Updated Wednesday at 9:48 a.m.
Atlanta-based railroad Norfolk Southern is leasing property in northwest Atlanta for a rail terminal. The location had been the site of a brick factory that used forced convict labor, and advocates had hoped to block any industrial development there and build a memorial and a park instead.
Norfolk Southern is planning to build a facility adjacent to its tracks at the location, to transfer ethanol from trains to trucks or to storage.
The site is mostly vacant now, but it had been the location of the Chattahoochee Brick Co., owned by former Atlanta Mayor James English.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the people who worked there making millions of bricks were convicts — mostly Black men — who had been leased to the company. They worked without pay and lived in filth under horrible conditions, with frequent whippings and rotting food. People died there.
