Slavery by Another Name (23 page)

infected boils and pus. Parke's tal y of prisoners held at Coal-burg

in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

the state's o cial records at the time—indicating that hundreds of

laborers had been sold into the mine through extralegal systems.

More than a hundred forced laborers died at the mine during the

two years prior to Parke's visit.

The physician, even one burdened with intensely racist

perspectives, was shocked by the inhumanity. He asked whether "a

sovereign state can a ord to send her citizens, for slight o enses, to

a prison where, in the nature of things, a large number are

condemned to die."

Embarrassed by the publication of Parke's report, Sloss-She eld

commissioned the physician it paid to care for the forced laborers,

Dr. Judson Davie, to write a response. He claimed the extraordinary

rate of mortality among blacks was their own fault. But even his

apologia for health conditions at Coalburg was tel ing. He said

many convicts, once injured, tried not to become wel to avoid a

return to the mine. "Some eat soap; some rub poisonous things into

their sores or cuts; but by far the greater obstacle to their making

quick and good recoveries is the mental depression of the new

men," he wrote. He added that many miners chose to drink the

pol uted "seep water" in which they worked "of their own accord in

preference to going to springs or other usual places of get ing

drinking water." He also contended that nearly every black man

contracts syphilis by adulthood. No blame for that could be ascribed

to the mine, he contended.

The larger issue, Davie wrote, was genetic: "It is a fact that the

negro race is inferior to the white race physical y as wel as

mental y and moral y— their powers of resistance, so far as a great

many diseases are concerned, notably tuberculosis, does not

compare at al favorably with the white race."

Stil , Dr. Parke's criticism of the lethal conditions in Sloss-

She eld's slave mine embarrassed the company enough that a

month later its president, Thomas Seddon, sent a let er to local

o cials defending his treatment of black workers. He summed up

the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."49

the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."

Sentiments like that were hardly rare in the three decades after

the Civil War. Yet throughout that di cult time, African Americans

stil clung at some level to the idea that whatever white men such

as Parke said or did, the United States as a whole stil stood

squarely to the contrary. This, the Civil War proved, was

immutable.

Then, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a thirty-year-old

white shoemaker with a trace of African blood, named Homer

Plessy the right to ride in the white compartment of an East

Louisiana Railroad train. On its face, the ruling sanctioned only the

newly conceived concept of "separate but equal" public facilities for

blacks and whites. But its actual import was vastly greater. Plessy v.

Ferguson legitimized the contemptuous at itudes of whites like the

top executives of Sloss-She eld. Moreover, it certi ed that any

charade of equal treatment for African Americans was not just

acceptable and practical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but

moral y and legal y legitimate in the highest venue of white society.

It was a signal moment in America's national discourse. From the

lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers,

Americans had shared a consensus that the highest de nition of a

citizen was his veracity, that truth tel ing and ful l ment of a man's

commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of

honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the

sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a stil new nation

born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an ut erly

sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.

That al egiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets

of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had

impel ed the nation toward civil war during the antebel um

decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic's

noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the

prevailing view among al white Americans that blacks were in

some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war

upon itself at devastating cost, in a con ict ultimately justi ed as a

struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required

were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in

the South. The moral y bewildering sacri ce of the war became a

concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itself

toward the "more perfect union" of the Founding Fathers. The

surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage

of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that

vision.

The Supreme Court's endorsement in 1896 of the agrantly

duplici-tous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a

resignation of America's white institutions to the conclusion that the

emancipation of black slaves had been fol y. Most agreed that the

elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past

abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white

Americans, the refusal of the southern states to ful y free or

enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue

worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United

States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white

security.

There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S.

politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of

the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of

their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the

principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the

American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment

of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of

citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that

abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be

reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern

cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a

pat ern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any

rationalization was su cient to excuse the most severe abuses of

African Americans.

Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

minds, the men control ing the mines and labor camps of the South

adopted even more imsy ruses of justi cation for black men's

imprisonment. The level of physical coercion increased terrifyingly

At the Prat Mines, an observer for a special Alabama legislative

commit ee in 1897 wrote a report describing 1,117 convicts, many

"whol y un t for the work," at labor in the shaft.50 In an 1898

convict board report, the largest category in a table listing charges

on which county convicts were imprisoned was "Not given." 51 No

one even bothered to invent a legal basis for their enslavement.

In a 1902 report, one man was in the mines for "disturbing

females on railroad car." More than a dozen were incarcerated for

"abusive and obscene language." Twenty convicts were digging coal

for adultery, twenty-nine for gambling. Dozens of prisoners were at

labor for riding a freight train without paying for a ticket. 52 In

1902 and 1903, local o cials in Je erson County prosecuted more

than three thousand misdemeanor cases, most of them yielding a

convict to work in a Sloss-She eld mine—the vast majority of

whom were black.53

One of those convicts was John Clarke, a miner convicted of

"gaming" on April 11, 1903. Unable to pay, he ended up at Sloss-

She eld. Working o the ne would take ten days. Fees for the

sheri , the county clerk, and the witnesses who testi ed against him

required that Clarke spend an additional 104 days in the mines.

Sloss-She eld acquired him from Je erson County for $9 a month.

One month and three days later, he was dead, crushed by "fal ing

rock."54

At least 2,500 men were being held against their wil at more

than two dozen labor camps across Alabama at the time Clarke

died. More than nine hundred were in the Prat Mines. Sloss-

She eld held nearly three hundred. The McCurdys stil control ed

nearly one hundred in Lowndes County. Scores more were

imprisoned in the turpentine and lumber camps of the Henderson-

Boyd and Horseshoe Bend lumber companies and other remote

prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

Alabama. Payments to the state that year exceeded a half mil ion

dol ars, the equivalent of $12.1 mil ion a century later and a gure

nearly equal to 25 percent of al taxes col ected in Alabama.55

As the dark cloud of the new slavery was descending on those

men and the hundreds of thousands of friends, acquaintances, and

family members across the South, the descendants of the old slave

Scipio struggled to maintain emancipated lives. Abraham

Cot ingham and his sons Jimmy and Frank, descendants of Mit ,

another son of Scipio, were among nearly four hundred black voters

who stil participated in Shelby County elections in 1892. De ant,

even as the vast majority of other black men in the county were

intimidated or obstructed from the pol s, Abraham paid an

increasingly onerous pol tax and complied year after year with

burgeoning requirements established by the state of Alabama for

blacks to qualify for a bal ot. Each election year, under hostile eyes,

he signed his name boldly in the register of voters maintained in

the worn-brick county courthouse across the street from the jail.56

But even Abraham could not resist the new state constitution

adopted in 1901, under which virtual y no black person could

again vote in Alabama. No black Cot ingham would cast a bal ot for

at least six decades.57

Sometime in the 1890s, Henry Cot inham died. The circumstances

of his death weren't recorded. In June of 1900, Mary Cot inham

abandoned Brier eld, where so many black descendants of the

Cot ingham farm had once congregated, leaving behind only

Henry's younger brother Elbert, with his own wife and ten children.

Struggling to survive, Mary, the former slave girl from the Bishop

farm, moved the remaining family to Monteval o, a town just inside

Shelby County, where a new mining company was expanding

quickly. She found work as a washerwoman. Her two daughters,

Ada and Mariet a, sixteen and twenty, were anxiously hoping for

marriage. Soon, the girls would leave home, and Mary was alone

with her youngest. Her baby boy, Green, was fourteen and had

learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

hostility engul ng black America, he was rising into the muscle,

hair, and boisterous curiosity of a teenage man.