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Slavery by Another Name

Page 53

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  A local grand jury in Birmingham reported that the bartering of

  African Americans for sale into the state's coal mines and the

  col usion of local justices of the peace in the system were only

  increasing. "The dockets of the justices of the peace in this county

  would convict many of them for peonage should the federal

  government choose to enforce its laws," read the nal report of the

  grand jurors, issued in September 1911. It cited thousands of

  unwarranted arrests and instances of cruelty, such as seventeen men

  penned into a fourteen-square-foot holding cel without food for up

  to two days.

  "It would be far bet er for the state of Alabama that every

  misdemeanant in the county of Je erson should go unpunished

  than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

  than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

  protect themselves," the jurors concluded. The U.S. at orney in

  Birmingham forwarded the report to Justice Department o cials in

  Washington, but no federal action was ever undertaken in

  response.37

  Desperate for traction in the face of the forces coalescing against

  African Americans, W. E. B. DuBois launched what would be the

  NAACP's seminal organ, The Crisis, in 1910. But the same year,

  Baltimore, fol owed by a host of cities across the South, enacted the

  rst local ordinances delineating the geographic boundaries of

  black and white neighborhoods.

  The election in 1912 of Woodrow Wilson, an openly white

  supremacist Democrat from Virginia, precipitated a dramatic

  expansion of Jim Crow restrictions on African Americans. In the

  nearly half century since the Civil War, the federal government had

  been the one province of American public life where black o cials

  could stil be appointed to important public positions, such as

  postmasters, customs o cers, and other administrative roles. The

  Washington government hired thousands of black workers, and

  within federal buildings, African Americans maintained a measure

  of civil equality with whites.

  Wilson, narrowly elected in a split election among himself,

  Republican Wil iam Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt running

  on an independent Bul Moose platform, aggressively reversed the

  federal government's traditions of at least modest equity for African

  Americans. In paradoxical contrast with the "Wilsonian" reputation

  the president developed after World War I for his pursuit of the

  visionary League of Nations, Wilson dramatical y curtailed the

  number of black appointees in his own government. His

  administration largely introduced to Washington, D.C., the

  demeaning southern traditions of racial y segregated work spaces,

  of ice buildings, and restrooms.

  Wilson strongly backed the demands of southern leaders that

  their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting

  without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

  without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

  chal enge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African

  Americans across the region. Another half century would pass

  before the civil rights movement could crack the anti-black legal

  regime consolidated during Wilson's tenure.

  After being named president of Princeton University in 1902,

  Wilson openly discouraged African Americans from applying to the

  school. In his academic writings as a political scientist, he blamed

  the existence of slavery not on American leaders but on England's

  imposing the institution upon its colonies despite England's

  abolition three decades before the Civil War.

  Wilson accepted the most distended idealization of the

  antebel um South and demonization of the black political

  participation that fol owed. "Domestic slaves were almost uniformly

  dealt with indulgently and even a ectionately by their masters," he

  wrote. The Reconstruction era of African American governance in

  states with black majorities was "an extraordinary carnival of public

  crime." Wilson cal ed the eventual suppression of black political

  activity "the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites."38

  In 1910, the vast majority, more than 93 percent, of the 10.2

  mil ion African Americans living in the United States continued to

  reside in the South. Nearly 60 percent of adult black men and

  nearly 50 percent of black women worked in farming.39

  Among whites, farming was a path to or an established form of

  economic independence. More than 3.7 mil ion white men, more

  than two thirds, owned their own farms. Conditions were more

  than reversed for blacks. Fewer than one third of nearly 900,000

  farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men

  who til ed the land. The rest worked at the behest of white men.

  There is lit le empirical evidence on which to establish the

  precise economic arrangements between most black families and

  the landlords who so dominated their lives—especial y on the

  question of how many black families lived in a form of

  uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

  uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

  survives indicates that the desperate plight of black farmers

  captured in DuBois's loosely ctionalized account of Lowndes

  County, Alabama, was only worsening. When federal census takers

  questioned every farmer in the United States in 1910, they

  calculated that nearly 700,000 black men, along with at least 2.5

  mil ion wives and children, lived and worked in the murky limbo

  of sharecroppers and rent farmers. Tenants ostensibly paid some

  form of rent for the land they farmed; sharecroppers gave up most

  of their crops at the end of each season to a landlord in return for

  use of his property, a house, and supplies. But under the South's

  regime of legal restrictions on black mobility and job freedom, the

  vast majority of those African Americans lived in a state of

  subjection to the white landowners or employers. Federal

  enumerators were unable to classify tens of thousands more men for

  whom the nature of their relationship to white landowners was

  unclear.

  A separate federal survey of farmers in 1909 gave a tel ing clue to

  the true status of African Americans who whites would have

  claimed were free laborers. Of nearly 2.5 mil ion farms in the

  eleven states of the old Confederacy, the owners of almost 1 mil ion

  farms reported giving some form of compensation to workers

  during the previous year. On most of the farms— a total of more

  than 850,000—the entire compensation to "laborers" for the year

  was less than seventy-nine dol ars.40

  When The Birth of a Nation, the movie version of the racial y

  vitriolic stage play The Clansman starring the former deputy sheri

  from Shelby County, Alabama, appeared in 1915, President Wilson

  enthusiastical y embraced it. The best-sel ing creator of the play,

  Thomas Dixon, who had proclaimed in Atlanta less than a decade

  earlier that the duty of every southern white man w
as to preserve

  "Aryan supremacy," was a classmate from Johns Hopkins University

  and longtime friend of the president.

  Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

  Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

  savage war on black political involvement in the 1870s, white

  audiences thril ed to the silent movie, the rst ful -length American

  lm. It became Hol ywood's rst true theatrical blockbuster. Its

  screening for President Wilson was the rst showing of a moving

  lm at the White House. Wilson helped arrange previews for other

  elected o cials, members of his cabinets, and justices of the

  Supreme Court. "My only regret," he reportedly said, "is that it is al

  so terribly true."

  As discom ting for blacks as the president's embrace of a lm

  that depicted their participation in public life as no less than venal

  was an extraordinary combination of applause and silence from

  other white Americans. Even in the most distant left-wing reaches of

  white political activism in the North, the embryonic movements to

  create socialist and communist parties in the United States, many

  succumbed to the lure of a caricatured view of African Americans as

  an inferior class capable of comic relief but lit le more. The Masses

  magazine, a groundbreaking socialist journal published in

  Greenwich Vil age, routinely ran cartoons and spoofs depicting

  large-lipped, bu oonish blacks. "Your pictures of colored people …

  depress the negroes themselves and con rm the whites in their

  contemptuous and scornful at itude," wrote a critical reader in a

  1915 let er to the editor.41

  In Alabama's forced labor coal mines, more than three thousand

  prisoners were at work by 1915.42 A study commissioned by

  Alabama's governor three years later concluded that the state's

  convict system remained an "extraordinary hazard to the life and

  limbs" of anyone pul ed into it. He recommended abolishing the

  labor system entirely43

  As thousands of black soldiers returned to the United States after

  the end of World War I in 1918, anticipating that their service

  overseas would earn some relief from racial animosity at home,

  whites across the country rampaged again, with gruesome riots in

  South Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., Il inois, and Arkansas, and

  a new wave of lynchings.

  In the spring of 1920, a white farmer in rural Jasper County,

  Georgia, visited the prison stockade on Bryan Street in Atlanta—the

  same one James W. English had relied on as a supply of slave labor

  for Chat ahoochee Brick two decades earlier. He spot ed a strong,

  young black man whose nickname was "Iron John," and paid his

  ne in return for a contract on the prisoner's labor, probably for

  one year.

  Repeating the ritual that played out hundreds of thousands of

  times in hundreds of counties across the South over more than half

  a century since the end of the Civil War, the farmer, John S.

  Wil iams, took the man back to his sprawling plantation and

  ordered him to get to work or expect to be brutal y punished. He

  was locked into a bunkhouse with about forty other black men

  acquired by similar means and held against their wil .

  It wasn't long before Iron John drew the wrath of Wil iams's

  grown son Leroy—who believed the new laborer wasn't working

  hard enough on a crew of black laborers ordered to build a fence.

  Iron John was stretched across a gasoline barrel, naked from the

  waist up, and whipped long and hard with a buggy whip. At some

  point, he cried out angrily, "Don't hit me no more …I'd rather be

  dead than treated this way"44

  Leroy Wil iams drew his pistol, stepped forward, and shot the

  striped and bleeding black man in the shoulder. "Do you want any

  more?" he asked.

  "Yes …shoot me," he answered.

  The white man raised the pistol to Iron John's head and red

  into his skul . He died instantly. At the instructions of the white

  man, other laborers at ached Iron John's body to a heavy log with

  wire, rowed it to the middle of a farm pond, and al owed it to sink.

  The murder—and certainly the whippings that preceded it—were

  hardly unusual. There had been many of the former and thousands

  of the lat er by the time a black laborer named Gus Chapman

  escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in

  escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in

  1921, he made his way to the federal courthouse in Atlanta. Two

  weeks after Chapman told his story to federal o cials, two agents

  from the Department of Justice's stil new Bureau of Investigation

  visited Wil iams to inquire about conditions.

  They found eleven black forced laborers working in a eld, al of

  them evidently there to work o criminal nes supposedly paid on

  their behalf by Wil iams. The African American men were

  supervised by Clyde Manning, a black overseer long entrusted by

  Wil iams to keep the men on the farm while he was away. While

  the agents were there, the plantation owner returned home.

  Wil iams, a thin fty-four-year-old with a drawn face and slight

  mustache, invited the two o cers to sit and have a glass of tea.

  Reclining on chairs on the porch, the agents asked if the black eld

  workers were being held in "peonage." Wil iams asked them to

  explain exactly what the "peonage" law was about.

  "If you pay a nigger's ne or go on his bond and you work him

  on your place, you're guilty of peonage," replied George W Brown,

  one of the Bureau of Investigation agents, using the time-honored

  southern signal that his questions didn't indicate any particular

  regard for black people.

  Wil iams laughed softly, according to later testimony. "Wel , if

  that is the case, me and most of the people who have done

  anything of the sort were guilty of peonage," the farmer replied. "I

  don't keep any of my niggers locked up. Of course, I do tel some of

  them they shouldn't leave before paying the ne they rightly owe

  me."

  Brown and his partner seemed satis ed with the answer. The

  farmer relaxed. But then Wil iams began to talk more about the

  farm. He described how he sometimes hunted down escapees and

  forced them to return. The agents asked if they could look around

  the plantation. They saw the slave quarters, where shackles and

  chains were clearly used to restrain forced laborers at night. Every

  black worker they quizzed, while appearing terri ed and reluctant

  to talk, nonetheless said they were satis ed with their treatment on

  the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

  the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

  other acts of violence on the farm.

  By the end of the day, the agents were convinced that Wil iams

  had commit ed at least a technical violation of the peonage statute.

  But to a pair of experienced eld agents, both native to the South,

  the situation looked typical for most big southern farms. The

  anxiety and mumbling of the workers were routine, given the
r />   unwavering social custom of blacks showing absolute deference to

  al whites and open fear to law enforcement. After al the years of

  investigations and failed peonage prosecutions in the South, Brown

  knew no Georgia jury would convict a white man for practices

  engaged in by tens of thousands of other white farmers across the

  region— especial y since Wil iams's laborers appeared relatively

  wel fed and clothed. This wasn't a case worth wasting time on. The

  agents explained the anti-peonage statute to the farmer again,

  warning him not to violate it further.

  "I don't think you need to have any fear of any case before the

  federal grand jury," Brown told him as they departed.

  That assurance wasn't enough for Wil iams. He was an intel igent

  and relatively worldly man. Now that he understood the peonage

  law more clearly—and knew that federal agents had identi ed him

  as a violator— Wil iams recognized his vulnerability, and that of his

  adult sons. The property he and his oldest sons farmed stretched for

  miles across Jasper County. In Wil iams's big house at the center of

  the plantation lived his wife and eight minor children.

  He had built a comfortable and in uential life, and a farm

  admired for its size and profitability. Wil iams had the distinction of

  owning an early automobile, and the ear of white county leaders.

  He would not risk seeing a personal empire built over twenty years

  ruined. Wil iams resolved that no African American would ever

  testify of the slavery on his plantation.

  Just after dawn the next morning, Wil iams found Manning, the

  black overseer, in the early chil and told him the other workers

  could "ruin" them al . "You have to get rid of al the stockade

  niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

  niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

  Two days later, Wil iams and Manning at acked Johnnie

  Wil iams, one of the forced laborers, in a remote pasture and

  bludgeoned him to death with the at side of an axe. The fol owing

  morning, John Wil Gaither was ordered to begin digging a new

  wel . Once it was a few feet deep, he was kil ed with a pickaxe

  blow to the head and buried in the hole.

  On the evening of Friday, February 25, 1921, a week after the

  federal agents visited, Wil iams entered the slave quarters and told

  the stunned men they were free to go. He said John Browne and

 

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