Slavery by Another Name (PBS Documentary 2012).mp4

[Music]

Mr. President,

I have a brother about 14 years old.

A man hired him from me

and I heard of him no more.

He went and sold him to McGrean,

they has been working him

in prison for 12 months.

I asked him to let me have

him but he won't let him go.

>> For a period of nearly 80 years,

between the Civil War and WWII,

black southerners were no longer

slaves but they were not yet free.

[Music]

In one of the most shameful

and little known chapters of American history,

generations of black southerners

were forced to labor against their will.

>> From almost the first moment,

white southerners were responding

to try to put African Americans

back into a position as close

to slavery as they possibly could.

[Music.]

>> The old south and what was

quickly becoming the new

south could not proceed

without the work of African-Americans.

>> But if you had something

for free in the past,

you don't necessarily

want to pay for it now.

>> It was a straight, simple,

exploitative system.

It was only power,

it was only force,

it was only brutality.

>> What happened in that period

of time was so much more

terrible than anything most

Americans recognize or understand today.

The depth of poverty,

the inability of African-Americans

to access any of the mechanisms of wealth,

achievement and growth,

they're all rooted in this terroristic

kind of regime that existed in so many places.

>> Their ability to have what we call

the American dream, that is what

has been stolen from black

folks all through the south.

And that legacy has to be understood

so that people will be able to

speak to it and give our ancestors voice.

[Music.]

>> My name is Sharon Malone

and my family is originally

from Wilcox County, Alabama.

[Music.]

My father was born in 1893.

As a child, I never knew why

Dad didn't share many of the

stories growing up in the rural south.

There was so little that I

actually knew about you know,

the generations beyond my parents.

And I realized that -

why don't I know these stories,

and why don't I know who those people are.

African-Americans were innately

wired to want to know who we are.

It's almost like being an adopted child.

We have no understanding of not

only what we have endured,

but what we have survived.

[Music.]

[Singing] Oh, freedom

Oh, freedom.

>> Freedom must have felt glorious

to those who'd never known it.

With the end of the Civil War,

and the passage of the 13th Amendment,

four million former slaves

could embark on new lives with

no one in charge but themselves.

-- [singing] and go home to my Lord and be free.

>> And what they desired more than

anything was independence.

They wanted independence from white owners.

They wanted their own churches.

They wanted their own schools

They wanted freedom to move.

[choir singing] Oh, freedom.

>> African-Americans after emancipation

are looking at the potential,

not only to enjoy and receive freedom.

But to live it.

They're deeply committed

to reaffirming marriage vows.

They're deeply committed to reconstituting families.

>> Ezekiel Archie, born into slavery,

was six when freedom came.

His mother moved the family.

Zeke, his two brothers and a sister.

From Georgia to Alabama.

Away from the old plantation

and toward a new future.

(Singing)

>> African-Americans were willing

to work very hard and exploit themselves

in the same way that immigrants who

had come to this country had exploited

themselves and their families with long work days.

They were willing to do that.

But they wanted to own their own land.

They wanted to control those hours.

They wanted to be the ones to decide.

>> John Davis was born a dozen years after the war.

He grew up in freedom.

Working hard on an Alabama farm

rented by his parents.

>>There was a tremendous motivation

and desire to integrate into American life.

>> Green Cottingham, born in 1885,

was also the son of an Alabama farmer.

He came of age in a nation

that was increasingly urban,

industrial and modern.

>> This is a photo of George Cottingham;

he's my great-grandfather.

He was actually Green Cottingham's first cousin.

How hopeful my Cottingham ancestors

must have been about

bright futures for their family.

These were hard working, honest people.

>> But freedom had come at a tremendous cost.

The war devastated the southern economy

which had supported one of the

wealthiest aristocracies in the world.

>> The cotton economy was in complete shambles.

The fields had been burned.

The cotton gins had been destroyed.

Equipment that was necessary for

the production of cotton didn't exist anymore.

But also, the primary engine of the economy,

of the cotton economy, that being

the labor of slaves, was lost.

>> In the five major cotton states

of the deep south, nearly half of all capital,

nearly half of all investment,

was in human beings.

So when those human beings

were confiscated, when the

investment was transferred

in essence from slaveholders

to the people themselves,

that meant a huge loss of capital

to southern slave holders.

To the people who controlled

the economy of the south.

>> A tiny slaveholding elite had

owned the majority of the

region's four million slaves.

Among them was Lucinda Comer, a widow.

After the war, she and her sons

oversaw the family's enterprises

in cotton, lumber, and corn.

>> I'm a great-great-granddaughter

of BB Comer, who was the governor of Alabama.

And the great-great-niece of JW Comer.

The things that I heard about

the Comer men especially BB Comer

were about their entrepreneurial spirit.

And being self-made men.

There was never a fool or a coward, it was said.

In the Comer family.

>> Emancipation turned the former

slaveholding world upside down.

>> The simple reality of people that

they had once owned now were

entitled to the same fruits of their labor.

The same ability to look a white

person in the eye, a man or

a woman and to demand equal respect,

to be called by one's first and last names,

challenged everything to the -

to the bitter core of white people's souls.

>> You have a group of people

who are accustomed to have people serve them.

Now suddenly these people are free.

They own guns.

You'd be as worried as hell.

Because what you're worried

is that people are gonna take revenge.

You also are worried that people

aren't gonna do any work anymore.

>> Most of the south's eight million

whites had not owned slaves.

Poverty was widespread.

And about a third of whites were illiterate.

>> Those individuals see blacks moving around,

trying to get land, trying

to improve themselves, as competitors.

They see a zero sum game.

In which they're going to lose.

The more that blacks gain.

>> These whites aligned with

leaders of the former confederacy.

Aided by President Andrew Johnson.

Lincoln's successor.

They formed vigilante groups.

To attack and intimidate blacks.

The violence grew widespread.

In the spring of 1866, Congress intervened.

Over the objections of the president,

it launched an era known as Radical Reconstruction.

>> At the beginning of Reconstruction,

there was a tremendous federal will

to both bring the south into submission

but also to protect African-Americans' civil rights.

>> Passed in 1866, the 14th Amendment

recognized the citizenship of all freed people.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment was passed,

which upheld the right of black men to vote.

>> Reconstruction was an attempt to

create a country in which it would

be possible to have a bi-racial

and equal citizenship.

Reconstruction gave African-Americans

for the first time across the south,

the opportunity to serve on juries.

To be witnesses in trial.

To serve as judges.

It also made possible an entire

generation of black politicians

across the south, almost as many

as 1500 serving through the

end of the 19th century.

>> Reconstruction governments in many

parts of the south succeeded in

passing new social legislation.

Creating the south's first free public schools.

>> Hee-yah!

(Horse naying)

>> But white resistance to bi-racial government

in the south intensified.

And national political

support began to wane.

By 1874, voters had shifted

the balance of power in Congress.

Allowing for the south to

return to local control.

>> There is no sustained federal presence

in the south really after 1874.

What they come away with is --

a sense that this is a really violent situation.

And that there's not much we can do about it.

And there's not much perhaps

we even should do about it.

>> African-Americans seeking freedom

could count on less and less help

from the federal government.

Less and less help from sympathetic

northerners and they could count on

more and more and more animosity and

attack from southern whites.

(Horse naying).

yahhhh--

[Music]

I grew up in a black part of Mississippi.

And I went to schools that were 60, 75 percent black.

All through my childhood.

That was in the 1970s.

What I learned about the Emancipation

Proclamation was the most

simplistic version of it.

That it had brought an end to slavery.

I also was taught as most Americans were in some way,

That the end of slavery unleashed

this population of people who

were ill equipped for freedom.

And that was all offered up in

some respect as an explanation

for the repressive things that

would have been done to African-Americans,

even the repressive things that I knew about.

What I came to realize was

that that fundamentally didn't happen.

[Music.]

>> With the end of Reconstruction,

the nature of both crime and punishment

in the south changed dramatically.

State after state and county after county --

new laws targeted African-Americans.

And effectively criminalized black life.

[Music.]

>> It was a crime in the south.

For a farm worker to walk beside a railroad.

It was a crime in the south to speak

loudly in the company of white women.

It was a crime to sell the

products of your farm after dark

>> Anything from spitting or drinking

or being found to be drunk in public

or loitering in public spaces

could result in confinement.

So there was an over-exaggeration

of African-American criminality

during this time period.

It's not to absolve all prisoners

from having committed crimes,

but there were many trumped up charges.

>> One of the most infamous set

of laws to come out of

this period were the Pig Laws.

Passed in Mississippi,

Georgia, Florida, Alabama.

Enhancing penalties for what

had been previously misdemeanor offenses.

To now felony offenses.

>> In Mississippi, theft of a pig,

worth as little as a dollar.

could mean five years in prison.

In Tennessee, hard labor might result

from stealing an eight cent fence ring.

>> But the most powerful,

the most damaging of all of these

laws were the vagrancy statutes.

In every southern state,

you became a criminal if you

could not prove at any given

moment that you were employed.

>> Under slavery, most black crime

was punished by slaveholders.

Leaving the courts to discipline whites.

Now only about 10% of those

arrested were white.

>> Now what does this mean?

Does this mean that white people

are not committing crimes in the south?

We know that's not true.

[Music.]

>> Southern states had a history of

placing prisoners with industries

that would bear the cost of guarding

and housing them in exchange for their labor.

Now states also began to charge fees,

renting prisoners to companies by the month.

The highest rates were for

the strongest workers and longest sentences.

>> When you go to the 13th Amendment,

one of fascinating things

about the text of that amendment

is that it says that slavery

is abolished except in the

case of a punishment for a crime.

And within that wiggle room

what you see in it is that

there is still the possibility

of extending slavery as it were,

by another name.

(Sound of steadily beating drums)

(Singing) But it's daylight in the morning

Baby when I rise

Well it's --

>>The system is known as convict leasing.

>> It took time for the system

of convict leasing to develop.

It took time for the state to

realize that prisoners believe

it or not could be a source of profit.

Once that revenue starts coming in,

they're pleasantly surprised.

This is new revenue we never had before.

>> The state of Alabama earned 14,000

dollars in its first year of convict leasing.

1874.

By 1890, revenue was 164,000 dollars,

roughly 4.1 million dollars today.

By then, states throughout

the south and hundreds of counties

and cities were engaged in some

form of leasing convicts

to private industry.

>> And it gave tremendous discretionary

power for the private owner,

either a landowner or a

corporation or coal mine.

Could be any business concern.

To do what they wanted

with that African-American.

>> We as convicts.

It's something like a man drowning.

We have been convicted of felonies.

And because of that,

we have lost every friend on earth.

>> In 1884, a series of remarkable

letters was sent from the

Pratt coalmines to Alabama's

new inspector of prisons.

Their author was Ezekiel Archie,

now a 25 year old convict.

All these years of how we suffered.

We have looked death in the face.

Worked hungry.

Thirsty.

Half clothed.

And sore.

>> Archie was one of hundreds of

convicts now being worked

in a growing network of mines

and factories around Alabama's

new industrial center.

Birmingham.

Founded in 1871 and fed

by intersecting railway lines,

Birmingham was poised to

exploit Alabama's rich

underground deposits of coal,

limestone and iron ore -

the ingredients of steel.

This was the new industrial south.

Envisioned just prior to the Civil War

by slaveholder John T. Milner.

>> John T. Milner was a brilliant engineer,

extraordinary businessman.

He was also a supreme racist

and a despotic person.

>> Negro labor can be made exceedingly

profitable in manufacturing

iron and in rolling mills.

Provided there is an overseer.

A southern man who knows

how to manage negroes.

>> He laid out some of the first

railroad lines that would

run across Alabama.

In many respects, he was the

father of southern industrialization.

Particularly in the deep, deep south.

>> Milner's vision triggered

decades of rapid industrial growth.

After emancipation, industrialists

replaced slaves with convicts.

Acquiring thousands from

state and county governments.

>> You can't drive free labor

the same way that you can

force prisoners to mine

five tons of coal a day.

And this is why people like

Milner wanted prisoners

in his coalmines.

He saw them as a great

source of profit and

he didn't have to worry

about labor disputes.

>> We would leave the cells

Around three o'clock a.m.

And return at eight o'clock p.m.

Going the distance of three miles.

Through rain.

Or snow.

>> To describe the conditions

in a coalmine at this time.

Is to say that they're primitive -

you can't even imagine it.

>> This is a place where for

weeks or months at a time,

men might never see daylight.

The mine was often filled

with standing water around

their ankles and their feet.

They had to drink from that water.

Disease ran rampant through these mines.

>> They were incredibly dangerous places to work.

Being subjected to violent explosions.

Poisonous gases that were

released as coal fell from the walls.

In addition to the falling coal itself.

>> Whippings, keeping people chained up.

Brutal kinds of physical torture

and mental abuse are the norm.

A lot of the things that kept

people in control under slavery

are amplified under this convict system.

>> Zeke Archie was one of about

500 convicts at the

Pratt Mines near Birmingham.

Nearly half the company's workforce.

They were overseen by

JW Comer, the former slaveholder

whose enterprises now

included convict mining.

>> That Comer is a hard man.

I've seen him.

I've seen him hit men.

100 and 160 times

with a ten prong strap.

Then say they was not whipped.

>> When I learned about

the brutality of J.W. Comer.

I -- uh -- well, I just started weeping.

And uh -- I actually didn't

leave my house for two days.

Because I was in such a

state of grief and shock.

The stories that I heard

about all the Comer men

when I was growing up

were about self-made men.

And so, to learn about the

ways that they weren't really

self-made but were making themselves

on the backs and by the

blood of other people,

specifically the blacks

and the convicts leasing system -

definitely shattered that image for me.

>> He'd go off after an escaped man.

One day.

And dig his grave the same day.

>> Exposes of the convict labor

system described it as worse than slavery.

Slaves had been a significant

long term investment.

A convict could be rented

for as little as nine dollars a month.

>> It was never an economic interest

of a slave owner to kill his own slaves.

Or to abuse them so terribly

that they couldn't work anymore.

So their economic value

protected them in certain ways.

After the Civil War,

someone working these kinds of slaves --

Would push them to the very

limits of human endurance.

>> We are the men who do the work.

Look at the white men.

How many are cutting five --

Or four ton coal per day.

They are few.

>> Convict leasing was a source

of labor where you could

realize the maximum return.

At a minimum social cost.

The feeding of course

was next to nothing.

Health was next to nothing.

>> Convict miners cost as much

as 50 to 80 percent less than free miners.

And could be worked six days a week.

Their presence allowed companies

to depress wages and resist unions.

>> When one could obtain black

labor at almost no cost.

The profits for that form

of business were enormous.

>> In Florida, prisoners extracted

gum and resin from tall pines.

And transformed it into turpentine.

In Georgia, they hauled wet

clay from river banks.

Molding it into the millions

of bricks needed for new

buildings and homes.

From Texas to Louisiana,

convicts forced their way

through acres of virgin forest,

harvesting timber and building railroads.

In all, more than 15,000 prisoners

worked in southern industry in 1886.

And that number was rising quickly.

In many labor camps, as many

as a third male convicts

were boys younger than 16.

Girls and women were

also forced into labor.

>> Over 90 percent of convict laborers

in Georgia were African-American men.

The next highest percentage

would obviously be white men.

But African-American women

were also utilized in these various tasks.

In manual labor, black women

are working in brick yards,

in turpentine camps.

In mining camps.

Farms and lumber yards.

>> Convict leasing becomes

a new form of economic development

in the south.

And a ubiquitous form of

punishment for southerners

as the criminal justice

system expanded itself.

>> And sweeps would take place

all throughout the south.

Whether it was for a dice game.

Whether it was for an altercation.

Whether it was for being mouthy or uppity.

>> The record of thousands upon

thousands of people arrested

in this way is everywhere in the south.

In the fall when it was time to pick cotton.

Huge numbers of black people

are arrested in all of

the cotton growing counties.

There are surges and arrests

in counties in Alabama in

the days before coincidentally

a labor agent from the coal

mines in Birmingham is coming

to town that day to pick up

whichever county convict are there.

>> Some charges were serious.

But more than two-thirds of

all state prisoners at the

time of Zeke Archie's arrest,

including Archie,

were convicted under vague

charges of burglary and larceny.

County prisoners too were sent to the mines

for often trivial offenses.

They faced the real possibility of death.

In some Alabama prison camps,

convicts died at a rate

of 30 to 40 percent a year.

>> And this system is one that

I think in many ways needs

to be understood as brutal

in a social sense.

But fiendishly rational

in an economic sense.

Because where else could

one take a black worker

and work them literally

to death after slavery.

And when that worker died

one simply had to go and

get another convict.

[Music]

>> The south prison population

continued to grow,

reaching 19,000 people by 1890.

Nearly 90 percent of those

held were African-American.

When folded into national statistics,

the concentration of black prisoners

seemed to reflect an

alarming rise in black crime.

>> So as early as 1890,

African-Americans are almost

three times over-represented

in the prison population.

The general population is 12 percent.

The nation's prisons population

of blacks is 30 percent.

>> So there are many important

implications and long term

consequences for this

convict leasing system.

Not only is it so oppressive

but when you have an

overwhelmingly black

prison population,

it cements that relationship

between criminality and

race in people's minds.

To the degree that it's

seen as something inherent.

>> Southern editorialists,

sociologists, politicians,

are all saying that the statistics

prove that black people are a criminal race.

And that freedom had been a mistake.

>> If you were to ask most southerners,

white southerners, what they thought

of African-Americans in the 1850s,

the 1860s even into the 1870s,

one profile would have been of

people who were loyal, dutiful,

trustworthy, those same people

in the 1880s and by the 1890s

have been demonized.

They no longer are trustworthy.

They no longer have the

capacity for citizenship.

By the 1890s white voters

had reversed the civil rights

gains made during Reconstruction.

New state constitutions kept

blacks out of voting booths

and limited funding for black schools.

Racial segregation was mandated by law.

>> They do this because it's

important to remind black people,

day after day after day,

minute after minute that they

have a place in this society

and that that place is subordinate.

So what that means is that when

a black person is walking down

the street and a white person

walks towards them,

they step into the gutter.

>> My name is Barbara Jean Belisle.

I was born in Birmingham in 1936.

You had to stay in your place.

Now my daddy was the one who was daring.

He used to be called that uppity nigger.

By white folks.

Because he believed that we

were just as good as anybody else.

He was a smart man.

He was one of the first black

men in this area to register to vote.

That was the time when the KKK folks

would pass by the house.

He made white folks mad about something.

He wouldn't let my mother work.

When she went to clean up a house one time.

And he went over to pick up and

she was cleaning out something

the cabinets down on her knees,

trying to clean out -- he told her,

you're not going back,

you clean up your own cabinets.

And that's the kind of man he was.

He's another story though.

I have to talk about him another time.

[Music.]

>> Segregation was not only mandated

by southern states;

it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an 1896 ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson.

>> And after that, white southerners,

white legislatures, never had

any reservation about imposing

the most severe,

the most repressive

restrictions on black life.

>> Ezekiel Archie was scheduled

for release on February 6, 1887.

At the age of 28.

But he was not free.

A new indictment for

reasons unknown was pending.

>> This letter is not all I could write.

But my condition will not permit.

Fate seems to curse the convict.

Death seems to summon us hence.

(Singing)

As the 19th century came

to a close and for many

decades to come,

the possibility of freedom

was overshadowed by the constant

threat of forced labor and violence.

(singing)

Decades after the Civil War,

the nation was reunited.

But the place of black Americans

within it seemed more uncertain than ever.

(Singing)

>> Many whites in the south

are completely indifferent

about whether black people live or die.

They want to see them in their place.

They want to see them as

an exploitable system of labor.

They want to see them as

an affirmation of their racial superiority.

And if they don't fulfill that role,

then to hell with them.

(Singing)

>> I never will forget.

I'm nine years old.

Going from West Palm Beach

to Tampa, where my mom's from

To see my grandma.

And we had a brand new Oldsmobile.

And a cop stopped her in

Kissimmee, Florida, and the

way he talked to my mom.

He gave her a ticket for speeding.

And she was not speeding.

It was just because he could do it.

You follow me?

And the ticket cost a one-month salary.

And my momma had to restrain me.

Because I wanted to get

after this white boy like

I could not believe.

At 9 years old.

When you have to just

kinda just tuck it in.

Like my mom would say,

you gotta just stop.

Because we may not get

out of here and you could

see the terror in her eyes.

You follow me.

Because we were in little old Kissimmee.

In the 50s.

[Train Sounds]

>> September 1901.

The dawn of a new century.

John Davis, now 23.

And renting his own Alabama farm.

Was on his way to Goodwater,

about 18 miles away.

His wife was ill,

being cared for there by her parents.

It was harvest time

and Davis would have

been careful to avoid trouble.

Eager to return safely to

his own small patch of cotton.

But trouble found him

in the form of Robert Franklin.

A local merchant and constable.

[Music]

>> Bob Franklin said

Nigger haven't got any money.

When are you gonna pay the money you owe me.

I said, I don't owe you any money.

>> Convicts were not the only

Southerners being forced into hard labor.

Throughout the south, many thousands

of African-Americans were tied

to white employers through

various forms of debt.

>> You get a person in debt.

You continually keep 'em in debt.

You never let 'em work it off.

And you control their labor.

Any kind of relationship where

you use debt as the fulcrum to extract labor.

That's illegal.

You violated the peonage law.

>> Peonage.

Or debt servitude was

outlawed by the federal

government just after the Civil War.

>> Peonage comes from the word "peon",

Mexicon peons.

It's serfdom; it's peasantry.

Ironically enough,

the United States made peonage

illegal only as a result of

the acquisition of New Mexico.

And the federal government

didn't want to introduce

Mexican peonage into the American -

the American legal system.

And so in 1867, the Congress

made peonage illegal.

>> Nearly 40 years later, in 1903,

a federal judge in Alabama

raised the alarm about

allegations of peonage

in his jurisdiction.

>> Witnesses have reported

that a systematic scheme

of depriving negroes of

their liberty in Alabama

has been practiced for some time.

>> Judge Thomas Good Jones was

a former confederate officer.

And two time governor of Alabama.

Viewed as something of a moderate,

he'd been appointed to the

federal court by US President

Theodore Roosevelt.

>> Teddy Roosevelt becomes

president in 1901.

After the assassination of William McKinley.

He viewed himself as an

egalitarian person on the

side of both business and the working man.

He believed that exposure

of the sins of society and

exposure of the sins of

commerce and industrialism

would lead to their eradication.

And he believed that for

the factories of the north

and he believed that for

the racial abuses of the south.

>> The president authorized

the federal investigation into peonage.

In the Alabama counties of

Shelby, Koosa, and Tallapoosa.

>> Now they thought that these

were exceptional circumstances.

They were out of the ordinary

and I think that the

Roosevelt administration,

the Roosevelt justice department

thought that it could --

score points is too easy a word.

But that it could, by -

by making a stand in this way,

it could accomplish quite a lot

and have a symbolic impact

that was pretty large.

>> Federal peonage inquires

were also underway in Georgia and Florida.

In Alabama, witnesses were called

to appear before the federal

grand jury to determine if

there was enough evidence to go to trial.

Prosecuting the case,

was US Attorney Warren S Reese.

Born in Alabama just after the Civil War.

>> Now I have lived in this

state my entire life of 37 years.

And I never comprehended until

now the extent of this

present method of slavery

through this peonage system.

>> Southern Progressives were

not free of the racism that

southern conservatives had;

northern Progressives not

free of that either.

But they did think that

there were some things that

were just beyond the pale.

And so when stories, horrific,

sensationalized,

stories of African-American

slavery came to light,

they were precisely the kind

of thing that we as a modern,

civilized nation should not engage in.

>> Among those testifying was John Davis,

freed hastily as word of

the investigation spread.

>> Bob Franklin said,

when are you gonna pay the

money you owe me.

I said, I don't owe you any money.

>> Nearly 18 months had passed

since he'd been stopped by

Franklin - the local constable.

His testimony echoed that of other victims.

Like Davis, they were falsely

accused and quickly convicted.

They were sentenced and

charged fines and court fees.

Which they couldn't pay.

They could do nothing as

local whites paid the court

and took control of them.

John Davis was bought from

the court by Bob Franklin.

And then resold for profit.

>> He said, we gonna carry you

over to Mr. Pace's --

I told him I didn't know anything about it.

He said, we know.

>> John Pace was the baron of

Tallapoosa County, Alabama.

He had been the sheriff of

the county in the 1880s.

He then amassed a substantial

amount of land, the most fertile

land along the Tallapoosa River

in his part of Alabama.

>> He was quite a character.

A six foot two, 230 pound man

who had frostbitten toes and

was supposed to be very ill.

And when he walked the

earth shook, they said.

>> I bought the Negro John Davis

from Bob Franklin, a constable of Tallapoosa.

I explained to Davis that he would

be confined on my farm just as

I confined county convicts.

>> Mr. Pace says, will you work ten months.

And I signed a contract.

>> These contracts gave employers

the right to whip, confine,

and even trade workers as long

as the debt was deemed unpaid.

>> Peonage varied from a kind

of paternalistic peonage to

just the most awful

conditions you could imagine.

People were put in barracks.

They were beaten.

And some killed.

People were flogged.

They were chased by bloodhounds.

It was pretty horrible at its worst,

about as bad as it could get.

>> Brutal things have transpired

and sometimes death has been the result

of the infliction of corporal punishment.

>> Prosecutor Warren Reese's reports

to Washington grew more urgent.

Peonage was not isolated in a few counties.

But was evident throughout the state.

Trapping hundreds or even thousands of people.

>> These violations have developed.

Into a miserable business and custom.

To catch up the negro men

and women upon the flimsiest of charges.

>> Reporting to Washington,

Reese would have had to

remind himself that this was 1903.

[Music.]

In Detroit, the Ford Motor Company

had begun production of the Model A.

On Wall Street, the new stock

exchange building had just opened.

In Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers

were preparing their first flight.

Yet in much of the south,

African-Americans were still

being held in what Reese and

the press called abject slavery.

>> What the US attorneys like

Reese found was a totally

corrupt legal system.

Where you had the justices

of the peace were corrupt.

And the people who came

before them may not be guilty

but they would find them guilty.

>> John Pace, Fletcher Turner

and William and George Cosby,

all of them wealthy farmers.

Were the ringleaders.

>> All of them had their

own justice of the peace.

In the case of John Pace.

He had a man named James Kennedy.

Mr. J.W. Pace and I are

brothers-in-law by marriage.

I went to work for him on

the 1st of June 1891.

>> And if they wanted a man convicted

of any particular thing,

then they simply had their

own justice of the peace

or the justice of the peace

of one of the other families

declare someone to be guilty.

>> No.

In none of these cases

that I have spoken about

did I receive one cent of costs.

Nor was I paid in any

other way by Mr. Pace.

Or anybody else for trying these cases.

>> After I worked that ten months,

my time was out on the 10th day of July.

1902.

I told him, my time is out this morning.

He said, go ahead to work.

I said no.

I'm going home this morning.

He locked me up for 3 days.

And after that he said,

if I don't go to work,

he'll put me in the river down there.

[Music.]

>> As the investigation in Alabama continued,

the federal grand jury

began issuing indictments.

John Pace was charged with

several counts of peonage.

If convicted, he faced decades in prison.

The next day, Pace's justice of the peace,

James Kennedy, unexpectedly returned to court.

James Kennedy came to be

terrified that he would be

convicted at trial once

he had been indicated.

He's the guy who fabricated

all the documents.

He's the one who declared

all these people guilty and

so he feels a great sense of jeopardy.

>> If anybody from the Cosby

family wanted a negro,

they would send somebody

before me and have an affidavit made.

The negro would be fined

and made to sign a contract

and sent out to a farm.

This was never reported to a judge.

>> Kennedy confirmed that at

least 80 men and women had

fallen victim to the conspiracy.

Many other cases were suspected.

As the grand jury continued

to issue indictments,

they asked Judge Jones to

explain the federal law against peonage.

>> Judge Jones comes back with

a ruling which asserts that

in essentially every case,

in which a landowner is holding

a laborer to pay back a debt,

that unless there has been a

conviction of that person

in an open court, in a sanctioned

way by the government, it's peonage.

It's debt slavery.

>> They are guilty of a conspiracy

to deprive that person of

the free exercise or enjoyment

of a right or privilege secured

to him by the Constitution

of the United States.

>> And the ruling from

Judge Jones unleashes

this firestorm of fear and panic.

Not just in Alabama but

all across the south.

>> Forty years after the Civil War,

the United States had emerged

as a global economic leader due

in part to southern industry

and agriculture.

Employers throughout the south

relied on debt to coerce labor.

The judge's ruling might apply

not just to convicts, or those

trapped by corruption.

But also hundreds of thousands

of black families tied to white

landowners through tenant

farming and sharecropping.

>> If they lose access to the army

of laborers or they are compelled

to deal with them on equitable

terms as free citizens,

then the entire southern economy

is disrupted and along with it,

the entire US economy is disrupted as well.

What had begun as a principal

investigation that was probably

gonna go nowhere, was turning

into a potential political catastrophe

for the Roosevelt administration.

>> Mr. President, I have a

brother about 14 years old.

A man hired him from me

and I heard of him no more.

>> Among black southerners,

reports that peonage was

being prosecuted sparked

a very different outcry.

A flood of letters.

Many of them addressed to the president.

>> At the National Archives today,

there's more than 30,000 pages

of this kind of material that

documented the arrest,

the subjugation,

the punishment,

the mistreatment,

the profit,

that was made off of

the forced labor of armies

and armies of people.

>> He has done nothing

wrong to keep him in chains.

So I ask you to help

me get my poor brother.

Please let me hear from you at once.

Carrie Kinzee.

>> My name is Bernard William Kinzee.

Carrie Kinzee is a cousin.

When I held this letter, I mean,

here you're holding Carrie's legacy.

When you begin to connect with your family,

you can put yourself back into 1900

and how difficult it was for

anybody to push up against a system.

>> Dear sir, I have a little girl

that has been kidnapped from me

>> My attention was called

to a condition of affairs

and existence there so appalling

in its vice and cruelty.

-- sores on me every day.

He started to whip me one day.

>> These letters are incredibly poignant.

A lot of them, even though

they're not written in the

language of rights,

do refer to the 13th Amendment.

They are aware that they have

a right not to be enslaved.

And they are calling upon

the government to protect

them from slavery that they

thought was supposed to be over.

>> And there was a tremendous hope.

It's absolutely evident through

these letters that a huge population

of African-Americans believed

that the president was finally

coming to their rescue.

[Music.]

>> But the Alabama peonage

trials in the summer of 1903

were over almost as

soon as they began.

(Gavel pounding)

The federal government was

eager to cap the investigation,

punish the ringleaders and move on.

The Cosby's and Fletcher Turner

pleaded guilty and Judge Jones

imposed minimum sentences.

>> Judge Jones really believed

that if you convicted these people,

some of 'em got fines,

a few of 'em even served

a little jail time,

that that would furnish

an example so that people

who were doing this would no longer do it.

>> Pace also pleaded guilty

and was sentenced to prison.

He remained free on appeal

as his lawyers prepared

an outrageous argument.

They said Pace was not guilty of peonage.

Because his victims did not owe him money.

And while he may have been

guilty of slavery, in 1903

that was not a crime.

[Music.]

>> It was a gray area because there

was a 13th Amendment that abolished

slavery but there was never

a statute passed to make you

guilty of slavery of holding

somebody in slavery after the Civil War.

>> Three months after the trial

in September 1903 --

President Roosevelt granted

a pardon to the Cosby's.

Three years later in 1906,

he also pardoned John W. Pace.

>> Pace never went to prison

and the federal government

turned a blind eye to the forced

laborers he continued to hold on his farm.

>> The federal government really pulls

back from doing these cases in a big way.

There was a lack of will to do

what would be and prove to be very

hard work of actually uprooting

the tremendous systems of involuntary

servitude that existed in the south.

And I don't think that the federal

government had that political will.

[Music]

>> My uncle was named Henry Malone.

He was my father's older brother.

This story happened somewhere

around maybe 1910.

Henry was then just a young man.

Whatever it was that he did.

A local sheriff came to my

grandfather's place and they

were looking for him and my

grandfather got my Uncle Henry

to come and turn himself in and

he was sent away and he had

to serve a year and a day.

We never got a chance to know

the stories of why or what may

have happened to him in

that year and a day.

For all of my life, knowing my uncle,

I don't think I ever saw him

smile or be a happy man.

[Music]

>> In 1908, two years after

the pardon of John Pace,

another young man would be

trapped in the shadow of slavery.

22 year old Green Cottingham.

>>The world he entered as a

man just as the 20th century

was beginning was completely

different in which already

every other southern state

had passed rafts of laws designed

to circumscribe the lives of

African-Americans to limit

their ability to work freely,

to move freely, to make it

almost impossible for them

to live in true independence

of the powerful whites.

Wherever it was that they lived.

Green was arrested with

others outside a train station.

In Columbiana, Alabama.

Within 24 hours,

he'd been convicted of vagrancy.

He was sentenced to 3 months

hard labor and 38 dollars in fines.

To pay the fine,

the hard labor was

extended to six months.

Green was sent to the Pratt Mines,

which paid the county

12 dollars a month for him.

It's important for us to now

go back and re-examine that

notion of what being a convict

meant at the turn of the century.

Green Cottingham was just picked up,

charged with vagrancy,

which is a crime of no real import,

but then thrown into this prison system.

Just because you put a label

on someone as a convict or whatever

your label is, that doesn't justify

not treating them like human beings.

I'm the daughter of Medda Cottingham,

the oldest daughter of George Cottingham.

I didn't know that people

could be just picked up and put in jail.

They could be lost in the system.

And nobody knew where to find them.

They could be buried in some

grave somewhere and families

still lookin' for them.

Don't know where they are.

I didn't know that the sheriff

department could sell free black

people to corporation steel

plants and coal mines.

It wasn't in the history books.

We didn't know.

Thirty years have passed.

But except for the electric lights,

Ezekiel Archie would have easily

recognized the conditions

Green Cottingham now faced.

Above ground though,

Birmingham was becoming the

region's largest industrial center.

The mine that leased Green's

labor was now owned by the

northern-based US Steel.

The largest corporation in the world.

(sound of trains)

And a growing number of African-Americans,

nearly two million between 1910 and 1930,

were moving out of the south.

>> There were plenty of reasons

for white people to get

the hell out of the south.

Having to put up with

the threat of lynching,

with being grabbed off

the street and put in jail.

And made to work.

And every time you walked

down the street,

you had to be on your P's and Q's

so you wouldn't offend anybody.

>> The north was erecting its

own barriers to black achievement.

President Woodrow Wilson,

elected in 1912, mandated southern

style segregation throughout

the federal government.

There's a kind of gentlemen's

agreement that's emerging during

the Wilson administration,

that the federal government

is not only going to look away

at the practices of the south,

but it's going to adopt those

practices in relation to the ways

in which it organizes its own affairs.

>> Nearly 400,000 African-Americans

fought for democracy in World War I.

They returned to unprecedented

racial hostility.

>> It just gives you chills that they -

that someone could go and fight

for their country and come back

and have to fight for their own life.

Because of one thing.

Because they are African-American.

>> A new generation of civil

rights organizations had emerged.

Among them was the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People,

founded in 1909 by a group

of activists including W.E.B. DuBois.

>> We claim for ourselves every

single right that belongs to

a free born American.

Political, civil, and

social, DuBois wrote.

And until we get these rights,

we will never cease to protest

and to assail the ears of America.

This battle we wage is not

for ourselves, but for all Americans.

>> W.E.B. DuBois is very clear

that the ways in which Jim Crow laws,

violence in the form of lynching,

disenfranchisement,

and overall discrediting,

disrespect, of black people's

basic humanity, is something

that has to be seen as a force

that holds black people down.

>> This paradigm, the NAACP--

was, there can be no

negotiation for civil liberties.

They must exist totally,

fully, and immediately --

more than a new narrative

and a new voice,

it also fielded a degree

of litigious activism.

>> They are saying that there

needs to be anti-lynching law.

They are saying that there

needs to be reform of the justice system.

They are saying that labor laws

and labor arrangements need

to be reformed within the south.

And they're becoming increasingly

effective in terms of doing that.

>>By 1908, the year Green Cottingham

was arrested, the south's use

of prison labor was changing.

County governments continued

to profit from renting convicts

to private industry.

But growing numbers of states

in what was billed as reform,

began to use prisoners on

state-run enterprises.

Chained together,

prisoners on road crews became

an icon of the modernizing south.

>> Perversely, one of the biggest

motivating factors behind the

creation of the chain gangs,

were that southerners all across

the region were frustrated that

the roads of the south were the

most terrible imaginable roads in America.

The economy couldn't grow effectively.

Crops were lost in the fields.

Simply because the roads were so terrible.

>> The conditions for chain gang

prisoners were equally horrific

as they were for convict

leased prisoners.

They were subject to the

same modes of brutality.

The same beatings.

The same standards of

meager healthcare.

Meager forms of shelter.

Clothing, food.

>> Chain gangs continued deep

into the 20th century.

Along with other forms of

forced labor including debt

peonage and sharecropping.

>> A sharecropper would agree to

work for a percentage of the

proceeds of the sale of the cotton crop.

Sharecroppers had to take

out loans in order to survive.

And in order to bring the

crop in during the year.

50, 70, 90 percent interest

rates were not uncommon all

throughout the south in relation

to sharecropping finance of

the basic necessities that

they needed to get through a year

So that system is gonna put

African-Americans in a position

where upward mobility is

essentially impossible for most of them.

>> Sharecropping also engulfed

growing numbers of whites

Including immigrants.

But without legal or political rights,

black sharecroppers were

especially vulnerable.

Millions of black people

in remote parts of the south

could not leave the farms

they were being held on.

If they did, they were subject

to arrest by the sheriff and

if they were arrested,

they would then be returned

to the very same farms,

oftentimes in chains,

receiving nothing.

Sharecropping is not slavery.

But it did become for an

enormous population of people,

forced slavery.

>> Families stayed intact.

Probably within a two mile

radius of where they were born.

Mothers, fathers, cousins,

grandparents, everybody stayed.

If you knew -- by the mere

fact of leaving, exposed you

to the danger of being caught

up in this system, it made you stay.

You knew what would happen

if you stepped off.

[Music]

>> I grew up in Monticello,

Georgia, which is a small

town about 90 miles south of Atlanta.

My paternal grandmother was

the daughter of John S. Williams.

He died long before I was born.

But I heard from my uncles,

from my father, from people

who knew him that he was

a wonderful man.

He was well respected

in the community.

>> In 1921, almost 18 years after

the peonage trials,

federal investigators

visited the Williams farm

to follow up on reports

that he was holding peons.

>> There's a group of black

men out in the field.

The men are obviously terrified.

Unwilling to say almost anything.

They're emaciated.

They clearly have

been terribly abused.

John Williams suddenly appears.

He claims that he didn't

know this was against the law.

That he'll do better.

His intentions were good.

Very apologetic to

these federal officials.

And they leave.

And he doesn't know

what they're gonna do.

He knows they found evidence.

That he was holding these people in slavery.

But he talks to his foreman, Clyde Manning.

And says, as the court transcript said,

we've got to do away with these boys.

The family story was that he

had worked prisoners on his farm.

That they were hardened criminals

and they had been put in the

penitentiary for a long time.

And one night a lot of the

prisoners tried to escape and

he along with other farmers who

were working these men,

tracked them down and in the

process of recapturing them,

killed some of them.

Then sometime later the

story came to light for me.

It was of course totally

different from the story that I had heard.

>> Williams and Manning, the black foreman,

systematically hunted and

murdered 11 black workers.

Some were bludgeoned.

Others were weighted down

with chains and forced into a nearby river.

Another was made to dig his own grave.

>> They did it in the most horrific

ways that you can imagine

that I really can't talk about.

I get - I just get -- so emotional.

When I think about not just

the fact that these men were murdered,

but the cruelty with which

it was carried out.

Uh, that's what's hardest for

me to imagine and hardest to accept.

>> And it came to light,

only because a little boy was

fishing down by the creek where

they had thrown some of the bodies.

And one of the bodies came up.

>> In the spring of 1921,

Williams and Manning

each faced an all white

jury in a Georgia state court.

Both were found guilty

and given life sentences.

Within a decade both had died in prison.

Williams was the first southern

white man since 1877 to be indicted

for the first degree murder

of an African-American.

It would not happen again until 1966.

The following year an expose

of peonage in Florida inflamed readers.

Because the victim, 22 year

old Martin Tabert, was white.

A traveler from North Dakota,

Tabert was picked up in a

sweep in rural Florida.

Charged with vagrancy and

sold to a lumber company.

He died soon after at the

hands of a brutal overseer.

>> First he whipped him on

his bare back 30 or 40 times.

Tabert then kept lying there.

So the boss continued to whip him.

Another 30 or 40 times

with a heavy leather lash.

Tabert crawled to his feet

and the guard began pursuing

him through the camp.

Whipping him as they ran.

Finally after almost 150 lashes,

Tabert made it back to the

cot that he had in a simple

cabin somewhere, collapsed

into his bed and never stood up again.

>> The outcry over Tabert's

death helped to end state

leasing in Florida.

Shortly after in 1928 a similar

case led Alabama to remove its

last prisoners from the coal mines.

But these changes had little impact.

As late as 1930 roughly half of

all African-Americans or

4.8 million people,

still lived in the black

belt region of the south.

The vast majority were almost

certainly trapped in some form

of exploitative labor arrangement.

>> For those African-Americans

who remain in the south,

through the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s even,

the conditions that they're

facing are often desperate

and they find themselves

more and more vulnerable.

If they try to rise up

and create some sense of

protest against the

conditions that they face.

>> In the fall of 1932,

the United States underwent

a profound political change.

Marked by the election of a

new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

a distant cousin of Theodore.

Much as Teddy Roosevelt was

seen as something of an advocate

for African-Americans,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

was a hundred times that.

African-Americans are becoming

an ever increasingly important

part of the democratic political coalition.

More African-Americans are moving north.

They are joining unions,

they are joining the NAACP

in unprecedented numbers.

>> African-Americans who

are involved in unions.

Members of churches.

And African-Americans

who are publishing newspapers

and magazines are all finding

ways to bring their influence

to bear on the federal government

and saying, do your job.

We're talking about

constitutional rights here.

We're talking about citizens

who are being abused here.

Do your job.

Or don't expect our support.

(Sounds of aircraft)

>> In December 1941,

the Japanese bombing of

Pearl Harbor brought the

United States into the Second World War.

>> President Roosevelt convened

a meeting of the cabinet and

the White House to discuss

preparations to fight this

war against Japan and Germany.

The president asked,

what are the things that

the Japanese are going

to attack us for in the

course of the war,

that are problematic.

Someone said, the treatment of the negro.

>> Months earlier, the Department

of Justice had established

a civil rights section.

But its focus was on labor issues,

not racial equality.

Now the president asked

his attorney general if

this unit might be used to

demonstrate a commitment to racial change.

>> And what stands at the intersection

of African-American rights

and labor rights -

peonage and involuntary servitude.

They can't just attack segregation

head on during World War II

because they still need the

white Southerners who are part

of the democratic coalition.

But they did sincerely believe

that these peonage cases were

pretty bad and they required a response.

>> Mrs. Roosevelt, I am a colored

mother and I need your help.

>> In the decades since the Pace trial,

the federal government had paid

little attention to the

continued complaints of forced labor

sent to the White House,

the Department of Justice and the NAACP.

>> My boy answered an advertisement

in our paper for a job.

They are being guarded all night

by armed guards and not allowed to write home.

Please don't send this letter

back because I am afraid if they

find out I have written to you,

they'll kill my boy.

Viola Cosley.

>> Nearly 80 years had passed

since the United States ratified

the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Now in December 1941,

President Roosevelt took steps

to finally enforce it.

Just five days after Pearl Harbor,

Roosevelt's attorney general issued circular 3591.

It said that federal attorneys

were to aggressively prosecute

any case of involuntary servitude or slavery.

Not only those defined as peonage.

>> He says whether they are being

held there because of a threat

of imprisonment or out of violence,

whatever the mechanism is that

is holding people in slavery,

you should go after it and

he says this is part of the war effort.

These cases are important because

we need to make sure that

African-Americans feel like

their rights are being taken care of.

>> And within months there was a

prosecution underway of a man

in Texas who had been holding

an African-American worker as

a slave for almost 15 years.

He was convicted by a federal

jury in 1942 and went to federal prison.

I mark that as the technical

end of slavery in America.

>> The records are incomplete.

But it's estimated that in the

80 years following the Civil War,

as many as 800,000 people had

faced the south's corrupt

system of justice.

Huge numbers of those arrested

were forced into involuntary servitude.

Some including Viola Cosely's son,

Marion, found freedom.

On January 7, 1943,

he enlisted as a private in the US Army.

One of more than 2.5 million

African-Americans who registered

for service during the second World War.

[Music]

>> Green Cottingham,

arrested in 1908,

might have served in the

first World War but by the

second World War,

he would have been in his 50s.

But Green never made it

out of the Birmingham prison mines.

>> We don't know the exact

details of the life that

he led in the stockade

or underground, but he survived

five months before becoming ill.

He went to see the doctor on

August the 2nd, 1908;

he never went back to the mine.

>> Thirteen days later, Green Cottingham died.

He is among more than 9000 prisoners

known to have died while leased

to industry by southern states and counties.

>> We want to think of some of

these atrocities as things that

happened occasionally but you can

imagine the turmoil if at any time

your child could be picked up,

never to be seen again.

How that would impact a

whole segment of people.

How they viewed their opportunities

and their future.

>> In all likelihood,

his body was dumped somewhere

in these fields outside the mine.

Where hundreds of other

prisoners also lie buried.

>> This was real; these were real people.

These were real lives and they make us who we are.

What's fascinating about

Green Cottingham is the fact

that he isn't special.

He's not well known;

he's not a historical figure of,

you know, importance.

But that's part of the beauty.

He is representative of all

of these nameless,

faceless people who disappeared

during this time frame,

who were deemed to be of no

value and then realize the value

isn't in being necessarily important -

we all have interesting stories,

we all have a life story worth telling.

[Music]

>> At the end of the Civil War,

there were four million freed

slaves who lived in absolute poverty,

uneducated, little access to opportunity.

We also know that there were an

equal number of white Americans

in the south like members of my family.

My ancestors.

Who were also impoverished,

illiterate, no access to opportunity.

Over the next 75 years American

society performed a miracle of sorts.

Those four million whites living

in those conditions became 40

million middle class Americans

by the beginning of World War II.

That's what made American society

the extraordinary super

power that it is today.

All of that though was done

in a way that excluded

African-Americans,

brutalized African-Americans

at the same time.

>> When you see how people's lives

were truly stolen from them,

their freedom was taken away,

their fathers or husbands were taken away,

you can understand how the difficulties

and the disparities would persist

for much longer than it seems

that they should have.

>> Without the appreciation of this history,

you descend into fantasies that

black people don't deserve equal

rights because black people constitutionally,

intellectually, morally,

are not the equals of whites period.

>> We have to recognize that in these awful,

ghastly tales of the brutalization

of black people in this country,

the motivation for that was profit

from small landowners to major

corporations and so at the end

of the day, that part of this country's

legacy is still with us.

>> When I think about Green Cottingham

and what he went through, I think about --

a quote comes to mind --

it says something like,

the arc of history is long but it bends

towards justice and even though

Green Cottingham didn't get

justice in his day, and that so

many thousands of people who were

just like Green, didn't get their justice,

maybe now through the telling of

this reality and this history,

these individuals can receive

some measure of justice.

[Music.]