Slavery by Another Name (18 page)

fifty years earlier.

Beyond the confines of the family's strained domesticity, lit le else

was evolving in the way that Henry and Mary and mil ions of other

black southerners, had imagined at the dawn of freedom.

As Green grew into school age and then adolescence, the family

increasingly felt the repercussions of two convulsive crescendos

building toward a climax early in the next century. First was the

progressively more overt e ort to obliterate al manner of black

independence and civic participation in the South—the e ective

reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and

reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and

Fifteenth amendments. Then came a fevered movement to fol ow

the great American territorial expansions of the nineteenth century

with an era of unprecedented government-engineered social and

economic uplift almost whol y reserved for whites. The two

campaigns arrived like successive storms on a shore—the rst

violent wave smashing any creation of man, the second scouring

what had been, scat ering the remains, and saturating the soil with

salt.

The totality of the destruction to be wrought on American blacks

was underscored by a remarkable and lit le acknowledged facet of

southern life in the nal two decades of the 1800s. African

Americans, by the most critical economic measures, were not

signi cantly disadvantaged in comparison to the great mass of poor

whites that surrounded them in the South. Of 4.4 mil ion black

southerners, poverty was abject and daunting. But mil ions of white

southerners shared the same plight. And while more than half of

southern blacks—about 2.5 mil ion—could not read, there were 1.3

mil ion whites among their neighbors who also were il iterate.

The prolonged economic inferiority and social subjugation of

African Americans that was to be ubiquitous in much of the next

century was not a conclusion preordained by the traditions of

antebel um slavery.

Indeed, optimism and an expansive sense of opportunity

pervaded black life in the years surrounding Green Cot enham's

birth in 1886. African Americans stil felt strongly that they were on

the cusp of authentic integration into mainstream American life.

Inspired by the moral force of the Civil War victory and the

pronouncements of evangelical uplift, self-reliance, and personal

improvement o ered by an army of black pastors and statesmen of

abolition such as Frederick Douglass, and soon Booker T

Washington, black Americans were poised to assimilate ful y into

American society. Already, African Americans were seeing concrete

dividends from the black public schools established during

dividends from the black public schools established during

Reconstruction.

The chal enges of freedom's aftermath remained surmountable,

and the United States, just beginning to emerge as a truly modern

nation, was embarking upon an unparal eled period of strategic

social uplift. Blacks and poor whites alike were ready to exploit the

opportunities of what would become a fty-year campaign by

federal and state governments to dramatical y elevate the horizons

of tens of mil ions of Americans living in crude frontier towns,

urban tenements, and the isolation of remote rural farms.

By World War I , mil ions of white southerners had been raised

from profound poverty, il iteracy, and ignorance to at least modest

middle-class status. Free public schools, consistent medical care,

passable roads, clean tap water, electricity, even the concept of

regular hourly wage work—al stil rarities across the South and

much of the rest of the nation at the dusk of the nineteenth century

—were promulgated upon mil ions of the most dispossessed of

Americans with a speed and e cacy that in hindsight made the

Great Society initiatives of the 1960s appear timid and indolent.

Even as southern whites rampaged violently and blacks su ered a

grinding series of legal and political reverses, African American

men continued to save meager funds to buy farms, mules, and

plows. Black land ownership surged. New communities were

established. Additional schools were opened against extraordinary

odds. Most African Americans were resigned to the reality that

whites would hold a dominant position in southern society, but

found it incomprehensible that they and their descendants might be

relegated again to a permanent, inferior social and legal position.

Many, probably a majority, were reconciled to the likelihood of

second-class citizenship. But, as argued by Booker T. Washington,

they saw this status as a way station to ful participation in society

—a time to build economical y and overcome the most obvious

vestiges of slavery. Tens of thousands of blacks continued to

exercise their vote, and a not insigni cant number of white leaders

stil accepted, even if reluctantly, that the equal citizenship of

former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal

former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal

construct of separate-but-equal segregated government services—

which would de ne the long era of Jim Crow in the twentieth

century—had not yet been clearly established. Even the practice of

identifying in government records every citizen as either "Negro" or

"White"—a nearly obsessive American compulsion by early in the

next century—in many areas had not yet become routine.

But the succeeding years would come as if the masses of

povertystricken whites and blacks were twin siblings of a parent

indulgent to one and venomous to the other. A new national white

consensus began to coalesce against African Americans with

shocking force and speed. The general white public, the national

leadership of the Republican Party, and the federal government on

every level were arriving at the conclusion that African Americans

did not merit citizenship and that their freedom was not valuable

enough to justify the con icts they engendered among whites. A

growing body of whites across the nation concluded that blacks

were not worth the cost of imposing a racial morality that few in

any region genuinely shared. As early as 1876, President Ulysses S.

Grant, commander of the Union army of liberation, conceded to

members of his cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freed

slaves the right to vote, had been a mistake: "It had done the Negro

no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a

political advantage to the North."1 "The long controversy over the

black man seems to have reached a nality," wrote the Chicago

Tribune, approvingly. Added The Nation: "The Negro wil

disappear from the eld of national politics. Henceforth, the nation,

as a nation, wil have nothing more to do with him."2 That the

parent had once sacri ced enormously to rescue the less favored

child only made its abandonment deeply more bit er.

By the end of the 1940s, when Green Cot enham might have been

easing toward a workman's retirement, it was only his white peers

who approached old age as the rst American generation with

social y guaranteed security. Emerging among the children and

grandchildren of those whites was a level of modest wealth,

educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to

educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to

anyone in the South of 1886. For the rst time in U.S. history, a

geographical y broad and stable national middle class had evolved

—an anchor of sustained wealth and shared values that would

sculpt American life through the end of the twentieth century. But it

would be defined in white-only terms.

The South was in the midst of an economic and cultural convulsion,

one that should have o ered an opening for a radical rede nition

of the roles of blacks and whites in American life. A terrible

depression in the 1870s had nal y eased as the South began to

emerge from economic ruin. In the disputed presidential election of

1876, white southern political leaders leveraged the electoral

col ege system to rob the winner of a huge majority of the popular

vote, Samuel J. Tilden, of the White House. In return, the Congress

and the administration of the fraudulent new Republican president,

Rutherford B. Hayes, final y removed the last Union troops from the

South and ended a decade of federal occupation of the region.3 An

era of southern economic revitalization appeared to be at hand. In

1886, Henry Grady the dynamic young editor of the Atlanta

Constitution, famously declared the creation of a "New South"—one

in which industrialism would replace agriculture and in which the

con icts of region and race that had paralyzed the nation for more

than twenty-five years were at an end.

In some places, the economic evolution was truly

phantasmagoric. In 1880, large portions of Alabama remained as

sparsely populated as the newest western territories of the United

States. Most of the state averaged fewer than twenty residents per

square mile. A decade later, nearly al of Alabama was as thickly

populated as most states to the east.

Birmingham il ustrated the tectonic forces at work in U.S. society

more than any other place. The booming city erupted out of

abandoned forest in the 1870s and suddenly became a national

center for the making of iron and steel. As coal production in

Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000

Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000

tons in 1881, the city built thousands of new homes, laid streets,

instal ed the infrastructure of a major capital, and opened schools,

churches, and col eges. Je erson County, center of the boom, nearly

quadrupled from fewer than 25,000 residents in 1880 to nearly

90,000 ten years later. By 1900, the number approached 150,000.4

The entire U.S. economy was surging with industrial fervor,

generating a ravenous appetite for Alabama's coal and iron ore.

Wal Street nanciers joined with the South's new generation of

industrialists, men such as Col. James W Sloss, James

DeBardeleben, and Truman Aldrich, to aggressively exploit the

deposits of iron ore and apparently limitless seams of coal that

riddled the Appalachian foothil s of northern Alabama. In 1878,

Sloss— one of the original lessors of Alabama prisoners sixteen

years earlier— DeBardeleben, and Aldrich formed the Prat Coal

and Coke Co., and took over what would become the underground

behemoth known as Prat Mines.

Recognizing the vast potential of the mineral deposits, the

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. soon moved its center of

operations from Nashvil e to the coal elds of Alabama. The coming

economic boom, unprecedented in the South, would require

thousands of men, working deep in the earth, in a never-stopping

excavation.

In 1886, Sloss sold his massive Birmingham furnace complex to a

group of New York-backed investors. A year later, with additional

nancial backing from the North, the new owners formed a

corporation that would come to be known as Sloss-She eld Iron

and Steel Company. The corporation quickly purchased the

territory and mining operation at Coalburg owned by John Milner.

Production boomed. The crude mines and simple furnaces of Bibb

County now paled in the glow of this industrial revolution. The old

shafts and digs were being abandoned. The work they represented

to families such as the black Cot inghams melted away. Word

spread that soon there would be no work except in the new city

spread that soon there would be no work except in the new city

exploding less than fty miles away— Birmingham. The family's

center was slipping too. Sometime in the 1880s the old slave

Scipio, the man who had carved a world from the wilderness, had

fathered and grandfathered so many in slavery but de antly never

forgot en his African roots, died at Brierfield.

The furnaces near Six Mile, where Scipio, Henry, and their clan

had sustained a measure of economic independence, ceased

operations. Only the families of grandson Henry and his much

younger half-brother Elbert remained in the community. Most of the