Jaquan Cummings wasn’t sure whether he wanted to attend the protests in Atlanta this weekend. Last year, the twenty-five-year-old photographer, who has a large Instagram following and some blue-chip commercial clients, got into what he described as “a drunken argument” with a police officer, and was charged with reckless conduct. (The case has yet to be resolved “because COVID keeps pushing court dates back,” he told me.) Cummings, who is black, lives with his mother and younger sister. “I was looking at everything online, trying to decide if I wanted to go out or not,” he said. “I had a fear of getting arrested.” A friend finally convinced him to go, “because that’s what photographers do,” he said. He grabbed a Nikon camera that his grandfather—“my favorite photographer”—gave him years ago, before he died, and he headed out.
By the time he arrived on Friday night, people had already marched from Centennial Olympic Park, downtown, to the capitol building, a mile away, carrying signs and chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” and “No justice, no peace.” Atlanta’s chief of police, Erika Shields—who, earlier in the week, had said that the Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd should serve prison time—spoke to protesters individually. “People are upset. They’re angry. They’re scared. And I get it,” she told a news crew. “They want to be heard.” Other Atlanta cops fist-bumped protesters and said that they had “a right to be pissed off.”
John Peterson, an eighteen-year-old political-science major at Georgia State University, had joined the march with a few friends. They brought medical supplies to help their fellow-protesters—Peterson is a lifeguard with CPR and first-aid training—but hadn’t needed to use them yet. It was a hot day, and a few of them went to Peterson’s apartment to cool off. Then he got a call from one who’d stayed: a crowd had gathered outside the CNN Center, a large complex adjacent to the park where the protest had begun. Police had formed a barrier in front of the building, blocking further passage along Centennial Olympic Park Drive. A protester had been maced. At around five p.m., Peterson and his friends headed back out, with a half-dozen first-aid kits and bottles of isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.
“It was still peaceful,” Peterson, who is white, said of the scene when they arrived. But the police presence had grown. He saw as many as twenty Atlanta Police Department squad cars in a line, and countless officers. He found another crew of ad-hoc medics, who were trying to move people behind large tree planters in front of the CNN Center, “because they were concerned that, if the police used tear gas, it would drive the protesters to break the barricade and cause a stampede,” he said. A few minutes later, three SWAT-unit Humvees with turrets on top pulled up. “They arrived before there was any violence, suited up for a riot,” Peterson said. He noticed a large prison bus arriving behind the Humvees.
“The officers made multiple announcements on the loudspeakers, telling people that, if they didn’t disperse, they were going to be arrested,” he told me. Protesters began to spray-paint the large CNN logo that sits on the sidewalk outside the center, and people jumped on top of the letters. One person waved a Black Lives Matter flag. Another waved a Mexican flag. The mood was still buoyant; Peterson said, “It felt more like a celebration.” But officers were trying to halt the graffiti, and protesters threw milk and water at them. Other protesters threw rocks and objects; Peterson thought their aim was to break the building’s windows. He heard someone say, “What the hell are y’all doing? Like, CNN is with us. One of their reporters got arrested the other day.” Someone responded, “There’s a police precinct here. They’re still with the cops.” The glass exterior eventually broke, and police formed a line at the edge of the building to prevent entry.
Cummings arrived at the complex with a friend, who also had a camera, and they began to shoot the unfolding drama. “It unfolded fast,” he said. A protester jumped on top of a police car that had been surrounded by protesters, and it became the focal point of activity. The windshield and windows were shattered; Peterson heard air coming out of the car’s slashed tires. People tried to tip the vehicle over. Cummings looked for a safe place to shoot as the police car went up in flames. “I honestly didn’t know that a car could burn like that,” Peterson told me. Protesters began coming to Peterson and his friends with injuries. One had bad cuts on his hands from the car’s broken glass, another had been hit by a rubber bullet and his arm was bleeding badly. Peterson tended to a man with bloody knees, who “reached into his pocket and offered me a crumpled five-dollar bill as, like, payment,” Peterson said. “I was, like, ‘No, man, that’s not something you got to do.’ ” A deaf man had been maced and was in pain—one of Peterson’s friends knew sign language, but the man couldn’t see on account of the pepper spray. They tried to flush it out with water.
Three people carried a motionless woman toward Peterson and said that she had been hit in the back of the head by a rubber bullet. Peterson and his friends laid her down in a comfortable position as a huge crowd ran from the street into the park, yelling about tear gas. The tear gas had made it painful to breathe, so Peterson couldn’t turn back and retrieve his things. Minutes later, a stranger handed Peterson his wallet and keys. “I saw a lot of stuff that really shook my faith in humanity, but protesters were looking out for each other,” he said.
“The gas dispersed everybody,” Cummings told me. “But it actually made it worse, because people just went down the street and started breaking into other businesses.” These included a Starbucks, a Korean deli, a sports bar. Cummings saw three police cars on fire. In front of one of them, a young woman wearing a head covering held a sign aloft that read “You got me fucked up!!! Fuck the police.”
As the night began to grow late, Cummings heard that people were headed to the Lenox Square mall, about twenty minutes north of the park, which caters to an upscale crowd. He arrived there around midnight, with his camera. Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, had just issued a state of emergency for Fulton County and activated some five hundred of the state’s National Guardsmen “to protect people & property in Atlanta.” Cummings watched as people began to deface nearby buildings. “I could see the residents above,” he said. “And they’re just, like, looking terrified. And I see some parents with their child in their hands. They don’t know if their building’s gonna burn down. They don’t know what’s gonna happen. People below them are throwing trash cans at windows. Tables and chairs from restaurants thrown into the streets. Complete chaos.”
Cumming was still taking pictures. He saw a man who’d been shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet writhing on the ground. “It wasn’t a protest anymore,” Cummings said. “It was like a big fight. Ignorance. Craziness.” He returned home around five in the morning. His younger sister was still awake, worried about him. “I’ve never seen this in Atlanta,” he told me. “I guess it was a long time coming with our history here.”
“What I see happening on the streets of Atlanta is not Atlanta,” the city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, said at a press conference on Friday night. “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is chaos.” In 1968, after King’s assassination, there were riots in many cities, but not in Atlanta, where he was born and raised—a matter, for some, of local pride. “If you love this city—this city that has had a legacy of black mayors and black police chiefs, where more than fifty per cent of business owners in metro Atlanta are minority business owners—if you care about this city, then go home,” Bottoms continued, telling people who wanted change to “show up at the polls.” Howard Shook, a white city-council member whose district includes the Lenox Square mall, told me the remarks were “a tour de force,” adding that Bottoms “probably went three rungs up the V.P. ladder.” (The mayor is reportedly among those Joe Biden is considering adding to the ticket.)
