Slavery by Another Name (73 page)

escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in

1921, he made his way to the federal courthouse in Atlanta. Two

weeks after Chapman told his story to federal o cials, two agents

from the Department of Justice's stil new Bureau of Investigation

visited Wil iams to inquire about conditions.

They found eleven black forced laborers working in a eld, al of

them evidently there to work o criminal nes supposedly paid on

their behalf by Wil iams. The African American men were

supervised by Clyde Manning, a black overseer long entrusted by

Wil iams to keep the men on the farm while he was away. While

the agents were there, the plantation owner returned home.

Wil iams, a thin fty-four-year-old with a drawn face and slight

mustache, invited the two o cers to sit and have a glass of tea.

Reclining on chairs on the porch, the agents asked if the black eld

workers were being held in "peonage." Wil iams asked them to

explain exactly what the "peonage" law was about.

"If you pay a nigger's ne or go on his bond and you work him

on your place, you're guilty of peonage," replied George W Brown,

one of the Bureau of Investigation agents, using the time-honored

southern signal that his questions didn't indicate any particular

regard for black people.

Wil iams laughed softly, according to later testimony. "Wel , if

that is the case, me and most of the people who have done

anything of the sort were guilty of peonage," the farmer replied. "I

don't keep any of my niggers locked up. Of course, I do tel some of

them they shouldn't leave before paying the ne they rightly owe

me."

Brown and his partner seemed satis ed with the answer. The

farmer relaxed. But then Wil iams began to talk more about the

farm. He described how he sometimes hunted down escapees and

forced them to return. The agents asked if they could look around

the plantation. They saw the slave quarters, where shackles and

chains were clearly used to restrain forced laborers at night. Every

black worker they quizzed, while appearing terri ed and reluctant

to talk, nonetheless said they were satis ed with their treatment on

the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

other acts of violence on the farm.

By the end of the day, the agents were convinced that Wil iams

had commit ed at least a technical violation of the peonage statute.

But to a pair of experienced eld agents, both native to the South,

the situation looked typical for most big southern farms. The

anxiety and mumbling of the workers were routine, given the

unwavering social custom of blacks showing absolute deference to

al whites and open fear to law enforcement. After al the years of

investigations and failed peonage prosecutions in the South, Brown

knew no Georgia jury would convict a white man for practices

engaged in by tens of thousands of other white farmers across the

region— especial y since Wil iams's laborers appeared relatively

wel fed and clothed. This wasn't a case worth wasting time on. The

agents explained the anti-peonage statute to the farmer again,

warning him not to violate it further.

"I don't think you need to have any fear of any case before the

federal grand jury," Brown told him as they departed.

That assurance wasn't enough for Wil iams. He was an intel igent

and relatively worldly man. Now that he understood the peonage

law more clearly—and knew that federal agents had identi ed him

as a violator— Wil iams recognized his vulnerability, and that of his

adult sons. The property he and his oldest sons farmed stretched for

miles across Jasper County. In Wil iams's big house at the center of

the plantation lived his wife and eight minor children.

He had built a comfortable and in uential life, and a farm

admired for its size and profitability. Wil iams had the distinction of

owning an early automobile, and the ear of white county leaders.

He would not risk seeing a personal empire built over twenty years

ruined. Wil iams resolved that no African American would ever

testify of the slavery on his plantation.

Just after dawn the next morning, Wil iams found Manning, the

black overseer, in the early chil and told him the other workers

could "ruin" them al . "You have to get rid of al the stockade

niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

Two days later, Wil iams and Manning at acked Johnnie

Wil iams, one of the forced laborers, in a remote pasture and

bludgeoned him to death with the at side of an axe. The fol owing

morning, John Wil Gaither was ordered to begin digging a new

wel . Once it was a few feet deep, he was kil ed with a pickaxe

blow to the head and buried in the hole.

On the evening of Friday, February 25, 1921, a week after the

federal agents visited, Wil iams entered the slave quarters and told

the stunned men they were free to go. He said John Browne and

Johnny Benson should get in his car to go to the train station that

night. Instead, Wil iams drove them to an isolated spot, where

Manning wrapped chains around their bodies and at ached a heavy

iron wheel from a cot on press. The pair were thrown alive o a

bridge into the Alcovy River, where they sank into the murk and

drowned.

As darkness fel on Saturday night, Wil ie Preston, Lindsey

Peterson, and Harry Price climbed into the car under the same ruse.

They were chained to bags l ed with bricks, and Preston and

Peterson were thrown o a di erent bridge. Price, resigned to his

fate, jumped in on his own. Before the church hour on Sunday

morning, Manning split Johnny Green's skul with an axe. The

white farmer watched as Manning at acked and then instructed him

to keep hit ing Green's shat ered skul until al signs of life ceased.

After a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and biscuits, Wil iams

cal ed for Wil ie Givens, another black slave worker, to join him

and Manning for a walk into the nearby woods. At the edge of the

forest, Manning sank his axe in Givens's back. A week later,

Wil iams drowned Charlie Chisolm, the other African American

who had been ordered to assist in the kil ings, and then shot to

death Fletcher Smith, the last of the other forced laborers.

A total of eleven African Americans were murdered to conceal

slavery on the Wil iams farm. Men who had grown to adulthood in

a South steeped in terror of physical harm, or even more brutal

forms of involuntary servitude, in which they had no cause to

expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned

expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned

themselves to violent death, unwil ing or unable to resist.

Only after decomposing bodies began to surface in the rivers of

Jasper County did the federal agents who had been wil ing to

ignore Wil iams's slave farm a few weeks earlier grow suspicious.

Wil iams and Manning were eventual y tried and convicted for

murder in connection with the kil ings. Wil iams—the only white

man found guilty in Georgia of kil ing a black man during the

ninety years between 1877 and 1966—died in prison.45

The Wil iams farm was exceptional in the level of violence used to

conceal its use of slave labor—and the degree to which the

revolting details of that violence came to be revealed. But as John

Wil iams easily admit ed to the federal agents when they rst

arrived at his property, forced labor remained as ubiquitous as

cot on in the South, an endemic feature of the landscape and

economy.

During the investigation of Wil iams, a government prosecutor

brought charges against Arthur Farmer, Dr. James T. Tyner, and

Charles Madares for holding slaves in central Alabama. After the

indictment in March 1921, the primary witness in the case, a black

man named Jim Sten-son, was kidnapped—twice—and spirited out

of the state. The white men eventual y pleaded no contest to the

charges and received a nominal penalty. There was no prosecution

for having intimidated their victim into refusing to testify46

Increasingly, after years of absolute political hegemony by the

white supremacist southern wing of the Democratic Party, federal

o cials in the South wanted as lit le as possible to do with the

political and social in ammation that came with investigations into

any racial y oriented crime. An accusation in 1924 that the logging

camp and sawmil of S. J. Wilkins on Alabama's Tombigbee River

had held a twenty-two-year-old African American man and his

fteen-year-old brother for more than nine months— claiming they

owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.47

owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.

U.S. at orneys and eld o ces of the Department of Justice

abrogated their role in such cases, knowing ful wel that virtual y

no act of violence by whites against African Americans—and

certainly no cases of involuntary servitude whatsoever—would ever

be prosecuted by sheri s or state o cials in the South. In April

1926, federal authorities in Birmingham were told of a brutal

whipping given to a black man working in a textile mil as a signal

to other African Americans that they shouldn't seek work above the

level of oor sweepers or janitors. The fol owing month, J. Edgar

Hoover, director of what was then cal ed the Department of

Justice's Bureau of Investigation, wrote Assistant At orney General

O. R. Luhring blithely asserting that the facts surrounding an at ack

on a black worker by whites in the Birmingham, Alabama, textile

mil didn't merit a federal investigation. "We have an enormous

amount of work on hand involving undoubted violations of Federal

statutes and I can see no reason for proceeding with this mat er,"

Hoover wrote.48 The case was ignored.

Two months later, a black woman in Birmingham named

Rebecca Jones mailed a let er to the White House, asking President

Calvin Coolidge to help her free her teenage daughter, Carolina

Dixon. The mother said two men claiming to be sheri s had seized

her daughter on a country road when she was just thirteen years old

and then held her in col usion with the Butler County judge for ve

years—forcing her to work and abusing her sexual y. When Jones

went to the farm of Tom Couch, the man holding her daughter, "I

was met with threats under the point of high powered ri es, stating

that I could not take my daughter back," Jones wrote. My "child was

scarred unmerciful in several places on her body." A federal agent

was dispatched to investigate, and the facts of the kidnapping were

put before a grand jury. It refused to indict Couch. The mat er was

dropped.49

Yet even as the federal government did lit le to check the breadth of

the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude

the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude

industrial enterprises to which slave labor lent itself so e ectively

for fty years were being eclipsed by modern technologies and

business strategies. Mechanized coal mining—using hydraulic

digging tools, electric lights, modern pumps, and transportation—

made obsolete the old manual labor mines of Alabama, packed

with thousands of slave workers and mules.

When cot on prices fel drastical y after World War I, and the new

scourge of the bol weevil ravaged mil ions of acres of cot on elds,

depression set in across the rural landscape. The cost of labor

plunged yet further. Prisoners o ered for sale by state o cials who

expected the returns on their business in labor to steadily increase

grew too expensive for some market conditions. Buying and sel ing

them was less and less sensible. As nancial incentives for the states

faded, political scandals and abuse outrages gained traction. In even

the most notorious states, public cries to end the leasing of convicts

to private contractors arose for the first time.

In the winter of 1921, Martin Tabert, a twenty-two-year-old white

man from a middle-class farm family in Munich, North Dakota,

decided to take a walk-about through the United States, traveling

by train, sleeping in railroad camps with tramps, and working to

support himself as he crossed the West, Midwest, and nal y the

South. Running short of money in December, Tabert, along with a