In 1877 the United States was rocked by one of the biggest strikes it had ever seen. That year, across the country but primarily on the East Coast and in Chicago, 100,000 railroad workers walked off the job. To suppress the strike, state and federal governments deployed the national guard and state militias in several states, resulting in at least a hundred deaths as troops fired on or injured strikers. The event became known as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
In the following years and decades, states (as well as, sometimes, private funders) responded to the 1877 strike and several other large-scale uprisings by building imposing armories, concentrated in cities that had seen ferocious striking or public disorder. Armories were an important piece of the government’s capacity to respond quickly and forcefully to strikes or protests, but they were also an important symbol. They were expensive, imposing structures that sat on the horizon like a giant with a club—an implied and ever-present threat, visible through factory windows and from rail yards.
The philosophy that gave rise to armories and bases has not gone anywhere. If anything, we are currently living through its most dramatic resurgence since the late nineteenth century. In the wake of the Movement for Black Lives and the 2014–2020 Black-led protests against police brutality, municipalities across the country have begun building large urban police training facilities—so-called “cop cities.”
In what follows, I revisit this history of armory building to explore how Atlanta’s effort to build a cop city demonstrates a resurgent willingness of the United States to mount an offensive against its own citizens. And it’s not just in Atlanta: we face the serious risk of this model being copied across the country as our government once again feels the need to put a physical reminder of its threat on the horizon.
In addition to uprisings and strikes brought on by organized labor, the latter half of the 1800s was marked by urban unrest connected to anti-immigrant and anti-Black sentiment. In New York City alone, city and state official were shaken by the public violence that occurred during the 1871 Orange Riots between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, the 1874 Tompkins Square Riot, and a series of anti-Black disturbances culminating in the horrific Riot of 1900. Growing fears among American-born and Protestant elite in the United States also resulted in a multi-decade panic over the “foreign radical”: an archetypal figure the state feared for both its foreignness, ethnic and linguistic difference, and left-wing politics. Those in power feared that the often-entwined reality of racial and ethnic violence and labor unrest would, if left unchecked, boil over. The situation was, as one nineteenth-century author called it, “the volcano under the city,” waiting to erupt.