Slavery by Another Name
Page 54
Johnny Benson should get in his car to go to the train station that
night. Instead, Wil iams drove them to an isolated spot, where
Manning wrapped chains around their bodies and at ached a heavy
iron wheel from a cot on press. The pair were thrown alive o a
bridge into the Alcovy River, where they sank into the murk and
drowned.
As darkness fel on Saturday night, Wil ie Preston, Lindsey
Peterson, and Harry Price climbed into the car under the same ruse.
They were chained to bags l ed with bricks, and Preston and
Peterson were thrown o a di erent bridge. Price, resigned to his
fate, jumped in on his own. Before the church hour on Sunday
morning, Manning split Johnny Green's skul with an axe. The
white farmer watched as Manning at acked and then instructed him
to keep hit ing Green's shat ered skul until al signs of life ceased.
After a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and biscuits, Wil iams
cal ed for Wil ie Givens, another black slave worker, to join him
and Manning for a walk into the nearby woods. At the edge of the
forest, Manning sank his axe in Givens's back. A week later,
Wil iams drowned Charlie Chisolm, the other African American
who had been ordered to assist in the kil ings, and then shot to
death Fletcher Smith, the last of the other forced laborers.
A total of eleven African Americans were murdered to conceal
slavery on the Wil iams farm. Men who had grown to adulthood in
a South steeped in terror of physical harm, or even more brutal
forms of involuntary servitude, in which they had no cause to
expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned
expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned
themselves to violent death, unwil ing or unable to resist.
Only after decomposing bodies began to surface in the rivers of
Jasper County did the federal agents who had been wil ing to
ignore Wil iams's slave farm a few weeks earlier grow suspicious.
Wil iams and Manning were eventual y tried and convicted for
murder in connection with the kil ings. Wil iams—the only white
man found guilty in Georgia of kil ing a black man during the
ninety years between 1877 and 1966—died in prison.45
The Wil iams farm was exceptional in the level of violence used to
conceal its use of slave labor—and the degree to which the
revolting details of that violence came to be revealed. But as John
Wil iams easily admit ed to the federal agents when they rst
arrived at his property, forced labor remained as ubiquitous as
cot on in the South, an endemic feature of the landscape and
economy.
During the investigation of Wil iams, a government prosecutor
brought charges against Arthur Farmer, Dr. James T. Tyner, and
Charles Madares for holding slaves in central Alabama. After the
indictment in March 1921, the primary witness in the case, a black
man named Jim Sten-son, was kidnapped—twice—and spirited out
of the state. The white men eventual y pleaded no contest to the
charges and received a nominal penalty. There was no prosecution
for having intimidated their victim into refusing to testify46
Increasingly, after years of absolute political hegemony by the
white supremacist southern wing of the Democratic Party, federal
o cials in the South wanted as lit le as possible to do with the
political and social in ammation that came with investigations into
any racial y oriented crime. An accusation in 1924 that the logging
camp and sawmil of S. J. Wilkins on Alabama's Tombigbee River
had held a twenty-two-year-old African American man and his
fteen-year-old brother for more than nine months— claiming they
owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.47
owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.
U.S. at orneys and eld o ces of the Department of Justice
abrogated their role in such cases, knowing ful wel that virtual y
no act of violence by whites against African Americans—and
certainly no cases of involuntary servitude whatsoever—would ever
be prosecuted by sheri s or state o cials in the South. In April
1926, federal authorities in Birmingham were told of a brutal
whipping given to a black man working in a textile mil as a signal
to other African Americans that they shouldn't seek work above the
level of oor sweepers or janitors. The fol owing month, J. Edgar
Hoover, director of what was then cal ed the Department of
Justice's Bureau of Investigation, wrote Assistant At orney General
O. R. Luhring blithely asserting that the facts surrounding an at ack
on a black worker by whites in the Birmingham, Alabama, textile
mil didn't merit a federal investigation. "We have an enormous
amount of work on hand involving undoubted violations of Federal
statutes and I can see no reason for proceeding with this mat er,"
Hoover wrote.48 The case was ignored.
Two months later, a black woman in Birmingham named
Rebecca Jones mailed a let er to the White House, asking President
Calvin Coolidge to help her free her teenage daughter, Carolina
Dixon. The mother said two men claiming to be sheri s had seized
her daughter on a country road when she was just thirteen years old
and then held her in col usion with the Butler County judge for ve
years—forcing her to work and abusing her sexual y. When Jones
went to the farm of Tom Couch, the man holding her daughter, "I
was met with threats under the point of high powered ri es, stating
that I could not take my daughter back," Jones wrote. My "child was
scarred unmerciful in several places on her body." A federal agent
was dispatched to investigate, and the facts of the kidnapping were
put before a grand jury. It refused to indict Couch. The mat er was
dropped.49
Yet even as the federal government did lit le to check the breadth of
the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude
the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude
industrial enterprises to which slave labor lent itself so e ectively
for fty years were being eclipsed by modern technologies and
business strategies. Mechanized coal mining—using hydraulic
digging tools, electric lights, modern pumps, and transportation—
made obsolete the old manual labor mines of Alabama, packed
with thousands of slave workers and mules.
When cot on prices fel drastical y after World War I, and the new
scourge of the bol weevil ravaged mil ions of acres of cot on elds,
depression set in across the rural landscape. The cost of labor
plunged yet further. Prisoners o ered for sale by state o cials who
expected the returns on their business in labor to steadily increase
grew too expensive for some market conditions. Buying and sel ing
them was less and less sensible. As nancial incentives for the states
faded, political scandals and abuse outrages gained traction. In even
the most notorious states, public cries to end the leasing of convicts
to private contractors arose for the first time.
In the winter of 1921, Martin Tabert, a twenty-two-year-old
white
man from a middle-class farm family in Munich, North Dakota,
decided to take a walk-about through the United States, traveling
by train, sleeping in railroad camps with tramps, and working to
support himself as he crossed the West, Midwest, and nal y the
South. Running short of money in December, Tabert, along with a
group of other itinerant men, hopped aboard a freight train without
a ticket.
Unbeknownst to Tabert, the sheri of Leon County, just south of
the Georgia state line, maintained a rich trade from spying on the
freight rails that crossed into his territory, seizing men from the
train, charging them with vagrancy or "beating" a ride on a railroad,
and sel ing them into slavery. Tabert was arrested, ned $25 for
vagrancy and then sold for three months’ work to a turpentine
camp owned by Putnam Lumber Company— then a vast enterprise
headquartered in Wisconsin but engaged in the harvest of hundreds
of thousands of swampy Florida forestland. Within days, Tabert's
family wired more than enough to pay the ne, but their son had
already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor
already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor
system. In sixty- ve years, the southern turpentine camp—
desperate, hungered, sadistical y despotic—had changed hardly at
al .Young Tabert did not last long in the putrid swamp. He was
given il - t ing shoes, and his feet became blistered and swol en. A
boil formed in his groin. Accused of shirking work in January 1922,
the slight-framed Tabert was forced by the camp whipping boss,
Walter Higginbotham, to lie on the ground as eighty- ve other
prisoners watched. Higginbotham pul ed up Tabert's shirt and
applied to his back more than thirty licks with a seven-and-a-half-
pound leather strap. By the time the beating concluded, Tabert was
"twitching on the ground," according to one witness. Higginbotham
placed his foot on Tabert's neck to keep him from moving, and
then hit him more than forty more times with the strap. The boss
ordered Tabert to stand, and when he moved too slowly, the guard
whipped him two dozen more times, witnesses later testi ed. When
the young North Dakota man, a thousand miles from home and an
immeasurable distance from any measure of sanity or decency,
nal y made it to his feet, Higginbotham chased him in a circle,
striking him over the head and shoulders, shouting repeatedly: "You
can't work yet?"
When the beating nal y ended, Tabert col apsed into his cot and
never stood again. A terrible odor rose from his body. He died the
fol owing night. A Putnam Lumber executive wrote to Tabert's
family a few days later, informing him that their son had died of
malaria and expressing the company's sympathy.
Unconvinced of the explanation for their son's death, the Tabert
family triggered a series of legal inquiries and a Pulitzer Prize-
winning journalistic investigation by the New York World.
Higginbotham was tried and convicted of second-degree murder.
But his conviction was later overturned by a Florida court. He was
never retried or punished.50 Stil , public disclosure of the gruesome
kil ing and its subsequent cover-up stirred a wave of outrage—
especial y as a demonstration that the excesses of the South's new
slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of
slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of
distinction. The fol owing year, the Florida legislature, after an
extended debate, voted to ban the use of the whip on any prisoners
in the state.51
Alabama o cials were also under growing humanitarian and union
pressures to end the worst abuses of the convict leasing system.
Over time, state agencies took more direct control of the
supervision and punishment of convicts—though through every
purported reform, black prisoners continued to be driven beyond
reasonable human limits under the cold mandates of the
businessmen and companies who captured them.
Most reforms were cursory and super cial, such as requiring that
men be clothed during their lashings. The fee system and its pro t
motivation to encourage sheri s to make as many arrests as
possible remained in force. "Our jails are money-making machines,"
wrote a state prison inspector, W. H. Oates, in a 1922 report.
At the same time, the number of men being arrested and
sentenced to some form of hard labor in Alabama bal ooned. In the
year ending September 30, 1922, total arrests nearly reached
25,000, driven partly by new prohibition laws. Within another ve
years, the figure was 37,701 for one twelve-month period.52
In 1924, another ghastly story of death in a slave mine surfaced.
Like Martin Tabert's murder, it took on sensational proportions
when the public realized that the young white man, James Knox,
died while undergoing tortures that in the minds of most whites
could only be justified as punishment for African Americans.
Working at Sloss-She eld's Flat Top prison outside Birmingham,
Knox was rst reported to have kil ed himself. Later, a grand jury
col ected evidence showing that the whipping boss in charge of
Knox's crew punished him for slow work with the water cure so
long in use in the slave camps of the South. "James Knox died in a
laundering vat, located in the yard of the prison near the hospital,
where he was placed by two negroes…It seems likely that James
Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused
Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused
by a combination of unusual exertion and fear…. After death it
seems that a poison was injected arti cial y into his stomach in
order to simulate accidental death or suicide."53
Despite howls of protest that a white could die so ignominiously,
Alabama's prisoners continued to struggle against medieval
conditions. Monthly memos writ en by Glenn Andrews, a state
medical inspector, recorded scores of routine lashings for o enses
such as cursing, failure to dig the daily quota of coal, and
"disobedience." One entry in March 1924 reported that in the
previous month, "a negro woman was given seven lashes for cursing
and ghting. On the same day, a negro man was given seven lashes
for burning a hole in prison oor. On Feb. 14, a negro man was
given seven lashes for cursing and ghting. On the same day and for
the same of ense two negro women were given six lashes each." In a
1925 report, two black inmates, Ernest Hal man and R. B. Green,
received ve lashes each for not obeying a guard. Others were put
in chains and given up to a dozen lashes for "not working." White
prisoners, now invested in larger numbers, were more often given
solitary confinement. 54
In March 1926, the front page of the New York World featured
an exposé on southern slavery. The stories reported that in fty-one
of Alabama's sixty-seven counties, nearly one thousand prisoners
had been sold into slave mines and forced labor camps the previous
year—generating $250,000, or about $2.8 mil ion in modern
currency, for local o cials. The state government pocketed
$595,000 in 1925—or $6.6 mil ion today—sel ing about 1,300 men
to Sloss-She eld's Flat Top mine, the successor to Prat
Consolidated—now cal ed Alabama By-Products Corp.—and the
Aldrich mine in Monteval o, Alabama, the town where Green
Cot enham's mother lived her last isolated years.
Once sold, the prisoners faced beatings with steel wire, hickory
sticks, whips, and shovels. The stories described "dog houses"—
rough-hewn boxes the size of co ns into which men were locked
for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty
for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty
such houses.55
Final y, in 1927, new Alabama governor Bibb Graves moved to
stanch the long-running negative depiction of the state and its
twentieth-century slavery. He began relocating a hundred prisoners
out of the mines and other private businesses each month and sped
up construction of new prison facilities and roadwork camps where
county prisoners would soon be shackled into chain gangs—seeding
the notorious scandals of the next generation.56
On June 1, 1928, the lungs of eight hundred men l ed the damp
air of the mine shafts at Flat Top with the sounds of "Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot." The white prisoners held here and at Alabama's
only other remaining prison mine had already been relocated to
work on road gangs.
Only African Americans remained at Flat Top. They rose out of
the mile-long manway in two columns—blinking at the sudden
brightness of the summer sun. As the plaintive lyric "Coming for to
carry me home" wafted into the daylight, the prisoners marched out
of the shaft, surrounded by armed guards, and walked to a train
platform. Within a few hours, they had been transported to the
state's newly constructed Kilby Prison. No more men would be sold
into slave mines by the state of Alabama.57
More than a year later, a thirty-six-year-old man born in
Tal apoosa County and named Henry Tinsley arrived at the gates of
Kilby Prison. Like Green Cot enham, he was born decades after
Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of his parents and grandparents.
Also like Green, al his years and every facet of his life were shaped
and circumscribed by the slavery that succeeded the freedom of his