CHARLOTTE–African working class communities in Charlotte are once again under assault. The city is moving forward with a $118 million police training facility—Charlotte’s version of “Cop City”—to be built on the Levine Campus of Central Piedmont Community College.
This militarized compound is not about public safety. It is a colonial counterinsurgency response to African resistance. The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) has exposed this project as part of a coordinated, nationwide strategy by the colonial State to crush uprisings, contain the African working class and defend capital.
What’s really being built?
Promoted as a “first responder training center,” the facility includes urban warfare simulations, a shooting range and expanded surveillance technology. So while communities face food insecurity, housing shortages, failing schools and skyrocketing rents, the State funnels nearly $120 million into police infrastructure. This is not about safety. This is about State violence.
Its location near Matthews, NC, adjacent to working class African neighborhoods, makes the target clear. The facility is being built to prepare police forces for what the State sees as its greatest threat: organized black resistance. It is a tool of repression aimed squarely at the African working class.
Keith Lamont Scott and colonial retaliation
In 2016, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police murdered Keith Lamont Scott, a disabled African man, as he sat in his vehicle. His assassination sparked righteous rebellion in the streets. Thousands of Africans rose up in defiance of liberal reform and police terror. The colonial State responded not with justice, but with escalation. Charlotte’s Cop City is the concrete expression of that retaliation. It is the material response to the threat of organized African resistance. The facility is counterinsurgency infrastructure—armed, funded and legitimized by the city and county governments.
Charlotte’s Cop City is not an anomaly. In Atlanta, the people resist a similar militarized compound in the Weelaunee Forest. In cities like Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, police budgets grow while social services shrink. These are not isolated developments. They are nodes in a colonial network of repression. What binds them is the logic of colonial capitalism: to maintain control over African labor and land through violence.
The people respond
In defiance of this assault, organizers from the APSP and our mass organization, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), held a political education gathering on July 19, 2025, at the Independence Regional Library. Titled Stop Colonial Cop City: Black Community Control of the Police, the event was a convergence of mass mobilization and revolutionary clarity.
Dr. Matsemela Odom, International President of InPDUM, delivered a keynote on the colonial origins of policing and why Black Community Control of the Police is not just a demand, but a program for self-determination. “Black Power,” he declared, “means controlling the institutions in our own communities.”
Comrade Osahene Asomdwee laid out the Party’s position clearly: “This facility is not for public safety; it is colonial counterinsurgency. The State waited nearly a decade after the Charlotte Uprisings to unveil it, because they understood its true purpose: to crush future resistance before it starts.” Panelist and local organizer Kalis Divine spoke to the on-the-ground mobilization work and later joined the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, uniting with the Party’s revolutionary line. This was not just an event. It was a revolutionary classroom.
This event marked the beginning of a new phase in our struggle. The APSP’s Southern Region has launched a petition to demand Black Community Control of the Police, beginning with a call to divest the $364.5 million allocated to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and redirect those funds to community-controlled housing, food sovereignty programs, free revolutionary childcare and African-centered education. We don’t need more police. We need power in the hands of the people.
We are also launching bi-weekly political education classes focused on the colonial origins of policing, the principles of African Internationalism and cadre development. These sessions are not just informative; they are training grounds for revolutionary leadership.
Our theory: African Internationalism
We are guided by African Internationalism, the scientific theory developed by the APSP that explains the world through the lens of the African working class. It teaches us that the police are not broken. They are doing exactly what they were created to do: protect colonial wealth, enforce capitalist exploitation and crush African resistance.
We reject liberal reforms like body cams and review boards. These are pacification tools, not solutions. We demand Black Community Control of the Police, the ability for the community to hire, fire, direct and, if necessary, abolish the police and replace it with genuine safety structures.
What is socialism? Socialism is the political and economic system in which the working class controls the means of production and distribution. It is the opposite of capitalism, where a few own everything while the masses have nothing and their labor continues to build wealth for that small few that own everything. Socialism under African Internationalism means an all-African socialist future where land, labor and resources are collectively owned and governed by the people. The people who do the work to build value should own and control the value they create.
Join the Party!
Charlotte’s Cop City is a colonial project built on stolen land to protect stolen wealth. Its purpose is to crush the next uprising before it begins. But the people are rising, this time with theory, organization and power. We call on every African in Charlotte and beyond: Join the African People’s Socialist Party. Build Black Power. Take back our communities.
Stop Colonial Cop City!
Black Community Control of the Police!
Build African Self-Determination!
Power to the African Working Class!
