Slavery by Another Name

Home > Other > Slavery by Another Name > Page 31
Slavery by Another Name Page 31

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  mistake, but that if the o cial "acted in bad faith or corruptly" he

  would be guilty of causing the person to be held in peonage. No

  judicial proceedings, regardless of how lawful they appear on their

  face, would be a defense, the judge noted, if they were "a cloak or a

  fraud to cover up the il egal design to cause persons to be held in

  peonage."44

  Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

  Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

  the grand jury, answering their inquiries and directing how they

  should interpret the federal peonage statute as their deliberations

  continued. Jones began with a long discourse on the origins of the

  peonage statute after the acquisition of New Mexico by the United

  States, and then laid out how the new labor system of Alabama

  appeared to violate that law.

  Jones explained that any man who induces a laborer to sign a

  contract agreeing to be held under guard and unable to leave until a

  debt is paid was guilty of peonage. A citizen or law enforcement

  o cer who tricked a laborer into believing he could avoid criminal

  prosecution or a sentence to hard labor only by signing such a

  contract was guilty of peonage, the judge explained. Anyone who

  falsely accused a person of a crime in order to compel him or her

  to sign such a contract or conspired to obtain the labor of a worker

  through such false charges, Jones wrote, was guilty of violating the

  pre-emancipation slave kidnapping act, which forbade "carrying

  away any other person, with the intent that such other person be

  sold into involuntary servitude."

  Jones also declared Alabama's labor contract law—which bound

  hundreds of thousands of black workers to white landowners—

  unconstitutional. Any person held against his wil under this statute,

  Jones ruled, should be released on habeas corpus—the ancient legal

  principle used to win the release of the falsely imprisoned.45

  Southern whites immediately recognized the implications of the

  ruling, and the reaction was furious. "Judge Jones’ …opinion, if

  sustained by the highest court, is far reaching and with disastrous

  consequences to the labor system of the South," wrote the Prat vil e

  Progress, a newspaper in the heart of a slave-riddled county. "There

  must be a revolution in the labor system."46

  The residents of counties across eastern Alabama were ba ed by

  Judge Jones's interpretation of the law. Tens of thousands of black

  workers were at labor in Alabama under contracts signed when a

  white man "confessed judgment" for an arrested black man—paying

  his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

  his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

  return a signed contract for labor.

  These arrangements sounded precisely like the ones described by

  Judge Jones as il egal. Hundreds of farmers were at risk of arrest.

  Thousands more African American laborers were being forced to

  work in mines and timber camps under similar contracts signed

  between county governments and the state of Alabama itself. Some

  local at orneys asked if farmers who worked convicts for debts were

  guilty of peonage, wasn't the state of Alabama equal y guilty in its

  handling of convict leases?47 It occurred to virtual y no one in

  Alabama that this was precisely the point. The vast majority of

  black laborers leased from the law enforcement system were being

  held il egal y.

  Even Judge Jones failed to comprehend the ful rami cations of

  his opinion. Like many wel -intentioned but stil fundamental y

  racist whites, he naively believed that the system engineered by

  Pace in Tal apoosa County was an isolated instance of abuse. He

  accepted the common convention of the time that African

  Americans were less intel igent and more inclined to criminal

  behavior than whites. He presumed that the vast majority of blacks

  arrested in the South were in fact guilty of their crimes, and merited

  severe punishment. What made him more "progressive" than other

  whites, and where he di ered from most white southerners, was

  that he believed blacks could not be brutalized in their punishment,

  and that the concept of impartial treatment of al citizens by the

  courts had to be upheld.

  Rank-and- le southerners, especial y in rural sections with large

  black populations, had no such il usions. They knew Judge Jones

  had set a standard by which thousands of white men were guilty of

  slave dealing, that hundreds of state and county o cials were in

  jeopardy, and that the whole nancial structure of governments and

  local economies was at risk. A correspondent to the Birmingham

  Age-Herald reported that "more than 100 men" in the area of Coosa

  and Tal apoosa counties—just two of Alabama's nearly seventy

  counties—were at risk of arrest in the federal investigation. "The

  people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

  people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

  been working criminals for twenty years, and the majority of such

  men do not know they are violating the law," the writer said.

  Inundated with bewildered queries, Judge Jones began to realize

  the breadth of coerced labor in his state. He hadn't intended to set

  o panic. To quel anxieties, Jones quietly summoned a reporter

  for the Associated Press and explained that white men could avoid

  breaking the law if their contracts with blacks were approved by a

  local judge and signed in court.48 Surely local judges could never

  condone slavery, Jones reasoned.

  While Judge Jones tried to soothe Alabama's worries, Warren

  Reese asked Sternfeld, the assistant who had listened to much of the

  testimony brought to the grand jury, to col ect for the at orney

  general the most egregious al egations that had surfaced so far in

  witness statements and reports from U.S. marshals in the

  countryside. As Mildred Elmore rat led the Remington's keys, they

  dictated what became an eight-page report to Washington.

  "There have been agrant abuses and violations … on the part of

  wealthy and in uential men," Reese began. "These violations have

  not been con ned to one or two periodical and independent

  instances, but it has developed into a miserable business and

  custom to catch up ignorant and helpless negro men and women

  upon the imsiest and the most baseless charges and carry them

  before a justice of the peace who is usual y a paid hireling of these

  wealthy dealers….

  The victim is found guilty and a ne is assessed which, in the beginning

  cannot be paid by the victim, and then it is that one of these slave dealers

  steps up, pretends to be the friend of the negro …telling him he will pay

  him out if he will sign a contract to work for him on his farm…

  …the negro readily agrees rather than go to the mines, as he is informed

  he will have to do, his ne is paid, the contract is signed, and the negro is

  taken to the farm or mine or mill or quarry of the employer….

  Placed into a conditio
n of involuntary servitude, he is locked up at

  nights in a cell, worked under guards during the day from 3 o'clock in the

  morning until 7 or 8 o'clock at night, whipped in a most cruel manner, is

  insu ciently fed or poorly clad—in fact the evidence in nearly all of the

  cases investigated reveals that the negro men are worked nearly naked,

  while the women are worked in an equally disgraceful manner.

  Brutal things have transpired and sometimes death has resulted from the

  infliction of corporal punishment….

  When the time of a good working negro is nearing an end, he is re-

  arrested upon some trumped up charge and again carried before some

  bribed justice and resentenced to an additional time. In this way negroes

  have been known to have worked on these places in this situation for

  years and years. They can get no word to friends nor is word allowed to

  reach them from the outside world…. They are held in abject slavery

  without any knowledge of what goes on in the outside world.

  If they run away the dogs are placed upon their track, and they are

  invariably retaken and subjected to more cruel treatment….

  The indictments so far found are based upon some twenty- ve negro

  men and women who have been the subjects of these violations. These are

  some of the most severe instances, but it has been discovered there are

  hundreds of other cases.49

  Reese and Sternfeld detailed the physical abuses they had

  discovered and the extraordinary obstacles to their investigation. In

  Tal apoosa County, the grand jury had already issued indictments

  against Pace, Fletch Turner, and the Cosbys. Also charged were the

  enforcers and procurers of the system, including Robert Franklin,

  Grogan, Pruit , and Dunbar, al constables. The jury had indicted the

  three justices of the peace most agrantly involved—-James M.

  Kennedy, Jesse L. London, and W. D. Cosby. Another eight men

  who had worked as whipping guards for Pace and the other buyers

  were also under charge, including Turner's son, Al en, and Pace's

  son-in-law, Anderson Hardy.

  Beyond Tal apoosa County, Reese reported, the grand jury was

  also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

  also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

  away and deep in the plantation country of the Black Belt, with

  more than 35,000 black farmhands and sharecroppers working

  cot on on the land of white men. "This county is real y the center

  where it is charged these practices are more freely indulged than

  anywhere else. This county, it is claimed, is honeycombed with

  slavery."50

  The slaving practiced in Lowndes County was orchestrated by the

  sheri himself, J. W. Dixon. In one case described by Reese, Dixon

  chased down a black worker named Dil ard Freeman, who had left

  his plantation without permission to visit a sick brother a few miles

  away. Tracked to his mother's home, Freeman was beaten by Dixon

  with a pistol, tied with a rope around the neck, and forced to run

  behind a mule for more than ve miles, while the sheri fol owed

  on horseback, "whipping him whenever he would lag behind."

  Once back at the plantation, Reese wrote, Dixon began whipping

  Freeman with a wide piece of rubber belt at ached to a wooden

  handle. "Four men were required to hold him o the ground while

  Mr. Dixon himself administered the punishment. When Mr. Dixon

  became tired, another man was made to do the whipping. In this

  way, the boy was whipped nigh until death. He cannot tel how

  many licks he was hit, nor can he tel how long this happened."

  After the whipping, Freeman was chained to the oor near the beds

  of Dixon and his overseer.

  In the grand jury room, Freeman revealed his back, Reese said,

  showing "one mass of scars from his thighs to his neck."

  Yet already the prospects of pursuing a conviction against the

  slavers of Lowndes County and the other plantation regions where

  hundreds of thousands more black farmworkers lived were being

  chal enged, Reese advised the at orney general. Dil ard Freeman

  was threatened with death if he testi ed to the grand jury. A

  member of the Dixon family had fol owed him to the courthouse in

  Montgomery on the day of his rst appearance. "It was impossible

  to get anything out of him because of his fear of death."

  When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

  When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

  home after a week of hearing witnesses, Sheri Dixon and his four

  brothers rode up to his house at midnight on horseback and

  demanded to know what was being said to the grand jury—

  testimony that is dictated to be secret under the U.S. Constitution.

  They told the juror to remember that "he had to live in Lowndes

  county, and if he did not stand up for his own people he knew

  what to expect," Reese wrote.

  The Dixons are "dangerous men," Reese continued. "They are said

  to have kil ed several men. It is believed that witnesses who come

  here and who expect to return to Lowndes county are practical y

  compel ed to perjure their souls because they fear their lives."51

  As the let er to Knox continued, Reese outlined how the new

  slavery was far larger than one or two places, and involved far

  more than scat ered pockets of involuntary servitude, confusion

  about the law, or unintended violations. His timbre rising as the

  report continued, Reese said that he was receiving daily let ers from

  other Black Belt locations—Wilcox, Sumter, Chambers, and Co ee

  counties. "Unquestionably, there are hundreds of these people in

  this district who are held in abject slavery," Reese related.

  The prosecutor continued that Judge Jones had just ruled that

  Alabama's contract labor law—a statute shared in some form by

  every southern state and e ectively criminalizing any black worker

  who left the employment of a white farmer without permission—

  was unconstitutional. The implications of the ruling were just

  dawning on Reese. He realized the black men and women of the

  South had never been truly set free.

  Judge Jones's ruling, Reese wrote, "in e ect, amounts to an actual

  and not a theoretical emancipation of the negro, and it is now

  necessary that this o ce make an e ort to rescue these people from

  their condition by and through habeas corpus proceedings."

  Reese recognized that his investigation could eventual y require

  thousands of court lings. He asked the at orney general to assign a

  Secret Service agent to assist with the investigations and to create a

  new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

  new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

  in Alabama instituting legal chal enges to free enslaved blacks.

  "Unless the government wil take steps to bring these habeas corpus

  proceedings …they wil not be much bene ted by these

  investigations." 52

  As Mildred typed out the last lines of the report, the telephone

  rang. Western Union told the secretary a bicycle delivery boy was

  pedaling toward
them with an urgent message. When the telegram

  arrived, Reese read that the at orney general wished him to

  personal y deliver his report to Washington. President Roosevelt

  had been briefed on the investigations and directed that a legal

  at ack be ful y pressed.53 Reese cal ed Western Union and dictated

  a reply. Mildred hastily retyped the last page of Reese's report: "I

  have just received your wire … I wil report to you at ten o'clock

  morning of seventeenth."54

  Reese rushed to Washington, where he outlined for the at orney

  general the details of the investigation and his belief that much

  more than scat ered peonage was at stake. Knox was cautious, but

  given the president's speci c interest in the cases, the expectations

  raised by his speech at Lincoln's tomb, and a chorus of cries from

  northern publications, he could not move slowly. "The new slave-

  driving in Alabama has pricked the conscience of the nation,"

  proclaimed The Nation on June 11.55

  After the meeting, the at orney general authorized what

  amounted to the most sweeping federal investigation into the

  working conditions of southern blacks since the Civil War. He

  directed U.S. at orneys in Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, and in

  the southern sections of Georgia to begin inquiries in their districts,

  including the densely populated Black Belt, and other areas where

  more than a mil ion impoverished African Americans lived. Across

  Alabama and Georgia, the prosecutors sent deputy federal marshals

  into the countryside with orders to bring back any evidence of

  ongoing slavery.

  Not since the rst years of Reconstruction had law enforcement

  o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

  o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

  blacks. Suddenly a squad of Secret Service agents led by an

  indefatigable detective named Henry C. Dickey, as wel as every

  federal marshal across a three-hundred-mile-wide swath of the

  South, was quietly, if often reluctantly, quizzing African American

  pastors, sharecroppers, and farmhands about the treatment of black

  laborers by many of the most prominent white landowners in the

  South.

  By late June, sixty-three indictments had been returned by the

  Montgomery grand jury, and locals expected as many as twenty

  more white men to be arrested. The government was holding nearly

 

‹ Prev