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Study · Atlanta · 9 min read

Atlanta's Record, 1837 to Now

The documented arc of municipal harm: a railroad city built on enslaved labor, convict leasing, the 1906 massacre, racial zoning, redlining, urban renewal, and Olympic-era clearance, through displacement still underway.

1837-1865 · A city built by enslaved people

The stake marking Terminus was driven in 1837 for the Western & Atlantic Railroad, and Southern railroads bought and hired enslaved workers almost exclusively to grade and build their lines.[1] Enslaved people were the young city's railroad builders, artisans, porters, cooks, and hired-out laborers.[2] By 1860 the town held 1,914 enslaved people; by 1863, 2,534, more than half of them women.[2]

A Capital B Atlanta investigation documented roughly twenty slave markets operating in pre-war Atlanta: at Whitehall Street near today's Five Points MARTA station, at Kenny's Alley in what is now Underground Atlanta, and a "slave stone" holding pen at the site of today's Garnett Station. As of that reporting, no historical marker names these sites or the people sold at them.[2] Fulton County itself was created in 1853.[3] Its Harm Report found that the assessed value of enslaved human beings supplied roughly a fifth of the county's early revenue, so taxation of Black bodies subsidized public services for white residents.[4]

1868-1908 · Convict leasing

After emancipation, Georgia leased its overwhelmingly Black prison population to private industrialists.[5][6] The largest Atlanta example was the Chattahoochee Brick Company (see the dedicated brief): up to 300,000 bricks a day made by leased convict labor under torture, purchased by the City of Atlanta by the millions to pave its streets and sidewalks.[6][7] Atlanta's own police force and municipal court, chaired and shaped by the brickyard's owner, supplied the arrests.[7][8] When leasing was abolished in 1908, county chain gangs continued forced Black labor on public roads.[5] Fulton County's Harm Report calculates roughly $1.78 billion in today's dollars of stolen convict-labor wages.[4][3]

1906 · The Massacre

On September 22, 1906, after newspapers competing over a white-supremacist governor's race printed four unsubstantiated "extra" editions alleging assaults on white women, mobs of thousands hunted Black Atlantans through downtown for days.[9] At least 25 Black residents were killed; estimates run past 40, and the count was officially suppressed.[9] On September 24 in Brownsville, police and militia disarmed and arrested some 250 Black residents, including college professors, who had armed in self-defense.[9] Black business was driven from downtown. Georgia's 1908 constitutional amendment then collapsed Black voting for two generations.[9] Walter White, who survived it at thirteen and later led the NAACP, wrote: "I knew then who I was."[10] The massacre went publicly unmarked until its centennial in 2006.[9]

1913-1962 · Segregation by design

  • 1913: Atlanta passed one of the nation's first racial zoning ordinances (the Ashley Ordinance).[35][11][12] When courts struck explicit racial zoning, the city hired planner Robert Whitten, whose 1922 plan simply mapped districts "R1 – white," "R2 – colored."[12]
  • 1938: The federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation mapped 111 Atlanta neighborhoods and graded each one for mortgage lenders; race determined the grade.[13] Sweet Auburn, then among the wealthiest Black streets in America, was redlined "hazardous," its appraisal sheet advising: "Property in this area, if acquired, should be sold as quickly as possible."[14][15]
  • 1960: A state highway report described the planned I-20 West corridor as "the boundary between the White and Negro communities." The racial intent was in writing, in an infrastructure plan.[16]
  • 1962: After a Black physician and D-Day veteran bought a home in Cascade Heights,[36] the City erected steel-and-wood barricades across Peyton Road, known as "Atlanta's Berlin Wall," to stop what white residents called "Negro encroachment."[37][38] A court struck it down within ten weeks.[17]

1954-1975 · Urban renewal and the highways

Expressway construction and urban renewal displaced roughly 67,000 Atlantans between 1956 and 1966, about one in seven residents, approximately 95% of them Black (Ronald Bayor's figure; the Partnership for Southern Equity cites ~70,000/95% for the interstates and urban renewal combined;[34] the University of Richmond's Renewing Inequality counts 14,000+ displaced within formally designated federal project areas alone; the record should keep both counts).[18][19][20] Buttermilk Bottom was leveled for a Civic Center; Washington-Rawson for the stadium; Summerhill and Mechanicsville were gutted for the interchange; Lightning was later erased for the Georgia World Congress Center and Dome.[18] The Downtown Connector was routed to sever Sweet Auburn.[16] Historian Ronald Bayor: "The original intention was to destroy that black business."[16]

1936-2011 · Public housing, built and demolished

Techwood Homes (opened 1936), the first federal public housing in America, was whites-only, and its construction cleared the racially integrated Tanyard Bottom community: 1,611 families displaced, none eligible to return.[21] Sixty years later, ahead of the 1996 Olympics, the city demolished Techwood/Clark Howell for the Olympic Village; only about 78 original households returned to the mixed-income replacement.[21] In the Olympics run-up, an estimated 30,000 poor, mostly Black residents were displaced and about 9,000 homeless people arrested, some on citations pre-printed with checkboxes for "homeless" and "African-American."[22][23] By 2011 the Atlanta Housing Authority had demolished essentially all ~14,000 units of its family public housing, the first major U.S. city to do so.[32][33]

2000-now · Harms that continue

  • Wealth: White Atlanta households hold a median $238,355 against $5,180 for Black households, a 46-to-1 gap (Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative).[24]
  • Mobility: Opportunity Insights ranks metro Atlanta 50th of the 50 largest metros for a poor child's chance of reaching the top fifth of incomes.[25]
  • BeltLine: homes within a half-mile appreciated 17.9% to 26.6% faster (2011-15), pressuring legacy Black homeowners through taxes; the project had delivered 2,153 of its promised 5,600 affordable units by 2020, fifteen years into the plan.[26][27]
  • Westside water: the ~95% Black Proctor Creek watershed carries chronic flooding and sewage legacies of Jim Crow-era infrastructure routing, and the ZIP codes now receiving flood-mitigation investment have each lost nearly one in five Black residents to "climate gentrification."[28][29]

The other half of the story

Against all of it: Sweet Auburn, "the richest Negro street in the world" (Fortune, 1956); Alonzo Herndon, born enslaved, building Atlanta Life; Citizens Trust Bank; the Atlanta University Center, the largest concentration of Black higher education on earth; and Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, where Martin Luther King Jr. was raised.[14][30] There is also a frequently cited policy precedent: Maynard Jackson's 1973 airport contracting mandate moved minority participation from under 1% to ~39% in five years, which supporters point to as evidence that deliberate municipal design can shift wealth at scale.[31]

Black Atlanta has a long record of answering exclusion with institution-building. Advocates describe a reparations process as a continuation of that tradition rather than an invention.

References

  1. Railroads and the Making of Modern America (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), "Slavery and Southern Railroads," railroads.unl.edu. Accessed July 2026.
  2. Capital B Atlanta, "Atlanta's Five Points Was Once a Slave Market," atlanta.capitalbnews.org. Accessed July 2026.
  3. Center for Civic Innovation, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force delivers Harm Report," civicatlanta.org. Accessed July 2026.
  4. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, The Harm Report (2025), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  5. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Convict Lease System," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  6. Atlanta Magazine, "For decades, prisoners were forced into unpaid labor at a brickyard along the Chattahoochee River. How will we remember them?" atlantamagazine.com. Accessed July 2026.
  7. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Chattahoochee Brick Company," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  8. Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (2008).
  9. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  10. Walter White, A Man Called White (1948).
  11. LeeAnn Lands, "A City Divided," Southern Spaces (2009), southernspaces.org. Accessed July 2026.
  12. Christopher Silver, "The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities," in June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, eds., Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (1997), newhumanityinstitute.org (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  13. Jason Rhodes, "Geographies of Privilege and Exclusion: The 1938 Home Owners Loan Corporation 'Residential Security Map' of Atlanta," Atlanta Studies (2017), atlantastudies.org. Accessed July 2026.
  14. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Auburn Avenue (Sweet Auburn)," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  15. Segregation by Design, "Atlanta: Redlining" (HOLC area D20 appraisal), segregationbydesign.com. Accessed July 2026.
  16. Atlanta Magazine, "Where It All Went Wrong," atlantamagazine.com. Accessed July 2026.
  17. Atlanta History Center, "Atlanta's Berlin Wall," atlantahistorycenter.com. Accessed July 2026.
  18. Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (1996).
  19. University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, "Renewing Inequality: Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race, 1950-1966," dsl.richmond.edu. Accessed July 2026.
  20. Joe Hurley, "Reassessing Urban Renewal in Atlanta and Beyond: A Review of Renewing Inequality," Atlanta Studies (2018), atlantastudies.org. Accessed July 2026.
  21. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Techwood Homes," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  22. Jean du Plessis, "Olympic scale of sport-induced displacement," Forced Migration Review, fmreview.org. Accessed July 2026.
  23. WBUR, "The Olympic Juggernaut: Displacing The Poor From Atlanta To Rio," wbur.org. Accessed July 2026.
  24. Atlanta Civic Circle, "How does Atlanta address its enormous racial wealth gap?" atlantaciviccircle.org. Accessed July 2026.
  25. SaportaReport, "Metro Atlanta is dead last when it comes to economic mobility," saportareport.com. Accessed July 2026.
  26. Daniel Immergluck and Tharunaya Balan, "Sustainable for Whom? Green Urban Development, Environmental Gentrification, and the Atlanta Beltline," Urban Geography 39 (2018).
  27. Next City, "The Atlanta Beltline Wants to Prevent Displacement of Longtime Residents," nextcity.org. Accessed July 2026.
  28. City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management, "Environmental Impact Bond," atlantawatershed.org. Accessed July 2026.
  29. Capital B News, "The Black Mecca's Climate Plan Is Costing Black Residents Their Homes," capitalbnews.org. Accessed July 2026.
  30. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Atlanta University Center," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  31. Black Enterprise, "Maynard Jackson: The Ultimate Champion for Black Business," blackenterprise.com. Accessed July 2026.
  32. Bloomberg CityLab, "By 2011, Atlanta Had Demolished All of Its Public Housing Projects. Where Did All Those People Go?" (May 8, 2014), bloomberg.com (archived). Accessed July 2026.
  33. Associated Press (via NBC News), "Atlanta to be first city without housing projects" (2009), nbcnews.com. Accessed July 2026.
  34. Partnership for Southern Equity, Opportunity Deferred: Race, Transportation, and the Future of Metropolitan Atlanta (2017), psequity.org (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  35. Atlanta Urban Archives, "Jackson Hill" (on the 1913 "Ashley Ordinance," named for Councilman Claude Ashley), atlurbanarchives.info. Accessed July 2026.
  36. AtlINtown/AtlINQ, "Civil Rights Giant and Activist Clinton E. Warner Jr., M.D., Succumbs at Age 87" (obituary; Omaha Beach, D-Day), atlinq.com. Accessed July 2026.
  37. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005), ch. 1 excerpt, press.princeton.edu (archived). Accessed July 2026.
  38. Archive Atlanta (podcast), "The Peyton Wall" episode notes, archiveatlantapodcast.com. Accessed July 2026.

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