Every family has a trade that runs through it. In mine, it's building.

Bryant, brick mason

When I went through the records on my side of the family, one occupation kept standing out: brick mason. Bryant, Chester's son, is listed as one in the census from around 1920. That means a man born into the years right after slavery learned a skilled trade and used it to lay bricks and put up buildings around Atlanta.

Seeing his trade written down in an official record meant a lot to me. I'm still searching for exactly what he built, and I'll share it as soon as I can confirm it.

Why a trade mattered so much

To understand what that meant, you have to know what Atlanta was like for Black workers then.

After the Civil War, Atlanta rebuilt itself fast, and it rebuilt in brick. Historians of the city note that the building trades, including masonry, carpentry and plastering, were among the occupations where Black Atlantans found real economic footing after emancipation. Many of those skills had been passed down from enslaved craftsmen who did the building before the war.

A skilled trade was one of the better paths to steady work, to owning property and to building a name. A mason could find work wherever the city was growing, and Atlanta was always growing.

But that footing was never secure. As Jim Crow laws tightened around the turn of the century, many of those opportunities were squeezed. And there's a darker side to Atlanta's brick that's important to say out loud. Through the convict leasing system, thousands of Black Georgians, many arrested on petty or made-up charges, were forced to make bricks under brutal conditions. The Chattahoochee Brick Company in northwest Atlanta produced hundreds of thousands of bricks a day, and those bricks paved the city's streets and sidewalks. Georgia didn't vote to end convict leasing until 1908.

So when I say a lot of Atlanta was built by Black hands, I mean it in both ways: by free, skilled tradesmen like Bryant who earned a living from it, and by people who were forced to.

That's why it matters to me that Bryant is on record as a brick mason. He was working in the trade by skill, and his name was written down.

Picking up the trowel

I picked up the work too. On 191 Peachtree, the tower downtown, I was a stone setter's assistant. At the Georgia Aquarium, on the dolphin exhibit, I was a brick mason's assistant. On a job site, that's a broad title. It meant mixing the cement and mortar, getting materials to the masons and doing whatever kept the work moving. It's the job where you learn the trade from the ground up, and nothing gets laid without it.

When I drive through Atlanta, I can point at buildings I helped put up. That isn't separate from my family's story. A brick mason in the generations before me, and me on the masonry crew now: different centuries, same kind of work, same city.

What masonry teaches you

There's something about masonry that stays with you.

It's slow work. You can't rush mortar, and you can't fake a straight line. Every course of brick depends on the one under it. If the foundation is off, everything above it shows it.

That's true about families too. And it's true about building a business. Nagast is built the same way, one course at a time, on a foundation I want to be able to stand on.

A building also outlasts the people who built it. A lot of what's standing in Atlanta was put up by Black hands whose names never made it onto a plaque. I'd like ours to be on the record.

Help us find more

If you've worked in the trades in Atlanta, or you know of a building your family helped put up, I'd like to hear about it. You can reach me through the contact page. Stories like yours are exactly what we want to document on Nagast TV.

If you missed the earlier parts, start with Part One and Part Two. You can find more history and culture programming on Nagast TV on Roku.