Fulton County Commission approves $250,000 budget to study reparations to Black residents

ATLANTA - Just two days after Martin Luther King Day, the civil rights icon’s dream for the descendants of African slaves got a step closer to coming true in his birth place of Fulton County. Commissioners voted last month to approve $250,000 in funding for its Reparations Task Force.

"For Dr. King, before his assassination, reparations for slaves was a top priority on his plate," Reparations Task Force Vice-Chair Marcus Coleman said.

The task force was created in 2021 to investigate and make recommendations to the Fulton County Board of Commissioners around the possibility of providing reparations to the county’s Black residents. 

The group requested the funding to conduct a study on whether the county owes its Black residents for the sins of slavery, Jim Crow and the effects of "Urban Renewal"—and if so how much. District 5 Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. is one of the county leaders advocating for that study.

"It is so important for the research to be done," he told FOX 5.

Dr. Karcheik Sims-Alvarado, Chairwoman of the Reparations Task Force, is one of the researchers conducting the study. She said they’ve already combed through around 4,600 historical documents in search of those answers.

"We’re compiling that data and we’re asking ourselves what does this mean for a race of people, a group of people who’ve been wronged over multiple centuries?" she said.

In a 2023 report submitted to the board, they identified two potential cases for reparations—the first concerning land taken from William Bagley and other Black property owners in the 1940s where Buckhead’s Bagley Park now sits.

"They were removed off their property due to eminent domain and displaced," Sims-Alvarado explained.

A second area of study is on the use of convict labor in Fulton County.

"The Chattahoochee Brick Company convict labor camp has received quite a bit of attention over the last 10 years but what we learned in our research is that there were convict camps all over the county," Sims-Alvarado added.

She told FOX 5 they’re still working to determine qualifications for reparations—on an even broader scale—but that the task force’s research is ongoing.

The Reparations Task Force will begin putting together the report for this round of funding in April. They’ll present their findings in October of 2024.