Slavery by Another Name (77 page)

minorities.

Still the voice of Green Cottenham would not speak. For six years I sought signs of

him. Nowhere was there more than the faintest trace. A icker here that a brother,

Sam, almost ten years his elder, died in 1953. Musty evidence that his sisters

married and remarried. A last glimpse of Mary, his mother, living her nal years at an

address on Block Street in the town of Montevallo, a few blocks from where she and

Henry moved long before, still in the shadow of the old slavery world. There, sometime

in the 1930s, Mary Cottenham, the girl born a slave and married at the dawn of

freedom, died alone. In the place of the little house she occupied for so long, only

weeds grow.

The black Cottinghams descended from the old plantation on Six Mile Road were

scattered, in variant spellings and skin tones, across the United States. I found a woman

my own age in Shelby County named Molly Cottenham. She knew little of her family's

past.

Molly is descended from Gabe, a toddler in the Cottingham Loop house of Milt

Cottingham when he was saved by his brothers from arrest and re-enslavement in 1893.

Gabe grew to manhood and scratched together enough to eventually buy land in Shelby

County, near a community of farms called Keywater. Nearby, a ferry transported goods

across the Coosa River from Fayetteville. A contemporary of Green, living in the same

county, Gabe almost certainly would have known of his cousin's fate at Slope No. 12.

Gabe's sons, Edgar, Charlie, and Abraham, joined in the heavy labor of poorly

educated workers of the time. Abraham died pouring iron in a foundry, according to

the few stories passed down to Molly, who still lives not far from the old Keywater

homeplace. Edgar worked in a quarry before retiring and then dying in the 1980s.

Gabe was forced to ee Shelby County after a ght with a white man, Molly was told.

Edgar and Charlie lived most of their lives without their father, reared by their mother.

Little else of the context or human familial foundation survives for the descendants

of the black Cottingham line. Molly, forty- ve years old in 2008, and the mother of two

grown children, doesn't remember her grandmother's name. She never knew the

identities of her great-grandparents.1

In some respects, it is little surprise that the long-lingering persistence of American

slavery has been so largely ignored. Its longevity mars the mythology most white

Americans rely upon to explain our past and to embroider our present. At the same

time, it grieves and shames the descendants of its victims. They recoil from the

implication that emancipated black Americans could not exercise freedom, and

remained under the cruel thumb of white America, despite the explicit guarantees of

the Constitution, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and the moral resolve of

the Civil War.

Harold Cottingham lives in a modest house on a quiet street in Centre-ville, Alabama.

In an o ce he built onto his workshop in the backyard, piles of newspaper clippings

and letters are heaped where he left them years ago—while piecing together the

genealogy of all the acknowledged descendants of Elisha Cottingham. He is Elisha's

grandson, four generations removed. Every summer, Harold visits the old family burial

ground to make sure the grass has been properly cut back from the tombstones. Today,

age and health challenge his dedication to the family plot. Already, the forest has

overtaken the sunken unmarked graves of many of those who died black on the

Cottingham farm.

On a chilly day, Harold and his wife take me to lunch at Oliver's, a little restaurant in

a historic home across the street from the Bibb County courthouse and its monument to

Confederate war dead. They know by verse the heroic accounts of how Elisha extracted

a legacy from the Alabama wilderness, and each of the succeeding white generations

that followed.

Nowhere in the stories is there reference to Scip, the man who worked beside Elisha

for most of fty years, who carved the farm from the forest with him. Harold, a gentle

man, is not responsible for the washing away of the memories of the family's partners

and likely cousins of the past. They had vaporized long before Harold became the

Cottingham storyteller. "I knew there was some slaves out there," he told me. "But I

never knew there was so many."2

The residual wealth of W. D. McCurdy's baronic slave farm in Lowndes County still

dominates a cluster of fabulous white-columned mansions in the old cotton town of

Lowndesboro, Alabama. A family mansion sits at the end of McCurdy Lane. W. D.

McCurdy's great-greatgrandchildren still hold much of the family land, but cotton died

here long ago. The county's overwhelming black majority elected the rst African

American sheriff in the 1970s.

The vast wealth of John T Milner began to dissipate with his death in the early

twentieth century. The dynasty that grew from his partnership with the Flowers family

collapsed in a 1920s bank failure. By 2007, however, a Massachusetts-reared grandson

three generations removed, Chris Flowers, had resurrected and exponentially eclipsed

the family's prior fortunes. His rm, J. C. Flowers & Co., emerged as one of the most

dynamic financiers in the private equity boom on Wall Street.3

Like Elisha Cottingham's antebellum slavery, few others of the thousands of

plantation dynasties forged with the modern forced labor of John W. Pace survived its

nal abolition. The big houses of the great Kinderlou slave farm in Georgia all burned

before World War II. The McRee family fell into obscurity. Pace died within a decade

of his pardon by President Roosevelt. In 1926, a hydroelectric dam was completed by a

Southern Company subsidiary on the Tallapoosa River, several miles south of the

convergence with Big Sandy Creek. The rich river-bottom plantation of John Pace,

along with many of the other slaveholding farms along Red Ridge Road, was swallowed

under 44,000 acres of water, much of it more than one hundred feet deep. Pace's

schoolteacher son, Fulton, became a civil engineer for the town of Goodwater and died

sometime after World War II. His grandson, Fulton Jr., retired to Florida and died there

in 1976. On a hilltop, near the lake's edge, a Cosby family cemetery plot clings to

existence amid a cluster of vacation homes.4

The legacy of this slavery is stronger among the corporations that relied on it. In 1969

Walter Industries, Inc., acquired an ailing company called U.S. Pipe & Foundry

Company in Birmingham. Seventeen years earlier, that company had merged with Sloss-

She eld Iron and Steel, the company with the longest record of operating slave mines

in Alabama. The purchase included Flat Top mine, where so many black laborers

perished under the whip. Later, the company changed the name of the mine and

bulldozed the old prison stockade. The sprawling town that surrounded the shafts was

abandoned when the mine shut down. In the 1980s, Walter Industries strip-mined the

land—consuming the earth and coal with massive machines that obliterated the

landscape for miles. Only an abandoned stretch of rail line and the old commissary, its

windows blown out, survive.

The old Sloss-She eld today is a subsidiary called Sloss Industries. Its parent's best-

known enterprise is another division called Jim Walter Homes—a famous maker of

inexpensive, prefabricated homes. A sign of aspiration and success among low-income

African Americans all across the Black Belt is to leave behind public housing or

broken-down trailer homes and purchase the comfort of a Jim Walter home.

Descendants of the South's forced laborers are a critical market.

On the Web site of Sloss Industries, the company heralds its long and rich history as

a titan of southern industry that helped "launch Birmingham's rise to fame as a major

industrial center."5 There is no reference to the human engines that fueled so much

economic activity over Sloss's nearly fifty-year reliance on slaves after the Civil War.

In the 1960s, U.S. Steel published a 100th anniversary commemorative book to honor

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.'s history dating to the 1860s. But the volume says

nothing of the tens of thousands of slave workers who passed through its mines, the

armies of broken miners, the hundreds buried or burned in its graveyards and ovens.

The executives of Walter Industries in the twenty- rst century say they know nothing

of that past. "Obviously, this was a dark chapter for U.S. business," Kyle Parks, a

spokesman for the company, told me in 2001. "Certainly no company today could even

conceive of this kind of practice."

In Atlanta, the fortunes generated at slave mines, plantations, and the nightmarish

Chattahoochee Brick became pillars of the economic transformation and social orbits

of the city that would outpace all others in the South. A daughter of James W. English

married a bank executive named James Robinson Sr., who grew the Fourth National

Bank into the most prosperous in the South. The family guided the bank through a

series of mergers and acquisitions ending in 1985, when it was purchased by a

company that is now part of Wachovia Bank Corp.—the fourth largest in the United

States as measured by assets. English's great-grandson, James Robinson III, was the chief

executive o cer of American Express from 1977 to 1993 and became a member of the

board of Coca-Cola Co., where he serves today.

Joel Hurt, who believed the slaves in his coal mines could never be whipped too

much, was also chairman of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank. In 1893, Hurt installed as

head of his streetcar company his younger brother-in-law Ernest Woodru . Leveraging

his interests in real estate and slave mines, Hurt and his enterprises became Atlanta's

most energetic deal makers and buyout artists. Beginning with a sale in 1902, the

streetcar company evolved over time into Georgia Power Company— agship of

Southern Company, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States today. In

1919, after succeeding Hurt as chairman of Trust Company, Woodru engineered the

purchase of Coca-Cola for $25 million and the current incarnation of that company.

Suntrust Bank, the modern version of Trust Company, remains one of the largest

holders of stock in Coca-Cola. Woodru 's son, Robert Woodru , was named president

of Coke in 1923, and ran the company until 1954, becoming the era's most in uential

business figure in the South. He died in 1985.

But what do these threads to a terrible past tell us? Every gure who chose to continue

slavery is dead. None of the actions, however cruel, of long-dead companies or men can

be interpreted as a re ection on their current corporate manifestations or on distant

lines of familial descent. I wanted to know, though, how the heirs to slave-dependent

corporations and the pools of wealth they sometimes left behind perceive that history

today—or whether they knew of it at all.

When I contacted descendants of Atlanta's former mayor and extraordinary early

entrepreneur James W. English, who died in 1925, the family asked me to speak with

Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the son-in-law of James Robinson III. It was obvious that even

nine decades after his death, English's descendants are drenched in the lore of his

remarkable life and achievements.

Cook is an elite architect, an ardent preservationist, and the driving force behind an

ambitious plan to build a dramatic seventy-three-foot-high monument in downtown

Atlanta as a tribute to the great families of the city, including the family of Captain

English. Once it is completed, exhibition space at the classical stone archway will

house the personal papers of English, Joel Hurt, and other pioneering builders of the

city. Some black entrepreneurs of later in the twentieth century will be featured as well.

Cook told me the museum space is expected to become the primary institution for

presenting the positive history of Atlanta and its emergence as a major American city

and commercial center.

After a long lunch with Cook and English Robinson, another family member, I was

uncertain, however, about how the museum will present the crucial role of the new

slavery in building Atlanta and the fortunes of their forebear. "In the proper context, we

don't object to it being discussed," Cook told me.6 But they were insistent that no

signi cant abuses of African Americans had ever occurred at the brick factory, coal