Manufactured vagrancy convictions funneled freeborn Black men into corporate forced labor.

Evidence

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham, a black man, was arrested in Alabama and charged with vagrancy. He was found guilty before a county judge and immediately sentenced to thirty days of hard labor. His sentence was later extended to almost a year because he could not afford to pay the considerable fines that came with his conviction. The next day he was “sold” to a subsidiary of U.S. Steel and sent to work in a mine. In exchange, they paid the county twelve dollars a month ($415 today) to pay off Cottenham’s fines. Cottenham worked long hours digging and loading coal, and at night he was chained inside a long wooden barrack. Failure to perform to the company’s satisfaction resulted in whippings. He wasn’t alone, as hundreds of men just like him worked in the mine. And while Cottenham was born free, the son of formerly enslaved people, this had to be as bad as anything his parents experienced. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 283

Categorization

• SEED: A vivid case study for an essay on how legal debt-plus-fines infrastructure manufactured modern servitude.
• SHARE: The U.S. Steel subsidiary buying convict labor detail is worth sending to anyone studying corporate complicity in postbellum slavery.