Between 1885 and 1909, thousands of people—mostly Black men—were enslaved through the convict leasing system in Georgia, forced to work under brutal, dehumanizing conditions.
Though Congress formally abolished chattel slavery in 1865, the 13th Amendment included a loophole: slavery remained legal as “punishment for a crime.” Southern states seized on this language as a legal workaround. With the plantation economy in ruins and white supremacy threatened, they passed Black Codes—laws designed to criminalize Black existence and funnel newly freed people back into forced labor.
Petty charges like “vagrancy,” loitering, or speaking too loudly to a white woman were enough to get someone arrested and leased to a private company. In reality, many of these charges were entirely fabricated. But with incarceration came profit—for the state, for local officials, and for wealthy industrialists eager to rebuild the South’s infrastructure.
James Warren English (1837-1925)
At the Chattahoochee Brick Company—one of the most notorious offenders in Georgia —these "leased" men lived in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. They suffered from malnutrition, scurvy, and untreated infections. They worked from sunup to sundown under the constant threat of violence, often whipped multiple times a day.
These men didn’t just make bricks, they bled and died for them.
The brickyard itself operated under several names over the years. It was founded in 1878 by James W. English,
J. W. Murphy, and Benjamin G. Lockett, and originally named B. G. Lockett & Company. Prison record keepers often referred to it as "English & Murphy," perhaps as a way to delineate between the brickyard from B.G. Lockett's cotton plantation in Albany.
In 1885, the company was formally incorporated as the Chattahoochee Brick Company with Captain James W. English and W. B. Lowe as sole owners.
In 1904, convict leasing ended at Chattahoochee Brick, but not before making James W. English and others among the most wealthy in the city of Atlanta.
These men built generational wealth on the exploitation of Black labor while maintaining a veneer of moral respectability—able to say they never owned slaves, while profiting off a system that recreated slavery in all but name.
Many official records were lost to fire. What remains are fragments—scattered pieces of a much larger and more disturbing puzzle. Add to that the hush-hush side deals, political favors, and corruption that kept the operation running, and it becomes nearly impossible to trace every person who was imprisoned there or what ultimately became of them.
Some were funneled through the site and sold off elsewhere, in scenes reminiscent of Sunday slave auctions before Emancipation. Others (again, mostly Black men) remained on-site, locked into a daily rhythm of physical abuse, hunger, and backbreaking labor.
The 1900 census tells us that more than 300 people were incarcerated at the site. Fewer than 10 percent were white—a strikingly disproportionate figure given the broader demographics of Atlanta and the prison system. It’s a clear reflection of how race, economics, and power coalesced into a new form of slavery—one that many white families would later deny having any part in, even as they inherited its spoils.
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