Forced Laborers Built Atlanta's Streets. How Should the City Remember Them?

There’s a spot by the Chattahoochee River northwest of downtown Atlanta where you’ll find remnants of an old brick factory: chunks of rusted metal, blocks of cement, shards of bricks. The wooded floodplain may seem serene today, but it was once the site of a cruel practice common during southern Reconstruction: forced labor. Around the turn of the 20th century, James English, a Civil War veteran and former mayor of the city, leased convicts—most of whom were black—from the state to make hundreds of thousands of bricks a day in his Chattahoochee Brick Company.

The convicts, who had largely been arrested for “crimes” such as vagrancy, were treated with incredible brutality. They were shackled to their beds at night, starved, and savagely beaten. “This was a place of unspeakable horror,” says Douglas Blackmon, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon says that thousands and thousands of forced workers passed through the company. “This is not just a factory where people were treated badly,” he says. “It’s a place where people were worked to death and buried in unmarked graves.”