The Forgotten History of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm: Part Three

This episode we discuss the question of unmarked grave sites at the Old Prison Farm property, and propose methods of carrying out further historical research.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome. This is it could Happen here the podcast about
how it feels like everything is kind of falling apart
and maybe what we can do to put stuff back together.
I'm Garrison Davis, your host for this episode, and this
is the third and final part of our mini series
on the history of the old Atlanta prison Farm, produced

(00:26):
in collaboration with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. We're actually
going to start this episode with a little update on
what's been going on in Atlanta as a part of
the Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cops City movement,
considering the Atlanta Police Foundation's Cops City project is very

(00:47):
much a direct continuation of the authoritarian and carceral oppression
of the prison farm that occupied the very same section
of land. Here's an audio clip of of my conversations
with members of the Atlantic Community Press Collective from right
before the recent July Week of Action, and this is

(01:10):
about the status of construction on the South River or
will Lonnie Forest. So for the past month or so,
it's kind of been a waiting game, Like if you
refer to the construction timeline that whenever open records request revealed,
like construction really should have started in earnest by now,
like they last time I saw a figure, they want

(01:35):
to have this open by fall of next year, and
they are not on that timeline. And that's not all
necessarily due to the movement. So I think between UM
just the general supply chain havoc that's happening across different
industries right now, definitely the construction industry. I think UM

(01:58):
they did mentioned this during one of the recent UM
Community Stakeholders Committee meetings where they're like, oh, yeah, by
the way, we are kind of having sub supply chain issues.
In addition to I don't think a p D and
the Police Foundation really expected to have any kind of
continued resistance on the ground UM or any kind of

(02:22):
continued public bad press. I don't think they think they
thought they'd passed the legislation on the public would kind
of move on UM, because that's correctly what he usually
happens when people, when people when movements that criticize the
police happen, they usually get repressed or people's attention turns

(02:43):
turns to other things. Pretty quickly. We know that they
have a permit for it's what exactly is it is
a permit for is kind of complicated. But one way
or another, it enables the police foundation, their contractors and
our vendors to construct a basically like a temporary construction

(03:07):
fence like you would see around a construction site. But
in that permit I believe expires in August of this year,
because that's a temporary permit, but that fence does not
seem to have gone up, so it's it's kind of
a stalemate right now. Just five days after the July
week of action wrapped on early Wednesday morning on August three,

(03:33):
dozens of work vehicles and police amassed around the forest,
staging heavy machinery, setting up roadblocks, and started dismantling barricades
in the forest. Sounds of tree cutting could be heard
near the occupied to stop Cops City tree sets. Police
were initially stalled by the burning of tire barricades near roads,

(03:57):
but around seven am, haveing machinery breached the proposed site
for Cops City and entered on the north side of
the forest. Excavators cleared barricades and trees were felled near trails,
making wider paths into the forest. De Cab County Police
officers accompanied gas pipeline workers who were on the ground

(04:20):
adjacent to Entrenchment Creek Park. One arrest was reported. The
arrestee was originally being taken straight to jail and then
got diverted to police headquarters for questioning, and it was
confirmed that FBI was also on the scene. There were
no attempts at extraction of tree sitters and no additional

(04:41):
arrests reported. That day, the Atlanta Police Foundations contract workers
did substantial forest clearing in an area of the woods
near the entrance gate on Key Road, directly adjacent to
the existing power line clearing. Much of the surrounding neighborhood
was blocked off by the Atlanta Police Department for most

(05:02):
of the day, with no warning given to local residents,
many of whom have stopped cops city yard signs. The
work being done along the power line cut is assumed
to be either for installing sewer lines and or drilling holes.
The presence of Georgia Power suggests that they could have

(05:23):
been trying to bore holes to install power lines. The
next morning, around twenty cops, some mounted on a t
v s, patrolled throughout the forest, possibly looking for rebuilt
barricades or to snatch up anyone they found in the area.
Ever since then, there's been cops, sometimes on a t
V s, spotted multiple times a week in the forest,

(05:45):
usually during early in the morning. How much grounds clearing
and pre construction work was done recently in the forest
was slightly surprising considering the land disturbance permit has not
yet been issued, though it is possible that the recent
work was covered by existing utility easements or the temporary

(06:07):
construction permit that expires later this month that was mainly
issued around the goal of putting up a security of
fence around the forest. And with that now, let's get
back to the history of the prison farm. As discussed
last episode, overcrowding was one of the initial motivations for
proposing to move the Glenwood Stockade prisoners to the dairy

(06:30):
Farm site, though it was not the final decisive factor
because at the time populations there were dwindling. Several years later, though,
Councilman Jose Wood was being praised for increasing the incarcerated
population because it brought in more revenue, and several years
after that, in overcrowding at the second Stockade on Decatur

(06:55):
and Hillard prompted discussions on expanding the prison farm by
going in portable buildings from the school board and expanding
the woman's prison by one hundred feet. A police report
from nineteen thirty six says, quote, we find that all
prisoners have separate quarters which are in sanitary condition but overcrowded.

(07:16):
We recommend that another unit be constructed for white female
prisoners as well as white male prisoners unquote, And by
nineteen thirty eight, a new wing was completed housing seventy
five more prisoners, and another edition of the same size
was expected to be added to the main building, but
only five months later the prison farm's own superintendent again

(07:39):
described the conditions there as overcrowded and recommended another expansion
and separate ward for quote unquote diseased prisoners. In nineteen
thirty nine, a proposal to extend the land by one
hundred and eighty four acres was protested by Decab residents
on the basis that it was directly next to a
white school and that quote further development of penal institutions

(08:02):
in that section would destroy the value of surrounding property
and preclude the development of a civic center, which citizens
seek near the west Side school grounds unquote. The plan
was abandoned, but later brought up with a compromise in
that they would instead only take a hundred and thirty

(08:23):
four acres, leaving a fifty acre buffer between the prison
farm and the school. A new building, originally slated to
be a medical ward, was built, and as we saw
in the healthcare section, this ended up becoming a new
prison building, and the old building became the Maneial Disease Hospital.
The new building could quote house seven and twenty five

(08:46):
prisoners without crowding them unquote, and was said to be
able to quote eliminate long standing criticism of nearby residents
because of escapes from the old overcrowded and ill arranged
structure unquote. In nineteen forty six, the city took possession
of an additional eighty nine acres of land for the
prison farm, but still overcrowding was again raised as an

(09:10):
issue in nineteen fifty two, but this time certain sentences
were reduced from twenty days to ten days to address
this problem, constituting the first time a slightly decarce oral
approach was used. But despite this and yet another new
wing being built in nineteen fifty eight, a grand jury

(09:30):
in nineteen sixty found that the prison farm was quote
unquote exceedingly overcrowded and quote as a result, the health
of prisoners is jeopardized unquote. They suggested building a quote
unquote work camp to alleviate crowding. Dick Herbert's undercover investigation
in nineteen sixty five found that men were sleeping on

(09:53):
the floor and tables because there was still not enough beds.
A quote from Herbert says, so closely packed are the
three hundred bunks that they are alternated head to foot.
In sixty seven, Atlanta started talking about chronic alcoholism as
a health problem rather than one of criminality. However, the

(10:15):
assumption was that this was still to be treated by
those in charge of the prisons. Quote. The prison is
already crowded up against its six hundred person capacity, said
the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But according to Superintendent Holsey, the
conversion to a rehabilitation center would mean longer stays and

(10:36):
thus higher populations, stating, quote they likely will have to
build a whole new city prison farm unquote. A nineteen
seventy six article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution says that
in nineteen seventy a thousand prisoners were packed in the
old building inmates slept in rickety beds, three high health

(10:58):
inspectors and judges the population for humanity's sake. It further
claimed that the facility was now quote well below its
comfortable capacity of four hundred prisoners unquote. In nineteen seventy four,
the Uniform Alcohol Treatment Act was passed, although never fully funded,
which effectively decriminalized alcoholism. This act was said to reduce

(11:22):
the population of the prison farm from five hundred in
nineteen seventy two to two hundred in nine eighty three,
although new laws were passed further criminalizing certain actions while
intoxicated at the behest of the business community who quote
demanded drunks and winos be removed from the streets unquote.

(11:43):
This era marks the last time the Atlantic community press
research found complaints of overcrowding. The lack of further complaints
strongly suggests that decriminalization is a better answer to the
problem of overcrowding rather than prison expansion. It's also necessary
to mention that alleviating the problem fifty years into the

(12:05):
project does not make up for the unnecessary harm and
death likely caused by these conditions over the years. As
we went over last episode, overcrowding of jail's remains a
problem in our modern jails and prisons. Currently, the Fulton
County Sheriff wants the Atlanta City government to abandon their
promise of closing a city jail and instead rent the

(12:28):
jail to Fulton County to alleviate overcrowding in their system.
This is billed as a humanitarian move, but as we've
discussed in the past few episodes, history suggests otherwise, and
the most successful way at reducing harm was decarce role approaches,

(12:56):
complaints about poor sanitation and malutrici, and also span the
prison farm's history. Combined with the previously detailed conditions, these
would further increase the likelihood of sickness and death within
the prison farm walls. Prisoners eight complained that quote a
silver dollar would cover each particle of food given to

(13:18):
prisoners and asked for quote more vegetables and less sorghum unquote.
In one during a tense meeting in which DECAB tried
unsuccessfully to prevent Atlanta from expanding the prison farm, a
DECAB resident said that the farm was without sanitary facilities,
despite frequent assurances that the facility was clean. However, work

(13:42):
was temporarily abandoned on that expansion after Decab County citizens
sought and obtained an injunction against the City of Atlanta
for dumping untreated sewage into entrenchment Creek. There is a
large gap in reporting on these particular conditions, but there's
evidence that they persisted, because in nineteen sixty the Decab

(14:03):
Ground jury found that quote restrooms were deplorable in both
white and negro wards unquote, and that the kitchen floor
was quote unquote in a deplorable state and should be replaced.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution's own inspection curiously concluded that the
farm was quote operated very efficiently and with good sanitary

(14:26):
conditions unquote, But just two years later, Dick Herbert's undercover
work as a prisoner showed quite the contrary. He found
puddles of spit at drainage grills, wondered if many of
the men had tuberculosis, and said that quote it was
not uncommon to find dead bugs or hair in food.

(14:48):
The rusty, dirty tins we drank out of should be
replaced unquote. Herbert also mentioned that quote the food was
almost entirely a thin and liquid diet and also said
that inmates often complained that the best of the farms
produce and meats are reserved for the guards and hired help,

(15:09):
and just a reminder that they themselves worked to grow
all that produce. A prisoner named Carl h sent to
the prison farm in nineteen sixty eight on a public
drunkenness charge, said, after five days at the facility, quote
I've had one half of a meal since I've been
here unquote. Apparently by this time, local court rulings had

(15:32):
determined that chronic alcoholics could no longer be arrested on
these charges, but the judge claimed, quote, I'm doing it
from a humanitarian standpoint, whether it's legal or not. Unquote.
Carl said of that matter, that the judge quote told
me that he was going to save my life. I
told him he can't save my life out there at

(15:53):
the stockade. I told him he can send me anywhere,
but not the stockade. He can't save my life out
there unquote. This was three years after Superintendent Holsey was
praised for his reforms and interviewed by the Atlanta Journal
Constitution saying, quote, I'm just trying to make this place
sanitary and livable for these people unquote. On two occasions

(16:16):
in nineteen sixty nine, the vast majority of prisoners went
on strike due to poor food. The first time, they
demanded a raise for the cook and the hiring of
a new cook, but four months later these conditions which
were agreed to to end the strike had still not
been met. Prison farm administrators once again promised to raise

(16:38):
cook wages and hire a new cook to end the strike,
but we have no indication that they ever followed through
on that. In Atlanta Journal Constitution article from nineteen seventy
states that prisoners were working in the kitchen while infected
with tuberculosis. Quote. One man was sent to Batty State
Hospital after it was found his tuberculosis was so advanced

(16:58):
that he started hemorrhaging. He had worked in the kitchen
the night before. Unquote. When asked about this, the prison
farm administrator R. F. Jordan's said that some prisoners do
have tuberculosis, and yes, quote some of them work in
the kitchen, but only if their case is arrested. Unquote.
Employees protesting discrimination against black employees at the farm and

(17:21):
unfair and illegal incarceration of alcoholics also said that quote,
there are rats and roaches and filth that you wouldn't
believe unquote. In nineventy one, the prison farm was found
to be serving food illegally without a license, but health
officials complained that there were only two of them for
the entire multi county district and they had no means

(17:43):
of actually enforcing licenses or food safety. Just one month later,
prisoners again went on strike due to being served watered
down gravy and being unjustly incarcerated for alcoholism. Reports on
conditions are few and far between after this period, but
the night two a c l U lawsuit claimed, among

(18:04):
other things, that the conditions at the facility are unsanitary.
There is most likely more information to find between these years,
as one prison farm worker said, quote, we used to
have strikes out here about every month, sometimes two or
three a month unquote. In nineteen eighty three, Superintendent Hudson,

(18:24):
once hailed as the great humanitarian reformer, was replaced after
quote complaints from employees and city politicians about his handling
of the city jail, its employees and prisoners. Hudson said
of the criticism, quote, I get bored when there aren't
any problems. Serenity is not my thing. Unquote. A big

(18:48):
focus of the research that the Atlantic Community Press did
was on the question of unmarked graves at the prison
farm site. There are persistent folk stories about these that
maybe tempting for some to write off as unfounded rumors. However,
oral histories and qualitative interviews need to be taken seriously

(19:09):
and considered alongside other forms of evidence. Some stories have
already been substantiated, and for others, the evidence found so
far certainly places them within the realm of possibility. This episode,
I'm not going to try to prove without a shadow
of a doubt that there are unmarked graves on the
property that is slated to become a cop city, but

(19:32):
I will discuss documentation that shows that there is a
strong possibility that needs to be carefully and fully investigated,
regardless of how long it takes to do so properly.
To start, there is this quote from an Atlanta Journal
Constitution piece from nineteen seventy six, quote, Maud, the deceased

(19:53):
elephant and two hundred and eighty inmates rest in peace
at the City of Atlanta prison Farm unquote. Now, I'm
gonna unpack that one at a time, because there's a
there's a lot there uh the elephant Maud was the
former zoo elephant that died and whose corpse was dumped

(20:13):
at the prison Farm property by the city. And as
for the line about two hundred and eighty buried inmates,
there's no other details given in the article, and some
researchers suspect that this is some kind of sick, sarcastic
joke on the newspaper's part, as the rest of the
article attempts to paint life at the prison Farm as

(20:37):
one of leisure and respite. According to local folk historian
Scott Peterson, there is, however, a known burial ground off
of Bouldercrest and Key Road that contains both marked and
unmarked graves that was once owned and operated by the
prison Farm. Now, to be perfectly clear, this burial ground

(20:59):
is not on the current property slated to become Cops City.
The section of land that was originally the prison Farm
has been divided up into many smaller pieces, a few
hundred acres of which the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying
to turn into the new militarized police training compound. However,
the burial site that Scott Peterson talks about does tell

(21:21):
us that a that there is some truth behind at
least some of the folk stories, and be the prison
farm as a whole contained at least some unmarked graves,
which leads us to believe that there could be others
throughout the property, and that other claims are at least
worth taking seriously. When the Atlantic Community Press was doing

(21:42):
the bulk of their historical research last year, they attempted
to find death and burial records for inmates that died
while incarcerated at the prison farm through archival digging. Select
inmate death and burial records were found simply via public reporting.
We know are certain that at least several deaths occurred

(22:02):
in very close time spans. One man was sprayed with
an insecticide, which the warden denies, but which the attending
nurse and those who sprayed the man corroborate. Samuel Bayon's
thirty six year old black man quote unquote, dropped dead
shortly after a patrolman woke him up to get dressed.

(22:25):
Mark Isaiah Willem died after quote unquote becoming sick. In
Atlanta Daily World headline reads quote corners jury will probe
death of prisoner, Brown urges full investigation, and that's dated
from nineteen fifty three. On April, Robert Reynolds, forty nine

(22:46):
year old black man, died from head injuries, prompting an investigation.
And in reference to Reynolds, Charlie Brown, a nineteen fifty
three mayor Old candidate, declared, quote, approximately ten prisoners have
died in jail in the last four years under mysterious
circumstances unquote. Despite these known deaths, finding official records listing

(23:10):
either deaths or burials at the site was much more difficult.
On top of searching through several archives, researchers sent Georgia
Open Records Act requests to the Police Department, the Department
of Corrections, and the Atlantic City Council. The Police Department
said that the records would be in the custody of
the Department of Corrections. However, the Department of Corrections stated

(23:33):
that they are not and never were, the custodians of
such records. The Atlantic City Council replied to requests by
sending the inaccurate Jillian Wooton History Report, but also connected
researchers with a historian. Serena McCracken of the Atlanta History
Center has said that there's a possibility such records simply

(23:55):
do not exist, either that they were never kept in
the first place due to law at the time, or
that they were destroyed at some point, either due to
negligence or an expiring period of retention. There is also
the possibility that these records do exist and simply have
not been yet found. They could have been misfiled, or

(24:16):
requests could have been sent to the wrong agency, or
they could just be sitting in a box of mill
doing records still on the land today, as so many
other records were when the city finally shut down the site,
many of which are now lost forever in the ensuing
fires and other ravages of time. In the Georgia Archives

(24:37):
file on the prison farm, a memo was discovered describing
procedures for the death of inmates. The memo says that
upon a prisoner's death, their nearest kin should be notified.
If the body is not claimed, quote, then the body
shall be given a pauper's burial not to exceed fifty
dollars unquote. Such burials don't always include a headstone, but

(25:01):
rather a marker or a burial flag, which can easily
erode away or become invisible over time. Not all unmarked
graves on the site necessarily exist within a traditional grave plot.
According to Scott Peterson, who has collected folk stories and
oral histories about the land for twenty years, there is

(25:22):
another plot next to an old oak tree and sunken
in structure that was once used to shade the warden
during lynch ings. This would of course be not legal,
but as we've talked about, legality does not always dictate
the behaviors of prison farm wardens, and there are records

(25:42):
of cases of runaways at other prison farms that were
later discovered to have been killed and buried on site.
As such, these claims are not outside the bounds of possibility, and,
if anything, are highly likely. There are also many similarities
between the conditions at the prison farm and those of
the Brandon Indian Residential School that would lead to the

(26:04):
need to bury many bodies without necessarily keeping tight records.
Katherine and Nichol's thesis details a history of airborne diseases
aggravated by factors such as poor sanitation and ventilation, lack
of medical attention, malnutrition, violence and abuse, overwork and accidents,

(26:25):
and harsh punishment of runaways, all of which are also
seen throughout the prison farm's history. I don't want to
draw too tight a comparison between the prison farm and
other places and other events. It is worth looking at
other similar situations as something that shows that the question
of unmarked graves is not unfounded nor uncharacteristic of the

(26:49):
institutions of the time. There have been several other instances
where institutions with similar conditions were later found to have
unmarked graves, burial grounds, or other human remains. Human remains

(27:13):
in sugar Land, Texas, near the old Imperial Prison Farm,
there were found to have quote belonged to prisoners who
worked on the land once used as a sugar plantation unquote.
An article from the Tyler Morning Telegraph describes life of
physical abuse, forced labor, and poor nutrition, much like the

(27:36):
prison farm in Atlanta. Similarly to Atlanta, quote, it wasn't
until it became clear that these abuses were widespread and
affecting white prisoners that public opinions started to shift unquote.
In Arkansas, in nineteen sixty eight, a reformist superintendent of
Cummins Prison Farm discovered the remains of three former prisoners.

(28:00):
His discovery quote made international news, embarrassed Governor Winthrop Rockefeller,
and infuriated conservative politicians. It also led to merchants firing
and banishment from the field of prison management unquote. Finally,
although the Brandon Indian Residential School was not a prison farm,

(28:20):
archival research points to conditions for the prisoners held at
the Atlanta prison Farm that are not dissimilar from the
conditions of the children held at the Brandon Indian Residential School.
We see lacking healthcare, poor sanitation and ventilation, malnutrition, violence
and abuse, a heavy workload, accidents, and harsh punishments all

(28:41):
contributed to the deaths there, and each of those factors
has been demonstrated via archival research to have existed on
the prison farm in Atlanta. As mentioned at the beginning
of the first episode, this is not an exhaustive or
comprehensive history for their research is necessary and hopefully, as

(29:02):
explained by the past few episodes, is extremely warranted. However,
what's laid out here and in the Atlantic community presses
other work already changes our fundamental understanding of the Atlanta
prison Farm. Far from a federal program ending in the
sixties before being essentially abandoned, we saw that the Atlanta

(29:24):
Prison Farm on Key Road was a city run from
the very beginning and the direct continuation of the already
cruel stockade. Contrary to popular belief, it was run continuously
from the early twenties up into the nineteen nineties. It
was a completely different property than the Honor Farm. Despite many,

(29:45):
including the Atlanta Police Foundation, continuing to use that phrase
when referring to the site. At the city run prison Farm,
atrocious conditions persisted across the better part of a century
and ongoing into what we would consider the modern era,
despite claims at each stage that the bad times were

(30:05):
behind us and a new era lay ahead. There is
a documented history of the city prioritizing its ability to
cut costs with prison labor, essentially extending slavery, Extensive records
of physical and emotional abuse, torture, forced labor, overwork, lack
of healthcare for sanitation, overcrowding, and poor nutrition ranging throughout

(30:27):
the entire history of the site. Nearly every stage of
leadership has gotten caught breaking rules and laws while avoiding
the same carceitral fate as the prisoners, as well as
a reluctance by city officials to enact policies that would
truly alleviate these harms and attempt to make up for them,
rather ensuring that power remains continuous, as is the case

(30:51):
with Cops City. This history demonstrates how Atlantic city government
is perfectly fine with over ruling rights of the residence
of decab count who are disenfranchised from the city. With
the Atlanta Police Foundation and the city getting closer and
closer to deforestation and facility construction, the window of opportunity
is shrinking for further on the ground historical research. The

(31:15):
fact that they've yet to meet the requirements for the
full environmental assessments, let alone the careful historical analysis necessary
considering the history of the land, means that the city
is not only physically erasing the history of the lives
it's destroyed, but also risking the possibility of desecrating their
graves in the process. A guest column in the Supporter

(31:38):
Report by Lilly Ponins, an environmental engineer and now former
member of the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta
Public Safety Training Center ak A Cop City, gave us
an inside look at how the development of Cops City
is knowingly and willingly refusing to do their due diligence

(31:59):
assessments and pave over decades of corstral history. Quote. Since
joining the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee for the Atlanta Public
Safety Training Center, I've observed the developers from Da Vinci
Development Collaborative, along with the Atlanta Police Foundation, mislead the
community into believing that they are following legitimate, regulated environmental

(32:20):
due diligence process. In reality, they are doing less than
the minimum to meet the legally defined standards for environmental
site assessment reporting and are breaking the trust of stakeholders
and the terms of their ground lease agreement with the
City of Atlanta. Given the historical operation as a prison
farm and plantation prior to that conditions violence, abuse, accidents,

(32:45):
and harsh punishments, it is reasonable to believe that areas
of the property could contain human remains in unmarked graves.
This was never investigated. Comments and professional input from myself
and others on Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee were brushed off,
and no additional site investigations were considered beyond the limited

(33:08):
site investigation. To remedy this, the City of Atlanta must
force the development team to act responsibly by requiring a
proper phase to environmental site assessment. If they fail to
do so, taxpayers are likely to foot the bill for
the remediation that is being ignored or for the complicated

(33:28):
litigation that will arise when this development team disturbs human
remains on this site unquote. A few months ago, Lily
Pontins was kicked off the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee after
writing this column. Both the Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee and
COPS City have repeatedly been made aware that the assessments

(33:52):
they've done failed to meet environmental requirements, and the reports
that they're using to base decisions off of and green
light proposals have been shown to be inaccurate. As far
as responding to City council, ap F enlisted terra Con
to write a cultural report. This report was highly inaccurate

(34:16):
due to relying on the Billian Wouten report. I personally
emailed City Council as Atlantic community press collective and as
I've repeatedly told them, hey, this is incorrect, this is why,
here's proof. This is really disgusting and sad that you

(34:40):
refuse to acknowledge any of this history. And ironically, a
month or two later, another report comes out that's slightly better,
slightly revised, but still has that whitewashed aspect that the
original one did. I have the misfortune to recently need

(35:02):
to reread the terra Con report um, and I don't
believe they they address when the city supposedly took over
the prison the federal farm at all. I don't think
they discussed that date in the slightest. But the Bluten
report that they draw from, I think she just says
sometime in the fifties, which was how we figured out,

(35:24):
because we were trying to nail down the date in
the fifties, and then we had to go back and
back and back and back and back. We found out
when the city purchased the land by literally just going
to the decat history archives at the courthouse and looking
them up. M a fairly quick process in terms of

(35:46):
research that APF obviously didn't hair or bother to look
into at all. Obviously the City of Atlanta didn't either. Yeah.
In her residential school thesis, Katherine Nichols lays out a
robust process for unobtrusively examining possibilities of human remains while

(36:08):
respecting the communities affected. Her process involves thorough archival research,
including the use of oral histories and unconfirmed local knowledge
to generate leads for a deeper investigation. This archivalry research
is then situated alongside the currently existing literature on the subject.
She then conducts qualitative interviews with local community members and

(36:31):
family members of those affected. She stresses that this qualitative
information is not to be written off just because it
does not align with records that the state institutions consider
to be legitimate. And finally, she lays out a method
for field research including site reconnaissance, field walking and probing,
site preparation, controlled burns, mapping, aerial photography, soil profiles, metal

(36:56):
detector surveys, ground penetrating radar, and ground conductivity surveys, all
checked against controls to ensure that they align with the
results of the same methods on previously known unmarked grave sites. Crucially,
all of this is done with the consent of the
relevant communities and is done unobtrusively as to not disturb

(37:17):
the graves. Now that the construction process has ostensibly started, Um,
how does that factor into, like, you know, disturbing the
grounds where there could be you know, all of this
history that is being unearthed and kind of paved over
top of Um, how does that kind of impact the

(37:39):
ability to do ethical research going forward into the history
of this land. So, for one thing, we talked on
and off with a handful of archaeologists and anthropologists and
related fields about if we were going to go onto
the prison farm property and conduct a search for grape

(38:02):
sites or other historical information, like, we have no legal
way to do that. It would be trespassing. And we
also know that from the quote unquote cultural report that
the Police Foundation had done, they didn't really do that
kind of search. Um. They were mostly searching for evidence

(38:24):
of I guess you could say indigenous artifacts, not let's
say bodies buried in the nineteen twenties. So the ability
to do on site historical research is it kind of
depends on, Hey, how willing are you to get picked
up for felony trespassing because that's a charge they can

(38:46):
put on you. It definitely feels like we're up against
a clock. I'm just going to add on to that.
I feel like one of the issues that we've definitely
come across, as far as looking for graves that are
related to the prison farm, your options are pretty much
ground prendy trating radar or what they call cadaver dogs.

(39:09):
Cadaver dogs theoretically can sniff up to a hundred years
from what I've read, how many people have connections to
cadaver dogs? Honestly? And then also the just logistics of
attempting to get ground penetrating radar in a forest UM

(39:29):
is definitely difficult. Are you worried as construction continues that
even if stuff is discovered, whether that be unmarked graves
or you know other other various other things that do
you have any any level of confidence that if things
are found they'll even go public? Or are you worried

(39:50):
that if they find things they'll just cover it up? Basically,
I have absolutely zero faith. I mean to me that
I have absolutely zero faith to retually ensure question. I
have absolutely zerobey that anything that is found will be preserved. UM.
We also have it on fairly good authority that the
issuing of construction permits is imminent. UM. Decab County Commissioner

(40:15):
Ted Terry is our our best legal ally, if you will,
um our best government ally. He last week, during the
Week of Action, introduced UM a resolution that would ask
de Cab County CEO Michael Thurmond, to basically make a

(40:37):
series of asks himself of the City of Atlanta. This
is basically legally the most the County Commission can do,
and it is all incumbent upon the CEO of the
County to actually do these things. UM, hope is not
great for the County CEO to do any of these things.
But um ted Terry, among other things, asked for additional

(40:59):
environment mental studies, which by the way, they are required
to do in the lease. He asked for additional historical
research and full disclosure. He actually cited the Press Collective's
history report we did last summer in the legislation, which
was both he's a state actor, but also you've got
to admit that's kind of cool. Um, it was gratifying

(41:23):
to see our work receive a fairly high level of recognition.
Additional environmental studies, historical research, noise studies, and ultimately he
asks that the CEO asked the city to consider just
relocating the site completely. I think something that we need
to take into consideration throughout this entire research process is

(41:48):
that a lot of the records that we have access
to our newspaper, the primary newspaper service we have access
to is the a j C. Which we have a
clear we have clear proof that a j C continues
to be racist, continues to focus on the narrative that
they would like to project as far as being accomplices

(42:14):
to the police and to APF and how that correlates
to this city's history and mishandling of this piece of land. Um.
When we were looking through older articles, there are handful

(42:35):
of papers. There's the Great Sparckled Bird, which is the
so it's a student run newspaper. This one. I'm assuming,
just based on the sixties and seventies time frame, that
there's a decent chance that it was primarily written by
white people. I do not have proof of that. I'm

(42:56):
just going on with gut feeling with that. Um. So
there is a probably a bit of bias, uh, but
it really does start to give a different picture of
the people that were sent to the prison from There
were several G. S U students who were sent there

(43:16):
and they were put in the whole. One was put
in the whole just because he had long hair and
he refused to cut his hair. So they said, you
know what you're going into isolation, have fun um and
he was there for a little bit. It's important to
reiterate that throughout much of the archival research that produced
these findings, the bulk of the articles discovered were from

(43:38):
the Atlanta Journal, The Atlantic Constitution, and the Atlanta Journal
Constitution after the two merged. Though these papers reported on
bad conditions once they had become public, and in two
cases were responsible for investigative work that made these conditions public.
These white run papers, much like many major newspapers, have

(43:59):
a known history of racism and support for the police
state and carcetral institutions. We therefore believe that a thorough
search through archives of black run newspapers such as the
Atlanta Daily, World, magazines and other publications is necessary to
gain a more complete understanding of the history. Both myself

(44:21):
and the researchers that put this history together are furthermore white,
and so it is possible that our own biases and
blind spots could be present in this reporting. We strongly
believe that a more complete accounting of this history could
be undertaken by people who have been more directly affected,
and hope that these episodes and the research they're based

(44:44):
on is not taken as the end of the story,
but just a beginning and an invitation to further scrutiny.
Is there really any way to continue the research that
would be necessary to actually preserve the history and keep
people knowledgeable about the atrocities that's happened the past hundred

(45:06):
plus years, Like with if construction continues, is there even
a way to do this now? Or is that clock
really just running out? So I think one of the
biggest hurdles as far as preserving the history is honestly
just getting people to care about it. Because it's not sexy.
It's not people in tree houses. It's sitting on a

(45:33):
computer just skimming through thousands of articles. No one cares
that in two the a c l You sued the
city because they were using illegal in unconstitutional punishments. Nobody
really cares about that kind of stuff. It's not that
exciting in the grand scheme of things, but it's part

(45:54):
of the history and it's part of what has led
us to where we are now with Cops City. And
with that, that wraps up our mini series on the
very much incomplete history of the old Atlanta Prison Farm.
The fact that there's seemingly little to know original official
records to learn from because they were either trashed or

(46:17):
never kept in the first place. Is itself cover up
and denial of history and gross denial of the experiences
of trauma and oppression of those who are subjected to
the horrors of the prison farm. It's bad enough that
the city couldn't be bothered to remember the history, but
crucially they're bulldozed over. Police endorsed narrative in whatever museum

(46:40):
or plaque they want to create cannot be allowed to
become the story of the prison farm. And it's many
atrocities that we are still rediscovering. There is still a
long way to go, and we have barely scratched the surface.
Hopefully this is just the start of more people paying
attention to the forgotten histories like this and and going

(47:00):
out and doing further digging. You can check out the
Atlantic Community Press Collective and they're great reporting at a
t L Press Collective dot com or Atlanta Underscore Press
on Twitter. See you all on the other side, It
could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

(47:22):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zone Media dot com or check us out on
the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could
happen here, Updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.