"The Slaves of Capitalism":
Convicts and Felons after the Civil War
Until 1928, companies leased' Alabama convicts — mostly
black and poor sending them to coal mines for cheap, unorganized labor
By Douglas A. Blackmon for The Wall Street Journal - 2001
BIRMINGHAM
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the
Shelby County, Ala., sheriff and charged with vagrancy. After three days in the
county jail, the 22-year-old African-American was sentenced to an unspecified
term of hard labor. The next day, he was handed over to a unit of U.S. Steel
Corp. and put to work with hundreds of other convicts in the notorious Pratt
Mines complex on the outskirts of Birmingham. Four months later, he was still
at the coal mines when tuberculosis killed him. Born two decades after the end
of slavery in America, Green Cottenham died a slave in all but name. The facts
are dutifully entered in the handwritten registry of prisoners in Shelby County
and in other state and local government records. In the early decades of the
20th century, tens of thousands of convicts — most of them, like Mr. Cottenham,
indigent black men — were snared in a largely forgotten justice system rooted
in racism and nurtured by economic expedience.
Until nearly 1930, decades after most other Southern states
had abolished similar programs, Alabama was providing convicts to businesses
hungry for hands to work in farm fields, lumber camps, railroad construction
gangs and, especially in later years, mines. For state and local officials, the
incentive was money; many years, convict leasing was one of Alabama's largest
sources of funding.
Assault with a stick
Most of the convicts were charged with minor offenses or
violations of "Black Code" statutes passed to reassert white control
in the aftermath of the Civil War. Mr. Cottenham was one of more than 40 Shelby
County men shipped to the Pratt Mines in the winter of 1908, nearly half of
them serving time for jumping a freight train, according to the Shelby County
jail log. George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a
stick," the log says. Lou William was in for adultery. John Jones for
gambling. Subjected to squalid living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant
food and frequent floggings, thousands died. Entries on a typical page from a
1918 state report on causes of death among leased convicts include:
"Killed by Convict, Asphyxia from Explosion, Tuberculosis, Burned by Gas
Explosion, Pneumonia, Shot by Foreman, Gangrenous Appendicitis,
Paralysis."
Mr. Cottenham was one of dozens of convicts who died at the
Pratt Mines complex in 1908. This form of government and corporate forced labor
ended in 1928 and slipped into the murk of history, discussed little outside
the circles of sociologists and penal historians. But the story of Alabama's
trade in human labor endures in minute detail in tens of thousands of pages of government
records stored in archives, record rooms and courthouses across Alabama.
These documents chronicle another chapter in the history of
corporate involvement in racial abuses of the last century. A $4.5 billion fund
set up by German corporations, after lawsuits and intense diplomatic pressure
from the U.S. and others, began making payments last month to the victims of
Nazi slave-labor programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese manufacturers
have come under criticism for their alleged use of forced labor during the same
period. Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to a $1.25 billion settlement of claims
related to the seizure of Jewish assets during the Holocaust.
Traditions of segregation
In the U.S., many companies — real-estate agents that helped
maintain rigid housing segregation, insurers and other financial-services
companies that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all stripes
that discriminated in hiring —helped maintain traditions of segregation for a
century after the end of the Civil War. But in the U.S., recurrent calls for
reparations to the descendants of pre-Civil War slaves have made little
headway. And there has been scant debate over compensating victims of 20th
century racial abuses involving businesses.
The biggest user of forced labor in Alabama at the turn of
the century was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., the U.S. Steel unit
that owned the mine where Mr. Cottenham died. Dozens of other companies used
convicts, too, many of them now defunct or absorbed into larger businesses. Executives
at some of the corporate descendants say they shouldn't be asked to bear
responsibility for the actions of executives long dead or the practices of
businesses acquired decades ago.
U.S. Steel says it can find no evidence to suggest that the
company ever abused or caused the deaths of convicts in Alabama. U.S. Steel
spokesman Thomas R. Ferrall says that concerns voiced about convict leasing by
Elbert H. Gary, the company's chairman at the time, helped set the stage for
"knocking the props out from under" the system. "We think U.S.
Steel proper was a positive player in this history . . . was a force for
good," Mr. Ferrall says.
The company's early presence in Alabama is still evident a
few miles from downtown Birmingham. There, on a hill-side overgrown with brush,
hundreds of sunken graves litter the ground in haphazard rows. A few plots bear
stones. No other sign or path marks the place. Only a muddy scar in the earth —
the recently filled-in mouth of a spent coal mine —suggests that this is the
cemetery of the Pratt Mines complex.
When Mr. Cottenham died in 1908, U.S. Steel was still new to
convict leasing. But by then, the system was decades old and a well-oiled
machine.
After the Civil War, most Southern states set up similar
penal systems, involving tens of thousands of African-Americans. In those
years, the Southern economy was in ruins. State officials had few resources,
and county governments had even fewer. Leasing prisoners to private
individuals or companies provided revenue and eliminated the need to build
prisons. Forcing convicts to work as part of their punishment was entirely
legal; the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1865, outlaws
involuntary servitude — except for "duly convicted" prisoners.
Convict leasing in other states never reached the scale of
Alabama's program. By the turn of the century, most states had ended the
practice or soon would because of opposition on humanitarian grounds and from
organized labor. Convict leasing also wasn't well-suited to the still largely agrarian
economies of most Southern states.
But in Alabama, industrialization was generating a ravenous
appetite for the state's coal and iron ore. Production was booming, and unions
were attempting to organize free miners. Convicts provided an ideal captive
work force: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize and available when free
laborers went on strike.
Incentives to Convict
Under the convict-leasing system, government officials
agreed with a company such as Tennessee Coal to provide a specific number of
prisoners for labor. State officials signed contracts to supply companies with
large blocks of men — often hundreds at a time — who had committed felonies.
Companies entered into separate deals with county sheriffs to obtain thou-sands
more prisoners who had been convicted of misdemeanors. Of the 67 counties in
Alabama, 51 actively leased their convicts, according to one contemporary
newspaper report. The companies built their own prisons, fed and clothed the
convicts and supplied guards as they saw fit.
In Barbour County, in the cotton country of southern
Alabama, nearly 700 men were leased between June 1891 and November 1903, most
for $6 a month, according to the leather bound Convict Record still kept in the
courthouse base-ment. Most were sent to mines operated by Tennessee Coal or
Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co., another major industrial presence in
Birmingham. Sheriffs, deputies and some court offi
Please see Convicts
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