Slavery by Another Name (66 page)

white o cials were "outraged at the at empts to establish social

equality between black and white miners," he demanded that the

strike end. He added that he would not tolerate "eight or nine

thousand idle niggars in the State of Alabama."8 When the walkout

continued, Governor Comer cal ed the unrest a threat to white

supremacy and dispatched the militia on August 26 to cut down the

tents of strikers and break up their camps.

Facing armed military units and out of money, the strike

col apsed on September 1. Free miners returned to their company

housing and reen-tered the forbidding shafts. Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad redistributed its prisoners back into multiple shafts at the

Prat Mines.

Tensions hardly eased. Death in U.S. Steel's slave mines continued

its march—two men in September; six more in October. Early in

November, Birmingham buzzed with word of the latest southern

lynching. A black man named Henry Leidy was accused by a fifteen-

year-old girl in Biloxi, Mississippi, of sexual assault. Quickly taken

from the town jail, he was hanged from a tree overlooking

picturesque Back Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. "Negro Quietly Swung

Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet here tonight," wrote the

Birmingham Age-Herald on its front page.9

Less than a week later, black convicts working alongside free

miners in the Prat No. 3 mine grew desperate enough to at empt

an impossibly irrational escape plan. As the day shift of workers

was leaving on November 16 to return to the prison stockade,

about fty African American prisoners couldn't be accounted for.

Extra guards were cal ed, but the missing miners didn't reappear. A

new crew of sixty men descended into the shaft to keep operations

under way.

Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of

Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of

ames coming from timbers supporting the manway the tunnel

used by miners to enter and leave the shaft. Within minutes, the

passageway was l ed with ames. Guards quickly discovered forty

of the missing miners waiting near another mine entrance with

dynamite—planning to blow open an iron gate during the chaos

and make their escape.

Eight other conspirators, who had set the diversionary re,

became trapped in the burning manway when one section of the

tunnel's roof col apsed as the con agration incinerated support

timbers. Engulfed in the ames, the miners were "roasted and

su ocated," according to a newspaperman on the scene.10 The

Board of Inspectors of Convicts recorded the deaths due to

"asphyxiation." The re burned for days. But within a week,

convicts were back in the tunnels of No. 3, digging coal again. By

the end of 1908, the rst ful year of U.S. Steel's ownership of the

Prat Mines, nearly sixty of the company's forced laborers had

died.11

Everywhere in the slave mines of Birmingham was death. Hardly

any week passed when one or more dead black corpses weren't

dragged up from inside the earth, heaped atop the mounds of coal

in the railcars, or found dead in the simple in rmaries of a prison.

Often no one knew or would say how a man died. The coroner of

Je erson County—a dour man named B. L. Brasher—made almost

continual visits to examine the dead or investigate the causes of

their demise.12

On July 20, 1909, Brasher went to examine the body of Joe

Hinson, sentenced to a life term for murder and sold into Prat 's No.

11 mine. Hinson had encouraged the story that his sentence was for

chopping o the head of a man in the town in East Lake after an

argument over Hinson's dog. A brutish record like that—whether

true or not—could save a convict from other prisoners, but not from

the mine itself. Charles Jones, another "prisner at Prat mines #11,"

as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal

as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal

car deep in the shaft and then slipped in the con ned quarters. As

he fel , his hand touched a live electric line. He died instantly from

electrocution.

On March 12, 1910, Harrison Grant, a slight eighteen-year-old

boy from Lowndes County with dark brown skin and a smal scar

atop his head, was digging alone in a room o the main shaft of

Prat No. 12—seven months into a term of one year and one day for

burglary. Grant had no formal education. His parents, three

brothers, and a sister lived in Montgomery.

As he hammered a wedge into shale beneath the coal seam, the

entire wal of rock suddenly col apsed, crushing him. There was

lit le in the obliterated mass of his body with which to identify him.

The coroner noted that he "wore shoe and hat #8."

Mat Dunn, an il iterate twenty-six-year-old black farmer from

Pickens County with missing teeth and only ve feet three inches

tal , was crushed on April 22, 1910, in the No. 12 mine, trapped

between a mining car and a "rib" of the mine—slang for the

columns of rock and coal left as supports for the roof of

underground chambers and shafts.13

The next day, inmates Wil Burck and Wil Wil iams began

ghting in the same shaft. Burck, a common laborer arrested in

Russel County for burglary, was gored rst in one side and then

through the head with a mining pick. Archey Hargrove, a black

man from Hale County, was found dead in No. 2 mine on July 3,

1910.

Sometimes death came in plainly obvious ways. Eugene Phil ips,

a twenty- ve-year-old black prisoner with a "ginger-cake

complexion," being held at the No. 12 prison for two years on a

charge of forgery, died July 16, 1910. "I found deceased came to his

death from a lick in the left side with a mining pick, at the hands of

Cli ord Reese," wrote Brasher. The two men had fought for reasons

no witness could recal . It ended with the shaft of pick imbedded in

Phil ips, a farm boy from Chilton County. W M. Hicks died at the

same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was

same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was

stabbed to death on August 25, by a convict defending himself from

Alexander. Gus Miles was crushed by fal ing rock in another Prat

mine on September 24.

On the rst day of October, miners at the No. 3 prison in Ensley

entered a dormant section of the mine and found submerged in the

rancid backwater the rot ing body of Wil Lindsay. A forty-one-year-

old black man, he had been sold by Shelby County sheri Fulton to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in November 1908. Lindsay was

reported escaped the fol owing July. Guards assumed he slipped

out of the prison. His remains proved he'd disappeared into the

black labyrinth of the forgot en section of the dig. "This negro has

never been heard of since his escape and is quite possible that in

trying to make his escape he got lost in abandoned part of mines

and died from starvation and bad air," the coroner wrote.

Just before Thanksgiving, a sixteen-year-old black farmhand from

Bar-bour County, serving 729 days leased to the mines for an

unrecorded theft, was kil ed by an accidental explosion of dynamite

in the Banner Mine. Also dead was twenty-seven-year-old John Tate

and a free white worker named Fred Woodman.

Four days later, on December 5, the desiccated remains of Joe L.

Thomas, another black man who had at empted to escape the Prat

No. 2 prison, was found lost in the fearsome place miners gave an

almost ethereal name: the "gob." Inside the great maze of tunnels

and rooms abandoned beneath the earth, often l ed with escaping

methane gas and the toxic runo of active shafts, the gob was an

ut erly lightless, nearly impenetrable maze of tunnels and

unventilated gas. "Deceased came to his death from exposure, as he

had been in ‘gob’ of mine for two or three weeks, trying to escape,"

the coroner wrote.

On January 21, 1911, Walter Cratick's skul was split with a

mining pick by another convict at the Banner Mine. A county

convict arrested in Je erson County for petit larceny barely a

month before his death, Cratick was a twenty-seven-year-old

farmhand from Barbour County, with a limp from a broken hip,

one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar

one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar

on his left side. Just 145 pounds and a lit le over ve feet, his term

was six months. The coroner ruled his death a justifiable homicide.

On January 31, 1911, Dink Tucker was found dead "for unknown

reasons" at Prat Slope No. 12. Nearing the end of his one-year

sentence to the mine, Tucker left behind a wife and two young boys

in Chambers County.

Cassie McNal y died from fal ing rock at the Prat No. 2 mine on

February 28, 1911. Essex Knox was found dead at the same shaft on

April 6. "I found deceased came to his death by being mashed to

death in the #2 prison by fal ing rock," wrote the company

physician.

By the spring of 1911, the coroner was making more and more

trips to the rising new competitor to U.S. Steel's Prat Mines. One of

Birmingham's most admired coal mining engineers and executives,

Erskine Ramsey, organized the Prat Consolidated Coal Company in

1904—quietly merging several smal companies and acquiring

98,000 acres of coalfields in Alabama.

A lifetime bachelor more comfortable with machines and metal

than men and women, Ramsey was intent on eclipsing his former

employer by building the most aggressive and pro table industrial

concern of the South. Prat Consolidated had by 1911 opened nine

new drift mines on previously undeveloped coal elds twenty miles

north of the Prat Mines. The company's showcase was the Banner

Mine, a deep shaft featuring the rst instal ation of electric lights,

cut ing tools, and hauling equipment—some of it invented by

Ramsey himself—and the largest prison compound in the state,

surrounded by a fteen-foot-high wooden stockade.14 Ramsey

sought to obtain as many convict workers as the sheri s of Alabama

would sel .

On April 8, 1911, two black convicts at the Banner Mine died

from inhaling afterdamp—the noxious combination of carbon

monoxide, nitrogen, and other gases left behind when methane

vapor ignites in a mine. One week later, near dawn on a rainy

Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

positions inside Banner, an ignition of blasting powder triggered a

massive detonation. A handful of men nearest the initial blast died

instantly; the ventilation fan that pushed fresh air deep into the

shaft was blown out of position by the force of the explosion. The

sudden ash of re consumed much of the oxygen in the tunnels.

Into the chemical vacuum created by the absence of oxygen poured

what miners cal ed, with terror, "black damp"—a su ocating

mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. About a dozen men stil

near the 1,700-foot chute leading into the shaft escaped to safety.

The rest—113 black prisoners, the vast majority of them being held

for trivial misdemeanors, ten white prisoners, and ve free miners

—were kil ed by the gases.

A quickly impaneled coroner's jury certi ed that the company

was "using al reasonable means for the prevention of accidents"

and was not culpable in the deaths. Most of the bodies of the dead

were quickly dumped in a long trench dug by other prisoners in the

mine's convict cemetery just outside the stockade.15 Within two

weeks, the Banner Mine was in operation again, with a fresh

contingent of black prisoners.

Alabama's other slave mines never slowed production in the

aftermath of the disaster. Cleve Wat s died at Prison No. 12 on May

22, 1911, "struck in the head with a mining pick." Less than a

month later, June 20, 1911, Lee Lawson was kil ed in the same

mine in a rock fal . On July 29, Frank Mil er was shot to death by

two guards as he tried to escape No. 12.

A week later, Jim Minor died in a pickaxe ght at Sloss-

Shef ield's Flat Top mine. Ed Jerring was crushed by "being jammed

between two cars" in TCI's No. 12 mine on September 29, 1911.

Jackson Wheeler died from "an electric shock" at the company's No.

2 prison on October 3, 1911. Henry Carter was kil ed at Slope No.

12 prison the same day, "from fal ing rock."16