ATLRepair AtlantaReparations Study Commission

Study · Atlanta · 5 min read

Fulton County: A Harm Report Next Door

The nation's first county reparations task force spent four years and $250K producing a 636-page, quantified harm record, and Atlanta sits inside its geography. What it found, how it worked, and the options it opens for the City.

Atlanta begins its reparations study with an unusual inheritance: the county it sits in has already documented two centuries of harm, from primary records, with a formal economic methodology, and formally adopted the result.[1][2]

How the task force came to be

The Fulton County Reparations Task Force was created April 14, 2021 (Resolution #21-0277) by a 4-2 vote of the Board of Commissioners, sponsored by Commissioners Marvin S. Arrington Jr. and Natalie Hall with Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, with Chairman Robb Pitts among the four commissioners who appointed its members, after years of advocacy by organizer Marcus Coleman.[3][4][17] It was the first county-led reparations task force in the United States; Arrington cites Evanston as his inspiration.[4][5] It has fourteen unpaid seats (two per commissioner), chaired by Morehouse historian Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, with Coleman as vice chair and Georgia Tech's Dr. Amanda Meng as secretary.[4][6]

Funding was modest and contested: $250,000 approved in the FY2023 budget on a 4-3 vote, with roughly $210K flowing to the study through Atlanta University Center involvement; the AUC Consortium served as fiscal agent, meaning it held and administered the money.[7][8][9]

The research model

The Harm Report was written in-house by a task-force-directed team that grew from about five researchers to more than twenty, joined by Georgia Tech's DataWorks for tax and convict data, the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library's Special Collections, a Duke research fellow, and outside experts consulted on quantification.[10][4][9] The team retrieved 4,600+ documents in its preliminary phase and reports having identified every enslaver and enslaved person in Fulton County from 1850s records.[7][18] Four years produced one report.[1] The model was volunteer-dependent and slow, but grounded in primary sources and inexpensive.[4][2]

What the 636 pages say

Accepted by the Board of Commissioners on November 19, 2025 (the county describes it as "accepted and adopted") and publicly released April 16, 2026 at the Auburn Avenue Research Library,[1][2][10] the report is organized as seven parts (Stolen Freedom and Labor; On the Backs of Black People; The Black Taxpayer's Burden; Social, Political, and Economic Control; Racial Terror; Overtaxed and Underserved; Statutes) built from the county's own tax digests, court files, and public-works ledgers.[11][12] Its distinctive method is Sims-Alvarado's Extraction-Accumulation Harm Theorem, written as H = Σ(PE + PA)(1 + r)^n. In plain terms: add up what government extracted from Black residents (taxes, labor, assets) and what private parties accumulated from Black labor, then compound the total across generations the way interest compounds.[13][11]

Headline findings:

  • Enslaved people's assessed value supplied roughly 20% of the county's early revenue, meaning Black bodies were taxed to subsidize services for white residents.[5]
  • Stolen enslaved labor 1854-1864: $8.96M in historical dollars, which the report compounds to $1.3 billion at 3% interest, $34 billion at 5%, and $902 billion at 7% under the extraction-accumulation model.[11][10]
  • Convict and chain-gang labor: unpaid wages of $796.8M in adjusted dollars, or roughly $4.6 billion to $13.6 billion with compound interest, from labor that physically built county roads, bridges, and sanitation.[11]
  • Black landowners historically bore more than double the property-tax burden of whites; the Reconstruction-era poll tax was $5 for Black residents against 25 cents for whites.[12][10]
  • Bagley Park: a prosperous Black Buckhead community dismantled in the 1930s-40s through Klan intimidation and official action, on land assessed near $60M today; one family's taking alone is valued at ~$15M.[10][4]
  • At least 36 racial-terror lynchings documented in Fulton (1877-1950), the most of any Georgia county, analyzed under the UN Genocide Convention and the UN Basic Principles on reparation, with data from EJI and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition.[15][11]

The report's conclusion is direct: "acknowledgment alone is not enough. Justice now demands repair."[11]

Where the county is now

The Board extended the task force 24 months.[16][1] Its Repair Report (recommendations on eligibility, funding mechanisms, and remedy design, with direct payments, community investment, housing assistance, and scholarships all named as possibilities) is due December 31, 2027.[10][14][5][12]

References

  1. Appen Media, "Fulton County extends Reparations Task Force two years," appenmedia.com. Accessed July 2026.
  2. Fulton County Government, "Fulton County Commissioner Marvin S. Arrington, Jr. to Host Panel Discussion as Reparations Taskforce Releases Harm Report" (Apr. 14, 2026), fultoncountyga.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  3. Fulton County Board of Commissioners, "A Resolution Creating and Establishing the Fulton County Reparations Task Force" (adopted Apr. 14, 2021), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  4. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force Report: April 2021 – January 2023," fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  5. Atlanta News First, "Fulton County reparations task force releases 600-page report detailing slavery, Jim Crow toll" (Apr. 16, 2026), atlantanewsfirst.com. Accessed July 2026.
  6. Fulton County Government, "Reparations Task Force," fultoncountyga.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  7. Fulton County Government, "Fulton County Approves Budget for Reparations Task Force" (Feb. 6, 2023), fultoncountyga.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  8. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Fulton allocates funds for reparations research" (July 2023), ajc.com. Accessed July 2026.
  9. Fulton County Reparations Task Force Executive Committee, "Update Letter" (Jan. 22, 2025), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  10. Adrianne Murchison, "Fulton Reparations Task Force quantifies harm tied to county's role in slavery, Jim Crow," SaportaReport (Apr. 2026), saportareport.com. Accessed July 2026.
  11. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, Harm Report (2025), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF, 636 pp). Accessed July 2026.
  12. Center for Civic Innovation, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force delivers Harm Report" (Nov. 23, 2025), civicatlanta.org. Accessed July 2026.
  13. Morehouse College News, "Dr. Sims-Alvarado Discusses Key Findings of Fulton County Reparations Task Force Harm Report With WABE," news.morehouse.edu. Accessed July 2026.
  14. CBS News Atlanta, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force releases landmark report documenting centuries of harm" (Apr. 2026), cbsnews.com. Accessed July 2026.
  15. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, "Stories from the Soil," fultonremembrance.org. Accessed July 2026.
  16. WSB-TV, "Fulton County commissioners extend reparations taskforce for 24 months" (Nov. 20, 2025), wsbtv.com. Accessed July 2026.
  17. WSB-TV, "Metro Atlanta celebrates Juneteenth, many say more work needs to be done" (June 2021; Marcus Coleman's advocacy via Save Ourselves), wsbtv.com; appointments per the task force's 2021-2023 report (ref 4). Accessed July 2026.
  18. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, ratified minutes (Mar. 7, 2024; researcher Christopher Smothers on identifying enslavers and enslaved people from 1850s records), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.

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