Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  Thompson said. "African American employees at our company in my view all of a

  sudden are always willing to give us the bene t of the doubt on our intentions about

  anything that's race related. There's a deeper trust…. What you get is more

  understanding and more ‘Okay let's go forward and gure out solutions for this in the

  future. Let's not rehash this forever.’ "16

  By frankly confronting a past that Wachovia didn't know existed and then expected to

  stir anger and tumult, an old southern bank found a kind of peace.

  I found something similarly gratifying in the life of Judge Eugene Reese, the grandson

  of the federal prosecutor who worked so assiduously—and unsuccessfully—to beat back

  slavery in 1903. The contemporary Reese actually knew nothing about that surprising

  crusade by his grandfather, who died before the eventual judge was born. But like his

  grandfather, Eugene Reese, a Democrat, is neither a bleeding heart nor willing to shy

  away from the vestiges of slavery. "Some people say we still have slavery," he said to

  me. Reese's most controversial ruling was in a 1990s case in which he declared

  unconstitutional Alabama's system for funding public schools, under which schools

  serving children in poor areas receive dramatically less than those in more a uent

  areas. The racial implications of the system, a vestige of the same constitution that

  ended black voting in 1901, are obvious. Reese was excoriated in conservative circles

  in his home state.

  "We've come a long way in Alabama," he told me. "But we still have a ways to go."17

  That most American corporations and families would rather not reopen the details of

  how they pro ted from the racial attitudes in the early twentieth century is perhaps to

  be expected. More puzzling is that as badly as many young African Americans want

  answers to the question of what truly happened in the century after the Civil War, many

  others do not.

  When Earl Brown18 became a young miner in Birmingham in the 1940s, he was sent

  to the remains of Flat Top mine. Where once two train lines into the shafts had been

  used to separate felony prisoners from misdemeanor prisoners, the company by then

  used the double-track system to separate white miners from black. Among the African

  Americans, many of the oldest laborers were former prisoners who had taken jobs as

  free workers in the mine after being freed from bondage. Those men still called the

  bosses in the shaft "Captain," and told stories to younger men of the bru-talizations that

  had occurred underground there. When Brown became a union activist, they warned

  him about the dangers of white managers and they told him stories of how they had

  been drawn into the mines as slaves on the basis of trumped-up charges and

  kidnappings by county sheriffs.

  Brown listened. But he didn't believe. "I never found it credible," he told me.

  Instead, Brown and so many other African Americans accepted a rationale that whites

  had long foisted upon them. There were "good" black people and "bad" black people.

  Those who ended up as slave laborers were bad or weak—adding further to the terror

  of being forced to join them and to share their social stain. Their injuries, and the fear

  they fostered among all other African Americans, were attributed to them—not their

  white masters. Whites repeatedly tried to stir this internal black tension. When Martin

  Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to tour the terrorized surrounding

  counties of the Black Belt, he was accused of pitting good blacks versus bad. When he

  drove to Lowndes County—which a full century after the end of slavery remained a

  place of desolate black powerlessness and unchecked white brutality—King and his

  activists were warned not to agitate the docile "good Negroes" of the county. Despite a

  population overwhelmingly majority-black, whites controlled virtually all the land, and

  every aspect of politics and economics. The Calhoun School had all but collapsed. Most

  African Americans remained tenants and sharecroppers, living in unplumbed hovels

  little changed from the desperate conditions recorded by DuBois in 1906.

  No African American had cast a vote there in the twentieth century. Galvanized by

  the work of civil rights ministers, dozens of young African Americans attempted

  unsuccessfully during the spring and summer of that year to register to vote outside the

  Lowndes County courthouse in Hayneville. On August 20, 1965, after releasing from the

  local jail a group of civil rights workers who had attempted a peaceful march in the

  county, Deputy Sheriff Tom Coleman—a man cut from the same crude cloth as Sheriff J.

  W. Dixon, who drove out federal investigators six decades earlier—followed the

  activists down a sunny street, raised a 12-gauge shotgun, and at point-blank range

  gunned down two white ministers working with the group. One, Jonathan Daniels, was

  killed instantly, his body all but cut in half by the force of the blast.19

  Reading Charles Silberman's Crisis in Black and White after its publication the prior

  year, Martin Luther King scribbled a long note in the margins of his personal copy:

  "The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the

  North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation

  Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person."20

  In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested

  and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the

  beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

  In my quest to nd Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when

  white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all

  marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our

  connections to the speci c crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we

  are tainted by the failures of our fathers to ful ll our national credos when their

  courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at

  the expense of others. It is not our "fault." But it is undeniably our inheritance.

  I never expected to discover my own family lines as characters in the narrative of this

  book. Yet to my great surprise, I learned that the branch of black Cottinghams who left

  the old farm in Alabama during the Civil War and made their way to Louisiana settled

  in the parish of my mother's birth, the place where I spent countless summer days on

  the modest farm of my grandparents. The Cottingham descendants expired generations

  in the backwoods black settlements of Jackson Parish through the cruel decades of the

  twentieth century, as my family migrated from arch-poverty to blue-collar stability and

  nally to the comfort of white middle-class sanctity. Today, an ebullient woman named

  Maureen Cottenham, my mother's peer, writes a regular column for the parish

  newspaper on the social life of African Americans in and around Jonesboro, Louisiana.

  Black Cottenhams are celebrated athletes in the schools of an adjacent town. The law

  rm of my eldest cousin has represented young Cottenhams who nd their way into

  trouble with the law. There is a measure of relief in that justice.

&nbs
p; But there was more. Many times in my childhood, my grandmother Myrtie Wiggins

  Blackmon told me the epic story, passed down to her by my great-great-grandmother, of

  the family's passage after the Civil War from a place she called New Light, Alabama, to

  the hill country of northern Louisiana. Morris Foshee, my great-great-great-grandfather,

  had returned from four years of ghting with the 48th Infantry to a devastated

  Alabama. An inconspicuous private who had fought with his brother Wiley from 1861

  until their surrender with Lee at Appomattox, he had been too poor to own slaves

  before the war, and poorer still in its aftermath. But in my visits to Alabama, searching

  for the shards with which to reconstruct the evil visage of John Pace, I found in the

  Tallapoosa County courthouse, among the slave deeds, mortgages, and convict

  contracts, the wedding license signed by Morris and my great-great-great-grandmother. I

  found the place of their farm, a few miles upstream on the Coosa River from the

  horri c Threat slave plantation. New Light was actually a tiny misremem-bered and

  mispronounced town called Newsite. I discovered that a distant Foshee line invested in

  a sawmill once operated with forced labor.

  As I tugged further at the tightly threaded shrouds of the past, I learned that Morris

  and Wiley served in gallant, if misguided, company—the Tal-lapoosa County men who

  famously charged the hill called Little Round Top and were repulsed by a hailstorm of

  Union gun re and bayonets in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. They attacked

  that day under the direct command of Lt. Col. Michael J. Bulger, the man who thirty

  years later rose in defense of John Pace as he climbed to power in Tallapoosa County.

  Another decade hence, it was Bulger's son—by then the town's most prominent lawyer—

  who represented Pace in his trial for slavery in 1903.

  I had no hand in the horrors perpetrated by John Pace or any of the other twentieth-

  century slave masters who terrorized American blacks for four generations. But it is

  nonetheless true that hundreds of millions of us spring from or bene t as a result of

  lines of descent that abided those crimes and benefited from them.

  Over the decades, Birmingham spread to surround the cemetery where convicts in the

  rst Pratt Mines prisons were buried. Low-rent apartments on one side of the

  graveyard, shabby storefronts on another, an industrial site, a city park designated for

  "colored" use when it was created. In 1994, industrial archaeologist Jack Bergstresser

  found the cemetery while conducting a survey for the federal government to map the

  remains of nearby coke ovens, mine shafts, and railroad lines.

  As a boy in the 1930s, Willie Clark, a lifelong resident of Pratt City, already knew

  what lay deep in the thick underbrush. He and other youngsters played among the

  unmarked graves of the rst cemetery, picking blackberries from the thorny vines that

  grew wild between the plots. Burials were rare by then. The older graves had begun to

  collapse, he says, exposing jumbles of human bones.

  "The convicts were buried out there," Clark told me, sweeping his arm toward the

  overgrown eld. "I heard my daddy talking about how they would beat the convicts

  with pick handles. If they didn't like them, they would kill them…. They would put them

  under harsh punishment. It was gruesome back then."21

  Though in his ninth decade, Clark, more than six feet tall, could still walk with me to

  the site from his nearby home and point out where old mine shafts reached the surface

  and where dozens of company houses once stood. He told me his father also said that

  when convicts were killed in the shafts, company o cials sometimes didn't take the

  time to bury them, but instead tossed the bodies into the red-hot coke ovens glowing

  nearby.

  "What can you do about it now?" he says, stepping gingerly through the trees and

  undergrowth. "But the company…ought to clean that land up, or turn it back over to the

  city or somebody else who can make some use of it, take care of it."

  On a cool fall night, Pearline Danzey the eighty-eight-year-old matriarch of the

  extended family of Martin Danzy who died as a slave worker in a turpentine camp in

  1916, welcomed me to her home. She presided from a worn vinyl recliner in her living

  room over a parade of nieces, nephews, and children. Across the room, her

  bewhiskered grandfather—one of Martin's older brothers—squints from a faded

  photograph above the television set. After all these years, it is hard for Mrs. Danzey to

  stay focused on the story of Uncle Martin—now commingled with so much time,

  struggle, and memories of the other privations and violence that came with life as a

  young black girl on a sharecrop farm. Whether the companies that played a hand in the

  abuse and death of her uncle and other African Americans should be held accountable

  today is an abstraction she can't or won't waste time contemplating.

  " To kill a colored person then, it wasn't nothing," she says. "We was slaves too in a

  way."22

  For most of the Danzeys gathered that night, this is the rst time they have heard

  "Pearl," as Mrs. Danzey is known to them all, tell the harsh tales of her childhood. Her

  daughter Ida was of the generation in their country town that as teenagers integrated

  the local schools and de ed the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. They are lled with a sense

  of righteous victory over the segregation of their childhoods. But until this night, Ida

  Hogan and most of the others had never inquired—never considered really—that the

  childhood Pearline was born into had been one vastly more difficult than their own.

  "Our daddy and momma never taught us to hate white people…. We just got taught

  who always got the job, who had authority, and we were supposed to address them with

  respect," explained Ida, one of Pearline's nieces. "Until the civil rights movement we

  didn't know" life could be any other way, she said.

  The racial disparities of the 1950s and 1960s were the routine, rarely commented-

  upon backdrop of rural black life. "We had to pick cotton to buy books, so we picked

  cotton," said Cynthia James, a great-niece of Pearline's in her late forties. "It was much

  later on that we realized that the raggedy old books we were getting were just being

  passed on."

  Inspired by Martin Luther King's historic visit to Selma, Ida and six other black

  children in Abbeville in 1966 insisted on being served in the town's whites-only diner.

  It was a turning point for the community. Her generation became the family's bridge

  between the desperate farm life Pearl was born into and today's mystifying era, when

  relative prosperity, lingering racial tensions, and the occasional biracial marriage all

  coexist in Henry County.

  The Danzeys live in a place where cotton has been grown for most of two centuries

  and where Mrs. Danzey's family traces its history back to 1832 and a slave, Frank,

  brought to the county by a local white farmer named John Danzey. Pearline

  remembered her uncle Martin mostly as a man who spelled his last name without an

  "e," as did one line of white Danzys who lived nearby. She said she no longer

  remembered his alleged crime.

  "My granddaddy used to talk about him. He went o to prison and died there," sh
e

  says. "They was real sad about it."

  In years past, Pearline had told her granddaughter, Melissa Danzey Craddock, that

  Uncle Martin and another local man were arrested after a brawl among men gambling

  outside a rural church. By the end of the ght, one man was dead. It wasn't clear

  whether the elder Mrs. Danzey's recollection had failed or, as was the case in many

  black families in Alabama, the stigma of imprisonment makes her uncomfortable

  discussing the subject. One thing is certain: after his arrest, Uncle Martin never came

  back.

  Pearl's father sharecropped all his life. "The man would take everything that was

  made," she says of the white man on whose land her father worked. "I worked in the

  elds for $1 a day." Her three sisters and three brothers worked alongside her. "If a

  colored man hit a white man, they could come in and kill him."

  She told the story of a childhood friend murdered by a white mob after allegedly

  speaking to a white woman. She tells of another night, when one of her brothers, Henry

  Edward Danzey, was seized by a mob after an argument at the town movie theater. The

  sheri took him to the jail to stop the lynching and then let the black teenager go in

  the dark. He made his way home, and Pearline's father and uncles waited all night with

  pistols, sticks, and rocks, expecting the mob to arrive. The whites never came, and

  Pearl's brother left town to join the army.

  Only after Dr. King, she says, did "people see how colored people were treated," and

  the terror began to subside.

  The younger Danzeys aren't sure what to make of the story of Uncle Martin. "You

  can't go back and change the past. Just don't let it happen again," says Cynthia James.

  Pearline's granddaughter, Melissa Craddock, disagrees. The companies that made money

  o the forced labor of Uncle Martin owe something, she says. "If there was something

  that came out of that, then there ought to be compensation," she says. "That was after

  slavery ended."

  Cynthia's brother, James Danzey, a deeply religious forty- ve-year-old, has listened

  intently as his great-aunt unspooled her stories. James Danzey brings up the talk of

  slave reparations he has heard recently and of other long-ago abuses of African