Slavery by Another Name (67 page)

The gruesome fates of al those men ricocheted across the landscape

of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

the deep residue of trauma left by thousands of prior horrors from

inside and outside the South's forced labor camps. Together, these

events formed the foundation of a col ective recognition among

African Americans of their precarious vulnerability in American

society. In the early years after Reconstruction, such news traveled

like a telegraph, ashing from one outraged bearer of the word to

another. Preachers decried the crimes against innocent men from

their pulpits. Before the nal ouster of blacks from virtual y al

southern elections, African American voters cast bal ots against

those who abided the system, in rare cases forcing a local o cial

out of o ce—as blacks once did to a sheri in Chat anooga,

Tennessee, after he permit ed the lynching of a man from his jail.17

There were isolated cases when black prisoners col ectively refused

to work in protest of brutal punishments meted out—and of

convicts physical y at acking their overseers.

But such resistance was almost invariably crushed with the sheer

force of guns, mob violence, and economic isolation. By the end of

the rst decade of the twentieth century, word of each new outrage

moved osmotical y absorbed often without explicit note into the

shared experience of a black society in which nearly al realistic

hope of authentic independence had been shat ered. The new

slavery of Alabama achieved its zenith. Three massive industrial

concerns—U.S. Steel's Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad unit, Sloss-

She eld, and now Prat Consolidated—competed mercilessly for

forced laborers. Other industrial concerns stood ready to step in if

any major player receded. The system arrived at a cynical optimum

of economic harmony, knit ing together the interests of capitalists,

white farmers, local sheri s and judges, and advocates of the most

cruel white supremacy—al joined and served by an unrelenting

pyramid of intimidation.

The companies, producing nearly fteen mil ion tons of coal

annual y by 1910, held more than three thousand black men against

their wil in Alabama's mines at al times—creating a bulwark

against labor unrest and an enormous economic subsidization to

their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

Americans worked in southern Alabama timber and turpentine

camps operated by Henderson Lumber Company, Horse Shoe

Lumber Company, McPhaul Turpentine Company, a textile factory

in Prat vil e, and other businesses. Hundreds more—no one kept

count—were parceled out by local sheri s to farmers and

businessmen scat ered around the state.

The reality of incarceration in the slave mines became so

ubiquitously understood for African American men that landlords

and local sheri s— equipped with almost unchecked powers of

arrest and conviction and enormous personal nancial interest in

providing labor to the mines and other enterprises—could make

almost any demand upon any black man. More often than any

other, that demand was that they remain on the land of speci c

white farmers, living lives of supposedly voluntary serfdom or as

prisoners sentenced to that fate under the system of "confessions"

rati ed by Judge Jones in 1903. Across the Black Belt of Alabama,

more than ninety thousand African American families lived in the

darkness of that oppression with only rare protest.

In Barbour County, 170 miles from Birmingham, deep in the

cot on country of southern Alabama, the shadow was cast in the

shape of two brothers, Wil iam M. and Robert B. Teal. In 1911,

when a term-limit law forced Wil iam to give up his job as sheri ,

Robert was elected to the job instead. Wil iam became his chief

deputy. "The brothers just swapped places," according to the local

newspaper, the Clayton Record.18

Because it control ed the county's convict leasing franchise, the

sheri 's o ce was a plum asset. Over one ten-year period, Barbour

County sent 691 men to the coal mines, primarily those operated

by Sloss-Shef ield and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.19

The Record took lit le note, among its weekly coverage of cot on

prices, buggy accidents, and lost mules, of the disappearance of so

many local black men. It enthusiastical y covered the lynchings of

African Americans, occurring with regularity in nearby towns and

across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

who gathered in Georgia for a celebration on the anniversary of the

Emancipation Proclamation. Northern whites who lent support to

wel -known African Americans such as Booker T. Washington were

"negrophilists."

On Confederate Memorial Day that April, the keynote speaker,

standing atop a platform festooned with the bat le colors of the

Confederacy, received "deafening" applause, according to a reporter,

as he told the crowd nearly ve decades after the legal end of

slavery that the forced labor of blacks had been completely

constitutional and never violated "divine or moral law." A local

white girl gave a reading of Uncle Remus stories. Organizers plied

the crowd for donations to help erect a memorial on the town

square to southern veterans of the Civil War.20

Prospects for any black man who crossed Sheri Teal and his

brother were grim. The jail itself was cramped and unsanitary, and

had been formal y condemned by state inspectors.21 What went for

justice for African American defendants was swift. After one trial of

"a negro charged with violating prohibition" in 1911, a local judge

in Eufaula, the more prosperous cot on trading town twenty miles

to the east, explicitly instructed the jurors to convict the man. When

the jury unexpectedly acquit ed instead, Judge M. Sol-lie threatened

to have the jurors arrested for contempt of court.22

Once convicted, African Americans were routinely sent to the coal

mines near Birmingham for o enses as slight as sel ing a bot le of

moonshine. Most months, the Teals arrested fewer than twenty

men. Then suddenly dozens of minor o enders were rounded up

over a few days’ time and charged with vagrancy, alcohol

violations, and other minor o enses. Nearly al were quickly

sentenced to hard labor and shipped out within ten days to l a

gap in men at the coal mines.23

On any given day in the summer of 1912, the county jail near the

town square in Clayton held from ten to two dozen men, awaiting

the arrival of circuit judges who rotated through the area's towns. A

man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

Another black man, Josia Marcia, was being held for al egedly

having had sexual relations with a white woman. Louis Denham

had been arrested for vagrancy. Housed with them were Ad Rumph,

Henry Demas, Jackson Daniels, and Peter Ford, four African

American men accused in the murder of a sharecropper named

George Blue. Demas, seventeen years old, and his wife were

boarders in the house of Rumph, another young black farmer, on

property near the remote farming community of Mt. Andrew.

Demas could read and write, but had no formal schooling. Rumph,

nineteen years old and il iterate, was married to a woman named

Fredie.24

Blue had been kil ed the prior spring by "a party of negroes,"

according to the Record. As often happened after black homicides

of that era, a large number of African Americans were charged in

the case. Indeed, on the same weekend that Blue was kil ed, seven

African Americans—including thirty-two-year-old farmhand Wil

Mil er—were charged in the death of another black man in Eufaula.

Mil er spent the summer in the Barbour County jail as wel .25

Whatever evidence was presented against the various defendants

was later lost, along with any record of their trials or whether the

men had access to at orneys. By fal , though, al had been convicted

and sentenced to varying terms of hard labor. Each of the accused

murderers received between twenty years and life. Col ins received

six months’ hard labor; Denham got ve months. No sentence was

recorded for Marcia.

Emaciated and marked, the men's bodies told their own story.

Mil er was logged into state records as having "one good tooth on

top," "shot through top of right shoulder," "badly burnt on back left

leg." Demas stood ve feet nine inches tal but weighed just 150

pounds. Scars were scat ered across his frame—the biggest a six-inch

gash stretching from above his left eye down the side of his face.26

In Henry County, the adjoining county to Barbour, Martin Danzy

was a thirty-three-year-old sharecropper and a husband of nine

years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

with a third man's death, though no records of the precise charge

survived. On October 21, 1915, Danzy was sentenced to a term of

twenty- ve years at hard labor. The man arrested with him, Bud L.

Clark, was sentenced to twenty years.27

Danzy was promptly sold to Henderson Land & Lumber Co.,

which put him to work in a turpentine harvesting camp near

Tuscaloosa. Clark lasted just over two months at labor before

pneumonia kil ed him. Danzy contracted pneumonia as wel . Five

months after his conviction, he too was dead.

Among the prisoners from Barbour County, Col ins and Denham

survived their terms of labor. Mil er lived only a few months, until

he died the fol owing April in a Prat Consolidated mine, at the

hands of another convict. In November 1916, Rumph died of

tuberculosis in a state prison hospital. Demas died the fol owing

month of pneumonia, at the Banner Mine. Daniels was kil ed July

27, 1917, while at empting to escape the Sloss mine at Flat Top.28

Years later, the authorized biography of Elbert H. Gary, the

founding chairman of U.S. Steel, who ran the corporation from

1901 to 1927, quoted Gary as saying he was outraged when he

learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using

slave labor. He said he ordered the executive just instal ed as

president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, George G. Crawford,

to halt the practice immediately. Gary, namesake of the U.S. Steel-

designed city of Gary, Indiana, was widely regarded among U.S.

executives at the time as the national leader on progressive labor

practices and business ethics. "Think of that!" Gary was quoted as

saying. "I, an Abolitionist from childhood, at the head of a concern

working negroes in a chain gang, with a state representative

punishing them at the whipping post! Tear up that contract…I

won't stand for it."29

Perhaps Gary believed he had in fact ended U.S. Steel's slaving

practices. Alabama was far from Pit sburgh. But deep in the bowels

of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

new southern unit of the company held contracts guaranteeing

thousands of forced workers from the state of Alabama for at least

four more years. The reality of the southern economic situation was

that even under the mandate of the most prominent and modern

new corporate executive of the era, U.S. Steel was unwil ing to

simply cease the practice of slavery at its new subsidiary.

Shortly after U.S. Steel acquired Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,

rumors circulated in Alabama that the northern owners were

unenthusias-tic about the convict system. In later testimony during

an investigation into corruption in the state's convict leasing

department, U.S. Steel executives said Judge Gary had indeed

directed them to abandon convict leasing "as soon as possible" after

the merger.

"Judge Gary said whether the hire of convicts was a good thing or

a bad thing that he didn't care to be connected with the penal

system of the State of Alabama," testi ed Walker Percy, a lawyer for

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.30

But in correspondence between company executives and state