Slavery by Another Name (65 page)

of free blacks permit ed by TCI to be buried on company land. The

rest—and al the burials outside the new prison at the top of the

slope—were the hastily l ed graves of mine prisoners from

families too poor or forgot en to retrieve the bodies of their dead.16

A few days after Cot enham arrived at Slope No. 12 in April 1908,

the president of U.S. Steel, W. E. Corey, and a contingent of other

top executives from the Pit sburgh headquarters made their rst

visit to inspect the new Alabama properties. There was great

applause in Birmingham for the men whose purchase had saved

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. from nancial ruin. But the

enthusiasm of the city's leaders was tempered by the quiet

recognition that the South's greatest industrial concern had come

under the control of men in Pennsylvania. Whatever ambition there

had been for Alabama's iron and steel industry to eclipse its rivals

in the North was lost. Already, there were rumors that the new

owners were uneasy about the conditions of the prison mine and

the brutality in icted on African Americans there. For the time

being though, lit le would change. Four more convicts died before

the end of the month. Five more in May. Another four in June and

four more in July17 The burial eld at Slope No. 12 quickly began

to fil .

By midsummer, U.S. Steel and other mine owners in Birmingham

were moving toward a bit er climax in their struggle with the

United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—

United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—

this time joined by ve hundred free black miners, many of whom

had been brought in as strikebreakers during earlier labor unrest

and had never been welcomed by a union run by white men. Now

hundreds of miners swarmed the entry-ways of the mines, harassing

any workers who entered and threatening to break free convicts as

they moved from the mines to their prison. The homes in Prat City

of some leading company of icials, as wel as miners who continued

to work, were dynamited in the night.

Coal company o cials petitioned the state to break up the strike

with militiamen and hired armed deputies, importing sixty "Texas

sharpshooters" to help defend the mines. To keep operating,

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad and Sloss-She eld pushed

Cot enham and other convict laborers—who had no choice but to

continue working—to excruciating limits. They soon resurrected the

long-abandoned and notorious practice of hiring black work gangs

through white foremen—often farm owners with large groups of

African American tenants under their control. In a practice

reminiscent of the Confederate government's inducements to slave

owners to work mines during the Civil War, white foremen brought

in workers from the countryside and directly supervised them in the

mines. The white "owner" col ected al their wages and paid his

black subjects a fraction of the pay of real miners.18 Trains loaded

with black farmworkers from the Black Belt pul ed into

Birmingham each day—to the hoots and threats of strikers. Al the

while, company labor agents prowled the countryside for more

convicts, encouraging local sheri s to arrest and sel as many more

men as possible.

The specter of black and white miners uni ed against the coal

companies was terrifying to the elite of Birmingham—and across

the South. Mine owners responded with an aggressive campaign to

divide the union along racial lines. A prominent African American

union leader, Wil iam Mil in, was taken from jail and lynched with

the aid of two white deputy sheri s. A week later, another union

miner was hanged from a tree—again by a deputy sheri —after

being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor

being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor

Braxton Comer issued orders preparing the state militia to mobilize

and banning strikers from congregating outside mine entrances.19

In the midst of the crisis, on August 2, Cot enham could not

return to his place in the mine. Green had survived ve months at

Slope No. 12. But he had become a shadow of the man arrested

behind the train station in Columbiana. A doctor diagnosed

Cot enham as having syphilis. If the doctor's assessment was correct,

Cot enham almost certainly was already infected at the time of his

arrest in Shelby County. Even in the bacterium's most aggressive

form in a nineteenth-century medical regime without knowledge of

penicil in, syphilis took at least two years to reach Green's mortal y

il condition. In the unsanitary circumstances of the prison mine, the

symptoms of syphilis were exacerbated and sometimes confused

with other maladies. Already, the organism that causes syphilis—a

bacterium called Treponema pal idum—had infected his central

nervous system. The dorsal columns of Cot enham's spinal cord

already were hardening or developing lesions—triggering

excruciating stabbing pains in his legs, rectum, and upper

extremities.

Even for the most fortunate patients, there was no cure for

syphilis in 1908. Doctors gave those who could a ord it doses of

mercury in the belief it fought the progress of the bacteria.

Otherwise, good food and clean surroundings were the only

prescription for extending the vigor of the patient. Cot enham had

neither. His symptoms progressed rapidly. Temporary blindness. A

lack of sensation in his feet. Searing pains. Soon, his doctor

diagnosed asitia—a loathing of al food—and locomotor ataxia, the

archaic term for syphilis of the spinal cord.20

Green began to lose his ability to maintain balance, and then to

control the movement of his legs. First, he would have walked only

with a stick to stand on, then only with a cane in each hand—

struggling to keep his feet from ying uncontrol ably to his sides,

front, or rear—slapping his feet back to the oor as he struggled to

contain the movement of each step. His stomach convulsed

contain the movement of each step. His stomach convulsed

agonizingly at the sight or swal owing of food, vomiting almost

anything he at empted to ingest.

Cot enham might have lived for weeks or months in such a state

— declining steadily toward a state of complete paralysis. But in his

gravely weakened condition, Green was even more vulnerable to

tuberculosis—the endemic respiratory disease cycling through the

prisoners of Slope No. 12. Transmit ed through impure water

supplies, infected food, close contact with other victims, unsanitary

surroundings, and a host of other means common to a prison mine,

tuberculosis was the world's leading kil er. Triggering vomiting,

night sweats, and chil s, it at acked the outer lining of victims’

lungs, so sapping them of strength and color that the

"consumption"—its common name at the time—was sometimes

mistaken for vampirism.

However or whenever Green became infected, he was spiraling

toward death by the time he entered the prison hospital on the rst

Saturday of August. Wracked with convulsive pains, starved by his

own disgust for food, fevered and unable to control the movement

of his limbs, friendless and lost to the other descendants of old

Scipio, Green Cot enham died thirteen days later.

On August, 15, 1908, his body was placed in a crude pine box

and carried by other convicts out the gate of Slope No. 12. A lit le

more than a hundred yards down the hil , alongside the track

fol owing a long creek bed, past the last pockmarks of shal ow

sinking graves dug earlier that year, the men rested the simple

casket on the ground and began digging among the trash and debris

of the burial eld. In the distance, the belching chimneys of the

Ensley furnaces blackened the western horizon. No record was

made of precisely where Cot enham's twisted remains, riddled with

tubercular infection, were buried. The company couldn't even

clearly remember his name. The doctor for Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Co. logged the event only as the death of "Green

Cunningham."

XV

EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

"Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet."

On the night before Green Cotenham's death at Slope No. 12, a

mob of twelve thousand white people rampaged in Spring eld,

Il inois, the longtime homeplace of Abraham Lincoln and site of

Theodore Roosevelt's "square deal for the Negro" promise ve years

earlier.

A month earlier, on July 4, Spring eld police thwarted the

kil ing of a black man accused of murdering a local white

businessman. On July 12, passengers on a Central of Georgia train

passing Round Oak, Georgia, watched out their windows as a crowd

seized and hanged a black man for pul ing a knife during a brawl

with a local white. Two days later, in Middle-ton, Tennessee, a mob

of one hundred hanged Hugh Jones for al egedly making an

advance on a seventeen-year-old white girl.1 Less than twenty-four

hours after that, an elderly black man was shot to death in

Beaumont, Texas, after a gang of marauding whites mistook him for

a younger African American accused of hit ing a thirteen-year-old

white girl. The mob was set ing two black-owned businesses a re

when the victim passed, but paused long enough to kil the man.2

The next week, news of a notably sordid lynching in Dal as,

Texas, ashed across national newswires: after an eighteen-year-old

African American named Tad Smith was accused of raping a white

woman, a crowd of one thousand whites tied him to a stake in the

ground, surrounded him with kerosene-soaked wood, and cheered

as they watched him burn to death.3

A week later, only a detachment of Georgia state militia in the

town of Ocil a was able to prevent the lynching of four randomly

seized African Americans taken by a mob after a white woman

claimed an unidenti ed black man entered her hotel room. The

next day, a mob in Pensacola, Florida, at acked the jail where

next day, a mob in Pensacola, Florida, at acked the jail where

Leander Shaw was being held for an al eged sexual assault and

kni ng of a white woman. The sheri and two deputies resisted a

crowd that grew to one thousand, shooting and kil ing at least two

of the white men at acking the jail. Sometime after midnight, the

crowd overwhelmed police, took Shaw from his cel , dragged him

two blocks with a noose on his neck, hanged him from a light pole

in the center of the city's park, and then began ring on his corpse.

"2,000 bul ets completely riddled his body," wrote a correspondent

for the Atlanta Constitution. On the same night, in Lyons, Georgia, a

white crowd tore through a brick jail wal to reach and kil a black

man accused of assault on a local white girl.4

Two days later, about one hundred white men broke into the

Russel -vil e, Kentucky, jail and seized a black farmer accused of

kil ing his white landlord; they took three other African Americans

from the jail as wel , and hanged al four from a tree on a country

road. A note at ached to one body read: "Let this be a warning to

you niggers to let white people alone."5

Back in Spring eld, a white woman falsely claimed rape on

August 14, after her secret sexual a air with a local black man was

discovered. The mob that raged that Friday night kil ed at least

seven black people, destroyed much of the African American

section of the town, and issued proclamations that no blacks should

return to the city. Calm was restored only after the arrival of four

thousand soldiers.6

Two weeks later, a delegation of prominent Birmingham citizens

visited leaders of the striking miners stil encamped in tents outside

the Alabama mines and issued an explicit threat. The owners of

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, Sloss-She eld, and Prat

Consolidated Coal—the three biggest companies and each a major

buyer of forced black laborers—made clear they would do anything

necessary to crush the strike. Unless the strike ended, Birmingham

would "make Spring eld, Il inois look like six cents," according to a

newspaper reporter who shadowed the visit.7

newspaper reporter who shadowed the visit.

Alabama governor Braxton Comer issued a statement insisting no

such madness would be necessary to destroy the biracial labor

activists of Birmingham. Tel ing union leaders that he and other