Slavery by Another Name

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by Douglas A. Blackmon


  of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

  of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

  been guilty of only trivial o ense; and many of these o enses are

  not in themselves criminal, or even immoral, but which have been

  made penal simply by statutory enactment," wrote Jerome Cochran,

  state health of icer, in 1892.

  "It is the peculiar misfortune of the negro," Cochran continued,

  "that his investment with the privileges of citizenship, and of the

  elective franchise has also subjected him to the operation of laws

  made by men for the government of white men—law which he

  does not understand, and the moral obligations of which he is not

  able to appreciate."48

  In 1895, Thomas Parke, the health o cer for Je erson County,

  investigated conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg prison mine. He

  found 1,926 prisoners at toil. Hundreds had been charged with

  vagrancy gambling, carrying a concealed weapon, or other minor

  o enses, he reported. In many cases, no speci c charges were

  recorded at al . Dr. Parke observed that many were held for minor

  infractions, ned $5 or $10, and, unable to pay, leased for twenty

  days to Sloss-She eld to cover the ne. Most then had another year

  or more tacked onto their sentences to cover fees owed to the

  sherif , the clerk, and the witnesses involved in prosecuting them.

  "The largest portion of the prisoners are sentenced for slight

  o enses and sent to prison for want of money to pay the nes and

  costs…. They are not criminals," Dr. Parke wrote in his formal

  report.

  Male prisoners were barracked in a primitive wood-plank prison

  beside the putrid Five Mile Creek, near a row of coke ovens. The

  miners spent nearly half of each twenty-four hours in the mine, six

  days a week. The shaft was minimal y ventilated; coal cars were

  pushed out of the earth by the miners themselves, rather than with

  mechanized equipment. Medical care was dispensed occasional y

  from a primitive shack; scores of miners worked with serious

  il nesses, including untreated and open wounds in amed with

  infected boils and pus. Parke's tal y of prisoners held at Coal-burg

  in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

  in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

  the state's o cial records at the time—indicating that hundreds of

  laborers had been sold into the mine through extralegal systems.

  More than a hundred forced laborers died at the mine during the

  two years prior to Parke's visit.

  The physician, even one burdened with intensely racist

  perspectives, was shocked by the inhumanity. He asked whether "a

  sovereign state can a ord to send her citizens, for slight o enses, to

  a prison where, in the nature of things, a large number are

  condemned to die."

  Embarrassed by the publication of Parke's report, Sloss-She eld

  commissioned the physician it paid to care for the forced laborers,

  Dr. Judson Davie, to write a response. He claimed the extraordinary

  rate of mortality among blacks was their own fault. But even his

  apologia for health conditions at Coalburg was tel ing. He said

  many convicts, once injured, tried not to become wel to avoid a

  return to the mine. "Some eat soap; some rub poisonous things into

  their sores or cuts; but by far the greater obstacle to their making

  quick and good recoveries is the mental depression of the new

  men," he wrote. He added that many miners chose to drink the

  pol uted "seep water" in which they worked "of their own accord in

  preference to going to springs or other usual places of get ing

  drinking water." He also contended that nearly every black man

  contracts syphilis by adulthood. No blame for that could be ascribed

  to the mine, he contended.

  The larger issue, Davie wrote, was genetic: "It is a fact that the

  negro race is inferior to the white race physical y as wel as

  mental y and moral y— their powers of resistance, so far as a great

  many diseases are concerned, notably tuberculosis, does not

  compare at al favorably with the white race."

  Stil , Dr. Parke's criticism of the lethal conditions in Sloss-

  She eld's slave mine embarrassed the company enough that a

  month later its president, Thomas Seddon, sent a let er to local

  o cials defending his treatment of black workers. He summed up

  the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."49

  the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."

  Sentiments like that were hardly rare in the three decades after

  the Civil War. Yet throughout that di cult time, African Americans

  stil clung at some level to the idea that whatever white men such

  as Parke said or did, the United States as a whole stil stood

  squarely to the contrary. This, the Civil War proved, was

  immutable.

  Then, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a thirty-year-old

  white shoemaker with a trace of African blood, named Homer

  Plessy the right to ride in the white compartment of an East

  Louisiana Railroad train. On its face, the ruling sanctioned only the

  newly conceived concept of "separate but equal" public facilities for

  blacks and whites. But its actual import was vastly greater. Plessy v.

  Ferguson legitimized the contemptuous at itudes of whites like the

  top executives of Sloss-She eld. Moreover, it certi ed that any

  charade of equal treatment for African Americans was not just

  acceptable and practical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but

  moral y and legal y legitimate in the highest venue of white society.

  It was a signal moment in America's national discourse. From the

  lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers,

  Americans had shared a consensus that the highest de nition of a

  citizen was his veracity, that truth tel ing and ful l ment of a man's

  commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of

  honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the

  sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a stil new nation

  born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an ut erly

  sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.

  That al egiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets

  of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had

  impel ed the nation toward civil war during the antebel um

  decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic's

  noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the

  prevailing view among al white Americans that blacks were in

  some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war

  upon itself at devastating cost, in a con ict ultimately justi ed as a

  struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

  struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

  doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required

  were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in

  the South. The moral y bewildering sacri ce of the war became a

  concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itse
lf

  toward the "more perfect union" of the Founding Fathers. The

  surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage

  of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that

  vision.

  The Supreme Court's endorsement in 1896 of the agrantly

  duplici-tous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a

  resignation of America's white institutions to the conclusion that the

  emancipation of black slaves had been fol y. Most agreed that the

  elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past

  abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white

  Americans, the refusal of the southern states to ful y free or

  enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue

  worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United

  States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white

  security.

  There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S.

  politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson

  marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of

  the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of

  their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the

  principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the

  American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment

  of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of

  citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that

  abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be

  reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern

  cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a

  pat ern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any

  rationalization was su cient to excuse the most severe abuses of

  African Americans.

  Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

  Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

  minds, the men control ing the mines and labor camps of the South

  adopted even more imsy ruses of justi cation for black men's

  imprisonment. The level of physical coercion increased terrifyingly

  At the Prat Mines, an observer for a special Alabama legislative

  commit ee in 1897 wrote a report describing 1,117 convicts, many

  "whol y un t for the work," at labor in the shaft.50 In an 1898

  convict board report, the largest category in a table listing charges

  on which county convicts were imprisoned was "Not given." 51 No

  one even bothered to invent a legal basis for their enslavement.

  In a 1902 report, one man was in the mines for "disturbing

  females on railroad car." More than a dozen were incarcerated for

  "abusive and obscene language." Twenty convicts were digging coal

  for adultery, twenty-nine for gambling. Dozens of prisoners were at

  labor for riding a freight train without paying for a ticket. 52 In

  1902 and 1903, local o cials in Je erson County prosecuted more

  than three thousand misdemeanor cases, most of them yielding a

  convict to work in a Sloss-She eld mine—the vast majority of

  whom were black.53

  One of those convicts was John Clarke, a miner convicted of

  "gaming" on April 11, 1903. Unable to pay, he ended up at Sloss-

  She eld. Working o the ne would take ten days. Fees for the

  sheri , the county clerk, and the witnesses who testi ed against him

  required that Clarke spend an additional 104 days in the mines.

  Sloss-She eld acquired him from Je erson County for $9 a month.

  One month and three days later, he was dead, crushed by "fal ing

  rock."54

  At least 2,500 men were being held against their wil at more

  than two dozen labor camps across Alabama at the time Clarke

  died. More than nine hundred were in the Prat Mines. Sloss-

  She eld held nearly three hundred. The McCurdys stil control ed

  nearly one hundred in Lowndes County. Scores more were

  imprisoned in the turpentine and lumber camps of the Henderson-

  Boyd and Horseshoe Bend lumber companies and other remote

  prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

  prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

  Alabama. Payments to the state that year exceeded a half mil ion

  dol ars, the equivalent of $12.1 mil ion a century later and a gure

  nearly equal to 25 percent of al taxes col ected in Alabama.55

  As the dark cloud of the new slavery was descending on those

  men and the hundreds of thousands of friends, acquaintances, and

  family members across the South, the descendants of the old slave

  Scipio struggled to maintain emancipated lives. Abraham

  Cot ingham and his sons Jimmy and Frank, descendants of Mit ,

  another son of Scipio, were among nearly four hundred black voters

  who stil participated in Shelby County elections in 1892. De ant,

  even as the vast majority of other black men in the county were

  intimidated or obstructed from the pol s, Abraham paid an

  increasingly onerous pol tax and complied year after year with

  burgeoning requirements established by the state of Alabama for

  blacks to qualify for a bal ot. Each election year, under hostile eyes,

  he signed his name boldly in the register of voters maintained in

  the worn-brick county courthouse across the street from the jail.56

  But even Abraham could not resist the new state constitution

  adopted in 1901, under which virtual y no black person could

  again vote in Alabama. No black Cot ingham would cast a bal ot for

  at least six decades.57

  Sometime in the 1890s, Henry Cot inham died. The circumstances

  of his death weren't recorded. In June of 1900, Mary Cot inham

  abandoned Brier eld, where so many black descendants of the

  Cot ingham farm had once congregated, leaving behind only

  Henry's younger brother Elbert, with his own wife and ten children.

  Struggling to survive, Mary, the former slave girl from the Bishop

  farm, moved the remaining family to Monteval o, a town just inside

  Shelby County, where a new mining company was expanding

  quickly. She found work as a washerwoman. Her two daughters,

  Ada and Mariet a, sixteen and twenty, were anxiously hoping for

  marriage. Soon, the girls would leave home, and Mary was alone

  with her youngest. Her baby boy, Green, was fourteen and had

  learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

  learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

  hostility engul ng black America, he was rising into the muscle,

  hair, and boisterous curiosity of a teenage man.

  V

  THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

  "I don't owe you anything."

  The last thing John Davis should have been doing in the second

  week of September 1901 was a long hike across the parched

  elds of cot on stretching endlessly along the Central of Georgia

  Railway line running from the Georgia state line to the notorious

  town of Goodwater. Mil ions of crisp brown cot on bol s, fat and

  cracking at the seams with bulging white ber, waited in the elds

  and river atlands of central Alabama cal ing out to be picked. The<
br />
  task would take weeks and demand the labor of virtual y every

  available man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles.1

  Davis needed to be in his own patch of cot on—the lifeline of his

  tiny farm near Nixburg, a wisp of a town twenty miles south of

  Goodwater. For him to maintain any glimmer of independence in

  the South's terrifying racial regime, Davis had to produce his single

  bale of cot on—the limit of the physical capacities of one farmer

  and a mule and just enough to pay a share to the owner of the land

  he farmed and supply his family with enough food and warmth to

  pass the cold months soon to set in.

  But as he struggled to reach the tight bend in the rails more than

  ten miles from his farm, where freight trains were forced to slow

  and itinerant travelers knew there was a chance to leap aboard

  empty freight cars, John knew he needed just as badly to see his

  wife, Nora. She was il —so sick it had become impossible for him

  to care for her and the young couple's two children—especial y at

  the very time of the season when he, like hundreds of thousands of

  men working smal farms across the South, had no choice but to

  remain in his fields from dawn to dusk.

  John and Nora had been married for only three years. At twenty-

  ve, she was two years older. She came to the marriage with two

  children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

  children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

  treated the youngsters as his own. The husband and wife had come

  of age just miles apart on the outskirts of the rough-edged railroad

  town of Goodwater and married there in 1898. Eleven-year-old

  Albert certainly was already John's most important helpmate in the

  elds. At harvest time, he would have also needed ten-year-old

  Alice and Nora picking the rows.2 Sending them al to Nora's

  parents’ house meant John would have to pul every bol himself.

  But it must have seemed the only way.

  John stayed behind working furiously to bring in the crop. But

  Nora remained desperately il . Her husband had to see her now. So

  Davis made his way on September 10, 1901, to the big railroad

  curve outside Alexander City and waited with the other men

  wandering the rails for the No. 1 train. The fal sun was just

  beginning to falter as the train eased out of the lit le mil town at

 

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