SubscribeOn March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”... Cottenham’s offense was blackness.... [After a brief trial] Cottenham... was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North — U.S. Steel Corporation — the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence.... he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners.... Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.— from the Introduction to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The book's website includes reviews of the book, an excerpt of the Introduction, and an extensive photo gallery that includes disturbing images of enslaved and tortured prisoners.
The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations....
By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina — where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived....
That the arc of Green Cottenham’s life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.
It's always the poor Southerner who is mocked. You can see this applied to both races, where the "bumpkin black" (think Bubba from Forrest Gump) and the redneck coexist in a strange mockable pocket dimension. Some people, even progressives, find it terrible to mock the first but acceptable to mock the second--without understanding that it wasn't primarily the poor of either race who made the South's problems what they are today.I think that sort of mocking is less against the poor whites of the period, and more against the subset of white Southerners of today who seem to consider that period the South's Golden Age.
And, yes, historically the way the ruling class keeps on top is by creating or exacerbating divisions and inciting hatred of "inferiors", whether the target of that hate is black, Jew, Kulak, Hispanic, Muslim, or Emanuel Goldstein.You then go on to say:
But why then, do we mock poor whites?
Well, part of the reason is that Cletus swallowed the myth of Herrenvolk Democracy fed him by his social superiors, wiped his mouth, and asked for seconds.Of course, you could easily say we mock poor whites because of the myth fed to us by our social superiors: the idea that we are also part of the elite, but you don't. It's the nature of social aspirants to "swallow the myth" fed to them by their social superiors, and most people are social aspirants.
So we mock Cletus, in part, because he enthusiastically fought against "Northern Aggression" and his own economic interests to try to protect a disgusting and dehumanizing system that didn't even economically benefit him (and indeed, hurt him economically and mired him in poverty for generations). We sneer at Cletus because he still today takes great pride in his ancestors' fight for the "Lost Cause". We sneer at Cletus because for decades he's reveled in his lack of education ansd ignorance, "'cause jus 'cause I ain't got no book-learnin', I's still better than any them niggers!"How many Southerners have you, personally, conversed with? How many Southerners who have been in the South for generations? How many Southerners who have been poor in the South for generations? Here's a hint: the vast majority of us aren't like the caricatures they paint. You see the idiot in the rebel flag tee at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert on TV? Most of us think he's an idiot too. He's also an outlier.
Bill Moyers: Have we ever had a real conversation in this society about what to do about so large a number of people who have been deliberating assigned to the margins, so that it's virtually impossible for them to climb out on their own. That is, they only have a minimal possibility of getting themselves out of the hole into which history and policy and other considerations have placed them. Have we ever had that real conversation?Have we ever had a real conversation in this society about what to do about so large a number of people who have been deliberating assigned to the margins, so that it's virtually impossible for them to climb out on their own.
Glenn C. Loury: Well, you know, I'm thinking here about the speech that Lyndon Johnson gave, and I know you know it very well, Bill, in 1965 at Howard University. A commencement address. In which he said, in effect, that it wasn't enough for the civil rights statutes, which had only just been enacted, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it wasn't enough to level the playing field.
You don't hobble a man, he said, in a metaphor with hundreds of years of deprivation and unfairness and then bring him to the starting line and shoot off the gun and say it's a fair race.
Orlando Patterson: There are two aspects of the problems that blacks face from the horrendous past from slavery and Jim Crow. One is the public exclusion of blacks, the systematic public exclusion of people, black people, of not belonging to the society. Not being real citizens. Even though they've been here longer than most whites as a group.
And that exclusion is in politics, in civic life, in the economy. As late as the late '50s. I love to illustrate the point with my students. Pick up any of the major weekly journals, even The New Yorker, and flip through it. You wouldn't see a black face. I mean, black problems weren't even considered worthy of discussion. This is a white country.
And with the laws, Jim Crow and elsewhere, I mean, were reinforced that. The major objective of the civil rights movement was to, of course inclusion. To insist that blacks are an integral part of this society. In its laws, in its public life, in its civil life, in its culture. In its conception of itself. And in that, it succeeded mightily. Blacks-
Bill Moyers: So that now we see blacks in the public square. We-
Orlando Patterson: That's right. Absolutely. I mean, the most influential woman in America, the two most influential women in America are black. The Secretary of State and Oprah Winfrey.
In that sense, what was inconceivable in America, as late, I'd say, as '59, '60, is now, I mean, we are an integral part of this society. And I'd say for the typical white person, America's definition of itself is no longer a white society. It's recognized as that, however there's another side of what slavery which is exclusion from the private domain.
Blacks were people who lived separately. People we did not marry. People who were simply seen as apart. And that had major consequences because you're excluded from the cultural capital of the society.
Glenn C. Loury: I think this is exactly correct. I think it's a very important distinction, this distinction I call discrimination in contract, the formal exclusion, and the discrimination in contact, the informal exclusion. I think the emphasis on social capital is exactly right. The fundamental question is what are the resources available for human development for people?
Bill Moyers: What was slope number 12?Transcript
Douglas Blackmon: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines. Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country. Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing circumstances, this place that was filled with disease and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible, terrible circumstances.
Bill Moyers: And you found the sunken graves five miles from downtown Birmingham?
Douglas Blackmon: It's just miles away. In fact there are just two places there, because all of these mines now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are almost no signs of human activity, except that if you dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies were buried.
Bill Moyers: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
Douglas Blackmon: That's right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men. And-
Bill Moyers: And yet, slavery was illegal?
Douglas Blackmon: It had been illegal for 40 years. And this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta. And those bricks are still there. And so these are the bricks that we stand on.
Bill Moyers: Didn't this economic machine that was built upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way that black life was criminalized, didn't this put African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage then and now?
Douglas Blackmon: Absolutely. The results of those laws and the results of particularly enforcing them with such brutality through this forced labor system, the result of that was that African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
Bill Moyers: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so unaware of what had just happened to our part of the country?
Douglas Blackmon: Well, I think there are a lot of explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of it.
I have noticed that in even the most racially charged areas of the south the races get along a lot better than they do in large parts of the north because we haven't adopted the northern solution of staking out an entire neighborhood and populating it only with Italians, Jews, blacks, etc. and threatening anyone else who comes around with casual violence. We have mostly at least mastered the art of pretending not to be racist fuckwits in social situations. No matter what race you are you can pretty much walk through any neighborhood in New Orleans or Jackson, MS without fear that you will be jumped because of your race.What's your number? I've traveled this entire country with the exception of a few pockets that might prove an exception (Maine & Washington State being the only two I can think of off hand). If you are arguing that the south is not/ has not (for some time) been segregated, you just don't get out much do you?
When the same thing is true of Chicago or New York, give me a call.
Robert E. Lee himself voiced the opinion that it wouldn't last 20 more years. And it had already lasted 80, in a country deeply split by the institution.
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posted by dawson at 2:13 AM on June 21, 2008