“The City That Was in a Forest: Atlanta’s Disappeared Trees and Black People” — Full Interview with Hugh Hunter

Foreword

Preparing for a documentary project, we decided to ride around the city and take notice of the stories around us. That day, I couldn’t stop talking about the trees that seem to touch the sky all throughout the city. HD Hunter, an ATL native and my political home’s de-facto city historian, couldn’t stop talking about how many more trees there USED to be.

‘The city that was in a forest’ is an interview with HD Hunter, a Black radical organizer and author in the city who knows what Atlanta used to look like. In the interview, I draw out the deep connections between gentrification and deforestation in Atlanta — how the city’s natural home has been changed due to unnatural forces and how Atlanta organizers seek to protect it. This piece will be a memory of what was, what is, and what we have to lose. I took some photos of Atlanta’s greenery to give folks who ain’t never been here a sense of what it feels like. We’ll discuss the #StopCopCity movement and how it connects to efforts to keep Black people and our natural home in place. This medium piece is the raw uncut — a blend of the interview and my thoughts on the conversation — but you can….

find the FULL INTERVIEW AUDIO & TRANSCRIPT HERE !

This interview was conducted in connection with a piece for Nonprofit Quarterly called “,The City That Was in a Forest — Atlanta’s Disappeared Trees and Black People” which can be found here! For that piece, we had to cut a lot of great elements from this interview, so I am self-publishing the full version for the people.

Enjoy The Interview

Contrary to the messaging of the city, Atlanta natives and residents have been fighting to protect themselves and the land from oppressive forces throughout, and before, the StopCopCity movement. Natives of the city have seen, time and time again, how promises of positive urban development have revealed themselves to be hollow — and come at an unbearable cost. But, in order to fully contextualize what it means to protect Atlanta’s natural home, we first dive deep into Atlanta as a home.

“My parents moved here in the eighties so this is home for me. I was born and raised in Atlanta,” Hugh explained. “I had my first kiss here, and my first fight here, [attended] high school and college here and I lived in other places and came back as well.”

Hugh has been an organizer in Endstate ATL, a grassroots political home with an abolitionist, Black Queer Feminist politic. In that space, he often brings in memory of his upbringing in this city to illustrate why he’s doing this work. He said “in terms of my stake in Atlanta, my first ever activity in movement was in Atlanta, and you know, I’m still organizing here.”

This is particularly important because, again, the City of Atlanta and Atlanta Police have been adamant about depicting all #StopCopCity and Defend the Atlanta Forest protestors and activists as “outside agitators.” There’s a history in that phrase, of course, which was often used as a bludgeon against many in the Civil Rights Movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself and many following him.

This small piece of contradiction in Atlanta’s story is reflected in this comment by Hunter, “So I’ve been able to watch the city change and grow in ways that are really cool and I’ve seen parts of it crumble. I see home in the only way that you really can, which is with a lot of complexity through whatever challenges and struggles there are,” he said with a tinge of grief in his voice.

Atlanta has a moniker: “the city in the forest,” a phrase which is actually featured in the neckline of Atlanta United’s recent jerseys. Naturally, this name was inspired by Atlanta’s lush, rich, sprawling natural environment that truly touches, or at least touched, all corners of the city. When I first arrived here, it was one of the first things I noticed. If you’ve never visited Atlanta, it is hard to understand just how much greenery there is, so I had Hugh describe it.

“Atlanta (at least used to be) one of the cities that had the most tree canopy out of like major cities in the US,” Hugh explained, “we’re just a city with a lot of vegetation and a lot of tall trees.”

Hugh pointed out that when you walk around here, you’re kind of covered on all sides by things that are green. “When I lived in other places, that’s one of the things that I missed the most — it was walking outside and just seeing what it felt like life. There are a lot of pines here, dogwood, there’s a lot of kudzu, a lot of oak trees”, he said.

Despite the fact that you are in a city, one of the most popular in the United States, Hugh asserts “it can feel like you’re in a rural area.”

During the interview we were sitting at a basketball court near a baseball field and some train tracks in Mosley Park, the neighborhood in Atlanta where Hunter lives. Technically, Mosley Park is in Atlanta, but I didn’t know that at the time it was being created it was 3 miles west of what was considered Atlanta proper. “Folks used to write about how Mosley Park was like a departure from the poisonous smog of the city..it was at present a preservation of like the nature that came before Atlanta started industrializing,” Hugh shared. As an aside, it’s these kinds of tidbits that earns him his title of de facto Atlanta historian.

In other words, Atlanta is *known* for its forest and natural environment, and sometimes, that can be seen clearest in reflections from visitors. Hugh tells me about the viewpoints of his friends, “they were just mesmerized by how green it was, and they were saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re in a city but it looks so much like we’re in the middle of nowhere.’” Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either.

But on a more disheartening note, and getting to the heart of this story, “and then, I had a friend last week come from Boston and say ‘I don’t remember Atlanta looking this much like a city like there’s so many buildings — there’s so much more stuff than I remember.’” In other words, the forest is being disappeared.

Hugh did also share the ways that it seems like many of Georgia’s institutions take this environment for granted — noting that in school growing up, forestry wasn’t necessarily something emphasized as a point of pride. Perhaps, a harbinger for policy choices to come.

This account by Hunter honestly felt contradictory to what I had learned in the Northeast about the landscape in the South, specifically Georgia, and its value. The forest in the south was untouched, well-preserved, and ripe for scientific exploration — it was invaluable, in fact, especially in comparison with other places around the country.

Hugh suspects some interest groups down here are pursuing development in order to look more like other major cities, though, “in a lot of ways in the interests of developing Atlanta into what it is..they’ve been chasing places like New York and chasing places like Los Angeles. So it’s almost like taking what you got for granted.”

The greenery certainly isn’t the only thing being taken for granted by those in power, though. Gentrification, defined by National Geographic as “a process where wealthy, college-educated individuals begin to move into poor or working-class communities, often originally occupied by communities of color,” has certainly sculpted Atlanta as well. Long-term, Black residents have been pushed out, new luxury townhomes installed, and policing expanded. The cost of living, alongside gentrification, has skyrocketed — and there are some tense racial and class dynamics undergirding these changes. In fact, as of 2022 Atlanta is no longer a majority Black city. In 1990, Black people represented 67% percent of the city population, this number has recently fallen to 49%.

In describing how Atlanta has changed, Hugh exhaled “so in short form: way more people, way less trees, way more buildings. And I think those things are related.”

“In the mid twentieth century we got this nickname, ‘the city too busy to hate.’” This was supposed to make folks believe that Atlanta was a place where “people weren’t worried about black or white — it was just about green” but Hugh was pretty clear that’s not the truth in his eyes, “which we know is a fallacy and more of a political marketing ploy than anything else.”

Another phenomenon, “The Atlanta Way” describes public-private partnerships to “deliver” on the needs of Atlantans, but like many ATL residents, Hugh feels like community members often lose more than they gain. “So many corporate interests have been invited in. And then, of course, that brings jobs, and that sounds good on paper, but we don’t often talk about the trade off, especially from an environmental perspective.”

Coupled with the damages to the environment brought on by interests and decisions of the elite are the ways the city is changing culturally — “Atlanta has changed and then also your interactions with people have changed…it used to feel like a soft landing spot for people, especially Black people.”

Atlanta has been identified by many sources as a top destination that people are moving to, but what are they experiencing when they get here? Personally, I know folks who, due to rising cost of living and lackluster social support, have had to deal with housing instability and hunger. Culturally, according to Hugh, the city didn’t always feel this way:

“But even being raised as a Georgian, I remember my dad — born and raised in Georgia but not Atlanta — I remember him telling me ‘you meet other black people, and if they’re away from home, then you see what they need, you see how you can be of service to them. You help them get adjusted, and then you all walk in lockstep together toward whatever next success exists for people who look like you here,” he shared. But when people move here, they struggle trying to find a place to live and a job.

Hugh said he is often the only person people have met here that’s actually *from* Atlanta. With all of the newcomers, Atlanta becoming an international city, he remarked “I do think that it feels like we’ve lost that ethos a little bit — southern hospitality, what I would like to call Collectivism, and community and care,” and he went on remorsefully, “It feels like a much harder landing spot for people now.”

So we understand what about Atlanta is changing — the landscape and environment, the population and demographics, and even the ethos and culture, but what’s driving these changes? Hugh thinks certain political agendas and systemic level issues are at the root of it.

“I feel like there’s a more extractive mindset around coming to Atlanta” he spells out, “I don’t often hear people talking about Atlanta as a place that they seek out with the understanding that there will be some mutuality — what they get as a result of being here, but also what they can give.” The reality is that corporations are many of the ones who are inspiring the deforestation to make space for them as they move to the city. And because they are here for profit, they’re going to extract more than they give.

In the long struggle to protect the Earth in Atlanta, originally Muscogee land, there are moments that stick out where the city and state government has really exacerbated deforestation. Top of mind for Hugh was Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Facility, commonly known as Cop City. This project earned the name “Cop City” due to the area that would be dedicated to building a mock city on the compound, so the police can practice raids, bomb testing and other urban warfare tactics.

Groups like Black Alliance for Peace Atlanta Chapter, Community Movement Builders and the In Defense of Black Lives ATL coalition have been adamant about centering impacts on Atlanta’s Black population — with knowledge of how domestic imperialism so often mirrors imperialism abroad. In this narrative work, the deleterious impacts of imperialism on the environment become clear. Along that theme is the fact that incessantly, the City of Atlanta and Atlanta Police have misled the residents about what this space is for. In fact, initially, the city promised residents a completely different use of the forest.

“There’s just so many twists and turns in the cop city story about how that land was apportioned to be used. There was a little window of time in there where that land was promised to be made into green space for people who live here,” Hugh recalls. Residents have been blindsided by the proposal to turn the forest into a training facility for cops, instead.

Outside of Atlanta, there’s even more punctuation in the story of the State and corporation’s assault on the land. “There’s a Georgia movement — [about] the Okefenokee Swamp,” he mentions, “by all these nature and wildlife specifications (that are out of my pay grade to really understand) it is considered one of the rarest swamps, rarest bodies of water in the world.” This rarity is due, in part, to the wildlife due to the number of species endemic to the swamp itself and the lack of light pollution.

“There’s an Alabama company, this is like a current fight that’s going on, that is trying to create a titanium mine that’s going to infringe — by the experts opinion irreparably damage — that swamp.” Hugh goes on to say “it has less to do with people than Cop City but it has the same level to do with profit, the same extraction for a capitalist agenda.”

Capitalism truly was a theme in this talk I had with the Atlanta-based author, and the scorched-earth, unforgiving economic model seemed to belie the last example of environmental destruction he shared. “And then one that I get very passionate about is The Beltline. I am of the age that I was here before the built line existed. I remember the announcement about it. I know folks whose homes were knocked down in order to make space for it.”

The Beltline is a series of connected multi-use trails that circumvents the city — it connects public parks, transit and housing that was supposed to be affordable along a 22-mile railroad corridor. Hugh started to raise his voice as he said “it’s really just been a big commercialization project, in my opinion for the city, for another disingenuous method of attracting people here.” He also talked about what was there before the beltline, an environment where “houses, trees, other wildlife was pushed out to make something that we were initially sold as like ‘this will be something that you know, helps bring people together and gives us accessibility.”

At this point there’s a sense of betrayal, violation being communicated. He says, “folks don’t understand what was — I won’t even say sacrificed, because that would indicate some form of agency — right? Folks don’t understand what people in Atlanta had taken from them to create something that seems recreational and fun. But, it’s a really hard history behind it”

A really hard history. And, I should note, this history hangs in the air here. If you attend city council meetings you can hear it in the voices of testifying residents. It truly does seem like they know where intentions of the people, and intentions of city officials, are misaligned. There’s a certain mistrust but understanding that the respective trajectories are intertwined — bound by the place they all call home.

Atlanta has a long history of strong people in conflict with oppressive forces — of the many people, creatures and movements that call Atlanta home, many of them are social justice legends. I asked Hugh if he felt like the current Stop Cop City movement is following in that lineage.

“Yes, in ways that I feel very spirited by, and then yes, in ways that I don’t feel so spirited by as well,” he said, a bit unexpectedly for me. He went on to say “you know that I like talking about Atlanta” — what I view to be the understatement of the century.

“So, I’ll start with one of the ways that I’m not so spirited by — which is gonna take us to the Fernbank forest. When I spoke about only having a few remaining of the Atlanta’s original forests, Fernbank forest is one of them.” The Fernbank forest is a beautiful, mystical group of trees and wildlife in North Dekalb county, specifically North Druid Hills, kissing Emory University’s illustrious campus.

As an aside, President Emory University Gregory Fenves sits on the Atlanta Community for Progress, a bit of an amorphous grouping of Atlanta’s leaders — a group that has stewarded the development of this Cop City project. Emory University and President Fenves have been targets of protests due to their role in the project. Anyways, all of that to say, it’s a small town. Back to Hugh.

Apparently, the Fernbank forest was apportioned by the State to be sold to a developer at the turn of the twentieth century, so this is pre-integration. Or, as Hugh put it, “so we’re talking like way back.” The reason Atlanta still has Fernbank today went as follows, again, according to our local historian, “wealthy white businessman created essentially a nonprofit that still exists today with a conservationist lens. They say ‘we don’t want this to happen.’ They fundraised for a year. They ended up paying the city for the land and we’re able to not have the forest be sold off to the developer.”

He says *this* is the part of #StopCopCity that feels similar and somewhat dispiriting in his eyes — “I can see us sometimes trying to use collaborations with the State or the nonprofit agenda too heavily in order to achieve a goal that those entities have no interest in serving.” Although he’s been riding with the StopCopCity movement since the very beginning, years ago, he seems concerned with the attempted use of state or institutional tools. “I don’t want us to lose sight of the power that we actually hold outside of bargaining and negotiating with people that don’t actually want the same things that we want, and don’t want to give us the things that we want.”

There is also plenty that has been inspiring about this movement, too! Hugh was heartened by the movement’s ability to transfer the local struggle with international implications into international solidarity. He says #StopCopCity will go down in history along some of the greatest struggles for freedom we can think of, “Defending the Forest and Stop Cop City will be one of those things. It will be one of the landmark movements.”

Something that I found to be particularly beautiful was a moment during the latest city council vote, this one to grant over $67 million to Atlanta Police Foundation to pay for the project. Housing Justice League (HJL) was there.

Hugh interjected “one of my favorite orgs!” excitedly. HJL are, every single day of the year, fighting displacement of residents who have been here, and they’re also in this fight against displacement of the forest and destroying the forest!

So one of the things that I think is beautiful here and that I have appreciated about the movement is how people recognize the intersections of the struggles and are showing up together because of that. And that feels like something that’s not only really special, but something that I’m not surprised happened in Atlanta.

Hugh, this time filled with pride, “at our best we’re very good…it feels like one of the most empowering places that I’ve ever been. Because I feel like we could do anything together.” The Atlanta native seemed to think there’s hope for our connectedness in movement spaces as well, “I think there’s a way that we can feel it (our strength) more by being more connected with each other, by caring more for one another.”

In terms of the vision for what protecting Atlanta’s home could look like, Hunter brought things back to abolition of policing and prisons and land back. Recognizing these are sweeping changes, he also talked about the everyday work of sharpening our principles and commitments: “It’s just tapping further into them, radicalizing ourselves more, helping other people along their journeys.”

Environmental issues have a potential for bringing people of all walks of life into the same struggle, he said that’s because “we’re all sharing this land.” Sharing was a big part of Hugh Hunter’s vision for success, and he talked about the risks of division in our movements particularly around strategy, “the folks who are looking to exploit the land would rather have in-fighting, and would rather us be confused among one another about exactly how we would choose to protect the land.”

As someone who teaches just as much as he writes, Hunter said education is always on the menu for him.

“We have so much to learn. There are still indigenous communities here in Georgia who have ancestral ties to this land that, frankly, the rest of us don’t have, that have traditions in this land, that have ways of knowing about it and ways of caring about it that not all of us are aware of or have access to. And being in partnership and community with those people is..invaluable isn’t even strong enough of a word to really indicate how we could be guided and guiding with the help of those folks. Especially for a return to harmony and mutuality with the land.”

He said “really reconnecting with the land and how we impact it, how it changes on its own, how we can give to it and what it gives to us” is crucial. Folks in the #StopCopCity know this to be true, too. They’ve worked with Muscogee peoples in learning about indigenous practices, camped out in the forest before being brutally removed, and tended to the forest over the course of the last two years. This movement is full of folks like Hugh, eager to get and remain grounded, rooted.

Hugh also spoke to those who haven’t yet engaged in this struggle, which he feels affects us all: “if you’re indifferent I think that’s just not enough. I think sometimes we have to face the hard truth that there are some things that can’t just be ‘whatever.’” With various unraveling crises it can feel like a means of survival to shut off to the issues around us, but this is a false option. The issues will find their ways to our front door regardless. “I think people that grew up here, as well as people who have come here should be investing in it,” he urged.

In an err of caution, Hugh left us with this: “If we allow the powers that be to extract all of the value out of this place, what will have been the point of us making our homes and making our lives here in the first place? And, moreover, what’ll stop them from doing the exact same thing when we find a new place?”

Despite him confessing “who knows what the right answer is”, I think there is certain truth to Hugh’s words. The one constant about deforestation in Atlanta is that it seems the city council has no limits to what they will approve. A sense of urgency floats about air at the sixth Stop Cop City Week of Action organized by forest defenders, potentially given the understanding that if we don’t stop deforestation and environmental destruction here, where will it end?

Atlanta natives and long-time residents, like Hugh, know more about what’s to lose than most of us. The City has excised people, trees, and culture from a city defined in many ways by them. The dreams of Black folks in Atlanta seemingly have nothing to do with a Cop City, but I did ask Hugh what his dreams for Atlanta *do* look like.

He talked about all Black people having guaranteed housing and education about our rights and how we can protect ourselves. He also wants Black people to remain connected, even beyond Atlanta, to mobilize our privileges to support struggles of all Black people globally. Here’s his vision: “I feel like as hard as we work to have more, a part of that is being able to give more as well. So I want us to have the things that we need, us being Black folks here, I want us to have the things that we need, but I don’t want us to get so comfortable in having things that we forget those who are fighting the same fight in other places and other ways.”

Regarding the environment, Hugh talked about healing. “remember when quarantine happened with the pandemic and then we were getting all these reports about how like fish we’re respawning?”

“Nature is healing!” I added.

He went on, “It’s just like let’s cease for a moment. Let’s cease with developing so many new places to live. Let’s cease with inviting so many businesses here. Let’s take an audit of our environmental conditions and our wildlife and our tree canopy, and just see where things are. Let’s see what we have done to this place. Let’s look at efforts to restore. Let’s wrap our arms around the land in a way that as nature’s miracles work, the land will start to regenerate itself. There’s capabilities and there’s power in this place that we’re not aware of, and we haven’t done our part to give it a fair chance to fight for itself.”

I agree. Let’s cease. Cease, or stop, Cop City. Cease the removal and erasure of indigenous and Black people from the lands they call home. Cease destroying the land and its inhabitants with reckless abandon in the name of profit. Cease policing and prisons as a part of an antiBlack domestic and global imperialist project.

This city of beautiful Black people and culture used to be in a forest. Whether that becomes true again rests in our resolve, courage and clarity in this struggle to #StopCopCity.

About the Author

Julian Rose is a community organizer, educator, and writer originally from Hartford, CT, and currently based in Atlanta, GA. His work focuses on Black Queer Feminism, abolition, and solidarity economy movement building. Julian’s political home is Endstate ATL. Other Atlanta organizing efforts he has been involved in include the Free Atlanta Abolition Movement, a Black-run bail formation, and Barred Business’ Protected Campaign.