The Chattahoochee Brick Company Memorial, Greenspace and Park board held its quarterly meeting at the Northwest Library at Scotts Crossing on Dec. 11 as the members continued to inch along a lengthy community input process.
An 11-member advisory board was appointed by the city of Atlanta to oversee the entire transformation of the fraught Chattahoochee Brick Company site into a memorial and city park.
The board’s mission is to promote public trust and engage in a transparent, thoughtful, inclusive and collaborative process for the visioning, planning, designing and redevelopment of the site.”
The Chattahoochee Brick Company’s 77-acre plot of land was the site of injustice from 1880 to 1908, when the brick manufacturer used local prisoners for back-breaking slave labor. Many workers died in the horrific, inhumane conditions.
In 2022, The City of Atlanta purchased the site after years of negotiations with plans to transform it from a dark site to a place that memorializes the treatment of the brick workers. It kicked off what will be a years-long process as the city gathers input and decides what exactly the memorial will look like.
At the Dec. 11 meeting, the board members made a key step in their process – adding the final member. Tony Lowe was officially welcomed to the group after his arrival was postponed from the Sept. 25 meeting.
Lowe is an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Social Work. He focuses on workplace safety issues, supervisory decision making and barriers to service access for people of color. He’ll join a board composed of community advocates, leaders and experts.
The board’s work is still in its early stages. Recently members visited The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Ala. The museum, founded by the Equal Justice Initiative, displays the history of slavery and racism in America.
It’s part of a three-site history experience in Montgomery: The Legacy Museum, which shows interactive content, historical accounts and a world-class art gallery, a six-acre memorial for victims of terror lynchings called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and a 17-acre Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.
Board member Keith Sharpe said his biggest takeaway was questions regarding what form the brick company memorial will take and if it will be more of a museum or memorial.
“I felt that since ours is in addition to a memorial, a park and green space, that experience has some very immediate relevant impact and relevance to the planning effort that is ongoing here,” Keith Sharpe said. “It made me think about what is the scope of our work, of this planning effort?”
Board member Erik Wilder posed a similar question, asking how interactive the site should be. The Legacy Museum in Montgomery is heavily interactive, thanks to varying types of technology. Other sites, like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice are less “interactive.” Wilder asked if the site should be “engaging and transforming pain into power.”
“Or is it going to be something where it’s standing and bearing witness to the pain and then taking that with you when you’re hurting when you go home?” Wilder asked. “I hope we can do both.”
Some board members cited concern about “mission creep” across the project, where the scope will potentially shift and broaden from the brick company victims to general civil rights in Georgia.
Ultimately, though, the board stressed their input is purely in an advisory capacity. No board member will make decisions for the city-led project – rather, they will be receiving feedback and leading listening sessions for the community. Eventually, the city will put out a request for proposals and vendors will submit their own for a chance to earn the conceptual design contract.
“We are soaking up all the feedback,” one board member said.
Project Director Andrew Walter, who wasn’t able to attend the Dec. 11 meeting, sent along a message to the board that the city has reached an agreement with a pre-construction consulting team. The city is in a “blackout period” so the consulting firm cannot be publicly announced until the contract is authorized at a City Council meeting in early 2025.
Once official, the consulting firm will work for approximately a year and a half on gathering community engagement and pre-planning the project to prepare it for actual construction stages.
It’s a lengthy process that includes environmental cleanup and remediation funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and promoting public trust in the project.
The board said they will host another community engagement session on Jan. 17, a breakfast in the park with a walk and talk about history. More details can be found through Atlanta’s Department of City Planning.
See Kelly Jordan’s photos from the city’s acquisition ceremony in September 2022 here.
