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 h
e and other
white o cials were "outraged at the at empts to establish social
equality between black and white miners," he demanded that the
strike end. He added that he would not tolerate "eight or nine
thousand idle niggars in the State of Alabama."8 When the walkout
continued, Governor Comer cal ed the unrest a threat to white
supremacy and dispatched the militia on August 26 to cut down the
tents of strikers and break up their camps.
Facing armed military units and out of money, the strike
col apsed on September 1. Free miners returned to their company
housing and reen-tered the forbidding shafts. Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad redistributed its prisoners back into multiple shafts at the
Prat Mines.
Tensions hardly eased. Death in U.S. Steel's slave mines continued
its march—two men in September; six more in October. Early in
November, Birmingham buzzed with word of the latest southern
lynching. A black man named Henry Leidy was accused by a fifteen-
year-old girl in Biloxi, Mississippi, of sexual assault. Quickly taken
from the town jail, he was hanged from a tree overlooking
picturesque Back Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. "Negro Quietly Swung
Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet here tonight," wrote the
Birmingham Age-Herald on its front page.9
Less than a week later, black convicts working alongside free
miners in the Prat No. 3 mine grew desperate enough to at empt
an impossibly irrational escape plan. As the day shift of workers
was leaving on November 16 to return to the prison stockade,
about fty African American prisoners couldn't be accounted for.
Extra guards were cal ed, but the missing miners didn't reappear. A
new crew of sixty men descended into the shaft to keep operations
under way.
Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of
Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of
ames coming from timbers supporting the manway the tunnel
used by miners to enter and leave the shaft. Within minutes, the
passageway was l ed with ames. Guards quickly discovered forty
of the missing miners waiting near another mine entrance with
dynamite—planning to blow open an iron gate during the chaos
and make their escape.
Eight other conspirators, who had set the diversionary re,
became trapped in the burning manway when one section of the
tunnel's roof col apsed as the con agration incinerated support
timbers. Engulfed in the ames, the miners were "roasted and
su ocated," according to a newspaperman on the scene.10 The
Board of Inspectors of Convicts recorded the deaths due to
"asphyxiation." The re burned for days. But within a week,
convicts were back in the tunnels of No. 3, digging coal again. By
the end of 1908, the rst ful year of U.S. Steel's ownership of the
Prat Mines, nearly sixty of the company's forced laborers had
died.11
Everywhere in the slave mines of Birmingham was death. Hardly
any week passed when one or more dead black corpses weren't
dragged up from inside the earth, heaped atop the mounds of coal
in the railcars, or found dead in the simple in rmaries of a prison.
Often no one knew or would say how a man died. The coroner of
Je erson County—a dour man named B. L. Brasher—made almost
continual visits to examine the dead or investigate the causes of
their demise.12
On July 20, 1909, Brasher went to examine the body of Joe
Hinson, sentenced to a life term for murder and sold into Prat 's No.
11 mine. Hinson had encouraged the story that his sentence was for
chopping o the head of a man in the town in East Lake after an
argument over Hinson's dog. A brutish record like that—whether
true or not—could save a convict from other prisoners, but not from
the mine itself. Charles Jones, another "prisner at Prat mines #11,"
as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal
as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal
car deep in the shaft and then slipped in the con ned quarters. As
he fel , his hand touched a live electric line. He died instantly from
electrocution.
On March 12, 1910, Harrison Grant, a slight eighteen-year-old
boy from Lowndes County with dark brown skin and a smal scar
atop his head, was digging alone in a room o the main shaft of
Prat No. 12—seven months into a term of one year and one day for
burglary. Grant had no formal education. His parents, three
brothers, and a sister lived in Montgomery.
As he hammered a wedge into shale beneath the coal seam, the
entire wal of rock suddenly col apsed, crushing him. There was
lit le in the obliterated mass of his body with which to identify him.
The coroner noted that he "wore shoe and hat #8."
Mat Dunn, an il iterate twenty-six-year-old black farmer from
Pickens County with missing teeth and only ve feet three inches
tal , was crushed on April 22, 1910, in the No. 12 mine, trapped
between a mining car and a "rib" of the mine—slang for the
columns of rock and coal left as supports for the roof of
underground chambers and shafts.13
The next day, inmates Wil Burck and Wil Wil iams began
ghting in the same shaft. Burck, a common laborer arrested in
Russel County for burglary, was gored rst in one side and then
through the head with a mining pick. Archey Hargrove, a black
man from Hale County, was found dead in No. 2 mine on July 3,
1910.
Sometimes death came in plainly obvious ways. Eugene Phil ips,
a twenty- ve-year-old black prisoner with a "ginger-cake
complexion," being held at the No. 12 prison for two years on a
charge of forgery, died July 16, 1910. "I found deceased came to his
death from a lick in the left side with a mining pick, at the hands of
Cli ord Reese," wrote Brasher. The two men had fought for reasons
no witness could recal . It ended with the shaft of pick imbedded in
Phil ips, a farm boy from Chilton County. W M. Hicks died at the
same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was
same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was
stabbed to death on August 25, by a convict defending himself from
Alexander. Gus Miles was crushed by fal ing rock in another Prat
mine on September 24.
On the rst day of October, miners at the No. 3 prison in Ensley
entered a dormant section of the mine and found submerged in the
rancid backwater the rot ing body of Wil Lindsay. A forty-one-year-
old black man, he had been sold by Shelby County sheri Fulton to
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in November 1908. Lindsay was
reported escaped the fol owing July. Guards assumed he slipped
out of the prison. His remains proved he'd disappeared into the
black labyrinth of the forgot en section of the dig. "This negro has
never been heard of since his escape and is quite possible that in
trying to make his escape he got lost in abandoned part of mines
and died from starvation and bad air," the coroner wrote.
Just before Thanksg
iving, a sixteen-year-old black farmhand from
Bar-bour County, serving 729 days leased to the mines for an
unrecorded theft, was kil ed by an accidental explosion of dynamite
in the Banner Mine. Also dead was twenty-seven-year-old John Tate
and a free white worker named Fred Woodman.
Four days later, on December 5, the desiccated remains of Joe L.
Thomas, another black man who had at empted to escape the Prat
No. 2 prison, was found lost in the fearsome place miners gave an
almost ethereal name: the "gob." Inside the great maze of tunnels
and rooms abandoned beneath the earth, often l ed with escaping
methane gas and the toxic runo of active shafts, the gob was an
ut erly lightless, nearly impenetrable maze of tunnels and
unventilated gas. "Deceased came to his death from exposure, as he
had been in ‘gob’ of mine for two or three weeks, trying to escape,"
the coroner wrote.
On January 21, 1911, Walter Cratick's skul was split with a
mining pick by another convict at the Banner Mine. A county
convict arrested in Je erson County for petit larceny barely a
month before his death, Cratick was a twenty-seven-year-old
farmhand from Barbour County, with a limp from a broken hip,
one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar
one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar
on his left side. Just 145 pounds and a lit le over ve feet, his term
was six months. The coroner ruled his death a justifiable homicide.
On January 31, 1911, Dink Tucker was found dead "for unknown
reasons" at Prat Slope No. 12. Nearing the end of his one-year
sentence to the mine, Tucker left behind a wife and two young boys
in Chambers County.
Cassie McNal y died from fal ing rock at the Prat No. 2 mine on
February 28, 1911. Essex Knox was found dead at the same shaft on
April 6. "I found deceased came to his death by being mashed to
death in the #2 prison by fal ing rock," wrote the company
physician.
By the spring of 1911, the coroner was making more and more
trips to the rising new competitor to U.S. Steel's Prat Mines. One of
Birmingham's most admired coal mining engineers and executives,
Erskine Ramsey, organized the Prat Consolidated Coal Company in
1904—quietly merging several smal companies and acquiring
98,000 acres of coalfields in Alabama.
A lifetime bachelor more comfortable with machines and metal
Slavery by Another Name Page 48
