By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
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2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
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3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
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4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
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5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
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6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
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The police arrested Anthony Lester later that night on probable cause, but released him after a 24-hour holding period, without charges. For four tense days, Ralph’s family, and the Black community in Kansas City, grieved and demanded justice, while Lester sat at home, free of charges. Obeying police instruction, local news agencies protected the perpetrator by refusing to speak or print his name. Nevertheless, local community members gathered in protest outside Lester’s house on 115th Terrace over the next few days, persistently demanding he be brought to justice for his attempted murder of an unarmed Black child. The police, the state prosecutor, and the Missouri courts did not want to prosecute him.

Anyone can see that this was an attempted murder. The Missouri statute for second degree murder, 565.021, is simple. It requires only that the perpetrator knowingly caused the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury, caused the death of another. There is no reasonable debate to be had. No one shoots a child in the head without intending at the very least to cause serious injury. Lester, in no uncertain terms, shot to kill, and Ralph almost died.

Missouri, like many states in the U.S. Empire, also has a so-called “attempt” statute (562.012). To be found guilty of an attempted crime, the law of Missouri requires only that the perpetrator have taken  a “substantial step” toward carrying it out. Failing to successfully carry out the crime in question is not a defense. Being physically unable to carry it out is not even a defense.  In other words, Ralph’s survival makes Lester no less guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. Moreover, the penalty for a criminal attempt in Missouri is the same as the penalty for the completed crime — in this instance, ten to thirty years imprisonment.

Now, most people believe that the police are obligated to enforce the law and “protect and serve” people. That’s why they exist, after all, right? What would be the point of the police if they only “protected and served” when they felt like it? 

Good question! In fact, police explicitly aren’t obligated to enforce the law or protect people from danger — not even life-threatening danger. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, the Supreme Court of the United States warned that citizens have “no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.” The Court ruled in that case that the county’s department of social services had no duty to protect a young boy from being beaten until he suffered brain damage, despite the fact that his mother repeatedly begged them to intervene. This doctrine, now well-established in U.S. law,  also applies to police departments. For example, in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzalez,  SCOTUS ruled 7–2 that police have no affirmative duty to protect people — even when doing so will prevent murder. In that case, a woman, Mrs. Gonzalez, called the police because her husband abducted her children, and she feared for their safety. In fact, she had an active protective order in place preventing him from coming to her house or seeing the children. The police chose to wait and see what happened. Mr. Gonzalez murdered all three of their children and then committed “suicide by cop.”

Every day, thousands of people across the U.S. Empire are arrested on “probable cause.” Only a modicum of evidence is required to make a “probable cause” arrest: If a single person says out loud that they saw a crime being committed, that is sufficient for police to arrest a suspect. Probable cause is so broad as to be essentially a free pass to police to arrest almost anyone at any time, for any (or virtually no) reason. Prosecution of any crime requires merely probable cause to proceed. This may be confused with another standard of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard for conviction in a criminal trial. To bring charges, all prosecutors need is a a few threads of evidence: hearsay, or a person claiming to have witnessed, for example, the suspect giving money to a friend on the street, or pocketing an item, or running down a street, or otherwise “acting suspicious,” is sufficient “probable cause” to support an arrest and continue prosecution for an illicit drug sale. “Probable cause,” those thin threads, prevents defendants from getting cases dismissed — cases upon which any reasonable person would say the state has no grounds to proceed. As a result, hundreds of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their families or are incarcerated each month — on these scant probable cause.

Every day, lawyers challenge probable cause on cases far less evident than this one, and judges in every court in the country frown and reply, “It’s only probable cause, counsel,” before overruling the defense. Yet in the case of Andrew Lester, who was witnessed and admitted to shooting Ralph Yarl, point-blank, in the head,  the police decided, and attempted to convince an enraged public, that there isn’t enough evidence to arrest this would-be child killer. The emperor is not only naked and exposed; he has been skinned and hanged from the branches of a sycamore tree.

The Black community of Kansas City, and their allies, did not wait for the police to act. They demanded action. The masses, primarily the local Black working-class community, poured into the streets. They gathered in front of Lester’s house to demand justice. They gathered in front of the police station to expose the lie of “protect and serve.” Missouri has not forgotten any of her dead — not Michael Brown, not any of the Black lives cut short by white supremacy. The Movement for Black Lives has only sunk deeper and broader roots among the masses; its demands have become more organically and urgently adopted with each Black life cut short by the U.S. Empire’s regime of apartheid terror. The people protested for days, crying for action. Slogans that have become all-too-familiar in their demands for justice denied under the white supremacist empire were heard on the streets — “Black lives are under attack!”; “Standup, fight back!”

An organization calling itself The People’s Coalition led the protests, mobilized  marches, prepared slogans, and channeled the wrath of the people into an undeniable, if still localized, political force. The Yarl family’s lawyer, Ben Crump, pressed the attack, demanding the recalcitrant state immediately arrest Lester. It’s not only in Missouri that voices have been raised. No, across the entire empire, the people have lifted their voices in protest. Black outrage and working-class solidarity rose swiftly.

Two days ago, over one thousand students at Staley High School in Missouri walked out of class in an organized display of protest at the callousness of Kansas City officials. Ralph’s friends and classmates carried signs and banners, and condemned the failure of the city to prosecute Lester, then to release him on a low bond — $200,000 — when most attempted murderers look at bonds of $1 million or more.

This firestorm has even drawn, like a dying, confused moth to a mighty inferno, the undead imperial president Biden, a man of an age and complexion with the murderous Lester, to Kansas City. There he and his second-in-command Kamala Harris took the opportunity to denounce, of all things, gun violence. Gun violence! Of course the white supremacist state has tried to tie the shooting of a young Black man by a white would-be killer, as pure an expression of direct national oppression, of murder motivated undeniably by racism, as a problem caused by the white supremacist’s tool! God forbid the oppressed take up the same tool, and wield it against their oppressor! No, it wasn’t the gun that gave rise to lynch terror! It’s not the gun that causes Black children to fear the police from childhood — the same rabid dogs-in-blue who will routinely pummel, tase, and strangle Black people to death without once drawing a gun! It wasn’t gun violence the people of Kansas City gathered to combat: it was the white supremacist state — the state that refused to bring a racist child-killer to justice, until it was forced to.

But that state, that white supremacist state, is afraid! Its servants keenly remember the of the 2020 Summer Uprisings, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and fear the specter of another rebellion. They know that the next wave could begin anywhere, and they are desperate to prevent it. The prosecuting attorney and his compatriots in the Kansas City police have finally made the decision to hold Lester “accountable,” and city officials have finally acknowledged that the crime had a “racial component.” But they will just as soon provide for Lester’s acquittal, if they believe the public is no longer watching. It’s not the crime that concerns them — it’s the threat of another uprising.

The people have everything within their power. When they are united and prepared, nothing can stand against them, not even the white supremacist state of the most powerful empire in human history. We have seen it reel; we have seen it falter. Now, the pressure must be kept up, not only to prevent Lester from entering a favorable plea deal or the state prosecutor from purposefully bungling a trial, but also to remind our oppressors of the cost of injustice — and only the people can do that.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.

The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required 

State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. 

Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color. 

Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. 

Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.

This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.

Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.

Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.

In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black  troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.

It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.

The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.

The Police as White Guard

Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments. 

But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”

The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous. 

Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.

These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.

These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire. 

Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.

Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.

James Baldwin warned:

We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.

They call it “the Foundation.” It is the evil heart of a reactionary network that stretches across the U.S. Empire. Its home is in Atlanta, Georgia. 

The city of Atlanta has been called a “Black mecca.” It’s the country’s 4th-largest Black-majority city and a center of Black wealth, political and social power, education, and culture. It has been called “the capital of the New South” and the “capital city of Black America.” It has one of the highest LGBT populations per capita, behind only San Francisco and Seattle; it’s the second-fastest growing city in the U.S. Empire. The wealth and size of the Black propertied classes of the city — its petit-bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, landlord, and political classes — are exceeded only by New York City and Washington, D.C. Yet, between 2000 and 2020, the city has seen wave after wave of white gentrifiers pour into the city. According to analysis performed by RentCafé, the average rent in Atlanta increased 65% between 2010 and 2020, from $895 to $1,474 per month. Median home prices in and around the city have increased by 98%, from $126,830 to $251,135 in that same period.

At the same time, Atlanta has seen the creation of the Foundation. But what is this mysterious reactionary Foundation? What do these demographic changes have to do with it? In order to answer that question, we have to examine it closely. More properly the “Atlanta Police Foundation,” the APF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit, incorporated in 2003. On June 12, 2020, Atlanta police murdered Rayshard Brooks for sleeping in his car at a Wendy’s drive through. On June 17, 2020, the Atlanta Police Department went on strike to protest the charges that were filed against the officers that performed the murder. On June 18, 2020 the Atlanta Police Foundation paid out each Atlanta police officer a special $500 bonus. The municipal government of Atlanta relies on the Foundation and its increasing ratchet of police militarization. It needs the Foundation to control the people.

But it’s not just Atlanta. The Foundation is far from the only police foundation in the U.S. Empire, and the money trail leading to the Atlanta Police Department doesn’t start with the Foundation itself. No, the money comes from a long list of corporations and firms. The APF, for instance, receives funding from JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, WH Capital (the Waffle House), Axon Enterprises (the company that manufactures police body cameras and Tasers), the Cathy Family (who own Chik-fil-A and lobby against reproductive and LGBT rights), Delta Air, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (which owns Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin Robbins), and other businesses. Foundations across the U.S. Empire have their own lists of capitalist backers, and the lists tend to overlap from one local department to the next.

Why do capitalists fund police foundations and police unions? As an investment. The police are the main domestic arm of the state’s repressive forces, whereas the military is the international arm, and the state that governs the U.S. Empire is a dictatorship of the capitalists and the other propertied classes. Ultimately, the American police serve the class of monopoly capitalists, represented by the big corporations. These corporations rely on the police to enact daily repressive violence and terror  against the vast majority of the population of the U.S. Empire: the colonized and working masses. These “unruly” masses must be continuously brutalized, beaten down, and reminded of who this country — this empire — really belongs to: the capitalists. Every time a politician runs on a platform of defunding, demilitarizing, or funding alternatives to the police, the local police foundation snaps into action and, through these foundations, the business community funnels money and  pledges more support and equipment to fund the murderous police.

The first of these organizations, these police foundations, was the New York City Police Foundation, which dates back to the 1971 police strike and city bankruptcy crisis. The foundation was created by the “Association for a Better New York,” a voluntary business association which was funded by real estate developers and local business owners. The logic is the same in Atlanta as it was in 1970s New York City: private business derives a particular benefit from the police. This is self-evident, if we really stop to think. Private businesses are property-hoarders, and the only way to protect this unjust distribution of property is with armed battalions to repel the needy by force. Here in the U.S. Empire, police have two basic jobs: the defense of corporate private property and the suppression of national self-determination in the Empire’s internal colonies. Atlanta, of course, the “capital of the New South” stands at the heart of the Black Belt, a crescent-shaped region of the U.S. South where the wealthiest slave plantations were located and where the majority of Black persons in the U.S. Empire today still live. Police foundations are the very incarnation of neoliberalism. Where the police cannot be privatized directly, private corporations can still fund and influence them, direct and guide them, and they can be run as companies, making money from the taxes of the masses by selling their “expertise” to municipalities. Today, the NYC Police Foundation gives millions of dollars in private donations to the NYPD each year which are not disclosed.

In 2019, the NYC foundation made $11,885,187 USD. The APF made $10,848,654 USD. The St. Louis foundation made $10,378,796 USD. On and on it goes. Of all the police foundations, the APF is one of the largest and most well-funded. These foundations are an engine of white terror — they are the direct expression of capitalist control over the oppressed nations within the U.S. Empire. They are factories that produce brutality and fear, the very machinery of the state outsourced, by 1970s neoliberal policy, to private corporations. Despite their tax-exempt status, these “foundations” still turn a profit and pay their executives and employees incredible salaries to teach the police how to better beat down the poor. Some employees of the APF, for instance, make nearly half a million dollars every year.Now, as the demographics of Atlanta change and the capitalist rulers of the region are united in a concerted effort to push out Black families, the APF wants to build the mother of all training centers: a 381 acre, $90+ million USD facility complete with fake streets to patrol. This is Cop City, in the words of Kwame Olufemi of the Community Movement Builders, a

war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The facility includes shooting ranges, plans for bomb testing and will practice tear gas deployment. They are practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continue to murder our people.

They make their money by the suppression of Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and Chicanx liberty, and by hawking their ludicrous wares to city governments. Cop City promises to be their crowning achievement.

The New White Guard

Like all police departments, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has an evil history. In 2006, APD officers killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson while trying to serve a no-knock warrant. Three officers entered her home, cutting off the bars on the door and breaking the door itself down. Although the officers claim that Kathryn fired at them, evidence suggests she may have fired a single shot over the heads of the officers. They fired 39 shots and hit her with five or six. They then planted marijuana in her house to cover themselves, but it was later discovered that not only had they lied about this, but that they had entirely fabricated the reports they submitted to a judge to get the no-knock warrant: they made up a story about buying cocaine at Kathryn’s house.

On September 10, 2009, APD raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar, brutalized its employees and patrons, and arrested eight of the bar’s employees. Seven of the eight had their charges dropped or were found not guilty at trial. The eighth failed to appear to court and was arrested by bench warrant. Those arrested — and there were 62 patrons in addition to the employees — were subject not only to beatings, but also to vicious anti-gay slurs. In 2011, sixteen of the police officers involved in the raid were fired for lying, fabricating evidence, and later destroying evidence that was pertinent to lawsuits against the city.

The city of Atlanta pays the APF for access to their Security Communication Network that, like something from a sci-fi dystopia, they call ComNet. This network is a radio link between private security firms (which have to pay to subscribe), the city’s 9-1-1 service, police dispatches, and the APD. 

In the late 2010s, the APF launched “Operation Shield.” This ominously named plan saw the installation, by the conclusion of 2017, of 3,000 surveillance cameras throughout the city. As part of the plan of Operation Shield, the APF also launched software that allows some 7,000 cameras owned by individuals and businesses to connect to the Shield network and integrate the ComNet system. Yes, private homes can link their Amazon Ring cameras into the Shield network — but that should come as no surprise, considering Amazon itself is one of the institutional investors in the APF. In total, then, this Operation Shield has transformed Atlanta into the most heavily surveilled city in the U.S. Empire, and most likely the world. The “public-private” snitch network not only ensures that businesses can call on APD jackboots whenever they need to, identify anyone in the city at a moment’s notice using their cameras, or summon both rent-a-cops and Atlanta’s own White Guard to their premises; it also transforms every home that signs up into a little Hitler-Jugend, ready to turn over friends, neighbors, and community members to the police for interrogation, prosecution, and incarceration.

The main product of the APD is White Terror. In revolutionary terms, white is the color of reaction and reactionaries. It was the color of the Bourbon kings in France and was taken up by monarchists across Europe. In the U.S. Empire, white is the color of the reactionary movement by a kind of metaphorical coincidence: here, the White Terror doesn’t represent the terror of monarchs and their nobility revenging themselves on the working people. We’ve never had formal nobility. Here, the White Terror is the terror of the settler-garrisons, the constant fear the ruling classes want to exert on the oppressed nations that they might be surveilled, arrested, questioned, jailed, or murdered at any moment. The police are the agents of the White Terror. It is what they’re paid to make, more so even than the arrests and “crime-stopping” power of prosecution, they exist to terrify and subdue. They are an alien, occupying army, encamped in the heart of every community.

The Atlanta Police Department is forced to spend roughly $950,000 a year on average to settle lawsuits brought by the communities in which it operates. Between 2018 and 2020, APD shot 14 people to death, all Black. This is White Terror. The old forms of punishment — public flogging and even execution, bodies hanging on gibbets or from the city walls — have given way to new ones. Rather than watch the punishment be inscribed on the bodies of others, we are forced to internalize the potential, to grow up under terror. No more does the ruling class ask us to go out and watch an outlaw or a rebel be hanged. Now, we are reminded that every house has a camera. The force of the regime has moved from the public square to lodge firmly in our hearts and minds. Institutionalized post-traumatic stress disorder is the tactic of the day.

If the police department of Atlanta serves as the White Guard of the New South, the APF is its captain and leader. New “policing initiatives” come from the APF. The city has tasked the APF with developing its plans for the police department — which now includes expanding the police force by at least 750 people, increasing their presence everywhere in the city, increasing arrests, and increasing convictions. The APF is the institutional memory of the Atlanta police; even when circumstances change, police chiefs retire or are fired, scandal rocks individual politicians, the APF sits behind everything, guiding the city to spend more money on the militarized police, granting payouts to killer cops, and buying police departments military-grade equipment. In this way, the big businesses can funnel money into state repression while presenting superficially clean hands. There are no direct links between Amazon and the Atlanta Police Department. No one can say with legal certainty that Amazon put Operation Shield into place, or that Amazon is putting advanced “crowd control” machinery, guns, drones, bombs, or armored cars into the hands of police. Moral certainty is another question. Amazon has done, is doing, and continues to do these things. So do all those businesses funding the police foundations. This is the fascist integration of the profit motive directly with the state’s apparatus of repression.

In September of 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to bulldoze 85 acres of woods in the South River Forest and commission the construction of the $90 million USD training camp that’s now known as “Cop City.” Just east of the land that’s been designated for the killer cops, the city gave permission to another developer to destroy a further 40 acres of forest to build a soundstage for Atlanta’s growing film industry. The two projects are linked by the bonds of gentrification and capital: as Atlanta’s white petit-bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie grows, it needs more and more protection from the impoverished working people who actually make the commodities it consumes and consume the commodities it makes.

In 2017, the same year the APF created the Shield network, it announced a plan to build a megachurch of white violence. In the words of the APF, the harmless-sounding Atlanta Public Safety Training Center will “improve morale, retention, recruitment and training for APD…, facilitate collaboration and joint training between Atlanta’s police… and their local, state, and federal partner agencies.” Of course, they harp about “community engagement,” and mention over and over again that Cop City will also train firefighters. In an official document, the Foundation said “APD and AFR training facilities have been starved for resources for 30-plus years,” which is a patent lie. The most telling admission, however, was that Cop City “was never envisioned as a money-making venture.” The Foundation is doing this purely out of the kindness of their hearts! Oh, and also because the corporations that fund it want more effective police to combat the working classes. What exactly is in this proposed 85-acre monument to police overreach and violence? It will have a shooting range, of course, to train the police in the use of their sidearms, which they use to shoot young Black men, often in the back. The shooting range will also presumably train the APD in more advanced crime-stopping techniques, such as precision riflery. There’s a leadership center, where the police can give lectures like those described in the Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop — that is, lectures “taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else.” These confessions are worth quoting at length:

The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

…[N]early everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS morality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

….Once police training has — through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle — promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.

….One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs.” Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

….Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were the result of their inherent criminality. ….To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.”

Above and beyond these, the real piece de resistance is the simulation city the Foundation calls its “Mock Village.” This is a four-block square containing a convenience store, a hotel, a nightclub, houses, residential apartment buildings (low and high-rise), and a warehouse. This is the plan for training a domestic occupation force. In the early 2010s, U.S. army intelligence built fake “Middle Eastern” villages to train its imperialist occupation forces. One of those training facilities also cost $90 million USD (in 2014 dollars). The words of the imperialists’ Asymmetric Warfare Group in 2014 are prophetic here: “In the emerging world of 21st century conflict, the battlefield is no longer the countryside but the city…. In full, the urban complex of the AWTC [Asymmetric Warfare Training Center] include [sic] stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, subway platform and a bridge…. The subway trains look exactly like that of the DC Metro’s, down to the logo.”

It’s clear that the Foundation planned Cop City with the June Uprisings of 2020 in mind. Although they first pitched their cathedral of violence in 2017, the design for Cop City wasn’t presented before the city until 2021. It is, in essence, a real life Call of Duty: a training simulator designed to look like the U.S. Empire’s newest war — the war at home, against its own working class.

The Direct Opposition: Six Activists Charged with Domestic Terror

Standing opposite the new campus of state terror are a mixed group of environmentalists, anarchists, and scientific socialists of all tendencies that go by the collective name Defend the Atlanta Forest (DAF). While the driving impetus appears to have been primarily environmental, the movement has become multivalent and much focus has been given to the construction of the new state terror complex as an evil in itself, above and beyond the clearing of forestland. They have established an encampment, Vengeance Village, in the forestland which is supplied by a network of supporters throughout the country. They host teach-ins and community events during the day and at night they have cultural performances that feature bands and local DJs.

The real work of the DAF, however, is violent confrontation with the developers and the state. Direct action — destroying excavators, chaining activists to trees, building barricades and armored treehouses — has been the word of the day. Most recently, five of the Forest Defenders were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism: Francis Carroll of Maine (22 years old), Nicholas Olson of Nebraska (25 years old), Serena Hertel of California (25 years old), Leonardo Voiselle of Macon (20 years old), Arieon Robinson of Wisconsin (22 years old), and Ariel Ebaugh of Stockbridge (22 years old) have been called the Atlanta Six by activist media and their unjust imprisonment may lead to becoming the all-empire faces of the movement. Their arrests appear to stem from bombarding police cars with rocks as the Atlanta cops and Georgia Bureau of Investigation (cops in fancier clothes) attempted to clear out Forest Defenders and the later discovery of prepared “incendiary devices” (read: gas bombs).

Under Georgia’s state law, anyone convicted of domestic terrorism is subject to 5-15 years in prison, no portion of which may be suspended, stayed, probated, deferred, or withheld. That makes the 5 year number a mandatory minimum jail term. It’s unlikely that the state will really proceed on these charges; it would do more harm than good to Cop City and its image among the community. One of the ways the state breaks up movements like this, however, is to threaten extreme legal response over a long period without actually needing to use it. That way, momentum is sapped, important members of the movement are taken out of the fight, and by the time the legal battle has concluded with a plea on a lesser charge or even outright dismissal or acquittal, the actual battle over the territory (in this case, the Atlanta forestlands) has been lost. The fight needs resources to carry on; the DAF is confronting the enemy state directly, head-on, and only with the support of an all-empire movement can it hope to overpower the State of Georgia, the City of Atlanta, and the titanic corporations behind the Foundation. The DAF solicits funds directly through the Forest Justice Defense Fund. More broadly, social justice and social revolutionary movements in Atlanta rely upon the legal assistance of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. If you cannot join the fight, consider making donations to stiffen the resistance to the Foundation and its citadel of White Terror — because if it isn’t stopped, it will become the center of a whole new network of police training and brutality throughout the U.S. Empire.