sheri on November 23, 1891, asking if a black man with the last
name of El iot had perhaps stabbed a man at the Shelby Iron
Works some years earlier. "Look into the mat er and see if there is
any Reward for him, and if so I wil bring him to you and divide
the Reward. I know where he is and can get him anytime. Hoping
to hear from you at your earliest convenience."36
A week later, a telegraph to Grant on November 29, 1891, from
the constable in Waverly Alabama, warned that he had arrested an
African American named Frank Hubbard but "wil not hold unless
there is an ample reward." Scores upon scores of such let ers—some
penned in re ned script of educated men, more often in the scrawl
of county brutes, sometimes crisp and terse telegrams—piled in
heaps in a drawer of the sheri 's wooden desk.37 Scat ered among
them were reminders from Je erson County's Sheri Rogers, who
later became general manager of convicts for the Tennessee Coal,
Iron & Railroad Co., to send along bil s and receipts related to the
transportation of prisoners from Columbiana to the Prat Mines—by
then the ultimate destination of nearly every one of the hundreds of
black men unfortunate enough to encounter Sherif Grant.38
black men unfortunate enough to encounter Sherif Grant.
The opportunities for abuse in these dealings were immense and
obvious. Blacks who fel into the disfavor of white o cials
anywhere in the South could be swept into the penal system on the
most super cial pretense. The ability of blacks to resist these
developments became more and more circumscribed.
The sudden rise of this new threat was shocking to blacks at a time
when thousands stil actively participated in southern political life.
But that too was soon under a new and corrosive at ack. In the
Alabama election of 1892, the political dynamics of the state were
cloaked in what appeared to be a clash of ideals between a new
populist rhetoric aimed at uniting agrarians and laborers against the
"Bourbon" al iance of plantation owners and industrialists who
control ed the Democratic Party—a theme echoing across the South.
The Alabama populists were led by gubernatorial candidate
Reuben Kolb. It was widely believed that his victory in the previous
election had been stolen in 1890, when Democrats stuf ed the bal ot
boxes with thousands of ostensible African American votes in
overwhelmingly black counties. The result had been the fraudulent
but irreversible coronation of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, a
former Confederate who a decade later would play a pivotal role
on the issue of continuing the South's new slavery.
In 1892, both Kolb and Jones ran for the governor's o ce again.
Kolb promised to support crop prices and regulate the abusive
railroad cartels that imposed high freight fees on farm goods being
shipped to market. Philosophical y, he had the support of new
activist black farmer's groups who shared the populist concerns
over laws and practices that abused poor people, sharecroppers,
and tenant farmers. In a nod to black voters, Kolb, the former state
agriculture secretary and a Confederate veteran as wel , also said he
opposed the practice of leasing convicts.
Governor Jones vowed to revive the state by encouraging the
explosive growth of Birmingham and continuing to help wealthy
cot on plantation owners in the state's predominantly black,
cot on plantation owners in the state's predominantly black,
southern counties. Whites were in turmoil over the choice, with
poorer hil country counties breaking for Kolb and whites in the
rich atlands once again supporting Jones. To win reelection, Jones
knew he had to once more pack the voting pol s with thousands of
black Republicans on his side. Despite their shared economic
interests with black sharecroppers and tenants, Kolb's poor-farmer
white fol owers responded to Jones's currying of African American
voters with the most shril white supremacist rhetoric.
Jones's conservative Democrat backers, including the state's major
newspapers, shamelessly turned the tables—accusing Kolb populists
of supporting black political rights and dubbing him the candidate
of the "nigger party." Kolb's supporters reacted with even more
odious anti-black invective. The South was tracing out the lines of
the violent racial ideology and vernacular that would consume it for
the next seventy-five years.
John Milner, the Alabama industrialist who had so aggressively
pushed for the state to adopt laws helping him l his mines with
forced black labor, published a pamphlet denouncing even the
vaguest suggestion of al owing black political rights.
Titled "WHITE MEN OF ALABAMA, STAND TOGETHER!," the
pamphlet blared: "It would be bet er … if left in the control of their
negroes, that Alabama …sink beneath the waves and be forever
lost."39
That was the real substance of the campaign. Most of the
philosophical clash between the two sides was a sham, as the South
was swept by the latest wave of white animosity toward African
Americans. Whites realized that the al ies of blacks in the North
appeared to be abandoning the former slaves. A time had come to
set le scores and relay the foundations for a society based on the
harshest racial divisions. Further inflaming the passions of 1892 was
the Federal Election Bil sponsored by Massachuset s representative
Henry Cabot Lodge. The act, known to opponents as the "Force
Bil ," mandated that black voting rights be protected in the South
through federal supervision of elections. Two years earlier, the
through federal supervision of elections. Two years earlier, the
measure was approved by the House of Representatives but failed
in the Senate. The new version raised the sensational specter of
reintroducing federal troops in the southern states to force
compliance.
In reality, the Force Bil was the last gasp of the dwindling
numbers of Civil War-era Republican idealists in Washington to
compel adherence to the mandates of the constitutional
amendments granting citizenship to African Americans. The
measure was doomed from introduction. But its consideration left
southern whites seething at the vision of another Union invasion
and a return of power to blacks. It spurred the push to eliminate
African American political activity once and for al . On election day
in Alabama, there was virtual y no doubt that Kolb outpol ed
Governor Jones. But once again, thousands upon thousands of
bal ots purportedly cast by blacks who clearly were no longer being
al owed to vote turned the balance for Jones. He was declared the
winner, after o cial returns showed 127,000 votes for Jones to the
chal enger's 116,000.
The reelection was fol owed by an astonishing surge of activity
against African Americans. The opening of the next session of the
state legislature marked the beginning of the nal push to end al
black political involvement, to consolidate the segregation codes
that would
de ne the Jim Crow era, and to begin cut ing African
Americans out of the most important e orts of government to
improve public life. Legislators voted to join seven other southern
states that already mandated segregated seating for blacks and
whites on trains. Public education, a new but increasingly popular
government function, was the most critical target of the racial
at ack.
Whites had chafed at the notion of black education as long as
Africans had been imported to the United States. Instruction of
slaves was il egal in the antebel um South. After emancipation,
government-col ected property taxes were used to open new
schools for al children. Whites gawked at the schools opened for
blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations
blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations
that predominated in the region. Per pupil spending on education
for black children and white children was essential y identical,
leading to wide resentment among whites—especial y in the cot on
plantation regions where whites owned the vast majority of land
and paid nearly al the taxes, but were enormously outnumbered by
African Americans in population. That "white taxes" were spent for
the education of black children, rather than solely their own, was
infuriating.
White leaders began to openly espouse that schools for blacks
were bad for the emerging new economic order. "Education would
spoil a good plow hand," opined a state legislator, J. L. M. Curry, in
a speech to the Alabama General Assembly.40 Most worrisome to
leading whites was that schooling il iterate blacks would encourage
"the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who
after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert
them."41
In the 1880s, the Alabama legislature at empted to enact laws
specifying that school funds would be apportioned on the basis of
which taxpayers contributed them: whites would fund white
schools, blacks would fund black schools. Federal courts quickly
declared that openly discriminatory scheme in violation of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
As the popularity of state-funded free public schools surged, the
friction caused by black education grew. The number of white
children at ending public schools in Alabama raced from 91,202 to
159,671 between the 1870s and late 1880s. At the same time, the
number of black pupils increased from 54,595 to 98,919. But the
amount of funding spent for every student was declining, and
at empts to raise taxes were doomed. Whites saw the money spent
in black schools as the only viable source of additional funds for
their own children.
In the legislative session of 1892, white leaders simply changed
the law so that school taxes were no longer distributed among al
schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of
schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of
students, white and black, would determine how much funding a
county or town received from the state. But it would be up to local
o cials to divide the money among schools "as they may deem just
and equitable." The author of the bil was hailed by another elected
o cial who said he "deserved a vote of thanks from the white
people of the state."42 The e ect on blacks was catastrophic.
Overnight, white schools came to receive the vast majority of al
funds for education. In one predominantly African American
county, the total budget for black teachers’ salaries in 1891 was
$6,545—in approximate parity with what was being spent per
student at white schools in the county. After turning over control of
funding to local o cials, black teacher salaries were slashed. Later
the length of the black school year was cut to just six months—
reducing costs and eliminating school as an excuse for African
American children not to work in the elds during planting and
harvest. Forty years later, the total salaries for teachers instructing
8,483 black children in the county had risen negligibly to just over
$8,000. The budget for white teachers, with fewer than two
thousand pupils, had climbed by a factor of almost 30, to nearly
$60,000.43
If any doubt remained about the intentions of southern whites in
1892, vigilante and mob violence soon dissolved it. More lynchings
of blacks occurred in the United States in 1892 than in any other
year—in excess of 250. Executions peaked in Alabama the
fol owing year, with the deaths of twenty-seven blacks.
At the same time, the region's biggest industrial concerns
continued to expand explosively. In December 1892, Tennessee
Coal, Iron & Railroad bought outright the Cahaba Coal Mining
Company and its 44,000 acres of coal-rich property—some of it
extending to within a few miles of the old Cot ingham plantation in
Bibb County. In addition to the coal elds, the company acquired a
fteen-mile railroad, nearly ve hundred coke ovens, much of the
town of Blocton, and seven mines producing up to three thousand
tons of coal a day44 The number of men forced into Alabama slave
tons of coal a day The number of men forced into Alabama slave
mines surged with the growth, swel ing by half to 1,200 in 1892
from 845 just three years earlier.
As labor strife surged in the early 1890s, company o cials
privately worked on plans to shift even more of the company's
operations to captive forced laborers. One Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad o cial visiting Montgomery wrote to the superintendent
of the Prat Mines: "[T]he probability is we wil have to arrange to
take care of a great many more convicts."45
On the fourteenth day of February 1893, a new era opened for
the black men of Shelby County—where Green Cot enham would
be arrested fteen years later. Four men were loaded onto the
Birmingham train, headed to the new buyer of Shelby's prisoners.
Ben Alston, Charles Garnes, and Issac Mosely had each been
convicted of assault six weeks earlier. Henry Nelson was arrested
the previous day for using "abusive language in the presence of a
female"—a phony charge available for arresting "impudent" black
men. Scratched into the record of prisoners was the same entry for
al four men, a destination so new that the jailer hadn't yet learned
to spel it: "sent to prats mines."46
Voices of opposition to what was happening in the South were
dying. Some reform-minded activists protested the physical abuses
of prison labor, but the explicitly racial aspect of the new forced
labor system was often largely unacknowledged. White southerners
responded with gal ing mendacity to the occasional criticism
expressed by northern newspapers. Many whites were thril ed by
the patina of legitimacy presented by Charles Darwin's new
concepts of human evolution, which were being twisted to o er a
genetic, seemingly objective rationale for black inferiority. The
dark-skinned race was capable of learning less, so blacks need
ed
fewer and smal er schools, according to this logic. Blacks could
work ef ectively only under threat of a whip.
In a speech to the National Prison Congress in Cincinnati, Ohio,
in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,
in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,
cool y defended the appal ing conditions at the mines in Coalburg
and Prat City. Virtual y al criticism of Alabama's and the South's
forced labor system were "exaggerations" and "falsehoods," he said.
The prisons were clean, the prisoners wel fed and humanely
treated. The hounds used to track escapees were "nothing more than
the fox or deer hounds that have been used in the South for the
chase from time immemorial, trained to run the human track."
Never once had a dog injured a convict, Lee maintained.
Prisoners in Alabama received generous amounts of corn bread,
bacon, fresh meat, bread, co ee, and tobacco. "Hundreds of convicts
have been sent to the penitentiary with diseases of which they
would have died at home for want of medical at ention, who have
been cured and sent home, at the end of their terms, sound men,"
Lee continued.
He said he was morti ed by al egations that the prisoners were
underfed and overworked. "In some form or other I have had the
management and control of negroes ever since I came to the years
of discretion," Lee said. "In the days of slavery, I fed, clothed and
worked them, and since they became free, I have employed and
managed them on the plantation. I see what, as free men, they have
to eat and wear, and the houses they live in. And I assert here,
without fear of successful contradiction, that the negro convicts …
are bet er housed, bet er fed, bet er clothed, and receive bet er
medical care and treatment in sickness than do the majority of the
same class, as free men, in their homes."47
The truth was that African Americans were trapped in a catch-22
between the laws criminalizing the mores of black life and other
laws that e ectively barred them from assimilating into mainstream
white American society or improving their economic position.
Even ostensible friends of African Americans succumbed to the
increasingly mandatory dismissal of black intel ectual faculties. "The
population of our prisons is mostly a population of negroes. These
people are proverbial y weak, improvident, credulous—the victims
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