Convict Leasing and the Coal Mines

Between eighteen seventy-five and nineteen twenty-eight, Alabama operated a system that historians now describe as a form of re-enslavement. The state leased its prison population to private companies, and those companies put the men to work underground.

The coal mines that powered Birmingham's furnaces ran on two kinds of labor. Some workers were paid wages. Others were convict leasees, men who had been arrested, convicted of minor offenses or no offense at all, and transferred by the state to companies that paid the county or state government a fee of between nine and eighteen dollars a month per prisoner. The Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, which became U.S. Steel's Birmingham subsidiary in nineteen oh-seven, held a ten-year state contract in the eighteen eighties that gave it claim to every able-bodied state prisoner.

The convict laborers were more than ninety percent Black, in a system built on broad vagrancy statutes that gave sheriffs and judges effective discretion to arrest and sentence Black men for doing almost nothing. Once inside the mine camps, they were worked as long and as hard as management chose. They lived in the same mine camps where they worked. Death rates were high; comprehensive records were not kept. The full human toll of the system is, to this day, not known with precision.

Reformers worked for decades to end the practice. Alabama's legislature repeatedly declined. In nineteen eleven, a federal grand jury investigation documented conditions in the camps. In nineteen twenty-eight, after sustained federal pressure and a campaign by white convict families whose relatives were also in the system, Alabama finally ended convict leasing. The legal scaffolding that had made it possible lasted considerably longer.