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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, APRIL 8–14, 2026  
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_ Slavery by Another Name (1911), Who Wrecked the Trains? (1961), It
Isn’t Easy to Get the Goods on Corporate Crime (1976), ‘Too
Horrifying to Broadcast’ (1966), A Great and Good Man, but No Saint
(1876) _

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_SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME_

APRIL 8 IS THE 115TH ANNIVERSARY of a catastrophic explosion at the
Banner Coal Mine, 50 miles northeast of Birmingham, Alabama. The
deadly 1911 event resulted in a national outcry.

The reaction was not just because the disaster killed at least 128
mine workers. It was provoked because 113 of the dead were Black men
who were working under conditions that were indistinguishable from
slavery. They had been convicted by Alabama courts of petty crimes
and, as prisoners, had been turned over to the mining company, which
paid prison officials for the right to force the convicts to work
without pay until they had served their sentences. Five white
prisoners were also killed, as were five white miners who were not
under legal compulsion, but working for wages.

The mine, which was owned by J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel
Company, provided the coal needed to operate the company’s two steel
mills in nearby Birmingham. The man who ran U.S. Steel at the time of
the disaster claimed to have ordered an end to the mine’s use of
forced labor four years before the explosion and to have been told
that his orders had been carried out. The falsity of the steel
magnate’s claim was only exposed in the 1990s by journalist Douglas
Blackmon, who later wrote “Slavery by Another Name: The
Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War
II.” 

As Blackmon detailed, for nearly three decades after the end of the
Civil War, all the states that had been part of the Confederacy leased
convicts, the vast majority of whom were Black, forcing them to work
for, and live under the control of private companies. The convicted
criminals were forced to work without pay for the duration of their
sentence. Even though the Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery,
it included a major loophole; slavery or servitude was not illegal
when used “as punishment for a crime.”

By 1911, at the time of the Banner Mine disaster, only five states –
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina and Texas – leased
convicts. The last three states to end the practice were Florida in
1923, Alabama (1928), and North Carolina (1933).

Convict leasing not only replicated the working conditions of
enslavement, but the payments for the employers also provided a major
portion of the revenue needed by state and local governments in the
former Confederacy. In Alabama for example, 73 percent of the
state’s 1898 budget came from convict-leasing income.

The Banner Mine explosion’s death toll encouraged a national
discussion of convict leasing, and may have hastened its end in
Arkansas and Texas (in 1913 and 1914, respectively), but Alabama
continued the practice – including in U.S. Steel’s Banner Mine –
for another 17
years. [link removed]

   

_WHO WRECKED THE TRAINS?_

APRIL 9 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of a dark day in the annals of
corporate crime and a sad day in the history of public transportation
in the U.S.

The Pacific Electric Railway, a vast system of streetcars and electric
trains that made it quick and inexpensive to travel all over Los
Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino County and Riverside
County, shut down its last line, forcing Los Angelenos to use either
an automobile (if they had one) or an inadequate, slow, polluting bus
network.

The 1961 bankruptcy of the Pacific Electric Railway was no accident. 
It was the direct result of a conspiracy by General Motors, Standard
Oil, Firestone Tire, Mack [Truck] Manufacturing and Federal
Engineering to compel commuters to use their cars by destroying cheap,
efficient public transportation. 
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_IT ISN’T EASY TO GET THE GOODS ON CORPORATE CRIME_

APRIL 11 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the announcement that the
People’s Bicentennial Commission – the radical alternative to the
official American Revolution Bicentennial Commission – was offering
a $25,000 cash reward (worth $140,000 today) for “evidence that
leads to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing and
imprisonment of a chief executive officer of [any] one of America's
Fortune 500 corporations for criminal activity relating to corporate
operations.”

The 1976 Campaign for Corporate Exposure made the offer in ten
thousand letters mailed to highly placed secretaries at Fortune 500
companies. The effort was inspired by way the Nixon tapes and
Watergate-related investigations had resulted in the admission by 17
major corporations that they had made illegal campaign contributions
to Nixon re-election efforts and by the disclosure of other illegal
corporate activities, including illegal foreign bribery schemes
conducted by the Lockheed Corporation, the Northrop Corporation, the
Exxon Corporation and by Tenneco Inc.

The many corporate convictions had resulted in monetary fines, but no
one had been sentenced to prison. The People’s Bicentennial effort
was to uncover at least one case that would put a Fortune 500 boss in
behind
bars. [link removed]

 

_‘TOO HORRIFYING TO BROADCAST’_

APRIL 13 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the premiere showing of
pseudo-documentary film, The War Game, which is one of the most
terrifying depictions of the effect of nuclear war imaginable. It was
originally produced to be televised by the BBC in Britain in October
1965, but when BBC managers previewed it, they cancelled the
broadcast, saying that it was “too horrifying for the medium of
broadcasting.”

After the 46-minute film, which was written, directed and produced by
Peter Watkins, was released for theatrical showing the next year, it
won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature in 1967.  
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_A GREAT AND GOOD MAN, BUT NO SAINT (1876)_

APRIL 14 IS THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY of Frederick Douglass delivering
“An Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” the keynote address at
the 1876 unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument near the
center of Washington, D.C.

The day for the event was the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s
assassination, and Douglass used the occasion to express his enormous
admiration for Lincoln’s success in leading the Union to victory
over the secessionists and in also leading the United States to put an
end to slavery. 

At the same time, Douglass expressed some frank criticisms of
prejudices that Lincoln had held, making it clear that he considered
Lincoln to have been “a great and good man,” but not a saint.

For example, in his oration Douglas said that Lincoln “in his
interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his
prejudices, he was a white man. He was preëminently the white man’s
President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready
and willing at any time during the first years of his administration
to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored
people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.”

Douglass went on to say, “You [that is, the whites in the audience]
are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We [Douglass himself and the
Black members of the audience] are at best only his step-children;
children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and
necessity.”

In the end, Douglass emphasized how important it was “that President
Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his
countrymen towards the colored race [because] . . . . this unfriendly
feeling on [Lincoln’s] part may [have been] . . . one element of his
wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the
tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that
conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to
save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his
country from the great crime of slavery.” According to Douglass,
despite or rather, because of, Lincoln’s human imperfections
“infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better
fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.”

You can read the entire, rather brief, speech
here: [link removed]

For more People's History,
visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/ 

* Forced labor
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* Public transportation
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* corporate crime
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* Nuclear war
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* Abraham Lincoln
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