Slavery by Another Name Read online

  Praise for Douglas A. Blackmon's

  S L A V E R Y

  BY ANOTHER NAME

  "Vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude

  of…neo- slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation

  such practices per sisted…. Provides insights on how we might

  regard the legacy of slavery, reparations, and perhaps even our

  justice and correctional system, with echoes for our own time."

  —The Boston Globe

  "A terri c journalist and gifted writer, Blackmon is fearless in

  going wher ever the research leads him."

  —Atlanta Magazine

  "Personalizing the larger story through individual experiences,

  Blackmon's book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut."

  —Rocky Mountain News

  "For those who think the conversation about race or exploitation

  in Amer ica is over, they should read Douglas Blackmon's

  cautionary tale, Slavery by Another Name. It is at once

  provocative and thought-provoking, sobering and heartrending."

  —-Jay Winik, author of The Great Upheaval:

  America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

  "A powerful and eye-opening account of a crucial but

  unremembered chapter of American history. Blackmon's

  magni cent research paints a devastating picture of the ugly and

  outrageous practices that kept tens of thousands of Black

  Americans enslaved until the onset of World War II. Slavery by

  Another Name is a passionate, highly impressive and hugely

  important book."

  —David J. Garrow, author of

  Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr.

  and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

  "Wall Street Journal Bureau Chief Blackmon gives a

  groundbreaking and dis turbing account of a sordid chapter in

  American history—the lease (essen tially the sale) of convicts to

  ‘commercial interests’ between the end of the nineteenth century

  and well into the twentieth."

  —Publishers Weekly

  DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON

  S L A V E R Y

  BY ANOTHER NAME

  Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He

  has written extensively on race, the economy, and American society. Reared in

  the Mississippi Delta, he lives in downtown Atlanta with his wife and children.

  www.slaverybyanothername.com

  To Michelle, Michael,

  and Colette

  Slavery:…that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the

  Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty

  Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to

  the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught

  to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible

  Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the

  Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.

  GEORGE MASON, JULY 1773

  VIRGINIA CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

  CONTENTS

  A Note on Language

  Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On

  PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON

  I. THE WEDDING

  Fruits of Freedom

  I . AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

  "Niggers is cheap."

  I I. SLAVERY’S INCREASE

  "Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."

  IV. GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD

  "The negro dies faster."

  PART TWO: HARVEST OF AN UNFINISHED WAR

  V. THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

  "I don't owe you anything."

  VI. SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

  "We shal have to kil a thousand…

  to get them back to their places."

  VI . THE INDICTMENTS

  "I was whipped nearly every day."

  VI I. A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

  "The master treated the slave unmerciful y."

  IX. A RIVER OF ANGER

  The South Is "an armed camp."

  X. THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

  "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."

  XI. SLAVERY AFFIRMED

  "Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

  "Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

  XI . NEW SOUTH RISING

  "This great corporation."

  PART THREE: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY

  XI I. THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM

  A War of Atrocities

  XIV. ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

  "Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."

  XV. EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

  "Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet."

  XVI. ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

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

  XVI . FREEDOM

  "In the United States one cannot sel himself."

  EPILOGUE

  The Ephemera of Catastrophe

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  A NOTE ON

  LANGUAGE

  Periodically throughout this book, there are quotations from individuals who

  used o ensive racial labels. I chose not to sanitize these historical statements

  but to present the authentic language of the period, whenever documented

  direct statements are available. I regret any o ense or hurt caused by these

  crude idioms.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Bricks We Stand On

  On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheri of Shelby

  County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy"1

  Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy the o ense of a

  person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed,

  was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of

  the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern

  states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheri s and constables,

  adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all

  in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among

  all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's

  offense was blackness.

  After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found

  guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately

  sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees

  assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheri , the deputy, the court clerk, the

  witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

  The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former

  slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between

  the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel

  Corporation—the sheri turned the young man over to the company for the

  duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron &

  Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay o Cottenham's ne

  and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of

  other black men th
ey purchased from sheri s across Alabama, was entirely up

  to them.

  A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a

  mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the

  edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a

  long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour

  digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of

  coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the

  requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable

  to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed

  years or decades in their own chthonian con nement. The lightless catacombs

  of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and

  coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in

  the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.

  Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before

  Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened

  dozens. Within his rst four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost

  sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.

  Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after,

  were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.

  Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal

  brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel's

  production of iron. Forty- ve years after President Abraham Lincoln's

  Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and

  more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

  Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by

  whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern

  corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

  Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside ve miles from the bustling

  downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only

  tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but

  completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of

  privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still

  marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest oor, these were

  sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S.

  Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No

  signs marked the place. No paths led to it.

  I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a

  story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American

  corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical

  confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that

  relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that

  robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

  My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist

  named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron

  fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.

  Bergstresser was mysti ed by its presence at the center of what at the

  beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest con uences of

  industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron

  around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a

  complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands

  of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron

  —all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in

  American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the

  dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been

  compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His

  grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial

  field near the family home place south of Birmingham.

  A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of

  that burial ground. No speci c record of the internments survived, but

  mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African

  Americans nearby con rmed that most of the cemetery's inhabitants had been

  inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above

  the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial eld,

  where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried. The camp had supplied

  tens of thousands of men over ve decades to a succession of prison mines

  ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not

  survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then "leased" by state and

  county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3

  Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the nal chapter of

  American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly

  di erent from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the

  relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not

  automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless

  slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled

  by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were

  repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white

  masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.

  The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a

  journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers

  on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a

  forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their

  understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum

  slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of

  one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard

  indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public

  Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point

  said to me: "I guess it's really no surprise."

  The reactions of African Americans were altogether di erent. Repeatedly,

  they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in

  some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the

  nation's most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one

  to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority,

  what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S.

  society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of

  the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the

  thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still

  visuals of lynching, had never been a su cient answer to these African


  Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four

  million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How

  had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded

  oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I

  began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those

  readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were

  simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers,

  the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth

  century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of

  government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.

  As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians

  concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse

  of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger

  sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the

  punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in

  light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and

  their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were

  unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been

  conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held

  that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks

  in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally

  they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals.

  Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened

  couldn't be determined. O cial accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged,

  because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which

  black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

  Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia,

  and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally awed.

  That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of o cial summaries

  and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources

  —southern whites who engineered and most directly pro ted from the system.