them to hard-labor chain gangs was il egal. Speer ordered the
freedom of Henry Jamison, a black man arrested on a charge of
drunk and disorderly conduct and then sentenced to spend 210 days
chained into a work crew repairing roads in Macon. The judge
found that local courts had no power to order such penalties for
pet y and largely unde ned crimes such as vagrancy, drunkenness,
or throwing trash in the street. "Enforced labor on a local chain-
gang, imposed for an o ense not amounting to crime, is involuntary
servitude and peonage, in the light of the decision of the United
States Supreme Court, no mat er what the state law or the
municipal ordinances on the subject may be," Speer wrote. "Let but
this crime continue, we wil al be slaves. We wil be slaves to our
prejudices, slaves in that like slaves we tolerate the violation of the
constitution and the law which we are sworn to support; slaves
because we slavishly fail or refuse to perform a lofty civic duty"32
Speer's ruling rippled across the southern landscape. Here was a
legal rationale far more sweeping than anything previously
articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.
articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.
Under the logic of Judge Speer, thousands—perhaps tens of
thousands—of African Americans being held against their wil to
work o nes levied for trivial, al eged misdemeanors should be
freed.
Back in Montgomery, Reese recognized the import of the decision
instantly. Just a few weeks earlier, he had convinced another grand
jury to hand up sixteen additional indictments on peonage charges
against men in another section of Alabama. But Reese could see the
inef ectual nature of the scat ershot prosecutions. There were clearly
thousands of African Americans being coerced into labor, and
contrary to Judge Jones's original hopes, convictions in a few high-
pro le cases weren't causing other whites to abandon the practice.
Reese knew a broader and more sustained at ack was the only
hope. In Speer's ruling, Reese saw a basis for chal enging the root of
the South's forced labor blight—the system of sel ing convicts
fol owed by the state of Alabama, nearly al of its counties, and at
least a half dozen other southern states.
Then came an astounding revelation, a discovery that must have
been the most dispiriting setback yet in the two years since Reese
made his vow to root out slavery for President Roosevelt. The U.S.
at orney learned that John Pace, his original nemesis in Tal apoosa
County, continued to hold African Americans in involuntary
servitude. "There are two boys ages fteen and sixteen respectively
who are now il egal y restrained of their liberty on the farm," Reese
wrote to his superiors. The teenagers were almost certainly Luke
and Henry Tinsley one of the pairs of brothers James M. Kennedy
had enumerated on the Pace farm during the census ve years
earlier.
Like many other blacks overlooked by investigators and grand
jurors during the probe of Pace's operation, the Tinsleys were never
discovered during the federal inquiry. Now Reese learned the
children had been il egal y held by Pace since 1897—eight years
earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of
earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of
their mother. Reese doubted whether he could bring a peonage
charge based on the sketchy facts surrounding the pair. He knew
without doubt it would be useless to seek charges against Pace in a
local court. Based on Judge Speer's ruling, the vehicle for freeing
the boys would be to seek a writ of habeas corpus—forcing Pace to
demonstrate his authority to hold the two boys against their wil .
The maneuver wouldn't stop with Pace, Reese believed. "There are,
in my judgment, hundreds of negroes that can be freed this way, if I
be given this authority," he wrote to his superiors.
At orney General Moody was unmoved. Undoubtedly, the
administration was not going to authorize Reese to begin
chal enging hundreds or thousands of whites about the status of
their black workers. "If you have good reason to believe that Pace is
holding minors to involuntary servitude, without the consent of the
parents …you should have warrant issued," came the reply. "The
habeas corpus proceedings should not be instituted."33A few days
later, Pace, having heard that Reese was preparing another
prosecution, released the two boys to their mother.34
But Tal apoosa County was quickly reverting to its former ways.
A woman who signed her name only as Susanna wrote Judge Jones
in mid-1905, describing another slaving operation already under
way a few miles from Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. "I whish
to enform you that theare is one J. D. Hugens and son holden
Negroes here in peonage at thear terpen tine Stil 10 miles South of
Dadevil e…. Please send your detective heare at once."35 No one
was sent.
Reese was convinced that his prosecutions had proved the
perverse nexus of debt slavery and the organized convict leasing
system that ourished around him. He made one last thrust to
destroy it. Writing to At orney General Moody in March 1905, Reese
pleaded again for permission to le habeas corpus petitions on
behalf of thousands of Alabama convicts then forced to work in
mines owned by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., other
companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.
companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.
"I am perfectly wil ing for one to shoulder this responsibility and
commence these proceedings …though in doing this I appreciate
ful y what this means," Reese wrote. "I am wil ing to jeopardize …
my relationship with al the nine congressmen and the two Senators
from this District, the local Bar, the Bench and the people of the
city of Montgomery, where I was born and raised," the at orney
continued.
"I desire to know … in case I commence this crusade, so to speak,
that I wil have not only your support, but in time to come if these
very men who have always supported me political y should turn
upon me, because I have instituted these prosecutions and done my
duty, that you wil protect me from such at acks."36
Reese knew that white leaders across Alabama were conspiring to
have him replaced when his term as U.S. at orney expired at the
end of 1905. He wrote Booker T. Washington a few weeks earlier
asking the black leader to send a discreet let er to President
Roosevelt endorsing Reese's work.37
At orney General Moody would have none of it. He ordered that
the young district at orney take no action until the Supreme Court
ruled on an appeal of Judge Speer's decision striking down
Georgia's misdemeanor convict system.38
As Reese was pressing to use the federal courts to free the
thousands of slaves held in Alabama mines—and set a precedent
that might have freed ten thousand or more in other
states—the
writer Thomas Dixon released in 1905 the fol ow-up to his
spectacular novel The Leopard's Spots. The new book, an even
more overt paean to the Ku Klux Klan violence that swept away
black political participation in the 1860s and 1870s, was titled The
Clansman. It sold in vast quantities in 1905 at the price of $1.50
and became perhaps the rst true blockbuster in modern U.S.
publishing. Its success— commercial y and as revisionist history—
was so complete that, in an irony of immeasurable proportion,
newspaper announcements for the volume featured a let er from
Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be
Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be
laid down."39
The author quickly fashioned the storylines of his two racist
novels into a stage play to tour the United States. The production
featured a cast of exquisitely at ractive young white actresses, white
actors in blackface playing lecherous emancipated slaves hungry to
assault white women and cowering and bu oonish black elected
o cials, gal ant former Confederate o cers, and a ful y out t ed
contingent of white-robed Klansmen who rode across the stage
mounted on horseback. The show opened in Norfolk, Virginia, in
August 1905 at the Academy of Music, and an epic, record-breaking
run of performances fol owed in theater hal s across the South,
Midwest, and Northeast.
It played to packed crowds everywhere, drawing in a period of
ten months "more people …than any other at raction … in the
theatrical history of United States theater," wrote one newspaper
critic.40 Not surprisingly, a new generation of southern white
leaders absorbed its account of Reconstruction and the fury of its
white actors as absolute fact. Audiences roared approval almost
everywhere else too—including standing-room-only audiences in
New York City. In Atlanta, the city's most prominent debutantes
held "box" parties for their friends in the expensive reserved seats of
the Grand Opera House when the play arrived in the city. Mrs.
Dixon, the author's wife, was feted by the finest ladies of Atlanta.41
After the rst performance on a chil y late October night, Dixon
addressed an adoring crowd—revealing from the stage that his
father had been a Ku Klux Klan member when the night riders
waged a campaign of violence on black political leaders during
Reconstruction. Georgia governor Joseph M. Terrel watched
approvingly from a special box. Later that night, Dixon was
honored at a lush private dinner at the Aragon Hotel hosted by the
Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternal order founded at the University of
Virginia in tribute to the life of Robert E. Lee. Raising their glasses
in a series of toasts to the guest of honor and his long membership
in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of
in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of
the city—the leadership elite who would govern and sculpt the
South's leading city for the next fty years—including Hugh Dorsey
a young at orney who a decade later in ated evidence to prosecute
Jewish businessman Leo Frank for the rape and kil ing of a young
woman that he did not commit.42 After his conviction, Frank was
murdered in an infamous lynching by an anti-Semitic mob, led by
the city's leading political and business leaders. Elevated by his role
in the Frank case, Dorsey went on to become governor of Georgia.
Scat ered voices of concern were raised against the brazenly
in ammatory racial rhetoric of the production, and in some cities
gangs of white men—adrenaline raised by the play's stirring cal to
defend their delicate women from the lusts of black brutes—
subsequently at acked random African Americans in their cities. A
commit ee of northern activists at empted to encourage protests
when the production arrived in new cities with special y printed
postcards showing a scene from the play and urging a boycot .43
Most notably, Dixon's own brother, the Reverend A. C. Dixon, cal ed
the stage play "rot en and slimy"44 Here and there moderate leaders
complained that the production painted an exaggerated portrait of
black and white antagonisms. The pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle
in Atlanta decried the performance as a "disgrace to southern
manhood and womanhood" and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux
Klan as fraudulent.45
In an interview before one performance in the South, Dixon said
that "the North" was beginning to see the urgency in repressing
African Americans. "It is only within the past 12 months that I have
seen big buck negroes parading up and down Broadway with white
girls hanging on their arms." When some members of an audience
hissed the show in Columbia, South Carolina, Dixon mounted the
stage to defend himself against critics. Stirring the crowd to his side,
he declared: "God ordained the southern white man to teach the
lessons of Aryan supremacy"46
XI
SLAVERY AFFIRMED
"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."
Some African American leaders stil held out hope that at least
northern whites could be turned back from the rising venality of
white Americans. Instead of embracing the accommodationist
philosophy of Booker T. Washington, a generation of younger black
intel ectuals led by W. E. B. DuBois insisted that it was whites who
needed to adapt to ful black citizenship. Born in Massachuset s and
schooled rst in Germany, then in Harvard, DuBois had been since
1897 a groundbreaking professor of sociology at Atlanta University,
one of the most prestigious majority-black institutions in the
country. A stream of his articles, novels, and non ction assessments
of the progress of African Americans, including The Souls of Black
Folk, published in 1903, were scathing incisions into the state of
race relations in the United States. Later, after the formation of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in
1909, DuBois would emerge as its most central early figure.
The arrival of DuBois in Atlanta had put him deep in the heart of
the new system of southern slavery. As part of his university duties,
DuBois directed a series of extraordinary statistical and sociological
surveys of the rural South, and black people within it, between
1898 and 1904. The last of them, "Negro Farmer," became a
bedrock demonstration of the new science of sociology and a rigidly
empiricist approach toward quantitative analysis in the study of
social forces. Two years later, the U.S. commissioner of labor,
whose o ce had funded the previous studies, agreed to back a new
DuBois project, this time focused speci cal y on the state of black
sharecroppers in the South.1
Choosing as his venue Lowndes County, Alabama, DuBois's
project injected one of the most extraordinary American intel ects
of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the
of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the
>
continent. Named after a nineteenth-century U.S. congressman from
South Carolina, Wil iam Lowndes, who prior to the Civil War
strenuously advocated the extension of slavery into new U.S.
territories, the county sat at the center of the Black Belt.
At the beginning of the Civil War, more than nineteen thousand
enslaved blacks—the twelfth-largest population of slaves in one
place in the country—lived on 1,100 farms in Lowndes County,
nearly ve hundred of which exceeded one thousand acres in size.
The war obliterated the hope of Congressman Lowndes and others
to expand slavery. But despite Lowndes having the largest
proportion of blacks to whites of any Alabama county, the war
seemed to have had lit le e ect on the question of whether slavery
would continue there. By 1900, even as the white population
dwindled further, the landholders who remained reforged an almost
impenetrable jurisdiction into which no outside authority could
extend its reach. By then, more than thirty thousand blacks worked
the rich flat cot on fields, no longer cal ed slaves but living under an
absolute power of whites nearly indistinguishable from the forced
labor of a half century earlier. Black land ownership in the county
was inconsequential. Where it existed on paper, the appearance of
independence was a chimera behind which local whites continued
to violently control when and where blacks lived and worked, and
how their harvests were sold. Most o ensive to blacks, white men
in Lowndes County continued to exercise their slavery-era
presumption that they were entitled to the sexual companionship
of virtual y any African American woman residing on their
property.
During the grand jury investigation of peonage that led to the
trials of 1903, Warren Reese concluded that Lowndes County was
the fountain-head of Alabama's new slave labor. W. D. McCurdy one
of the original operators of the most notorious convict slave mines
near Birmingham, also kept dozens of black workers imprisoned on
his home plantation in Lowndes County. It was here that federal
investigators working for Reese had reported—until being run out
of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an
of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an
active participant in a violently enforced convict slave system that
Slavery by Another Name Page 40