The Story We Tell is a community-led public memory initiative.
Join the listIt is an effort to confront the history of forced labor, racial terror, and erasure woven through the streets of Atlanta, and to honor the generations of Black Atlantans who lived, resisted, and thrived throughout that history.
Its aim is to reclaim overlooked places as spaces of remembrance, reflection, and public engagement, and to put the power of memory and repair in the hands of everyday Atlantans.
We believe the process is as important as the product.
When a community holds agency over how its stories are told and remembered, its role shifts from passive recipient to active protagonist, and the work of designing together becomes an act of capacity-building and repair.
The Story We Tell is grounded in inquiry, reflection, skill-sharing, and collective transformation. We ask ourselves questions and then build the capacities necessary to answer them ourselves.
A brickyard on the river where James W. English, a former Atlanta mayor, worked leased convicts under brutal conditions until Georgia ended convict leasing in 1908. The City of Atlanta now owns the site and is planning a memorial and park there.
The city ran a prison farm on Key Road from the 1920s until the mid 1990s. Building ruins and a cemetery of unmarked graves remain, and the city is master planning a Restoration Memorial and Preserve on the surrounding land.
Granite here was broken by the Fulton County chain gang, mostly Black prisoners held at the Bellwood convict camp. The quarry now holds Atlanta’s emergency water supply inside Shirley Clarke Franklin Park, where a memorial is being planned.
The city’s municipal prison on Glenwood Avenue, where men were chained in gangs to break stone and pave streets. The building still stands in Grant Park and is listed on the National Register.
George V. Gress founded Gress Lumber Company in 1883, with mills at Gresston in Dodge County. We are still tracing its labor records and what tied it to Atlanta.
Around twenty slave trading firms operated near Whitehall and Alabama streets, with auction rooms close to what is now Five Points. The sites remain essentially unmarked.
White mobs attacked Black Atlantans beginning on September 22, 1906, and residents of Brownsville organized to defend themselves. Historians put the Black death toll at roughly twenty five to forty, and coalitions now place markers and teach the history.
In December 1962 the city barricaded Peyton and Harlan Roads to stop Black families moving further into southwest Atlanta. A judge ordered the barriers down on March 1, 1963, after about ten weeks.
The City of Atlanta Reparations Study Commission was seated in October 2025. The Fulton County Reparations Task Force and a City of Decatur task force are working alongside it.
We'll keep you up to date on everything we hear about the projects in development, and we'll let you know when Story We Tell gatherings take place.