Slavery by Another Name (74 page)

group of other itinerant men, hopped aboard a freight train without

a ticket.

Unbeknownst to Tabert, the sheri of Leon County, just south of

the Georgia state line, maintained a rich trade from spying on the

freight rails that crossed into his territory, seizing men from the

train, charging them with vagrancy or "beating" a ride on a railroad,

and sel ing them into slavery. Tabert was arrested, ned $25 for

vagrancy and then sold for three months’ work to a turpentine

camp owned by Putnam Lumber Company— then a vast enterprise

headquartered in Wisconsin but engaged in the harvest of hundreds

of thousands of swampy Florida forestland. Within days, Tabert's

family wired more than enough to pay the ne, but their son had

already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor

already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor

system. In sixty- ve years, the southern turpentine camp—

desperate, hungered, sadistical y despotic—had changed hardly at

al .Young Tabert did not last long in the putrid swamp. He was

given il - t ing shoes, and his feet became blistered and swol en. A

boil formed in his groin. Accused of shirking work in January 1922,

the slight-framed Tabert was forced by the camp whipping boss,

Walter Higginbotham, to lie on the ground as eighty- ve other

prisoners watched. Higginbotham pul ed up Tabert's shirt and

applied to his back more than thirty licks with a seven-and-a-half-

pound leather strap. By the time the beating concluded, Tabert was

"twitching on the ground," according to one witness. Higginbotham

placed his foot on Tabert's neck to keep him from moving, and

then hit him more than forty more times with the strap. The boss

ordered Tabert to stand, and when he moved too slowly, the guard

whipped him two dozen more times, witnesses later testi ed. When

the young North Dakota man, a thousand miles from home and an

immeasurable distance from any measure of sanity or decency,

nal y made it to his feet, Higginbotham chased him in a circle,

striking him over the head and shoulders, shouting repeatedly: "You

can't work yet?"

When the beating nal y ended, Tabert col apsed into his cot and

never stood again. A terrible odor rose from his body. He died the

fol owing night. A Putnam Lumber executive wrote to Tabert's

family a few days later, informing him that their son had died of

malaria and expressing the company's sympathy.

Unconvinced of the explanation for their son's death, the Tabert

family triggered a series of legal inquiries and a Pulitzer Prize-

winning journalistic investigation by the New York World.

Higginbotham was tried and convicted of second-degree murder.

But his conviction was later overturned by a Florida court. He was

never retried or punished.50 Stil , public disclosure of the gruesome

kil ing and its subsequent cover-up stirred a wave of outrage—

especial y as a demonstration that the excesses of the South's new

slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of

slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of

distinction. The fol owing year, the Florida legislature, after an

extended debate, voted to ban the use of the whip on any prisoners

in the state.51

Alabama o cials were also under growing humanitarian and union

pressures to end the worst abuses of the convict leasing system.

Over time, state agencies took more direct control of the

supervision and punishment of convicts—though through every

purported reform, black prisoners continued to be driven beyond

reasonable human limits under the cold mandates of the

businessmen and companies who captured them.

Most reforms were cursory and super cial, such as requiring that

men be clothed during their lashings. The fee system and its pro t

motivation to encourage sheri s to make as many arrests as

possible remained in force. "Our jails are money-making machines,"

wrote a state prison inspector, W. H. Oates, in a 1922 report.

At the same time, the number of men being arrested and

sentenced to some form of hard labor in Alabama bal ooned. In the

year ending September 30, 1922, total arrests nearly reached

25,000, driven partly by new prohibition laws. Within another ve

years, the figure was 37,701 for one twelve-month period.52

In 1924, another ghastly story of death in a slave mine surfaced.

Like Martin Tabert's murder, it took on sensational proportions

when the public realized that the young white man, James Knox,

died while undergoing tortures that in the minds of most whites

could only be justified as punishment for African Americans.

Working at Sloss-She eld's Flat Top prison outside Birmingham,

Knox was rst reported to have kil ed himself. Later, a grand jury

col ected evidence showing that the whipping boss in charge of

Knox's crew punished him for slow work with the water cure so

long in use in the slave camps of the South. "James Knox died in a

laundering vat, located in the yard of the prison near the hospital,

where he was placed by two negroes…It seems likely that James

Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused

Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused

by a combination of unusual exertion and fear…. After death it

seems that a poison was injected arti cial y into his stomach in

order to simulate accidental death or suicide."53

Despite howls of protest that a white could die so ignominiously,

Alabama's prisoners continued to struggle against medieval

conditions. Monthly memos writ en by Glenn Andrews, a state

medical inspector, recorded scores of routine lashings for o enses

such as cursing, failure to dig the daily quota of coal, and

"disobedience." One entry in March 1924 reported that in the

previous month, "a negro woman was given seven lashes for cursing

and ghting. On the same day, a negro man was given seven lashes

for burning a hole in prison oor. On Feb. 14, a negro man was

given seven lashes for cursing and ghting. On the same day and for

the same of ense two negro women were given six lashes each." In a

1925 report, two black inmates, Ernest Hal man and R. B. Green,

received ve lashes each for not obeying a guard. Others were put

in chains and given up to a dozen lashes for "not working." White

prisoners, now invested in larger numbers, were more often given

solitary confinement. 54

In March 1926, the front page of the New York World featured

an exposé on southern slavery. The stories reported that in fty-one

of Alabama's sixty-seven counties, nearly one thousand prisoners

had been sold into slave mines and forced labor camps the previous

year—generating $250,000, or about $2.8 mil ion in modern

currency, for local o cials. The state government pocketed

$595,000 in 1925—or $6.6 mil ion today—sel ing about 1,300 men

to Sloss-She eld's Flat Top mine, the successor to Prat

Consolidated—now cal ed Alabama By-Products Corp.—and the

Aldrich mine in Monteval o, Alabama, the town where Green

Cot enham's mother lived her last isolated years.

Once sold, the prisoners faced beatings with steel wire, hickory

sticks, whips, and shovels. The stories described "dog houses"—

rough-hewn boxes the size of co ns into which men were locked

for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty

for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty

such houses.55

Final y, in 1927, new Alabama governor Bibb Graves moved to

stanch the long-running negative depiction of the state and its

twentieth-century slavery. He began relocating a hundred prisoners

out of the mines and other private businesses each month and sped

up construction of new prison facilities and roadwork camps where

county prisoners would soon be shackled into chain gangs—seeding

the notorious scandals of the next generation.56

On June 1, 1928, the lungs of eight hundred men l ed the damp

air of the mine shafts at Flat Top with the sounds of "Swing Low,

Sweet Chariot." The white prisoners held here and at Alabama's

only other remaining prison mine had already been relocated to

work on road gangs.

Only African Americans remained at Flat Top. They rose out of

the mile-long manway in two columns—blinking at the sudden

brightness of the summer sun. As the plaintive lyric "Coming for to

carry me home" wafted into the daylight, the prisoners marched out

of the shaft, surrounded by armed guards, and walked to a train

platform. Within a few hours, they had been transported to the

state's newly constructed Kilby Prison. No more men would be sold

into slave mines by the state of Alabama.57

More than a year later, a thirty-six-year-old man born in

Tal apoosa County and named Henry Tinsley arrived at the gates of

Kilby Prison. Like Green Cot enham, he was born decades after

Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of his parents and grandparents.

Also like Green, al his years and every facet of his life were shaped

and circumscribed by the slavery that succeeded the freedom of his

forebears.

It was Henry Tinsley and his brother, Luke, who as children three

decades earlier had been captured by John Pace and forced to work

on his brutal Tal apoosa plantation. 58 They were the two young

boys Warren Reese had discovered stil being held by Pace ve

years after taking them from their mother and long after Pace had

been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold

been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold

slaves again.

Henry had worked for a time in the warehouse of a grocery

wholesaler in Birmingham. He had married and fathered a child

more than a decade earlier. He had been a soldier too, cal ed in

1917 to ght in the U.S. Army59But the Alabama Henry returned to

after World War I was the same state he was born into in 1892. And

soon it returned him to the condition Alabama had reserved for him

at birth.

His crime in 1929 was recorded as assault with intent to murder.

The details of the case are lost, but the sentence of two years’

imprisonment suggests a brawl in which the other man was

injured.60 Regardless of whether the man who had grown from that

captive thirteen-year-old commit ed a real crime or whether it was

his enslavement by John Pace that led him to do so twenty-three

years later, deep into the twentieth century, Henry Tinsley wore

chains again.

XVI

FREEDOM

"In the United States one cannot sel himself."

Two years after the last convicts emerged from Flat Top prison, a

white writer named John Spivak visited the o ces of the state

Prison Commission in Georgia in September 1930. Presenting

himself in Atlanta as a journalist seeking to document reforms in

the convict system, Spivak was given a let er of introduction from

none other than the state's top penal o cer, directing the wardens

of every prison camp in Georgia to give him ful access to their

stockades and inmates.

Spivak, born in Connecticut, had worked as a police reporter for

a newspaper in his home state and as a writer of pulp ction

stories. His strong socialist leanings made him sympathetic to the

plight of blacks held against their wil in the South. His skil with

the jocular techniques of insinuating into the comfort of sheri s and

wardens gave him the tools to render an astonishingly sharp

portrait of what he found.

Contrary to the congratulatory pronouncements that fol owed

Georgia's "abolition" of the practice of sel ing black prisoners in

1908, the state had more forced labor slaves than ever by 1930. In

excess of eight thousand men—nearly al of them black—worked in

chain gangs in 116 counties. Of 1.1 mil ion African Americans in

the state that year, approximately half lived under the direct control

and force of whites—unable to move or seek employment

elsewhere under threat that doing so would lead to the dreaded

chain gang.1

Two years later Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a 241-page

ctionalized account of his nds—built around the harrowing

narrative of a young black boy drawn inexorably and cynical y into

a lifetime of slavery—on a county chain gang, as a debt slave to

farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.

farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.