Fulton County reparations report estimates billions in harm to Black residents

A report from a volunteer group estimates that restitution for Black residents in Fulton County could be in the billions.

The Fulton County Reparations Task Force submitted a 636-page report to commissioners outlining the harms to Black residents perpetrated through slavery and discrimination in Georgia’s most populous county, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The report did not record one comprehensive amount for the damage and did not give recommendations for reparations, which is the next stage of the task force’s project.

“People like to talk about how these harms were done in the past and they’re no longer our responsibility, and we fundamentally disagree with that,” Amanda Meng, a task force member, told county commissioners last month. “A lot of our data in the study show that these inequities are still visible today, and we’re still responsible for them.”

Here are some key numbers from the report.

• In 1853, Fulton County received $75,000 from taxes based on the assessed value of enslaved people. That could equal between $2.4 million to $674 million today depending on the compound interest rate.
• After slavery was abolished, convict labor began in 1876 with Georgia’s first county chain gang in Fulton. The report calculated the total loss for Black convict laborers in Fulton County to be between $4.6 billion and $13.6 billion depending on if their wages were invested over time.
• Unequal access to the public library system during segregation resulted in the loss of $81 million to $1.7 billion in resources and services.

The commissioners approved extending the task force another 12-24 months to prepare a Repair Report.

Other places in Georgia are also looking to conduct research regarding the harm done to Black residents of the state. The Decatur Reparations Task Force plans to prepare a Harm Report as well as Atlanta’s Reparations Study Commission.