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Before I left Nashville, I drove out to the Bellwood community in Wilson County where my ancestor Mary was enslaved.

What it doesn’t show is that Atlanta was rebuilt with slavery’s successor: convict labor, working in horrific conditions to break granite at the Bellwood Quarry and burn clay at the Chattahoochee Brick Company.

"When you just use your common sense as what’s there, yeah it just, it didn’t add up," said Hope a 63-year-old father of two who lives in suburban Bellwood, west of Chicago.

“When you just use your common sense as what’s there, yeah it just, it didn’t add up,” said Hope a 63-year-old father of two who lives in suburban Bellwood, west of Chicago.

“It’s convincing,” says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at Australian National University who wasn’t involved with the work.