Slavery by Another Name (72 page)

individuals, that codes and statutes were increasingly unnecessary

for its preservation.

African Americans had virtual y no political representation in any

place in the South—even those where blacks of voting age made up

the overwhelming majority of the population. Public education for

African Americans was a threadbare re ection of that provided for

whites—limited to half the number of days provided for white

children in most cot on-producing counties. Only 5 percent of

whites were entirely il iterate in 1910; nearly a third of blacks

were. Nearly 69 percent of white children at ended school; 37

percent of African Americans did so. Laws writ en and unwrit en

barred African Americans from sel ing the produce of their farms to

anyone but the most powerful white merchant in their worlds and

prohibited them from buying goods from anyone else as wel .

A local grand jury in Birmingham reported that the bartering of

African Americans for sale into the state's coal mines and the

col usion of local justices of the peace in the system were only

increasing. "The dockets of the justices of the peace in this county

would convict many of them for peonage should the federal

government choose to enforce its laws," read the nal report of the

grand jurors, issued in September 1911. It cited thousands of

unwarranted arrests and instances of cruelty, such as seventeen men

penned into a fourteen-square-foot holding cel without food for up

to two days.

"It would be far bet er for the state of Alabama that every

misdemeanant in the county of Je erson should go unpunished

than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

protect themselves," the jurors concluded. The U.S. at orney in

Birmingham forwarded the report to Justice Department o cials in

Washington, but no federal action was ever undertaken in

response.37

Desperate for traction in the face of the forces coalescing against

African Americans, W. E. B. DuBois launched what would be the

NAACP's seminal organ, The Crisis, in 1910. But the same year,

Baltimore, fol owed by a host of cities across the South, enacted the

rst local ordinances delineating the geographic boundaries of

black and white neighborhoods.

The election in 1912 of Woodrow Wilson, an openly white

supremacist Democrat from Virginia, precipitated a dramatic

expansion of Jim Crow restrictions on African Americans. In the

nearly half century since the Civil War, the federal government had

been the one province of American public life where black o cials

could stil be appointed to important public positions, such as

postmasters, customs o cers, and other administrative roles. The

Washington government hired thousands of black workers, and

within federal buildings, African Americans maintained a measure

of civil equality with whites.

Wilson, narrowly elected in a split election among himself,

Republican Wil iam Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt running

on an independent Bul Moose platform, aggressively reversed the

federal government's traditions of at least modest equity for African

Americans. In paradoxical contrast with the "Wilsonian" reputation

the president developed after World War I for his pursuit of the

visionary League of Nations, Wilson dramatical y curtailed the

number of black appointees in his own government. His

administration largely introduced to Washington, D.C., the

demeaning southern traditions of racial y segregated work spaces,

of ice buildings, and restrooms.

Wilson strongly backed the demands of southern leaders that

their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting

without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

chal enge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African

Americans across the region. Another half century would pass

before the civil rights movement could crack the anti-black legal

regime consolidated during Wilson's tenure.

After being named president of Princeton University in 1902,

Wilson openly discouraged African Americans from applying to the

school. In his academic writings as a political scientist, he blamed

the existence of slavery not on American leaders but on England's

imposing the institution upon its colonies despite England's

abolition three decades before the Civil War.

Wilson accepted the most distended idealization of the

antebel um South and demonization of the black political

participation that fol owed. "Domestic slaves were almost uniformly

dealt with indulgently and even a ectionately by their masters," he

wrote. The Reconstruction era of African American governance in

states with black majorities was "an extraordinary carnival of public

crime." Wilson cal ed the eventual suppression of black political

activity "the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites."38

In 1910, the vast majority, more than 93 percent, of the 10.2

mil ion African Americans living in the United States continued to

reside in the South. Nearly 60 percent of adult black men and

nearly 50 percent of black women worked in farming.39

Among whites, farming was a path to or an established form of

economic independence. More than 3.7 mil ion white men, more

than two thirds, owned their own farms. Conditions were more

than reversed for blacks. Fewer than one third of nearly 900,000

farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men

who til ed the land. The rest worked at the behest of white men.

There is lit le empirical evidence on which to establish the

precise economic arrangements between most black families and

the landlords who so dominated their lives—especial y on the

question of how many black families lived in a form of

uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

survives indicates that the desperate plight of black farmers

captured in DuBois's loosely ctionalized account of Lowndes

County, Alabama, was only worsening. When federal census takers

questioned every farmer in the United States in 1910, they

calculated that nearly 700,000 black men, along with at least 2.5

mil ion wives and children, lived and worked in the murky limbo

of sharecroppers and rent farmers. Tenants ostensibly paid some

form of rent for the land they farmed; sharecroppers gave up most

of their crops at the end of each season to a landlord in return for

use of his property, a house, and supplies. But under the South's

regime of legal restrictions on black mobility and job freedom, the

vast majority of those African Americans lived in a state of

subjection to the white landowners or employers. Federal

enumerators were unable to classify tens of thousands more men for

whom the nature of their relationship to white landowners was

unclear.

A separate federal survey of farmers in 1909 gave a tel ing clue to

the true status of African Americans who whites would have

claimed were free laborers. Of nearly 2.5 mil ion farms in the

eleven states of the old Confederacy, the owners of almost 1 mil ion

farms reported giving some form of compensation to workers

during the previous year. On most of the farms— a total of more

than 850,000—the entire compensation to "laborers" for the year

was less than seventy-nine dol ars.40

When The Birth of a Nation, the movie version of the racial y

vitriolic stage play The Clansman starring the former deputy sheri

from Shelby County, Alabama, appeared in 1915, President Wilson

enthusiastical y embraced it. The best-sel ing creator of the play,

Thomas Dixon, who had proclaimed in Atlanta less than a decade

earlier that the duty of every southern white man was to preserve

"Aryan supremacy," was a classmate from Johns Hopkins University

and longtime friend of the president.

Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

savage war on black political involvement in the 1870s, white

audiences thril ed to the silent movie, the rst ful -length American

lm. It became Hol ywood's rst true theatrical blockbuster. Its

screening for President Wilson was the rst showing of a moving

lm at the White House. Wilson helped arrange previews for other

elected o cials, members of his cabinets, and justices of the

Supreme Court. "My only regret," he reportedly said, "is that it is al

so terribly true."

As discom ting for blacks as the president's embrace of a lm

that depicted their participation in public life as no less than venal

was an extraordinary combination of applause and silence from

other white Americans. Even in the most distant left-wing reaches of

white political activism in the North, the embryonic movements to

create socialist and communist parties in the United States, many

succumbed to the lure of a caricatured view of African Americans as

an inferior class capable of comic relief but lit le more. The Masses

magazine, a groundbreaking socialist journal published in

Greenwich Vil age, routinely ran cartoons and spoofs depicting

large-lipped, bu oonish blacks. "Your pictures of colored people …

depress the negroes themselves and con rm the whites in their

contemptuous and scornful at itude," wrote a critical reader in a

1915 let er to the editor.41

In Alabama's forced labor coal mines, more than three thousand

prisoners were at work by 1915.42 A study commissioned by

Alabama's governor three years later concluded that the state's

convict system remained an "extraordinary hazard to the life and

limbs" of anyone pul ed into it. He recommended abolishing the

labor system entirely43

As thousands of black soldiers returned to the United States after

the end of World War I in 1918, anticipating that their service

overseas would earn some relief from racial animosity at home,

whites across the country rampaged again, with gruesome riots in

South Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., Il inois, and Arkansas, and

a new wave of lynchings.

In the spring of 1920, a white farmer in rural Jasper County,

Georgia, visited the prison stockade on Bryan Street in Atlanta—the

same one James W. English had relied on as a supply of slave labor

for Chat ahoochee Brick two decades earlier. He spot ed a strong,

young black man whose nickname was "Iron John," and paid his

ne in return for a contract on the prisoner's labor, probably for

one year.

Repeating the ritual that played out hundreds of thousands of

times in hundreds of counties across the South over more than half

a century since the end of the Civil War, the farmer, John S.

Wil iams, took the man back to his sprawling plantation and

ordered him to get to work or expect to be brutal y punished. He

was locked into a bunkhouse with about forty other black men

acquired by similar means and held against their wil .

It wasn't long before Iron John drew the wrath of Wil iams's

grown son Leroy—who believed the new laborer wasn't working

hard enough on a crew of black laborers ordered to build a fence.

Iron John was stretched across a gasoline barrel, naked from the

waist up, and whipped long and hard with a buggy whip. At some

point, he cried out angrily, "Don't hit me no more …I'd rather be

dead than treated this way"44

Leroy Wil iams drew his pistol, stepped forward, and shot the

striped and bleeding black man in the shoulder. "Do you want any

more?" he asked.

"Yes …shoot me," he answered.

The white man raised the pistol to Iron John's head and red

into his skul . He died instantly. At the instructions of the white

man, other laborers at ached Iron John's body to a heavy log with

wire, rowed it to the middle of a farm pond, and al owed it to sink.

The murder—and certainly the whippings that preceded it—were

hardly unusual. There had been many of the former and thousands

of the lat er by the time a black laborer named Gus Chapman

escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in