Read Slavery by Another Name Online
Authors: Douglas A. Blackmon
dice, or to nd a day's labor, or for some other claimed reason that
in truth was no di erent from any other. The train station was
simply where he went almost every day, where nearly al young
black men found themselves.
The freight docks of the station in Columbiana, and in every
other county seat on the Southern Railway line between
Birmingham and Eufaula, a lush cot on center deep in southern
Alabama, were the hub of life for African American men in the
South in 1908. Open freight cars, easily boarded as trains eased out
of towns like Columbiana or when they slowed to cross rickety
bridges and tight curves, were the only mechanized means of
movement for the armies of destitute blacks searching or waiting
for work in the rst years of the century—especial y those like
Green who had uncoupled themselves from the traditional black
life of serfdom in a cot on patch. The tracks themselves, removed
from the view of most whites, were the safest paths for walking
from town to town as wel . Either way, a man on the rails or the
trains was violating Alabama law by entering the property of a
railroad company. But the appeal of motion and movement, of
opportunity, that the tracks and trains represented was too much
for a young man like Green to resist.
That spring, there were hardly any jobs for cash to be had for a
black man, unless he was wil ing to take up a cot on hoe or venture
into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the
into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the
swampy jungle forests below the Florida state line, or across the
Georgia border. Railroad companies claimed to pay $2 a day for a
strong hand who could handle an axe, cut ing trees or shaping rail
ties. But the railroad camps sat at the ends of long spurs cut into
near-virgin forests, with no roads or other means of exit except via
the trains that brought more fresh backs every day. Once a man
arrived, there was no departing unless the camp boss al owed it.
And there was no knowing whether the Southern Railway or any
other company would keep its word to pay the amount it
promised, or even to feed men or keep them out of the rain and
swamps. Guards with shotguns and dogs patrol ed the perimeters of
the worksites. The captains of the camps kept long leather straps,
a xed to thick wooden handles, to beat men who tried to ee.
County sheri s developed an uncanny eye for spot ing any eeing
African Americans who made it through the woods to a farm or
town, and received rewards for hauling them back in chains.
That was the work available to an independent black man like
Green: free labor camps that functioned like prisons, cot on tenancy
that equated to serfdom, or prison mines l ed with slaves. The
alternatives, reserved for African Americans who crossed a white
man or the law, were even more grim. Stil , the freight depots were
a magnet of excitement. There was always in some corner a simple
game of dice being played for pennies or tobacco. Now and again,
the freight agent or some farmer in town with a wagon would pay
a man a nickel or a quarter to help move a trol ey of crates from an
open freight car. In picking season, white men would come to the
station every day looking for extra hands in the cot on elds,
apprising on sight—by the look of their hands or the smel of liquor
on their breath— whether an African American boy or man was
worth paying for a week's work in his elds, or whether they
belonged to the new class of independent blacks that whites saw as
the scourge of their lives and towns.
Regardless of their conclusions, every African American was a
nigger in a white man's eyes. So the term for those African
American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant
American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant
at itudes was "cigaret e dudes." These were men cocky by
comparison to their peers; they had learned some reading and
writing, and sometimes worked and sometimes slouched on street
corners. Sometimes cigaret es sat akilter on their lips. There was
likely a bot le of moonshine or a pistol in a pocket somewhere
among each throng of young men gawking from their poses against
the board and bat en wal s of the freight station. Instead of
threadbare overal s, the uniform of al blacks and poor country
whites for as long as anyone could remember, these men might
wear trousers and jackets, even neckties. They stood by the dozens
in the studio of a black photographer in Columbiana, cigaret e
dudes lounging with their arms draped around black girls in their
best Sunday dresses, glaring at the lens. On their faces an air of
de ant con dence, visages of the men they knew they should have
been al owed to be. Among a population of 8.5 mil ion blacks in
the southern states, crushed into subservience in the forty years
since the Civil War, these men were the last refuges of resistance as
the twentieth century dawned.
According to almost every white, these cigaret e dudes were the
source of every trouble in the South. These were the blacks never to
be hired, never to be befriended—to be denied embrocation of any
kind. To be rid of them forever, by whatever means could
accomplish that goal, was something nearly every white man in the
South, most certainly in Columbiana, had openly cal ed for and
worked toward for at least three decades.
This was the snare waiting for Green Cot enham at the Columbiana
railroad station on March 30, 1908. On the prior day, a Wednesday,
the sheri 's chief deputy, a scrawny white man named Newton
Eddings, grabbed Monroe Dolphus, a black man about Green's age,
as he stood in the train yard of the depot. The deputy seized
Cot enham the fol owing day and tossed him into the same fetid
cel where Dolphus had spent the night. There was uncertainty
about what charges against the men should be entered into the
prison registry at the jail.
prison registry at the jail.
Initial y, Eddings claimed that the crime commit ed by Dolphus
was taking a 25 cent tin of sh from the lunch pail of a Southern
Railway worker. Cot enham was charged with riding a freight train
without a ticket. There was no tangible evidence that either man
had commit ed any infraction at al .
Taken before Judge Longshore the fol owing day, Cot enham and
Dol-phus each denied the charges. Eddings was unable to produce
any evidence or witnesses to convict them. But sticking to the
cynical script fol owed thousands of times in the South, Judge
Longshore chose not the release the men anyway. Instead, he
declared them guilty of "vagrancy" that catchal of ense to which any
black man was vulnerable at almost any time. 1
Longshore sentenced both Dolphus and Cot enham to three
months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Under its
standing contract with Shelby County, the company would pay the
county $12 per month for each man as long as he worked in their
mines.2 The two prisoners were also ordered to pay fees to the
sheri , judge, and other local o cials totaling $31.85 for Dolphus,
$38.40 for Cot enham—extraordinary sums for an unemployed
black man. Unable to pay those costs, Dolphus was ordered to
work an extra two months and twenty days at the mines to cover
the fees. Cot enham would have to spend an additional three
months and six days.3
A day later, Eddings arrived at the county jail with his shiny, six-
inch-barreled Colt .38 pistol in a holster dangling against his thigh.
A simple metal badge pinned to his coat read "Deputy Sheri ." He
carried thick round manacles connected with three tight steel links.
A trace of chains was draped over his shoulder. Eddings barked for
Cot enham and the nine other men in the Shelby County cel s to get
up. It was time to go to "Prat s."
The jail sat at the corner of South Main and Mildred streets,
almost directly across from the spare old county courthouse that the
town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure
town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure
three blocks to the north.
Green had never felt irons before that day.4 5 As Deputy Eddings
clapped a shackle on his left ankle, Green must have been surprised
how quickly his skin began to bruise, how heavily the rings of iron
clung to the ground between himself and Monroe Dolphus. Then
there was the startling sharp cold of the steel when Eddings slipped
a metal col ar around his neck.
Eddings locked the clasp on Green and did the same to "Mun," as
the men cal ed Dolphus, and then to each of the other eight
prisoners in the lockup that morning. Earley Bol ing, House
Pearson, and four others had been arrested at the train station too
and convicted for hopping a ride on an empty freight car without
permission. Henry Witherspoon was found guilty of petit larceny—
a crime applied to the theft of any object worth more than $10.
John Jones, arrested as he played dice inside a circle of other black
men squat ed in the dirt on the edges of the railroad yard, was
convicted of gambling. Once al ten were chained together, Eddings
told them to start walking back to the railway station. They trudged
out the scu ed rear door of the jailhouse and around the corner,
passing by the back porch of Sheri Fulton's wood-frame house
next door and on toward Main Street.
Al in the ragged group were stil in the street clothes they had
worn at the time of their arrest. But now the men were smeared
with the lth of the jail's grimy, wet interior. Most had been there
for several weeks, waiting for the monthly delivery to Tennessee
Coal, Iron & Railroad. Several walked shakily, taken aback by the
bright sunlight and unbalanced by subsistence on the sheri 's
meager rations and the partial sleep of nights on remnants of putrid
bedding. As they passed the sheri 's home, the men crossed the
shadow of the jail, looming above them, higher than al the
surrounding structures, the face of the massive tower interrupted
only by the keyhole window in the hanging chamber.6 On a
Saturday morning three months later, the sheri would release the
trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-
trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-
year-old black man convicted of murder, would twist to his death at
the end of the rope.
At the station, Eddings took Green and the other prisoners to the
far end of the platform to wait for the early morning train. They
rode the one-hour journey in the baggage car. Outside the
Birmingham depot, Eddings piled the shackled men into an open,
horse-drawn wagon he had telegraphed ahead to hire. Two mules
slowly pul ed Green and the others away from the city's bustling
center, then through the tempestuous streets of Prat City, past a
haphazard cemetery bulging with dead prisoners’ remains near
Smokey Row, and nal y up the long hil rising from the saloons
and whorehouses past the Catholic church to Tennessee Coal, Iron
& Railroad's newly completed wooden stockade at Slope No. 12.
It was a familiar journey for Eddings, and one he didn't mind. He
had delivered more than sixty men to the Prat Mines in the
previous twelve months, nearly al of them black men he had
himself rounded up and testi ed against to obtain conviction. As
chief deputy, Eddings made considerably less than the high sheri ,
but the business of arresting blacks and get ing them to the Prat
Mines was a good one for a scantly educated man from deep in the
countryside. He'd come to Columbiana to get away from the
drudgery of the isolated farm road where his father and older
brother lorded over his childhood, while the mother who gave birth
to him midway through the Civil War grew progressively demented.
By the time Eddings reached manhood, she was ful y insane.7
Sometimes it seemed the whole South was insane in 1908. Vast
numbers of freed slaves and their o spring like Green had
abandoned their former owners’ lands and scat ered across the rural
landscape, demanding wages and, almost as ridiculously to whites
such as Eddings's father, insisting on writ en contracts to be paid for