Slavery’s Last Chapter

One of the main figures in your book is Green Cottenham. Why was he such an important person to profile?
Because of his complete anonymity and inconsequential life. He was a man born to freed slaves in the 1880s, [and] grew up in great poverty in a difficult but optimistic time. By the time he reached adulthood in the early 20th century, a dark curtain of oppression began to fall across the South and all of black life. In 1908, he was arrested, sold into a coal mine owned by U.S. Steel Corp. and died there under horrifying conditions a few months later. Cottenham came to represent as an individual all of the similar things which had been done in totality to tens of thousands of African-Americans in the South during this time.

You report in your book that by the spring of 1903 the Department of Justice was investigating "neoslavery" in Southern states, so why did the U.S. government allow these atrocities to continue for another 40 years?
All the investigations that began in 1903 failed for various reasons, but the main one was that it wasn't a crime in America to hold a slave. The 13th amendment passed in 1865 made slavery unconstitutional. There was no federal statute that made it a crime to hold a black person as a slave. When the U.S. attorney general in the South began investigating slavery in 1903 and attempted to bring charges, they realized they did not have a clear federal statue. So the prosecution was brought under other crimes that were similar but in the end all the prosecution failed because the laws were not applicable and no [Southern] jury would convict a white man for any crime against blacks.

What is the connection between the end of neoslavery and the beginning of World War II?
The end of neoslavery came as a direct result to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When President Franklin Roosevelt convened his cabinet to discuss retaliation, the main issue was propaganda and the Japanese ability to effectively embarrass America for the treatment of blacks in the South. Immediately President Roosevelt passed a congressional law criminalizing lynching. Four days after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. attorney general ordered a memorandum that instructed all federal prosecutors to aggressively prosecute all cases of involuntary servitude.

Several companies including U.S. Steel and Georgia Power Co. were directly responsible for capitalizing off of African-American slave labor, according to your research. Have any of these companies commented on your findings?
U.S. Steel Corp. has acknowledged that their company used these forced labor during the beginning of the 20th century. The executives today insist that they don't know much about the situation and it would be wrong to judge their company in 2008 based on actions from 1907. So their view is that these may be historical realities but these are not events for which the company needs to take any steps or any action to address what happened a hundred years ago.

Should reparations be issued to descendants of these laborers?
We first need to come to terms as a society with the enormity with what happened during the first years of the 20th century. Millions of African-Americans were injured by those events and millions of white Americans benefited from the continuation of slavery. We need to have an honest unified conversation as a society about the way forward. If that includes some form of financial reparations, so be it. We have already made progress through affirmative action and scholarships. These are efforts the nation as a whole can embrace as an effective way to bridge the black-and-white divide.

© 2008