Chattahoochee Brick

Graffiti/mural/urban art observed in Northwest Atlanta near the former Chattahoochee Brick Works.

The Chattahoochee Brick Works represent a most deplorable period in the history of Atlanta. In the history of America.  Chattahoochee Brick was owned by Civil War veteran and one-time (1881 to 1883) Atlanta mayor Capt. James English.  The company manufactured many of the bricks used to construct Atlanta's streets and some of its oldest neighborhoods, achieving high levels of productivity and realizing huge profits in the process. However, the productivity and profits were the result of leasing convict laborers from the city and subjecting them to brutal discipline and cruel deprivation.  Most of the convicts were black, and many were arrested for petty crimes like vagrancy. 

Guards reported that at the brickyard, prisoners were forced to work under unbearable circumstances, fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens.  One guard estimated that 200 to 300 laborers were flogged each month.  

Captain English denied that he or any member of his family had ever directed an act of cruelty against any convict and insisted he only used convict labor to do "work that a white man cannot and will not perform. " Yet he routinely violated the law by buying and selling the leases on convict laborers and transferring them as if they were slaves. A witness reported, "On Sunday afternoons, white men frequently met in the yard of the English brick factory to swap or buy black men, little changed from the slave markets of a half century earlier."

“Chattahoochee Brick was a place of absolute horror,” said Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name.  There’s an overwhelming body of evidence, said Blackmon, “that this was essentially a death camp.”

The story of Chattahoochee Brick and Reconstruction-era convict labor are sad, tragic chapters in America's history of racial relations.  At least things aren't like that anymore, right?