Page 48 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

Slavery By Another Name -
Prof. Douglas Blackmon
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Green Cottenham was born in 1886 in Bibb County, Alabama. In April 1908, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham began working in the Pratt coal mine just west of Birmingham. Four months of labor later, Green Cottenham was dead.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon breathes new life into Green Cottenham, giving him a voice to tell his story. You see, Green Cottenham did not take a job in the Pratt Mines by choice. Far from it.
Green Cottenham was arrested on March 30, 1908, for being an unemployed Black man in the American south. He was convicted of vagrancy (that is, being unemployed), fined $38.40, and sentenced to three months of hard labor with the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company. Because Green could not pay the fine, the judge added three months and six days to his sentence. Under a standing arrangement, Tennessee Coal paid the County $12 per month for the right to force Cottenham to dig eight tons of coal each day to support America’s burgeoning steel industry.
Forty years after adoption of the post-war Civil Rights Amendments, Green Cottenham was a slave, for all practical purposes owned by Tennessee Coal. Until his death four months later, Cottenham would spend sixteen hours a day six days a week in the dark recesses of a mine, enduring the ever-present structural danger, filth, violence, and disease of life underground.
Douglas Blackmon describes the scheme by which law enforcement, judges, and prosecutors actively participated in re-enslaving thousands of American citizens and sentencing them to spend a period of their lives – often until their deaths – in an underground coal mine or on a rural cotton plantation or at a deep forest turpentine farm.
Prof. Blackmon’s slightly abridged remarks at the Spring Meeting follow.
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