Ending Slavery In Georgia

Although Georgia's law doesn't mention the word "slavery", it does mention "involuntary servitude" which we all know is simply another name for slavery to support the re-emergence of human labor trafficking and the companies (and governments) that profit  most from slavery via the convicting of Georgians (i.e. mass incarceration). Article 1, Section 22 of Georgia's Constitution states "There shall be no involuntary servitude within the State of Georgia except as a punishment for crime after legal conviction thereof or for contempt of court." Therefore, slavery IS indeed legal in Georgia, is at the root of Georgia's fascination with profiting from incarceration AND continues to feed its insidious legacy of racism!

Because of Georgia's "profit from lockups" model that incentivizes incarceration over rehabilitation and education through "lockup quotas", Georgia remains at the top of the list of Southern States that continues to funnel slaves into a criminal legal system for the sole purpose of holding onto slavery and to make a profit! Georgians (especially Black Georgians) are not only arrested at disproportionaet rates that their white counterparts with the same offenses but are arrested and convicted for the smallest of offenses, many of which are not "criminal" at all such as being poor, mentally ill or substance dependent (all of which should be addressed in ways that are humane, restorative and rooted in dignity such as treatment, social assistance, housing, employment or community service.

From Chattel Slavery to Neo Slavery (Modern Day Slavery)

Following the Emancipation Proclamation, incarcerated people—mostly black men—were “leased” for profit through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments, further proving that convict leasing was used get around the loophole in the 13th amendment (the exception) to reestablish what amounted to a new system of involuntary servitude AKA slavery decades after Abraham Lincoln declared “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

When the 13th amendment was passed, slave owners panicked at the thought of losing their "property" that provided free labor and as a result, exploited the loophole in the 13th amendment that stated slavery was illegal EXCEPT when used as a punishment for a crime, hence the creation of "Black Codes" that gave them a legal way to get slaves by locking up FREE black people for the simplest of "offenses" such as walking on grass, selling corn or flour and being unemployed (which isn't a crime at all). Incarceration boomed and led to "convict leasing" which was a practice

thousands upon thousands of formerly enslaved Blacks were criminalized for minor offenses like vagrancy, imprisoned and then “leased” out by prison wardens to private companies to be worked as free labor – hence the characterization of this and similar practices by Blackmon as “slavery by another name.” 

The Exploitation of Women & Girls with Hard Labor

Incarcerated women were doubly burdened, performing domestic duties in prison camps and in the homes of white families in addition to strenuous manual labor alongside incarcerated men. Even while performing demanding and dangerous tasks like breaking rock, shoveling and hauling wet clay, and baking brick near extremely hot kilns, incarcerated women were expected to wear “female clothing" and often subjected to sexual assault on a daily basis. Georgia was not only one of the first states to exploit the labor of incarcerated women for railroad construction; it also built the first all-female work camp in 1885 in Atlanta where the women were required to make the 40,000 odd bricks used to build the adjacent Fulton County Almshouse. In another female camp, the Bolton Broom Factory, women produced brooms. The number of incarcerated Black women far surpassed the number of incarcerated white women. While large numbers of Black men were arrested for vagrancy, many Black women were charged with minor offenses such as arguing or using profane language in public. (source: Women in Convict Camps)

The Chattahoochee Brick Company: A Grisly Stain on Georgia's Racist History

Atlanta was home to the infamous Chattahoochee Brick Co., owned by former Atlanta mayor James English who was known for helping move Georgia’s capital from Milledgeville to Atlanta. English oversaw one of Atlanta’s largest banks, and served as police commissioner. Founded in 1878, Chattahoochee Brick Company's labor was performed by the free and forced labor of primarily black people (men, women and children) who had been arrested for petty crimes (if any crimes at all). It is notable for its extensive use of convict lease labor, wherein hundreds of incarcerated African Americans worked in conditions similar to those experienced during antebellum slavery. It is speculated that some workers who died at the brickworks were buried on its grounds as there is a cemetary on the property. The brickworks was discussed in Douglas A. Blackmon's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name where he called it a “death camp" due to its horrific history of the ruthless and brutal use of African Americans as forced labor that left thousands permanently disabled and killed even more.

For 15 hours every day, hundreds of workers at Chattahoochee Brick shoveled red clay from the banks of the nearby river and Proctor Creek—when working at full capacity, it churned out 300,000 bricks every day. They dried the mud in rectangular molds in the open air, then hauled the blocks to 10-foot-tall, beehive-shaped, coal-fired kilns, where the fires burned so hot that security guards didn’t carry guns because heat might detonate their ammunition. (source: The Grisly History of the Chattahoochee Brick Company).  In 1908, Senator Thomas Felder launched a commission to investigate reports of gruesome and dangerous working conditions created by the state’s lucrative practice of leasing incarcerated people to private businesses. For three weeks, more than 120 witnesses—including former workers and guards at the Chattahoochee Brick Company, English’s 75-acre brickyard in northwest Atlanta—had testified about abuse at 14 prison camps across the state, which housed more than 3,400 men and 130 women. English defended himself before a panel of state lawmakers at the Georgia Capitol by insisting that if he had known of any abuse and cruelty towards the laborers by the warden or guards that he would have had them  indicted and prosecuted. News coverage of the testimony outraged the public, spurred faith leaders to condemn the practice, and inspired English’s competitors to promote their “nonconvict bricks.” By October, Governor Hoke Smith had called a special legislative session, the General Assembly had laid the framework for a referendum banning convict leasing, and Georgia’s nearly all-white electorate had approved the measure by a two-to-one margin. (Wheatley, 2021).

In 1908, the state outlawed the convict lease system, with the official end to the system occurring on March 31, 1909. of the next year. While company officials were initially concerned that the company would shut down due to the increased cost of labor, the plant continued producing bricks. However, the year after the convict lease system ended, the company reported a near-50% drop in annual brick production, with a significant increase in production costs as well. The Chattahoochee Brick Company would continue to operate at this site until the 1970s or 1980s, when it closed and another brickworks company began to operate at the site. In 2011, the property ceased to be an active brickworks and was demolished. (Wikipedia, 2023).

"Before the Civil War, police had rarely detained enslaved people, instead returning them to slavers for discipline", says Douglas Blackmon Pulitzer Prize winner author of Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). "After emancipation, Black men, women, and children were increasingly targeted and arrested for “crimes” such as loitering, spitting, walking along a railroad, and vagrancy. These misdemeanors were created or strengthened by Southern legislators to harass Black people or, worse, trap them into a penal system that provided virtually free labor primarily for emerging new industries in the South—such as Chattahoochee Brick and coal mines in north Georgia. Black citizens soon accounted for up to 90 percent of the prisoners in dozens of work camps across Georgia and the South. They would be leased to brickyards, turpentine camps, lumber yards, and factories. In Louisiana and Texas, workers built railroad lines and subsisted on “food buzzards would not eat,” Blackmon writes. In Alabama and north Georgia, convicts worked nearly 18 hours a day in coal mines—amid standing water, poisonous air, and frequent deadly explosions. In Atlanta, they baked bricks." (Blackmon, 2008).

Blackmon notes that the Chattahoochee Brick Company was one of dozens of forced labor camps in southern states, but is one of only a few with physical remains. It’s also significant in that it was the primary source of wealth for James English, who is referred to as the father of modern Atlanta. Convict labor made the factory extremely profitable; this allowed English to create a multitude of enterprises, some of which continue to this day, such as SunTrust Bank. Bricks from the company paved Atlanta’s streets and built its homes and buildings. Speaking of the site, Blackmon stated "This is not just a factory where people were treated badly. It’s a place where people were worked to death and buried in unmarked graves."“Hundreds of millions of these bricks are still in use today,” says Blackmon. “What happened there is still very much alive.” The conditions of the bricks’ creation also have contemporary echoes. While Blackmon says that what happened at the brick factory and other camps is different from the mass incarceration of black men and women today, they are related. “We have to be willing to candidly acknowledge our long history of oppressing African-Americans,” he says.“We have to be willing to candidly acknowledge our long history of oppressing African-Americans,” he says in an interview with Mimi Kirk (2017).

The convict lease system extracted enormous wealth from free Black Labor, filling the coffers of States and private companies in the South, including the Chattahoochee Brick Company – which generated so much wealth from this brutal system that it opened the 4^th National Bank, which evolved into the Wachovia Bank and eventually Wells Fargo. Untold numbers of Blacks, many of whom were in their teens and early twenties were worked to death on the grounds of the Chattahoochee Brick Company, never receiving a proper burial. As more and more information is unearthed about the real legacy of a Company whose bricks were used to construct hundreds of building in the Atlanta metro area, there is growing outrage and demand that the property/the grounds be consecrated as a Sacred Site. On April 3, 2021, over the Easter Weekend, a broad-based coalition of community and interfaith faith leaders gathered at the Chattahoochee Brick Company site to claim and declare the grounds a Sacred site to memorialize African Americans who died there working as forced laborers. People of faith, across all color lines, gathered to recognize the horror that happened at the site to condemn its history and the practice of the use of incarcerated labor.  (IBW21, 2021)

Oddly enough (and considering that the city of Atlanta currently profits from the leasing of incarcerated people), the city of Atlanta currently owns the land the Chattahoochee Brick Company sat on and operated and plans to convert the space into a park for the community.

The Roots of Wealth-Based Injustice (an excerpt from Atteeyah Hollie's 2023 ABA article "Criminalizing Poverty through the “Market in Incarcerated People”)

"The criminalization of poverty has become a hot-button issue in the last 15 to 20 years, but its roots date back to the Thirteenth Amendment. This watershed constitutional provision banned slavery “except as a punishment” for those convicted of a crime. With this devastating loophole, slavery morphed into another oppressive system—convict leasing—that derived free labor from Black people convicted of crimes ranging from murder to loitering, vagrancy, and not carrying proof of employment. Once convicted, poor Blacks had the false choice of either paying a court-ordered fine or slave labor (again). Unable to pay a fine, Black people convicted of a crime were forced into a system that replicated its predecessor’s brutality and money-making power. While convict leasing has ended, the system of mass incarceration that followed doesn’t look much different than the system it replaced. Today, we have what some researchers call a “market in incarcerated people,” a catch-all term for the “financial incentives and legal mechanisms that enable mass incarceration revenue streams, federal policy mandates, administrative and municipal actions.” When we think about those ensnared in this market, we cannot forget the Colbys, who, though free, are one missed payment away from a jail cell. We are stripping people of their freedom for reasons that have nothing to do with their underlying offense. Rather, the major focus in determining whether a formerly incarcerated person can remain free is whether they can pay to stay out of jail or off probation." (Hollie, 2023)

A 2015 study found that 2/3 of private prison contracts included "lockup quotas" which are occupancy guarantees that incentivizes private prisons, their investors, local and state governments to keep prison beds filled at any cost to satisfy the prison's revenue driven business model. These quotas and low-crime taxes put taxpayers on the hook for guaranteeing profits for private prison corporations.

Georgia's fascination with "tough on crime" policies and swiftness to incarcerate as opposed to implementing alternative sentencing is rooted in it's dependency on slavery, its refusal to let go of a supremacist, inhumane and oppressive system that prioritizes profits over people and it must end! Between the Black Codes , "lockup quotas", the bail system, probation and parole fees, Georgia has made BILLIONS off mass incareration and slavery by getting paid to lock people up (mostly Black people) then "selling & leasing" them to the highest bidder (city government, corporations, etc.). Using "slaves" is not only an exploitive, oppressive and inhumane practice akin to trafficking but it takes paying jobs away from people in the community!

TAKE ACTION! LET'S END SLAVERY IN GEORGIA

Georgia's continued use of slavery harms communities, especially Black communities, as its Black citizens are disproportionately subjected to arrest, are incarcerated fives times more than white people (Puglise, 2016) and are longer sentences than white people who commit the same crime which subjects them to being slaves, to lifelong debt (and guaranteed barriers that will put them back in prison) upon release via probation and parole and contributes to unemployment of newly released individuals as well as people on the outside who are denied these jobs for a wage. Incarcerating people costs Georgia taxpayers over $1 billion dollars annually and using slavery not only contributes to unemployment by stifles Georgia's economic growth!

 WE DON'T NEED TO USE SLAVERY TO BE ECONOMICALLY PRODUCTIVE, TO PUNISH OR TO "TEACH" SKILLS. The city of South Fulton proves that by NOT depending on slave labor! Let Georgia know that you do not support slavery in our state by signing our petition to END SLAVERY IN GEORGIA!

CITED SOURCES:

• To read more on the Black Codes and how they actually kept slavery alive and legal through mass incarceration, read the History Channel's Black Codes.
• Puglise, Nicole. (June 18, 2016). The Guardian. Black Americans incarcerated five times more than white people – report
• To read more on the roots and exploitation of leasing incarcerated humans for the sole purpose of holding on to slavery and to make a profit, read "The convict leasing system: Slavery in its worst aspects"
  
• Read Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and "Low-Crime Taxes" Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations to learn more about lockup quotas and how Georgia (and other states) are financially incentivized to incarcerate people, even for the simplest of offenses and even for offenses that aren't even a crime!
  
• Read about the 10 Companies That Use Prison Labor to Rake in Profits by not paying YOU but instead choose to exploit incarcerated people for their FREE labor but won't hire them when they get out!
• Read Atteeyah Hollie's 2023 American Bar Association's article Criminalizing Poverty Through the Market in Incarcerated People that explains how local and state governments "market in incarcerated people,” a catch-all term for the “financial incentives and legal mechanisms that enable mass incarceration revenue streams, federal policy mandates, administrative and municipal actions" and learn the two key reasons why probation is such an economic boon for for-profit companies.
• Chattahoochee Brick Company. Wikipedia.
• Blackmon, Douglas. (2008). Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
• Kirk, Mimi. (March 31, 2017). Bloomberg. Forced Laborers Built Atlanta's Streets. How Should the City Remember Them? Groups are pushing for a memorial and park on the site of a brick factory where leased convicts died more than a century ago—but two companies own the land.
• Purchase your copy of Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
• IBW21 (The Institute of the Black World 21st Century). (March 29, 2021). Press Release- The Infamous Chattahoochee Brick Company: Community Coalition, Faith Leaders to Declare Grounds A Sacred Site
• Video. IBW21. (September 4, 2021). Convict Leasing, Forced Labor, Theft of Black Wealth: The Case of the Chattahoochee Brick Company
• Wheatley, Thomas (August, 2021). Atlanta Magazine. For decades, prisoners were forced into unpaid labor at a brickyard along the Chattahoochee River. How will we remember them? The story of the Chattahoochee Brick Company proves how resurrecting history can lead to change, regardless of how much time has passed.
• Atlanta New First YouTube. 2022. City of Atlanta buys old brick company site, where convict leasing persisted.

SUGGESTED VIEWING:

Convict Leasing, Forced Labor, Theft of Black Wealth: The Case of the Chattahoochee Brick Company