ATLRepair AtlantaReparations Study Commission

Study · Atlanta · 5 min read

Chattahoochee Brick: Convict Leasing and the City It Built

The brickyard where leased convicts made the bricks that paved Atlanta, the probable burial ground on its banks, and the memorial now being designed with the community.

If Atlanta's reparations process has a single site where history is physical, it is 77 acres at the confluence of the Chattahoochee River and Proctor Creek.[1]

The operation

The Chattahoochee Brick Company was founded in 1878 and controlled by Captain James W. English: Confederate veteran, Mayor of Atlanta (1881-83), longtime chairman of the Atlanta police commission, and president of what became Fourth National Bank.[2][3] By the 1890s English's penitentiary interests controlled more than 1,200 leased convicts statewide, with about 150 at the brickyard producing 200,000 to 300,000 bricks per day, which made it Georgia's largest brickmaker.[2][3][4]

The labor force was Georgia's convict-lease system: men, women, and children, up to 90% Black, swept into custody for offenses like vagrancy or "walking along a railroad," then leased to private industry.[3][4][5] A 1908 Georgia legislative investigation, later documented in Douglas Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning Slavery by Another Name, recorded the conditions at Chattahoochee Brick: rotting food, prisoners "driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant," fifteen-hour days at a run, and a guard's testimony of "between two hundred and three hundred whippings a month."[2][3] Men died there.[2] Accounts passed down through testimony describe burials in unmarked ground, and bodies thrown into the kilns.[3][4]

The city was the customer and the supplier

This is what places Chattahoochee Brick directly inside the Commission's assignment, which covers the City of Atlanta's own actions. Blackmon: "The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of these bricks and used them to pave the streets and sidewalks in the city in the first decades of the 20th century."[4] The bricks sit "in the foundations of almost every building in Atlanta that predates 1910."[13] The laborers arrived through Atlanta police arrests and municipal court convictions while the brickyard's owner chaired the police commission.[2][3] The city bought the product of torture from the man whose police filled the yard.[3][4] When leasing was abolished in 1908, the company's production fell by nearly half, a measure of how much of its profit came from stolen labor.[2][5]

The site now

  • Community leader Donna Stephens and Groundwork Atlanta fought off a fuel-terminal plan for the property; in April 2021 an interfaith coalition declared the grounds a Sacred Site.[4][6] The Chattahoochee Brick Company Descendants Coalition anchors the community's voice.[6] Stephens: "It's like slavery ended and then Dr. King showed up."[4]
  • The Conservation Fund purchased the ~77-acre site and transferred it to the City of Atlanta in August 2022 for a memorial, greenspace, and river access.[1]
  • In 2025 the City contracted a design team led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture with MASS Design Group's Public Memory & Memorials Lab, with New South Associates and Jones Archeology conducting archaeology and Chrysalis Lab leading engagement.[7][8]
  • June 2026: the City announced that ground-penetrating radar scans conducted in late May identified soil disruption consistent with shallow graves, a potential burial site of convict laborers. (Earlier scans reported at a March community meeting had found no burials.)[9] Non-invasive work continues.[9] If confirmed, the finding would make the site one of the country's most significant memorial grounds of the convict-lease era.
  • July 25, 2026: the project team presents concept design alternatives at a public community meeting, with a preferred concept due October 1, 2026.[8][10] In the UN's five categories of repair, memorials count as "satisfaction."[11] This one is being designed right now, and attending is a direct way to take part.

What it offers the reparations process

  1. The harm has names (English), instruments (police commission, municipal court, city procurement), dollar trails (brick purchases), and victims.[3] Records of this kind hold up under both historical scrutiny and legal challenge.
  2. Memory work can feed repair work. Tulsa's mass-graves archaeology and DNA descendant program show where this can lead: identifying victims, building a registry of descendants, and creating records that support everything that follows.[12]
  3. The corporate trail. Some of today's institutions descend directly from the companies involved: English's bank merged into what became one of the South's largest financial institutions, eventually absorbed into Wachovia.[2][13] Advocates argue the Commission's funding conversations (see funding models) could include institutions whose balance sheets trace to leased labor.
  4. Descendant leadership. The Descendants Coalition's role in defeating the fuel terminal, and its place in the memorial process since, is Atlanta's clearest example of descendants organizing to influence what happens on a harm site. How much formal decision power descendants should hold is a question the survey asks directly.[4][6]

References

  1. The Conservation Fund, "Conservation as Racial Justice in Atlanta," conservationfund.org. Accessed July 2026.
  2. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Chattahoochee Brick Company," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  3. Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (2008).
  4. 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.
  5. New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Convict Lease System," georgiaencyclopedia.org. Accessed July 2026.
  6. Institute of the Black World 21st Century, "The Infamous Chattahoochee Brick Company: Community Coalition, Faith Leaders to Declare Grounds A Sacred Site" (press release, April 2021), ibw21.org. Accessed July 2026.
  7. SCAPE, "Chattahoochee Brick Company Memorial, Greenspace, and Park," scapestudio.com. Accessed July 2026.
  8. Rough Draft Atlanta, "Historic Chattahoochee Brick site to become public space," roughdraftatlanta.com. Accessed July 2026.
  9. WABE, "Archaeologists find potential burial sites at Chattahoochee Brick Company property" (June 24, 2026), wabe.org (archived). Accessed July 2026.
  10. City of Atlanta, "Chattahoochee Brick Co. and Atlanta RiverLands: Community Engagement," chattbrickriverlands.atlantaga.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  11. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 60/147, "Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law" (2005), documents.un.org (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  12. City of Tulsa, "1921 Graves Investigation," cityoftulsa.org. Accessed July 2026.
  13. Democracy Now!, "Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon" (interview transcript, July 11, 2008), democracynow.org. Accessed July 2026.

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