Slavery by Another Name (55 page)

earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of

earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of

their mother. Reese doubted whether he could bring a peonage

charge based on the sketchy facts surrounding the pair. He knew

without doubt it would be useless to seek charges against Pace in a

local court. Based on Judge Speer's ruling, the vehicle for freeing

the boys would be to seek a writ of habeas corpus—forcing Pace to

demonstrate his authority to hold the two boys against their wil .

The maneuver wouldn't stop with Pace, Reese believed. "There are,

in my judgment, hundreds of negroes that can be freed this way, if I

be given this authority," he wrote to his superiors.

At orney General Moody was unmoved. Undoubtedly, the

administration was not going to authorize Reese to begin

chal enging hundreds or thousands of whites about the status of

their black workers. "If you have good reason to believe that Pace is

holding minors to involuntary servitude, without the consent of the

parents …you should have warrant issued," came the reply. "The

habeas corpus proceedings should not be instituted."33A few days

later, Pace, having heard that Reese was preparing another

prosecution, released the two boys to their mother.34

But Tal apoosa County was quickly reverting to its former ways.

A woman who signed her name only as Susanna wrote Judge Jones

in mid-1905, describing another slaving operation already under

way a few miles from Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. "I whish

to enform you that theare is one J. D. Hugens and son holden

Negroes here in peonage at thear terpen tine Stil 10 miles South of

Dadevil e…. Please send your detective heare at once."35 No one

was sent.

Reese was convinced that his prosecutions had proved the

perverse nexus of debt slavery and the organized convict leasing

system that ourished around him. He made one last thrust to

destroy it. Writing to At orney General Moody in March 1905, Reese

pleaded again for permission to le habeas corpus petitions on

behalf of thousands of Alabama convicts then forced to work in

mines owned by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., other

companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.

companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.

"I am perfectly wil ing for one to shoulder this responsibility and

commence these proceedings …though in doing this I appreciate

ful y what this means," Reese wrote. "I am wil ing to jeopardize …

my relationship with al the nine congressmen and the two Senators

from this District, the local Bar, the Bench and the people of the

city of Montgomery, where I was born and raised," the at orney

continued.

"I desire to know … in case I commence this crusade, so to speak,

that I wil have not only your support, but in time to come if these

very men who have always supported me political y should turn

upon me, because I have instituted these prosecutions and done my

duty, that you wil protect me from such at acks."36

Reese knew that white leaders across Alabama were conspiring to

have him replaced when his term as U.S. at orney expired at the

end of 1905. He wrote Booker T. Washington a few weeks earlier

asking the black leader to send a discreet let er to President

Roosevelt endorsing Reese's work.37

At orney General Moody would have none of it. He ordered that

the young district at orney take no action until the Supreme Court

ruled on an appeal of Judge Speer's decision striking down

Georgia's misdemeanor convict system.38

As Reese was pressing to use the federal courts to free the

thousands of slaves held in Alabama mines—and set a precedent

that might have freed ten thousand or more in other states—the

writer Thomas Dixon released in 1905 the fol ow-up to his

spectacular novel The Leopard's Spots. The new book, an even

more overt paean to the Ku Klux Klan violence that swept away

black political participation in the 1860s and 1870s, was titled The

Clansman. It sold in vast quantities in 1905 at the price of $1.50

and became perhaps the rst true blockbuster in modern U.S.

publishing. Its success— commercial y and as revisionist history—

was so complete that, in an irony of immeasurable proportion,

newspaper announcements for the volume featured a let er from

Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be

Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be

laid down."39

The author quickly fashioned the storylines of his two racist

novels into a stage play to tour the United States. The production

featured a cast of exquisitely at ractive young white actresses, white

actors in blackface playing lecherous emancipated slaves hungry to

assault white women and cowering and bu oonish black elected

o cials, gal ant former Confederate o cers, and a ful y out t ed

contingent of white-robed Klansmen who rode across the stage

mounted on horseback. The show opened in Norfolk, Virginia, in

August 1905 at the Academy of Music, and an epic, record-breaking

run of performances fol owed in theater hal s across the South,

Midwest, and Northeast.

It played to packed crowds everywhere, drawing in a period of

ten months "more people …than any other at raction … in the

theatrical history of United States theater," wrote one newspaper

critic.40 Not surprisingly, a new generation of southern white

leaders absorbed its account of Reconstruction and the fury of its

white actors as absolute fact. Audiences roared approval almost

everywhere else too—including standing-room-only audiences in

New York City. In Atlanta, the city's most prominent debutantes

held "box" parties for their friends in the expensive reserved seats of

the Grand Opera House when the play arrived in the city. Mrs.

Dixon, the author's wife, was feted by the finest ladies of Atlanta.41

After the rst performance on a chil y late October night, Dixon

addressed an adoring crowd—revealing from the stage that his

father had been a Ku Klux Klan member when the night riders

waged a campaign of violence on black political leaders during

Reconstruction. Georgia governor Joseph M. Terrel watched

approvingly from a special box. Later that night, Dixon was

honored at a lush private dinner at the Aragon Hotel hosted by the

Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternal order founded at the University of

Virginia in tribute to the life of Robert E. Lee. Raising their glasses

in a series of toasts to the guest of honor and his long membership

in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of

in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of

the city—the leadership elite who would govern and sculpt the

South's leading city for the next fty years—including Hugh Dorsey

a young at orney who a decade later in ated evidence to prosecute

Jewish businessman Leo Frank for the rape and kil ing of a young

woman that he did not commit.42 After his conviction, Frank was

murdered in an infamous lynching by an anti-Semitic mob, led by

the city's leading political and business leaders. Elevated by his role

in the Frank case, Dorsey went on to become governor of Georgia.

Scat ered voices of concern were raised against the brazenly

in ammatory racial rhetoric of the production, and in some cities

gangs of white men—adrenaline raised by the play's stirring cal to

defend their delicate women from the lusts of black brutes—

subsequently at acked random African Americans in their cities. A

commit ee of northern activists at empted to encourage protests

when the production arrived in new cities with special y printed

postcards showing a scene from the play and urging a boycot .43

Most notably, Dixon's own brother, the Reverend A. C. Dixon, cal ed

the stage play "rot en and slimy"44 Here and there moderate leaders

complained that the production painted an exaggerated portrait of

black and white antagonisms. The pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle

in Atlanta decried the performance as a "disgrace to southern

manhood and womanhood" and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux

Klan as fraudulent.45

In an interview before one performance in the South, Dixon said

that "the North" was beginning to see the urgency in repressing

African Americans. "It is only within the past 12 months that I have

seen big buck negroes parading up and down Broadway with white

girls hanging on their arms." When some members of an audience

hissed the show in Columbia, South Carolina, Dixon mounted the

stage to defend himself against critics. Stirring the crowd to his side,

he declared: "God ordained the southern white man to teach the

lessons of Aryan supremacy"46

XI

SLAVERY AFFIRMED

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

Some African American leaders stil held out hope that at least

northern whites could be turned back from the rising venality of

white Americans. Instead of embracing the accommodationist

philosophy of Booker T. Washington, a generation of younger black

intel ectuals led by W. E. B. DuBois insisted that it was whites who

needed to adapt to ful black citizenship. Born in Massachuset s and

schooled rst in Germany, then in Harvard, DuBois had been since

1897 a groundbreaking professor of sociology at Atlanta University,

one of the most prestigious majority-black institutions in the

country. A stream of his articles, novels, and non ction assessments

of the progress of African Americans, including The Souls of Black

Folk, published in 1903, were scathing incisions into the state of

race relations in the United States. Later, after the formation of the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in

1909, DuBois would emerge as its most central early figure.

The arrival of DuBois in Atlanta had put him deep in the heart of

the new system of southern slavery. As part of his university duties,

DuBois directed a series of extraordinary statistical and sociological

surveys of the rural South, and black people within it, between

1898 and 1904. The last of them, "Negro Farmer," became a

bedrock demonstration of the new science of sociology and a rigidly

empiricist approach toward quantitative analysis in the study of

social forces. Two years later, the U.S. commissioner of labor,

whose o ce had funded the previous studies, agreed to back a new

DuBois project, this time focused speci cal y on the state of black

sharecroppers in the South.1

Choosing as his venue Lowndes County, Alabama, DuBois's

project injected one of the most extraordinary American intel ects

of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the

of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the

continent. Named after a nineteenth-century U.S. congressman from

South Carolina, Wil iam Lowndes, who prior to the Civil War

strenuously advocated the extension of slavery into new U.S.

territories, the county sat at the center of the Black Belt.

At the beginning of the Civil War, more than nineteen thousand

enslaved blacks—the twelfth-largest population of slaves in one

place in the country—lived on 1,100 farms in Lowndes County,

nearly ve hundred of which exceeded one thousand acres in size.

The war obliterated the hope of Congressman Lowndes and others

to expand slavery. But despite Lowndes having the largest

proportion of blacks to whites of any Alabama county, the war

seemed to have had lit le e ect on the question of whether slavery

would continue there. By 1900, even as the white population

dwindled further, the landholders who remained reforged an almost

impenetrable jurisdiction into which no outside authority could

extend its reach. By then, more than thirty thousand blacks worked

the rich flat cot on fields, no longer cal ed slaves but living under an

absolute power of whites nearly indistinguishable from the forced

labor of a half century earlier. Black land ownership in the county

was inconsequential. Where it existed on paper, the appearance of

independence was a chimera behind which local whites continued

to violently control when and where blacks lived and worked, and

how their harvests were sold. Most o ensive to blacks, white men

in Lowndes County continued to exercise their slavery-era

presumption that they were entitled to the sexual companionship