Slavery by Another Name (68 page)

o cials, U.S. Steel made clear that despite the chairman's

discomfort with the system, it realized the bene ts of a captive

workforce, particularly in thwarting e orts to unionize local labor.

It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control.

In a let er to the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts in 1911, the

president of TCI was unequivocal: "The chief inducement for the

hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal for our

manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor troubles."31

Instead of quickly ending its reliance on forced labor, as Judge

Gary later claimed, U.S. Steel made modest improvements,

primarily by raising health standards at the No. 12 mine. At the

same time, it publicly praised Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's

past record of "humane and considerate treatment" of prisoners,32

and entered into new agreements to acquire more convicts from

county sheri s. In 1911, the number of deaths at U.S. Steel prison

mines fel to eighteen.

mines fel to eighteen.

But when Alabama o cials began cut ing the number of men

supplied to U.S. Steel in the middle of that year—four years after

Gary claimed he had ordered an end to slaving in his mines—the

company protested forceful y. The company's general

superintendent, Edward H. Coxe, wrote convict bureau president

James Oakley to complain, "asking him for 30 or 40 more men."

When the number of prisoners dwindled below three hundred later

that summer, Coxe paid a personal visit to Oakley to demand more

forced laborers.33

As the end of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's agreement with

the state was approaching, the company told Alabama o cials it

wanted to begin negotiations to extend the contract for at least one

more year. The state responded that it intended to lease al the

convicts to the Banner Mine—ostensibly because Erskine Ramsey's

company would pay more for them.

"I wish to enter a very vigorous protest against this action, as it is

manifestly unfair to us to take the men from us," responded Coxe in

a September 25, 1911, let er to the o cial in charge of convicts.

"We are paying the State a great big price for these convicts, and it

is certainly a hardship on us to deplete our organization."34

State o cials, some of whom were receiving secret payments to

help Ramsey's company, were unswayed. On January 1, 1912, the

last remaining two hundred state convicts held at the Prat Mines

were marched out under guard and turned over to their new

overseers to help replenish the ranks of forced laborers at the

Banner Mine, decimated by the disaster less than a year earlier.

On December 13, 1912, a roaming labor agent for U.S. Steel sent

out to hustle up as many workers as possible made a last stop at

the Shelby County jail. Deputy Eddings no longer made regular

deliveries to Birmingham. With al state prisoners in the Banner

Mine, other companies sent out their own agents to local sheri s to

col ect convicts and haul them back to the shafts. The man from

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad paid $103.50 to acquire one last

lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

Wal s, and John H. Huntley had al been arrested together on the

crime that had supplied thousands of laborers to the company:

"train riding."

There must have been some amazement that day in that al of the

men purchased were white. It was likely the only instance in the

company's thirty-year relationship with Shelby County sheri s in

which a shipment of men included no blacks. It would have been

no surprise though that for the "crime" which thousands of African

Americans were sent to the mines for months or years—and

hundreds of whom died for it—these ve white men received

sentences of just ten days’ labor.35

XVI

ATLANTA,

THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

"I wil murder you if you don't do that work."

During the same scorching southern summer that Green

Cot enham and so many others died deep in the Alabama coal

mines—or at the ends of ropes in places from Texas to Il inois—

a litany of horrors from the slave camps of Georgia was spil ing

into public view in Atlanta.

Beginning late in July 1908, a commission established by the

Georgia legislature convened a series of remarkable hearings into

the operations of the state's convict leasing system. Meeting early

every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating

heat, the panel cal ed more than 120 witnesses over the course of

three weeks to give testimony in the state capitol's regal Room No.

16.The architects of the investigation—primarily state senator

Thomas Felder—launched the inquiry in hopes of proving

corruption in the management of Georgia's extensive system of

buying and sel ing prisoners. It would prove that. But as the long

line of witnesses perspired beneath the chamber's whirling ceiling

fans, they learned of crimes far greater than graft and payof s.

Across Georgia, fourteen separate camps held men sold by the

state; at another sixteen locations men charged in county and city

courts were held in slavery—including more than 430 at Durham

Coal mines; more than 350 at Egypt, in the plantation belt of south

Georgia; nearly 200 at Chat ahoochee Brick Company on the

outskirts of Atlanta; and scores more at a coal mine near Lookout

Mountain. In total, at least 3,464 men and 130 women lived in

explicit forced labor in Georgia. 1

Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

arrangements with work camps, factories, and timber operations

scat ered across the state, that no one in Georgia government could

say where any particular man might have ended up, or the true

total of African Americans being held against their wil .

Complicating any e ort to track the fates of these forced laborers,

the new slavery of Georgia had metamorphed into a ful -blown

system of human traf icking.

Felder's commit ee learned that at least six hundred slave

workers, nearly al of them African American, had been resold to

other buyers after being leased from the state for convictions on

minor of enses.2 Witness after witness—ranging from former guards

to legislators to freed slaves— o ered nauseating accounts of the

system's brutalities. Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were

left to die on the oor of a storage shed at a farm near

Mil edgevil e. Laborers who at empted escape from the Musco-gee

Brick Company were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-

long spikes turned inward—to make it impossibly painful to run

again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physical y

abusive. In almost every camp, forced laborers lived and slept for

months in the same tat ered clothing. They bedded each night on

fragments of bed linens clot ed with dirt and filth.

One legislator told of a black man at Lookout Mountain Coal and

Coke Company in the mountains of north Georgia whose arm was

broken in a rock fal inside the mine. Months later he was working

again, but with a disjointed arm, distended in a grotesque

misalignment, where the bones healed together in an unnatural

shape. At a camp in Floyd County, black women riddled with

venereal diseases worked on a roadway chained to one another.

Everywhere, prisoners worked, ate, and slept almost continual y

shackled. Legislators who visited the Pinson & Al en lumber and

turpentine camp in Mil er County were so revolted by the trash and

insect-riddled food given to prisoners, they had to leave without

completing the tour.3

In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

clenched hand gave his name as Daniel Long. What fol owed was a

plain-spoken description of his sentence served a year earlier in a

turpentine camp after being accused of stealing a watch chain.

Senator Felder asked him if he'd been whipped.

"Yes sir," Long responded. "Say I wasn't working good enough."

Felder asked how severely and how often.

"Hit me 75 licks…. Some times twice a day," Long answered.4

Asked what was the mat er with his hand, Long said the camp

whipping boss beat it with a leather strap after Long said he was

get ing cramps from his work. After that, the boy could never open

his hand again. Final y the chairman of the commission asked Long

to take o his shirt and let the panel see his back. To gasps of

horror in the audience and grimaces on the faces of the commit ee,

the slight young man do ed his shirt and turned to reveal a back

grossly swol en and scarred with stripes from the turpentine camp

beatings. Scars and marks covered the trunk of the teenager. One

foot was stil seriously infected where a whipping had literal y

removed a piece of skin.

Long's mother moved into the witness chair and told the

commit ee how she was noti ed after his last beating that Daniel

was soon to die. The boy had been convicted of pet y theft in

Mariet a, just north of Atlanta, but was sold and resold by traders in

black labor until he arrived at the turpentine camp hundreds of

miles to the south. She borrowed money to travel to the camp in

south Georgia—walking for miles on country roads in search of

him. By the time she found the camp, her son had been sold again,

along with a crew of healthy prisoners, to a nearby farm. She asked

the whipping boss where to go to find her son.

"I don't know anything about the goddam black son of a bitch, I

beat hel out of him," Mrs. Long quoted the man saying. "He told

me if I went down that road … he would kil me and throw me in

the river. He said he had kil ed lots of goddamn negroes and

throwed them in the river."

She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

with his clothes stuck to his scabs and oozing skin. The new owner

of the lease on her son al owed her to take him home. Only after

three months of recuperation did a doctor conclude Daniel would

survive.5

As the inquiry progressed, what began as revelations of brutish

behavior by uncouth men in distant labor camps slowly became

instead an unset ling portrait of some of Atlanta's, and Georgia's,

most prominent families—many of whom appeared to be direct

bene ciaries of the most sordid revelations in Room 16. The

commit ee learned that the kil ing of the young black boy described

by Ephraim Gaither—whose account of the decomposed body being

dragged through the woods by dogs sickened the gal ery—occurred

in a camp owned by Joel Hurt, one of Atlanta's most esteemed

businessmen, and run by his adult son, George.

Other witnesses recounted the fate of a sixteen-year-old white boy

named Abe Wynne, who was sold into the Durham Coal and Coke

Company mine after being caught two years earlier stealing two

tins of pot ed ham. The company, owned by former Atlanta mayor

James W. English, operated a dangerous shaft in north Georgia.

Some sections of the mine were l ed with more than waist-deep

water, which seeped out through the slate surrounding the coal.

Pumps were inadequate to remove the water. Not enough timbers

were provided for miners to brace the tunnels, leading to routine

and often deadly cave-ins. Even when material was provided,

miners often skipped the safety steps for fear of being punished if

they ran out of time to dig their required daily al otment, or "task,"

of coal.

"Many times the men wouldn't take time to do it because they

knew that they could not timber the wal s and nish their tasks,

and it meant a whipping if they did not nish them," testi ed R. A.

Keith, a former prisoner al owed to work as a clerk at the mine

of ice.

Every morning, slave laborers at the Durham mines were forced

to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

bread and a piece of raw meat and to watch whippings of any

worker who failed to make task the prior day. "I have seen them