The City of Atlanta purchased the Chattahoochee Brick Company site in August 2022. Since then, City staff and various stakeholders have met regularly to discuss plans for site remediation, development, and use. This event will give attendees an opportunity to hear from selected stakeholders and to learn about the work done on the site to date. Speakers also will talk about the complexity of transforming the site from its former use to one that not only memorializes those who worked (and possibly died) there, but also one that will serve the needs of Atlanta residents today. Additionally, Professor Clarissa Myrick-Harris will talk about the importance of memorialization and atonement as they relate to Atlanta’s Black history and culture.

This lecture will feature a local scholar whose work focuses on the history of the Native peoples who inhabited the area that would become the City of Atlanta—and home to the Chattahoochee Brick Company. The indigenous peoples and their cultures that existed during The Mississippian Period (A.D. 800-1600) were some of the most advanced and complex that ever existed in North America. With the onset of European invasions, however, these peoples and their way of life quickly declined. Those who remained engaged in ongoing struggles not only to retain their land and culture, but also to adapt to a new reality. This second session will cover some of this history as well as the forced dispossession of indigenous peoples and the Georgia land lottery that opened the land to European colonization.

A local scholar will discuss nineteenth-century events that directly impacted African Americans (enslaved and free) and led to the convict leasing system—a practice that, for all intents and purposes, re-enslaved Black people, especially men and young boys. Topics covered during this seminar include Black enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Amendments, Black Codes/Jim Crow Laws, and convict leasing in the State of Georgia.

Civil War veteran (CSA), businessman, Atlanta councilman, mayor and police commissioner, James W. English (1837-1925) would become a controversial figure in Georgia and U.S. history. Born in Louisiana just outside New Orleans, English moved to Atlanta in the mid-1800s. At its peak, his signature business, the Chattahoochee Brick Company, produced between 200-300 thousand bricks per day. And while businesses like Chattahoochee Brick were the fuel that powered the second U.S. Industrial Revolution, labor shortages on farms, low pay, deplorable living conditions for laborers, child labor, urban pollution, unregulated sewage, and water contamination were some of the negative side effects the country paid for greater production and profits. This seminar will look at James English and the late nineteenth-century practices of industry, labor, and environmental degradation.

Many Atlanta residents are unaware of the enormous quantity of brick required to build the city we know today. Not only were buildings made of brick, but also streets, sewers, and sidewalks. This seminar will provide valuable information about brick and its role in building the Gateway City. The talk also will explore the dynamics of race in the city “too busy to hate,” as Atlanta’s built environment is racial—then, and now. The Chattahoochee Brick Company site, and its practices, provide meaningful insights into matters of race, social politics, and crime reform that are relevant today.