Praise for Douglas A. Blackmon's
S L A V E R Y
BY ANOTHER NAME
"Vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude
of…neo- slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation
such practices per sisted…. Provides insights on how we might
regard the legacy of slavery, reparations, and perhaps even our
justice and correctional system, with echoes for our own time."
—The Boston Globe
"A terri c journalist and gifted writer, Blackmon is fearless in
going wher ever the research leads him."
—Atlanta Magazine
"Personalizing the larger story through individual experiences,
Blackmon's book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut."
—Rocky Mountain News
"For those who think the conversation about race or exploitation
in Amer ica is over, they should read Douglas Blackmon's
cautionary tale, Slavery by Another Name. It is at once
provocative and thought-provoking, sobering and heartrending."
—-Jay Winik, author of The Great Upheaval:
America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800
"A powerful and eye-opening account of a crucial but
unremembered chapter of American history. Blackmon's
magni cent research paints a devastating picture of the ugly and
outrageous practices that kept tens of thousands of Black
Americans enslaved until the onset of World War II. Slavery by
Another Name is a passionate, highly impressive and hugely
important book."
—David J. Garrow, author of
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr.
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
"Wall Street Journal Bureau Chief Blackmon gives a
groundbreaking and dis turbing account of a sordid chapter in
American history—the lease (essen tially the sale) of convicts to
‘commercial interests’ between the end of the nineteenth century
and well into the twentieth."
—Publishers Weekly
DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON
S L A V E R Y
BY ANOTHER NAME
Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He
has written extensively on race, the economy, and American society. Reared in
the Mississippi Delta, he lives in downtown Atlanta with his wife and children.
www.slaverybyanothername.com
To Michelle, Michael,
and Colette
Slavery:…that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the
Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty
Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to
the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught
to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible
Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the
Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.
GEORGE MASON, JULY 1773
VIRGINIA CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
CONTENTS
A Note on Language
Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On
PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON
I. THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
I . AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY
"Niggers is cheap."
I I. SLAVERY’S INCREASE
"Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."
IV. GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD
PART TWO: HARVEST OF AN UNFINISHED WAR
V. THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE
"I don't owe you anything."
VI. SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME
"We shal have to kil a thousand…
to get them back to their places."
VI . THE INDICTMENTS
"I was whipped nearly every day."
VI I. A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903
"The master treated the slave unmerciful y."
IX. A RIVER OF ANGER
The South Is "an armed camp."
X. THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD
"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."
XI. SLAVERY AFFIRMED
"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."
"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."
XI . NEW SOUTH RISING
"This great corporation."
PART THREE: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
XI I. THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM
A War of Atrocities
XIV. ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE
"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."
XV. EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH
"Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet."
XVI. ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY
"I wil murder you if you don't do that work."
XVI . FREEDOM
"In the United States one cannot sel himself."
EPILOGUE
The Ephemera of Catastrophe
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
A NOTE ON
LANGUAGE
Periodically throughout this book, there are quotations from individuals who
used o ensive racial labels. I chose not to sanitize these historical statements
but to present the authentic language of the period, whenever documented
direct statements are available. I regret any o ense or hurt caused by these
crude idioms.
INTRODUCTION
The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheri of Shelby
County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy"1
Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy the o ense of a
person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed,
was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of
the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern
states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheri s and constables,
adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all
in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among
all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's
offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found
guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately
sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees
assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheri , the deputy, the court clerk, the
witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former
slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between
the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel
Corporation—the sheri turned the young man over to the company for the
duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay o Cottenham's ne
and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of
other black men th
ey purchased from sheri s across Alabama, was entirely up
to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a
mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the
edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a
long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour
digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of
coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the
requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable
to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed
years or decades in their own chthonian con nement. The lightless catacombs
of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and
coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in
the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before
Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened
dozens. Within his rst four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost
sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after,
were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal
brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel's
production of iron. Forty- ve years after President Abraham Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and
more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by
whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern
corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside ve miles from the bustling
downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only
tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but
completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of
privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still
marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest oor, these were
sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S.
Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No
signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a
story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American
corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical
confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that
relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that
robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?
My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist
named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron
fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.
Bergstresser was mysti ed by its presence at the center of what at the
beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest con uences of
industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron
around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a
complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands
of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron
—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in
American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the
dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been
compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His
grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial
field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of
that burial ground. No speci c record of the internments survived, but
mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African
Americans nearby con rmed that most of the cemetery's inhabitants had been
inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above
the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial eld,
where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried. The camp had supplied
tens of thousands of men over ve decades to a succession of prison mines
ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not
survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then "leased" by state and
county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3
Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the nal chapter of
American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly
di erent from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the
relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not
automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless
slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled
by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were
repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white
masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a
journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers
on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a
forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their
understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum
slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of
one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard
indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public
Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point
said to me: "I guess it's really no surprise."
The reactions of African Americans were altogether di erent. Repeatedly,
they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in
some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the
nation's most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one
to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority,
what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S.
society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of
the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the
thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still
visuals of lynching, had never been a su cient answer to these African
Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four
million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How
had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded
oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I
began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those
readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were
simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers,
the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth
century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of
government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.
As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians
concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse
of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger
sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the
punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in
light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and
their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were
unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been
conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held
that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks
in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally
they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals.
Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened
couldn't be determined. O cial accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged,
because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which
black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.
Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia,
and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally awed.
That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of o cial summaries
and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources
—southern whites who engineered and most directly pro ted from the system.