Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule

[mahatmakanejeeves]

20. Slavery by Another Name

So let's discuss a little about the history of extractive industries in the south--such as coal and lumber--which were mostly owned and controlled by that better breed of aristocrat--the yankee one. It was Northern money that sent lawyers into Appalachia and other areas to deceive and intimidate small farmers into selling their mineral rights--or shot the resisters and forged their signatures outright--and then took their land out from under them. It was Northern money that compelled local governments and police to go along with this, while they set up coal camps that were every bit as exploitative and brutal as any slave plantation, and with severe environmental degradation to boot.

The best book I read in 2011 was Slavery by Another Name, written by Douglas A. Blackmon, the ex-Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. No amount of recommedation is enough. This is an astonishing work about a subject that I knew next to nothing about.

I'll let the author speak for himself:

INTRODUCTION
The Bricks We Stand On

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.” Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, 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. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, 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— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.

Please read this book. Once Sara Robinson has done that, then she can tell me all about enlightenment.