Brick Work: Material Culture and the Afterlife of Enslavement in the U.S. South

Fragments of red brick manufactured near Atlanta, Georgia, in the mid-1880s witness the long, violent afterlife of chattel slavery in new formations of unfree labor and racial capitalism. Now in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, these pieces of brick were produced by incarcerated people—overwhelmingly, Black men convicted of petty crimes, often without due process—working in the dangerous pressing machinery and hot kilns of a brickyard on the city’s outskirts. Between 1878 and 1909, the Chattahoochee Brick Company’s unpaid laborers produced millions of bricks, paving Atlanta’s sidewalks and building factories, middle-class neighborhoods, and the halls of the 1881 International Cotton Exposition.

Historically, the bricks evidence the entanglement of carcerality, capital, and state power in the guise of convict leasing, a widespread practice of racialized labor exploitation in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South. Yet art historically, these bricks—many press-molded into “ornamental” shapes popularized by the transatlantic vogue for Gothic Revival—also suggest a specific aesthetic moment. John Ruskin, Gothic Revival’s most influential exponent, set preindustrial artisanry against industrial toil, which he termed “slavery...a thousand times more bitter than that of the scourged African.” In the Chattahoochee brickyard, however, neo-Gothic design was yoked to racialized neoslavery. How might this carceral history complicate our understanding of labor and aesthetics in this period? I explore these questions in relation to the unfree craftspeople of the Chattahoochee Brick Company and material culture produced under the carceral conditions of racial capitalism in the late nineteenth-century South.