held hundreds or thousands of black laborers. The Smith family—
whose deadly convict farm had become the symbol of convict
leasing's most lethal manifestations in the nineteenth century—was
one of the county's most prominent landholders. But Reese could
bring no charges in Lowndes County because no blacks forced into
slavery were wil ing to risk the lives of family members or their
own by testifying to the grand jury in Montgomery. Even a black
grand juror from Lowndes County participated in the inquiry only
under protest—for fear he would be kil ed upon his return home.
But the failure of the federal investigation to reach Lowndes
County didn't indicate there had been less slavery than federal
agents initial y claimed. Indeed, there was vastly more. In the
summer of 1906, W. E. B. DuBois and a team of more than a dozen
researchers, including sociologists Monroe Work, Richard R. Wright,
and others of the most extraordinary young black minds of the new
century, arrived at the Calhoun School. Founded in 1892 by a
wealthy white northern socialite, the institution operated largely on
the industrial education principles of Booker T. Washington. But
the Calhoun School was distinct in one regard among the many
institutions for blacks established near the end of the nineteenth
century— often naively and il -fated—by wealthy benefactors.
Going beyond training black children in basic academics and
advanced vocational skil s such as bricklaying and carpentry, the
school's founder, a wel -bred Connecticut spinster named Charlot e
Thorn, actual y moved to Lowndes County and eventual y
promoted a land ownership experiment for blacks in the heart of
what was likely the single most repressive white-power regime in
the South. Over time, land companies established by the school
purchased a total of more than four thousand acres of cot on land,
encouraged local blacks to operate the farms on a quasi-communal
basis, and ultimately resold smal er tracts of land to African
Americans.2
DuBois, whose di erences with Booker T Washington had not
advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men
advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men
against each other as commit ed enemies, was at racted to the
Calhoun School as a preserve in which idealistic and educated
whites and blacks could interact freely. He also delighted in the
e rontery the school presented to the white dominance that
surrounded it.
DuBois went to Lowndes County in hopes of capturing an
unassailable, empirical y proven portrait of the penury and
exploitation that African Americans there—and by extension most
of the South—were forced to endure. With funding from the federal
Bureau of Labor, the DuBois team fanned across the countryside
carrying ten thousand copies of questionnaires containing a bat ery
of piercing questions regarding land ownership, labor control,
family life, education, sexual mores, morality, political activity, and
other aspects of black life. By late fal in 1906, more than 21,000 of
the county's black farmers had been interviewed through a cabin-to-
cabin canvass, with researchers scrupulously recording the answers
and compiling tables of the responses back at the school.
Separately, two white investigators provided by the federal
government conducted an even more discreet inquiry into the
political operations and sexual morality of Lowndes County whites.
To cross-reference the individual interviews, white researchers
examined and analyzed prodigious volumes of Lowndes County
mortgages, liens, arrests, incarcerations, and proceedings of local
justices of the peace—al of the key instruments of government used
by whites to contain and control blacks throughout the South.
DuBois used the legal record and personal accounts to create
detailed maps and tables of the county, showing between 1850 and
1906 the evolution of economic, social, and political power and a
chronological movement of land ownership among blacks and
whites.3
No social study on such a scale of research and ambition had ever
been undertaken in the United States, certainly not one focused on
black life and even more so never one at empted in the
environment of overt physical danger that existed in Lowndes
County.
County.
Local whites were already openly hostile toward the existence of
the Calhoun School and its implicit chal enge to the neo-slavery
that surrounded it. DuBois wrote later that researchers met "with the
greeting of …shotguns in certain parts of the county"4 5 He told U.S.
commissioner of labor Charles P. Neil that two investigators "were
shot at and run out of one corner of the county. "
Yet DuBois and others believed the enormity of the data and the
impregnability of a federal y authorized analysis conducted under
the most rigorous scienti c methodology presented an opportunity
to smash the racial myopia and growing indi erence to conditions
in the South of the majority of American whites. DuBois later cal ed
the project his "best sociological work."6 7 By the end of 1906, the
report had been completed, writ en by hand, and delivered to the
Bureau of Labor for publication.
The growing ubiquity for al African Americans of the dangers
DuBois and his col eagues encountered in Lowndes County was
underscored on September 22, 1906, when the team learned that a
mob of as many as ten thousand whites was on the rampage in
Atlanta. DuBois rushed aboard a train to return to his wife, Nina,
and daughter, Yolande, who had remained in their quarters at South
Hal on the campus of Atlanta University, where DuBois was a
professor. He sat in vigil on the steps of the building with a
shotgun. But white at ackers never arrived.
By the time the riot ended, hundreds of African Americans, by
virtual y al accounts, had been at acked on the streets of the city.
Atlanta had never completely cooled since the performances of The
Clansman ten months earlier. Tensions—driven by rumors of black
ambitions for political power and open race baiting by candidates
running for governor—had mounted over the months.
In the weeks just before the riot, the fal of 1906, Atlanta was
whipped into a fury by weeks of exaggerated and fabricated
accounts published in the Atlanta Constitution and other local
newspapers of blacks al egedly raping and insulting white women.
A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was
A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was
being arranged—this time featuring in the cast two cousins of
Je erson Davis, the late president of the Confederacy. Two days
after the production began its new tour on September 20, with
packed performances in Charleston, South Carolina, a crowd of
whites—delirious with racial animosity—gathered in downtown
Atlanta.
Heeding an anonymous public cal to revive a new Ku Klux Klan,
a group of men gathered to discuss how to respond to the al eged
series of sexual assaults against white women. Almost none of the
al eged at acks were ever proven. But by late afternoon, the city's
competitive newspapers were rol ing o extra editions to report
even newer dubious claims of black men at acking young women.
Just before midnight, the crowd began marauding indiscriminately
through the city. For ve days, vigilantes, police o cers, and
soldiers grabbed and beat African Americans, seizing them o
sidewalks and streetcars. They broke into businesses where blacks
were employed and crashed into homes in African American
neighborhoods, spil ing blood everywhere they went. In some areas,
blacks stood their ground, ghting back with guns and sts—
spurring even more anger and a rationale for police and militia to
join on the side of white rioters. In the end, the mobs were believed
to have kil ed at least two dozen African Americans. Fewer than a
half dozen whites died.8
Three weeks after the riot in September 1906, a former U.S.
congressman from Georgia, Wil iam H. Fleming, raised a rare voice
against rising racial animosity. "How many causes have recently
been cooperating in that line from the theater, the press and the
stump to familiarize us with the disrespect for law and to arouse
hate and contempt by the whites against the blacks?" Representative
Fleming asked. "Chief among o enders stands a former preacher,
Rev. Thomas Dixon, with his Clansman."9
In Washington, federal o cials who previously had shown such
assiduous interest in the research by DuBois—and the possibility it
would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly
would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly
faltered. Tabulations that had appeared acceptable months earlier
now looked questionable to Commissioner Neil . He signaled that
publication of the report would no longer be immediate. Nearly a
year after completion, it remained under review, when a new
commissioner replaced Neil . After reading the report, W W.
Hangar, the new head of the agency, wrote taciturnly to DuBois: "It
would be extremely unwise to make any use whatsoever of the
material which was gathered."10 A year later, after months of
pushing for publication of his research, or at the very least that the
document be returned, DuBois was informed that the study's
conclusions "touched on political mat ers." It could not be sent to
him because "it had been destroyed."11
Nothing of what might have been a seminal study of black life
survived—with one exception. Three years later, DuBois penned his
rst novel—The Quest for the Silver Fleece—a richly descriptive
portrayal of African Americans struggling against the strictures
tightening against them in the North and South. The heart of the
novel was a narrative drawn from what DuBois and his researchers
had witnessed during their dangerous summer in Lowndes County.
Substituting new names for the Calhoun School, the McCurdys, and
other great white landholding families, DuBois rendered the social
order of what he cal ed Tooms County in sharp, but unexaggerated,
relief. The baronic family whose patriarch, Colonel Cress-wel , had
been the county's largest slaveholder before emancipation stil
control ed in the twentieth century fty thousand acres of prime
cot on land and uncounted black families who lived upon it in the
novel's account.
In the portrait etched by DuBois, Colonel Cresswel lived in a
sprawling mansion far from town, surrounded by endless numbers
of broken cabins inhabited by terri ed and uneducated "tenants."
Cresswel was intent on crushing any semblance of movement
toward economic or political independence among those blacks.
"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers," he exclaimed. No manner
of shared interests between blacks and whites could ever be
contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need
contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need
be…. It's the Negro …we've got to beat to his knees."
In the county described by DuBois, black sharecroppers lived or
died on the whim of the white men stil cal ed "master" by most.
They begged the white men for their broken-down log cabins, for
food and cloth to make clothes. Maturing black girls complied with
their initiation into sexual activity when Colonel Cresswel 's son
demanded it, because "he was our master."
The Cresswel s and other whites "bought" and sold sharecroppers
at wil —substituting the sale of their al eged debts for rent and
supplies as a proxy for the sale of humans themselves. Able black
men and their families routinely "sold" for $250 in this Lowndes
County. Black families who resisted their sale to other whites were
subject to brutal violence and the con scation or burning of their
homes and possessions. Once under a labor contract to any white
man, blacks knew they would almost certainly never be free of it.
Disputes over the value of the cot on they raised were set led by
local o cials control ed by the white farmers. Any man who fought
back against overseers beating workers in the eld risked gruesome
punishments and sale into the convict leasing system.
Robbed of her crop, DuBois's central character, Zora, knows she
has no recourse: "What should she do? She never thought of appeal
to courts, for Colonel Cresswel was Justice of the Peace and his son
was baili . Why had they stolen from her? She knew. She was now
penniless, and in a sense helpless. She was now a peon bound to a
master's bidding." She knew that signing a contract to work for the
Cresswel s "would mean slavery, jail, or hounded running away."
While hunger and the physical abuse of overseers haunted every
day, it was jail, the chain gang, or any other contact with the
judicial system that loomed as the greatest constant jeopardies to
blacks. Starved and manacled squads of black men prowled the
town square and the roads between plantations, hustled along by
gun- and whip-toting guards—a scene hardly changed from the
traveling slave salesmen of a half century earlier. At the slightest
provocation, Cresswel threatened this ignominious horror to any
uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a
uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a
white man would, almost without exception, be court-sanctioned
ownership. Once hauled before a judge, any African American
could be purchased by Colonel Cresswel or another white. One
passage of DuBois's novel described the routine courthouse scene:
"What's this nigger charged with?" demanded the Judge when the rst
black boy was brought up before him.
"Breaking his labor contract."
"Any witnesses?"
"I have the contract here," announced the sheriff. "He refuses to work."
"A year, or one hundred dollars."
Colonel Cresswell paid his fine, and took him in charge.12
In October 1905,
the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Judge
Speer's order against Georgia's county convict leasing system,13
nding that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to dismantle the
system of obtaining and sel ing prisoners so vividly described by
DuBois. In January 1906, Warren Reese gave up the modest o ce
in the Montgomery federal building from which he had waged his
quixotic war on slavery. The White House named a new district
at orney for central Alabama.
Three months later, in April 1906, John W. Pace was pardoned
for his crimes by President Roosevelt.14 The fol owing year, Fletcher
Turner was elected to represent Tal apoosa County in the Alabama
House of Representatives.
XI
NEW SOUTH RISING
"This great corporation."
For three years, Americans had received periodic reports on the
slavery of Tal apoosa County. The county, with its exotic
Choctaw Indian name meaning "pulverized rock," and the image
of John Pace, a brutish farmer from the backcountry became the
only enduring symbol of the peonage cases—even as hundreds and
then thousands of other incidents emerged in parts of Alabama,
Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Darkness was crowding
black life in America in an ever more sinister way.
Lost in the Alabama peonage inquiry was how the case began—
with the report to Judge Jones of a miscarriage of justice in the
adjacent Shelby County. Whatever misdeeds had occurred there—
especial y the fact that Fletcher Turner's family operated a slave-
driven quarry within the county— had been almost entirely
forgot en. The town of Columbiana—a provincial county seat
urgently hoping to embody the incipient gleam of the new century
—escaped excoriation. One town nearer to Birmingham than
Dadevil e, bustling with prosperity, new residents, and a vague
sense of Rooseveltian modernity, Columbiana was swel ing with
new wealth. Old one-man, one-mule mines of the nineteenth
century—lit le more than crude horizontal pits dug into hil sides
outside the town—were fast disappearing, replaced by giant brick
edi ces of factories like the Siluria Cot on Mil , where white men
and women could earn wages in regular hourly increments. They
worked de ned shifts, rather than the meteorological clock of
sunup to sundown that had governed farm life since the days of the
Slavery by Another Name Page 41