Americans that have come to light in recent years.
"I believe it's God's hand," says James Danzey, who works as a counselor at a center
for behaviorally disturbed children in a nearby town. "I believe there are some good
true white people of God, who realize that their ancestors did bad, and they have to
make right."
The indictments of white people, despite her own contributions, begin to make
Pearline uneasy, though. "There've always been some good white people," she interjects.
The younger people nod heads in deference.
But James Danzey doesn't waver. "Think about all the money those companies made
on those people," he says later. "Those companies should be investigated for doing that.
They should have to pay something."23
The Danzeys were as close as I would ever come to the heart of Green Cottenham. But I
did nd a version of his voice. Louis Cottingham lives in Montevallo, Alabama, the
same small town where Green Cottenham's mother went to live on Block Street after her
son's death at the Pratt Mines. Until I called out of the blue in the winter of 2003, he
had never heard of Green Cottenham.
Cottingham's wife answered the phone. She was uncertain at the sound of an
unknown white man's voice seeking her husband. Admittedly, my appearance in the
lives of descendants of twentieth-century slaves was for many akin to the arrival of
some unidenti able creature dropped from the sky. It was, for many, an unnatural, un-
credible event. As I explained who I was, where I was calling from, and my interest in
the genealogy of the black Cottinghams, she grew impatient. No, I don't want to sell
anything, I tried to reassure her. I'm a newspaper reporter in Atlanta, writing a book
about African Americans and your husband's family.
My words, increasingly quick and pleading, were disintegrating in the telephone line
on the way to Alabama. Mrs. Cottingham was hearing none of it. Finally, I blurted that
the book was about a man in their family who had been forced into slavery long after
slavery was supposed to have ended.
"Slavery?" she screeched. "You can talk to my husband. But don't nobody round here
have anything to say about slavery."
Finally, her husband took the receiver, as his wife continued a querulous mutter in
the background. "Slavery! Nothing to say about some slave!"
Louis Cottingham's voice is strong and crisp. It resonates not with the jowly dialect of
rural Alabama blacks but the smoothly de ant lilt of urban Birmingham. "Who are you
asking about?" he wanted to know. "Green Cottenham. I don't know who that is."
"No, he wasn't a brother to my daddy. I know all the names of my daddy's brothers
and sisters."
"My grandfather? No, he wasn't named Henry. His name was Elbert."
"No, not Edgar! Elbert. E-L-B-E-R-T."
Each of his sentences ended with a successively heavier tone of nality, the signal
that at any moment, still ba ed as to why this young white voice was quizzing him
about long-dead family, Cottingham was going to say an absolute goodbye. Asking him
to bear with me just a moment more, I scanned the genealogical chart of the Cottenham
family I'd constructed over the previous fourteen months. Finally, I spotted Elbert, at a
dead end of one branch of the family. His father had been a brother of Green
Cottenham's father.
"I see it now, Cottingham," I said. "Elbert Cottingham. Yes. His father was George,
born on a plantation in Bibb County in 1825. Your daddy must have been named for
him. That was your great-grandfather."
Louis Cottingham went silent for a moment, and then spoke slowly. "Well I never
knew that. I never knew past my granddaddy and my grandmother."
His tone was still unin ected. He was curious, for an instant. Perhaps he would talk
to me, would help me unlock the enigma of Green Cotten-ham. I dropped what I knew
was my only real bombshell.
"I know the name of your great-great-grandfather too," I said. "He was Scip, and he
spelled his name Cottinham. He was born in 1802, in Africa. He's the African slave you
and your family are descended from."
"You say his name was Scip?" Cottingham said.
"Yes, I think that's short for Scipio."
"A slave named Scip. Born in, when did you say? 1802?"
"Yes sir. That's right."
Cottingham turned away from the phone and repeated to his wife, "Says there was a
slave named Scip Cottinham, born in 1802." There was wonder in Cottingham's voice as
he relayed the words. But not the wonder I had hoped for. Instead of astonishment, and
gratitude, that a stranger had o ered up the connection to Africa and lost generations
of souls that millions of American blacks claim a visceral, but ultimately almost never
requited, need to nd, the wonder in Cottingham's voice was at and heavy and
sorrowful. Sorrowful that a past escaped still lived at all. I thought to myself, he's glad
to know, but he doesn't want to know anything else. His wife had been right from the
first instant. Nobody around here wants to talk about slavery.
Still, I tried again. "Could you help me contact your older brothers who are still
alive? Perhaps they remember more," I pressed gently.
"No, I couldn't do that," he said.
Could I come to your home, I o ered, and share all that I've found? Perhaps it would
jog a recollection. Perhaps there's a younger person with an interest in history. "I could
be there in a few days," I said.
"No. No. I don't think so."
As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by
generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling
explanations for the ssures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain
more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum
slavery that preceded.
Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any
consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must
acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945— well into the childhoods
of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be
reset.
Even more plain, no one who reads this book can wonder as to the origins, depth,
and visceral foundation of so many African Americans’ fundamental mistrust of our
judicial processes.
Most profoundly, the evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National
Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible
contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much
of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade
it. This book is not a call for nancial reparations. Instead, I hope it is a formidable
plea for a resurrection and fundamental reinterpretation of a tortured chapter in the
collective American past.
We should rename this era of American history known as the time of "Jim Crow
segregation." How strange that decades de ned in life by abject brutalization came to
be identi ed in history with the image of a largely forgotten white actor's minstrel
performance—a caricature called "Jim Crow." Imagine if the rst years of the Holocaust
/> were known by the name of Germany's most famous anti-Semitic comedian of the
1930s. Let us de ne this period of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was
the Age of Neoslavery Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's grip on U.S.
society—its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its
injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—
can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.
A few months before the publication of this book, as I studied a century-old map of
coal mines near Birmingham, it dawned on me that the name of an old mining camp
town called Docena was a Spanish translation of "dozen"—as in Slope No. 12, the
prison mine where Green Cottenham died. I quickly con rmed that Docena, at the top
of the long hill above the graveyard at Pratt Mines, was the site of the No. 12 shaft,
renamed after U.S. Steel nally stopped using slave laborers to avoid association with
the company's last forced labor mine.
I drove there on a Saturday morning, with my wife and young children in the car. On
the way we stopped near the ruins of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's Ensley furnaces.
The giant smokestacks have been dead for decades but still own the sky—like lightning
streaks of rust or a frightening amusement park ride, the kids said.
Nearby was Docena. The old mine had long been abandoned. Its opening at the
center of the little town was collapsed and unrecognizable. Trees and brush crowded a
streambed owing from the site of the entrance. A disabled white man in a crumbling
house nearby told me he remembered an old plot of unmarked graves a short distance
down the hill, in a hollow where his father had kept pigs in his childhood. It was the
mine burial ground. I knew Green's body was almost certainly buried there, just outside
what had been the walls of the Pratt No. 12 prison.
We drove to the site. It was densely covered with undergrowth and pine trees. A path
into the forest led from one heap of garbage and refuse to another. A forest re had
opened the way through another part of the woods. The children and I picked our way
through the litter and foliage. We found the brick and concrete foundation of a shower
room built for free miners after the company lost its slaves. The graves were supposed
to be a few feet away. I pressed into the thicket of scrub and briars. We studied the
ground for the telltale slumps in the earth like those scattered by the hundreds in the
burial eld at the bottom of the hill. I searched for the remains of a fence delineating a
plot, rocks in the symmetry of graves, a crude headstone, any sign. But there was
nothing. Too much time had passed. Too much had been done—or gone undone. The
last evidence of Green Cottenham's life and death was obliterated by the encroachment
of nature and the detritus of man.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As a young seventh grader in the public schools of Leland, Mississippi, in
1977, I decided to enter an essay contest sponsored by the Washington County
Historical Society. For reasons no longer remembered, I settled for a topic on
the story of an all but forgotten civil rights incident on the outskirts of our
Mississippi Delta town a little more than a decade earlier. A group of African
American farmworkers on a plantation there had gone on strike, defended
themselves against the Klan, and ultimately built a desperate but de ant
encampment called Strike City—one that persists precariously even in 2008.
The two-page essay won a second-place certificate during the county fair and
a promise that it would be included in a future journal of the historical
society. A year later, I gave a speech based on the essay in an oratorical
contest held by a local men's fraternal organization. Standing before that group
of middle-aged white men during a springtime lunch hour, I told a story that
to my twelve-year-old thinking was ancient history—but to my listeners was a
searing lightning bolt from the near past. I experienced for the rst time that
day the combustible response that can come with unearthing history that a
community would just as soon forget. My English teacher, Freida Inmon, who
unbeknownst to me had fought behind the scenes to make sure my speech was
heard that day, applauded loudly and then rescued me from an angry critic.
Later I learned that the wrathful man who berated me that day had been one of
the violent white supremacists. (For the record, I did not win the contest.)
Afterward, despite the turmoil of that day, my mother, Sarah Avery
Blackmon, urged me to " nish the story" on Strike City—to go back and talk to
even more participants, to get to the bottom of what happened in 1965, to
study the results of that incident on the people involved and the community
surrounding it. I have been doing so ever since—for thirty years attempting to
plumb the forgotten or withheld chapters of history that shape the ever larger
communities that have fascinated me. Slavery by Another Name still doesn't
nish the story, but with the help of many extraordinary friends, colleagues,
historians, and researchers, it hopefully begins to bridge a gaping omission in
American history.
The book, and the July 21, 2001, article in The Wall Street Journal that
preceded it, would never have occurred without the guidance and passion of
Jack Bergstresser, director of the museum at Tannehill Ironworks Historical
State Park in McCalla, Alabama.
The research for this book has also been made much easier by the expert
sta s of the departments of history and archives in Alabama, Georgia,
Mississippi, and Arkansas, the Atlanta History Center, and countless clerks,
sheri s, and local historical society volunteers in county seats across Alabama,
Georgia, and Florida. Of particular help were Jim Baggett, director of the
Birmingham Public Library Archives, and Bobby Joe Seales, the indefatigable
president of the Shelby County Historical Society, where I spent many days
over many years. The sta s of the libraries of Emory University in Atlanta,
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the Harry Ransom Center at
the University of Texas at Austin were gracious and patient with my overlong
borrowings from their shelves and searches for obscure images. My thanks as
well to A. S. Williams III, of Birmingham, who generously granted access to his
unrivaled private collection of materials related to Alabama history.
I am also indebted to the many historians and scholars whose work guided
aspects of my research. Pete Daniel, curator in the Division of Work and
Industry at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, who in
1972 authored the seminal work on twentieth-century peonage in the South,
was kind enough to share a dinner and wise suggestions with me midway
through the project. For the years prior to 1900, no work rivals the research of
Mary Ellen Curtin, now a lecturer at the University of Essex, and the author of
Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900. My e ort on this book
was also inspired by the incomparable southern historian Dan T. Carter, now
at the University of South Carolina, whose 1964 thesis on convict leasing set
the groundwork for dozens of historians who have followed.
The book would never have been completed without the support of many
colleagues and editors, especially at The Wall Street Journal. My editor, John
Blanton, sharpened and elevated the original story. Managing editor Paul E.
Steiger o ered invaluable support for that article, as well as all of my other
work at the Journal since then and for the completion of this book. The
reporters of the Journal's Atlanta bureau have inspired me with their devotion
and talent—especially in their unrivaled coverage of hurricanes in recent
years. My fellow journalists and friends Nikhil Deogun, Rick Brooks, Glenn
Ru enach, Ken Wells, Catherine Williams, Carrie Teegardin, and Ken Foskett
have pushed me forward many times. I was often inspired by the late Manuel
Maloof and my wise friend Angelo Fuster. My thanks as well to Doubleday's
Bill Thomas, who suggested that I write this book; Stacy Creamer, the editor
who has gently asked for it ever since then; and David Black, my agent and
friend.
Finally, even though it is a writer's cliché, I am most grateful to my family
for their unwavering enthusiasm and patience for this project. This book has
hovered, a seemingly immovable background, over every weekend, holiday, and
beach trip in most of my remarkable son Michael's young life and for every
one of them in my extraordinary daughter Colette's. Yet they have urged me on
without fail and with my only penance being a periodic update to their
classmates. My wife, Michelle Jones Blackmon, has supported and assisted me
in more ways than I could ever record here while at the same time founding
and nurturing the amazing neighborhood school where our children learn.
This book is dedicated to them, Michelle, Michael, and Lettie.
NOTES
Abbreviations:
ADAH
Alabama Department of Archives and History,
Montgomery,
Ala.
AHC
Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Ga.
BCC
Bibb County Courthouse, Centrevil e, Ala.
Birmingham Public Library Archives, Birmingham,
BPLA
Ala.
BTW Papers Booker T. Washington Papers, Volumes 1-14
National Archives, Regional Records Center, East
EPRRC
Point, Ga.
Georgia Department of Archives and History,
Slavery by Another Name Page 59
