Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  here long ago. The county's overwhelming black majority elected the rst African

  American sheriff in the 1970s.

  The vast wealth of John T Milner began to dissipate with his death in the early

  twentieth century. The dynasty that grew from his partnership with the Flowers family

  collapsed in a 1920s bank failure. By 2007, however, a Massachusetts-reared grandson

  three generations removed, Chris Flowers, had resurrected and exponentially eclipsed

  the family's prior fortunes. His rm, J. C. Flowers & Co., emerged as one of the most

  dynamic financiers in the private equity boom on Wall Street.3

  Like Elisha Cottingham's antebellum slavery, few others of the thousands of

  plantation dynasties forged with the modern forced labor of John W. Pace survived its

  nal abolition. The big houses of the great Kinderlou slave farm in Georgia all burned

  before World War II. The McRee family fell into obscurity. Pace died within a decade

  of his pardon by President Roosevelt. In 1926, a hydroelectric dam was completed by a

  Southern Company subsidiary on the Tallapoosa River, several miles south of the

  convergence with Big Sandy Creek. The rich river-bottom plantation of John Pace,

  along with many of the other slaveholding farms along Red Ridge Road, was swallowed

  under 44,000 acres of water, much of it more than one hundred feet deep. Pace's

  schoolteacher son, Fulton, became a civil engineer for the town of Goodwater and died

  sometime after World War II. His grandson, Fulton Jr., retired to Florida and died there

  in 1976. On a hilltop, near the lake's edge, a Cosby family cemetery plot clings to

  existence amid a cluster of vacation homes.4

  The legacy of this slavery is stronger among the corporations that relied on it. In 1969

  Walter Industries, Inc., acquired an ailing company called U.S. Pipe & Foundry

  Company in Birmingham. Seventeen years earlier, that company had merged with Sloss-

  She eld Iron and Steel, the company with the longest record of operating slave mines

  in Alabama. The purchase included Flat Top mine, where so many black laborers

  perished under the whip. Later, the company changed the name of the mine and

  bulldozed the old prison stockade. The sprawling town that surrounded the shafts was

  abandoned when the mine shut down. In the 1980s, Walter Industries strip-mined the

  land—consuming the earth and coal with massive machines that obliterated the

  landscape for miles. Only an abandoned stretch of rail line and the old commissary, its

  windows blown out, survive.

  The old Sloss-She eld today is a subsidiary called Sloss Industries. Its parent's best-

  known enterprise is another division called Jim Walter Homes—a famous maker of

  inexpensive, prefabricated homes. A sign of aspiration and success among low-income

  African Americans all across the Black Belt is to leave behind public housing or

  broken-down trailer homes and purchase the comfort of a Jim Walter home.

  Descendants of the South's forced laborers are a critical market.

  On the Web site of Sloss Industries, the company heralds its long and rich history as

  a titan of southern industry that helped "launch Birmingham's rise to fame as a major

  industrial center."5 There is no reference to the human engines that fueled so much

  economic activity over Sloss's nearly fifty-year reliance on slaves after the Civil War.

  In the 1960s, U.S. Steel published a 100th anniversary commemorative book to honor

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.'s history dating to the 1860s. But the volume says

  nothing of the tens of thousands of slave workers who passed through its mines, the

  armies of broken miners, the hundreds buried or burned in its graveyards and ovens.

  The executives of Walter Industries in the twenty- rst century say they know nothing

  of that past. "Obviously, this was a dark chapter for U.S. business," Kyle Parks, a

  spokesman for the company, told me in 2001. "Certainly no company today could even

  conceive of this kind of practice."

  In Atlanta, the fortunes generated at slave mines, plantations, and the nightmarish

  Chattahoochee Brick became pillars of the economic transformation and social orbits

  of the city that would outpace all others in the South. A daughter of James W. English

  married a bank executive named James Robinson Sr., who grew the Fourth National

  Bank into the most prosperous in the South. The family guided the bank through a

  series of mergers and acquisitions ending in 1985, when it was purchased by a

  company that is now part of Wachovia Bank Corp.—the fourth largest in the United

  States as measured by assets. English's great-grandson, James Robinson III, was the chief

  executive o cer of American Express from 1977 to 1993 and became a member of the

  board of Coca-Cola Co., where he serves today.

  Joel Hurt, who believed the slaves in his coal mines could never be whipped too

  much, was also chairman of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank. In 1893, Hurt installed as

  head of his streetcar company his younger brother-in-law Ernest Woodru . Leveraging

  his interests in real estate and slave mines, Hurt and his enterprises became Atlanta's

  most energetic deal makers and buyout artists. Beginning with a sale in 1902, the

  streetcar company evolved over time into Georgia Power Company— agship of

  Southern Company, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States today. In

  1919, after succeeding Hurt as chairman of Trust Company, Woodru engineered the

  purchase of Coca-Cola for $25 million and the current incarnation of that company.

  Suntrust Bank, the modern version of Trust Company, remains one of the largest

  holders of stock in Coca-Cola. Woodru 's son, Robert Woodru , was named president

  of Coke in 1923, and ran the company until 1954, becoming the era's most in uential

  business figure in the South. He died in 1985.

  But what do these threads to a terrible past tell us? Every gure who chose to continue

  slavery is dead. None of the actions, however cruel, of long-dead companies or men can

  be interpreted as a re ection on their current corporate manifestations or on distant

  lines of familial descent. I wanted to know, though, how the heirs to slave-dependent

  corporations and the pools of wealth they sometimes left behind perceive that history

  today—or whether they knew of it at all.

  When I contacted descendants of Atlanta's former mayor and extraordinary early

  entrepreneur James W. English, who died in 1925, the family asked me to speak with

  Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the son-in-law of James Robinson III. It was obvious that even

  nine decades after his death, English's descendants are drenched in the lore of his

  remarkable life and achievements.

  Cook is an elite architect, an ardent preservationist, and the driving force behind an

  ambitious plan to build a dramatic seventy-three-foot-high monument in downtown

  Atlanta as a tribute to the great families of the city, including the family of Captain

  English. Once it is completed, exhibition space at the classical stone archway will

  house the personal papers of English, Joel Hurt, and other pioneering builders of the

  city. Some black entrepreneurs of later in the twentieth century will be featured as well.

  Cook told me the museum space is expected to become the primary institution for

  presenting the positive history of Atlanta
and its emergence as a major American city

  and commercial center.

  After a long lunch with Cook and English Robinson, another family member, I was

  uncertain, however, about how the museum will present the crucial role of the new

  slavery in building Atlanta and the fortunes of their forebear. "In the proper context, we

  don't object to it being discussed," Cook told me.6 But they were insistent that no

  signi cant abuses of African Americans had ever occurred at the brick factory, coal

  mines, and lumber camps of a century ago. They cited an admirable account of

  English's unsuccessfully attempting to calm and disperse the white mobs that rampaged

  in Atlanta during the bloody race riot of 1906 and a nineteenth-century newspaper

  article extolling the food and fellowship o ered to the forced laborers at the family

  brick factory. They knew nothing of the real history. I sympathized with their

  discomfort in encountering my contradictions to the heroic, tutelary portrait of English

  handed down through generations. But I left our dialogue worried that the slaves who

  made the bricks with which Atlanta was built would yet be denied their place in the

  city's history.

  Most corporations say it would be terribly wrong to associate their current

  manifestations with the abuses of convict leasing and twentieth-century forced labor—

  particularly for actions committed by companies they acquired or merged into decades

  after the fact.

  Drummond Coal Company, founded in 1935,7 says it has no meaningful connection

  to the use of convict labor, despite its merger in 1985 with Alabama By-Products

  Corp.,8 a company created through a merger in 1925 with Pratt Consolidated Coal, one

  of the biggest users of forced labor during the previous two decades and owner of the

  deadly Banner Mine.

  Drummond today is a family-owned coal and real estate company based in Jasper,

  Alabama, with mining operations in Alabama and South America. "I don't know how we

  could be tied back to something that happened in the early part of the century,"

  Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy said when I called to inquire about the company's

  roots. "Drummond wasn't even founded then."9

  U.S. Steel executives say that while convict leasing was clearly "abhorrent," their

  company shouldn't be associated with it—especially events that predated the

  acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in late 1907. "When it comes to the

  question of burden, I don't think anybody here at this company today would feel

  burdened at all by anything that happened before 1908," Richard F. Lerach, assistant

  general counsel to U.S. Steel, told me in 2001. "If we in fact knew that the people who

  were there between 1908 and 1911 were forced to work in obviously unsafe

  conditions, which we don't know that was true, we would feel badly about that."10

  Legally, there are few grounds on which to argue that a modern corporation inherits

  any liability of a predecessor's civil rights violations or other crimes that might have

  occurred in the distant past. A federal judge in 2004 denounced the horrors of a 1921

  rampage by whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed between one hundred and three

  hundred African Americans and destroyed more than a thousand homes.11 But at the

  same time he dismissed a lawsuit brought by elderly plainti s whose families were

  attacked in the riot, saying the statute of limitations had passed for any legal claims and

  that the passage of time would make it impossible for the truth ever to be fully

  revealed.

  Yet U.S. law is unequivocal that the deaths of executives who were responsible for

  dubious actions don't end a company's legal obligations. And in the speci c area of

  hazardous waste, the United States has adopted laws forcing companies to take

  responsibility for contamination by predecessor companies, regardless of the passage of

  time. "It doesn't matter whether you had nothing to do with this toxic stu . If you buy a

  company that failed to clean up this stu , you're responsible," says Martha Minow, a

  professor at Harvard University Law School who has written extensively about

  reparations for social abuses. "Why have we done that on environmental matters, but

  not race?"12

  Indeed, the commercial sectors of U.S. society have never been asked to fully account

  for their roles as the primary enforcers of Jim Crow segregation, and not at all for

  engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War. The civil rights

  movement focused on forcing government and individual citizens to integrate public

  schools, reinstate full voting rights, and end offensive behavior.

  But it was business that policed adherence to America's racial customs more than any

  other actor in U.S. society. American banks maintained ubiquitous discriminatory

  lending practices throughout the country that until the 1960s prevented millions of

  working-class African Americans from obtaining the lines of credit that millions of

  white families used to accumulate wealth and move from lower- to middle-class status.

  Indeed, the opportunity for blacks to pursue the most basic American formula for

  achieving middle-class status—buying a home in desirable neighborhoods where real

  estate values were likely to appreciate over time—was openly barred by legions of real

  estate agents in every city and region. Until the 1950s, rules of the National Association

  of Realtors made it a violation of the organization's code of ethics for an agent to sell a

  home in a white neighborhood to an African American, or vice versa. It was hundreds

  of thousands of individual businesses that refused to give blacks jobs, equal pay, or

  promotions. It was wealthy men on Wall Street and in the executive suites of southern

  banks that nanced the organized opposition to passage of the Civil Rights Act of

  1964.13

  U.S. Steel executives say that whatever happened at the company's Alabama mines

  long ago, it would be impossible to appropriately assign responsibility for any

  corporation's actions in so remote an era. "Is it fair in fact to punish people who are

  living today, who have certain assets they might have inherited from others, or

  corporate assets that have been passed on?" said Lerach. "You can get to a situation

  where there is such a passage of time that it simply doesn't make sense and is not fair."

  U.S. Steel said it knew almost nothing about the cemeteries in Pratt City, where so

  many are buried. It still owns the properties, and obtained a cemetery property tax

  exemption on the largest burial eld in 1997. But o cials say they are unable to locate

  records of burials there, or of the company prisons that once stood nearby, or for that

  matter any other aspect of the company's history of leasing forced laborers. The only

  reference to the graveyards in surviving corporate documents, they say, is a map of the

  property marked with the notation "Negro Cemetery." Company o cials theorize that

  the graveyard was an informal burial area used by African American families living

  nearby, with no formal connection to U.S. Steel.

  "Are there convicts on that site? Possibly, quite possibly," said Tom Fer-rall, the

  company spokesman. "But I am unable to tell you that there are."14

  A striking contrast to U.S. Steel's approach is that of Wachovia Ban
k, the North

  Carolina financial institution that in 1985 acquired FirstAtlanta Corp., the bank born of

  the wealth created by James W. English's slave-driven brick factory in Atlanta.

  Prompted by an ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council, Wachovia disclosed in

  2005 that two predecessor banks in Georgia and South Carolina owned or held as

  collateral at least 691 slaves before the Civil War. It formally apologized to "all

  Americans and especially to African Americans and people of African descent,"

  established scholarship funds for minorities, and promoted a broad discussion of racial

  issues inside the company. 15

  Wachovia's chief executive o cer, Ken Thompson, a fty-seven-year-old native of

  Rocky Mount, North Carolina, was an enlightened white southerner but had never

  much considered if the racial climate of earlier eras related to the present. Like many

  Americans, he was vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of delving into sensitive

  discussions of race or the past.

  "I had the attitude that this was something that happened ve generations ago, and

  we have no responsibility for it," Thompson told me. But he was convinced by a close

  adviser that the disclosure requirement ought to be taken seriously, both to ensure the

  bank's ongoing business relationship with the city of Chicago and to demonstrate its

  willingness to probe a difficult issue honestly.

  A team of historians was hired to investigate the past records of Wachovia, all the

  banks it had acquired, and all their corporate predecessors . Once the results were

  back, Thompson and other top managers began meeting with employee groups to

  discuss the ndings and repeatedly apologizing for the company's ties to events more

  than 150 years earlier. What initially felt like a rote "diversity" relations process to

  fulfill a government regulation quickly became something more profound.

  "I was overwhelmed by the emotional impact our apology had …for African American

  employees," Thompson said. Workers cried, held hands, embraced one another

  regardless of company rank, and, in an unprecedented way, began speaking to one

  another.

  "Just by going through the act of acknowledging something that happened one

  hundred fty years before and talking about it galvanized that group…It was cathartic,"