Slavery by Another Name (56 page)

of virtual y any African American woman residing on their

property.

During the grand jury investigation of peonage that led to the

trials of 1903, Warren Reese concluded that Lowndes County was

the fountain-head of Alabama's new slave labor. W. D. McCurdy one

of the original operators of the most notorious convict slave mines

near Birmingham, also kept dozens of black workers imprisoned on

his home plantation in Lowndes County. It was here that federal

investigators working for Reese had reported—until being run out

of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an

of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an

active participant in a violently enforced convict slave system that

held hundreds or thousands of black laborers. The Smith family—

whose deadly convict farm had become the symbol of convict

leasing's most lethal manifestations in the nineteenth century—was

one of the county's most prominent landholders. But Reese could

bring no charges in Lowndes County because no blacks forced into

slavery were wil ing to risk the lives of family members or their

own by testifying to the grand jury in Montgomery. Even a black

grand juror from Lowndes County participated in the inquiry only

under protest—for fear he would be kil ed upon his return home.

But the failure of the federal investigation to reach Lowndes

County didn't indicate there had been less slavery than federal

agents initial y claimed. Indeed, there was vastly more. In the

summer of 1906, W. E. B. DuBois and a team of more than a dozen

researchers, including sociologists Monroe Work, Richard R. Wright,

and others of the most extraordinary young black minds of the new

century, arrived at the Calhoun School. Founded in 1892 by a

wealthy white northern socialite, the institution operated largely on

the industrial education principles of Booker T. Washington. But

the Calhoun School was distinct in one regard among the many

institutions for blacks established near the end of the nineteenth

century— often naively and il -fated—by wealthy benefactors.

Going beyond training black children in basic academics and

advanced vocational skil s such as bricklaying and carpentry, the

school's founder, a wel -bred Connecticut spinster named Charlot e

Thorn, actual y moved to Lowndes County and eventual y

promoted a land ownership experiment for blacks in the heart of

what was likely the single most repressive white-power regime in

the South. Over time, land companies established by the school

purchased a total of more than four thousand acres of cot on land,

encouraged local blacks to operate the farms on a quasi-communal

basis, and ultimately resold smal er tracts of land to African

Americans.2

DuBois, whose di erences with Booker T Washington had not

advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men

advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men

against each other as commit ed enemies, was at racted to the

Calhoun School as a preserve in which idealistic and educated

whites and blacks could interact freely. He also delighted in the

e rontery the school presented to the white dominance that

surrounded it.

DuBois went to Lowndes County in hopes of capturing an

unassailable, empirical y proven portrait of the penury and

exploitation that African Americans there—and by extension most

of the South—were forced to endure. With funding from the federal

Bureau of Labor, the DuBois team fanned across the countryside

carrying ten thousand copies of questionnaires containing a bat ery

of piercing questions regarding land ownership, labor control,

family life, education, sexual mores, morality, political activity, and

other aspects of black life. By late fal in 1906, more than 21,000 of

the county's black farmers had been interviewed through a cabin-to-

cabin canvass, with researchers scrupulously recording the answers

and compiling tables of the responses back at the school.

Separately, two white investigators provided by the federal

government conducted an even more discreet inquiry into the

political operations and sexual morality of Lowndes County whites.

To cross-reference the individual interviews, white researchers

examined and analyzed prodigious volumes of Lowndes County

mortgages, liens, arrests, incarcerations, and proceedings of local

justices of the peace—al of the key instruments of government used

by whites to contain and control blacks throughout the South.

DuBois used the legal record and personal accounts to create

detailed maps and tables of the county, showing between 1850 and

1906 the evolution of economic, social, and political power and a

chronological movement of land ownership among blacks and

whites.3

No social study on such a scale of research and ambition had ever

been undertaken in the United States, certainly not one focused on

black life and even more so never one at empted in the

environment of overt physical danger that existed in Lowndes

County.

County.

Local whites were already openly hostile toward the existence of

the Calhoun School and its implicit chal enge to the neo-slavery

that surrounded it. DuBois wrote later that researchers met "with the

greeting of …shotguns in certain parts of the county"4 5 He told U.S.

commissioner of labor Charles P. Neil that two investigators "were

shot at and run out of one corner of the county. "

Yet DuBois and others believed the enormity of the data and the

impregnability of a federal y authorized analysis conducted under

the most rigorous scienti c methodology presented an opportunity

to smash the racial myopia and growing indi erence to conditions

in the South of the majority of American whites. DuBois later cal ed

the project his "best sociological work."6 7 By the end of 1906, the

report had been completed, writ en by hand, and delivered to the

Bureau of Labor for publication.

The growing ubiquity for al African Americans of the dangers

DuBois and his col eagues encountered in Lowndes County was

underscored on September 22, 1906, when the team learned that a

mob of as many as ten thousand whites was on the rampage in

Atlanta. DuBois rushed aboard a train to return to his wife, Nina,

and daughter, Yolande, who had remained in their quarters at South

Hal on the campus of Atlanta University, where DuBois was a

professor. He sat in vigil on the steps of the building with a

shotgun. But white at ackers never arrived.

By the time the riot ended, hundreds of African Americans, by

virtual y al accounts, had been at acked on the streets of the city.

Atlanta had never completely cooled since the performances of The

Clansman ten months earlier. Tensions—driven by rumors of black

ambitions for political power and open race baiting by candidates

running for governor—had mounted over the months.

In the weeks just before the riot, the fal of 1906, Atlanta was

whipped into a fury by weeks of exaggerated and fabricated

accounts published in the Atlanta Constitution and other local

newspapers of blacks al egedly raping and insulting white women.

A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was

A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was

being arranged—this time featuring in the cast two cousins of

Je erson Davis, the late president of the Confederacy. Two days

after the production began its new tour on September 20, with

packed performances in Charleston, South Carolina, a crowd of

whites—delirious with racial animosity—gathered in downtown

Atlanta.

Heeding an anonymous public cal to revive a new Ku Klux Klan,

a group of men gathered to discuss how to respond to the al eged

series of sexual assaults against white women. Almost none of the

al eged at acks were ever proven. But by late afternoon, the city's

competitive newspapers were rol ing o extra editions to report

even newer dubious claims of black men at acking young women.

Just before midnight, the crowd began marauding indiscriminately

through the city. For ve days, vigilantes, police o cers, and

soldiers grabbed and beat African Americans, seizing them o

sidewalks and streetcars. They broke into businesses where blacks

were employed and crashed into homes in African American

neighborhoods, spil ing blood everywhere they went. In some areas,

blacks stood their ground, ghting back with guns and sts—

spurring even more anger and a rationale for police and militia to

join on the side of white rioters. In the end, the mobs were believed

to have kil ed at least two dozen African Americans. Fewer than a

half dozen whites died.8

Three weeks after the riot in September 1906, a former U.S.

congressman from Georgia, Wil iam H. Fleming, raised a rare voice

against rising racial animosity. "How many causes have recently

been cooperating in that line from the theater, the press and the

stump to familiarize us with the disrespect for law and to arouse

hate and contempt by the whites against the blacks?" Representative

Fleming asked. "Chief among o enders stands a former preacher,

Rev. Thomas Dixon, with his Clansman."9

In Washington, federal o cials who previously had shown such

assiduous interest in the research by DuBois—and the possibility it

would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly

would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly

faltered. Tabulations that had appeared acceptable months earlier

now looked questionable to Commissioner Neil . He signaled that

publication of the report would no longer be immediate. Nearly a

year after completion, it remained under review, when a new

commissioner replaced Neil . After reading the report, W W.

Hangar, the new head of the agency, wrote taciturnly to DuBois: "It

would be extremely unwise to make any use whatsoever of the

material which was gathered."10 A year later, after months of

pushing for publication of his research, or at the very least that the

document be returned, DuBois was informed that the study's

conclusions "touched on political mat ers." It could not be sent to

him because "it had been destroyed."11

Nothing of what might have been a seminal study of black life

survived—with one exception. Three years later, DuBois penned his

rst novel—The Quest for the Silver Fleece—a richly descriptive

portrayal of African Americans struggling against the strictures

tightening against them in the North and South. The heart of the

novel was a narrative drawn from what DuBois and his researchers

had witnessed during their dangerous summer in Lowndes County.

Substituting new names for the Calhoun School, the McCurdys, and

other great white landholding families, DuBois rendered the social

order of what he cal ed Tooms County in sharp, but unexaggerated,

relief. The baronic family whose patriarch, Colonel Cress-wel , had

been the county's largest slaveholder before emancipation stil

control ed in the twentieth century fty thousand acres of prime

cot on land and uncounted black families who lived upon it in the

novel's account.

In the portrait etched by DuBois, Colonel Cresswel lived in a

sprawling mansion far from town, surrounded by endless numbers

of broken cabins inhabited by terri ed and uneducated "tenants."

Cresswel was intent on crushing any semblance of movement

toward economic or political independence among those blacks.

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers," he exclaimed. No manner

of shared interests between blacks and whites could ever be

contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need

contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need

be…. It's the Negro …we've got to beat to his knees."

In the county described by DuBois, black sharecroppers lived or

died on the whim of the white men stil cal ed "master" by most.

They begged the white men for their broken-down log cabins, for

food and cloth to make clothes. Maturing black girls complied with

their initiation into sexual activity when Colonel Cresswel 's son

demanded it, because "he was our master."

The Cresswel s and other whites "bought" and sold sharecroppers

at wil —substituting the sale of their al eged debts for rent and