The Criminalization of Solidarity: The Stop Cop City Prosecutions
IWW rally on May Day 1914 in New York City in solidarity with Colorado miners (Getty Images)
Georgia’s sweeping and political application of conspiracy law echoes a tactic that shattered the left roughly a hundred years ago, when the U.S. government targeted socialist parties and militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition.
by Tadhg Larabee and Eva Rosenfeld
Just after sunrise on November 13, 2023, hundreds of protesters gathered in Gresham Park on Atlanta’s outskirts. As they zipped up painted jumpsuits, a police helicopter circled overhead. It was the start of the latest action in a sprawling, decentralized campaign to stop construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as Cop City.
A two-year occupation of the Weelaunee Forest, the site of the proposed complex, ended in early 2023 after police killed a forest defender known as Tortuguita and, over several months, charged forty-two people with domestic terrorism. The majority of those charged were attending a protest music festival in March while property destruction occurred nearly a mile away. In April, three activists distributing fliers about the police murder of Tortuguita were arrested and jailed for almost three months. It was unclear whether any of the prosecutions would go forward until September, when Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, brought a single case against sixty-one protesters, using the state’s exceptionally broad Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to paint the Stop Cop City movement as a criminal syndicate akin to the Mafia. The sprawling indictment accused them of a conspiracy to spread “virulent anarchist ideals.”
Amid this campaign of state repression, one segment of Stop Cop City put out a national call to action: Meet in Atlanta. March onto the construction site. Issue, through nonviolent direct action, what organizers called a “people’s stop-work order.” Render absurd, through widely publicized mass participation, the notion that this is a conspiracy and not a broad-based political movement.
“It’s vital to make sure everybody knows . . . that there are people in Atlanta that want this to stop,” said Lorraine Fontana, a seventy-six-year-old activist who was arrested days before the march for blocking the entrance to the construction site. “We’re holding saplings,” a young protester said. “To replant the forest that the police have destroyed in trying to build Cop City,” another added. Papier-mâché puppets and protest signs sat in the grass, collecting dew; one sign, shaped like a dragonfly, read, “This is what a domestic terrorist looks like.” Hours later, as the tear gas dissipated and the protesters retreated to Gresham Park, a riot policeman was photographed removing the same sign from nearby Constitution Road. In the hands of the officer, it seemed to turn this charge back on the state.
The Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a jail support network established in 2016, was prepared to coordinate bail and legal representation for detained protesters, and to notify their families and workplaces in the event of arrests. Its organizers were taking a big risk, too. In late May 2023, a SWAT team broke down the door of the Solidarity Fund’s office, seized its records and electronics, and arrested three of the fund’s organizers. They are now defendants in the RICO indictment, which charges them with money laundering and charity fraud for their organizational support of Cop City protesters. The raid and the indictment made the Solidarity Fund’s partner organizations afraid to work with the group, and as a result its citywide mutual-aid programs collapsed, interrupting food access for hundreds of families. When a separate group of activists launched a campaign to put the future of Cop City to a referendum vote, the Solidarity Fund heard concerns from numerous people that merely signing the petition could expose them to legal risk.
“My speculation is that the authorities understand that their political objective is to discourage a political movement,” said Marlon Kautz, an indicted Solidarity Fund organizer. That goal effectively requires targeting not only protesters but organizations, such as civil liberties groups and bail funds, that empower protesters to carry on in the face of intimidation, brutality, and aggressive prosecution. It’s an attempt, according to Kautz, to create “a blueprint that can be applied to solve the problem of social movements as a political force in the U.S.” What is ultimately at stake, he said, “is the notion of solidarity within a broad social movement.”
The criminalization of a left-wing movement comes as no surprise. But Georgia’s sweeping and openly political application of conspiracy law is a particularly concerning case. It was this tactic that shattered the left roughly a hundred years ago, when the U.S. government targeted growing socialist parties and increasingly militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition. Now, as then, conspiracy stands in as the evil double of plain solidarity—the tool we need to fight repression, and what makes protest possible.
Paranoia about violent, left-wing conspiracies has appeared throughout American history: in the labor-conspiracy laws of the nineteenth century, the Smith Act prosecutions of the 1940s and ’50s, the McCarthyist purges, and the trials of Vietnam War protesters. Yet it was never more damaging than during the antiradical panic that gripped the country between 1917 and 1920.
The First Red Scare channeled a feeling of national crisis that began in the late nineteenth century, fueled at first by industrialization, immigration, and inflation, and later by the First World War, the flu pandemic of 1918, and the Great Migration. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, the U.S. government found two targets for its anxieties. The first were the Galleanisti, a small group of Italian anarchists who carried out a failed bombing attack on John D. Rockefeller in 1914 and became a nationwide scourge by the late 1910s. The second was the Industrial Workers of the World, which by 1910 had risen to national prominence as an openly revolutionary union. “The IWW’s links to anarchism were minimal,” the legal historian Ahmed White said, but exaggerating those links “gave the air of credibility to the claim that these people were extremely dangerous . . . in a very immediate, criminal sense.”
The IWW, whose members were called Wobblies, had faced legal and extralegal repression since its inception, in 1905. The government’s justification was stopping the sabotage of industrial equipment—a once-used tactic that the union had distanced itself from but struggled to expunge from its public image. The pressure on the IWW intensified in 1917, after a little-known Idaho lawyer named Benjamin Walker Oppenheim drafted the first statute prohibiting “criminal syndicalism” in the United States.
Idaho lumber interests wanted the IWW gone, but this objective presented them with a legal dilemma. Their loyal state legislators couldn’t target sabotage because it was already illegal, and only small numbers of Wobblies engaged in it; they also couldn’t ban the union outright, which would likely have been unconstitutional. Oppenheim’s draft law threaded the needle by making it a crime “to belong to an organization that advocated industrial or political change by means of sabotage, crime, violence, or other criminal behavior,” White said. Over the next few years, twenty other states copied Idaho’s model.
These laws made life easy for prosecutors. Wobblies were stopped on the street, snatched off picket lines, and rounded up by the hundreds in raids on their union halls, especially when local business owners knew they were planning a strike. If any members tried to help their comrades in court by testifying that their organization was neither violent nor criminal, they could be seized on the spot, having just admitted under oath that they belonged to a group presumed violent and criminal. On one occasion, police stormed into an IWW hall in California during an ongoing criminal-syndicalism trial, arresting members who had assembled to coordinate the defense.
Criminal-syndicalism laws did not cite the common-law conspiracy doctrine, under which two or more persons can be held liable for agreeing to break the law together. Instead, they gave prosecutors something even simpler to prove, what an IWW lawyer described at the time as “constructive conspiracy”: a doctrine that treats mere association with an organization that is deemed to be criminal as an implicit agreement to commit a crime.
The Red Scare hysteria burned hottest in 1919. That April, thirty-six bombs were mailed to well-known politicians, businessmen, and law-enforcement figures. On May Day, riots broke out across the country, turning bloody in Cleveland, where the IWW cofounder Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned. Steelworkers, coal miners, and Boston police officers went on strike; segregated black communities revolted in more than two dozen cities. Ten more Galleanisti bombs, far larger than their predecessors, exploded in June. “For many elites and much of the public, all of the unrest of that year was the work of a perilous amalgamation of anarchism, bolshevism, socialism, IWWism, black radicalism, and feminism,” White wrote in his 2022 book Under the Iron Heel.
The panic began to lift the following May Day, when the attorney general predicted a national uprising that didn’t take place. The IWW never regained its former strength, and the laws created to destroy the union remained on the books. Communists and socialists sometimes faced criminal-syndicalism charges into the 1930s and ’40s, but the doctrine gradually fell out of use. In the 1960s, a few prosecutors rediscovered criminal syndicalism (along with its close cousin, criminal anarchy) and applied the charge to black radicals such as John Harris, who was indicted in 1968 for handing out leaflets condemning a police murder. A year later, the Supreme Court effectively ended the doctrine in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which threw out the criminal-syndicalism conviction of an Ohio Ku Klux Klan leader on First Amendment grounds.
Yet parallels with the legal and political tactics of the First Red Scare are everywhere in Georgia today. Property crimes, whether industrial sabotage or vandalism of bulldozers, are described as acts of terror aimed at people and society at large. Anarchism, a minor current in the IWW and a far larger one in Stop Cop City, eclipses the movement’s other ideological tendencies, serving as a ready-made signifier that its cause is antisocial. The movement suddenly resembles a conspiracy, its objectives reduced to violence and destruction, its positive social vision erased. The more organized it gets, the more sinister the conspiracy appears. Acts of solidarity put everyone at risk of arrest.
In April 1969, amid a different season of political crisis, President Richard Nixon announced an ambitious plan to crush organized crime, an effort that culminated in the passage of the federal RICO Act the following year. RICO’s main framer, G. Robert Blakey, faced the same problem as Oppenheim before him: the Constitution doesn’t permit the government to outlaw membership in a specific group. His solution—to allow prosecutors to mass-indict individuals who have committed two or more acts of “racketeering” on behalf of a shared “enterprise”—invited wider application of his new statute.
By Blakey’s own admission, the legislation was based on concepts from early twentieth-century antiradical law, and RICO was soon seen as a solution to problems beyond organized crime. Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke had ominous words for the Weather Underground, campus protesters, and other “misguided radicals” in the fall of 1970, when the act was signed into law: RICO, he said, would “bring a number of these lawless acts under federal jurisdiction with penalties appropriate to the seriousness of these offenses.”
There is no reason to doubt that most of RICO’s early supporters saw it as a tool to fight the Mob. Yet, according to the legal scholar Benjamin Levin, “growing the police state or growing a prosecutorial state in a moment of state conflict with radicals means growing the arsenal of weapons that can be used against those radicals.”
More than fifty years after the act’s passage, plenty of Mob bosses and a few executives have gone to jail because of RICO, which allows judges to impose sentences of up to twenty years on figures whose foot soldiers have done the dirty work. But the law also facilitates the prosecution of large groups of low-level alleged offenders. RICO has been applied in controversial crackdowns, especially on poor, black neighborhoods, where police can tenuously link many people to small-time gang activity. In an operation in 2016, law enforcement swept up 120 residents of a housing project in the Bronx, almost half of whom weren’t even accused of gang membership.
Anti-abortion protesters and environmental activists have faced RICO charges, too, though mostly when sued by their political opponents under its civil section. Rarely have prosecutors brought criminal RICO charges against protesters, and almost never with the wide scope and explicit political intent of the indictment against Stop Cop City. It is an exceptional case, at least in recent history—one that marks a stunning revival of America’s long, ugly tradition of criminalizing left-wing organizations.
Levin said that these types of prosecutions tend to come at moments when elites “sense what we might think of as an existential threat to capitalism, or to the state, or to whatever the dominant ideology or political economy may be.” The Stop Cop City movement has its roots in such a moment. In May 2020, Atlanta’s mayor responded to an uprising over the killing of George Floyd by declaring a state of emergency, and Governor Brian Kemp sent more than 1,000 Georgia National Guard troops to the city. When Atlanta police murdered Rayshard Brooks the following month, protesters returned to block an interstate highway and set fire to the Wendy’s where Brooks was shot. Huge crowds chanted formerly marginal slogans such as “abolish the police,” and many began to link the issue of systemic racism to the broader failings of capitalism and the American state. Meanwhile, business leaders pressured the city to crack down on property crimes and rioting, and residents of the wealthy neighborhood of Buckhead threatened to secede from Atlanta, taking their tax dollars with them, unless the city invested more in policing.
The following year, the city announced a plan for a $90 million police-training center developed by the Atlanta Police Foundation, a private entity helmed and funded by politicians and corporate executives. Nicknamed Cop City because it is set to include a mock city for urban-warfare and riot-suppression training, the facility would be among the largest police-training centers in the country. Building it required cutting down large swaths of a public forest in unincorporated DeKalb County south of Atlanta. In an age of ecological catastrophe, Cop City threatened a major climate buffer, one of the area’s critical defenses against extreme heat, air pollution, and flooding.
A broad refrain of the movement against it is that the stakes are global—that the struggle over Cop City is a battle over the future of policing, the fate of the climate, and the right of ordinary people to control the cities they live in. The combative response from police and prosecutors has made it clear that Cop City’s backers also sensed these high stakes.