Atlanta is a city with numerous forms of protests: It was where Dr. King’s vehicle for coordinating nonviolent demonstrations across the nation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was born. Its educational protest takes the form of four higher education institutions reserved for Black students, one of the least represented groups in American colleges and universities.18 An economic protest like Greenwood’s fits into the rebellious fabric of the city like a single stitch in a vast tapestry.
Since the launch of its site in 2022, the bank has made two key acquisitions that have expanded its reach. In May 2022 Greenwood announced the acquisition of the Gathering Spot, a membership-based community of Black and Latino professionals, creatives, and entrepreneurs with brick-and-mortar locations in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, as well as offshoots in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, and Houston. The Gathering Spot cofounder and CEO Ryan Wilson was named chief community officer at Greenwood, and the team estimates the combined community of Greenwood account holders and the Gathering Spot members is over 1 million people.
A month after the Gathering Spot announcement, Greenwood acquired Valence, a development platform for Black professionals that has tens of thousands of job listings and career opportunities. The three deals, according to the bank’s press office, have created “a trifecta of fintech product, million member community, and career development platform.”19
In addition to strategic acquisitions, Greenwood penned a name, image, and likeness deal with Travis Hunter, the number one overall college football recruit in the 2021–2022 season. Hunter became the highest-ranked prospect to ever commit to an HBCU when he chose to enroll at Jackson State University; now he is the face of Greenwood’s “Choose Black” campaign, which encourages people to support Black businesses, schools, and causes.
“By choosing to join forces with Greenwood, I am again highlighting the strength of the Black community in collaborating and partnering,” Hunter said in a release announcing his role as a Greenwood brand ambassador. “I want the next generation to feel empowered to make the right choices and support Black businesses and Black excellence. I’m inspired by what Greenwood is doing to support financial freedom for minorities.”20
As for its founders, Ryan Glover is still steering the everyday operations of the company and serves as its primary PR machine, explaining the ins and outs of the venture to the press and curious parties like myself. Killer Mike continues to promote Greenwood on social media and in public appearances, but he has spent much of his time since the bank’s launch in the studio, and released his sixth studio album, MICHAEL, in 2023. His first solo record in over a decade, the album is an homage to “the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, which gave us some of the most beautiful music ever,” he told Hypebeast.21
Andrew Young, at ninety-one years of age, has seen a lot of ups and downs when it comes to progress. After winning reelection for mayor in 1985, he announced to supporters, “I am glad to be mayor of this city, where once the mayor had me thrown in jail.”22 He’s lived through the assassination of one of his closest friends and long enough to see Dr. King’s vision reverberate decades beyond his death. He’s seen Atlanta go from a city whose 1917 city planner Robert Whitten wrote, “A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable,”23 to an international city, with eighteen Fortune 100 companies—including Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, Delta Air Lines, AT&T Mobility, and Newell Rubbermaid—headquartered there.24
Greenwood bank hopes to be this kind of equal but opposite reaction to what was eventually the downfall of its namesake. The Greenwood district thrived for over two decades until, in 1921, a Black shoe shiner in Tulsa was accused of raping a white elevator operator. A feverish white mob descended on Greenwood, killing 300 residents and detaining 6,000 more in internment camps. The Tulsa Race Massacre lasted for two days, left 35 blocks of grocery stores, restaurants, and drug stores in ashes, and rendered nearly 10,000 residents homeless. Although there was some rebuilding in subsequent years, insurance companies refused to pay damage claims, and a new fire ordinance was enacted to prevent Black owners from independent building. Due to the sheer magnitude of the devastation and the barriers to rebuilding that followed, the town never fully recovered.25
I asked Andrew about Greenwood not just as an inspiration but as a cautionary tale. Was the idea of a Black Wall Street too good to be true? If not, what made this moment different?
“Just 100 years of effort,” he retorted.
Through various diversification efforts—like the one Maynard Jackson forced in Atlanta banks—and cultural advancements, such as the rise of rap and hip-hop, there have been many successful economic campaigns in the Black community. Mike points to the rise of Cadillac cars to exemplify the kind of power Black Americans can exert with buying power.
“Had it not been for Black people’s want to buy Cadillac cars, we would not have Cadillac cars today,” he asserts. “At one point Cadillac would not sell to Black people. Once Cadillac lifted that shadow ban of sorts, Cadillac sales flourished, Cadillac became one of the more popular brands, and I would even argue in matters of SUVs and trucks now, had it not been for hip-hop and their making an icon of the Cadillac Escalades, I doubt you would have Cadillac so prominent in the truck market today. Well, that happens more if you take care of your individual and community finances and when your community participates in the bigger world economy.”
Although their mission and messaging around Black empowerment through capital are aligned, the three cofounders are very different. Shoulder-to-shoulder they look like Goldilocks’s three bears, with Mike a head taller than the rest, the crown of Andrew’s head just reaching Mike’s bicep, and Ryan bridging the vertical gap between them. They’re also inspired by different movements from the past, Andrew taking cues from his friend Dr. King, while Mike tends to exude a more Malcolm X vibe, even sampling Malcolm’s “Who Are You?” speech in his track “Pressure.” But like the variety of artistic techniques that line the Beltline underpass, the men’s theories of change blend seamlessly to move a new generation of activists who are beginning to see the merits of both missions. Their politics are not in conflict. Rather, they harmonize like the rhythmic beats of a single track.
These seeming contradictions are not unfamiliar to Andrew, who’s seen his fair share of life’s tendency to present us with both all that is good and all that is evil. His life has been filled with bright stars and dark days, liberation and death, prosperity and famine. None of it makes much sense, he conceded. Why would the Olympics come to Atlanta? Why would a rapper and an activist go in on a bank? Why would a city in the Deep South be the hub for HBCUs? Why would millions of Africans be made cargo, then trade, then slaves?
The answers fall into Andrew’s long list of “unknowns.” But in a sitdown with Mike on his WABE Atlanta show “Love & Respect with Killer Mike,” Andrew offered an interesting hypothesis for that last question.
“We may have been sent here by God to make this nation be what it ought to be.”
Doing Time by Gerald Morgan
6
Reimagining Infrastructure:
The Autonomous Infrastructure Mission (AIM)
“Sista Paula.”
His voice was deep and mellow. It reminded me of Frantz Fanon’s introduction to Black Skin, White Masks where he wrote, “Things I’m going to say, not shout. I’ve long given up on shouting.”1 The voice on the other end of the call echoed through a long hallway he just finished mopping. It came through scratchy, a common side effect of old-school pay phones still mounted to the walls of Kern Valley State Prison.
I was getting quite fond of Heshima Denham calling me “sista.” His expression of intimacy reminded me that we are bonded by a connective tissue deeper than race.
“‘Shima, how you holding up?” I replied.
A correctional officer positioned some distance from the payphone barked an order. It bounced off the walls and reverberated through the phone. Prison is intentionally disorientating, as I am constantly aware, whether it be the prerecorded messages that interrupt my conversations with Heshima and Ivan every few minutes or the irregular schedules we work around to communicate. No matter how many years you’ve been inside—Heshima has been incarcerated since 1994—you never get used to it.
“Disorienting tactics allow prison officials to alter inmates’ views, beliefs, and realities,” writes political scientist Patrick Doolittle in his senior thesis for Yale University, the basis for the Marshall Project’s Emmy-nominated series The Zo.2 “They do away with structures, traditions, worldviews, and logic that may empower them, or keep them tethered to reality itself.”
I first reached out to Heshima after learning about Amend the 13th, an organization he developed in prison to oppose the slavery exception in the US Constitution. In researching an article, I discovered a recording of a speech Heshima had made for the August 2017 Millions for Prisoners March, where activists from around the country descended on Washington DC to protest inhumane prison conditions and the 13th Amendment’s slavery provision. One of the country’s last remaining Black-owned radical periodicals, the San Francisco Bay View, helped galvanize support for the demonstration in the Bay Area and posted Heshima’s speech on its website.
“From the slave codes to the Black codes, to the legal slavery provision of the 13th Amendment and the thousands of civil death statutes that derive their legal authority therefrom, America has made a mockery of the concept of ‘freedom and justice for all’ by ensuring it is always denied to some,” his speech went.3
I wrote to him at Kern Valley State Prison to ask if he’d be interested in contributing an article about the 13th Amendment for an upcoming issue of the All of Us or None newspaper. After several replies were confiscated by guards, he called me.
“I’m doing OK, you know? Can’t complain,” he said.
He most certainly could complain, but that’s not really his style. With each new evolution of punishment and deprivation he’s endured, Heshima has held firm to his humanity and identity. He does this by using his New Afrikan name, Joka Heshima Denham—rather than his government name, Shannon Denham—Heshima stemming from the Swahili word sima, meaning respect and honor, and Joka referring to Hồ Chí Minh’s “dragon,” a being that would fly out of the prison gates upon the dismantlement of imperialism.4
He also makes stylistic choices in his writing to maintain a sense of autonomy. In his articles for publications from the Bay View to Mother Jones, he critiques “Amerika” or “Amerikkka”—the single K standing for “killer,” he says, and the KKK being fairly obvious—calling attention to the 50 million Indigenous people killed during western expansion and the 250 million Africans who died en route to the New World.
“It’s a way for my reader to see a term and not associate it with what the current zeitgeist associates the term with, but instead its function and purpose,” Heshima told me. “The underlying basis of law in this nation is violence and death.
“There’s also a more rebellious motive associated with how men like me express ourselves. Words are instruments of power.”
To exert that power, Heshima writes prolifically and provocatively. He’s written about America’s devolution into “the most advanced fascist state in human history,” rising above Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, made possible through both advanced technology and a more cunning ability to disguise itself as noble in its actions.5 This can be seen in the many Big Brother spy tactics it deploys in the name of national security. Cloaked in this camouflaged persona as a gatekeeper of peace and security, the United States can claim to be the world’s safeguard of liberty while having its population heavily surveilled and more prisoners per capita than any other nation. Domestically, its deception is even more profound, evolving and advancing oppressive systems that impact a compliant population that yearns for the status quo and is conditioned against revolution.
“When I speak of fascism, I’m talking about the assimilation of billions of people to a particular psychology,” Heshima once told me. “It’s a psychology that rationalizes stuff like having more than enough housing to house every single person inside this country, yet callously allowing millions of people to sleep on the street; that claims to be the beacon of freedom and justice yet has the largest prison population on the planet.”
Perhaps the greatest validation of the power of Heshima’s words comes in the form of the consequences they’ve earned him in prison. The most severe of these consequences were inflicted during his time at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California, in the early 2000s. Heshima began receiving 1819 forms, the corrections department’s “Notification of Disapproval,” and his mail would go missing. Next came a slew of Form 115s, the department’s disciplinary report. These seemed to correlate less with actual violations and more with how outspoken he was becoming about his New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalists beliefs, an ideology stemming from Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Black revolutionary tradition. Eventually, the department used a tattoo he had, his possession of Blood in My Eye, and a drawing he had made as “evidence” of an affiliation with a prison gang and sent him to what was termed a “validated security housing unit (SHU),” an area where prisoners who were accused of being gang members were held in solitary confinement indefinitely unless they were paroled or “debriefed” by defecting from the gang and providing incriminating information about its members. As prisoners in Pelican Bay put it: “Parole, snitch, or die.”6
The prison department justified its use of indeterminate solitary by claiming prison gangs were responsible for rampant violence and drug sales within the system. In response to criticism, the prison warden at the time, Clark Ducart, was quoted as saying, “You gotta keep the predators away from the prey.”7
The “predator” reference, an age-old racist trope, lends itself to the argument that prisoners are not seen as people. But more significantly, this wide-cast dragnet of gang suspicion allowed correctional officers and prison administrators to control the proliferation of ideas under the pretense of controlling contraband. To the prison department, ideas carry just as much danger, if not more, than alleged gang beefs or drug use. This position was no more apparent than an instance in 2012 when four men, allegedly from the four biggest rival gangs inside California’s prison system, penned a joint letter calling for a ceasefire in the name of cooperation. They gave it to administrators and asked them to proliferate it. After all, they were being kept in the SHU for instigating violence, and this was a call to end it. Prison officials confiscated the statement and destroyed it: Apparently, the idea of prisoners working together was far more foreboding than the population killing itself off.8
