An excerpt from the Introduction to "Slavery By Another Name" by Wall
Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon:
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby
County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1 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.
full: http://www.slaverybyanothername.com
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