(gentle music) - Well, the reason that I came to Atlanta in the beginning, right out of college, in part was because I was a newspaper guy and the idea of working for the Atlanta Constitution, working for the newspaper built by the very heroic journalist of the 1950s and 60s, Ralph McGill, Pulitzer Prize winner for his columns about segregation and in favor of the civil rights movement was a very powerful attraction for me.

And so I got an internship the summer after I graduated from college.

I came to Atlanta, lived in a tiny little apartment.

Had no money.

Worked as a police reporter for that summer at this newspaper that I had revered from far away for all these years.

I've gotten to enjoy this experience of what really I think is probably the most deeply integrated and synthesized racial community in the country.

And that's the Atlanta that I have lived in.

One of the fascinating things about Atlanta is that it is a place that is in many respects obsessed with history.

And it was the city, the unique qualities of the city, that helped create Martin Luther King.

Atlanta escaped much of the upheaval of the civil rights era.

And that's all a part of why Atlanta became a great powerhouse economically and the city that it is in the present today.

There's another story of Atlanta that was obscured, largely forgotten, because of this recent history that is so positive and so good around race.

The set of characters who I had never heard of but who I came to realize were really the architects of the modern Atlanta, that initial wealth that was created by those men in that era, much of it came from the exploitation of these terrible labor practices that victimized thousands and thousands of African-American men in coal mines and timber camps, in railroad building operations, who were claimed to be criminals, but in fact, the vast majority of whom were not.

Captain James English, he's a person who connected to the economic, the political, and the social fabric of the city in a way that was unparalleled by any other person.

But Captain English's wealth derived overwhelmingly from this brick factory, Chattahoochee Brick, that employed hundreds and hundreds of these forced laborers.

And the city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of bricks from Chattahoochee Brick.

Chattahoochee brick made by these enslaved men is everywhere in Atlanta if you look for it.

It is literally what you're walking on.

It is the history that we're standing on in so many places in Atlanta.

And all of that is rooted inextricably back to this new kind of slavery that was being used in such a vicious and brutal ways at the beginning of the 20th century.

I had a passage in the book where I had been trying and trying to find living relatives of the main character in the book.

A man named Green Cottenham who died in a coal mine in Alabama in 1908.

And I had finally located, but through tremendous amount of genealogical work, this man Louis Cottingham.

I came up with a phone number for him.

I called him up one day.

I couldn't pull Louis Cottingham into a conversation.

The idea of talking about this terrible past was too unpleasant for him to bear.

As I realized I was losing him, I said, "Well, is there anyone else in the family, maybe some younger person, who is interested in history?"

And he said, "No, no, no."

And that was the end of the conversation.

Well, years later, long after the book had been published, one day I got an email from Tonya Groomes, living here in Atlanta, saying on a certain page of your book, you are talking to Louis Cottingham and you say, "Is there another person in the family?

Is there a young person who's interested in history who would want to talk with me about this history?"

And then she said, "I am that person."

- [Tonya] I am that younger person with an interest in history.

You offered to meet with Uncle Louis to share information on my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's (indistinct).

I am thrilled that you have found my connection to Africa.

So that was really a fun beginning of more of this adventure.

I don't know, I've always felt a connection with these strangers that make us who we are.

So I think that what's really beautiful about this process is that now we celebrate the unknown.

If you think about the myth associated with turn-of-the-century African-Americans as shiftless and lazy, you couldn't be, or else you'd be dead.

The choice was work hard or die.

And so I think it's important to kind of eliminate those- - [Tonya] Stereotypes.

- Yeah, stereotypes of people and revisit what it really was like.

Who were the hard workers?

Who built the city?

I think that it's very fitting that we have found such a relative in our ancestry - Green Cottingham, your relative who died in a coal mine in Alabama in 1908 after being enslaved, these bricks were made by similar men in a somewhat similar place, Chattahoochee Brick.

The men were obtained through the same kinds of means, either kidnapped or bought out of jails, many of them brought there with trumped up charges.

And then they had to work in these almost unbearable conditions.

You know, the incredible heat of the brick kilns and they were being whipped constantly.

Men were frequently beaten to death there.

And they could make as many as a million or more bricks a day at Chattahoochee Brick.

So it was just a huge, huge enterprise.

And bricks were how you paved streets and bricks for how you paved sidewalks.

And so there were miles and miles and miles of streets, sidewalks, walls, and all kinds of things that were being built using these millions and millions of bricks that were being made out of Chattahoochee Brick.

Oakland Cemetery.

The 19th century cemetery of Atlanta, particularly for the more prominent people of Atlanta.

In this place, there's no way to know for sure where every brick here came from.

But overwhelmingly, these bricks had to come from Chattahoochee Brick.

So, it's things like this that for me are as close as we can get to Green.

Objects made by men like him.

On Sunday afternoons, there's testimony that survives, there were slave sales at Chattahoochee Brick in the 20th century.

- Is Chattahoochee Brick still around today?

- No, it eventually was sold to another company called General Shale.

And the brick yard is now abandoned and derelict.

Most of the buildings are gone.

But General Shale does still exist today.

And so in that sense, Chattahoochee Brick is alive and well today.

- What do you think?

- And there's some really heavy stuff in all of this, but from a teenager's point of view.

- I think the thing about teenagers today, and African-Americans teenagers today, is that we personally haven't experienced it.

It's really hard to relate because, I mean, people could argue that racism is still alive and well and that a lot of minority children don't have the same amount of opportunities.

I mean, it's a lot better than it used to be.

And so it's kind of hard to relate 'cause I have very diverse group of friends and talk about where we're from.

But after a while, you don't want to necessarily point fingers at your friends whose families might've been responsible for this.

You don't want to make them feel uncomfortable and you kind of just want it to go away because it kind of hurts to think about sometimes.

But I personally feel like it's something that people should know about but not dwell on.

That you should touch on and you should understand the magnitude of what happened, but you shouldn't live in it and just let it suck you in and die under it, you know?

So you gotta live your life, but you have to remember what happened.

- I think that a large part of it is education and understanding.

And I think if your motive isn't to bring about guilt or to try to somehow punish those who may not know anything about it, then I think that you could have a reasoned discussion.

(gentle music) - My name is Susan Burnore And the way I'm related to Doug's work is my great-grandfather John S. Williams is a person in his book who participated in peonage and actually murdered some of the men that he had as slaves.

- There's a group of black men out in the field.

The men are obviously terrified, unwilling to say almost anything.

They're emaciated, they clearly had been terribly abused.

John Williams suddenly appears.

- He knows they found evidence that he was holding these people in slavery.

He talks to his foreman Clyde Manning and says, "As the court transcripts said, we've got to do away with these boys."

And it came to light only because a little boy was fishing down by the creek where they'd thrown some of the bodies and one of the bodies came up.

- It is a different feeling being down here.

- I learned as a police reporter that you always go to the scene.

- This is the first time either of us has been here.

- Now, Susan, how did you know that the John Williams story ever happened?

How did you come into that awareness?

- Well, all my life, I was told the family story of John Williams.

And that was that he was a very good man.

Everyone seems to say that over and over.

That he was a good man and he had convicts working on his plantation.

And that one night, several of them tried to escape.

And in the process of gathering them back in, capturing them, several of them were killed.

Still, that's the story that I heard.

Just last week, I saw my aunt, and she said, "But you know that he was just working convicts."

And I said, "Well, but still it seems that there was a bit of slavery going on there."

And she said, "Oh, well, they wouldn't have been in jail if there hadn't been some thing that they did wrong.

These were bad men that he was working."

John Williams' sons who I did know and loved very much, my great uncles, several of them had to have been involved, but they were never tried.

- That was actually the purpose of the FBI investigation.

They're trying to decide if they should charge the sons with either murder or peonage, but they had dispersed so much and there was no evidence remaining because all of the workers from the farm had disappeared.

I mean, there was never any documentation of them so they couldn't locate any witnesses.

So they were never brought to trial for that.

- So, you heard this story then, but you heard the more accurate version of it.

- I had to write a history paper for my IB diploma.

She was there, actually, we were sitting on the front porch of our farm house down the road in Jasper County.

And they brought up the story.

And I was like, "Wait, I've never heard this before."

Just researching the facts I think gave me an interesting perspective because we talked about how it's kind of sort of redemption uncovering the truth.

Just because we feel like we need to be honest about it.

And so that was the approach I tried to take.

Just honesty, no bias whatsoever.

So it was more of a factual approach.

- And what did your teachers or your classmates, I mean, were they surprised?

- They were kind of like, "Wow, that's your family?"

And I said, "Yes, but it was 1921.

It's not really a reflection of who I am or who our family is today.

And we can just move forward by not continuing the lies that have been perpetuated in the past."

- It's very good for me to be able to look at the facts, and I'm really grateful to Doug and to Kate because Kate helped me a lot with this, to be able to look at those facts and know two things.

Number one, to know the truth.

To know what actually happened.

And number two, to know that some reparations were made.

My family did pay for this crime in that they lost their wealth, they lost their land, and they were dispersed.

The Williams son had to leave the state and it broke up the family for a while.

So there was a big payment for what was done there.

So much in your book that it is just heartbreaking to think, especially people that I knew could be that cruel.

- To be them, that's something that most people wouldn't want to talk about.

So I think that's commendable that they were willing to talk about it when a lot of people would fight against it.

- I know you came from the South.

You're a son of the South.

You love the South, probably like most others.

And even with the history that it has, me being a southerner, I love the South as well.

The South in and of itself is not a bad place.

It's home.

But what do you think motivated you to have an interest in this truth that so many other people just don't even want to be bothered with?

Why do you care?

- I was growing up a kid in the tumultuous time of the desegregation of schools in a place that was actually an overwhelmingly Black location.

You know, sort of a majority Black town in a very majority Black County in a very majority Black part of Mississippi.

So I was really trying to figure all that stuff out, trying to understand what was going on.

And I was really bothered at some level by the fact that with just a very few exceptions, literally, a half dozen maybe, all the Black people I knew lived in what you would call shanties today.

And many of them just a few blocks away from where I lived.

And I just couldn't quite figure that all out.

And nobody was ever offering any explanations for... And most people seem to be operating under the assumption that, well, that's just how it is.

And when the answers that would come back were never very satisfying answers, then that made me actually ask more.

So I just got on this track of trying understand these things.

The world he entered as a man just as the 20th century was beginning was completely different in which already every Southern state had passed rafts of laws designed to circumscribe the lives of African-Americans.

- [Narrator] Green would be arrested at the age of 23 and sent into the mines outside Birmingham.

- Oh, yeah.

There we are.

- Yeah, I finally met Green Cottenham.

- Ha!

Tell us about it.

- Well, we were shooting a part of the documentary in Alabama.

Out of the group of actors who had been selected, Sam Pollard told me to pick out Green Cottenham.

And then somewhat I suddenly realized, wow, for 10 years now, I must have been looking for... - Yes.

You've been thinking about this.

Yeah, you know, and I looked up and went, "Wait a minute.

That's Green Cottenham."

I had finally met him.

- Well, you know it's interesting too because we've always had a pull towards these people and then I've always had these thoughts.

I'll never forget.

I was working as an engineer and I was getting pushback being a female, young, Black, and I'd had a minor victory at a meeting.

I remember I was leaving the production facility feeling great about it, right?

And I immediately started to wilt under the August Georgia heat.

And I stopped, and I looked out across from the production facility and I don't even know what's really there because in my mind I was transported back in time and these people were picking cotton in my mind.

So, I've had those kinds of pools of... And they stopped picking cotton in my vision and looked up at me like I had something to tell or something that needed to be seen.

They wanted to be remembered.

So I kind of get the sense that it is time to tell their story, and it is time to understand what it must've been like.

- So, Tonya, for me was both an answer to the void of trying to find a living person who somehow understood something about the importance of Green Cottenham's life, but she also was able to demonstrate that the story of the black Cottenhams isn't just this terrible story of how one branch of the family was crushed at the beginning of the 20th century.

She represents the story of their triumph.

Of how against all these odds, against all these terrible things, they nonetheless succeeded and achieved and we have with us today Tonya Groomes.

(gentle music)