Fulton County, Georgia's most populous jurisdiction and home to Atlanta, has released a sweeping 600-page report documenting how slavery and subsequent racist policies systematically stripped wealth from Black residents and funneled it into public coffers and private fortunes.
The report, produced by a county reparations taskforce, is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation to examine slavery's economic damage through a local government lens rather than federal or state frameworks. Researchers analyzed how county decisions, policies, and practices created generational harm that persists today.
The financial toll is staggering. Researchers calculated that enslaved labor in Fulton County between 1854 and 1864 alone generated approximately $903 billion in value. During that same decade, enslavers were exempted from paying $8.9 million in wages while Georgia collected only $149,316 in taxes and the county collected $74,544.
Before the Civil War, enslaved Black people were legally counted as taxable property. Their labor generated substantial revenue for county coffers, yet they received nothing. After emancipation, the exploitation continued through convict leasing and chain gang systems, where Black residents arrested under discriminatory laws were forced into unpaid labor on county and state infrastructure projects. These workers, according to the report, physically constructed Fulton County's roads, bridges, and sanitation networks.
The Jim Crow era brought additional layers of theft. Black communities were forcibly displaced through eminent domain seizures. Documented lynchings terrorized residents. Property tax discrimination became systematic and severe. In 1933, during the Great Depression, the county's board of assessors slashed the assessed value of white-owned city and town property by 63 percent but refused similar relief to Black residents. Throughout the 1930s, Black-owned urban properties carried tax burdens three to four times higher than comparable white properties.
A specific case illustrates the magnitude of loss. After the Civil War, Black settlers established Macedonia Park, later known as Bagley Park, which became a thriving community with grocery stores, restaurants, barbershops, and other businesses. William Bagley and his wife settled there in 1912 after fleeing racial violence elsewhere in Georgia, eventually owning multiple parcels of land.
In the 1930s, Fulton County commissioners, working with the Ku Klux Klan, dismantled the community. Klan members marched openly in robes to intimidate residents into leaving. The land, now worth approximately $60 million and developed as Buckhead under city of Atlanta ownership, was seized from Black families who had built wealth there. Property that belonged to William Bagley's family would be valued at roughly $15 million today.
Elon Butts Osby, Bagley's granddaughter, attended the report's unveiling and serves on the reparations taskforce. Her family's loss exemplifies the hidden dimension of the county's development.
The taskforce presented its findings at a panel discussion held on the 162nd anniversary of the Compensated Emancipation Act, the first major federal legislation freeing a significant number of enslaved people, signed eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Fulton County commissioners have not yet decided on reparations. The taskforce, extended through at least 2027, will develop formal recommendations ranging from direct cash payments to community investments and policy changes, which will require a board vote.
Author James Rodriguez: "The county has finally quantified what everyone knew but nobody could prove with precision: systematic theft on a massive scale, documented and authorized by the same government that now must decide what justice looks like."
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