Slavery by Another Name (78 page)

mines, and lumber camps of a century ago. They cited an admirable account of

English's unsuccessfully attempting to calm and disperse the white mobs that rampaged

in Atlanta during the bloody race riot of 1906 and a nineteenth-century newspaper

article extolling the food and fellowship o ered to the forced laborers at the family

brick factory. They knew nothing of the real history. I sympathized with their

discomfort in encountering my contradictions to the heroic, tutelary portrait of English

handed down through generations. But I left our dialogue worried that the slaves who

made the bricks with which Atlanta was built would yet be denied their place in the

city's history.

Most corporations say it would be terribly wrong to associate their current

manifestations with the abuses of convict leasing and twentieth-century forced labor—

particularly for actions committed by companies they acquired or merged into decades

after the fact.

Drummond Coal Company, founded in 1935,7 says it has no meaningful connection

to the use of convict labor, despite its merger in 1985 with Alabama By-Products

Corp.,8 a company created through a merger in 1925 with Pratt Consolidated Coal, one

of the biggest users of forced labor during the previous two decades and owner of the

deadly Banner Mine.

Drummond today is a family-owned coal and real estate company based in Jasper,

Alabama, with mining operations in Alabama and South America. "I don't know how we

could be tied back to something that happened in the early part of the century,"

Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy said when I called to inquire about the company's

roots. "Drummond wasn't even founded then."9

U.S. Steel executives say that while convict leasing was clearly "abhorrent," their

company shouldn't be associated with it—especially events that predated the

acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in late 1907. "When it comes to the

question of burden, I don't think anybody here at this company today would feel

burdened at all by anything that happened before 1908," Richard F. Lerach, assistant

general counsel to U.S. Steel, told me in 2001. "If we in fact knew that the people who

were there between 1908 and 1911 were forced to work in obviously unsafe

conditions, which we don't know that was true, we would feel badly about that."10

Legally, there are few grounds on which to argue that a modern corporation inherits

any liability of a predecessor's civil rights violations or other crimes that might have

occurred in the distant past. A federal judge in 2004 denounced the horrors of a 1921

rampage by whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed between one hundred and three

hundred African Americans and destroyed more than a thousand homes.11 But at the

same time he dismissed a lawsuit brought by elderly plainti s whose families were

attacked in the riot, saying the statute of limitations had passed for any legal claims and

that the passage of time would make it impossible for the truth ever to be fully

revealed.

Yet U.S. law is unequivocal that the deaths of executives who were responsible for

dubious actions don't end a company's legal obligations. And in the speci c area of

hazardous waste, the United States has adopted laws forcing companies to take

responsibility for contamination by predecessor companies, regardless of the passage of

time. "It doesn't matter whether you had nothing to do with this toxic stu . If you buy a

company that failed to clean up this stu , you're responsible," says Martha Minow, a

professor at Harvard University Law School who has written extensively about

reparations for social abuses. "Why have we done that on environmental matters, but

not race?"12

Indeed, the commercial sectors of U.S. society have never been asked to fully account

for their roles as the primary enforcers of Jim Crow segregation, and not at all for

engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War. The civil rights

movement focused on forcing government and individual citizens to integrate public

schools, reinstate full voting rights, and end offensive behavior.

But it was business that policed adherence to America's racial customs more than any

other actor in U.S. society. American banks maintained ubiquitous discriminatory

lending practices throughout the country that until the 1960s prevented millions of

working-class African Americans from obtaining the lines of credit that millions of

white families used to accumulate wealth and move from lower- to middle-class status.

Indeed, the opportunity for blacks to pursue the most basic American formula for

achieving middle-class status—buying a home in desirable neighborhoods where real

estate values were likely to appreciate over time—was openly barred by legions of real

estate agents in every city and region. Until the 1950s, rules of the National Association

of Realtors made it a violation of the organization's code of ethics for an agent to sell a

home in a white neighborhood to an African American, or vice versa. It was hundreds

of thousands of individual businesses that refused to give blacks jobs, equal pay, or

promotions. It was wealthy men on Wall Street and in the executive suites of southern

banks that nanced the organized opposition to passage of the Civil Rights Act of

1964.13

U.S. Steel executives say that whatever happened at the company's Alabama mines

long ago, it would be impossible to appropriately assign responsibility for any

corporation's actions in so remote an era. "Is it fair in fact to punish people who are

living today, who have certain assets they might have inherited from others, or

corporate assets that have been passed on?" said Lerach. "You can get to a situation

where there is such a passage of time that it simply doesn't make sense and is not fair."

U.S. Steel said it knew almost nothing about the cemeteries in Pratt City, where so

many are buried. It still owns the properties, and obtained a cemetery property tax

exemption on the largest burial eld in 1997. But o cials say they are unable to locate

records of burials there, or of the company prisons that once stood nearby, or for that

matter any other aspect of the company's history of leasing forced laborers. The only

reference to the graveyards in surviving corporate documents, they say, is a map of the

property marked with the notation "Negro Cemetery." Company o cials theorize that

the graveyard was an informal burial area used by African American families living

nearby, with no formal connection to U.S. Steel.

"Are there convicts on that site? Possibly, quite possibly," said Tom Fer-rall, the

company spokesman. "But I am unable to tell you that there are."14

A striking contrast to U.S. Steel's approach is that of Wachovia Bank, the North

Carolina financial institution that in 1985 acquired FirstAtlanta Corp., the bank born of

the wealth created by James W. English's slave-driven brick factory in Atlanta.

Prompted by an ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council, Wachovia disclosed in

2005 that two predecessor banks in Georgia and South Carolina owned or held as

collateral at least 691 slaves before the Civil War. It formally apologized to "all

Americans and especially to African Americans and people of African descent,"

established scholarship funds for minorities, and promoted a broad discussion of racial

issues inside the company. 15

Wachovia's chief executive o cer, Ken Thompson, a fty-seven-year-old native of

Rocky Mount, North Carolina, was an enlightened white southerner but had never

much considered if the racial climate of earlier eras related to the present. Like many

Americans, he was vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of delving into sensitive

discussions of race or the past.

"I had the attitude that this was something that happened ve generations ago, and

we have no responsibility for it," Thompson told me. But he was convinced by a close

adviser that the disclosure requirement ought to be taken seriously, both to ensure the

bank's ongoing business relationship with the city of Chicago and to demonstrate its

willingness to probe a difficult issue honestly.

A team of historians was hired to investigate the past records of Wachovia, all the

banks it had acquired, and all their corporate predecessors . Once the results were

back, Thompson and other top managers began meeting with employee groups to

discuss the ndings and repeatedly apologizing for the company's ties to events more

than 150 years earlier. What initially felt like a rote "diversity" relations process to

fulfill a government regulation quickly became something more profound.

"I was overwhelmed by the emotional impact our apology had …for African American

employees," Thompson said. Workers cried, held hands, embraced one another

regardless of company rank, and, in an unprecedented way, began speaking to one

another.

"Just by going through the act of acknowledging something that happened one

hundred fty years before and talking about it galvanized that group…It was cathartic,"

Thompson said. "African American employees at our company in my view all of a

sudden are always willing to give us the bene t of the doubt on our intentions about

anything that's race related. There's a deeper trust…. What you get is more

understanding and more ‘Okay let's go forward and gure out solutions for this in the

future. Let's not rehash this forever.’ "16

By frankly confronting a past that Wachovia didn't know existed and then expected to

stir anger and tumult, an old southern bank found a kind of peace.

I found something similarly gratifying in the life of Judge Eugene Reese, the grandson

of the federal prosecutor who worked so assiduously—and unsuccessfully—to beat back

slavery in 1903. The contemporary Reese actually knew nothing about that surprising

crusade by his grandfather, who died before the eventual judge was born. But like his

grandfather, Eugene Reese, a Democrat, is neither a bleeding heart nor willing to shy

away from the vestiges of slavery. "Some people say we still have slavery," he said to

me. Reese's most controversial ruling was in a 1990s case in which he declared

unconstitutional Alabama's system for funding public schools, under which schools

serving children in poor areas receive dramatically less than those in more a uent

areas. The racial implications of the system, a vestige of the same constitution that

ended black voting in 1901, are obvious. Reese was excoriated in conservative circles

in his home state.

"We've come a long way in Alabama," he told me. "But we still have a ways to go."17

That most American corporations and families would rather not reopen the details of

how they pro ted from the racial attitudes in the early twentieth century is perhaps to

be expected. More puzzling is that as badly as many young African Americans want

answers to the question of what truly happened in the century after the Civil War, many

others do not.

When Earl Brown18 became a young miner in Birmingham in the 1940s, he was sent

to the remains of Flat Top mine. Where once two train lines into the shafts had been

used to separate felony prisoners from misdemeanor prisoners, the company by then

used the double-track system to separate white miners from black. Among the African

Americans, many of the oldest laborers were former prisoners who had taken jobs as

free workers in the mine after being freed from bondage. Those men still called the

bosses in the shaft "Captain," and told stories to younger men of the bru-talizations that

had occurred underground there. When Brown became a union activist, they warned

him about the dangers of white managers and they told him stories of how they had

been drawn into the mines as slaves on the basis of trumped-up charges and

kidnappings by county sheriffs.

Brown listened. But he didn't believe. "I never found it credible," he told me.

Instead, Brown and so many other African Americans accepted a rationale that whites

had long foisted upon them. There were "good" black people and "bad" black people.

Those who ended up as slave laborers were bad or weak—adding further to the terror

of being forced to join them and to share their social stain. Their injuries, and the fear

they fostered among all other African Americans, were attributed to them—not their