A local grand jury in Birmingham reported that the bartering of
African Americans for sale into the state's coal mines and the
col usion of local justices of the peace in the system were only
increasing. "The dockets of the justices of the peace in this county
would convict many of them for peonage should the federal
government choose to enforce its laws," read the nal report of the
grand jurors, issued in September 1911. It cited thousands of
unwarranted arrests and instances of cruelty, such as seventeen men
penned into a fourteen-square-foot holding cel without food for up
to two days.
"It would be far bet er for the state of Alabama that every
misdemeanant in the county of Je erson should go unpunished
than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to
than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to
protect themselves," the jurors concluded. The U.S. at orney in
Birmingham forwarded the report to Justice Department o cials in
Washington, but no federal action was ever undertaken in
response.37
Desperate for traction in the face of the forces coalescing against
African Americans, W. E. B. DuBois launched what would be the
NAACP's seminal organ, The Crisis, in 1910. But the same year,
Baltimore, fol owed by a host of cities across the South, enacted the
rst local ordinances delineating the geographic boundaries of
black and white neighborhoods.
The election in 1912 of Woodrow Wilson, an openly white
supremacist Democrat from Virginia, precipitated a dramatic
expansion of Jim Crow restrictions on African Americans. In the
nearly half century since the Civil War, the federal government had
been the one province of American public life where black o cials
could stil be appointed to important public positions, such as
postmasters, customs o cers, and other administrative roles. The
Washington government hired thousands of black workers, and
within federal buildings, African Americans maintained a measure
of civil equality with whites.
Wilson, narrowly elected in a split election among himself,
Republican Wil iam Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt running
on an independent Bul Moose platform, aggressively reversed the
federal government's traditions of at least modest equity for African
Americans. In paradoxical contrast with the "Wilsonian" reputation
the president developed after World War I for his pursuit of the
visionary League of Nations, Wilson dramatical y curtailed the
number of black appointees in his own government. His
administration largely introduced to Washington, D.C., the
demeaning southern traditions of racial y segregated work spaces,
of ice buildings, and restrooms.
Wilson strongly backed the demands of southern leaders that
their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting
without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no
without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no
chal enge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African
Americans across the region. Another half century would pass
before the civil rights movement could crack the anti-black legal
regime consolidated during Wilson's tenure.
After being named president of Princeton University in 1902,
Wilson openly discouraged African Americans from applying to the
school. In his academic writings as a political scientist, he blamed
the existence of slavery not on American leaders but on England's
imposing the institution upon its colonies despite England's
abolition three decades before the Civil War.
Wilson accepted the most distended idealization of the
antebel um South and demonization of the black political
participation that fol owed. "Domestic slaves were almost uniformly
dealt with indulgently and even a ectionately by their masters," he
wrote. The Reconstruction era of African American governance in
states with black majorities was "an extraordinary carnival of public
crime." Wilson cal ed the eventual suppression of black political
activity "the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites."38
In 1910, the vast majority, more than 93 percent, of the 10.2
mil ion African Americans living in the United States continued to
reside in the South. Nearly 60 percent of adult black men and
nearly 50 percent of black women worked in farming.39
Among whites, farming was a path to or an established form of
economic independence. More than 3.7 mil ion white men, more
than two thirds, owned their own farms. Conditions were more
than reversed for blacks. Fewer than one third of nearly 900,000
farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men
who til ed the land. The rest worked at the behest of white men.
There is lit le empirical evidence on which to establish the
precise economic arrangements between most black families and
the landlords who so dominated their lives—especial y on the
question of how many black families lived in a form of
uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record
uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record
survives indicates that the desperate plight of black farmers
captured in DuBois's loosely ctionalized account of Lowndes
County, Alabama, was only worsening. When federal census takers
questioned every farmer in the United States in 1910, they
calculated that nearly 700,000 black men, along with at least 2.5
mil ion wives and children, lived and worked in the murky limbo
of sharecroppers and rent farmers. Tenants ostensibly paid some
form of rent for the land they farmed; sharecroppers gave up most
of their crops at the end of each season to a landlord in return for
use of his property, a house, and supplies. But under the South's
regime of legal restrictions on black mobility and job freedom, the
vast majority of those African Americans lived in a state of
subjection to the white landowners or employers. Federal
enumerators were unable to classify tens of thousands more men for
whom the nature of their relationship to white landowners was
unclear.
A separate federal survey of farmers in 1909 gave a tel ing clue to
the true status of African Americans who whites would have
claimed were free laborers. Of nearly 2.5 mil ion farms in the
eleven states of the old Confederacy, the owners of almost 1 mil ion
farms reported giving some form of compensation to workers
during the previous year. On most of the farms— a total of more
than 850,000—the entire compensation to "laborers" for the year
was less than seventy-nine dol ars.40
When The Birth of a Nation, the movie version of the racial y
vitriolic stage play The Clansman starring the former deputy sheri
from Shelby County, Alabama, appeared in 1915, President Wilson
enthusiastical y embraced it. The best-sel ing creator of the play,
Thomas Dixon, who had proclaimed in Atlanta less than a decade
earlier that the duty of every southern white man w
as to preserve
"Aryan supremacy," was a classmate from Johns Hopkins University
and longtime friend of the president.
Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's
Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's
savage war on black political involvement in the 1870s, white
audiences thril ed to the silent movie, the rst ful -length American
lm. It became Hol ywood's rst true theatrical blockbuster. Its
screening for President Wilson was the rst showing of a moving
lm at the White House. Wilson helped arrange previews for other
elected o cials, members of his cabinets, and justices of the
Supreme Court. "My only regret," he reportedly said, "is that it is al
so terribly true."
As discom ting for blacks as the president's embrace of a lm
that depicted their participation in public life as no less than venal
was an extraordinary combination of applause and silence from
other white Americans. Even in the most distant left-wing reaches of
white political activism in the North, the embryonic movements to
create socialist and communist parties in the United States, many
succumbed to the lure of a caricatured view of African Americans as
an inferior class capable of comic relief but lit le more. The Masses
magazine, a groundbreaking socialist journal published in
Greenwich Vil age, routinely ran cartoons and spoofs depicting
large-lipped, bu oonish blacks. "Your pictures of colored people …
depress the negroes themselves and con rm the whites in their
contemptuous and scornful at itude," wrote a critical reader in a
1915 let er to the editor.41
In Alabama's forced labor coal mines, more than three thousand
prisoners were at work by 1915.42 A study commissioned by
Alabama's governor three years later concluded that the state's
convict system remained an "extraordinary hazard to the life and
limbs" of anyone pul ed into it. He recommended abolishing the
labor system entirely43
As thousands of black soldiers returned to the United States after
the end of World War I in 1918, anticipating that their service
overseas would earn some relief from racial animosity at home,
whites across the country rampaged again, with gruesome riots in
South Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., Il inois, and Arkansas, and
a new wave of lynchings.
In the spring of 1920, a white farmer in rural Jasper County,
Georgia, visited the prison stockade on Bryan Street in Atlanta—the
same one James W. English had relied on as a supply of slave labor
for Chat ahoochee Brick two decades earlier. He spot ed a strong,
young black man whose nickname was "Iron John," and paid his
ne in return for a contract on the prisoner's labor, probably for
one year.
Repeating the ritual that played out hundreds of thousands of
times in hundreds of counties across the South over more than half
a century since the end of the Civil War, the farmer, John S.
Wil iams, took the man back to his sprawling plantation and
ordered him to get to work or expect to be brutal y punished. He
was locked into a bunkhouse with about forty other black men
acquired by similar means and held against their wil .
It wasn't long before Iron John drew the wrath of Wil iams's
grown son Leroy—who believed the new laborer wasn't working
hard enough on a crew of black laborers ordered to build a fence.
Iron John was stretched across a gasoline barrel, naked from the
waist up, and whipped long and hard with a buggy whip. At some
point, he cried out angrily, "Don't hit me no more …I'd rather be
dead than treated this way"44
Leroy Wil iams drew his pistol, stepped forward, and shot the
striped and bleeding black man in the shoulder. "Do you want any
more?" he asked.
"Yes …shoot me," he answered.
The white man raised the pistol to Iron John's head and red
into his skul . He died instantly. At the instructions of the white
man, other laborers at ached Iron John's body to a heavy log with
wire, rowed it to the middle of a farm pond, and al owed it to sink.
The murder—and certainly the whippings that preceded it—were
hardly unusual. There had been many of the former and thousands
of the lat er by the time a black laborer named Gus Chapman
escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in
escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in
1921, he made his way to the federal courthouse in Atlanta. Two
weeks after Chapman told his story to federal o cials, two agents
from the Department of Justice's stil new Bureau of Investigation
visited Wil iams to inquire about conditions.
They found eleven black forced laborers working in a eld, al of
them evidently there to work o criminal nes supposedly paid on
their behalf by Wil iams. The African American men were
supervised by Clyde Manning, a black overseer long entrusted by
Wil iams to keep the men on the farm while he was away. While
the agents were there, the plantation owner returned home.
Wil iams, a thin fty-four-year-old with a drawn face and slight
mustache, invited the two o cers to sit and have a glass of tea.
Reclining on chairs on the porch, the agents asked if the black eld
workers were being held in "peonage." Wil iams asked them to
explain exactly what the "peonage" law was about.
"If you pay a nigger's ne or go on his bond and you work him
on your place, you're guilty of peonage," replied George W Brown,
one of the Bureau of Investigation agents, using the time-honored
southern signal that his questions didn't indicate any particular
regard for black people.
Wil iams laughed softly, according to later testimony. "Wel , if
that is the case, me and most of the people who have done
anything of the sort were guilty of peonage," the farmer replied. "I
don't keep any of my niggers locked up. Of course, I do tel some of
them they shouldn't leave before paying the ne they rightly owe
me."
Brown and his partner seemed satis ed with the answer. The
farmer relaxed. But then Wil iams began to talk more about the
farm. He described how he sometimes hunted down escapees and
forced them to return. The agents asked if they could look around
the plantation. They saw the slave quarters, where shackles and
chains were clearly used to restrain forced laborers at night. Every
black worker they quizzed, while appearing terri ed and reluctant
to talk, nonetheless said they were satis ed with their treatment on
the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or
the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or
other acts of violence on the farm.
By the end of the day, the agents were convinced that Wil iams
had commit ed at least a technical violation of the peonage statute.
But to a pair of experienced eld agents, both native to the South,
the situation looked typical for most big southern farms. The
anxiety and mumbling of the workers were routine, given the
al whites and open fear to law enforcement. After al the years of
investigations and failed peonage prosecutions in the South, Brown
knew no Georgia jury would convict a white man for practices
engaged in by tens of thousands of other white farmers across the
region— especial y since Wil iams's laborers appeared relatively
wel fed and clothed. This wasn't a case worth wasting time on. The
agents explained the anti-peonage statute to the farmer again,
warning him not to violate it further.
"I don't think you need to have any fear of any case before the
federal grand jury," Brown told him as they departed.
That assurance wasn't enough for Wil iams. He was an intel igent
and relatively worldly man. Now that he understood the peonage
law more clearly—and knew that federal agents had identi ed him
as a violator— Wil iams recognized his vulnerability, and that of his
adult sons. The property he and his oldest sons farmed stretched for
miles across Jasper County. In Wil iams's big house at the center of
the plantation lived his wife and eight minor children.
He had built a comfortable and in uential life, and a farm
admired for its size and profitability. Wil iams had the distinction of
owning an early automobile, and the ear of white county leaders.
He would not risk seeing a personal empire built over twenty years
ruined. Wil iams resolved that no African American would ever
testify of the slavery on his plantation.
Just after dawn the next morning, Wil iams found Manning, the
black overseer, in the early chil and told him the other workers
could "ruin" them al . "You have to get rid of al the stockade
niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."
niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."
Two days later, Wil iams and Manning at acked Johnnie
Wil iams, one of the forced laborers, in a remote pasture and
bludgeoned him to death with the at side of an axe. The fol owing
morning, John Wil Gaither was ordered to begin digging a new
wel . Once it was a few feet deep, he was kil ed with a pickaxe
blow to the head and buried in the hole.
On the evening of Friday, February 25, 1921, a week after the
federal agents visited, Wil iams entered the slave quarters and told
the stunned men they were free to go. He said John Browne and
Slavery by Another Name Page 53
