ATLRepair AtlantaReparations Study Commission

Study · Framework · 7 min read

Building the Harm Record: Methods That Held Up

How commissions turned archives into evidence and evidence into dollars: Fulton's extraction-accumulation accounting, California's per-year damages, takings audits, truth commissions, and what each requires.

After the SFFA ruling, courts left open one path for repair programs: a government repairing discrimination it can document itself committing.[1] The harm report is that documentation, which makes it the legal foundation for everything that follows. It also supplies the political mandate and the formal acknowledgment that other remedies build on. Four approaches have a track record.

1 · The municipal-records method (the Fulton model)

Fulton County's 636-page Harm Report was built almost entirely from the government's own records: tax digests, court files, jail registers, public-works ledgers, and marriage records, assembled by a task-force-directed team of 20+ researchers with Georgia Tech's DataWorks, the AUC Consortium as fiscal agent, and library special collections.[2][3][4][8] Cost: roughly $250K. Time: four years.[5]

Its quantification signature is Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado's Extraction-Accumulation Harm Theorem:[6][7]

H = Σ(PE + PA)(1 + r)^n

Total harm equals public extraction (revenue, labor, assets, and infrastructure government gained through slavery, racialized taxation, convict leasing, dispossession, and service denial) plus private accumulation (wealth individuals and firms took from Black labor and talent), compounded across generations.[6] Applied to Fulton: enslaved labor 1854-1864 worth $8.96M in historical dollars compounds to $1.3B at 3% interest, $34B at 5%, and $902B at 7%;[7] convict labor comes to $4.6B-$13.6B with compound interest;[7] double property-tax burdens and $5-vs-25¢ poll taxes documented from the digests themselves.[9][2]

Why it holds up: the evidence comes from the government's own files, which leaves little room to dispute the record. What it costs: years, archival patience, and volunteer stamina.

2 · Per-year damages formulas (the California model)

California's economics team (Craemer, Darity, Campbell, Spriggs, Mullen) put dollar figures on each category of harm, per year a person lived through it:[10]

  • Health (the life-expectancy gap multiplied by the standard dollar value governments use for a year of life): $13,619/year[10]
  • Over-policing and mass incarceration (1971-2020): $2,352/year[10]
  • Housing discrimination (1933-1977): $3,378/year[10]
  • Black business devaluation: ~$77,000 equivalent[10]
  • Unjust property takings: a case-by-case claims process (data insufficient for a formula)[11]

Total exposure estimates ran $500B to $800B.[12] The task force deliberately published methodologies rather than a headline number, and the methodologies outlived the backlash while San Francisco's flat "$5M per person" became a national attack line.[11][13] Anyone who lived in the state during a harm period is presumed harmed, with no individual proof required for each category.[10]

The method any city can borrow: pick one well-defined harm, set its time period from the record, and calculate per-year or per-property figures that can be checked and explained.

3 · Takings and property audits

Parcel-level research converts "displacement" from narrative to itemized record: the AEA's Black land-loss study compounded 16M lost acres into ≈$326B;[14] Fulton's Bagley Park chapter traced one Buckhead community's seizure to ~$60M of present-day land value;[2] Bruce's Beach required tracing the property's ownership history before land could return.[15] Atlanta's equivalents (urban renewal relocation rolls, Techwood and Olympic-era files, highway right-of-way acquisitions, tax sales) exist in city and county archives and in residents' deed boxes.

4 · Truth commissions and testimony

  • Greensboro TRC (2004-06): seven commissioners democratically selected from 67 community nominees; about 200 interviews and statements, including from police officers, Klansmen and Nazi Party members; three two-day public hearings; a 529-page report, completed despite the city council voting against endorsement.[16][17]
  • Maryland Lynching TRC (2019-25): county-by-county hearings where descendants of victims and perpetrators testified; final report December 2025, 630 pages, 84 recommendations including material compensation to victims' families and a permanent implementation body.[18]
  • EJI's community remembrance model: research, soil collection, narrative markers, dedication. The Fulton County Remembrance Coalition has carried this work through the county's 36 documented lynchings, with soil collected and markers placed at several sites.[19][20]

Care standards recur across these processes: trained statement-takers; testimony in venues survivors choose; private and anonymous options; counselors present; stipends for the labor of remembering; letting each person decide how their story may be used.[16][18] Testimony is evidence, and it is also someone reopening a wound in public. The processes that budgeted for care kept community trust, and the ones that did not lost it.

Who does the research

Four staffing models produced the reports above: university-anchored volunteer teams (Fulton: cheap, credible, slow),[2][3] state-staffed (California's DOJ attorneys: fast and professional, though the result reads as a government product),[21] paid community researcher corps (EJI-style: trust-building and capacity-building),[19] and outsourced consultants (Boston's split academic contracts ran three years late;[22] Asheville burned through two consultants;[23] Kansas City couldn't fund its scope[24]). Across cities, consultant-dependent processes stalled while in-house and university-anchored ones kept moving.

The survey asks Atlanta's path (full city report, chapters onto Fulton's foundation, rapid synthesis, or truth-hearings-first), the research model, which quantification methods to adopt, and the testimony care standards to guarantee.

References

  1. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), slip op. (recognizing "remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute" as a compelling interest), supremecourt.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  2. 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.
  3. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Fulton allocates funds for reparations research" (July 2023), ajc.com. 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. Fulton County Government, "Fulton County Approves Budget for Reparations Task Force" (Feb. 6, 2023), fultoncountyga.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  6. 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.
  7. Fulton County Reparations Task Force, Harm Report (2025), fultoncountyga.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  8. CBS News Atlanta, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force releases landmark report documenting centuries of harm" (Apr. 2026), cbsnews.com. Accessed July 2026.
  9. Center for Civic Innovation, "Fulton County Reparations Task Force delivers Harm Report" (Nov. 23, 2025), civicatlanta.org. Accessed July 2026.
  10. California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, "Final Report — Executive Summary" (June 2023), oag.ca.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  11. California Department of Justice, "California Reparations Task Force Unveils Comprehensive Final Proposals" (June 29, 2023), oag.ca.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  12. Associated Press (Janie Har), "Reparations could cost California more than $800 billion, economists estimate" (Mar. 2023), pbs.org. Accessed July 2026.
  13. San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, "Reparations Plan — Draft" (Dec. 2022), § 1.1, sf.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  14. Dania V. Francis, Darrick Hamilton, Thomas W. Mitchell, Nathan A. Rosenberg & Bryce Wilson Stucki, "Black Land Loss: 1920−1997," AEA Papers and Proceedings 112 (2022), aeaweb.org. Accessed July 2026.
  15. County of Los Angeles Chief Executive Office, "Bruce's Beach," ceo.lacounty.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  16. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Final Report — Executive Summary" (2006), archived at archive.org. Accessed July 2026.
  17. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report (May 25, 2006), pp. 34 (three two-day public hearings), 406 ("About 200 interviews were held and statements taken"), 519 (statement-giver list), 529 (final page); full report hosted by the McMaster University Truth Commissions project, truthcommissions.humanities.mcmaster.ca (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  18. Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Final Report" (Dec. 2025), msa.maryland.gov (PDF). Accessed July 2026.
  19. Equal Justice Initiative, "Community Remembrance Project," eji.org. Accessed July 2026.
  20. Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, "Stories from the Soil," fultonremembrance.org. Accessed July 2026.
  21. California Department of Justice, "AB 3121: Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans," oag.ca.gov. Accessed July 2026.
  22. The Boston Globe, "Where are Boston's reparations reports?" (June 17, 2026), bostonglobe.com. Accessed July 2026.
  23. Blue Ridge Public Radio, "Community Reparations Commission extends process; consultant 'steps back'" (Oct. 18, 2023), bpr.org. Accessed July 2026.
  24. KCUR, "Kansas City's reparations commission has been working for 2 years, but there's a lot left to do" (June 18, 2025), kcur.org. Accessed July 2026.

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