Slavery by Another Name (43 page)

white man "confessed judgment" for an arrested black man—paying

his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

return a signed contract for labor.

These arrangements sounded precisely like the ones described by

Judge Jones as il egal. Hundreds of farmers were at risk of arrest.

Thousands more African American laborers were being forced to

work in mines and timber camps under similar contracts signed

between county governments and the state of Alabama itself. Some

local at orneys asked if farmers who worked convicts for debts were

guilty of peonage, wasn't the state of Alabama equal y guilty in its

handling of convict leases?47 It occurred to virtual y no one in

Alabama that this was precisely the point. The vast majority of

black laborers leased from the law enforcement system were being

held il egal y.

Even Judge Jones failed to comprehend the ful rami cations of

his opinion. Like many wel -intentioned but stil fundamental y

racist whites, he naively believed that the system engineered by

Pace in Tal apoosa County was an isolated instance of abuse. He

accepted the common convention of the time that African

Americans were less intel igent and more inclined to criminal

behavior than whites. He presumed that the vast majority of blacks

arrested in the South were in fact guilty of their crimes, and merited

severe punishment. What made him more "progressive" than other

whites, and where he di ered from most white southerners, was

that he believed blacks could not be brutalized in their punishment,

and that the concept of impartial treatment of al citizens by the

courts had to be upheld.

Rank-and- le southerners, especial y in rural sections with large

black populations, had no such il usions. They knew Judge Jones

had set a standard by which thousands of white men were guilty of

slave dealing, that hundreds of state and county o cials were in

jeopardy, and that the whole nancial structure of governments and

local economies was at risk. A correspondent to the Birmingham

Age-Herald reported that "more than 100 men" in the area of Coosa

and Tal apoosa counties—just two of Alabama's nearly seventy

counties—were at risk of arrest in the federal investigation. "The

people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

been working criminals for twenty years, and the majority of such

men do not know they are violating the law," the writer said.

Inundated with bewildered queries, Judge Jones began to realize

the breadth of coerced labor in his state. He hadn't intended to set

o panic. To quel anxieties, Jones quietly summoned a reporter

for the Associated Press and explained that white men could avoid

breaking the law if their contracts with blacks were approved by a

local judge and signed in court.48 Surely local judges could never

condone slavery, Jones reasoned.

While Judge Jones tried to soothe Alabama's worries, Warren

Reese asked Sternfeld, the assistant who had listened to much of the

testimony brought to the grand jury, to col ect for the at orney

general the most egregious al egations that had surfaced so far in

witness statements and reports from U.S. marshals in the

countryside. As Mildred Elmore rat led the Remington's keys, they

dictated what became an eight-page report to Washington.

"There have been agrant abuses and violations … on the part of

wealthy and in uential men," Reese began. "These violations have

not been con ned to one or two periodical and independent

instances, but it has developed into a miserable business and

custom to catch up ignorant and helpless negro men and women

upon the imsiest and the most baseless charges and carry them

before a justice of the peace who is usual y a paid hireling of these

wealthy dealers….

The victim is found guilty and a ne is assessed which, in the beginning

cannot be paid by the victim, and then it is that one of these slave dealers

steps up, pretends to be the friend of the negro …telling him he will pay

him out if he will sign a contract to work for him on his farm…

…the negro readily agrees rather than go to the mines, as he is informed

he will have to do, his ne is paid, the contract is signed, and the negro is

taken to the farm or mine or mill or quarry of the employer….

Placed into a condition of involuntary servitude, he is locked up at

nights in a cell, worked under guards during the day from 3 o'clock in the

morning until 7 or 8 o'clock at night, whipped in a most cruel manner, is

insu ciently fed or poorly clad—in fact the evidence in nearly all of the

cases investigated reveals that the negro men are worked nearly naked,

while the women are worked in an equally disgraceful manner.

Brutal things have transpired and sometimes death has resulted from the

infliction of corporal punishment….

When the time of a good working negro is nearing an end, he is re-

arrested upon some trumped up charge and again carried before some

bribed justice and resentenced to an additional time. In this way negroes

have been known to have worked on these places in this situation for

years and years. They can get no word to friends nor is word allowed to

reach them from the outside world…. They are held in abject slavery

without any knowledge of what goes on in the outside world.

If they run away the dogs are placed upon their track, and they are

invariably retaken and subjected to more cruel treatment….

The indictments so far found are based upon some twenty- ve negro

men and women who have been the subjects of these violations. These are

some of the most severe instances, but it has been discovered there are

hundreds of other cases.49

Reese and Sternfeld detailed the physical abuses they had

discovered and the extraordinary obstacles to their investigation. In

Tal apoosa County, the grand jury had already issued indictments

against Pace, Fletch Turner, and the Cosbys. Also charged were the

enforcers and procurers of the system, including Robert Franklin,

Grogan, Pruit , and Dunbar, al constables. The jury had indicted the

three justices of the peace most agrantly involved—-James M.

Kennedy, Jesse L. London, and W. D. Cosby. Another eight men

who had worked as whipping guards for Pace and the other buyers

were also under charge, including Turner's son, Al en, and Pace's

son-in-law, Anderson Hardy.

Beyond Tal apoosa County, Reese reported, the grand jury was

also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

away and deep in the plantation country of the Black Belt, with

more than 35,000 black farmhands and sharecroppers working

cot on on the land of white men. "This county is real y the center

where it is charged these practices are more freely indulged than

anywhere else. This county, it is claimed, is honeycombed with

slavery."50

The slaving practiced in Lowndes County was orchestrated by the

sheri himself, J. W. Dixon. In one case described by Reese, Dixon

chased down a black worker named Dil ard Freeman, who had left

his plantation without permission to visit a sick brother a few miles

away. Tracked to his mother's home, Freeman was beaten by Dixon

with a pistol, tied with a rope around the neck, and forced to run

behind a mule for more than ve miles, while the sheri fol owed

on horseback, "whipping him whenever he would lag behind."

Once back at the plantation, Reese wrote, Dixon began whipping

Freeman with a wide piece of rubber belt at ached to a wooden

handle. "Four men were required to hold him o the ground while

Mr. Dixon himself administered the punishment. When Mr. Dixon

became tired, another man was made to do the whipping. In this

way, the boy was whipped nigh until death. He cannot tel how

many licks he was hit, nor can he tel how long this happened."

After the whipping, Freeman was chained to the oor near the beds

of Dixon and his overseer.

In the grand jury room, Freeman revealed his back, Reese said,

showing "one mass of scars from his thighs to his neck."

Yet already the prospects of pursuing a conviction against the

slavers of Lowndes County and the other plantation regions where

hundreds of thousands more black farmworkers lived were being

chal enged, Reese advised the at orney general. Dil ard Freeman

was threatened with death if he testi ed to the grand jury. A

member of the Dixon family had fol owed him to the courthouse in

Montgomery on the day of his rst appearance. "It was impossible

to get anything out of him because of his fear of death."

When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

home after a week of hearing witnesses, Sheri Dixon and his four

brothers rode up to his house at midnight on horseback and

demanded to know what was being said to the grand jury—

testimony that is dictated to be secret under the U.S. Constitution.

They told the juror to remember that "he had to live in Lowndes

county, and if he did not stand up for his own people he knew

what to expect," Reese wrote.

The Dixons are "dangerous men," Reese continued. "They are said

to have kil ed several men. It is believed that witnesses who come

here and who expect to return to Lowndes county are practical y

compel ed to perjure their souls because they fear their lives."51

As the let er to Knox continued, Reese outlined how the new

slavery was far larger than one or two places, and involved far

more than scat ered pockets of involuntary servitude, confusion

about the law, or unintended violations. His timbre rising as the

report continued, Reese said that he was receiving daily let ers from

other Black Belt locations—Wilcox, Sumter, Chambers, and Co ee

counties. "Unquestionably, there are hundreds of these people in

this district who are held in abject slavery," Reese related.

The prosecutor continued that Judge Jones had just ruled that

Alabama's contract labor law—a statute shared in some form by

every southern state and e ectively criminalizing any black worker

who left the employment of a white farmer without permission—

was unconstitutional. The implications of the ruling were just

dawning on Reese. He realized the black men and women of the

South had never been truly set free.

Judge Jones's ruling, Reese wrote, "in e ect, amounts to an actual

and not a theoretical emancipation of the negro, and it is now

necessary that this o ce make an e ort to rescue these people from

their condition by and through habeas corpus proceedings."

Reese recognized that his investigation could eventual y require

thousands of court lings. He asked the at orney general to assign a

Secret Service agent to assist with the investigations and to create a

new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

in Alabama instituting legal chal enges to free enslaved blacks.

"Unless the government wil take steps to bring these habeas corpus

proceedings …they wil not be much bene ted by these

investigations." 52

As Mildred typed out the last lines of the report, the telephone

rang. Western Union told the secretary a bicycle delivery boy was

pedaling toward them with an urgent message. When the telegram

arrived, Reese read that the at orney general wished him to

personal y deliver his report to Washington. President Roosevelt

had been briefed on the investigations and directed that a legal

at ack be ful y pressed.53 Reese cal ed Western Union and dictated

a reply. Mildred hastily retyped the last page of Reese's report: "I

have just received your wire … I wil report to you at ten o'clock

morning of seventeenth."54

Reese rushed to Washington, where he outlined for the at orney

general the details of the investigation and his belief that much

more than scat ered peonage was at stake. Knox was cautious, but

given the president's speci c interest in the cases, the expectations

raised by his speech at Lincoln's tomb, and a chorus of cries from

northern publications, he could not move slowly. "The new slave-