Slavery by Another Name (34 page)

Miles Benjamin McSweeney of South Carolina.16

The opprobrium continued for months, growing more virulent

with each announcement of another in the slow trickle of black

appointees made by the White House. After several black

o ceholders and their wives at ended a White House reception in

early 1903, the race-baiting Mississippi politician James K.

Vardaman cal ed Roosevelt a "lit le, mean, coon- avored

miscegenationist." The White House, Vardaman said, was "so

saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge

in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

fol owing year.17

A century later it is di cult to comprehend the degree to which

most southern whites had so thoroughly adopted the rationale

embodied by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling less than ten years earlier

—which e ectively held that African Americans had no basis of

legitimate complaint regarding the racial climate at the turn of the

century, regardless of how overtly apparent was the disparate

treatment of and opportunities for whites and blacks.

Roosevelt's overtures to blacks were not just violations of an

accepted social custom, but gal ing because they suggested that in

fact African Americans did have reason to object to their current

status in the United States. White southerners by and large shared a

consensus that this view was simply nonsensical. They were certain

that the vast majority of blacks were entirely content and that their

contentment would only increase as freed-men were pushed nearer

to a legal status barely distinguishable from those of their parents in

antebel um society.

The Birmingham Ledger newspaper—describing a state in which

African Americans could no longer vote, could not hold o ce,

could not serve on local juries, were proscribed from most higher-

wage work, could arrange only the slimmest legal representation in

the courts, and were subject to ut erly arbitrary enforcement of the

law—summed up the fantasy shared by mil ions of southerners:

"The court of Alabama and schools of Alabama are open to negroes

and every door of opportunity can be entered and above al it is

easier for a negro to get rich here than anywhere else in the

world."18That delusion would not waver in the South for at least

another fty years, until the very climax of the civil rights

movement.

The Dadevil e Spot Cash, the voice of John Pace's Tal apoosa

County, enunciated this white delusion—and its o ense at the

inherent impudence of Roosevelt's at itudes—in a detailed

fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

many kinds of negroes, as lit le boys have many kinds of marbles.

We have good negroes and bad negroes, industrious negroes and

idle negroes, negroes determined to bet er their own condition and

negroes who care no more about the future than the birds care.

Alabama has negroes who have earned the respect and regard of

the people who know them, and Alabama has negroes who wear

the stripes of the convict."19

The Dadevil e editor also re ected the broadly shared paranoia

that any e ort to change or improve the conditions of blacks

amounted to an e ort to seize control of society: "Alabama has

negroes who own land and cat le and who are rearing their families

respectably and who can go to the bank and borrow money without

security. There are negroes who are teaching and many who are

fol owing honorable lines of work, and it has some who think with

the president that the door of hope for them means governing

white people as of icials. Al these we have and others."20

The message was clear, and shared almost universal y among

whites: whatever happens to black men is strictly the result of their

own choices. Those choices ultimately were to submit quietly to the

emerging new order or be crushed by it.

The reaction of southern leaders to Roosevelt's gesture to

Washington further underscored how far southern whites could

extend their ability to reconcile the obvious and extraordinary

abuses of blacks occurring around them with their rhetorical

insistence that African Americans were entirely free, content, and

unmolested. Never before in American history had so large a

portion of the populace adopted such explicitly false and calculated

propaganda. Many southern whites actual y came to believe claims

that black schools were equal y funded, black train cars were

equal y appointed, and that black citizens were equal y defended

by the courts—as preposterous as those claims obviously were.

Those who truly knew bet er nonetheless relished the clever

fabrication of this mythology, and how it so e ectively stymied the

busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

cynical thread in the mosaic of racial myth was the outrage of

southern white men at Roosevelt's supposed encouragement of

sexual interrelations between blacks and whites. White men openly

forced black slaves into their beds for two centuries before the Civil

War, and sexual access to local black women remained a running

point of confrontation between white landowners and their black

laborers deep into the twentieth century—a phenomenon that

continued to demonstrate itself a century later with the public

revelation that South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond fathered a

black child with an African American family servant in 1925.

"The whole country wel knows that white men of the South have

come into closer relations with negroes and commit ed far grosser

sins than that of sit ing down to meat with a reputable and

representative colored person," wrote Wil iam A. Sinclair, a black

physician, in 1905. "And in the eyes of their fel ows they su ered

no disgrace."21

President Roosevelt was shocked by the calumnies and vitriol

spewing from the South regarding his friendliness toward blacks.

He moderated slightly— never inviting another black man to his

dinner table again—but continued to insist that good Americans

could not legitimately object to the view that law-abiding and

industrious blacks should be treated with equity and ful protection

of the law.

Roosevelt concluded a long circuit of speeches across much of the

country in the spring of 1903 with an address in Spring eld,

Il inois, on June 4, at the monument there to Abraham Lincoln.

Arriving on a 10:15 A.M. train, Roosevelt was greeted euphorical y

rst by aging Union soldiers in the Lincoln-McKinley Veteran

Voters’ Association, then by more than ve thousand schoolchildren

massed along the street leading past the state capitol and furiously

waving American ags. Businesses and homes were decorated in

elaborate patriotic bunting and ags. A gathering of ten thousand

impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

would dedicate later in the day. Also in the crowd at the Lincoln

memorial were several detachments of the Il inois National Guard,

including the al -black Company H of the Eighth Regiment. "It

seems to me eminently t ing that the guard around the tomb of

Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers," Roosevelt said,

citing his own service in Cuba beside black soldiers. "A man who is

good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be

given a square deal afterward."22

The words were a modest anodyne for black Americans, given

the scale of the campaign over the previous two decades to

circumscribe their constitutional protections and limit their free

participation in American society. Yet the sentence—condensed by

newspaper reporters and repeated ubiquitously as a promise by

Roosevelt of "a square deal for the negro"—in amed white

southerners yet again. What most gal ed whites was the implication

by Roosevelt that African Americans were not already receiving as

square and fair a deal as they could possibly deserve.

In Alabama, as Secret Service agents scoured the countryside for

slavery, whites recognized that Roosevelt's remarks might be more

than the pitiable window dressing of equal civil rights they had

heard from McKinley and the other Republican leaders of the

previous decade.

By early June 1903, Alabama was a ame. Judge Jones—only

nineteen months into his service as the new member of the federal

bench—had proven to be precisely the gure Roosevelt hoped. The

slavery investigation announced in late May was spreading across

the state. Prominent white landowners in a half dozen counties had

learned they were under examination or at least al egation. Black

laborers—while stil acutely aware that the investigation subjected

them to a new degree of jeopardy with angry whites—quietly

expressed a level of anticipation unlike anything since rst word of

the coming emancipation had arrived forty years earlier.

The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

was hired to represent a black prisoner being held in Shelby

County. Local authorities obstructed Parsons's e orts to nd the

prisoner and refused to say why he was being held. Parsons

contacted the U.S. at orney in Montgomery, who in turn told Judge

Jones. The rst handful of frightened witnesses were brought before

a grand jury sit ing in Birmingham and presided over by Jones.

They told the first shocking account of Pace's slaving network.23

In March, Judge Jones red o a bewildered let er to At orney

General Philander C. Knox in Washington, D.C. "Some witnesses

before the Grand Jury here developed the fact that in Shelby

County in this District, and in Coosa County in the Middle district, a

systematic scheme of depriving Negroes of their liberty, and hiring

them out, has been practiced for some time," Jones wrote. "The

plan is to accuse the negro of some pet y o ense, and then require

him, in order to escape conviction, to enter into an agreement to

pay his accuser so much money, and sign a contract, under the

terms of which his bondsmen can hire him out until he pays a

certain sum. The negro is made to believe he is a convict, and

treated as such. It is said that thirty negroes were in the stockade at

one time." Already, at least one witness had been seized from a

train after testifying. Judge Jones ordered a deputy U.S. marshal to

protect the man. He urged the at orney general to send a special

investigator into the area quickly24

At orney General Knox, a shrewd lawyer from Pennsylvania who

before entering government service had amassed a fortune as

counsel to some of the largest U.S. corporations, was hardly an

obvious al y of southern blacks. A dapper man who contravened

current fashion with a clean-shaven face and sported high col ars

and broad French cu s, he had no natural a nity for the South or

its black inhabitants. His greatest claim to fame was as legal counsel

to Andrew Carnegie's vast steelmaking enterprises. In 1901, he

played a key role in the merger of Carnegie Steel with J. P.

Morgan's Federal Steel Company and virtual y every other major

steel and iron concern in the nation. The new organization was U.S.

Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity

Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity

created up to that point. It immediately control ed 7 percent of the

nation's gross domestic product. Four days after the merger was

o cial y consummated, President McKinley, a close friend since his

col ege years, named Knox at orney general. Less than six months

later, McKinley was dead, and Knox was part of Theodore

Roosevelt's cabinet.

In light of Roosevelt's pledge of a renewed commitment to black

civil rights, At orney General Knox could hardly ignore Judge

Jones's report of slavery stil being practiced forty years after

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Moreover, the al egations

reanimated a running legal dilemma for the Justice Department. At