Back then, they called it Whitehall Street.
Today, it’s the Five Points station, where trains rattle beneath pavement and buses exhale their daily breath into the Georgia sun.
But before there was MARTA, before the high-rises, before Black folks were paid for the culture that created the pulse of this city, we were on the auction block.
Slave pens. Brick and breath. Flesh for sale.
Crawford, Frazer & Co. owned and run by Robert Crawford and Addison and Thomas Frazer, stood on Whitehall Street, a well-lit storefront where humans were appraised and auctioned.
They, along with William K. Bagby, Clark & Grubb, Fields & Gresham, Zachariah Rice, S.H. Griffin, W.H. Henderson, Inman, Cole & Co., and the Ponder brothers, all trafficked in lives across 20 slave markets in Atlanta.
They placed newspaper ads beside listings for tobacco and furniture, promising “prime Negroes,” field hands, cooks, and wet nurses.
On auction days, I imagine the air thickened with dread for many, alongside joy and smiles for others. Enslaved men were made to flex their muscles. Women were inspected like broodmares. Children sized up by their height and teeth. A mother might hold her child’s hand in the morning and lose them by sundown.
On May 2, 1863, traders sold Harry (34) and Hannah (30) for $3,600 in Confederate paper. “Sound in body and mind,” the receipt read. No line for grief. No space for memory.
And the city itself collected $2 in tax per head.
Atlanta was born not despite slavery but because of it. The rails that crisscrossed the city did not simply carry cotton — they carried people.
Shackled. Branded. Sold.
The very tracks that shuttle thousands from the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, under the CNN Center, behind the old Atlanta Journal-Constitution building and into Five Points — they are the same rails that once carried human cargo.
These were the arteries of the slave trade, pulsing into Atlanta’s heart from every Southern outpost.
History beneath our feet
Although Georgia only formally sanctioned slavery in 1750, it quickly grew to be one of its most fervent defenders.
By the Civil War, more than 400,000 African Americans were enslaved in the state. In 1850, Atlanta held around 493 enslaved people; by 1860, that number soared to 1,914, and by 1863, 2,534. More than half were women.
Unlike plantation towns, most enslavers in Atlanta held just a few people, often just one or two per household. But a small elite owned dozens. These enslaved people were artisans, porters, cooks, nurses, gardeners, and hired laborers. Some built the railroads. Some worked in hotels. Some performed on stage, like “Blind Tom,” who played Beethoven for white audiences.
They were seen on Hungry Corner (now Central Avenue), hiring out their labor, bartering, selling fish and cakes, or running small businesses — despite laws meant to stop them. Some became literate. Some taught others. Some resisted. Some escaped. Some were whipped in public.
Free Black Atlantans lived under their own shadows — forced to carry papers, barred from owning businesses, forbidden from trading goods. And yet they made a way. Roderick Badger, a Black dentist, served white clients until he was forced to flee to Chicago. Elizabeth Rebecca Barnes was freed on the condition she leave for Liberia — her grandson, William V.S. Tubman, would later serve as president of that nation from 1943 to 1971.
Atlanta’s enslaved and free communities forged something stubborn and holy. They left behind more than suffering. They left behind Atlanta. Now, this Juneteenth, we are tasked with remembering those on the block again.
Looking for the lost
There was one main auction site in pre-Civil War Atlanta.
Kenny’s Alley/Five Points (now Underground Atlanta) and down the street on Whitehall (current day Peachtree), where Garnett Station sits today, was the Slave Stone Holding Pen, a gathering place for hope and mourning.
After the Civil War, newly freed Black people would return there — no longer to be sold, but to search. They clutched faded names, scraps of cloth, fragments of memory. They came looking for daughters. Their sons. His wife. Her brothers.
In 1884, 20 years after slavery ended, the auction blocks were still visible. And yet today, no marker speaks their names. The stone has been scrubbed clean. The silencing of the horror is intentional.
At the intersection of today’s Brotherton and Peachtree streets, MARTA’s Garnett Station downtown sits atop what was once a slave stone holding pen.
The earth remembers what happened, even if we don’t. It holds memories like water, a splash of grief each time a foot steps where chains once dragged. The stones beneath your feet remember the names you do not know.
And hovering always, the presence of ancestors — watchful, solemn, bearing witness.
In the hush of that rail line. In the corners of Kenny’s Alley. In the dust beside Forsyth Street. There are voices. They are saying: Remember us. Not only in pain — but in our return. For the same corners where we were once sold became the corners where we sought reunion. The place of parting became the place of pilgrimage.
Say their names.
Say Hannah.
Say Harry.
Say their names as you wait for a train at Whitehall. As you walk down Forsyth. As you tour Underground.
Speak their names as an invocation, as a drumbeat, as a calling home of all who were lost.
Let this not be history — let it be remembrance.
