myself and others on the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee were brushed off and no additional site investigations were considered beyond the limited site investigation. To remedy this, the city of Atlanta must force the development team to act responsibly by requiring a proper phase to environmental site assessment. If they fail to do so, taxpayers are likely to foot the bill for the remediation that is being ignored, or for the complicated litigation that will arise when this development team disturbs human remains on this site." A few months ago, Lily Ponance was kicked off the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee after writing this column. Both the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee and COP City have repeatedly been made aware that the assessments they've done fail to meet environmental requirements, and the reports that they are using to base decisions off of and green light proposals have been shown to be inaccurate.

As far as responding to city council, APF enlisted TerraCon to write a cultural report. This report was highly inaccurate due to relying on the Billy Mootin report. I personally emailed City Council as Atlantic Community Press Collective and as I've repeatedly told them, hey, this is incorrect, this is why, here's proof, this is really disgusting and sad that you refuse to acknowledge any of this history. And ironically, a month or two later, another report comes out that's slightly better, slightly revised, but still has that whitewashed aspect that the original one did. I had the misfortune to recently need to reread the TerraCon report, and I don't believe they address when the city supposedly took over the prison, the federal farm at all. I don't think they discussed that date in the slightest, but the Mootin report that they draw from, I think she just says sometime in the 50s, which was how we figured out because we were trying to nail down the date in the 50s and when we had to go back and back and back and back and back.

We found out when the city purchased the land by literally just going to the DECAP history archives at the courthouse and looking them up. It was just a fairly quick process in terms of research that APF obviously didn't hair or bother to look into at all. Obviously the city of Atlanta didn't either. In her residential school thesis, Catherine Nichols lays out a robust process for unobtrusively examining possibilities of human remains while respecting the communities affected. Her process involves thorough archival research, including the use of oral histories and unconfirmed local knowledge to generate leads for deeper investigation. This archival research is then situated alongside the currently existing literature on the subject. She then conducts qualitative interviews with local community members and family members of those affected. She stresses that this qualitative information is not to be written off just because it does not align with records that the state institutions consider to be legitimate.

And finally, she lays out a method for field research, including site reconnaissance, field walking and probing, site preparation, controlled burns, mapping, aerial photography, soil profiles, metal detector surveys, ground penetrating radar, and ground conductivity surveys all checked against controls to ensure that they align with the results of the same methods on previously known unmarked grave sites. Crucially, all of this is done with the consent of the relevant communities and is done unobtrusively as to not disturb the graves. Now that the construction process has ostensibly started, how does that factor into like, you know, disturbing the grounds where there could be, you know, all of this history that is being unearthed and kind of paved over top of? How does that kind of impact the ability to do ethical research going forward into the history of this land? So for one thing, we talked on and off with a handful of like archaeologists and anthropologists and related fields about if we were going to go onto the prison farm property and conduct a search for grave sites or other historical information, like we have no legal way to do that. It would be trespassing. And we also know that from the quote unquote cultural report that the police foundation had done, they didn't really do that kind of search. They were mostly searching for evidence of, I guess you could say, indigenous artifacts, not let's say bodies buried in the 1920s.

So the ability to do on site historical research is, it kind of depends on, hey, how willing are you to get picked up for felony trespassing, because that's a charge they can put on you. It definitely feels like we're up against a clock. I'm just going to add on to that. I feel like one of the issues that we've definitely come across as far as looking for graves that are related to the prison farm. Your options are pretty much ground penetrating radar or what they call cadaver dogs cadaver dogs theoretically can sniff up to 100 years from what I've read. Many people have connections to cadaver dogs, honestly. And then also the just logistics of attempting to get ground penetrating radar in a forest is definitely difficult. Are you worried as construction continues that even if stuff is discovered, whether that be unmarked graves or, you know, other various other things, that do you have any any level of confidence that if things are found, they'll even go public? Or are you worried that if they find things, they'll just cover it up basically. I have absolutely zero faith. I mean, to me that I have absolutely zero faith to directly ensure a question I have absolutely zero faith that anything that is found will be preserved.

We also have it on fairly good authority that the issuing of construction permits is imminent. DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry is our best legal ally, if you will, our best government ally he last week during the week of action introduced a resolution that would ask DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond to basically make a series of asks himself of the city of Atlanta. This is basically legally the most the county commission can do. And it is all incumbent upon the CEO of the county to actually do these things. Hope is not great for the county CEO to do any of these things. But Ted Terry, among other things asked for additional environmental studies which by the way they are required to do in the lease. He asked for additional historical research and full disclosure. He actually cited the press collectives history report we did last summer in the legislation which was both he's a state actor but also you got to admit that's kind of cool. It was gratifying to see our work receive a fairly high level of recognition additional environmental studies historical research noise studies.

And ultimately he asks that the CEO ask the city to consider just relocating the site completely. I think something that we need to take into consideration throughout this entire research process is that a lot of the records that we have access to our newspaper. The primary newspaper source we have access to is the AJC which we have a clear. We have clear proof that AJC continues to be racist continues to focus on the narrative that they would like to project as far as being accomplices to the police and to APF and how that correlates to the city's history and mishandling of this piece of land. When we were looking through older articles. There are handful of newspapers there's the Great Speckled Bird which is a GS. So it's a student run newspaper.

This one I'm assuming just based on the 60s and 70s timeframe that there's a decent chance that it was primarily written by white people I do not have proof of that I'm just going on with gut feeling with that. But it really does start to give a different picture of the people that were sent to the prison from there were several GSU students who were sent there and they were put in the hole. One was put in the hole just because he had long hair and he refused to cut his hair. So they said, you know what you're going into isolation. Have fun. And he was there for a little bit. It's important to reiterate that throughout much of the archival research that produced these findings. The bulk of the articles discovered were from the Atlanta Journal, the Atlantic Constitution, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution after the two merged.

Though these papers reported on bad conditions once they had become public, and in two cases were responsible for investigative work that made these conditions public, these white run papers, much like many major newspapers, have a known history of racism and support for the police state and carceral institutions. We therefore believe that a thorough search through archives of black run newspapers such as the Atlanta Daily World, magazines and other publications is necessary to gain a more complete understanding of the history. Both myself and the researchers that put this history together are furthermore white. And so it is possible that our own biases and blind spots could be present in this reporting. We strongly believe that a more complete accounting of this history could be undertaken by people who have been more directly affected, and hope that these episodes and the research they're based on is not taken as the end of the story, but just a beginning and an invitation to further scrutiny. Is there really any way to continue the research that would be necessary to actually preserve the history and keep people knowledgeable about the atrocities that's happened the past hundred plus years like with if construction continues. Is there even a way to do this now or is the clock really just running out. So I think one of the biggest hurdles as far as preserving the history is honestly just getting people to care about it, because it's not sexy. It's not people in tree houses.

It's sitting on a computer just skimming through thousands of articles. No one cares that in 1982 the ACLU sued the city because they were using illegal and unconstitutional punishments. Nobody really cares about that kind of stuff. It's not that exciting in the grand scheme of things. It's part of the history and it's part of what has led us to where we are now with Cops City. And with that, that wraps up our miniseries on the very much incomplete history of the old Atlanta prison farm. The fact that there's seemingly little to no original official records to learn from because they were either trashed or never kept in the first place is itself a cover up and denial of history and gross denial of the experiences of trauma and oppression of those who are subjected to the horrors of the prison farm. It's bad enough that the city couldn't be bothered to remember the history, but crucially their bulldozed over police endorsed narrative in whatever museum or plaque they want to create cannot be allowed to become the story of the prison farm and its many atrocities that we are still rediscovering. There is still a long way to go and we have barely scratched the surface. Hopefully this is just the start of more people paying attention to the forgotten histories like this and then going out and doing further digging. You can check out the Atlanta Community Press Collective and they're great reporting at atlpresscollective.com or Atlanta underscore press on Twitter. See you all on the other side.

You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.