of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have
of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have
been guilty of only trivial o ense; and many of these o enses are
not in themselves criminal, or even immoral, but which have been
made penal simply by statutory enactment," wrote Jerome Cochran,
state health of icer, in 1892.
"It is the peculiar misfortune of the negro," Cochran continued,
"that his investment with the privileges of citizenship, and of the
elective franchise has also subjected him to the operation of laws
made by men for the government of white men—law which he
does not understand, and the moral obligations of which he is not
able to appreciate."48
In 1895, Thomas Parke, the health o cer for Je erson County,
investigated conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg prison mine. He
found 1,926 prisoners at toil. Hundreds had been charged with
vagrancy gambling, carrying a concealed weapon, or other minor
o enses, he reported. In many cases, no speci c charges were
recorded at al . Dr. Parke observed that many were held for minor
infractions, ned $5 or $10, and, unable to pay, leased for twenty
days to Sloss-She eld to cover the ne. Most then had another year
or more tacked onto their sentences to cover fees owed to the
sherif , the clerk, and the witnesses involved in prosecuting them.
"The largest portion of the prisoners are sentenced for slight
o enses and sent to prison for want of money to pay the nes and
costs…. They are not criminals," Dr. Parke wrote in his formal
report.
Male prisoners were barracked in a primitive wood-plank prison
beside the putrid Five Mile Creek, near a row of coke ovens. The
miners spent nearly half of each twenty-four hours in the mine, six
days a week. The shaft was minimal y ventilated; coal cars were
pushed out of the earth by the miners themselves, rather than with
mechanized equipment. Medical care was dispensed occasional y
from a primitive shack; scores of miners worked with serious
il nesses, including untreated and open wounds in amed with
infected boils and pus. Parke's tal y of prisoners held at Coal-burg
in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in
in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in
the state's o cial records at the time—indicating that hundreds of
laborers had been sold into the mine through extralegal systems.
More than a hundred forced laborers died at the mine during the
two years prior to Parke's visit.
The physician, even one burdened with intensely racist
perspectives, was shocked by the inhumanity. He asked whether "a
sovereign state can a ord to send her citizens, for slight o enses, to
a prison where, in the nature of things, a large number are
condemned to die."
Embarrassed by the publication of Parke's report, Sloss-She eld
commissioned the physician it paid to care for the forced laborers,
Dr. Judson Davie, to write a response. He claimed the extraordinary
rate of mortality among blacks was their own fault. But even his
apologia for health conditions at Coalburg was tel ing. He said
many convicts, once injured, tried not to become wel to avoid a
return to the mine. "Some eat soap; some rub poisonous things into
their sores or cuts; but by far the greater obstacle to their making
quick and good recoveries is the mental depression of the new
men," he wrote. He added that many miners chose to drink the
pol uted "seep water" in which they worked "of their own accord in
preference to going to springs or other usual places of get ing
drinking water." He also contended that nearly every black man
contracts syphilis by adulthood. No blame for that could be ascribed
to the mine, he contended.
The larger issue, Davie wrote, was genetic: "It is a fact that the
negro race is inferior to the white race physical y as wel as
mental y and moral y— their powers of resistance, so far as a great
many diseases are concerned, notably tuberculosis, does not
compare at al favorably with the white race."
Stil , Dr. Parke's criticism of the lethal conditions in Sloss-
She eld's slave mine embarrassed the company enough that a
month later its president, Thomas Seddon, sent a let er to local
o cials defending his treatment of black workers. He summed up
the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."49
the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."
Sentiments like that were hardly rare in the three decades after
the Civil War. Yet throughout that di cult time, African Americans
stil clung at some level to the idea that whatever white men such
as Parke said or did, the United States as a whole stil stood
squarely to the contrary. This, the Civil War proved, was
immutable.
Then, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a thirty-year-old
white shoemaker with a trace of African blood, named Homer
Plessy the right to ride in the white compartment of an East
Louisiana Railroad train. On its face, the ruling sanctioned only the
newly conceived concept of "separate but equal" public facilities for
blacks and whites. But its actual import was vastly greater. Plessy v.
Ferguson legitimized the contemptuous at itudes of whites like the
top executives of Sloss-She eld. Moreover, it certi ed that any
charade of equal treatment for African Americans was not just
acceptable and practical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but
moral y and legal y legitimate in the highest venue of white society.
It was a signal moment in America's national discourse. From the
lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers,
Americans had shared a consensus that the highest de nition of a
citizen was his veracity, that truth tel ing and ful l ment of a man's
commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of
honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the
sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a stil new nation
born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an ut erly
sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.
That al egiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets
of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had
impel ed the nation toward civil war during the antebel um
decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic's
noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the
prevailing view among al white Americans that blacks were in
some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war
upon itself at devastating cost, in a con ict ultimately justi ed as a
struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had
struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had
doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required
were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in
the South. The moral y bewildering sacri ce of the war became a
concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itse
lf
toward the "more perfect union" of the Founding Fathers. The
surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage
of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that
vision.
The Supreme Court's endorsement in 1896 of the agrantly
duplici-tous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a
resignation of America's white institutions to the conclusion that the
emancipation of black slaves had been fol y. Most agreed that the
elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past
abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white
Americans, the refusal of the southern states to ful y free or
enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue
worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United
States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white
security.
There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S.
politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson
marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of
the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of
their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the
principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the
American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment
of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of
citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that
abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be
reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern
cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a
pat ern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any
rationalization was su cient to excuse the most severe abuses of
African Americans.
Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal
Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal
minds, the men control ing the mines and labor camps of the South
adopted even more imsy ruses of justi cation for black men's
imprisonment. The level of physical coercion increased terrifyingly
At the Prat Mines, an observer for a special Alabama legislative
commit ee in 1897 wrote a report describing 1,117 convicts, many
"whol y un t for the work," at labor in the shaft.50 In an 1898
convict board report, the largest category in a table listing charges
on which county convicts were imprisoned was "Not given." 51 No
one even bothered to invent a legal basis for their enslavement.
In a 1902 report, one man was in the mines for "disturbing
females on railroad car." More than a dozen were incarcerated for
"abusive and obscene language." Twenty convicts were digging coal
for adultery, twenty-nine for gambling. Dozens of prisoners were at
labor for riding a freight train without paying for a ticket. 52 In
1902 and 1903, local o cials in Je erson County prosecuted more
than three thousand misdemeanor cases, most of them yielding a
convict to work in a Sloss-She eld mine—the vast majority of
whom were black.53
One of those convicts was John Clarke, a miner convicted of
"gaming" on April 11, 1903. Unable to pay, he ended up at Sloss-
She eld. Working o the ne would take ten days. Fees for the
sheri , the county clerk, and the witnesses who testi ed against him
required that Clarke spend an additional 104 days in the mines.
Sloss-She eld acquired him from Je erson County for $9 a month.
One month and three days later, he was dead, crushed by "fal ing
rock."54
At least 2,500 men were being held against their wil at more
than two dozen labor camps across Alabama at the time Clarke
died. More than nine hundred were in the Prat Mines. Sloss-
She eld held nearly three hundred. The McCurdys stil control ed
nearly one hundred in Lowndes County. Scores more were
imprisoned in the turpentine and lumber camps of the Henderson-
Boyd and Horseshoe Bend lumber companies and other remote
prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern
prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern
Alabama. Payments to the state that year exceeded a half mil ion
dol ars, the equivalent of $12.1 mil ion a century later and a gure
nearly equal to 25 percent of al taxes col ected in Alabama.55
As the dark cloud of the new slavery was descending on those
men and the hundreds of thousands of friends, acquaintances, and
family members across the South, the descendants of the old slave
Scipio struggled to maintain emancipated lives. Abraham
Cot ingham and his sons Jimmy and Frank, descendants of Mit ,
another son of Scipio, were among nearly four hundred black voters
who stil participated in Shelby County elections in 1892. De ant,
even as the vast majority of other black men in the county were
intimidated or obstructed from the pol s, Abraham paid an
increasingly onerous pol tax and complied year after year with
burgeoning requirements established by the state of Alabama for
blacks to qualify for a bal ot. Each election year, under hostile eyes,
he signed his name boldly in the register of voters maintained in
the worn-brick county courthouse across the street from the jail.56
But even Abraham could not resist the new state constitution
adopted in 1901, under which virtual y no black person could
again vote in Alabama. No black Cot ingham would cast a bal ot for
at least six decades.57
Sometime in the 1890s, Henry Cot inham died. The circumstances
of his death weren't recorded. In June of 1900, Mary Cot inham
abandoned Brier eld, where so many black descendants of the
Cot ingham farm had once congregated, leaving behind only
Henry's younger brother Elbert, with his own wife and ten children.
Struggling to survive, Mary, the former slave girl from the Bishop
farm, moved the remaining family to Monteval o, a town just inside
Shelby County, where a new mining company was expanding
quickly. She found work as a washerwoman. Her two daughters,
Ada and Mariet a, sixteen and twenty, were anxiously hoping for
marriage. Soon, the girls would leave home, and Mary was alone
with her youngest. Her baby boy, Green, was fourteen and had
learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of
learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of
hostility engul ng black America, he was rising into the muscle,
hair, and boisterous curiosity of a teenage man.
V
THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE
"I don't owe you anything."
The last thing John Davis should have been doing in the second
week of September 1901 was a long hike across the parched
elds of cot on stretching endlessly along the Central of Georgia
Railway line running from the Georgia state line to the notorious
town of Goodwater. Mil ions of crisp brown cot on bol s, fat and
cracking at the seams with bulging white ber, waited in the elds
and river atlands of central Alabama cal ing out to be picked. The<
br />
task would take weeks and demand the labor of virtual y every
available man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles.1
Davis needed to be in his own patch of cot on—the lifeline of his
tiny farm near Nixburg, a wisp of a town twenty miles south of
Goodwater. For him to maintain any glimmer of independence in
the South's terrifying racial regime, Davis had to produce his single
bale of cot on—the limit of the physical capacities of one farmer
and a mule and just enough to pay a share to the owner of the land
he farmed and supply his family with enough food and warmth to
pass the cold months soon to set in.
But as he struggled to reach the tight bend in the rails more than
ten miles from his farm, where freight trains were forced to slow
and itinerant travelers knew there was a chance to leap aboard
empty freight cars, John knew he needed just as badly to see his
wife, Nora. She was il —so sick it had become impossible for him
to care for her and the young couple's two children—especial y at
the very time of the season when he, like hundreds of thousands of
men working smal farms across the South, had no choice but to
remain in his fields from dawn to dusk.
John and Nora had been married for only three years. At twenty-
ve, she was two years older. She came to the marriage with two
children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John
children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John
treated the youngsters as his own. The husband and wife had come
of age just miles apart on the outskirts of the rough-edged railroad
town of Goodwater and married there in 1898. Eleven-year-old
Albert certainly was already John's most important helpmate in the
elds. At harvest time, he would have also needed ten-year-old
Alice and Nora picking the rows.2 Sending them al to Nora's
parents’ house meant John would have to pul every bol himself.
But it must have seemed the only way.
John stayed behind working furiously to bring in the crop. But
Nora remained desperately il . Her husband had to see her now. So
Davis made his way on September 10, 1901, to the big railroad
curve outside Alexander City and waited with the other men
wandering the rails for the No. 1 train. The fal sun was just
beginning to falter as the train eased out of the lit le mil town at
Slavery by Another Name Page 17