Slavery by Another Name (22 page)

southern whites seething at the vision of another Union invasion

and a return of power to blacks. It spurred the push to eliminate

African American political activity once and for al . On election day

in Alabama, there was virtual y no doubt that Kolb outpol ed

Governor Jones. But once again, thousands upon thousands of

bal ots purportedly cast by blacks who clearly were no longer being

al owed to vote turned the balance for Jones. He was declared the

winner, after o cial returns showed 127,000 votes for Jones to the

chal enger's 116,000.

The reelection was fol owed by an astonishing surge of activity

against African Americans. The opening of the next session of the

state legislature marked the beginning of the nal push to end al

black political involvement, to consolidate the segregation codes

that would de ne the Jim Crow era, and to begin cut ing African

Americans out of the most important e orts of government to

improve public life. Legislators voted to join seven other southern

states that already mandated segregated seating for blacks and

whites on trains. Public education, a new but increasingly popular

government function, was the most critical target of the racial

at ack.

Whites had chafed at the notion of black education as long as

Africans had been imported to the United States. Instruction of

slaves was il egal in the antebel um South. After emancipation,

government-col ected property taxes were used to open new

schools for al children. Whites gawked at the schools opened for

blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations

blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations

that predominated in the region. Per pupil spending on education

for black children and white children was essential y identical,

leading to wide resentment among whites—especial y in the cot on

plantation regions where whites owned the vast majority of land

and paid nearly al the taxes, but were enormously outnumbered by

African Americans in population. That "white taxes" were spent for

the education of black children, rather than solely their own, was

infuriating.

White leaders began to openly espouse that schools for blacks

were bad for the emerging new economic order. "Education would

spoil a good plow hand," opined a state legislator, J. L. M. Curry, in

a speech to the Alabama General Assembly.40 Most worrisome to

leading whites was that schooling il iterate blacks would encourage

"the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who

after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert

them."41

In the 1880s, the Alabama legislature at empted to enact laws

specifying that school funds would be apportioned on the basis of

which taxpayers contributed them: whites would fund white

schools, blacks would fund black schools. Federal courts quickly

declared that openly discriminatory scheme in violation of the

Fourteenth Amendment.

As the popularity of state-funded free public schools surged, the

friction caused by black education grew. The number of white

children at ending public schools in Alabama raced from 91,202 to

159,671 between the 1870s and late 1880s. At the same time, the

number of black pupils increased from 54,595 to 98,919. But the

amount of funding spent for every student was declining, and

at empts to raise taxes were doomed. Whites saw the money spent

in black schools as the only viable source of additional funds for

their own children.

In the legislative session of 1892, white leaders simply changed

the law so that school taxes were no longer distributed among al

schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of

schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of

students, white and black, would determine how much funding a

county or town received from the state. But it would be up to local

o cials to divide the money among schools "as they may deem just

and equitable." The author of the bil was hailed by another elected

o cial who said he "deserved a vote of thanks from the white

people of the state."42 The e ect on blacks was catastrophic.

Overnight, white schools came to receive the vast majority of al

funds for education. In one predominantly African American

county, the total budget for black teachers’ salaries in 1891 was

$6,545—in approximate parity with what was being spent per

student at white schools in the county. After turning over control of

funding to local o cials, black teacher salaries were slashed. Later

the length of the black school year was cut to just six months—

reducing costs and eliminating school as an excuse for African

American children not to work in the elds during planting and

harvest. Forty years later, the total salaries for teachers instructing

8,483 black children in the county had risen negligibly to just over

$8,000. The budget for white teachers, with fewer than two

thousand pupils, had climbed by a factor of almost 30, to nearly

$60,000.43

If any doubt remained about the intentions of southern whites in

1892, vigilante and mob violence soon dissolved it. More lynchings

of blacks occurred in the United States in 1892 than in any other

year—in excess of 250. Executions peaked in Alabama the

fol owing year, with the deaths of twenty-seven blacks.

At the same time, the region's biggest industrial concerns

continued to expand explosively. In December 1892, Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad bought outright the Cahaba Coal Mining

Company and its 44,000 acres of coal-rich property—some of it

extending to within a few miles of the old Cot ingham plantation in

Bibb County. In addition to the coal elds, the company acquired a

fteen-mile railroad, nearly ve hundred coke ovens, much of the

town of Blocton, and seven mines producing up to three thousand

tons of coal a day44 The number of men forced into Alabama slave

tons of coal a day The number of men forced into Alabama slave

mines surged with the growth, swel ing by half to 1,200 in 1892

from 845 just three years earlier.

As labor strife surged in the early 1890s, company o cials

privately worked on plans to shift even more of the company's

operations to captive forced laborers. One Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad o cial visiting Montgomery wrote to the superintendent

of the Prat Mines: "[T]he probability is we wil have to arrange to

take care of a great many more convicts."45

On the fourteenth day of February 1893, a new era opened for

the black men of Shelby County—where Green Cot enham would

be arrested fteen years later. Four men were loaded onto the

Birmingham train, headed to the new buyer of Shelby's prisoners.

Ben Alston, Charles Garnes, and Issac Mosely had each been

convicted of assault six weeks earlier. Henry Nelson was arrested

the previous day for using "abusive language in the presence of a

female"—a phony charge available for arresting "impudent" black

men. Scratched into the record of prisoners was the same entry for

al four men, a destination so new that the jailer hadn't yet learned

to spel it: "sent to prats mines."46

Voices of opposition to what was happening in the South were

dying. Some reform-minded activists protested the physical abuses

of prison labor, but the explicitly racial aspect of the new forced

labor system was often largely unacknowledged. White southerners

responded with gal ing mendacity to the occasional criticism

expressed by northern newspapers. Many whites were thril ed by

the patina of legitimacy presented by Charles Darwin's new

concepts of human evolution, which were being twisted to o er a

genetic, seemingly objective rationale for black inferiority. The

dark-skinned race was capable of learning less, so blacks needed

fewer and smal er schools, according to this logic. Blacks could

work ef ectively only under threat of a whip.

In a speech to the National Prison Congress in Cincinnati, Ohio,

in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,

in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,

cool y defended the appal ing conditions at the mines in Coalburg

and Prat City. Virtual y al criticism of Alabama's and the South's

forced labor system were "exaggerations" and "falsehoods," he said.

The prisons were clean, the prisoners wel fed and humanely

treated. The hounds used to track escapees were "nothing more than

the fox or deer hounds that have been used in the South for the

chase from time immemorial, trained to run the human track."

Never once had a dog injured a convict, Lee maintained.

Prisoners in Alabama received generous amounts of corn bread,

bacon, fresh meat, bread, co ee, and tobacco. "Hundreds of convicts

have been sent to the penitentiary with diseases of which they

would have died at home for want of medical at ention, who have

been cured and sent home, at the end of their terms, sound men,"

Lee continued.

He said he was morti ed by al egations that the prisoners were

underfed and overworked. "In some form or other I have had the

management and control of negroes ever since I came to the years

of discretion," Lee said. "In the days of slavery, I fed, clothed and

worked them, and since they became free, I have employed and

managed them on the plantation. I see what, as free men, they have

to eat and wear, and the houses they live in. And I assert here,

without fear of successful contradiction, that the negro convicts …

are bet er housed, bet er fed, bet er clothed, and receive bet er

medical care and treatment in sickness than do the majority of the

same class, as free men, in their homes."47

The truth was that African Americans were trapped in a catch-22

between the laws criminalizing the mores of black life and other

laws that e ectively barred them from assimilating into mainstream

white American society or improving their economic position.

Even ostensible friends of African Americans succumbed to the

increasingly mandatory dismissal of black intel ectual faculties. "The

population of our prisons is mostly a population of negroes. These

people are proverbial y weak, improvident, credulous—the victims

of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

been guilty of only trivial o ense; and many of these o enses are

not in themselves criminal, or even immoral, but which have been

made penal simply by statutory enactment," wrote Jerome Cochran,

state health of icer, in 1892.

"It is the peculiar misfortune of the negro," Cochran continued,

"that his investment with the privileges of citizenship, and of the

elective franchise has also subjected him to the operation of laws

made by men for the government of white men—law which he

does not understand, and the moral obligations of which he is not

able to appreciate."48

In 1895, Thomas Parke, the health o cer for Je erson County,

investigated conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg prison mine. He

found 1,926 prisoners at toil. Hundreds had been charged with

vagrancy gambling, carrying a concealed weapon, or other minor

o enses, he reported. In many cases, no speci c charges were

recorded at al . Dr. Parke observed that many were held for minor

infractions, ned $5 or $10, and, unable to pay, leased for twenty

days to Sloss-She eld to cover the ne. Most then had another year

or more tacked onto their sentences to cover fees owed to the

sherif , the clerk, and the witnesses involved in prosecuting them.

"The largest portion of the prisoners are sentenced for slight

o enses and sent to prison for want of money to pay the nes and

costs…. They are not criminals," Dr. Parke wrote in his formal

report.

Male prisoners were barracked in a primitive wood-plank prison

beside the putrid Five Mile Creek, near a row of coke ovens. The

miners spent nearly half of each twenty-four hours in the mine, six

days a week. The shaft was minimal y ventilated; coal cars were

pushed out of the earth by the miners themselves, rather than with

mechanized equipment. Medical care was dispensed occasional y

from a primitive shack; scores of miners worked with serious

il nesses, including untreated and open wounds in amed with