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Slavery by Another Name

Page 43

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  as they, and local judges, were su ciently hygienic in the records

  they maintained.

  The old southern window dressing of legal rights for African

  Americans won the day again. There was no evidence of the decline

  anticipated by Reese and Jones in the number of African Americans

  being held by private individuals as a result of ostensible court

  nes. If anything, the number of black men "confessing judgment"

  swel ed, now plainly and unabashedly acknowledged in open court.

  Moreover, undaunted by Judge Jones's ruling against the state's

  laws forbidding black men from leaving the employment of one

  white man without permission to work for another, the Alabama

  legislature passed a new but essential y identical "false pretenses"

  statute. Once held under a labor contract, black men who at empted

  to leave their employers faced criminal prosecution for doing so. If

  they had entered into the contract to avoid an earlier prosecution,

  the departure would exponential y increase the time they could be

  held as slaves.

  In Shelby County, the number of African Americans "confessing

  judgment" in open court bal ooned.8 Between November 1890 and

  August 1906, the dank county jail admit ed 1,327 prisoners, facing

  a total of more than 1,500 charges. Physical descriptions were

  recorded only intermit ently, but during the periods when notations

  of race were made, more than 90 percent of those arrested were

  black. A few were women.

  black. A few were women.

  A fortunate group of 326 prisoners—general y whites and black

  men with some modicum of means—were able to scrape together

  enough cash to post a bond and obtain freedom until a later trial

  date. Most then simply forfeited their bonds and remained free.

  Among the 1,001 prisoners left behind, acquit als were

  infrequent. Fewer than 250 defendants won their freedom, by virtue

  of a not guilty verdict or some other discharge during the sixteen

  years. Al but a handful of the other 750 were ordered to pay

  nominal nes coupled with huge fees. A total of 124 of those new

  convicts, fewer than 17 percent, were able to pay their judgments.

  Ben Holt, convicted of vagrancy on August 29, 1906, was ordered

  to pay the county a ne of $1. The costs of his arrest and

  prosecution, however, totaled $76.28. Instead of paying, he

  confessed judgment with a white farmer named James Wharton,

  who paid the ne and fees and in return owned Holt for a

  minimum of two hundred days.9

  Of the remaining six hundred men, convicted of pet y crimes and

  unable to pay what the courts demanded of them, almost ve

  hundred were bartered into forced labor. More than two dozen

  convicts were leased to other industrial concerns, eight each to the

  Sloss mines and Alabama Manufacturing Co. Eight more were

  acquired by two sawmil companies, Walter Brothers, in Sprague,

  Alabama, and Henderson-Boyd Lumber Co., in Richburg,

  Alabama.10

  Among the leadership circles of a place such as Shelby County,

  the casual acquisition of blacks through the now careful y

  choreographed ritual at the courthouse became a routine perk of

  modest influence.

  Arrested for petit larceny in May of 1905, Jim Goodson was ned

  $25. To avoid being sent to the mines with other county convicts,

  he agreed to sign a contract for labor with Robert E. Bowden to

  work 236 days "in his rock quarry" Bowden bridged two groups

  common in southern towns—as both an important local

  entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful

  entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful

  town leaders. His thriving quarry, Keystone Lime Co., was a busy

  competitor to the Turner lime quarry not far away in Calcis. Bow-

  den's much larger enterprise produced 1,500 barrels of quicklime a

  day, in fteen kilns. Deriving lime from the massive formations of

  limestone undergirding al of Shelby County before the advent of

  the steam shovel required armies of men engaged in the crudest

  form of manual labor. Hardly any person would choose such work

  freely. Convicts were ideal.

  For a quarter of a century, Bowden bene ted handsomely from

  the availability of strong black men at the Shelby County jail.

  Between 1905 and 1913, he took possession of at least eighteen

  people arrested in the county, after each confessed judgment in

  open court—just as required by Judge Jones's order.

  Nearly al of the essential local enterprises in Shelby County

  enjoyed at least periodic use of entrapped African Americans.

  Shelby Iron Works, the area's largest employer and biggest

  commercial taxpayer, continued to acquire black men by confessing

  judgment for their sentences before Judge Longshore—continuing a

  nearly uninterrupted use of slaves and other forced black labor

  from the early 1860s to the end of the rst decade of the twentieth

  century.

  Even Sherif Fulton periodical y acquired blacks through the court

  for his personal use. Fulton paid nes and costs totaling $58 on a

  man named John Mack in October 1907, and in return took control

  of him for six months. One of his favored deputies, W. J. Finney

  arrested—and then purchased—four di erent black men between

  1905 and 1913.11

  Later that year, Peter Minor, faced with a $126 ne for carrying a

  concealed weapon, agreed to become a sharecropper for W. W.

  Wal ace, the popular mayor of Columbiana and secretary of the

  Democratic County Commit ee. Minor agreed to give up half of

  anything he produced on land provided by the mayor.12

  But the largest portion of the men arrested in Shelby County,

  nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

  nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. About one hundred others

  were sentenced to "hard labor for the county" and then almost

  certainly transferred to the same place.

  Alabama's slave system had evolved into a forced labor agricultural

  and industrial enterprise unparal eled in the long history of slaves

  in the United States. During 1906, the state sold nearly two

  thousand black men to twenty di erent buyers. Nearly half were

  bought by the two biggest mining companies, Tennessee Coal &

  Iron and Sloss-She eld. The McCurdy brothers of Lowndes County

  bought dozens. Hundreds more went to timber camps and sawmil

  companies.

  In addition to the prisoners auctioned o by the state, nearly

  seventy individual local governments, like Shelby County, parceled

  thousands more laborers to a hundred or more other buyers.13

  These prisoners lived in such misery that even some political

  gures in Alabama acknowledged the shamefulness of the system.

  In a 1904 report to acting governor Russel Cunningham, the state's

  top prison o cial, J. M. Carmichael, reported that Sloss-She eld

  had been "required to move its prison" at the Flat Top mine to a

  new location "because of the death rate at the prison formerly

  occupied by them." Car
michael added that he found: "Hundreds and

  hundreds of persons are taken before the inferior courts of the

  country, tried and sentenced to hard labor for the county, who

  would never be arrested except for the mat er of fees involved. This

  is a condition inexcusable, not to say shameful."14

  "The County Convict System is worse than ever," wrote Shirley

  Bragg, president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, in 1906.

  "The demand for labor and fees has become so great that most of

  them now go to the mines where many of them are un t for such

  labor, consequently it is not long before they pass from this earth…

  If the state wishes to kil its convicts it should do it directly and not

  indirectly"15

  Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

  Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

  son of a great and once slaveholding Lowndes County plantation

  family—one whose property had been destroyed, according to

  family lore, because of their connection to a famous Confederate

  general during the same raid by Union general Wilson that also

  freed the Cot ingham slaves in 1865.

  Yet Bragg, a child during the Civil War, was nauseated by the

  degradation he witnessed in oversight of the state penal system. "I

  am more convinced that the ideas of humanity and civilization

  would be bet er carried out if the torch were applied to every jail

  in Alabama. It would be more humane and far bet er to stake the

  prisoner out with a ring around his neck like a wild animal than to

  con ne him in places that we cal jails, that are reeking with lth

  and disease and alive with vermin of al kinds," Bragg continued.

  He cal ed the prison mines, where at last sixty-four miners had died

  of disease, accidents, or unrecorded causes in the previous two

  years, "nurseries of death."16

  Sloss-She eld, the successor to John Milner's horrifying Coalburg

  and Newcastle mines of the 1880s, had long excel ed at the

  exploitation of this county convict system. The old Coalburg mine—

  scene of more than twenty years of continuous slave labor—was

  nearly exhausted. To exploit the remaining coal in the area, new

  managers at Sloss-She eld were building a new two-thousand-foot-

  deep mine nearby, named for Flat Top Mountain, and an adjoining

  complex of two hundred coke ovens. Work was hastened after a

  new round of criticism when thirty-two prisoners died at Coalburg

  of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other sickness in just the rst three

  months of the year.17 In September 1902, the company relocated its

  nearly two hundred state prisoners and nearly a thousand more

  men purchased from county governments to the vast new Flat Top

  mine.

  But the Prat Mines complex, so long in production and now so

  large and intricate that not even the owners could keep up with the

  locations of al its shafts and underground tangents, outrivaled al

  other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

  other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. nal y conquered inherent

  chemical aws that limited the use of iron ore from its mines and

  mastered production of steel at a commercial y viable cost—the first

  success at rol ing steel in the South. "This great corporation has

  probably done more toward the industrial development of the

  South than any other agency," enthused the Birmingham Age-

  Herald.18

  By the mid-1890s, more than six thousand men toiled in the Prat

  Mines, performing dozens of tasks—digging coal, engineering trains,

  building ovens, loading and unloading cars, washing coal, charging

  ovens, operating furnaces—the free workers each earning from $1

  to $3 per day19About a quarter of the workers were seized through

  the judicial system, including 504 at Prison No. 2 in June 1900 and

  another 400 at Prison No. 1.

  The number of free laborers surged past ten thousand, as the

  company's thirty coal mines—including the fourteen on the

  outskirts of Birmingham—generated nineteen thousand tons a day

  in 1900. To provide the most critical raw materials in iron and steel

  production, TCI—as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was

  commonly known—operated 3,722 coke ovens and four quarries

  producing one hundred railroad cars of limestone and dolomite

  every day. Twenty blast furnaces smelted 3,550 tons of pig iron

  each day. More than two dozen furnaces generated 830,000 tons of

  iron and steel, shipped to thirty- ve states and eight foreign

  countries. TCI owned in excess of 400,000 acres of mineral lands.20

  W. F. Tyler, purchasing agent for TCI's prison mines and fourteen

  company stores, stocked food, clothing, furniture, and tools to

  supply ten thousand miners and their families—including

  provisions for more than one thousand prisoners. "Quote us your

  lowest price on say 3,000 yards 10 oz wool convict stripes," he

  wrote to a fabric maker in Columbus, Georgia, in 1899.21 The

  company issued pay in its own coinage and paper scrip,

  emblazoned with the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. name

  and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

  and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

  1900, the enterprises col ected $2 mil ion a year in revenue.

  Responding to booming demand, TCI invested heavily in its Prat

  Mines complex and dozens of other sites across the seemingly

  boundless coal elds surrounding Birmingham. It spent $7.4 mil ion

  to open new shafts, re t old mines, and streamline equipment to

  extract coal from ever deeper in the earth and speed the tasks of

  sorting, cleaning, and shipping coal to market. The company's

  operations teemed with more than twelve thousand miners, guards,

  construction, and the endless clang, steam, and whistles of

  locomotives and coal cars.

  A thriving, permanent town cal ed Prat City sprang up nearby,

  with a bustling commercial district, bars, brothels, streetcars,

  churches, and an overwhelmingly black population. Six miles to the

  west, another town, Ensley grew around the company's

  mushrooming pig iron plant and six open-hearth blast furnaces,

  each topped with a looming red smokestack perpetual y bil owing

  with cinders and toxins. The plants created thousands of the types

  of skil ed jobs that only whites could seek to obtain, and soon more

  than ten thousand residents crowded into Ensley's houses and

  hastily erected tenements. TCI's production of train rails and other

  steel surged to more than four hundred thousand tons annual y in

  the first years of the century.

  Scat ered everywhere were bulging stacks of rough-cut timber and

  posts used to shore up the wal s and ceilings of mine shafts. Smoke,

  belching from coke ovens, train engines, and houses, never cleared.

  The skies were cast with a constant gray haze. In dry weather, a

  thick black residue of coal coated every at surface, windowpane,

  branch, and leaf—insinuating itself under doors and into cupboards

  of TCI mining camps, ines
capable for an army of men and their

  families. More than a dozen separate major mines near Prat City

  soon produced nearly three mil ion tons of coal a year.

  Where each shaft disappeared underground, enormous hoist

  houses contained the elaborate mechanisms—as big as train engines

  —used to lower coal cars containing miners into the shaft at the

  beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

  beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

  hours later l ed with coal. Past the hoist house sat the coal washer

  —where each day's bituminous produce was washed and any slate

  or stone accidental y added to the mix removed. Then rose the

  tipples—massive timbered structures in the design of the huge

  railroad bridges spanning the great gorges in the West. Trams

  loaded with cleaned coal were pul ed to the end of the tipple and

  the contents dumped into much larger railroad cars waiting on a

  track below. From there the coal was rol ed to Tennessee Coal, Iron

  & Railroad's thousands of stone ovens— to be baked into coke.

  Dozens of the beehive-shaped coke ovens sat a few hundred feet

  east of the prison built at the mine cal ed Slope No. 12. Further on,

  fanning out from the base of the hil was a rowdy community

  surrounding Slope No. 12 and nine other coal shafts operated by

  free men. Thousands of miners and their family members were

  packed into shacks, tenements, and company houses nearby. A

  private rail line passed through the nearly denuded landscape,

  connecting the mines, tipples, and furnaces owned by the company.

  One spur of track reached a mile-long row of another two hundred

  ovens, visibly pulsating the darkness with their heat. Beyond them,

  stretched along a fouled stream cal ed Black Creek, was "Smokey

  Row," an encampment of rough-sawn company houses occupied by

  free African American miners, many of whom had survived their

  time in the prison shaft and then stayed on in the town to dig coal

  for pay.

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. had always been reluctant

  for politicians, the public, or the region's embryonic unions to

  realize how lucrative its army of forced laborers had proven to be.

  Company o cials publicly complained about the shiftless and

  uninspired work of prison laborers and black workers in general.

  They accused sheri s of palming o sick and dying men to the

 

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