Birmingham News

Industrial archeologist Jack Bergstresser, left, filmmaker Sam Pollard and author Douglas Blackmon walk toward the grown-over graveyard where convict laborers are buried. The laborers died while working in coal mines near Pratt City. (Thomas Spencer/Birmingham News)Deep in the tangle of privet in what was once a smoky waste pile for coal mines near Pratt City, author Douglas Blackmon is pointing out to a crew of documentary filmmakers subtle depressions in the moist forest floor.

The depressions form, he explains, when pine boxes rot and collapse, creating the only visible reminder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unmarked graves. The men in these graves, almost all of them black, were convicts forced to labor in hellish conditions in the coal mines that powered Birmingham's iron and steel industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That's a central theme of Blackmon's book, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War Until World War II," which won the 2009 non-fiction Pulitzer Prize.

Blackmon, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was in town last week to speak to Leadership Birmingham.

His book tells how Southern states in the decades following the Civil War developed a system of arresting blacks on flimsy charges and then selling them to plantations, lumber camps and mines for hard labor in deplorable circumstances. In Alabama, the convict-lease system persisted until 1928, longer than in any other state.

The book's central narrative follows Green Cottenham, a son of former slaves. He was arrested in Columbiana in March 1908. His sentence for vagrancy amounted to six months of hard labor.

Sold by Shelby County to U.S. Steel subsidiary Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co., Cottenham served his sentence in shackles, alongside more than 1,000 convicts at TCI's Pratt mines, digging coal with a pick in the dark and damp. If he didn't meet his daily quota of eight tons, he faced a lashing, according to Blackmon's account.

He slept chained in an overcrowded and unsanitary bunkhouse with 200 prisoners. In five months, he was dead of tuberculosis and buried among the other mine debris.

The book caught the eye of two prominent documentary filmmakers -- Catherine Allan and Sam Pollard --who are working on turning Blackmon's book into a film scheduled to air on PBS in 2011.

But, until now, the book has received little attention in Birmingham.

Confronting history

Blackmon, who grew up in the Mississippi Delta and has family roots in Alabama, understands people here have developed a weariness of the discussion of the racial injustices of the past. "There hasn't been much reaction at all out of Birmingham," he said.

But Blackmon and the documentary crew hope that will change. The story of the convict-lease system and how it worked in tandem with other Jim Crow-era laws has been discussed by scholars, but neglected in the general understanding of history.

Understanding it explains a lot.

Klan violence may have been dramatic, but it was the regular function of the legal and economic system that created the more constant and pervasive terror that kept blacks subjugated until the civil rights movement, Blackmon argues.

"I don't think Birmingham or anywhere else has confronted the magnitude of what happened."

This 1907 photo of convict miners in Birmingham is from the Dr. Thomas Parke collection from the Birmingham Public Library. (Special/Birmingham Public Library)Blackmon's book grew out of a Wall Street Journal article nine years ago. At the time, corporations were examining and apologizing for their connections to Hitler's persecution of the Jews or to slavery in America. Blackmon wrote about the convict-lease system and found that most modern corporations with links to the system knew little about it.

U.S. Steel declined to comment Friday about the corporation's mention in Blackmon's book.

After Reconstruction, Southern whites began to reassert their control over blacks politically and through the legal system.

When cash-strapped governments found they could make money leasing out prisoners, arrests increased. Laws were either tailored to or selectively enforced against black men, Blackmon found in his research.

If you were jobless, you could be arrested for vagrancy. At a time when carrying a gun was common, blacks were often charged with carrying a concealed weapon, a law rarely enforced against whites. The same went for the use of profanity or speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman.

When labor needs were acute, arrests spiked and convict leasing became a major source of revenue at the state and local levels.

TCI -- the company that leased Cottenham -- paid Shelby County $12 a month per man in the mines. In addition to a three-month sentence, Cottenham was required to pay fees to the sheriff, judge and local officials totaling $38.40. That tacked another three months onto his sentence in the mines.

Convict labor fees

The deputy who arrested Cottenham received a fee for each convict he delivered to the mine, plus expenses for his trip. In fact, the deputy and the sheriff in most counties derived their entire compensation from this commerce in human lives.

Birmingham area industries fought for as many inmates as they could get from the state and from local governments.

Though it's hard to imagine a system worse than slavery, the convict-lease system may have been, Blackmon writes.

At least a slavemaster would theoretically have some interest in the health and longevity of his principal assets, his slaves. But in the mines, quarries, plantations and turpentine camps around the South, there was no shortage of potential convicts for lease and no penalty for letting a prisoner die.

The convicts not only provided a cheap source of labor, they were a weapon against unions because they kept mines running when free workers held strikes.

John T. Milner, one of Birmingham's founding fathers, helped pioneer the use of slaves in industrial settings before and during the Civil War. After the war, Milner became a vocal proponent of white supremacy and a major user of convict labor. Conditions at his company's slave mines at Coalburg, Flat Top and New Castle were even more horrific than those at the Pratt mines, according to Blackmon's book.

High mortality rates

Blackmon's book is carefully sourced and much of the detail comes from prison inspectors who were often upset and revolted at the conditions they saw, with mortality rates that at times exceeded 30 percent.

Shirley Bragg, president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, wrote in 1905: "If the state wishes to kill its convicts, it should do it directly not indirectly."

A Republican U.S. attorney in Montgomery, Warren Reese, with the initial backing of Theodore Roosevelt's Justice Department, waged a public crusade against the new slavery. The case made headlines across the country but ultimately failed to bring down the system that had forced many blacks back into bondage.

Even though the case was national news, descendants of some of the principal players knew nothing about it. Reese's grandson is Montgomery Circuit Judge Gene Reese, who in the 1990s ruled that inequalities in the way Alabama schools were funded violated the Alabama Constitution. It was Blackmon who revealed to Reese his ancestor's role.

Reading the book, Robert Corley, director of UAB's Global and Community Leaders Honor Program, was shocked to discover something he'd never known about his great-grandfather, Robert Franklin.

Franklin, a constable and shopkeeper in Goodwater, was convicted of rounding up blacks and essentially selling them to a plantation owner. Franklin was fined $1,000. Corley said no one in his family knew the story and they have been struggling to comprehend it.

Franklin continued in business. When he died in 1946, Franklin's estate was worth about $1 million. Corley said his own ability to go to college and obtain advanced degrees was in some part due to Franklin's prosperity.

Corley, who helped design the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and was a founding member of its board, wonders about the damage done to the men his great-grandfather arrested.

"My great-grandfather was a real criminal," Corley said. "These others he arrested were not, and yet he didn't suffer any real consequences."

Odessa Woolfolk, the BCRI's former board president, said more attention should be paid to the period between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. Some worry about bringing up the story, but the facts need to be faced, she said.

"We have a tendency to want to sweep unpleasant facts under the rug," she said. "I hope that there gets to be more public discussion about the book and the history that the book recalls."

Recognition due

The documentarians involved are some of the country's best. Allan, now a producer for Twin Cities Public Television, was the executive director for "Hoop Dreams," an acclaimed documentary about the aspirations of inner-city basketball players. Pollard directed episodes of the civil rights documentary "Eyes on the Prize" and has worked with Spike Lee on several films including "4 Little Girls," Lee's documentary about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

Blackmon said he hoped the book would foster discussion.

"Enough time has passed now that we really ought to be able to talk about these things," he said. "If we do, we really have to have a much clearer of understanding of how we got to where we are now."

Blackmon would at least like to see some recognition of the laborers who perished and are buried in that forgotten tangle of privet.

"It deserves some sort of acknowledgment that it even exists," he said.