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Slavery by Another Name

Page 50

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  But when Alabama o cials began cut ing the number of men

  supplied to U.S. Steel in the middle of that year—four years after

  Gary claimed he had ordered an end to slaving in his mines—the

  company protested forceful y. The company's general

  superintendent, Edward H. Coxe, wrote convict bureau president

  James Oakley to complain, "asking him for 30 or 40 more men."

  When the number of prisoners dwindled below three hundred later

  that summer, Coxe paid a personal visit to Oakley to demand more

  forced laborers.33

  As the end of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's agreement with

  the state was approaching, the company told Alabama o cials it

  wanted to begin negotiations to extend the contract for at least one

  more year. The state responded that it intended to lease al the

  convicts to the Banner Mine—ostensibly because Erskine Ramsey's

  company would pay more for them.

  "I wish to enter a very vigorous protest against this action, as it is

  manifestly unfair to us to take the men from us," responded Coxe in

  a September 25, 1911, let er to the o cial in charge of convicts.

  "We are paying the State a great big price for these convicts, and it

  is certainly a hardship on us to deplete our organization."34

  State o cials, some of whom were receiving secret payments to

  help Ramsey's company, were unswayed. On January 1, 1912, the

  last remaining two hundred state convicts held at the Prat Mines

  were marched out under guard and turned over to their new

  overseers to help replenish the ranks of forced laborers at the

  Banner Mine, decimated by the disaster less than a year earlier.

  On December 13, 1912, a roaming labor agent for U.S. Steel sent

  out to hustle up as many workers as possible made a last stop at

  the Shelby County jail. Deputy Eddings no longer made regular

  deliveries to Birmingham. With al state prisoners in the Banner

  Mine, other companies sent out their own agents to local sheri s to

  col ect convicts and haul them back to the shafts. The man from

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad paid $103.50 to acquire one last

  lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

  lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

  Wal s, and John H. Huntley had al been arrested together on the

  crime that had supplied thousands of laborers to the company:

  "train riding."

  There must have been some amazement that day in that al of the

  men purchased were white. It was likely the only instance in the

  company's thirty-year relationship with Shelby County sheri s in

  which a shipment of men included no blacks. It would have been

  no surprise though that for the "crime" which thousands of African

  Americans were sent to the mines for months or years—and

  hundreds of whom died for it—these ve white men received

  sentences of just ten days’ labor.35

  XVI

  ATLANTA,

  THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

  "I wil murder you if you don't do that work."

  During the same scorching southern summer that Green

  Cot enham and so many others died deep in the Alabama coal

  mines—or at the ends of ropes in places from Texas to Il inois—

  a litany of horrors from the slave camps of Georgia was spil ing

  into public view in Atlanta.

  Beginning late in July 1908, a commission established by the

  Georgia legislature convened a series of remarkable hearings into

  the operations of the state's convict leasing system. Meeting early

  every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating

  heat, the panel cal ed more than 120 witnesses over the course of

  three weeks to give testimony in the state capitol's regal Room No.

  16.The architects of the investigation—primarily state senator

  Thomas Felder—launched the inquiry in hopes of proving

  corruption in the management of Georgia's extensive system of

  buying and sel ing prisoners. It would prove that. But as the long

  line of witnesses perspired beneath the chamber's whirling ceiling

  fans, they learned of crimes far greater than graft and payof s.

  Across Georgia, fourteen separate camps held men sold by the

  state; at another sixteen locations men charged in county and city

  courts were held in slavery—including more than 430 at Durham

  Coal mines; more than 350 at Egypt, in the plantation belt of south

  Georgia; nearly 200 at Chat ahoochee Brick Company on the

  outskirts of Atlanta; and scores more at a coal mine near Lookout

  Mountain. In total, at least 3,464 men and 130 women lived in

  explicit forced labor in Georgia. 1

  Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

  Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

  arrangements with work camps, factories, and timber operations

  scat ered across the state, that no one in Georgia government could

  say where any particular man might have ended up, or the true

  total of African Americans being held against their wil .

  Complicating any e ort to track the fates of these forced laborers,

  the new slavery of Georgia had metamorphed into a ful -blown

  system of human traf icking.

  Felder's commit ee learned that at least six hundred slave

  workers, nearly al of them African American, had been resold to

  other buyers after being leased from the state for convictions on

  minor of enses.2 Witness after witness—ranging from former guards

  to legislators to freed slaves— o ered nauseating accounts of the

  system's brutalities. Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were

  left to die on the oor of a storage shed at a farm near

  Mil edgevil e. Laborers who at empted escape from the Musco-gee

  Brick Company were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-

  long spikes turned inward—to make it impossibly painful to run

  again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physical y

  abusive. In almost every camp, forced laborers lived and slept for

  months in the same tat ered clothing. They bedded each night on

  fragments of bed linens clot ed with dirt and filth.

  One legislator told of a black man at Lookout Mountain Coal and

  Coke Company in the mountains of north Georgia whose arm was

  broken in a rock fal inside the mine. Months later he was working

  again, but with a disjointed arm, distended in a grotesque

  misalignment, where the bones healed together in an unnatural

  shape. At a camp in Floyd County, black women riddled with

  venereal diseases worked on a roadway chained to one another.

  Everywhere, prisoners worked, ate, and slept almost continual y

  shackled. Legislators who visited the Pinson & Al en lumber and

  turpentine camp in Mil er County were so revolted by the trash and

  insect-riddled food given to prisoners, they had to leave without

  completing the tour.3

  In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

  In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

  clenched hand gave his name as Daniel Long. What fol owed was a

  plain-spoken description of his sentence served a year earlier in a

  turpentine camp after being ac
cused of stealing a watch chain.

  Senator Felder asked him if he'd been whipped.

  "Yes sir," Long responded. "Say I wasn't working good enough."

  Felder asked how severely and how often.

  "Hit me 75 licks…. Some times twice a day," Long answered.4

  Asked what was the mat er with his hand, Long said the camp

  whipping boss beat it with a leather strap after Long said he was

  get ing cramps from his work. After that, the boy could never open

  his hand again. Final y the chairman of the commission asked Long

  to take o his shirt and let the panel see his back. To gasps of

  horror in the audience and grimaces on the faces of the commit ee,

  the slight young man do ed his shirt and turned to reveal a back

  grossly swol en and scarred with stripes from the turpentine camp

  beatings. Scars and marks covered the trunk of the teenager. One

  foot was stil seriously infected where a whipping had literal y

  removed a piece of skin.

  Long's mother moved into the witness chair and told the

  commit ee how she was noti ed after his last beating that Daniel

  was soon to die. The boy had been convicted of pet y theft in

  Mariet a, just north of Atlanta, but was sold and resold by traders in

  black labor until he arrived at the turpentine camp hundreds of

  miles to the south. She borrowed money to travel to the camp in

  south Georgia—walking for miles on country roads in search of

  him. By the time she found the camp, her son had been sold again,

  along with a crew of healthy prisoners, to a nearby farm. She asked

  the whipping boss where to go to find her son.

  "I don't know anything about the goddam black son of a bitch, I

  beat hel out of him," Mrs. Long quoted the man saying. "He told

  me if I went down that road … he would kil me and throw me in

  the river. He said he had kil ed lots of goddamn negroes and

  throwed them in the river."

  She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

  She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

  with his clothes stuck to his scabs and oozing skin. The new owner

  of the lease on her son al owed her to take him home. Only after

  three months of recuperation did a doctor conclude Daniel would

  survive.5

  As the inquiry progressed, what began as revelations of brutish

  behavior by uncouth men in distant labor camps slowly became

  instead an unset ling portrait of some of Atlanta's, and Georgia's,

  most prominent families—many of whom appeared to be direct

  bene ciaries of the most sordid revelations in Room 16. The

  commit ee learned that the kil ing of the young black boy described

  by Ephraim Gaither—whose account of the decomposed body being

  dragged through the woods by dogs sickened the gal ery—occurred

  in a camp owned by Joel Hurt, one of Atlanta's most esteemed

  businessmen, and run by his adult son, George.

  Other witnesses recounted the fate of a sixteen-year-old white boy

  named Abe Wynne, who was sold into the Durham Coal and Coke

  Company mine after being caught two years earlier stealing two

  tins of pot ed ham. The company, owned by former Atlanta mayor

  James W. English, operated a dangerous shaft in north Georgia.

  Some sections of the mine were l ed with more than waist-deep

  water, which seeped out through the slate surrounding the coal.

  Pumps were inadequate to remove the water. Not enough timbers

  were provided for miners to brace the tunnels, leading to routine

  and often deadly cave-ins. Even when material was provided,

  miners often skipped the safety steps for fear of being punished if

  they ran out of time to dig their required daily al otment, or "task,"

  of coal.

  "Many times the men wouldn't take time to do it because they

  knew that they could not timber the wal s and nish their tasks,

  and it meant a whipping if they did not nish them," testi ed R. A.

  Keith, a former prisoner al owed to work as a clerk at the mine

  of ice.

  Every morning, slave laborers at the Durham mines were forced

  to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

  to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

  bread and a piece of raw meat and to watch whippings of any

  worker who failed to make task the prior day. "I have seen them

  punish the convicts severely for not nishing their tasks and have

  seen them work until ten and eleven o'clock at night to nish their

  tasks and then be whipped for working overtime," Keith said.

  Asked to describe the instruments used by the camp whipping

  boss, Keith said convicts were beaten with a thick strap of leather

  at ached to a handle. "You take a strip of heavy harness leather

  about as wide as my three ngers or a lit le bit wider and about

  two and a half feet long. It would weigh somewhere in the

  neighborhood of …three and a half pounds," Keith testi ed. "Some

  times they would wet the leather by spit ing on it and rubbing it on

  the sand; that was when they wanted to bring the blood. It would

  hurt a great deal worse to og them with it than with the dry

  strap…. The sand wil take the skin of ."6

  In the yard where the whippings took place, the warden also

  kept a herd of between forty and fty hogs. The aggressive animals

  —made fearless of the docile prisoners—crowded in on the

  emaciated men to grab scraps of bread or other food that fel to the

  ground. One evening, Abe Wynne was al owed to brew a pot of

  co ee on an open re in the yard. Since arriving at the mine as a

  fourteen-year-old, his once stout, six-foot frame withered to just 160

  pounds. When a hog began nosing against him for food, he splashed

  a cup of hot cof ee on the pig to drive it away.

  Word quickly spread to the warden that Wynne had abused one

  of his hogs. As punishment, witnesses testi ed that Wynne was

  forced to strip naked, held stretched across a barrel by two other

  prisoners, and then whipped with a leather strap sixty-nine times.

  "The whipping was more than he could stand," Keith said.

  A few days later, Wynne's older brother, Wil , visited what was

  cal ed the mine hospital. He told the commission his brother was

  lying on a lthy bed, stil wearing his convict stripes with no

  underclothes and coated in the dust of the mine. "I saw that the boy

  could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

  could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

  Wynne. "About al I asked him was if he was prepared to die."

  Delirious and unable to tel his brother what happened, Wynne

  died a week later. The boy's family was told he'd contracted

  "gal oping" tuberculosis and succumbed suddenly7

  James W English, the owner of Durham Coal and Coke, was a

  luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the city

  rising from the Civil War's ashes would have associated with so

  cruel a kil ing as Abe Wynne's. But by 1908, English—despite

  having never owned antebel um slaves—was a man whose great

  personal wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of

  thousands of men.

&n
bsp; Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he

  apprenticed himself to a carriage maker and then served notably as

  a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in

  a prominent Georgia brigade. Serving in a forward position near

  Appomat ox, he received the rst writ en surrender demand from

  Ulysses S. Grant to Robert E. Lee. After the South's defeat, he went

  to Atlanta, to establish himself in the business and politics of the

  bustling new capital of southern commerce. He was elected to the

  city council partly on the renown of his war service, and later

  served on the Atlanta school board and as the city's police

  commissioner. He led a drive to make Atlanta the state capital of

  Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center, and in

  1880 he was elected mayor.8

  Presiding from a regal home a few blocks from the center of the

  city, English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a

  matching mustache, fostered a col ection of enterprises that grew as

  Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin. The base of his wealth was

  the Chat ahoochee Brick Company, a business perfectly consonant

  in the 1870s and 1880s with the needs of a booming metropolis

  recovering from Union general Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman's ring

  of the city a decade earlier.

  As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

  As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

  of using black forced laborers in his enterprises. Chat ahoochee

  Brick relied on slave workers from its inception in 1878, and by the

  early 1890s more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting

  heat of its res. The company held another 150 forced laborers at a

  sawmil in Richwood, Georgia, three hundred slaves at its Durham

  mines in Walker County, and several dozen more at English's Iron

  Belt Railroad and Mining Company. By 1897, English's enterprises

  control ed 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in

  brick making, cut ing cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction,

  and turpentining.

  During his tenure as mayor of Atlanta, English launched the

  Georgia Paci c Railroad, eventual y tying Atlanta to the coal elds

  of Alabama and then on to the cot on nub of Greenvil e,

  Mississippi. While building that rail line in 1883, English il egal y

  bought hundreds of convicts—and the coal mine they worked in—

 

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