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Slavery by Another Name

Page 49

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  than men and women, Ramsey was intent on eclipsing his former

  employer by building the most aggressive and pro table industrial

  concern of the South. Prat Consolidated had by 1911 opened nine

  new drift mines on previously undeveloped coal elds twenty miles

  north of the Prat Mines. The company's showcase was the Banner

  Mine, a deep shaft featuring the rst instal ation of electric lights,

  cut ing tools, and hauling equipment—some of it invented by

  Ramsey himself—and the largest prison compound in the state,

  surrounded by a fteen-foot-high wooden stockade.14 Ramsey

  sought to obtain as many convict workers as the sheri s of Alabama

  would sel .

  On April 8, 1911, two black convicts at the Banner Mine died

  from inhaling afterdamp—the noxious combination of carbon

  monoxide, nitrogen, and other gases left behind when methane

  vapor ignites in a mine. One week later, near dawn on a rainy

  Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

  Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

  positions inside Banner, an ignition of blasting powder triggered a

  massive detonation. A handful of men nearest the initial blast died

  instantly; the ventilation fan that pushed fresh air deep into the

  shaft was blown out of position by the force of the explosion. The

  sudden ash of re consumed much of the oxygen in the tunnels.

  Into the chemical vacuum created by the absence of oxygen poured

  what miners cal ed, with terror, "black damp"—a su ocating

  mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. About a dozen men stil

  near the 1,700-foot chute leading into the shaft escaped to safety.

  The rest—113 black prisoners, the vast majority of them being held

  for trivial misdemeanors, ten white prisoners, and ve free miners

  —were kil ed by the gases.

  A quickly impaneled coroner's jury certi ed that the company

  was "using al reasonable means for the prevention of accidents"

  and was not culpable in the deaths. Most of the bodies of the dead

  were quickly dumped in a long trench dug by other prisoners in the

  mine's convict cemetery just outside the stockade.15 Within two

  weeks, the Banner Mine was in operation again, with a fresh

  contingent of black prisoners.

  Alabama's other slave mines never slowed production in the

  aftermath of the disaster. Cleve Wat s died at Prison No. 12 on May

  22, 1911, "struck in the head with a mining pick." Less than a

  month later, June 20, 1911, Lee Lawson was kil ed in the same

  mine in a rock fal . On July 29, Frank Mil er was shot to death by

  two guards as he tried to escape No. 12.

  A week later, Jim Minor died in a pickaxe ght at Sloss-

  Shef ield's Flat Top mine. Ed Jerring was crushed by "being jammed

  between two cars" in TCI's No. 12 mine on September 29, 1911.

  Jackson Wheeler died from "an electric shock" at the company's No.

  2 prison on October 3, 1911. Henry Carter was kil ed at Slope No.

  12 prison the same day, "from fal ing rock."16

  The gruesome fates of al those men ricocheted across the landscape

  of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

  of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

  the deep residue of trauma left by thousands of prior horrors from

  inside and outside the South's forced labor camps. Together, these

  events formed the foundation of a col ective recognition among

  African Americans of their precarious vulnerability in American

  society. In the early years after Reconstruction, such news traveled

  like a telegraph, ashing from one outraged bearer of the word to

  another. Preachers decried the crimes against innocent men from

  their pulpits. Before the nal ouster of blacks from virtual y al

  southern elections, African American voters cast bal ots against

  those who abided the system, in rare cases forcing a local o cial

  out of o ce—as blacks once did to a sheri in Chat anooga,

  Tennessee, after he permit ed the lynching of a man from his jail.17

  There were isolated cases when black prisoners col ectively refused

  to work in protest of brutal punishments meted out—and of

  convicts physical y at acking their overseers.

  But such resistance was almost invariably crushed with the sheer

  force of guns, mob violence, and economic isolation. By the end of

  the rst decade of the twentieth century, word of each new outrage

  moved osmotical y absorbed often without explicit note into the

  shared experience of a black society in which nearly al realistic

  hope of authentic independence had been shat ered. The new

  slavery of Alabama achieved its zenith. Three massive industrial

  concerns—U.S. Steel's Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad unit, Sloss-

  She eld, and now Prat Consolidated—competed mercilessly for

  forced laborers. Other industrial concerns stood ready to step in if

  any major player receded. The system arrived at a cynical optimum

  of economic harmony, knit ing together the interests of capitalists,

  white farmers, local sheri s and judges, and advocates of the most

  cruel white supremacy—al joined and served by an unrelenting

  pyramid of intimidation.

  The companies, producing nearly fteen mil ion tons of coal

  annual y by 1910, held more than three thousand black men against

  their wil in Alabama's mines at al times—creating a bulwark

  against labor unrest and an enormous economic subsidization to

  their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

  their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

  Americans worked in southern Alabama timber and turpentine

  camps operated by Henderson Lumber Company, Horse Shoe

  Lumber Company, McPhaul Turpentine Company, a textile factory

  in Prat vil e, and other businesses. Hundreds more—no one kept

  count—were parceled out by local sheri s to farmers and

  businessmen scat ered around the state.

  The reality of incarceration in the slave mines became so

  ubiquitously understood for African American men that landlords

  and local sheri s— equipped with almost unchecked powers of

  arrest and conviction and enormous personal nancial interest in

  providing labor to the mines and other enterprises—could make

  almost any demand upon any black man. More often than any

  other, that demand was that they remain on the land of speci c

  white farmers, living lives of supposedly voluntary serfdom or as

  prisoners sentenced to that fate under the system of "confessions"

  rati ed by Judge Jones in 1903. Across the Black Belt of Alabama,

  more than ninety thousand African American families lived in the

  darkness of that oppression with only rare protest.

  In Barbour County, 170 miles from Birmingham, deep in the

  cot on country of southern Alabama, the shadow was cast in the

  shape of two brothers, Wil iam M. and Robert B. Teal. In 1911,

  when a term-limit law forced Wil iam to give up his job as sheri ,

  Robert was elected to the job instead. Wil iam became his chief

  deputy. "The brothers just swapped places," according to the local

 
; newspaper, the Clayton Record.18

  Because it control ed the county's convict leasing franchise, the

  sheri 's o ce was a plum asset. Over one ten-year period, Barbour

  County sent 691 men to the coal mines, primarily those operated

  by Sloss-Shef ield and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.19

  The Record took lit le note, among its weekly coverage of cot on

  prices, buggy accidents, and lost mules, of the disappearance of so

  many local black men. It enthusiastical y covered the lynchings of

  African Americans, occurring with regularity in nearby towns and

  across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

  across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

  who gathered in Georgia for a celebration on the anniversary of the

  Emancipation Proclamation. Northern whites who lent support to

  wel -known African Americans such as Booker T. Washington were

  "negrophilists."

  On Confederate Memorial Day that April, the keynote speaker,

  standing atop a platform festooned with the bat le colors of the

  Confederacy, received "deafening" applause, according to a reporter,

  as he told the crowd nearly ve decades after the legal end of

  slavery that the forced labor of blacks had been completely

  constitutional and never violated "divine or moral law." A local

  white girl gave a reading of Uncle Remus stories. Organizers plied

  the crowd for donations to help erect a memorial on the town

  square to southern veterans of the Civil War.20

  Prospects for any black man who crossed Sheri Teal and his

  brother were grim. The jail itself was cramped and unsanitary, and

  had been formal y condemned by state inspectors.21 What went for

  justice for African American defendants was swift. After one trial of

  "a negro charged with violating prohibition" in 1911, a local judge

  in Eufaula, the more prosperous cot on trading town twenty miles

  to the east, explicitly instructed the jurors to convict the man. When

  the jury unexpectedly acquit ed instead, Judge M. Sol-lie threatened

  to have the jurors arrested for contempt of court.22

  Once convicted, African Americans were routinely sent to the coal

  mines near Birmingham for o enses as slight as sel ing a bot le of

  moonshine. Most months, the Teals arrested fewer than twenty

  men. Then suddenly dozens of minor o enders were rounded up

  over a few days’ time and charged with vagrancy, alcohol

  violations, and other minor o enses. Nearly al were quickly

  sentenced to hard labor and shipped out within ten days to l a

  gap in men at the coal mines.23

  On any given day in the summer of 1912, the county jail near the

  town square in Clayton held from ten to two dozen men, awaiting

  the arrival of circuit judges who rotated through the area's towns. A

  man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

  man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

  Another black man, Josia Marcia, was being held for al egedly

  having had sexual relations with a white woman. Louis Denham

  had been arrested for vagrancy. Housed with them were Ad Rumph,

  Henry Demas, Jackson Daniels, and Peter Ford, four African

  American men accused in the murder of a sharecropper named

  George Blue. Demas, seventeen years old, and his wife were

  boarders in the house of Rumph, another young black farmer, on

  property near the remote farming community of Mt. Andrew.

  Demas could read and write, but had no formal schooling. Rumph,

  nineteen years old and il iterate, was married to a woman named

  Fredie.24

  Blue had been kil ed the prior spring by "a party of negroes,"

  according to the Record. As often happened after black homicides

  of that era, a large number of African Americans were charged in

  the case. Indeed, on the same weekend that Blue was kil ed, seven

  African Americans—including thirty-two-year-old farmhand Wil

  Mil er—were charged in the death of another black man in Eufaula.

  Mil er spent the summer in the Barbour County jail as wel .25

  Whatever evidence was presented against the various defendants

  was later lost, along with any record of their trials or whether the

  men had access to at orneys. By fal , though, al had been convicted

  and sentenced to varying terms of hard labor. Each of the accused

  murderers received between twenty years and life. Col ins received

  six months’ hard labor; Denham got ve months. No sentence was

  recorded for Marcia.

  Emaciated and marked, the men's bodies told their own story.

  Mil er was logged into state records as having "one good tooth on

  top," "shot through top of right shoulder," "badly burnt on back left

  leg." Demas stood ve feet nine inches tal but weighed just 150

  pounds. Scars were scat ered across his frame—the biggest a six-inch

  gash stretching from above his left eye down the side of his face.26

  In Henry County, the adjoining county to Barbour, Martin Danzy

  was a thirty-three-year-old sharecropper and a husband of nine

  years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

  years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

  with a third man's death, though no records of the precise charge

  survived. On October 21, 1915, Danzy was sentenced to a term of

  twenty- ve years at hard labor. The man arrested with him, Bud L.

  Clark, was sentenced to twenty years.27

  Danzy was promptly sold to Henderson Land & Lumber Co.,

  which put him to work in a turpentine harvesting camp near

  Tuscaloosa. Clark lasted just over two months at labor before

  pneumonia kil ed him. Danzy contracted pneumonia as wel . Five

  months after his conviction, he too was dead.

  Among the prisoners from Barbour County, Col ins and Denham

  survived their terms of labor. Mil er lived only a few months, until

  he died the fol owing April in a Prat Consolidated mine, at the

  hands of another convict. In November 1916, Rumph died of

  tuberculosis in a state prison hospital. Demas died the fol owing

  month of pneumonia, at the Banner Mine. Daniels was kil ed July

  27, 1917, while at empting to escape the Sloss mine at Flat Top.28

  Years later, the authorized biography of Elbert H. Gary, the

  founding chairman of U.S. Steel, who ran the corporation from

  1901 to 1927, quoted Gary as saying he was outraged when he

  learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using

  slave labor. He said he ordered the executive just instal ed as

  president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, George G. Crawford,

  to halt the practice immediately. Gary, namesake of the U.S. Steel-

  designed city of Gary, Indiana, was widely regarded among U.S.

  executives at the time as the national leader on progressive labor

  practices and business ethics. "Think of that!" Gary was quoted as

  saying. "I, an Abolitionist from childhood, at the head of a concern

  working negroes in a chain gang, with a state representative

  punishing them at the whipping post! Tear up that contract…I

  won't stand for it."29

  Perhaps Gary believed he had in fact ended U.S. Steel's slaving

  practic
es. Alabama was far from Pit sburgh. But deep in the bowels

  of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

  of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

  new southern unit of the company held contracts guaranteeing

  thousands of forced workers from the state of Alabama for at least

  four more years. The reality of the southern economic situation was

  that even under the mandate of the most prominent and modern

  new corporate executive of the era, U.S. Steel was unwil ing to

  simply cease the practice of slavery at its new subsidiary.

  Shortly after U.S. Steel acquired Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,

  rumors circulated in Alabama that the northern owners were

  unenthusias-tic about the convict system. In later testimony during

  an investigation into corruption in the state's convict leasing

  department, U.S. Steel executives said Judge Gary had indeed

  directed them to abandon convict leasing "as soon as possible" after

  the merger.

  "Judge Gary said whether the hire of convicts was a good thing or

  a bad thing that he didn't care to be connected with the penal

  system of the State of Alabama," testi ed Walker Percy, a lawyer for

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.30

  But in correspondence between company executives and state

  o cials, U.S. Steel made clear that despite the chairman's

  discomfort with the system, it realized the bene ts of a captive

  workforce, particularly in thwarting e orts to unionize local labor.

  It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control.

  In a let er to the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts in 1911, the

  president of TCI was unequivocal: "The chief inducement for the

  hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal for our

  manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor troubles."31

  Instead of quickly ending its reliance on forced labor, as Judge

  Gary later claimed, U.S. Steel made modest improvements,

  primarily by raising health standards at the No. 12 mine. At the

  same time, it publicly praised Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's

  past record of "humane and considerate treatment" of prisoners,32

  and entered into new agreements to acquire more convicts from

  county sheri s. In 1911, the number of deaths at U.S. Steel prison

  mines fel to eighteen.

  mines fel to eighteen.

 

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