Slavery by Another Name
Page 55
forebears.
It was Henry Tinsley and his brother, Luke, who as children three
decades earlier had been captured by John Pace and forced to work
on his brutal Tal apoosa plantation. 58 They were the two young
boys Warren Reese had discovered stil being held by Pace ve
years after taking them from their mother and long after Pace had
been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold
been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold
slaves again.
Henry had worked for a time in the warehouse of a grocery
wholesaler in Birmingham. He had married and fathered a child
more than a decade earlier. He had been a soldier too, cal ed in
1917 to ght in the U.S. Army59But the Alabama Henry returned to
after World War I was the same state he was born into in 1892. And
soon it returned him to the condition Alabama had reserved for him
at birth.
His crime in 1929 was recorded as assault with intent to murder.
The details of the case are lost, but the sentence of two years’
imprisonment suggests a brawl in which the other man was
injured.60 Regardless of whether the man who had grown from that
captive thirteen-year-old commit ed a real crime or whether it was
his enslavement by John Pace that led him to do so twenty-three
years later, deep into the twentieth century, Henry Tinsley wore
chains again.
XVI
FREEDOM
"In the United States one cannot sel himself."
Two years after the last convicts emerged from Flat Top prison, a
white writer named John Spivak visited the o ces of the state
Prison Commission in Georgia in September 1930. Presenting
himself in Atlanta as a journalist seeking to document reforms in
the convict system, Spivak was given a let er of introduction from
none other than the state's top penal o cer, directing the wardens
of every prison camp in Georgia to give him ful access to their
stockades and inmates.
Spivak, born in Connecticut, had worked as a police reporter for
a newspaper in his home state and as a writer of pulp ction
stories. His strong socialist leanings made him sympathetic to the
plight of blacks held against their wil in the South. His skil with
the jocular techniques of insinuating into the comfort of sheri s and
wardens gave him the tools to render an astonishingly sharp
portrait of what he found.
Contrary to the congratulatory pronouncements that fol owed
Georgia's "abolition" of the practice of sel ing black prisoners in
1908, the state had more forced labor slaves than ever by 1930. In
excess of eight thousand men—nearly al of them black—worked in
chain gangs in 116 counties. Of 1.1 mil ion African Americans in
the state that year, approximately half lived under the direct control
and force of whites—unable to move or seek employment
elsewhere under threat that doing so would lead to the dreaded
chain gang.1
Two years later Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a 241-page
ctionalized account of his nds—built around the harrowing
narrative of a young black boy drawn inexorably and cynical y into
a lifetime of slavery—on a county chain gang, as a debt slave to
farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.
farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.
The episodes that make up the narrative could have just as easily
been rsthand accounts of the ery lynching disaster in Pine Apple,
Alabama, the brutish violence and perversion of Lowndes County
three decades earlier, or the "murder farm" of John S. Wil iams.
Unlike the plethora of chain-gang-themed novels and movies that
fol owed in the next four decades such as the 1967 lm Cool Hand
Luke—nearly al of which assiduously labored to depict the
southern penal barbarism as something directed equitably at both
whites and blacks—Spivak made no e ort to blunt the overtly
racial character of involuntary servitude. He unstintingly portrayed
a system designed to enslave or intimidate black men into
obedience. That a smal minority of white men were drawn in as
wel was peripheral and inconsequential.
Spivak created a character named David Jackson, a black
sharecropper's son rst sentenced to the chain gang of ctional
Ochlockonee County for no apparent crime. Stil a teenager, he was
released from the traveling camp—in which prisoners were, as in
actual life at the time, held in rol ing cages similar to circus wagons
transporting exotic animals. The men were perpetual y chained to
one another—eating, sleeping, working, bathing, and defecating
together, never freed from their heavy iron links.
After the character's release from the chain gang, David watched a
game of dice in an al eyway during a Saturday visit to town. A ght
breaks out: "A steel blade glinted in the yel ow light. The burly
nigger grunted and clutched at his neck. The assailant dropped the
knife and ed. Someone scooped up the money and ran. Only the
knife was left by the time the restaurant proprietor and his two
customers rushed out. David instinctively turned to the lighted
streets, hoping to lose himself in the crowds. Dark forms scurried
by. A strong hand grasped the boy's arm and a voice demanded:
‘What's yo’ hurry nigger?’
" ‘I didn't do nothing,’ " he protested frantical y.2
Rounded up with four other young black men, none of whom
was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that
was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that
he must al ow the county's largest landowner to buy him or sit in a
vermin-infested jail for a year, awaiting trial. Sold to the white
plantation farmer for $25—ostensibly to pay a ne for disturbing
the peace—David is taken in chains to Jim Deering's remote
plantation. There he is worked as a slave, and witnesses how
Deering handles those blacks who resist any order— ogging men
on their naked but ocks with straps dipped in syrup and sand,
beating men with sts and clubs. As the farm fal s behind during
picking season—raising the prospect that some of the cot on in the
eld could be lost—Deering's methods of compel ing the slaves to
work harder grow even more sadistic. To teach others a lesson, he
orders a man nicknamed "High Yal er" for his lighter skin to be
whipped for stopping to get a drink of water.
A guard slipped handcu s on him. Another appeared with a long,
leather strap of knotted thongs. With a quick movement the guards threw
him face down. One sat on his shoulders and the other on his feet. Charlie
slipped the niggers overalls down until the buttocks were exposed, took
the strap and stepped back. It swished through the air and cracked like a
pistol shot on the brown flesh.
High Yaller screamed and squirmed, rubbing his face in the soil. The
guards dug their feet into the earth to keep from being thrown off.
Red welts showed on the skin.
The strap swished through the air again. High Yaller ceased scream
ing
before the twentieth stroke. He moaned and his body jerked
spasmodically. His face was scratched and bleeding. He tried to spit the
red clay from his mouth but it stuck to his lips and chin. The exposed
esh was a mass of welts and criss-crossed lines of blood…. Flies settled
on the raw buttocks.3
Another morning a sick prisoner named Limpy—for his injured
hip— begs in the road to be al owed to rest. Ordered to begin
picking cot on again, Limpy has the audacity to resist. He accuses
the farmer of trying to work him to death, of treating the prisoners
worse than "real" slaves before the Civil War. "If I was yo’ slave an’
you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de
you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de
mis'ries but you kin git plenty mo’ niggers cheap if I die,’ " Limpy
yel ed from the pages of the book.
Deering turned on him white with fury. His st smashed against the
nigger's face. Limpy sank to the ground, blood running from his nose and
mouth….
"Get up and go to work!" Deering ordered tersely. "Get up, or I'll give
you something to get sick over!"
"Sho," he growled, "why doan you kill me now instead o’ sendin’ me out
in de fiel's to die!"
The planter's face turned apoplectic. For a moment he tried to restrain
himself. Then with a swift movement his hand darted to his hip and drew
his pistol.
With a hoarse scream Limpy tried to scramble to his feet, his hands half
raised in supplication.
"Mist’ Deerin’—" he cried.
Deering red twice. Limpy slumped to the ground, his head on his
chest….
"You asked for it, you black bastard! …I want no impudence around
here!" he shouted to the terrified niggers at the tables. "Remember that!"
He turned to the gigantic nigger beside him. "Weight the son of a bitch
and bury him in the swamp!"4
Spivak's protagonist eventual y escaped Deering's farm, but his
freedom leads only to a series of pathetic and ever more desperate
e orts to avoid returning to his slave status under Deering or
another white man. Final y nding a way out of his home county
and the feudal dominion of Deering and the sheri he control ed,
Jackson discovers that every other town in Georgia is another
vortex of police coercion and involuntary servitude. He is quickly
arrested and sold to other white men. Hunted down by
bloodhounds after another escape—betrayed by a prisoner who had
been "stretched" on a rack by guards—-Jackson is nal y resigned to
his fate. Spikes riveted to his ankles and an iron col ar padlocked to
a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.5
a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.
To underscore the veracity of Spivak's description of black life in
Georgia, the author published as a visual epilogue to the book a
series of photographs taken in Georgia's labor camps. He reprinted
reports detailing whippings, extra chains, and "put in barrel"—a
variation of the sweatbox. One document—titled "O cial Whipping
Report"—listed fty beatings at one camp in August 1930. A gal ery
of photographs showed bloodhounds baying at an escapee in a tree.
Guards proudly demonstrated to their visitor the latest techniques of
punishment and torture—colonial-era stocks, black men trussed
around pick handles like pigs ready for slaughter, the "stretching"
rack.67
Across the South, despite claimed reforms in many states, more
prisoners than ever before were pressed into compel ed labor for
private contractors— but now almost entirely through local customs
and informal arrangements in city and county courts. The state of
Alabama was no longer sel ing slaves to coal mines, but thousands
of men continued to work on a chain gang or under lease to a local
owner. The total number of men arrested on misdemeanor charges
and subject to sale by county sheri s in 1927 grew to 37,701. One
out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama
was captured in some form of involuntary servitude.
The triviality of the charges used to justify the massive numbers
of people forced into labor never diminished. More than 12,500
people were arrested in Alabama in 1928 for possessing or sel ing
alcohol; 2,735 were charged with vagrancy; 2,014 with gaming; 458
for leaving the farm of an employer without permission; 154 with
the age-old vehicle for stopping intimate relations between blacks
and whites: adultery.
Roughly half of al African Americans—or 4.8 mil ion—lived in
the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of
whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor
like that described in Spivak's chil ing account.
Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and
Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and
$30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring
black laborers and sel ing them to local planters. After a plea for
more cot on pickers in August 1932, police in Macon, Georgia,
scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy"
charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner
named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a
similar roundup in the cot on town of Helena, Arkansas.8
Ot o B. Wil is, a forty-six-year-old white farmer living near
Evergreen, Alabama, deep in the Black Belt, wrote the Department
of Justice in 1933, describing the desperate system under which
black families were held as de facto serfs on the land of the county's
white landowners. Why Wil is— an Alabama-born farmer with a
wife and six children, living on land they owned—would be moved
to defend the plight of the tens of thousands of black laborers who
shared rural Hale County with him is a mystery. But in an elegant
longhand, he described point by damning point how black men and
their wives and children were compel ed to remain at work for
years upon years to retire so-cal ed debts for their seed, tools, food,
clothing, and mules that could never be extinguished, regardless of
how much cot on they grew in any year. Lit le had changed since
Klansmen in Hale County shipped R. H. Skinner to the Alabama
slave mines in 1876.
"The negro is worse than broke…. His family goes ragged and
without medical at ention and the women are at ended by ignorant
colored midwives at childbirth and many die from blood poison,"
Wil is wrote. "The negro is half starved and half clothed, yet he sees
no hope of ever being out of debt, cause many landowners tel
them if they move o his land he wil have them put in jail or
threatened bodily harm. Colored people have lit le standing in
court here. So he is afraid to move. So they are forced to remain on
and start another crop for the landlord…. These are the facts…. Is it
right?"9
Whatever motivation Wil is had in penning his detailed litany of
the me
chanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the
the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the
issue had lit le interest. Writing on behalf of the at orney general,
Joseph B. Keenan replied with the timeworn explanation for why
slavery was not a mat er meriting the at ention of the Department
of Justice—that only narrowly de ned debt slavery would be
examined by federal agents.
"Peonage is a condition of compulsory service based upon the
indebtedness of the peon to the master; the basal fact being
indebtedness," Keenan wrote, in bored, boilerplate language.
Ignoring that Wil is's let er explicitly described a system of holding
laborers against their wil until claimed debts were paid o , the
Justice Department o cial dismissed Wil is with a patronizing
bureaucratic directive. "If you have any speci c facts showing that
the mat er fal s within the above de nition, it is suggested that you
report the same." The case was closed.10
By the middle of the decade before World War I , federal
investigations into peonage al but stopped except in the most
egregious cases. Even those resulted in the rarest convictions. Even
more rare was meaningful punishment. On October 13, 1941,
Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile,
Alabama, to a charge of peonage for holding a black man named
Martin Thompson against his wil . Using the same technique as
John Pace in 1903, Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that
federal o cials and the U.S. District Court judge would not deal
harshly with a white man holding slaves. He was correct. Bledsoe's
punishment was a ne of $100 and six months of probation. The
status of new black slavery appeared complete. The futility of
combating it was clear.
Less than two months after the slap on the wrist of Charles Bledsoe,
the naval forces of imperial Japan launched their at ack on Pearl
Harbor. Caught at-footed and unprepared for war, U.S. o cials
frantical y planned for a massive national mobilization. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt instinctively knew the second-class citizenship
and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited
and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited
by the enemies of the United States. At orney General Francis
Biddle cal ed together his top assistants and shared the president's