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. https://www.pbs.org/video/slavery-another-name-slavery-video/
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. http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/g/gm/gm.htm
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_convicted_of_felony_offenses_in_the_United_States
‘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. https://web.archive.org/web/20051016134931/http://www.filmint.nu/pdf/special/watkins.pdf
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: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln
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