How do you measure the impact of a wound so deep and gaping that it still reverberates today?

A wound of that magnitude denotes harm.

The Fulton County Reparations Task Force drew on an abundance of documents and data to “quantify harm” against Black people during slavery and the Jim Crow era. The result: a loss of trillions of dollars to descendants, Fulton County Commissioner Marvin S. Arrington Jr. said.

Arrington joined task force leaders — Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado and Dr. Amanda Meng — in presenting the “Fulton County Reparations Task Force Harm Report” during a panel discussion on Thursday at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. The findings have been published in a 615-page hardcover book.

The panel was moderated by Ann Hill Bond, a research committee member. Marcus Coleman, vice chair of the task force, was also in attendance.

“They’ve documented over $1 trillion worth of harm by Fulton County,” Arrington said.

Last month, the United Nations approved a resolution recognizing the enslavement of Africans as crimes against humanity and urging reparations. While 52 countries abstained, the United States, Argentina and Israel voted against the resolution.

The Harm Report states that Fulton County “stole over $8.9 million in labor from over 4,200 enslaved Black individuals between 1854 and 1864.”

The Fulton County Commission established the task force in 2021 and approved a $250,000 budget in 2023 for the first phase of research. A team of more than 20 researchers conducted investigations, analyzed data and reviewed findings, including work with Georgia Tech’s DataWorks.

Sims-Alvarado, chair of the task force and an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College, said she consulted external experts, including a friend who worked at NASA, to review a formula developed to measure harm.

“… This is what the government took from the value of black lives — what was taken from Black people in order to build the county, the infrastructure, ” Karcheik Sims-Alvarado said, explaining parts of the formula. “[And] what is the wealth collected by individuals who resided in Fulton County. This is where we begin to look at the profiteers of slavery.”

The report also examines disparities in taxation during the post-Civil War period. It found that free Black people were required to pay a $5 poll tax, compared to 25 cents for White residents.

“The poll tax was actually a head count for being in the county. It’s not for voting,” Sims-Alvarado said.

The report says that the exploitation of Black labor during slavery and the economic structures of Jim Crow helped build generational wealth for white landowners while systematically denying that same opportunity to Black residents.

One example cited in the report is the dismantling of Bagley Park, also known as Macedonia Park, a once-thriving Black community in Buckhead that the task force says illustrates the exertion of social, political and economic control.

According to the report, Black residents began settling there after the Civil War. William Bagley and his wife resettled there in 1912 after fleeing racial violence in Forsyth County.

Bagley had owned 60 acres of land in Forsyth, the report states. He later acquired six of his 10 lots in Buckhead for $2,100.

In Buckhead’s Bagley Park, Black residents operated grocery stores, restaurants, a barbershop and other businesses. But in the 1930s, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, along with civic groups and the Ku Klux Klan, moved to dismantle the community, citing unsanitary and rundown conditions, according to the report.

“On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons in the 1930s and 40s, the Ku Klux Klan would hold parades to clear Blacks from the Buckhead business district,” the report states. “In full robes, they paraded from their sheet factory on Roswell Road through the business district and back.”

The parcel that comprises Bagley Park, now owned by the city of Atlanta, had an assessed value of nearly $60 million in 2025, the report shows.

“That’s just 40 percent of the retail value,” Sims-Alvarado said.

Bagley’s granddaughter, Elon Butts Osby, is a member of the task force and was in the audience for the panel discussion.

“… If the community had not been displaced, the value of her family’s land would be $15 million today,” Sims-Alvarado added.

The task force has until December 31, 2027 to present its final recommendations to the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.

In the meantime, Arrington said the group plans to broaden the conversation around the Harm Report and potentially share its findings with the United Nations.

“We have to take this conversation national and international,” Arrington said. “We do have to make this conversation larger and bigger than life, because this moment is larger and bigger than life… Acknowledgment is the first step in reparations.”

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