by Bill Moyers
The consequences of those three centuries of slavery and segregation were pervasive and palpable, and our government at last instituted affirmative action policies in an attempt to overcome the cruel effects of a long tradition. Much of the opposition to affirmative action was a continuation of the denial that enabled slavery to flourish so long in a society that had proclaimed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as every citizen’s inalienable right.
Denial was a blindfold slipped on and off as convenience required, a common practice where I grew up in deeply segregated east Texas in the 1940s and 1950s. In twelve years of public schooling I cannot remember one of the teachers I cherished describing slavery for what it was—if they mentioned the word at all. Nor did they or anyone else in town talk about that tortured period following the Civil War, when our town restored white supremacy, determined, with so many others across the South, to prevent emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom supposedly won when the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox.
For decades to come, thousands of freed black Americans were arrested, often on trumped-up charges, and forced into labor as humiliating and painful as slavery. Such prolonged exploitation, which persisted right up until World War II, was like a hammer constantly raining blows on the limbs of its victims, who were then expected to get up and join America’s fiercely competitive economy as if they merely had been in training for it at the local gym.
To read Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book Slavery by Another Name and then have the opportunity to talk with him about it is to open the past, including the recent past, to the raw truth of an oppression whose scars persist today. Born in Leland, Mississippi, Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. His team’s articles on race, wealth, and other issues have been nominated by The Journal for Pulitzers four times. His reporting on U.S. Steel’s use of forced African American labor in Alabama coal mines during the early twentieth century was included in the 2003 edition of The Best Business Stories of the Year and was the inspiration for his book, which will soon be the subject of a PBS documentary.
—Bill Moyers
What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War than they turned around and, in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
Well, by the time you got to the end of the nineteenth century, twenty-five or thirty years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who’d been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally, this generation of people experienced difficult, hard lives after the Civil War, but they had real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government, they farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America that effectively reenslaved enormous numbers of people. And that was rooted in the Southern economy and in the way the American economy was addicted to slavery, addicted to forced labor, and the South could not resurrect itself. So there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
Yes. Before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes, laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, by which a slave had to have a written pass to leave the plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes, and they essentially attempted to re-create the Slave Codes. This was such an obvious effort to re-create slavery that the Union military leadership still in the South overruled all of that. But that didn’t work, and by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the Southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren’t called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities no poor black farmer could avoid.
Such as?
Vagrancy. You were breaking the law if you couldn’t prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you. None of these laws said it only applies to black people, but overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, young black men ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they had worked in chains, not even as a free worker, but as a slave.
You write about how thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps, and factories in the deep South. And this went on right up to World War II?
It was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made-up stuff, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
You have a photograph in the book I have not been able to get out of my mind. It’s of an unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed sometime around 1932, which was only two years before I was born.
A journalist named John Spivak took an astonishing series of pictures in these forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps; some of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part, because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame in what was happening.
But what the picture also demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. This kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved, they went without clothing. Relatives reported that they would go looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves, naked, chained, whipped. It was just astonishing, the level of brutality.
You tell the story of a young man, a teenager, who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of the warden he was working for. He was stripped, stretched across a barrel, and flogged sixty-nine times with a leather strap. He died a week later. That’s not a unique story in this book.
No, that was incredibly common. There were thousands and thousands of people who died under these circumstances over the span of the period that I write about. And over and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition, and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
You give voice to a young man long dead, whose voice would never have been heard had you not discovered, resurrected, and presented it. He’s the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham.
Green Cottenham was born in the 1880s to a mother and father who had been slaves and who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War. Imagine a young man and a young woman who’ve just been freed from slavery, and now they have the opportunity to break away from the plantations where they’d been held and begin a new life. And so they do. They marry, they have many children. Green Cottenham is the last of them.
He’s born just as this terrible curtain of hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep across all of black life in the South. And by the time he becomes an adult, in the first years of the twentieth century, the worst of the efforts to reenslave black Americans are in full power across the South. And in the North, the white allies of the freed slaves have abandoned them. Whites all across America have essentially reached this new consensus that slavery shouldn’t be brought back, but if African Americans are re
turned to a state of absolute servility, that’s okay.
Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that moment, and then, in the spring of 1908, he’s arrested standing outside a train station in a little town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn’t remember what the charge was by the time he brought him in front of the judge. So he’s conveniently convicted of a different crime than the one he was originally picked up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of Birmingham.
Slope Number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest-growing city in the country; huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place. There’s this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
All of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
You say that Atlanta, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of reenslaved black men.
That’s right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. Some of the most prominent families and individuals in the creation of modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from this practice. The most dramatic example was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day. The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers, and almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that, on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse-trade with the guards, trading one man for another, or two men.
And yet, slavery was illegal?
It had been illegal for forty years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, and those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. Those bricks are still there. They are the bricks that we stand on today.
Obviously, this economic machine that was built upon forced labor—these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized—put African Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now.
Absolutely. The result of those laws—particularly of enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system—was that thousands of African Americans worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to buy property and enjoy the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of abusive laws, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
How is it, you and I, both southerners, could grow up right after this era and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven’t wanted to know as a country. We’ve engaged in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly the severity of it. And the official history of this time, the conventional history, tended to minimize the severity of the things that were done again and again and again, and to focus instead on false mythologies. Like the idea that freed slaves after emancipation became lawless and went wild, turned to thievery, that all sorts of crimes were being committed by African Americans right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest records from that period of time, there’s just no foundation for that. There was hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were being arrested on these specious charges so they could be forced back into labor.
Very often, those who raised these allegations, or wrote about them when I was growing up, were dismissed as Communists.
Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions was at risk of complete excoriation among other white southerners. But that’s also what’s remarkable about the present moment. One of the things I’ve discovered in the course of talking about the book with people is that there’s an openness to a conversation about these things that didn’t exist even ten or fifteen years ago.
Americans don’t like to confront these pictures, these stories.
They don’t. But over and over and over again I’ve encountered people who’ve read the book, who emailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it somewhere, particularly African Americans, who know this story in their hearts. They may not know the facts. They may not know exactly the scale of things. But they know in their hearts that this is what happened. And so people come up to me and say, “Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before she died twenty years ago, I never believed it. Because she would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia after World War II, or just before. And it never made sense to me. Now it does.”
It is amazing that this was happening at a time when many of the African Americans retiring today were children.
Exactly. These are events unlike antebellum slavery. These connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.
You can imagine why there might be so much anger in the black community among, let’s say, African Americans who are my age, seventy-three, seventyfour, who were children at the time this was still going on.
Well, there’s no way that anybody can read this book and come away still wondering why there is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among African Americans toward the judicial system, for instance. That suspicion is incredibly well founded. The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South, primarily became an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger that still percolates among many, many African Americans today.
SAM TANENHAUS
When I read Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism, I wondered if he had spent his time and considerable talent on a premature autopsy. He had hardly finished writing it when the Tea Partiers burst onto the political scene, stirring new life on the right and prompting some to chuckle at the possibility that, like rumors of Mark Twain’s demise, the obituary had been written before there was a corpse. Within a few months of this interview—which took place roughly one year after Barack Obama’s victory and one year before the Republican resurgence in the recent midterm elections—conservatives were again in the ascendency. But Tanenhaus’ book turns out to have been prescient about the nature of the insurgency. He distinguishes between the conservatism of Rush Limbaugh
and Glenn Beck and the conservatism of Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley. Buckley, whose passing Tanenhaus grieves, could actually make a reasoned argument and hold forth at length on the corrective value of tradition, order, and authority as a restraint on the excesses of democracy. Conservatives of that bygone era feasted on ideas and first principles and welcomed debate; their successors wolf down raw meat laced with jalapeños.
Tanenhaus, editor of both The New York Times Book Review and that paper’s “Week in Review” section, is a liberal who clearly respects a worthy adversary; he has practically made conservatism his reportorial beat. He wrote an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist and mainstream journalist who accused the State Department’s Alger Hiss of Soviet espionage. Chambers then became Bill Buckley’s soul mate in the founding days of Buckley’s National Review. Now Tanenhaus is working on a biography of Buckley himself, and wonders what that archer of quick wit and rational debate would make of our nation’s most recent surge of right-wing agitation.
—Bill Moyers
If you’re right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people showing up on television at rallies in Washington and across the country?
I’m afraid they’re radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time between two strains, what I call realism and revanchism. We’re seeing the revanchist side.
Revanchism?
I mean a politics based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that’s been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for “revenge.” It’s a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the nineteenth-century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right—and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we’re seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets—think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration: “Give it back to us.”