Elon Butts Osby’s parents and grandparents were not the kind of people who liked to pack up and move. That decision was made for them, because they were Black.
Osby’s grandfather, William Bagley, was forced to leave his 60-acre property in Forsyth County without compensation during the 1912 racial cleansing there. He resettled in Buckhead, in a neighborhood that came to be known as Bagley Park after he and his wife bought 10 lots.
Then, in the 1940s, the family was forced out again, so Fulton County could build a park for wealthy white residents of the neighboring Garden Hills subdivision.
“You start to wonder — and I try to stay away from this as much as I can — but why are we hated so much?” said Osby, 75, who lives in the northwest Atlanta home where her parents relocated from Buckhead. “It may have been more obvious back in those times, but it’s still just prevalent.”
Osby is a member of the Fulton County Reparations Task Force, a volunteer group that recently submitted a 636-page report on the harms Georgia’s most populous county perpetrated through slavery and discrimination against Black residents.
The report did not tally one comprehensive amount quantifying the cost, though it said restitution for some practices could be worth billions of dollars today. Nor does it make any recommendations for payments or other actions to repair the damage.
Those recommendations are the subject of the task force’s next phase.
“People like to talk about how these harms were done in the past and they’re no longer our responsibility, and we fundamentally disagree with that,” Amanda Meng, a task force member who is a researcher in the computer science school at Georgia Tech, told county commissioners last month. “A lot of our data in the study show that these inequities are still visible today and we’re still responsible for them.”
Prosperity ‘built on bondage’
In the first decade after Fulton County was established in 1853, the county brought in about $75,000 from taxes on enslavers based on the assessed value of the people they enslaved, according to the report. Depending on the compound interest rate used, that could equal anywhere from $2.4 million to $674 million today.
Tax revenue from monetizing enslaved people paid for roads, the courthouse, jails and salaries for commissioners, judges and the sheriff, according to the reparations task force’s chairperson, historian and Morehouse College professor Karcheik Sims-Alvarado.
“For Fulton County, the stakes were exceptionally high,” the report says. ”It required reliable revenue to build its governing capacity. Taxation on enslaved people supplied 20 to 30 percent of its income, providing steady revenue that financed its growth into the state’s commercial hub.
“In this sense, Fulton’s prosperity was built on bondage, its public institutions literally financed by the appraised value of enslaved lives.”
After slavery was abolished, Fulton established Georgia’s first county chain gang in 1876, which the report described as a “brutal reincarnation of slavery” along with the statewide convict lease system.
For the first 40 years, 86% of convicts whose races were recorded were Black, the report said. Black people were arrested at high rates for minor crimes, it said.
An 1870 investigation of the convict lease system found prisoners’ sleeping quarters were often overcrowded and too few hours were allowed for sleep in the summer, the report said. Water was inadequate in many camps and inhumane punishments were inflicted at times, the report said.
The preferred method of discipline was whipping.
By 1874, privately contracted convicts were working on public projects in Fulton, the report said. Leased convicts were not paid.
The Chattahoochee Brick Company used convicts to produce bricks for projects including the state Capitol, the Atlanta federal penitentiary, many Grant Park homes, the exterior walls of the Oakland Cemetery and the Pullman plant in Kirkwood.
At Chattahoochee Brick, convicts were “compelled to work on Sunday and at night, (and) that they were forced to carry loads of bricks at a fast trot from the ovens to be loaded onto railroad cars,” a 1907 investigation found. Convict food was bad and their sleeping and dining quarters were unsanitary, the investigation found.
That report caused a public outcry and led to the end of the convict lease system statewide two years later.
The county-run chain gang, however, continued until 1943. It consisted of people convicted of misdemeanors from Fulton and other counties, along with state felony convicts, the report said.
“Members of the chain gang built and paved roads, built bridges, dug culverts and roadside ditches, and drained swamps,” the report said. “Convicts also worked in quarries, blasting, digging, and cutting stone and crushing gravel for county projects. Other convicts were put to work on municipal projects in Atlanta, building and improving roads, laying curbs and sidewalks, and building sewers.”
In 1889, a county grand jury reported the South Atlanta chain gang camp was unclean, food was inadequate and convicts were whipped excessively, especially those who were sick or unable to do as much work as others.
Many members of the Ku Klux Klan worked in Fulton’s justice system during the first half of the 20th century, according to the task force report. Paul S. Etheridge, the Klan’s national chief of staff in the 1920s, also chaired the county’s Committee on Public Works, a position that gave him direct control of the chain gangs, the report said.
The total loss for Black convict laborers in Fulton County, if they had been paid and their wages had been invested over time, is between $4.6 billion and $13.6 billion, the report said.
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