Last evening
Last edited Sat Feb 11, 2017, 11:33 PM - Edit history (1)
I ran across a book in my local progressive, family owned bookstore..'.Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, author Douglas A. Blackmon'. Just the introduction was a crystal clear picture of the corporate culture that helped build this country into the 20th century manufacturing giant it once was. It took place in Alabama and the racist mentality of AG jeff sessions immediately came to mind. I'll give you an except from the introduction and it's rather long:
"On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy"
Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the 19th century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two year old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner--fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses--Cottenhams sentence was extended to nearly a year at hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North--U.S. Steel Corporation--the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fee. What the companies managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No,12--one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham know as Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners--many of whom already had passed years and decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of ALABAMA(caps mine)---even a child of slaves--could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population, In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was out, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents and homicide. Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine. Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal into coke--the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel's production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing american slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic corporation emerging in the gilded North, THEY WERE SLAVES IN ALL BUT NAME"
caps mine).
This type of mentality is now the AG of the United States, Chief Counselor to the boy-potus and Chief WH strategist to the boy-potus and running this country now. Period. RESIST AND PERSIST!!!!!!
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