Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  coerced or falsified votes cast in those years by thousands of blacks.

  Yet Washington and Jones had been secret al ies for years—even

  as Jones was manipulating black votes in the 1890s.12 It is also

  possible that as a result of Washington's secret in uence, some of

  the thousands of Jones votes cast by blacks and long assumed by

  historians to be fraudulent, were in fact legitimate.

  But Washington knew that as an o cer in the state militia in

  1883, Jones also had cal ed out troops to prevent a lynching. He

  had spoken publicly on many occasions of the importance of

  respecting other new rights granted to freed slaves by the

  amendments to the U.S. Constitution passed in the 1870s. As

  governor, he blocked e orts to divert funds for black schools to

  white ones. At the same time, Jones maintained his base of support

  with the state's business elite by cal ing out troops to suppress a

  major strike by newly unionized miners in the 1890s.

  Over the years, Jones appeared to have moderated even further

  on race. More recently, he had been a delegate to the just

  completed 1901 Alabama constitutional convention. The document

  agreed to at the meeting and later rati ed, which would govern

  Alabama for the duration of the twentieth century and into the

  twenty- rst, nal y eliminated virtual y al vestiges of the electoral

  and civil rights given to blacks after emancipation. But Jones de ed

  the political winds of the day, vigorously pushing for one of the few

  measures approved that bene ted blacks, a law al owing for

  impeachment of any sheri who al owed a prisoner to be seized by

  a lynch mob. Jones also opposed e orts to eliminate al black

  voting and to require that public schools for African American

  children be funded only with those taxes col ected from blacks.

  Jones quietly strategized with Washington throughout the

  convention, consistently engaged in a tone of equals, addressing the

  black leader with the honorific "Dear Sir."13

  On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after

  On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after

  Roosevelt had been sworn in as president, Washington sent a let er

  through an aide imploring the new chief executive to name Jones

  as the new federal judge in Alabama. "He stood up in the

  constitutional convention and elsewhere for a fair election law,

  opposed lynching, and has been outspoken for the education of

  both races," Washington wrote. "He is head and shoulders above any

  of the other persons who I think wil apply to you," Washington

  wrote to Roosevelt on October 2, 1901.14

  Roosevelt took the advice and appointed Judge Jones less than a

  week later. The decision elicited the e ect Roosevelt hoped for.

  Many southern whites were impressed by the president's

  wil ingness to turn to one of their "best men" for a critical federal

  position, despite Jones being a prominent Democrat. Newspapers

  in the region hailed the move.

  Ten days after the appointment, the president was informed that

  Washington was in the capital city. He insisted that the black

  educator come to a private dinner at the White House with the

  Roosevelt family. It was a dizzying sequence of events for

  Washington and other African Americans who shared his belief that

  accommodating discrimination while incremental y working to

  reverse it was the best route to black freedom. Here was proof, it

  seemed. Regardless of the struggles stil faced by the majority of

  slave descendants, black men of accomplishment could rise to

  unprecedented levels of influence.

  Blacks had visited the White House before, and prior presidents

  had sought the advice of black men. But never had a black man

  appeared to be among the very most in uential gures in a

  president's execution of so critical a task as selecting federal of icials

  in an entire region. Yet more astonishing was that the white

  president who had taken his advice won accolades for the resulting

  decision. Black men could not be the leaders of whites in this

  regime, but they could quietly wield great in uence as to who the

  rulers would be. Now, the president wished his African American

  counselor to openly sup with himself, his wife, and his children—

  making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.

  making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.

  Roosevelt had no hint of the reaction that would ensue.

  Notwithstanding Washington's national fame and his widely known

  view that blacks should in most regards accept their legal y inferior

  position in the South, word that "a Negro" had dined at the same

  table as the president, his wife, and his children—violating one of

  the most sacrosanct protocols of southern racial custom—provoked

  a sensational backlash.

  U.S. senator Ben "Pitchfork" Til man of South Carolina sput ered:

  "Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we

  shal have to kil a thousand niggers to get them back to their

  places." The Memphis Press Scimitar cal ed the evening meal "the

  most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any

  citizen of the United States." The Rich-mond News declared that

  Roosevelt "at one stroke and by one act has destroyed regard for

  him. He has put himself further from us than any man who has ever

  been in the White House." The governor of Georgia, Al en Candler,

  said, "No southerner can respect any white man who would eat

  with a negro."15

  Laced throughout the vili cations was the implicit or explicit

  message that Roosevelt's decision to al ow Washington to share his

  personal dining room amounted to an endorsement of sexual

  relations—and predations— between black men and white women.

  "It is simply a question of whether those who are invited to dine are

  t to marry the sisters and daughters of their hosts," said Governor

  Miles Benjamin McSweeney of South Carolina.16

  The opprobrium continued for months, growing more virulent

  with each announcement of another in the slow trickle of black

  appointees made by the White House. After several black

  o ceholders and their wives at ended a White House reception in

  early 1903, the race-baiting Mississippi politician James K.

  Vardaman cal ed Roosevelt a "lit le, mean, coon- avored

  miscegenationist." The White House, Vardaman said, was "so

  saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge

  in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

  in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

  fol owing year.17

  A century later it is di cult to comprehend the degree to which

  most southern whites had so thoroughly adopted the rationale

  embodied by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling less than ten years earlier

  —which e ectively held that African Americans had no basis of

  legitimate complaint regarding the racial climate at the turn of the

  century, regardless of how overtly apparent was the disparate

  treatment of and opportunities for whites and b
lacks.

  Roosevelt's overtures to blacks were not just violations of an

  accepted social custom, but gal ing because they suggested that in

  fact African Americans did have reason to object to their current

  status in the United States. White southerners by and large shared a

  consensus that this view was simply nonsensical. They were certain

  that the vast majority of blacks were entirely content and that their

  contentment would only increase as freed-men were pushed nearer

  to a legal status barely distinguishable from those of their parents in

  antebel um society.

  The Birmingham Ledger newspaper—describing a state in which

  African Americans could no longer vote, could not hold o ce,

  could not serve on local juries, were proscribed from most higher-

  wage work, could arrange only the slimmest legal representation in

  the courts, and were subject to ut erly arbitrary enforcement of the

  law—summed up the fantasy shared by mil ions of southerners:

  "The court of Alabama and schools of Alabama are open to negroes

  and every door of opportunity can be entered and above al it is

  easier for a negro to get rich here than anywhere else in the

  world."18That delusion would not waver in the South for at least

  another fty years, until the very climax of the civil rights

  movement.

  The Dadevil e Spot Cash, the voice of John Pace's Tal apoosa

  County, enunciated this white delusion—and its o ense at the

  inherent impudence of Roosevelt's at itudes—in a detailed

  fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

  fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

  many kinds of negroes, as lit le boys have many kinds of marbles.

  We have good negroes and bad negroes, industrious negroes and

  idle negroes, negroes determined to bet er their own condition and

  negroes who care no more about the future than the birds care.

  Alabama has negroes who have earned the respect and regard of

  the people who know them, and Alabama has negroes who wear

  the stripes of the convict."19

  The Dadevil e editor also re ected the broadly shared paranoia

  that any e ort to change or improve the conditions of blacks

  amounted to an e ort to seize control of society: "Alabama has

  negroes who own land and cat le and who are rearing their families

  respectably and who can go to the bank and borrow money without

  security. There are negroes who are teaching and many who are

  fol owing honorable lines of work, and it has some who think with

  the president that the door of hope for them means governing

  white people as of icials. Al these we have and others."20

  The message was clear, and shared almost universal y among

  whites: whatever happens to black men is strictly the result of their

  own choices. Those choices ultimately were to submit quietly to the

  emerging new order or be crushed by it.

  The reaction of southern leaders to Roosevelt's gesture to

  Washington further underscored how far southern whites could

  extend their ability to reconcile the obvious and extraordinary

  abuses of blacks occurring around them with their rhetorical

  insistence that African Americans were entirely free, content, and

  unmolested. Never before in American history had so large a

  portion of the populace adopted such explicitly false and calculated

  propaganda. Many southern whites actual y came to believe claims

  that black schools were equal y funded, black train cars were

  equal y appointed, and that black citizens were equal y defended

  by the courts—as preposterous as those claims obviously were.

  Those who truly knew bet er nonetheless relished the clever

  fabrication of this mythology, and how it so e ectively stymied the

  busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

  busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

  cynical thread in the mosaic of racial myth was the outrage of

  southern white men at Roosevelt's supposed encouragement of

  sexual interrelations between blacks and whites. White men openly

  forced black slaves into their beds for two centuries before the Civil

  War, and sexual access to local black women remained a running

  point of confrontation between white landowners and their black

  laborers deep into the twentieth century—a phenomenon that

  continued to demonstrate itself a century later with the public

  revelation that South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond fathered a

  black child with an African American family servant in 1925.

  "The whole country wel knows that white men of the South have

  come into closer relations with negroes and commit ed far grosser

  sins than that of sit ing down to meat with a reputable and

  representative colored person," wrote Wil iam A. Sinclair, a black

  physician, in 1905. "And in the eyes of their fel ows they su ered

  no disgrace."21

  President Roosevelt was shocked by the calumnies and vitriol

  spewing from the South regarding his friendliness toward blacks.

  He moderated slightly— never inviting another black man to his

  dinner table again—but continued to insist that good Americans

  could not legitimately object to the view that law-abiding and

  industrious blacks should be treated with equity and ful protection

  of the law.

  Roosevelt concluded a long circuit of speeches across much of the

  country in the spring of 1903 with an address in Spring eld,

  Il inois, on June 4, at the monument there to Abraham Lincoln.

  Arriving on a 10:15 A.M. train, Roosevelt was greeted euphorical y

  rst by aging Union soldiers in the Lincoln-McKinley Veteran

  Voters’ Association, then by more than ve thousand schoolchildren

  massed along the street leading past the state capitol and furiously

  waving American ags. Businesses and homes were decorated in

  elaborate patriotic bunting and ags. A gathering of ten thousand

  impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

  impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

  would dedicate later in the day. Also in the crowd at the Lincoln

  memorial were several detachments of the Il inois National Guard,

  including the al -black Company H of the Eighth Regiment. "It

  seems to me eminently t ing that the guard around the tomb of

  Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers," Roosevelt said,

  citing his own service in Cuba beside black soldiers. "A man who is

  good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be

  given a square deal afterward."22

  The words were a modest anodyne for black Americans, given

  the scale of the campaign over the previous two decades to

  circumscribe their constitutional protections and limit their free

  participation in American society. Yet the sentence—condensed by

  newspaper reporters and repeated ubiquitously as a promise by

  Roosevelt of "a square deal for the negro"—in amed white

  southerners yet again. What most gal ed whites was the implication

  by Roosevelt that African Americans were not already receiving as

  square and fair a deal as they could possibly deser
ve.

  In Alabama, as Secret Service agents scoured the countryside for

  slavery, whites recognized that Roosevelt's remarks might be more

  than the pitiable window dressing of equal civil rights they had

  heard from McKinley and the other Republican leaders of the

  previous decade.

  By early June 1903, Alabama was a ame. Judge Jones—only

  nineteen months into his service as the new member of the federal

  bench—had proven to be precisely the gure Roosevelt hoped. The

  slavery investigation announced in late May was spreading across

  the state. Prominent white landowners in a half dozen counties had

  learned they were under examination or at least al egation. Black

  laborers—while stil acutely aware that the investigation subjected

  them to a new degree of jeopardy with angry whites—quietly

  expressed a level of anticipation unlike anything since rst word of

  the coming emancipation had arrived forty years earlier.

  The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

  The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

  was hired to represent a black prisoner being held in Shelby

  County. Local authorities obstructed Parsons's e orts to nd the

  prisoner and refused to say why he was being held. Parsons

  contacted the U.S. at orney in Montgomery, who in turn told Judge

  Jones. The rst handful of frightened witnesses were brought before

  a grand jury sit ing in Birmingham and presided over by Jones.

  They told the first shocking account of Pace's slaving network.23

  In March, Judge Jones red o a bewildered let er to At orney

  General Philander C. Knox in Washington, D.C. "Some witnesses

  before the Grand Jury here developed the fact that in Shelby

  County in this District, and in Coosa County in the Middle district, a

  systematic scheme of depriving Negroes of their liberty, and hiring

  them out, has been practiced for some time," Jones wrote. "The

  plan is to accuse the negro of some pet y o ense, and then require

  him, in order to escape conviction, to enter into an agreement to

  pay his accuser so much money, and sign a contract, under the

  terms of which his bondsmen can hire him out until he pays a

  certain sum. The negro is made to believe he is a convict, and

  treated as such. It is said that thirty negroes were in the stockade at

  one time." Already, at least one witness had been seized from a