PROTECTING BLACK LIVES & DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITIES

1 Project South Covid-19 Testing Report

Just months ago, it seemed like the world stopped. Schools closed. Cities shut down. Folks who could, or had to, stayed inside. Confusion and fear – and often, apathy in the U.S., grown from the denial and inaction of this federal administration – mounted around the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, a pandemic with ripples the world has not felt since the flu pandemic 102 years ago. Given this country’s history of inferior healthcare for Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor folks, as well as its active methods of keeping our communities locked out of access to education, living wages, and other resources that would move folks out of poverty, we knew that with COVID-19, our communities would suffer the most.

We also knew that regardless of so much being paused for the moment, we had to keep moving. Our anticipation was right. According to the Centers for Dis-ease Control, Indigenous and Black folks are five tims more likely to be hospitalized for and more than three times more likely to die from COVID-19 infection than their white coun-terparts. For Latinx communities, the rates are four times and nearly three times, respectively. And while seniors are a vul-nerable group across all populations, the virus is also more likely to affect younger ages in all communities of color. With more than a decade of studying and practicing ways to respond quickly to various disasters locally and across the

U.S. South, though, Project South had the tools to provide the most neglected communities with one critical step in controlling the spread of COVID-19: free testing. “It’s crazy and tiring, but it’s great because I get to see all of my community members,” said Donshay Brown, an orga-nizer at the Mutual Aid Liberation Center, who manages the Hunger Coalition of Atlanta’s Hunger Hotline. “I’ve stayed in Atlanta my whole life – all of the communities where we did the mobile testing sites, I’ve lived in.”

PROTECTING BLACK LIVES & DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITIESProject South practices mutual aid through COVID-19 testing

The Mutual Aid Liberation Center team’s first mobile site at Victory Outreach Church, where dozens of folks gathered for the “Justice for Maud Caravan” on May 16.


Brown was part of the team that operated Project South and the Hunger Coalition’s free drive-thru and walk-up testing at the Mutual Aid Liberation Center, the building our organiza-tions share at 9 Gammon Avenue in South Atlanta. We teamed up with Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE), a national partner co-founded by actor Sean Penn and Ann Lee, to run safe and exposure-free testing daily from May 4 to June 12, 2020. Rooted in our ongoing response to the COVID-19 crisis that centers Black low-income com-munities — young people ages 13 to 18, elders over 65, and families — we hosted the testing at our building for the first three weeks. After that, we took testing straight to the people, setting up mobile testing and education sites around Atlanta at apartment homes, senior centers, churches, and libraries, including polling sites on Election Day.

In the absence of public testing services or directives to curb COVID-19 — and more importantly, in the spirit of our communities taking care of each other — grassroots orga-nizations have been stepping up to do public health work as an essential resource to the community. And unlike many other testing options, we eliminated many barriers to testing.

Testing was free, and folks did not have to have insurance or meet any symptomatic stipulations. “It felt powerful for us as community members to help other community members, and to see that so many people cared enough to come get tested,” Brown said. “I love the work we’re doing.” Our testing team included 10 graduates of Project South’s summer youth program, the Septima Clark Community Power Institute, multiple members of Project South and Hunger Coalition, several members of partner organizations including Grupo Nzinga de Capoeira Angola, Afrikan Martial Arts, graduates of Carver High School, and community leaders. “Not only have we built great teamwork, we’ve built a family,” Zion Fowler said. A member of the testing team, he partici-pated in the youth program just two years ago. This experience allowed us to activate the power and strengthen the relationships within our community, broaden-ing our social movement infrastructure. Every day of testing, we applied the Southern People’s Initiative of protecting and defending each other, and supported young people who were out of work to develop employable skills in public health, which builds toward a new social economy. Activating our communities to engage in frontline crisis response and lead-ership is part of a longer-term organizing strategy to build and maintain our independence and self-reliance as a unified local community, and as a regional and global alliance with partners across frontlines. Starting weeks before and continuing throughout the testing period, our neighborhood organizing team worked with first responders and health experts in our network to develop Community Health Protection Protocols to gather, assem-ble, and deliver food packages and public health supplies (masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning spray, etc.) to 125 house-holds weekly. Beyond the 10 neighborhoods we serve in and around South Atlanta, we were able to expand our food deliveries to people outside of the neighborhood who tested positive, needed to quarantine, and did not have access to food. Running community-based testing and education sites was also a huge opportunity to educate our folks about protecting ourselves and our families throughout this

PROTECTING BLACK LIVES & DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITIES

Mutual Aid Liberation Center COVID-19 Testing & Education Team


unfolding health and economic crisis, and to provide information on next steps, whether a person’s test result was positive or negative. “Some people are afraid of their results. They want to know, but there’s still a fear of the worst,” said Shekinah King, a member of the testing team who participated in Project South’s youth programs from 2013 to 2015. Though quick and painless, the mouth and nasal swab tests left some needing a little convincing. “This experience has been very humbling because we under-stand the relationship Black people have with healthcare and the mistrust formed over centuries,” said Toyia Gray, another member of the testing team and former Project South youth organizer. “Being able to merge that knowledge with how we relate to people who come get tested is helpful.” Grassroots-led testing has filled in a months-long gap left by public officials and a classist medical system that could have prevented thousands of coronavirus infections. Many Southern states often float around the bottom rungs of the country’s perception, in doubt and criticism, despite the re-gion’s history of leading transformative change in the nation. With the level of training for the team, however, this testing program pushed us not only to learn new, transferable skills and strategies but also to return to the skills and strategies of mutual aid that have lifted Black folks to liberation for centu-ries, especially in the South.

WE BEEN DOING THIS

Mutual Aid is part of the Black Radical Traditions in the U.S. South

Before Emancipation, the concept and practice of mutual aid was more than a survival tactic among enslaved Black people; it was a reflection of our African cultural and spiritual roots. Project South understands mutual aid as a basis for how Black people created, and still create, social life. In the face of great adversity – enslavement, capitalism, JimCrow, Imperialism, structural racism, police brutality, and now, a pandemic – mutual aid is a practice of freedom from these adversities. “Mutual aid was a method of self-help for Black people who were coming out of slavery, so (we are paying) homage to that period and what we are going through now, with raceequality and this particular effort challenging the healthcare system, liberty, and accessibility,” said Alvin Dollar, a long-time Atlanta organizer and friend of Project South. The COVID-19 pandemic is thick with uncertainty and poten-tial trauma from its effects. We look to history and the Black Radical Tradition to guide us through this crisis, adjusting seasoned organizing strategies to meet modern needs, and mapping community assets to lean on in times of crisis.


Testing team member Tony Davis and Project South Organizer Bassey Etuk prepare to open our MALC testing site on May 4.

Testing site manager Melissa Pittman, of the Hunger Coalition; longtime Atlanta organizer Alvin Dollar; and Hunger Coalition Executive Director Carolyn Pittman


HEEDING OUR HISTORY

Past movement responses to public health crises guide Project South through present

Project South relies on history to guide our organizing strate-gies. Our people’s histories carry many examples of connect-ing public health to movement building, and two examples from Southern history inform our organizing and strategy development in the COVID19 crisis.

White supremacist terror, intentional starvation, economic impoverishment and the complete exclusion of Black folks from political life gave birth to Freedom Summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Freedom Summer also gave birth to the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). Dr. Robert Smith, ‘doctor to the movement’, initiated the Southern MCHR and along with organized groups like Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) organized progressive northern doctors to provide emergen-cy ‘first aid’ and ‘counsel’ to injured civil rights workers. With few black doctors in Mississippi and many of those forced to leave the state if they treated civil rights workers, the Delta population had little or no access to healthcare, traumatic or chronic. The Mississippi Mound Bayou Health Clinic, in 1967, developed tributaries of care throughout the Delta; wrote “prescriptions” for food for malnourished people; dug wells and sanitation systems; held educational classes, and hired Mississippi midwives who had been the mainstay of birthing for eons in segregated Mississippi.

We also look to ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and the powerful grassroots fight to contend with the AIDS epidemic. The novel Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was a major public health epidemic that emerged in the late 1970s. HIV/AIDS ravaged marginalized communities, particularly affecting gay men, transwomen, and drug users. Hundreds

of thousands of people died from AIDS related illnesses before adequate treatment was made available. ACT UP was founded in 1987, and though prominent in New York also had powerful chapters in Atlanta and around the South. ACT UP focused on demanding life saving drugs and accessible med-ical care from public health departments and governmental agencies across the U.S and around the world. Direct ac-tions, investigative and scientific research, and media inter-ventions, were all grassroots organizing strategies designed to force access to treatment and bring attention to the crisis. ACT UP demonstrates the power of movement building to intervene in a deadly public health crisis, and both historical examples provide guidelines for our organizing during the crisis of COVID.


Actor Sean Penn, co-founder of CORE (Community Organized Relief Effort), tours the Mutual Aid Liberation Center with Hunger Coalition Executive Director Carolyn Pittman and Project South co-Director Steph Guilloud.

Our testing site provided drive-thru & walk-up testing for three weeks before expanding to mobile sites.


BRIDGING THE GAP

Day of testing to ‘Protect Black Lives’ serves protesters, organizers across Atlanta

For many, staying at home means sitting with anxiety and an-ger as Black bodies continue to be hunted and killed – from the Deep South at the hands of a white militia, to the Upper Midwest at the hands of corrupt police officers, and every-where in between. For many others, it means confronting internal biases and realizing the urgency of defeating white supremacy.

As tempers surpassed the sweltering summer temperatures and allies rose up in solidarity, these folks converged, joining in local protests for justice related to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Ga., Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., Tony McDade in Talla-hassee, Fla., and Rayshard Brooks, who was killed by Atlanta police at the Wendy’s just around the corner from the Project South and Hunger Coalition building.

Understanding the balance between standing up for human rights and protecting public health, we hosted “Protect Black Lives” on June 6, a mobile testing site geared toward pro-testers and organizers.

“This allowed us to engage our community through the turmoil,” Gray said. “It’s good to be able to take people off the edge and have the community aspect -- people can walk up or drive up and see somebody who looks like them, so there’s more trust.”

Protesters put the pressure on systems, demanding justice, accountability and transformation. Project South organizes actions and protests, and we have seen the effectiveness of mass public protests in social movements, from Puerto Rico in 2019 to a local campaign to close Atlanta’s city jail. We are grateful for people’s bravery and committed to keeping each

other safe and healthy on such an active protest day, with the help of our neighborhood partners, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, Georgia Equality and Georgia Representative Kim Schofield.

June 6 was our largest one-day turnout, and we tested 223 people with about 60% of them describing themselves as protesters and organizers. We tested over 100 people who gathered at our first mobile site on May 16 at the “Justice for Maud” caravan from Atlanta to Brunswick.

These testing sites aimed at social justice organizers am-plified the intersections that are already so blaring: The communities that experience the failures of privatized health systems are the same communities that experience violent, and deadly, law enforcement. Thus, many of our folks who have been hitting the ground for weeks, raising their voices and advocating for our communities, are the same folks who are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

It’s a heavy burden, but staying vigilant leads our communi-ties to lasting recovery, even as we prepare for some form of disaster to strike again, an inevitable threat for marginalized folks.

As many Southern states, including Georgia, reopened too soon at the order of governors who value profits over people, these same communities were also more likely to face risk of infection from working essential jobs that make physical distancing impossible, and that do not offer benefits like sick leave so that folks can take care of their health.


“The coronavirus kinda

woke up the world.”

Shekinah King Mutual Aid Testing Team &

Former Project South youth organizer

The Neighborhood Organizing/MALC team, Donshay Brown, Stephen Garlington, Annie Thomas and Bassey Etuk, packaged and delivered food to 125 South Atlanta households from March to July.


Once it became apparent who was dying from the virus, the need for public safety diminished in the eyes of the state’s leaders. Today, cases of COVID-19 hospitalization and average daily confirmed cases in Georgia continue to rise, while the average daily confirmed deaths has decreased.

COVID-19 testing before, during, and after this season of protest and changemaking is critical to the long-term health of our communities. As people organize to abolish policeand prisons, there is a growing consciousness to view healthcare, healing and well-being as integral to that move-ment. Organizations like Project South, our partners, andother Atlanta-based social justice, labor, and faith-based institutions, have been here for decades and will continue to build effective education, public health responses, andcommunity organizing to contend with these overlapping crises.

“We’ve tested over 1,500 people in communities that receive no services — people who don’t have insurance, people who don’t have transportation,” said Project South Co-Director Steph Guilloud. “We pulled folks out of the convenience stores, we pulled folks off the street to get tested and learn more about this virus. We have to keep educating our com-munities even when we’re not testing every day.”

We are our own first responders. Social movements are critical first lines of defense

in a public health crisis.Project South grows social movements to eliminate pover-ty and genocide. As the novel coronavirus pandemic only heightens the already towering forces of oppression in ourcommunities, we have seen the effects of poverty not only in the loss of jobs amid people’s mounting financial obligations, but also in the lack of access to health care for our folks; as well as in the experiences of immigrants who are detained in the crowded and unhealthy detention centers that we are working to shut down.

Lukewarm – and, sometimes, outright cold – responses to the COVID-19 crisis by some in federal, state and local public leadership demonstrate active genocide of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. This centuries-long effort shows up in many ways, from unchecked police brutality to the criminal-ization of poor folks, to the closing of public health facilities in neighborhoods like our own South Atlanta.

To push back, and ultimately win, against the systems that intend to impoverish and kill us, we strategize and learn to be our own first responders, we draw from the generations-long practice of mutual aid as a direct way to activate our collective power, and we strengthen community by standing in for each other where public systems consistently fail us. Our experience over these first three months of the pandemic will now inform the collective design for sustainable infrastructure beyond the current crisis.


MALC Organizer Donshay Brown grew up in South Atlanta. Though the coronavirus is concerning, she said, she is happy to be a familiar face while reaching out to help folks reduce their risk.


STATISTICS BY THE NUMBERS 1,763 people tested32 days of testing Every weekday for six weeks; and two Saturdays to supportcommunity members who were protesting for racial justice.

24 members of the Mutual Aid Testing TeamTony Davis, Shekinah King, Alicia Wun, Zion Fowler, Maggie Bassey, Toyia Gray, Quala Wright, Ayinde Summers, Nickogles Crumbley, Lalicia Anderson, Jaequan Allison, Kimiya Pittman, James Oliver, Quatez Oilver, Melissa Pittman, Dante Allison, Donshay Brown, Annie Thomas, Carolyn Pittman, Stephanie Guilloud, Bassey Etuk, Lauren Wiggins, Alvin Dollar, and Stephen Garlington

18 Testing SitesWe worked with community partners to test in accessible locations for walk-up and drive-thru testing, including senior homes, Election Day polling sites, libraries, social justice/protest gatherings, churches, food drives, and apartment complexes.

Mutual Aid Liberation CenterVictory Outreach Church“Justice For Maud” Caravan for Ahmaud ArberyVillages at Carver Apartments Villas of Hope Apartments 7 Courts Apartments The Veranda: Senior Housing at Carver St. Paul’s AME ChurchMt. Pleasant Baptist Church & Columbia Blackshear Senior HomeChosewood Arts Complex Georgia Avenue High Rise

Martin St. Plaza Apartments Louise Watley Library at Southeast Atlanta BranchCleveland Avenue Branch Library Mechanicsville Branch Library New Calvary Missionary Baptist ChurchMetropolitan Branch Library College Park Branch Library


The MALC and CORE Testing Team practiced decontamination and other means of preventing exposure, skills learned during training.

PROTECTING BLACK LIVES & DEFENDING OUR COMMUNITIES

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