We Make History but Not As We Please: Class Struggle in the Atlanta Forest
Presented by Sasha Tycko

Thursday May 21st, 4pm
South Bend Commons

When the movement to Defend the Atlanta Forest began, it had two development projects as its target: a police training center (“Cop City”) and a campus of movie soundstages that would be built on public parkland won by a private developer in a “land swap” with the county (“Hollywood Dystopia”). The forest itself grew on abandoned fields planted first as an antebellum plantation, then maintained as a Jim Crow prison farm. As Stop Cop City became the national identity of the movement, however, the forest, its history, and the land swap dropped out of public conversation. As we reflect today, how might refocusing our attention on these aspects of the movement inform how we understand its objectives?

Based on three years of research in and about the Atlanta forest, Sasha Tycko will present what she learned about the oft-misunderstood history of the prison farm and what it reveals about the changing dynamics of race, class, and property in the South. By placing Cop City and Hollywood Dystopia within this historical context, she will then discuss what they indicate about new forms of political capitalism in twenty-first-century America. Karl Marx echoes prophetic through the treetops: humans “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” After Sasha’s presentation, there will be ample time for discussion about the long struggle to defend the Atlanta forest.