Taskforce releases landmark report on lasting impact of slavery in Fulton county

A Georgia taskforce has released a landmark report that details the lasting impact of slavery and its afterlives in Fulton county.

The report, spanning more than 600 pages, is based on original research by the Fulton county reparations taskforce and a review of primary source documents. It is the first-of-its-kind in the nation, according to county leaders and researchers. Rather than examining the impact of slavery and racism at the federal or state level, the harm report investigated the role of the county government.

Policies and decisions made at the county level contributed to long-term harm for Black residents, the researchers found.

Before the civil war, enslaved Black people were counted as property. They generated significant tax revenue for the county – revenue from which they were prevented from benefiting. As enslaved people, they received no wages for their labor, though their work enriched others.

After the civil war, Black men made up a disproportionate percentage of forced workers in the convict leasing and chain gang systems, though Black women and children were also arrested under discriminatory laws. The county leased the people it arrested to private contractors and forced them “into unpaid labor for county and state projects, effectively extending slavery under another name”, the report concludes. Those workers “physically built Fulton County’s roads, bridges, and sanitation networks”.

The injustices continued through the Jim Crow era, with Black communities being forcibly displaced through eminent domain, racial terror in the form of dozens of documented lynchings in Fulton county and Black property owners being taxed at higher rates than white people. In 1933, during the Great Depression, the Fulton county board of assessors lowered the value of white-owned city and town property by 63%, but continued to levy Black residents at a higher rate and did not grant tax relief to Black residents. Through the final years of the Great Depression, the report found, Black-owned city and town property “carries a tax burden three to four times higher than that of whites”.

The cumulative effect of these decisions continue to impact Black residents today.

The taskforce unveiled its findings at a panel last week, which was held on the 162nd anniversary of the Compensated Emancipation Act. That act, signed into law eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation, was the first federal legislation to free a significant number of enslaved people.

In an attempt to quantify the financial impact of the county’s discrimination against Black residents, researchers created two theorems, the Dual Lens Hidden Disparities Theorem and the Extraction-Accumulation Harm Theorem, to translate the harms – stolen labor and lost wages – into dollar amounts. In just one decade, from 1854 to 1864, that labor translates to about $903bn, according to the report.