Slavery by Another Name (2 page)

and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of

other black men they 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.

It overlooked many of the most signi cant dimensions of the new forced labor,

including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to

suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and

the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of

African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and

tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from

political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or

forced labor camps. The judges and sheri s who sold convicts to giant

corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans

to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to

acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because

most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to

each southern state, they minimized the collective e ect of the decisions by

hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this

period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of

the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward

blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial

views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—

seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the

speci c decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans

were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S.

society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black

Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people

still not free fty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the e ects of

cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation

rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of

repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new

generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and

resources.

Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage

sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original

documents and personal narratives revealing a very di erent version of events.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest

to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans

into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty

thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the les of the Department