Report: Fulton’s past harms to Black residents are worth billions

“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.

Credit: N'neka Scruggs

Credit: N'neka Scruggs

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.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

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.

Credit: Daniel Varnado

Credit: Daniel Varnado

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.

Unequal opportunities

Owning 60 acres of land was a notable accomplishment for a Black man in 1912. After William Bagley and his wife Ida fled their Forsyth County farm, they became community leaders in their Black enclave of Buckhead.

William Bagley died in 1939. Nine years later, Fulton County offered the Bagleys’ daughter, Willie Mae, and her husband, Pete Butts, “pennies on the dollar” to vacate their Buckhead home, said Osby, who is the Butts’ daughter.

Osby’s parents accepted the offer. The alternative was being forced to move without payment, a fate that befell some neighbors, Osby said.

Two years later, Osby was born. As an adult, she did administrative work. She retired in June from Atlanta Housing, where she worked as a senior administrative assistant and project manager. She has two daughters and two grandsons.

Osby said she is not sure how much money Fulton County gave her parents. Today, their two lots are worth almost $4 million, and they might have been entitled to more from other inherited lots, Osby said.

“Property has always been a big thing with my family,” she said. “I think that during that era, it was a big thing with all Black families. If you owned property, you were somebody.”

For her, the harm is largely emotional — the knowledge that her family’s hard-won land could be, and was, taken away on the whims of their white neighbors.

Fulton County assesses all the Bagley Park land the county seized in the 1940s at a total of nearly $60 million for tax purposes, according to the reparations task force report, giving it a fair market value of about $150 million today.

Speaking for herself, Osby said the county should compensate Bagley Park property owners’ descendants based on current land values. If Osby’s parents hadn’t been forced out, she could have owned their land today, she said.

Credit: Buckhead Heritage Society

Credit: Buckhead Heritage Society

The reparations task force’s report also quantified the loss to Black residents of books, job assistance and educational programming caused by unequal access to the public library system until 1959, when the libraries were integrated.

By 1959, Fulton County and the city of Atlanta owned and operated two “colored” libraries and 15 whites-only libraries, the report said. The whites-only branches included the Central Library, funded with a donation from industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The small “colored” libraries served almost 97,000 patrons per site, while the white libraries served about one-quarter that number, leading to better resources and experiences for white users, the report said.

“We often didn’t have the type of materials, or we didn’t have enough materials to furnish a (Black) citizen on whatever the citizen might be looking for,” librarian Annie McPheeters said in a 1992 interview for a Georgia State University oral history that is quoted in the Fulton reparations task force report. “And the citizens knew that this material was in the library, the main library — or maybe in some of the other larger branches."

The state in 1983 transferred full responsibility over the libraries to the county.

The estimated value of library services lost to Black patrons under segregation, with compound interest through 2024, ranges from about $81 million to $1.7 billion, according to the reparations task force report.

“These figures include losses in literacy support, youth programming, job readiness resources, and general civic participation opportunities,” the report says.

Political headwinds

The push for reparations over slavery and racism gained national prominence in 2020, after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered unarmed Black man George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.

The Fulton County Commission narrowly approved the creation of the reparations task force in April 2021, with just four of seven commissioners voting in favor. Fulton became the first county government in the United States to create such a task force.

Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said he got the idea from Evanston, Illinois, which has begun making $25,000 reparation payments from cannabis tax revenue to some Black residents, Bloomberg reported.

The state of California in 2021 gave beach land back to descendants of Black owners who had been forced out about a century earlier. The family later sold the land for $20 million.

California’s reparations task force came up with more than 100 recommendations in 2023, including payments of up to $1.2 million to some residents, The New York Times reported. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed legislation in October creating a structure for reparations but vetoed related measures, citing cost among the factors.

The city of San Francisco created a reparations fund in December but did not immediately allocate money to it, Bay City News reported.

The concept of reparations also faces persistent opposition, particularly from white Americans, according to a series of Brookings Institution polls. Opponents cited the difficulty of determining how much is owed, the fact that no one directly involved in slavery is alive today and the argument that slavery does not have current impacts.

Fulton’s task force was scheduled to dissolve at the end of this year, but the County Commission last month granted a two-year extension, again with just four votes.

“Research has to be done to determine what’s feasible based on economics, and that’s not part of our current responsibility,” task force member Rodney Littles said before the vote.

Republican County Commissioner Bridget Thorne asked if the reparations task force analyzed “benefits that were provided to the Black community to try to help repair the harms.”

“Oh no,” Sims-Alvarado replied. “That data does not exist because the act has not occurred, which is what we’re asking for now.”

Credit: Jason Getz /AJC

Credit: Jason Getz /AJC

In the heated exchange that followed, Thorne said her north Fulton constituents ask: “Why we should be responsible for a crime we didn’t commit?”

Thorne pointed to county spending on public transit, Grady Health, the Policing Alternatives & Diversion initiative and historically Black colleges and universities. She also mentioned Title I grants, which the federal government provides school systems.

Other commissioners argued those things are beside the point.

“Point of order, Mr. Chair, this has nothing to do with the topic,” Arrington said. “She’s talking about MARTA.”

Chairman Robb Pitts repeated that the reparations task force was presenting its findings, not its recommendations. He banged his gavel repeatedly while Thorne shouted over the argument.

“There isn’t all harm,” Thorne said before her microphone was cut off.

“I think your assumption is just incorrect in that what has been done in the past few decades is repair,” Meng told Thorne. “It’s not repair unless the people who have experienced the harm, who are descendants of people who have experienced the harm, have laid it out.”

Littles said he is a third-generation descendant of the Tulsa race massacre. He supports reparations in Fulton County although he does not expect to benefit from them.

“This is not a partisan issue,” he said. “This is a human rights issue.”