Slavery by Another Name
Page 49
than men and women, Ramsey was intent on eclipsing his former
employer by building the most aggressive and pro table industrial
concern of the South. Prat Consolidated had by 1911 opened nine
new drift mines on previously undeveloped coal elds twenty miles
north of the Prat Mines. The company's showcase was the Banner
Mine, a deep shaft featuring the rst instal ation of electric lights,
cut ing tools, and hauling equipment—some of it invented by
Ramsey himself—and the largest prison compound in the state,
surrounded by a fteen-foot-high wooden stockade.14 Ramsey
sought to obtain as many convict workers as the sheri s of Alabama
would sel .
On April 8, 1911, two black convicts at the Banner Mine died
from inhaling afterdamp—the noxious combination of carbon
monoxide, nitrogen, and other gases left behind when methane
vapor ignites in a mine. One week later, near dawn on a rainy
Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their
Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their
positions inside Banner, an ignition of blasting powder triggered a
massive detonation. A handful of men nearest the initial blast died
instantly; the ventilation fan that pushed fresh air deep into the
shaft was blown out of position by the force of the explosion. The
sudden ash of re consumed much of the oxygen in the tunnels.
Into the chemical vacuum created by the absence of oxygen poured
what miners cal ed, with terror, "black damp"—a su ocating
mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. About a dozen men stil
near the 1,700-foot chute leading into the shaft escaped to safety.
The rest—113 black prisoners, the vast majority of them being held
for trivial misdemeanors, ten white prisoners, and ve free miners
—were kil ed by the gases.
A quickly impaneled coroner's jury certi ed that the company
was "using al reasonable means for the prevention of accidents"
and was not culpable in the deaths. Most of the bodies of the dead
were quickly dumped in a long trench dug by other prisoners in the
mine's convict cemetery just outside the stockade.15 Within two
weeks, the Banner Mine was in operation again, with a fresh
contingent of black prisoners.
Alabama's other slave mines never slowed production in the
aftermath of the disaster. Cleve Wat s died at Prison No. 12 on May
22, 1911, "struck in the head with a mining pick." Less than a
month later, June 20, 1911, Lee Lawson was kil ed in the same
mine in a rock fal . On July 29, Frank Mil er was shot to death by
two guards as he tried to escape No. 12.
A week later, Jim Minor died in a pickaxe ght at Sloss-
Shef ield's Flat Top mine. Ed Jerring was crushed by "being jammed
between two cars" in TCI's No. 12 mine on September 29, 1911.
Jackson Wheeler died from "an electric shock" at the company's No.
2 prison on October 3, 1911. Henry Carter was kil ed at Slope No.
12 prison the same day, "from fal ing rock."16
The gruesome fates of al those men ricocheted across the landscape
of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop
of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop
the deep residue of trauma left by thousands of prior horrors from
inside and outside the South's forced labor camps. Together, these
events formed the foundation of a col ective recognition among
African Americans of their precarious vulnerability in American
society. In the early years after Reconstruction, such news traveled
like a telegraph, ashing from one outraged bearer of the word to
another. Preachers decried the crimes against innocent men from
their pulpits. Before the nal ouster of blacks from virtual y al
southern elections, African American voters cast bal ots against
those who abided the system, in rare cases forcing a local o cial
out of o ce—as blacks once did to a sheri in Chat anooga,
Tennessee, after he permit ed the lynching of a man from his jail.17
There were isolated cases when black prisoners col ectively refused
to work in protest of brutal punishments meted out—and of
convicts physical y at acking their overseers.
But such resistance was almost invariably crushed with the sheer
force of guns, mob violence, and economic isolation. By the end of
the rst decade of the twentieth century, word of each new outrage
moved osmotical y absorbed often without explicit note into the
shared experience of a black society in which nearly al realistic
hope of authentic independence had been shat ered. The new
slavery of Alabama achieved its zenith. Three massive industrial
concerns—U.S. Steel's Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad unit, Sloss-
She eld, and now Prat Consolidated—competed mercilessly for
forced laborers. Other industrial concerns stood ready to step in if
any major player receded. The system arrived at a cynical optimum
of economic harmony, knit ing together the interests of capitalists,
white farmers, local sheri s and judges, and advocates of the most
cruel white supremacy—al joined and served by an unrelenting
pyramid of intimidation.
The companies, producing nearly fteen mil ion tons of coal
annual y by 1910, held more than three thousand black men against
their wil in Alabama's mines at al times—creating a bulwark
against labor unrest and an enormous economic subsidization to
their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African
their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African
Americans worked in southern Alabama timber and turpentine
camps operated by Henderson Lumber Company, Horse Shoe
Lumber Company, McPhaul Turpentine Company, a textile factory
in Prat vil e, and other businesses. Hundreds more—no one kept
count—were parceled out by local sheri s to farmers and
businessmen scat ered around the state.
The reality of incarceration in the slave mines became so
ubiquitously understood for African American men that landlords
and local sheri s— equipped with almost unchecked powers of
arrest and conviction and enormous personal nancial interest in
providing labor to the mines and other enterprises—could make
almost any demand upon any black man. More often than any
other, that demand was that they remain on the land of speci c
white farmers, living lives of supposedly voluntary serfdom or as
prisoners sentenced to that fate under the system of "confessions"
rati ed by Judge Jones in 1903. Across the Black Belt of Alabama,
more than ninety thousand African American families lived in the
darkness of that oppression with only rare protest.
In Barbour County, 170 miles from Birmingham, deep in the
cot on country of southern Alabama, the shadow was cast in the
shape of two brothers, Wil iam M. and Robert B. Teal. In 1911,
when a term-limit law forced Wil iam to give up his job as sheri ,
Robert was elected to the job instead. Wil iam became his chief
deputy. "The brothers just swapped places," according to the local
; newspaper, the Clayton Record.18
Because it control ed the county's convict leasing franchise, the
sheri 's o ce was a plum asset. Over one ten-year period, Barbour
County sent 691 men to the coal mines, primarily those operated
by Sloss-Shef ield and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.19
The Record took lit le note, among its weekly coverage of cot on
prices, buggy accidents, and lost mules, of the disappearance of so
many local black men. It enthusiastical y covered the lynchings of
African Americans, occurring with regularity in nearby towns and
across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans
across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans
who gathered in Georgia for a celebration on the anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation. Northern whites who lent support to
wel -known African Americans such as Booker T. Washington were
"negrophilists."
On Confederate Memorial Day that April, the keynote speaker,
standing atop a platform festooned with the bat le colors of the
Confederacy, received "deafening" applause, according to a reporter,
as he told the crowd nearly ve decades after the legal end of
slavery that the forced labor of blacks had been completely
constitutional and never violated "divine or moral law." A local
white girl gave a reading of Uncle Remus stories. Organizers plied
the crowd for donations to help erect a memorial on the town
square to southern veterans of the Civil War.20
Prospects for any black man who crossed Sheri Teal and his
brother were grim. The jail itself was cramped and unsanitary, and
had been formal y condemned by state inspectors.21 What went for
justice for African American defendants was swift. After one trial of
"a negro charged with violating prohibition" in 1911, a local judge
in Eufaula, the more prosperous cot on trading town twenty miles
to the east, explicitly instructed the jurors to convict the man. When
the jury unexpectedly acquit ed instead, Judge M. Sol-lie threatened
to have the jurors arrested for contempt of court.22
Once convicted, African Americans were routinely sent to the coal
mines near Birmingham for o enses as slight as sel ing a bot le of
moonshine. Most months, the Teals arrested fewer than twenty
men. Then suddenly dozens of minor o enders were rounded up
over a few days’ time and charged with vagrancy, alcohol
violations, and other minor o enses. Nearly al were quickly
sentenced to hard labor and shipped out within ten days to l a
gap in men at the coal mines.23
On any given day in the summer of 1912, the county jail near the
town square in Clayton held from ten to two dozen men, awaiting
the arrival of circuit judges who rotated through the area's towns. A
man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.
man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.
Another black man, Josia Marcia, was being held for al egedly
having had sexual relations with a white woman. Louis Denham
had been arrested for vagrancy. Housed with them were Ad Rumph,
Henry Demas, Jackson Daniels, and Peter Ford, four African
American men accused in the murder of a sharecropper named
George Blue. Demas, seventeen years old, and his wife were
boarders in the house of Rumph, another young black farmer, on
property near the remote farming community of Mt. Andrew.
Demas could read and write, but had no formal schooling. Rumph,
nineteen years old and il iterate, was married to a woman named
Fredie.24
Blue had been kil ed the prior spring by "a party of negroes,"
according to the Record. As often happened after black homicides
of that era, a large number of African Americans were charged in
the case. Indeed, on the same weekend that Blue was kil ed, seven
African Americans—including thirty-two-year-old farmhand Wil
Mil er—were charged in the death of another black man in Eufaula.
Mil er spent the summer in the Barbour County jail as wel .25
Whatever evidence was presented against the various defendants
was later lost, along with any record of their trials or whether the
men had access to at orneys. By fal , though, al had been convicted
and sentenced to varying terms of hard labor. Each of the accused
murderers received between twenty years and life. Col ins received
six months’ hard labor; Denham got ve months. No sentence was
recorded for Marcia.
Emaciated and marked, the men's bodies told their own story.
Mil er was logged into state records as having "one good tooth on
top," "shot through top of right shoulder," "badly burnt on back left
leg." Demas stood ve feet nine inches tal but weighed just 150
pounds. Scars were scat ered across his frame—the biggest a six-inch
gash stretching from above his left eye down the side of his face.26
In Henry County, the adjoining county to Barbour, Martin Danzy
was a thirty-three-year-old sharecropper and a husband of nine
years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection
years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection
with a third man's death, though no records of the precise charge
survived. On October 21, 1915, Danzy was sentenced to a term of
twenty- ve years at hard labor. The man arrested with him, Bud L.
Clark, was sentenced to twenty years.27
Danzy was promptly sold to Henderson Land & Lumber Co.,
which put him to work in a turpentine harvesting camp near
Tuscaloosa. Clark lasted just over two months at labor before
pneumonia kil ed him. Danzy contracted pneumonia as wel . Five
months after his conviction, he too was dead.
Among the prisoners from Barbour County, Col ins and Denham
survived their terms of labor. Mil er lived only a few months, until
he died the fol owing April in a Prat Consolidated mine, at the
hands of another convict. In November 1916, Rumph died of
tuberculosis in a state prison hospital. Demas died the fol owing
month of pneumonia, at the Banner Mine. Daniels was kil ed July
27, 1917, while at empting to escape the Sloss mine at Flat Top.28
Years later, the authorized biography of Elbert H. Gary, the
founding chairman of U.S. Steel, who ran the corporation from
1901 to 1927, quoted Gary as saying he was outraged when he
learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using
slave labor. He said he ordered the executive just instal ed as
president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, George G. Crawford,
to halt the practice immediately. Gary, namesake of the U.S. Steel-
designed city of Gary, Indiana, was widely regarded among U.S.
executives at the time as the national leader on progressive labor
practices and business ethics. "Think of that!" Gary was quoted as
saying. "I, an Abolitionist from childhood, at the head of a concern
working negroes in a chain gang, with a state representative
punishing them at the whipping post! Tear up that contract…I
won't stand for it."29
Perhaps Gary believed he had in fact ended U.S. Steel's slaving
practic
es. Alabama was far from Pit sburgh. But deep in the bowels
of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This
of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This
new southern unit of the company held contracts guaranteeing
thousands of forced workers from the state of Alabama for at least
four more years. The reality of the southern economic situation was
that even under the mandate of the most prominent and modern
new corporate executive of the era, U.S. Steel was unwil ing to
simply cease the practice of slavery at its new subsidiary.
Shortly after U.S. Steel acquired Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,
rumors circulated in Alabama that the northern owners were
unenthusias-tic about the convict system. In later testimony during
an investigation into corruption in the state's convict leasing
department, U.S. Steel executives said Judge Gary had indeed
directed them to abandon convict leasing "as soon as possible" after
the merger.
"Judge Gary said whether the hire of convicts was a good thing or
a bad thing that he didn't care to be connected with the penal
system of the State of Alabama," testi ed Walker Percy, a lawyer for
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.30
But in correspondence between company executives and state
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.