Atlanta’s Fault Lines in a Moment of Protest

A crowd of people marches with signs.
“I’ve never seen this in Atlanta,” one resident said of the protests in the city. “I guess it was a long time coming with our history here.”Photograph by Lynsey Weatherspoon

Jaquan Cummings wasn’t sure whether he wanted to attend the protests in Atlanta this weekend. Last year, the twenty-five-year-old photographer, who has a large Instagram following and some blue-chip commercial clients, got into what he described as “a drunken argument” with a police officer, and was charged with reckless conduct. (The case has yet to be resolved “because COVID keeps pushing court dates back,” he told me.) Cummings, who is black, lives with his mother and younger sister. “I was looking at everything online, trying to decide if I wanted to go out or not,” he said. “I had a fear of getting arrested.” A friend finally convinced him to go, “because that’s what photographers do,” he said. He grabbed a Nikon camera that his grandfather—“my favorite photographer”—gave him years ago, before he died, and he headed out.

By the time he arrived on Friday night, people had already marched from Centennial Olympic Park, downtown, to the capitol building, a mile away, carrying signs and chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” and “No justice, no peace.” Atlanta’s chief of police, Erika Shields—who, earlier in the week, had said that the Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd should serve prison time—spoke to protesters individually. “People are upset. They’re angry. They’re scared. And I get it,” she told a news crew. “They want to be heard.” Other Atlanta cops fist-bumped protesters and said that they had “a right to be pissed off.”

John Peterson, an eighteen-year-old political-science major at Georgia State University, had joined the march with a few friends. They brought medical supplies to help their fellow-protesters—Peterson is a lifeguard with CPR and first-aid training—but hadn’t needed to use them yet. It was a hot day, and a few of them went to Peterson’s apartment to cool off. Then he got a call from one who’d stayed: a crowd had gathered outside the CNN Center, a large complex adjacent to the park where the protest had begun. Police had formed a barrier in front of the building, blocking further passage along Centennial Olympic Park Drive. A protester had been maced. At around five p.m., Peterson and his friends headed back out, with a half-dozen first-aid kits and bottles of isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.

“It was still peaceful,” Peterson, who is white, said of the scene when they arrived. But the police presence had grown. He saw as many as twenty Atlanta Police Department squad cars in a line, and countless officers. He found another crew of ad-hoc medics, who were trying to move people behind large tree planters in front of the CNN Center, “because they were concerned that, if the police used tear gas, it would drive the protesters to break the barricade and cause a stampede,” he said. A few minutes later, three SWAT-unit Humvees with turrets on top pulled up. “They arrived before there was any violence, suited up for a riot,” Peterson said. He noticed a large prison bus arriving behind the Humvees.

“The officers made multiple announcements on the loudspeakers, telling people that, if they didn’t disperse, they were going to be arrested,” he told me. Protesters began to spray-paint the large CNN logo that sits on the sidewalk outside the center, and people jumped on top of the letters. One person waved a Black Lives Matter flag. Another waved a Mexican flag. The mood was still buoyant; Peterson said, “It felt more like a celebration.” But officers were trying to halt the graffiti, and protesters threw milk and water at them. Other protesters threw rocks and objects; Peterson thought their aim was to break the building’s windows. He heard someone say, “What the hell are y’all doing? Like, CNN is with us. One of their reporters got arrested the other day.” Someone responded, “There’s a police precinct here. They’re still with the cops.” The glass exterior eventually broke, and police formed a line at the edge of the building to prevent entry.

Cummings arrived at the complex with a friend, who also had a camera, and they began to shoot the unfolding drama. “It unfolded fast,” he said. A protester jumped on top of a police car that had been surrounded by protesters, and it became the focal point of activity. The windshield and windows were shattered; Peterson heard air coming out of the car’s slashed tires. People tried to tip the vehicle over. Cummings looked for a safe place to shoot as the police car went up in flames. “I honestly didn’t know that a car could burn like that,” Peterson told me. Protesters began coming to Peterson and his friends with injuries. One had bad cuts on his hands from the car’s broken glass, another had been hit by a rubber bullet and his arm was bleeding badly. Peterson tended to a man with bloody knees, who “reached into his pocket and offered me a crumpled five-dollar bill as, like, payment,” Peterson said. “I was, like, ‘No, man, that’s not something you got to do.’ ” A deaf man had been maced and was in pain—one of Peterson’s friends knew sign language, but the man couldn’t see on account of the pepper spray. They tried to flush it out with water.

A protest in Atlanta on Friday, May 29th.Photograph by Jaquan Cummings

Three people carried a motionless woman toward Peterson and said that she had been hit in the back of the head by a rubber bullet. Peterson and his friends laid her down in a comfortable position as a huge crowd ran from the street into the park, yelling about tear gas. The tear gas had made it painful to breathe, so Peterson couldn’t turn back and retrieve his things. Minutes later, a stranger handed Peterson his wallet and keys. “I saw a lot of stuff that really shook my faith in humanity, but protesters were looking out for each other,” he said.

“The gas dispersed everybody,” Cummings told me. “But it actually made it worse, because people just went down the street and started breaking into other businesses.” These included a Starbucks, a Korean deli, a sports bar. Cummings saw three police cars on fire. In front of one of them, a young woman wearing a head covering held a sign aloft that read “You got me fucked up!!! Fuck the police.”

As the night began to grow late, Cummings heard that people were headed to the Lenox Square mall, about twenty minutes north of the park, which caters to an upscale crowd. He arrived there around midnight, with his camera. Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, had just issued a state of emergency for Fulton County and activated some five hundred of the state’s National Guardsmen “to protect people & property in Atlanta.” Cummings watched as people began to deface nearby buildings. “I could see the residents above,” he said. “And they’re just, like, looking terrified. And I see some parents with their child in their hands. They don’t know if their building’s gonna burn down. They don’t know what’s gonna happen. People below them are throwing trash cans at windows. Tables and chairs from restaurants thrown into the streets. Complete chaos.”

Cumming was still taking pictures. He saw a man who’d been shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet writhing on the ground. “It wasn’t a protest anymore,” Cummings said. “It was like a big fight. Ignorance. Craziness.” He returned home around five in the morning. His younger sister was still awake, worried about him. “I’ve never seen this in Atlanta,” he told me. “I guess it was a long time coming with our history here.”

“What I see happening on the streets of Atlanta is not Atlanta,” the city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, said at a press conference on Friday night. “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is chaos.” In 1968, after King’s assassination, there were riots in many cities, but not in Atlanta, where he was born and raised—a matter, for some, of local pride. “If you love this city—this city that has had a legacy of black mayors and black police chiefs, where more than fifty per cent of business owners in metro Atlanta are minority business owners—if you care about this city, then go home,” Bottoms continued, telling people who wanted change to “show up at the polls.” Howard Shook, a white city-council member whose district includes the Lenox Square mall, told me the remarks were “a tour de force,” adding that Bottoms “probably went three rungs up the V.P. ladder.” (The mayor is reportedly among those Joe Biden is considering adding to the ticket.)

She was followed at the podium by two of the city’s homegrown hip-hop stars: Clifford Harris, Jr., who performs as T.I., and Michael Render, a.k.a. Killer Mike. “We can’t do this here,” Harris said. “This is Wakanda. This is sacred—it must be protected.” Render also counselled against the destruction of property. “It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy,” he said.

“The mayor and a lot of these voices you’re hearing on TV are privileged black voices,” Miya Bailey, an artist, entrepreneur, and community activist who moved to the city from North Carolina in the nineteen-nineties, told me later. “I came from not the privileged, and I hang with mostly not the privileged, so I understand that mind state.” Bailey owns multiple local businesses, including a popular tattoo parlor downtown; he took part in the protests on Saturday. “I’ve been beaten by the police multiple times,” he said. “Multiple times. So I understand the frustration of the youth. It’s past talking.” Bailey, who is black and, like Michael Render, forty-five years old, saw a generation gap that reminded him of previous eras. (Harris is thirty-nine; Bottoms is fifty.) “The Black Panther Party were young,” Bailey said. “They were criticized by the older generation. This is the same thing. They’re supposed to get upset and spark change to lead us! We’re supposed to support them, even if we don’t understand their mind state.” As for the destruction of property, he didn’t think it had been entirely random or without purpose. “It was luxury businesses for the most part,” he said. “It was in the wealthy part of town. So I don’t agree with the notion at the press conference that Atlanta was getting burnt down. No one was burning their own houses down.”

When Howard Shook woke up on Saturday, he checked his phone. “I about choked when I saw it,” he said. “They hit all my places: the CVS, my Target, my Publix, my dry cleaner, all of it.” That morning, he walked a few miles around his district, which begins about ten minutes north of downtown by car; it encompasses many of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods and shopping areas, where white businesses and patrons predominate. “I was stunned,” Shook said, “because the clips I saw on the news mostly were centered on what was going on downtown, which had better visuals—you know, police cars on fire.” He saw a few hand-printed signs taped to broken windows—he didn’t know if the messages were placed before or after the damage had been done—that said “Black Lives Matter: Minority Owned Business.” “It breaks my heart,” he said.

Later that day, protests resumed, both downtown and at the governor’s mansion, which is situated in a neighborhood about fifteen minutes from the Lenox Square mall, where antebellum homes are surrounded by acres of manicured grass. Liliana Bakhtiari, a prominent activist who worked for Planned Parenthood and has run for city office, attended the protest at the governor’s mansion both as a participant and, at the request of local organizers, as a liaison to the police. “It was pretty obvious that both roles would be necessary,” she said. Shields, the police chief, had released a statement praising officers “for showing professionalism and restraint” and for “allowing protestors to voice their valid concerns.” “We were patient,” the statement went on. “But we will not allow these protests to devolve into the destruction of property or placing the safety or our officers in jeopardy.”

Members of the National Guard stood outside the governor’s mansion, and a number of white protesters formed a line between them and the mostly black crowd. “We really did want to keep it peaceful,” Zach Kindy, a twenty-one-year-old activist, and a friend of John Peterson’s, who moved to Atlanta last year, told me. “We kneeled in the street for a bit, as they started surrounding us,” Kindy said. “They kept backing us up.” The protesters chanted, “Let my people go!” “I can’t breathe,” and “No justice, no peace.” Some sang. At one point there was a Muslim prayer. Around six-thirty, Bakhtiari saw rubber bullets fired when someone stepped into the street. A woman was hit in the face and in the hand, she said.

Eight or nine police cars arrived, boxing the protesters in. “It became quite obvious they were about to start tear-gassing,” Bakhtiari said. “They said so as they were masking up. I told people they needed to start putting on their masks and their goggles. I made sure people had the bail phone number on their arm.” The protesters freed up one side of the street; the expected tear-gassing didn’t happen.

Protesters began walking to their cars; the city had announced a curfew of 9 p.m. “We stayed close to one another,” Bakhtiari said. “We dropped a lot of people off where they needed to go, so they weren’t trapped on the streets after curfew hit, because we knew they’d be arrested.”

“My point was not to be there for my own anger. My goal is to be a body, to make sure that people of color were not injured or taken away,” Bakhtiari told me. “But anger has a purpose. It gives people a sense of a voice who don’t know how to access their government or be heard any other way.” As for the violence of the weekend, she said, “It’s a failure on all sides. It’s a failure on our legislative side. On the fact that Atlanta has one of the highest attrition rates when it comes to police and they’re low-paid. It’s also us not doing a good enough job fostering our next generation of protesters.” She also thought that the motivations of those protesting couldn’t be summed up easily—it wasn’t only anger about the death of George Floyd, killed by police in Minneapolis, or of Breonna Taylor, killed by police in Louisville, or of Ahmaud Arbery, killed while being chased by two white men in Georgia. “It’s complex,” Bakhtiari said, “and it varies from state to state, but a lot of what we’re seeing has little to do with the A.P.D. and more to do with just general helplessness and anger at everything. People taking causes and emotion into their own hands and acting out.” Bakhtiari, who is Iranian- and Azeri-American, added, “I can never feel the pain of a black person in the South. I’m not George Floyd. I’m not going to tell people how they should feel or respond. I’m always going to be a body that’s there to help, not to silence anyone, but to try to help de-escalate things, without taking away anyone’s voice.” She went on, “Energy can’t be destroyed, so it’s gonna come out in other ways. People want power. They’re grieving. People aren’t feeling like they’re being heard or supported . . . If we aren’t working to constructively shape peoples’ frustrations and sadness and grief, it’s going to keep coming out this way.”

That night, back at Centennial Park, police again used tear gas on protesters. Police tased two black college students, who were in their car; two of the officers were terminated on Sunday, and three were put on desk duty, after a harsh reprimand from Shields and Bottoms. Cummings was on the scene with his camera again. “They were trapping people in parking lots after curfew,” he said. “I saw five squad cars go into a parking lot and arrest everybody in the parking lot, so we took off. I didn’t want to provoke them. I just ran.” On Sunday, National Guardsmen were stationed around Centennial Olympic Park; police patrolled the Lenox mall. Another sixty-four people were arrested, bringing Atlanta’s total this weekend to almost three hundred. Cummings wished he could have stayed out longer. “I got some powerful images, though,” he said. “Grandfather would be proud.”


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