rst set lers. Keystone Lime Co. supplied trainloads of the caustic
essential ingredient for iron to the county's biggest employer, the
antebel um Shelby Iron Works, and to the ravenous new furnaces
coming into blast on the fringes of Birmingham.
The bounding economic progress promised far more for whites
than blacks, but African Americans could not resist the entrancing
al ure of new prosperity. Shelby County was now home to growing
numbers of the black members of the Cot ingham clan. Brier eld,
the old Confederate munitions foundry where Green Cot enham and
his family had sheltered during the 1890s, couldn't survive against
the new mil ennium's technology of coal, iron, and steel
production. The foundry town had been a refuge for the family in
the storm of the late nineteenth century. Sheltered by the foundry's
need for a steady supply of black workers, some of the Cot en-hams
avoided for a time the resubjugation of African Americans occurring
on mil ions of southern farms. A succession of black men linked
back to the Cot ingham farm—Scip, the patriarchal slave who now
spel ed his name Cot inham, his sons, Elbert and Henry, his
grandsons, and others—worked in the wilting orbits of re
surrounding the furnaces. Mary and the other wives and older
daughters kept house and washed or cooked for laborers. The
foundry work was grueling, but for a lit le longer Brier eld
a orded these African Americans a way station of modest freedom
and a residue of authentic independence that was fast disappearing
for most rural blacks. Relatively remote from any large population
of whites, the six hundred African Americans there could avoid the
implicit risk of mingling with whites on the roadways into the
county seat or accidental con icts on the back roads of the
countryside. The whites of the furnace town needed them. Rev.
Starr's old Methodist church stil stood—giving Brier eld's black
families their own forum for leadership and worship. In a crude,
overcrowded school for black children, Green and his two older
sisters learned to read and write.
What irony that the maker of cannons for Lee's armies and armor
for the Confederacy's warships became a place of refuge for freed
slaves. But Brier eld, with its redolent sense of post-emancipation
freedom, was vanishing. By 1910 only twenty-nine people
remained. Mary Green, and the girls, Ada and Mariet a, fol owed
the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,
the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,
a lit le town perched on a new coal mine in Shelby County just
south of Birmingham. Soon, Mary was working— washing and
cleaning for a white man. Columbiana was a short freight car ride
away. Whatever remained to harbor Green and his siblings would
quickly dissolve before the torrent of trouble pouring across their
world.
Late in the summer of the great 1903 peonage trials in
Montgomery, Green turned eighteen years old.1 Ada was twenty-
one and Mariet a nineteen. Green and his sisters and cousins had
experienced none of the emancipation exhilaration that their
parents and grandparents remembered from the end of the war.
Theirs had been a life of perplexing contradiction, of an ostensible
but most often unrealized freedom, of supposed political and
economic independence from whites but in truth, even in Brierfield,
ultimately a complete dependence on the authority and protection
of whites—or simply the security of isolation. The sisters would stay
with their mother at least until marriage. But Green was nearly a
man now, tal , lean, and muscular like his father, sharpened by the
paucity of food, hardened by the incessant labor demanded of his
life. The freedom of approaching male adulthood—even in the
circumscribed South—was an inescapable al ure.
Green soon ventured deep into the sphere of white men, though
they must have remained a mystery to him. He had to know al the
stories of his father and aunts and uncles who had lived with the
white Cot inghams on the farm by the river. But those were ancient
tales from before his birth. In his iron-town childhood and young
adult years, there had never been familial bonds with any white
people, especial y not the old Cot ingham master and his
acknowledged of spring.
Green's uncle, Abraham Cot ingham, the once spirited
Republican, having journeyed farther from the country crossroads
where the freed slaves congregated after emancipation from old
man Cot ingham's farm than any others, made his home in Shelby
County. Abraham's sons, Jimmy—known as "Cap"—and Frank, were
nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the
nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the
bit ersweet paradox of black life at the dawn of the twentieth
century. They had never been slaves. They had voted in elections.
Now they had seen al vestiges of legal citizenship stripped away.
Cap, Frank, and Abraham cast bal ots for the last time in 1901, the
nal election in which blacks were permit ed meaningful
participation in Alabama. Green would never experience that act.
Cap Cot ingham's ouster from the voting rol s was punctuated a
few months later by his arrest, during a visit back in Bibb County,
on a misdemeanor charge. He was quickly sold into the bondage of
a white farmer named O. T. Grimes. On February 18, 1902, Cap
and another prisoner named Henry Johnson successful y ed the
farm and escaped.2
In the fal of 1903, as Warren Reese prepared for the last
peonage trial in Montgomery, Cap was arrested again, this time by
a Shelby County deputy. The charge was for violating the Alabama
statute forbidding any person from carrying a concealed weapon.
The records of Cap's arrest signal that he was picked up as part of a
general roundup in Columbiana to l an order for black labor
from Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. Cap, a muscular six-foot-
tal thirty- ve-year-old with skin as deeply black as his great-
grandfather Scipio's, was arrested along with another African
American named Monroe Wal ace. Both were charged with carrying
concealed weapons on October 2, 1903, and sentenced to four
months and twenty days of hard labor to pay their nes and fees to
the sheri and court. By the end of the month, the two were joined
in the jail by seven other blacks arrested for climbing aboard an
empty freight car, another for gambling, and one more for an
al eged pet y theft.
Six weeks later, on November 21, the county's convict labor
agent, W J. Farley, emptied the jail and delivered its contents to
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Cap Cot ingham was turned over
for $9 a month.3 He survived his winter in the Prat Mines and
returned to Columbiana the fol owing year. The creep of darkness
paused, but it would not last.
As the new century bloomed, the civic con dence of the editor of
the gray-typed Shelby County Sentinel was so great that
he ordered
a photographer to document the landmarks of the burgeoning town
and penned a twenty-page paean to its economic prospects and fine
citizenry. It was natural, and more than a lit le self-interested, for
editor J. A. MacKnight to do so, given that on the side he was also
the town's leading real estate man.
"The town is beautiful y situated, on a plateau which is
splendidly drained," MacKnight gushed. "There is so lit le sickness
that the doctors are nearly al poor men and their number is few."4
Hyperbole yes, but there was good reason to be enthused. The
county was in the sweetest bend of a rising economic curve. More
land was under farm production than at any point since the arrival
of white squat ers a century before. In each harvest since the turn of
the century, Shelby's cot on gins and compresses pumped out more
than ten thousand bales—totaling in excess of ve mil ion pounds
of handpicked ber. The only hint of the coming bol weevil
debacle that a decade hence would sweep in to ravage the elds
were fearful exclamations from farmers in far-away Texas. The
town population, more than two thousand already, was growing at
a heady rate. Two railroads, the Southern Rail Line and the
Louisvil e & Nashvil e, converged at the freight terminal at the end
of Depot Street. A cot on gin, grist mil , and warehouses crowded
the edge of the commercial district, and plans were being nalized
for that most tantalizing of new luxuries, an electric light plant.
Columbiana was brimming with n-de-siècle optimism. Working
furiously to bring a measure of re nement and civic improvement,
stil coarse towns across the South were laying the building blocks
on which twentieth-century American prosperity would rise. The
community's most respected leaders championed e ulgent
campaigns to bring the rst paved streets, public schools, and
shared utility systems—al social advancements careful y engineered
to transform their town but that would also exclude from its
benefits nearly al African Americans.5
benefits nearly al African Americans.
(There was proof to Columbiana of the town's rising
sophistication in Henry Walthal , the son of the sheri and himself
chief deputy at the Shelby County jail a few years earlier. In the
1890s, he helped his father capture and sel black prisoners ful -
time and taught theater on the side. In the summers, he produced
Shakespeare with a local cast until final y joining a traveling theater
company. Removed to the nascent Hol ywood, Walthal starred a
decade later as the Colonel in The Birth of a Nation, D. W Gri th's
1915 blockbuster lm based on the Dixon blockbuster, white
supremacist stage show, The Clansman. The lm was the rst
moving picture ever shown at the White House. President Woodrow
Wilson, a southerner and an open racist, was said to have praised
the film.)
At the monumental cost of $250,000, Shelby County erected a
new courthouse that without exaggeration could be described only
as extraordinary. Replacing an unadorned brick edi ce scu ed and
scarred with more than a half century of unceremonious use, the
new building was a temple to citizen governance and, even more
so, to the county's rising expectations for itself.
At the grand entrance on Main Street, four columns soared fty
feet to an ornate Greek Revival portico. Encircling the roo ine on
every side, a carved parapet railing framed cupolas of hammered
brass leaf on each wing of the building. At the center of the roof
rose an immense octagonal clock tower, looming magni cently
above the town. In the low sun of early evening, the building's
chiseled west facade, constructed of thousands of tons of yel ow
limestone quarried from the ridges above the nearby Coosa River,
glowed luminescently The shadow fal ing to east and south was
nearly large enough to blot out the rest of the town's jumble of
humble red-brick stores and whitewashed houses. The building was
the community's ag plunged into the earth of the new century, a
clear portent of the ambitions of those who led it. A new future was
coming, to be built and shaped in the manner of its new makers.
The architect of this bold new vision, if not of the courthouse
itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a
itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a
fervent populist, he commanded a nearly mesmerized local
fol owing. How else that a county stil licking its wounds from the
Civil War would agree to borrow a fortune to build the grandest
courthouse in the South? To Longshore, a rate of 6 percent per
annum on county bonds was simply the wage to be paid for a
di erent future. Already, he dressed and looked in the manner of
the new century rather than the last. Above a mustache twisted at
each end and a tiny tufted goatee on the point of his chin, Judge
Longshore looked ahead, only ahead.
From atop the courthouse, Columbiana's other highest spire was
clearly visible at the opposite diagonal of town. With angular
Victorian sternness, it descended sharply into a square tower of
stacked bricks and then three stories down to the iron-barred door
of the Shelby County jail. A dozen dank cel s on the other side of
the building were heated by coal grates and il uminated by shafts of
sunlight coming between the bars on every window. As new
prisoners passed Sheri J. H. Fulton's house next door and
approached the front entrance on West Sterret Street, one odd
window at the top of the jail's tower could not escape their notice.
Almost as tal as a man, circular at the top and rectangular at the
bot om, the opening in the shape of a giant keyhole gave view into
the county's hanging chamber. There, men condemned to die would
arrive on steps from the second- oor cel block and then twist at the
end of a rope, safe from any last e orts to escape their fate, but
with justice stil plainly on view.6
In the newspaper editor's assessment of Columbiana in 1907,
Mac-Knight included just one photograph containing a black face.
Standing, expressionless, with each arm draped on the shoulders of
a young white child in her care, the woman was identi ed only as
"Black Mammy on Duty." On the whole, MacKnight reported that
"the negro population is not excessive, and is orderly and law-
abiding. They have their own churches and schools, and many of
them own their homes. The ease with which a livelihood is made
here renders them independent, and it is not easy to secure either
male or female help from among them."7
male or female help from among them."
Indeed, obtaining African Americans was crucial and sometimes
di cult, as any traveler arriving in Shelby County during the rst
decade of the century would have seen long before the train pul ed
up to the weathered wooden platform in Columbiana. The rails
into and out of town were surrounded by endless vistas of cot on
and its production.
While the twentieth c
entury brought wonders of technological
advancement in the realm of early automobiles, faster trains, and
electric il umination, every square foot of cot on eld was being
tended in a way lit le di erent from how Scipio had done it on the
Cot ingham place in 1840. It took hands. Mil ions of them had to
be available to plow and seed, and mil ions more to hoe and pick.
That meant African Americans. Strong, dependent, docile black
men. The leaders of Shelby County and thousands of other southern
towns and counties were intent on assuring that they could be
found.
The great crusade against involuntary servitude—and especial y
Judge Jones's famous charge to the grand jury and the Supreme
Court's ruling against Georgia's Judge Speer—achieved an
unexpected result for those in the South most reliant on black
backs. Instead of ending the new regimes of forced labor, Judge
Jones's denunciations and the subsequent legal rulings became
guideposts for a reorganization of the contemporary tra c in black
men. Indeed, the further the court opinions decrying peonage
echoed across the southern landscape, the more hol ow they
became.
The Supreme Court's renunciation of Speer's at empt to outlaw
the misdemeanor convict leasing system was so complete that the
opinion was not even writ en, but issued summarily and oral y.
Among the thousands of words of Judge Jones's famous direction to
the federal jury on the de nitions of legal and il egal labor
practices, a single sentence ultimately rose to greatest prominence.
Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose
Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose
sureties "confessed judgment" for them and worked them against
their wil could avoid violating the peonage statue by fol owing a
simple procedure. The laborers must be convicted in an authentic
court— not by any bumpkin justice of the peace. The judgment and
penalty had to be writ en down and recorded with the local courts.
And the contract between the defendant and the person paying the
ne—in which the defendant agreed to work for a certain amount
of time to pay o the penalty— had to be signed "in open court
with writ en approval of the judge."
The implication was clear. There would be no risk of another
energetic U.S. at orney arresting white farmers for peonage so long
Slavery by Another Name Page 42
