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[orchestra plays softly]

(woman) Mr. President,
I have a brother

about 14 years old.

A man hired him from me
and I heard of him no more.

He went and sold him
to McGrehan

they've been workin' him
in prison for 12 months.

I asked him to let me have him,
but he won't let him go.

(male narrator)
For a period of nearly 80 years,

between the Civil War
and World War II,

black Southerners
were no longer slaves,

but they were not yet free.

In one of the most shameful
and little-known chapters

of American history, generations
of black Southerners

were forced to labor
against their will.

(woman)
From almost the first moment,
white Southerners

were responding to try
to put African Americans

back into a position as close to
slavery as they possibly could.

(man)
The Old South, and what was
quickly becoming the New South,

could not proceed without the
work of African Americans.

But if you had something
for free in the past,

you don't necessarily
want to pay for it now.

It was a straight, simple,
exploitative system.

There was only power,
there was only force,

and there was only brutality.

What happened
in that period of time,

was so much more terrible
than anything most Americans

recognize or understand today.

The depth of poverty, the
inability of African Americans

to access
any of the mechanisms of
wealth achievement and growth.

They're all rooted in this
terroristic kind of regime

that existed in so many places.

Their ability to have what
we call the American Dream,

that is what has been stolen

from black folks
all through the South.

And that legacy has to be
understood so that people

will be able to speak to it
and give our ancestors voice.

My name is Sharon Malone

and my family is originally
from Wilcox County, Alabama

My father was born in 1893.

As a child, I never knew why Dad
didn't share many of the stories

growing up in the rural South.

There was so little
that I actually knew

about the generations beyond my
parents, and I realized, I said,

"Why don't I know these stories,
and why don't I know

"who those people are?"

African Americans
are innately wired

to want to know who we are.

It's almost like being
an adopted child.

We have no understanding of

not only what we have endured,

but what we have survived.

(woman) ♪ Oh freedom ♪

♪ Oh freedom ♪

(narrator)
Freedom must have felt glorious
to those who'd never known it.

With the end of the Civil War

and the passage
of the Thirteenth Amendment,

four million former slaves
could embark on new lives

with no one in charge
but themselves.

(woman) ♪ And go home
to my Lord ♪

♪ And be free ♪

(woman)
And what they desired more
than anything was independence.

They wanted independence
from white owners,

they wanted their own churches,
they wanted their own schools,

they wanted freedom to move.

(men and women)
♪ Oh freedom ♪

(man) African Americans
after emancipation,

are looking at the potential,

not only to enjoy
and receive freedom,

but to live it.

They're deeply committed
to reaffirming marriage vows,

they're deeply committed
to reconstituting families.

♪ To my Lord ♪

♪ And be free ♪

(narrator)
Ezekiel Archey,
born into slavery,

was six when freedom came.

His mother moved the family,

Zeke, his two brothers
and a sister

from Georgia to Alabama,

away from the old plantation
and toward a new future.

(man)
African Americans were willing
to work very hard

and exploit themselves in
the same way that immigrants

who have come to this country
have exploited themselves

and their families
with long workdays.

They were willing to do that,

but they wanted to own
their own land,

they wanted to control those
hours,

they wanted to be the ones
to decide.

(narrator)
John Davis was born
a dozen years after the war.

He grew up in freedom,
working hard

on an Alabama farm
rented by his parents.

(man)
There was a tremendous
motivation and desire

to integrate
into American life.

(narrator)
Green Cottenham, born in 1885,

was also the son
of an Alabama farmer.

He came of age
in a nation that was

increasingly urban,
industrial and modern.

(woman)
This is a photo
of George Cottenham,

he's my great grandfather.

He was actually
Green Cottenham's first cousin.

How hopeful my Cottenham
ancestors must have been

about bright futures
for their family.

These were hardworking,
honest people.

(narrator)
But freedom had come
at a tremendous cost.

The war devastated the Southern
economy, which had supported

one of the wealthiest
aristocracies in the world.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
The cotton economy was
in complete shambles.

The fields had been burned

and the cotton gins
had been destroyed.

Equipment that was necessary

for the production of cotton
didn't exist anymore.

But also, the primary engine
of the cotton economy,

that being the labor of slaves,
was lost.

(James Grossman)
In the five major cotton states
of the deep South,

nearly half of all capital,

nearly half of all investment
was in human beings.

So when those human beings
were confiscated,

when the investment was
transferred in essence

from slaveholders to
the people themselves that meant

a huge loss of capital
to Southern slaveholders,

to the people who controlled
the economy of the South.

(narrator)
A tiny, slaveholding elite
had owned the majority

of the region's
four million slaves.

Among them was Lucinda Comer,
a widow.

After the war,
she and her sons

oversaw the family's enterprises
in cotton, lumber, and corn.

The great-great-
granddaughter

of B.B. Comer,

who was the governor of Alabama,

and the great-great niece
of J. W. Comer.

The things that I heard about
the Comer men, especially

B.B. Comer, were about
their entrepreneurial spirit

and being self-made men, there
was never a fool or a coward

it was said in the Comer family.

(narrator)
Emancipation turned the former
slaveholding world upside down

(Khalil Muhammad)
The simple reality of people
that they had once owned,

now were entitled to the same
fruits of their labor,

the same ability to look
a white person in the eye,

a man or a woman, and to demand
equal respect,

to be called by one's first
and last names, challenged

everything to the bitter core
of white people's souls.

(James Grossman)
You have a group of people
who are accustomed

to have people serve them.

Now, suddenly, these people
are free, they own guns--

you'd be as worried as hell,
because what you're worried

is that people are going
to take revenge.

You also are worried that people

aren't going to do
any work anymore.

(narrator)
Most of the South's

8 million whites
had not owned slaves.

Poverty was widespread,

and about a third of whites
were illiterate.

(man)
Those individuals
see blacks moving around,

trying to get land,
trying to improve themselves,
as competitors.

They see a zero sum gain, in
which they're going to lose

the more that blacks gain.

(narrator)
These whites aligned

with leaders
of the former Confederacy,

aided by President Andrew
Johnson, Lincoln's successor.

They formed vigilante groups
to attack and intimidate blacks.

The violence grew widespread.

In the spring of 1866,
Congress intervened.

Over the objections
of the president,

it launched an era known
as Radical Reconstruction.

(Risa Goluboff) At the beginning
of Reconstruction,

there was
a tremendous federal will

to both bring the South
into submission,

but also to protect the African
American Civil Rights.

(narrator)
Passed in 1866,
the Fourteenth Amendment

recognized the citizenship
of all freed people.

In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment
was passed,

which upheld the right
of black men to vote.

(Adam Green)
Reconstruction was an attempt
to create a country

in which it would be possible
to have

a biracial
and equal citizenship.

(Khalil Muhammad)
Reconstruction gave African
Americans, for the first time,

across the South, the
opportunity to serve on juries,

to be witnesses in trial,
to serve as judges.

It also made possible
an entire generation

of black politicians
across the South,

almost as many as 1500 serving

through the end
of the 19th century.

(narrator)
Reconstruction governments
in many parts of the South

succeeded in passing
new social legislation

creating the South's
first free public schools.

(man) Hey-ya!

(narrator)
But white resistance to biracial
government in the South

intensified, and national
political support began to wane.

By 1874, voters had shifted the
balance of power in Congress,

allowing for the South's return
to local control.

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
There is no sustained

federal presence
in the South really after 1874.

What they come away with
is that a sense

that this is
a really violent situation

and that there's not much
we can do about it.

And there's not much perhaps we
even should do about it.

(Adam Green)
African Americans
seeking freedom, could

count on less and less help
from the federal government,

less and less help from
sympathetic Northerners,

and they could count on more
and more and more

animosity and attack from
Southern whites.

[horse whinnies]

(man) Hee-ya!

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
I grew up in a black part
of Mississippi,

and I went to schools that
were 60%, 75% black

all through my childhood.

That was in the 1970's.

What I learned about
the Emancipation Proclamation

was the most simplistic
version of it,

that it brought
an end to slavery.

I also was taught, as most
Americans were in some way,

that the end of slavery

unleashed this population
of people

who were ill equipped
for freedom,

and that was all offered up
in some respect

as an explanation
for the repressive things

that would have been done
to African Americans,

even the repressive things
that I knew about.

What I came to realize, was

that that fundamentally
didn't happen.

(narrator) With the end of
Reconstruction,

the nature of both crime

and punishment in the South
changed dramatically.

In state after state,
and county after county,

new laws targeted
African Americans

and effectively criminalized
black life.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
It was a crime in the South
for a farm worker

to walk beside a railroad.

It was a crime in the South
to speak loudly

in the company of white women.

It was a crime to sell

the products of your farm
after dark.

Anything from spitting
or drinking

or being found to be

drunk in public or loitering
in public spaces

could result in confinement.

So there was
an over exaggeration

of African American criminality

during this time period.

It's not
to absolve all prisoners

from having committed crimes,

but there were many
trumped-up charges.

One of the most infamous set of
laws to come out of this period

were the Pig Laws, passed in
Mississippi, Georgia, Florida,

Alabama, enhancing penalties
for what had been previously

misdemeanor offenses,
to now felony offenses.

(narrator)
In Mississippi, theft of a pig
worth as little as a dollar

could mean five years in prison.

In Tennessee,
hard labor might result

from stealing
an eight-cent fence rail.

But the most powerful, the most
damaging of all of these laws

were the vagrancy statutes.

In every Southern state,
you became a criminal if

you could not prove at any given
moment that you were employed.

(narrator)
Under slavery, most black crime
was punished by slaveholders,

leaving the courts
to discipline whites.

Now, only about ten percent
of those arrested were white.

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
Now, what does this mean?

Does this mean
that white people

are not committing crimes
in the South?

We know that's not true.

(narrator)
Southern states had a history

of placing prisoners
with industries

that would bear the cost of
guarding and housing them,

in exchange for their labor.

Now states also began
to charge fees,

renting prisoners
to companies by the month.

The highest rates were

for the strongest workers
and longest sentences.

(Adam Green) When you
go to the 13th Amendment,

one of the fascinating things
about the text of that amendment

is that it says that slavery
is abolished,

except in the case of a
punishment for a crime.

And within that wiggle room,
what you see in it is that

there's still the possibility
of extending slavery,

as it were, by another name.

[gunshots]

(man)
♪ When it's early
in the mornin' ♪

♪ Baby when I rise a-well ah ♪

(narrator)
The system was known
as convict leasing.

♪ When I rise a-well ah ♪

♪ When it's early
in the mornin' ♪

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
It took time for the system
of convict leasing to develop.

It took time for the state
to realize that prisoners,

believe it or not, could be
a source of profit.

Once that revenue
starts coming in,
they're pleasantly surprised.

This is new revenue
we never had before.

(narrator)
The State of Alabama
earned $14,000

in its first year
of convict leasing, 1874.

By 1890, revenue was
$164,000,

roughly $4.1 million today.

(man)
♪ Heard that my woman
done leave me ♪

♪ Well oh well-ah well-ah ♪

(narrator)
By then, states
throughout the South

and hundreds of counties
and cities were engaged

in some form of leasing convicts
to private industry.

(Khalil Muhammad) And it gave
tremendous discretionary power

for the private owner, either
a landowner or a corporation

or a coal mine, could be
any business concern

to do what they wanted
with that African American.

(man) We as convicts,

is something like
a man drowning.

We have been convicted of
felonies and because of that,

we have lost
every friend on earth.

(narrator)
In 1884, a series
of remarkable letters

was sent from
the Pratt Coal Mines

to Alabama's
new inspector of prisons.

Their author was Ezekiel Archey,
now a 25-year-old convict.

(man, as Ezekiel)
"All these years

of how we suffered.

We have looked death
in the face,

worked hungry, thirsty,

half-clothed and sore.

(narrator)
Archey was one of hundreds
of convicts now being worked

in a growing network
of mines and factories

around Alabama's new industrial
center, Birmingham.

Founded in 1871 and fed by
intersecting railway lines,

Birmingham was poised to exploit

Alabama's rich underground
deposits of coal,

limestone, and iron ore:
the ingredients of steel.

This was the new
industrial South, envisioned

just prior to the Civil War
by slaveholder John T. Milner.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
John T. Milner

was a brilliant engineer,

extraordinary businessman;
he was also a supreme racist

and a despotic person.

(man)
Negro labor can be made
exceedingly profitable

in manufacturing iron
and in rolling mills,

provided there is an overseer,

a Southern man
who knows how to manage Negroes.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
He laid out some of the first
railroad lines

that would run across Alabama.

In many respects, he was

the Father of Southern
Industrialization,

particularly in
the deep, deep South.

(narrator)
Milner's vision triggered

decades of rapid
industrial growth.

After emancipation,
industrialists replaced
slaves with convicts,

acquiring thousands from state
and county governments

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
You can't drive free labor
the same way that you can

force prisoners to mine
five tons of coal a day.

And this is why people
like Milner

wanted prisoners
in his coal mines.

He saw them as
a great source of profit,

and he didn't have to worry
about labor disputes.

(man)
We would leave the cells
around 3:00 a.m.,

and return at 8:00 p.m.,

going the distance of 3 miles
through rain or snow.

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
To describe the conditions

in coal mine at this time,

and to say that they're
primitive is,

you can't even imagine it.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
This is a place where for weeks

or months at a time,
men might never see daylight.

The mine was often filled
with standing water

around their ankles
and their feet.

They had to drink
from that water.

Disease ran rampant
through these mines.

(Khalil Muhammad)
They were incredibly
dangerous places to work,

being subjected to violent
explosions, poisonous gases

that were released as coal fell
from the walls,

In addition
to the falling coal itself.

Whippings, keeping
people chained up,

brutal kinds
of physical torture,

and mental abuse are the norm.

A lot of the things that kept
people in control under slavery,

are amplified under
this convict system.

Zeke Archey was one of
about 500 convicts

at the Pratt Mines
near Birmingham,

nearly half
the company's workforce.

They were overseen
by J.W. Comer,

the former slaveholder
whose enterprises

now included convict mining.

That Comer's a hard man.
I've seen him.

I've seen him hit men,

100 and 160 times,

with a 10-pronged strap,

then say they was not whipped.

(Cristina Comer)
When I learned about the
brutality of J. W. Comer,

I um...well,

I just started
weeping, and um,

I actually didn't leave
my house for two days,

'cause I was in such a state
of grief and shock.

The stories that I heard
about all the Comer men

when I was growing up,
were about self-made men.

And so to learn about the ways

that they weren't
really self-made,

but were making themselves
on the backs and

by the blood of other people,
specifically the blacks

and the convict leasing system,

definitely shattered
that image for me.

He'd go off after
an escaped man,

one day, and dig his grave
the same day.

(narrator)
Exposés of the convict
labor system described it

as "...worse than slavery."

Slaves had been a significant
long-term investment.

A convict could be rented for
as little as 9 dollars a month.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
It was never in the economic
interest of a slave owner

to kill his own slaves
or to abuse them so terribly

that they couldn't work anymore.

So their economic value
protected them in certain ways.

After the Civil War,

someone working
these kinds of forced laborers,

would push them to the very
limits of human endurance.

(man)
We are the men who do the work.

Look at the white men--

how many are cutting 5
or 4 ton coal per day?

They are few.

(Adam Green)
Convict leasing was
a source of labor

where you could realize

the maximum return
at a minimum social cost.

The feeding, of course,
was next to nothing,

health was next to nothing.

(narrator)
Convict miners cost
as much as 50% to 80% less

than free miners, and could be
worked 6 days a week.

Their presence allowed companies

to depress wages
and resist unions.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
When one could obtain

black labor at almost no cost,

the profits for that form
of business were enormous.

(narrator)
In Florida, prisoners extracted

gum and resin from tall pines

and transformed it
into turpentine.

In Georgia, they hauled wet clay
from riverbanks,

molding it into the millions
of bricks needed

for new buildings and homes.

From Texas to Louisiana,
convicts forced their way

through acres of virgin forest,

harvesting timber
and building railroads

In all,
more than 15,000 prisoners

worked in Southern industries
in 1886,

and that number
was rising quickly.

In many labor camps, as many
as a third of male convicts

were boys younger than 16.

Girls and women were
also forced into labor.

Over 90% of convict laborers
in Georgia

were African American men.

The next highest percentage
would obviously be white men,

but African American women
were also utilized

in these various tasks.

In manual labor, black women
are working in brickyards,

in turpentine camps, in mining
camps, farms, in lumberyards.

(Khalil Muhammad)
Convict leasing becomes
a new form

of economic development
in the South,

and a ubiquitous form of
punishment for Southerners

as the criminal justice system
expanded itself.

And sweeps would take place
all through out the South,

whether it was for a dice game,

whether it was
for an altercation,

whether it was for
being mouthy or uppity.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
The record of thousands
upon thousands of people

arrested in this way, is
everywhere in the South.

In the fall, when it was
time to pick cotton,

huge numbers of black people
are arrested

in all of the cotton-growing
counties.

There are surges in arrests in
counties in Alabama in the days

before coincidentally a labor
agent from the coal mines

in Birmingham is
coming to town that day

to pick up whichever
county convicts are there.

(narrator)
Some charges were serious.

But more than two-thirds
of all state prisoners

at the time of Zeke Archey's
arrest, including Archey,

were convicted under vague
charges of burglary and larceny.

County prisoners too
were sent to the mines.

For often trivial offenses,

they faced
the real possibility of death.

In some Alabama prison camps,

convicts died at a rate
of 30% to 40% a year.

And this system is one
that I think in many ways,

needs to be understood
as brutal in a social sense,

but fiendishly rational
in an economic sense.

Because where else could
one take a black worker

and work them literally to death
after slavery?

And when that worker died,
one simply had to go

and get another convict.

(narrator) The South's state
prison population

continued to grow, reaching
19,000 people by 1890.

Nearly 90% of those held
were African American.

When folded
into national statistics,

the concentration
of black prisoners

seemed to reflect an alarming
rise in black crime.

(Khlil Muhammad)
So as early as 1890,
African Americans are almost

3 times overrepresented
in the prison population.

The general population is 12%,

the nation's prisons'
populations of blacks is 30%.

So there are many
important implications

and long-term consequences for
this convict leasing system.

Not only is it so oppressive,
but when you have

an overwhelmingly
black prison population,

it cements that relationship

between criminality and race
in people's minds

to the degree that it's seen
as something inherent.

(Khlil Muhammad)
Southern editorialists,
sociologists, politicians,

are all saying that the
statistics prove

that black people
are a criminal race

and that freedom
had been a mistake.

If you were to ask
most Southerners,

white Southerners,
what they thought

of African Americans
in the 1850's,

the 1860's, even
into the 1870's,

one profile would have been

of people who are loyal,
dutiful, trustworthy.

Those same people
in the 1880's

and by the 1890's
have been demonized.

They no longer are trustworthy,

they no longer have
the capacity for citizenship.

(narrator)
By the 1890s,
white voters had reversed

the civil rights gains made
during Reconstruction.

New state constitutions kept
blacks out of voting booths

and limited funding
for black schools.

Racial segregation
was mandated by law.

(James Grossman)
They do this because

it's important
to remind black people,

day after day after day,
minute after minute,

that they have a place
in this society

and that that place is
subordinate.

So what that means is that
when a black person is

walking down the street and a
white person walks towards them,

they step into the gutter.

My name is
Barbara Jean Belisle.

I was born
in Birmingham in 1936.

You had to stay in your place.

Now, my daddy was
the one who was daring.

He used to be called that
uppity nigger by white folks

because he believed that we were
just as good as anybody else.

He's a smart man; he's
one of the first black men

in this area
to register to vote.

There were a lot of times
truckloads of KKK folks

would pass by the house,

where he had made white folks
mad about something.

He wouldn't let my mother work.

She went to clean up a house
one time, and he went over

to pick her up and she
was cleaning the cabinets

down on her knees, trying
to clean out a cabinet,

he told her,
"You're not going back,

you clean up your own cabinets."

And that's
the kind of man he was.

But he's another story though,

I'd have to talk about him
another time.

(narrator)
Segregation was not only
mandated by Southern states,

it was upheld by
the US Supreme Court

in an 1896 ruling,
Plessy versus Ferguson.

And after that, white
Southerners, white legislatures,

never had any reservation
about imposing the most severe,

the most repressive restrictions
on black life.

(narrator)
Ezekiel Archey was scheduled
for release on February 6, 1887,

at the age of 28,
but he was not free;

a new indictment, for reasons
unknown, was pending.

(man, as Ezekiel)
This letter is not all
I could write,

but my condition
will not permit.

Fate seems to curse the convict,

death seems
to summon us hence.

(narrator)
As the 19th century
came to a close,

and for many decades to come,

the possibility of freedom
was overshadowed

by the constant threat
of forced labor and violence.

Decades after the Civil War,
the nation was reunited.

But the place
of black Americans within it

seemed more uncertain than ever.

[man hums softly]

(Adam Green)
Many whites in the South
are completely indifferent

about whether black people
live or die.

They want to see them
in their place.

They want to see them as an
exploitable system of labor.

They want to see them as
an affirmation

of their racial superiority.

And if they don't fulfill that
role, then to hell with them.

(man)
♪ Another man done gone
another man done gone ♪

I never will forget this;
I'm 9 years old,

going from
West Palm Beach

to Tampa, where
my mom's from,

to see
my Grandmom.

And we had a
brand new Oldsmobile,

and a cop stopped her
in Kissimmee, Florida,

and the way he
talked to my mom, he gave her

a ticket for speeding,
and she was not speeding.

It was just because he
could do it, you follow me?

The ticket cost
a one month's salary.

And my mama had to restrain me
'cause I wanted

to get after this white boy
like I could not believe,

at 9 years old, when you have
to just kind of just tuck it in.

Like my mom would say, "Bernard,
you've got to just stop.

because me may not
get out of here."

And you could see the terror
in her eyes, you follow me?

"Cause we in little ol'
Kissimmee in the '50's.

[steam whistle blows]

(narrator)
September 1901--
the dawn of a new century.

John Davis, now 23 and renting
his own Alabama farm,

was on his way to Goodwater,
about 18 miles away.

His wife was ill, and being
cared for there by her parents.

It was harvest time,

and Davis would have been
careful to avoid trouble,

eager to return safely to
his own small patch of cotton.

But trouble found him
in the form of Robert Franklin,

a local merchant and constable.

Bob Franklin said, "Nigger
have you got any money?

When are you gonna pay
the money you owe me?"

I said,
"I don't owe you any money."

(narrator)
Convicts were not
the only Southerners

being forced into hard labor.

Throughout the South, many
thousands of African Americans

were tied to white employers
through various forms of debt.

You get a person in debt, you
continually keep him in debt,

you never let him work it off,
and you control their labor.

Any kind of relationship
where you use debt

as the fulcrum to extract labor,
that's illegal.

You've violated the peonage law.

(narrator)
Peonage, or debt servitude,
was outlawed

by the federal government
just after the Civil War.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
Peonage comes from the word
peon, of Mexican peons.

It's serfdom, it's peasantry.

Ironically enough, the United
States made peonage illegal

only as a result of the
acquisition of New Mexico.

And the federal government
didn't want

to introduce Mexican peonage
into the American legal system.

And so in 1867, the Congress
made peonage illegal.

(narrator)
Nearly 40 years later, in 1903,

a federal judge in Alabama
raised an alarm

about allegations of peonage
in his jurisdiction.

(man)
Witnesses have reported
that a systematic scheme

of depriving Negroes
of their liberty in Alabama

has been practiced
for some time.

Judge Thomas Goode Jones was
a former Confederate officer

and two-time governor
of Alabama.

Viewed as something
of a moderate,

he'd been appointed
to the federal court

by U.S. President
Theodore Roosevelt.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
Teddy Roosevelt
becomes president in 1901,

after the assassination
of William McKinley.

He viewed himself
as an egalitarian person

on the side of both business
and the working man.

He believed that exposure
of the sins of society

and exposure of the sins
of commerce industrialism

would lead to their eradication.

And he believed that for
the factories of the North

and he believed that for the
racial abuses of the South.

(narrator)
The president authorized
a federal investigation

into peonage
in the Alabama counties

of Shelby, Coosa,
and Tallapoosa.

(Risa Goluboff)
Now, they thought that these
were exceptional circumstances,

they were
out of the ordinary.

And I think that
the Roosevelt administration

and the Roosevelt Justice
Department

thought that it could-- score
points is too easy a word--

but that it could, by making
a stand in this way,

it could accomplish quite a lot

and have a symbolic impact
that was pretty large.

(narrator)
Federal peonage inquiries
were also underway

in Georgia and Florida.

In Alabama, witnesses
were called to appear

before the federal grand jury
to determine

if there was enough evidence
to go to trial.

Prosecuting the case was
U.S. Attorney Warren S. Reese,

born in Alabama
just after the Civil War.

(man, as Reese)
Now I have lived in this state
my entire life of 37 years,

and I have never comprehended
until now the extent

of this present
method of slavery

through this peonage system.

Southern progressives
were not free of the racism

that Southern conservatives had

or Northern progressives
were not free of that either.

But they did think that there
were some things

that were just beyond the pale.

And so when stories, horrific,
sensationalized stories

of African American slavery
came to light,

they were precisely
the kind of thing that we,

as a modern, civilized nation,
should not engage in.

(narrator)
Among those testifying
was John Davis,

freed hastily as word
of the investigation spread.

(man, as John Davis)
Bob Franklin said,

"When are you going to pay
the money you owe me?"

I said,
"I don't owe you any money."

(narrator)
Nearly 18 months had passed
since he'd been stopped

by Franklin,
the local constable.

His testimony echoed
that of other victims.

Like Davis, they were falsely
accused and quickly convicted.

They were sentenced and charged
fines and court fees,

which they couldn't pay.

They could do nothing
as local whites paid the court,

and took control of them.

John Davis was bought
from the court by Bob Franklin,

and then resold, for profit.

(man, as John Davis)
He said, "We gonna'
carry you over to Mr. Pace's."

I told him I didn't know
anything about it,

and he said, "We know."

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
John Pace was the baron

of Tallapoosa County, Alabama.

He had been the sheriff
of the county in the 1880's.

He then amassed
a substantial amount of land,

the most fertile land
along the Tallapoosa River

in his part of Alabama.

He was quite a character,
6 foot 2, 230-pound man

who had frostbitten toes
and was supposed to be very ill.

And when he walked the earth
shook they said.

(man)
I bought the Negro John Davis
from Bob Franklin,

the constable of Tallapoosa.

I explained to Davis that he
would be confined on my farm,

just as I confined
county convicts.

(man, as John Davis)
Mr. Pace asks,

"Will you work
10 months with me?"

And I signed a contract.

(narrator)
These contracts gave employers
the right to whip, confine,

and even trade workers, as long
as the debt was deemed unpaid.

(Peter Daniel)
Peonage varied from a kind
of paternalistic peonage

to just the most awful
conditions you could imagine.

People were put in barracks,

they were beaten,
and some killed.

People were flogged; they were
chased by bloodhounds.

It was pretty horrible
at its worst,

It was about as bad
as it can get.

(man, as Reese)
Brutal things have transpired
and sometimes death has been

the result of the infliction
of corporal punishment.

(narrator)
Prosecutor Warren Reese's
reports to Washington

grew more urgent.

Peonage was not isolated
in a few counties,

but was evident throughout
the state,

trapping hundreds
or even thousands of people.

(man, as Reese)
These violations have developed

into a miserable business
and custom to catch up

with Negro men and women
upon the flimsiest of charges.

(narrator)
Reporting to Washington,

Reese would have had to remind
himself that this was 1903.

In Detroit,
the Ford Motor Company

had begun production
of the Model A.

On Wall Street,
the new Stock Exchange Building
had just opened.

In Kitty Hawk,
the Wright Brothers

were preparing
their first flight.

Yet in much of the South,
African Americans

were still being held

in what Reese and the press
called, "abject slavery."

(Pete Daniel)
What the U.S. attorneys
like Reese found

was a totally corrupt
legal system,

where you had the justices
of the peace were corrupt,

in that the people
that came before them

may not be guilty, but
they would find them guilty.

(narrator)
John Pace, Fletcher Turner
and William and George Cosby,

all of them wealthy farmers,
were the ringleaders.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
All of them had their own
justice of the peace.

In the case of John Pace, he had
a man named James Kennedy.

Mr. J. W. Pace and I are
brothers-in-law by marriage.

I went to work for him
on the first of June, 1891.

If they wanted a man convicted
of any particular thing,

then they simply had their own
justice of the peace,

or the justice of the peace
of one of the other families,

declare someone to be guilty.

Note in none of these cases
that I have spoken about

did I receive one cent of costs,
nor was I paid in any other way

by Mr. Pace or anybody else
for trying these cases.

And after I worked
that 10 months,

my time was out
on the 10th day of July, 1902.

I told him,
"My time is out this morning."

He said, "Go ahead to work."

I said, "No, I'm
going home this morning."

And he locked me up for 3 days,
and after that he said,

"If I don't go to work,

he'll put me
in the river down there."

(narrator)
As the investigation
in Alabama continued,

the federal grand jury
began issuing indictments

John Pace was charged with
several counts of peonage

If convicted,
he faced decades in prison.

The next day, Pace's
justice of the peace,

James Kennedy, unexpectedly
returned to court.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
James Kennedy came
to be terrified

that he would be convicted at
trial once he had been indicted.

He's the guy who fabricated
all the documents,

he's the one who declared
all these people guilty,

and so he feels
a great sense of jeopardy.

If anybody from
the Cosby family wanted a Negro,

they would send somebody before
me and have an affidavit made.

The Negro would be fined
and made to sign a contract

and sent to the farm.

This was never reported
to the jurors.

(narrator)
Kennedy confirmed that
at least 80 men and women

had fallen victim
to the conspiracy.

Many other cases were suspected.

As the grand jury continued
to issue indictments,

they asked Judge Jones

to explain
the federal law against peonage.

Judge Jones comes back
with a ruling, which asserts

that in essentially every case,

in which a landowner is holding
a laborer to pay back a debt,

that unless there has been
a conviction

of that person in an open court,
in a sanctioned way

by the government, it's peonage,
it's debt slavery.

(man, as Judge Jones)
They are guilty of a conspiracy

to deprive that person
of the free exercise

or enjoyment of a right
or privilege secured to him

by the Constitution
of the United States.

And the ruling from Judge Jones

unleashes this firestorm
of fear and panic,

not just in Alabama,
but all across the South.

(narrator)
Forty years after the Civil War,
the United States had emerged

as a global economic leader,
due in part

to Southern industry
and agriculture.

Employers throughout the South
relied on debt to coerce labor.

The judge's ruling might apply
not just to convicts

or those trapped by corruption,
but also hundreds of thousands

of black families tied
to white landowners

through tenant farming
and sharecropping.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
If they lose access
to that army of laborers,

or they're compelled
to deal with them

on equitable terms
as free citizens,

then the entire Southern economy
is disrupted, and along with it,

the entire U.S. economy
is disrupted as well.

What had begun as
a principal investigation

that was probably
going to go nowhere,

was turning into a potential
political catastrophe

for the Roosevelt
Administration.

(woman)
"Mr. President, I have
a brother about 14 years old.

A man hired him from me
and I heard of him no more."

Among black Southerners,
reports that peonage

was being prosecuted sparked
a very different outcry:

a flood of letters, many of them
addressed to the president.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
At the National Archives today,
there's more than 30,000 pages

of this kind of material
that document the arrest,

the subjugation, the punishment,
the mistreatment,

the profit that was made off
of the forced labor

of armies and armies of people.

He has done nothing wrong
for them to keep him in chains.

So I write to you to help me
get my poor brother.

Please let me hear from you
at once, Carrie Kinsey.

My name is
Bernard William Kinsey.

Carrie Kinsey is a cousin.

When I held this letter,
and it hadn't, I mean,

here you holding
Carrie's legacy.

When you begin to connect
with your family,

you can put yourself back
into 1900

and how difficult
it was for anybody

to push up against the system.

(man)
"Dear Sir, I have a little girl
that has been kidnapped from me.

Some time ago, my attention was
called to a condition of affairs

in existence there so appalling
in its vice and cruelty.

And they just beat sores
on me every day.

They started to whip me
one day..."

These letters are
incredibly poignant.

A lot of them, even though

they're not written
in the language of rights,

do refer
to the Thirteenth Amendment.

They are aware that they have
a right not to be enslaved,

and they're calling upon the
government to protect them

from slavery that they thought
was supposed to be over.

There was a tremendous hope,
it's absolutely evident
through these letters

that a huge population
of African Americans

believed that the president was
finally coming to their rescue.

(narrator)
But the Alabama peonage trials
in the summer of 1903

were over almost
as soon as they began.

[banging of a gavel]

The federal government was eager
to cap the investigation,

punish the ringleaders,
and move on.

The Cosbys and Fletcher Turner
pleaded guilty,

and Judge Jones imposed
minimum sentences.

Judge Jones
really believed

that if you convicted
these people,

some of them got fines,

a few of them even served
a little jail time,

that that would furnish
an example

so that people who were doing
this would no longer do it.

(narrator)
Pace also pleaded guilty
and was sentenced to prison.

He remained free on appeal

as his lawyers prepared
an outrageous argument.

They said Pace was
not guilty of peonage,

because his victims
did not owe him money.

And while he may have been
guilty of slavery,

in 1903 that was not a crime.

(Pete Daniel)
It was a grayish area
because there was

a Thirteenth Amendment
that abolished slavery,

but there was never
a statute passed

to make you guilty of slavery,

of holding somebody in slavery
after the Civil War.

(narrator)
Three months after the trial,
in September 1903,

President Roosevelt granted
a pardon to the Cosbys.

Three years later, in 1906,
he also pardoned John W. Pace.

Pace never went to prison,
and the federal government

turned a blind eye
to the forced laborers

he continued
to hold on his farm.

(Risa Goluboff)
The federal government
really pulls back

from doing these cases
in a big way.

There was a lack of will to do
what would be and proved to be

very hard work of actually
uprooting the tremendous systems

of involuntary servitude that
existed in the South.

I don't think
the federal government
had that political will.

(woman)
My uncle was named Henry Malone.

He's my father's older brother.

This story happened
somewhere around maybe 1910.

Henry was then just a young man.

Whatever it was that he did,
the local sheriff

came to my grandfather's place
and they were looking for him,

and my grandfather
got my Uncle Henry

to come and turn himself in.

He was sent away and he had to
serve a year and a day.

We never got a chance to know
the stories of why

or what may have happened to him
in that year and a day.

For all of my life
and knowing my uncle,

I don't think I ever saw him
smile or be a happy man.

(narrator)
In 1908, two years after
the pardon of John Pace,

another young man
would be trapped

in the shadow of slavery:
22-year old Green Cottenham.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
The world he entered as a man,

just as the 20th century
was beginning, was

completely different
in which already

every Southern state
had passed rafts of laws

designed to circumscribe
the lives of African Americans

to limit their ability to work
freely, to move freely,

to make it almost impossible
for them to live

in true independence
of the powerful whites,

wherever it was that they lived.

(narrator)
Green was arrested with others

outside a train station
in Columbiana, Alabama.

Within 24 hours, he'd been
convicted of vagrancy.

He was sentenced to 3 months
hard labor, and $38 in fines.

To pay the fine, the hard labor
was extended to 6 months.

Green was sent
to the Pratt Mines,

which paid the county
$12 a month for him.

It's important for us

to now go back and re-examine
that notion

of what being a convict meant
at the turn of the century.

Green Cottenham was just picked
up, charged with vagrancy,

which is a crime
of no real import,

but then thrown
into this prison system.

Just because you put a label
on someone as a convict

or whatever your label is,
that doesn't justify

not treating them
like human beings.

I'm the daughter
of Meddy Cottenham,

the oldest daughter
of George Cottenham.

I didn't know that people
could be

just picked up and put in jail.

They could be lost in the system

and nobody knew
where to find them.

They could be buried
at some grave somewhere

and the family still looking for
them, don't know where they are.

I didn't know that the sheriff
department could sell

free black people to corporation
steel plants and coal mines.

It wasn't in the history books;
we didn't know.

(narrator)
Thirty years had passed, but
except for the electric lights,

Ezekiel Archey would have
easily recognized

the conditions Green Cottenham
now faced.

Above ground though,
Birmingham was becoming

the region's largest
industrial center.

The mine that leased Green's
labor was now owned

by the Northern-based
U.S. Steel--

the largest corporation
in the world.

[steam whistle blows]

And a growing number
of African Americans,

nearly 2 million
between 1910 and 1930,

were moving out of the South.

(Pete Daniel)
There were plenty of reasons
for black people

to get the hell
out of the South.

Having to put up
with the threat of lynching,

with being grabbed
off the street

and put in jail
and made to work,

and every time
you walked down the street,

you had to be
on your p's and q's

so you wouldn't offend anybody.

(narrator)
The North was erecting its own
barriers to black achievement.

President Woodrow Wilson,
elected in 1912,

mandated Southern-style
segregation

throughout
the federal government.

There's a kind of
gentleman's agreement

that's emerging during
the Wilson administration

that the federal government is
not only going to look away

at the practices of the South,

but it's going to adopt
those practices

in relation to the ways in which
it organizes its own affairs.

(narrator)
Nearly 400,000 African Americans

fought for democracy
in World War One.

They returned to unprecedented
racial hostility.

(Bernard Kinsey)
It just gives you chills to
think that someone could go

and fight for their
country and come back

and have to fight
for their very life

because of one thing, because
they are African American.

(narrator)
A new generation of civil rights
organizations had emerged.

Among them was
the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored
People, founded in 1909

by a group of activists,
including W.E.B. Du Bois.

"We claim for ourselves every
single right that belongs

to a freeborn American,
political,

civil and social,"
Du Bois wrote.

"And until we get these rights
we will never cease to protest

and to assail
the ears of America.

This battle we wage is

not for ourselves
but for all Americans."

W. B. Du Bois is very clear

that the ways in which
Jim Crow Laws,

violence in the form of
lynching, disenfranchisement,

and overall discrediting,
disrespect

of black people's
basic humanity,

is something that has to be seen

as a force that holds
black people down.

(David Levering Lewis)
This paradigm, the NAACP's was,

there can be no negotiation
for civil liberties;

they must exist totally,
fully, and immediately,

more than a new narrative
and a new voice,

it also fielded a degree
of litigious activism.

They are saying that there needs
to be anti-lynching law.

They are saying
that there needs to be
reform of the justice system.

They are saying that labor laws
and labor arrangements

need to be reformed
within the South.

And they're
becoming increasingly effective
in terms of doing that.

(narrator)
By 1908, the year
Green Cottenham was arrested,

the South's use
of prison labor was changing.

County governments
continued to profit

from renting convicts
to private industry.

But growing numbers of states,
in what was billed as reform,

began to use prisoners
on state-run enterprises.

Chained together,
prisoners on road crews

became an icon
of the modernizing South.

Perversely, one of the biggest
motivating factors

behind the creation
of the chain gangs

were that Southerners
all across the region

were frustrated
that the roads of the South

were the most terrible
imaginable roads in America.

The economy couldn't
grow effectively,

crops were
lost in the fields,

simply because the roads
were so terrible.

The conditions for chain gang
prisoners were

equally horrific as they were
for convict leased prisoners.

They were subject
to the same modes of brutality,

the same beatings, the same
standards of meager health care,

meager forms of shelter,
clothing, food.

(narrator)
Chain gangs continued deep
into the 20th century,

along with other forms
of forced labor,

including debt peonage
and sharecropping.

(Mary Ellen Curtin)
A sharecropper will agree

to work for a percentage
of the proceeds

of the sale of the cotton crop.

Sharecroppers had to take out
loans in order to survive

and in order to bring
the crop in during the year.

(Adam Green)
50%, 70%, 90% interest rates
were not uncommon

all throughout the South in
relation to

sharecropping finance
of the basic necessities

that they needed
to get through the year.

So that system is going
to put African Americans

in a position where
upward mobility

is essentially impossible
for most of them.

(narrator)
Sharecropping also engulfed

growing numbers of whites,
including immigrants.

But without legal
or political rights,

black sharecroppers were
especially vulnerable.

Millions of black people
in remote parts of the South

could not leave the farms
they were being held on.

If they did, they were subject
to arrest by the sheriff,

and if they were arrested,
they would then be

returned to the very same farms,

oftentimes in chains,
receiving nothing.

Sharecropping is not slavery,
but it did become,

for an enormous population
of people, forced labor.

(Sharon Malone)
Families stayed intact,
probably within

a two mile radius
of where they were born.

Mothers, fathers, cousins,
grandparents, everybody stayed.

If you knew by the mere fact
of leaving,

exposed you to the danger

of being caught up in this
system, it made you stay.

You knew what would happen
if you stepped off.

(woman)
I grew up
in Monticello, Georgia,

which is a small town
about 90 miles south of Atlanta.

My paternal grandmother was the
daughter of John S. Williams.

He died long before I was born.

But I heard from my uncles,
from my father,

from people who knew him,
that he was a wonderful man.

He was
well-respected

in the community.

(narrator)
In 1921, almost 18 years
after the peonage trials,

federal investigators
visited the Williams farm

to follow up on reports
that he was holding peons.

There's a group of black men
out in the field.

The men are obviously terrified,

unwilling to say
almost anything.

They're emaciated; they clearly
have been terrible abused.

John Williams suddenly appears.

He pleads that he didn't know
this was against the law,

that he'll do better,
his intentions were good,

very apologetic to these federal
officials, and they leave.

And he doesn't know
what they're going to do.

He knows they found evidence

that he was holding these people
in slavery.

He talks to his foreman,
Clyde Manning and says,

as the court transcript said,

"We've got to do away
with these boys."

The family story was that he had
worked prisoners on his farm,

that they were hardened
criminals and they had been

put in the penitentiary
for a long time.

And one night, a lot of the
prisoners tried to escape.

And he, along with other farmers
who were working these men,

tracked them down and in the
process of recapturing them,

killed some of them.

Then sometime later, the story
came to light for me.

It was, of course,
totally different

from the story that I had heard.

(narrator)
Williams and Manning,
the black foreman,

systematically hunted and
murdered 11 black workers.

Some were bludgeoned; others
were weighted down with chains

and forced into a nearby river.

Another was made
to dig his own grave.

They did it in the most horrific
ways that you can imagine,

[with much emotion]
that I really can't talk about.

I get, I get, I just get um,

so emotional
when I think about--

not just the fact
that these men were murdered,

but the cruelty with which
it was carried out.

Um, that's what hardest for me

to imagine
and hardest to accept.

It came to light only because
a little boy was fishing

down by the creek where they'd
thrown some of the bodies,

and one of the bodies came up.

(narrator)
In the spring of 1921,
Williams and Manning

each faced an all-white jury,
in a Georgia state court.

Both were found guilty
and given life sentences.

Within a decade,
both had died in prison.

Williams was the first
Southern white man since 1877

to be indicted
for the first-degree murder

of an African American; it would
not happen again until 1966.

The following year,
an expose of peonage in Florida

inflamed readers,
because the victim,

22-year-old Martin Tabert,
was white.

A traveler from North Dakota,
Tabert was picked up

in a sweep in rural Florida,
charged with vagrancy,

and sold to a lumber company.

He died soon after at the hands
of a brutal overseer.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
First he whipped him on
his bare back, 30 or 40 times.

Tabert then kept lying there, so
the boss continued to whip him,

another 30 or 40 times
with a heavy leather lash.

Tabert crawled to his feet
and the guard began

pursuing him through the camp,
whipping him as they ran.

Finally, after almost
150 lashes, Tabert made it

back to the cot that he had
in a simple cabin somewhere,

collapsed into his bed
and never stood up again.

(narrator)
The outcry over Tabert's death

helped to end state leasing
in Florida.

Shortly after, in 1928,
a similar case led Alabama

to remove its last prisoners
from the coal mines.

But these changes
had little impact.

As late as 1930, roughly half
of all African Americans,

or 4.8 million people

still lived in the Black Belt
region of the South.

The vast majority were
almost certainly trapped

in some form of exploitative
labor arrangement.

For those African Americans
who remained in the South

through the 1920's,
1930's, 1940's even,

the conditions that they're
facing are often desperate,

and they find themselves
more and more vulnerable

if they try to rise up
and create some sense of protest

against the conditions
that they face.

(narrator)
In the fall of 1932,
the United States

underwent
a profound political change,

marked by the election
of a new president,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
a distant cousin of Theodore.

Much as Teddy Roosevelt was seen

as something of an advocate
for African Americans,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was a hundred times that.

African Americans are
becoming an ever-increasingly

important part of the democratic
political coalition.

More African American's
are moving North,

they're joining unions,
they're joining the NAACP

in unprecedented numbers.

(Adam Green)
African Americans who are
involved in unions,

members of churches,
and African Americans

who are publishing
newspapers and magazines

are all finding ways to bring
their influence to bear

on the federal government
and saying do your job!

We're talking about
constitutional rights here.

We're talking about citizens
who are being abused here.

Do your job
or don't expect our support.

[airplane engines roar;
loud explosions]

(narrator)
In December 1941, the Japanese
bombing of Pearl Harbor

brought the United States
into the Second World War.

[loud explosions]

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
President Roosevelt convened
a meeting of the Cabinet

at the White House
to discuss preparations

to fight this war
against Japan and Germany.

The president asked
what are the things

that the Japanese are
going to attack us for

in the course of the war,
that are problematic?

Someone said
the treatment of the Negro.

(narrator)
Months earlier,
the Department of Justice

had established
a civil rights section,

but its focus was on labor
issues, not racial equality.

Now, the president asked his
attorney general if this unit

might be used to demonstrate
a commitment to racial change.

And what stands
at the intersection

of African American rights
and labor rights?

Peonage
and involuntary servitude.

They can't
just attack segregation head on
during World War II,

because they still need
the white Southerners

who are part
of the democratic coalition.

But they did sincerely believe
that these peonage cases

were pretty bad
and they required a response.

(woman)
"Mrs. Roosevelt, I am a colored
mother and I need your help."

(narrator)
In the decades
since the Pace trial,

the federal government had paid
little attention

to the continued complaints
of forced labor

sent to the White House,

the Department of Justice,
and the NAACP.

(woman)
"My boy answered
an advertisement

in our Post Paper for a job.

They are being guarded
all night by armed guards

and not allowed to write home.

Please don't send
this letter back,

because I'm afraid
if they find out

I've written to you, they'll
kill my boy. Viola Cosley."

Nearly 80 years had passed

since the United States ratified

the Thirteenth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution.

Now, in December 1941,

President Roosevelt took steps
to finally enforce it.

Just five days
after Pearl Harbor,

Roosevelt's attorney general
issued Circular 3591.

It said that federal attorneys
were to aggressively prosecute

any case of involuntary
servitude or slavery,

not only
those defined as peonage.

(Risa Goluboff)
He says, whether
they're being held there

because of a threat of
imprisonment or out of violence,

whatever the mechanism is that
is holding people in slavery,

you should go after it.

And he says this is
part of the war effort.

These cases are important
because we need to make sure

that African Americans feel like

their rights
are being taken care of.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
And within months, there was
a prosecution underway

of a man in Texas
who had been holding

an African American worker
as a slave for almost 15 years.

He was convicted
by a federal jury in 1942

and went to federal prison.

I mark that as the technical
end of slavery in America.

(narrator)
The records are incomplete,
but it's estimated

that in the 80 years
following the Civil War,

as many as 800,000 people

had faced the South's
corrupt system of justice.

Huge numbers of those arrested

were forced
into involuntary servitude.

Some, including Viola Cosley's
son, Marion, found freedom.

On January 7, 1943,

he enlisted
as a private in the U.S. Army,

one of more than 2.5 million
African Americans

who registered for service
during the Second World War.

Green Cottenham,
arrested in 1908,

might have served
in the First World War,

But by the Second World War,
he would have been in his 50s.

But Green never made it out of
the Birmingham prison mines.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
We don't know the exact details

of the life that he led
in the stockade or underground.

But he survived 5 months
before becoming ill.

He went to see the doctor
on August the second, 1908

and never went back to the mine.

(narrator)
Thirteen days later,
Green Cottenham died.

He is among more than
9,000 prisoners

known to have died
while leased to industry

by Southern states and counties.

(Tonya Groomes)
We want to think of
some of these atrocities

as things that happened
occasionally,

but you can imagine the turmoil

if at any time
your child

could be
picked up, never
to be seen again.

How that would impact
a whole segment of people,

how they view their
opportunities and their future.

(narrator)
In all likelihood
his body was dumped

somewhere in these fields
outside the mine,

where hundreds of other
prisoners also lie buried.

(Tonya Groomes)
This was real; these were real
people, these were real lives,

and they make us who we are.

What's fascinating
about Green Cottenham

is the fact
that he isn't special.

He's not well-known, he's not a
historical figure of importance,

but that's part of the beauty.

He is representative of all of
these nameless, faceless people

who disappeared
during this time frame,

who were deemed to be
of no value.

And then you realize
that the value isn't in being

necessarily important; we
all have interesting stories,

we all have
a life story worth telling.

(Douglas A. Blackmon)
At the end of the Civil War,

there were
4 million freed slaves

who lived in absolute poverty,

uneducated,
little access to opportunity.

We also know
that there were an equal number

of white Americans in the South,
like members of my family,

my ancestors, who were also
impoverished, illiterate,

no access to opportunity.

Over the next 75 years,

American society performed
a miracle of sorts.

Those 4 million whites
living in those conditions

became 40 million
middle-class Americans

by the beginning
of World War II.

That's what made American
society

the extraordinary superpower
that it is today.

All of that though,
was done in a way

that excluded African Americans,

brutalized African Americans
at the same time.

(Susan Burnore)
When you see how people's lives
were truly stolen from them,

their freedom was taken away,

their fathers or husbands
were taken away,

you can understand how the
difficulties and the disparities

would persist for much longer

than it seems
that they should have.

(Adam Green)
Without the appreciation
of this history,

you descend into fantasies
that black people

don't deserve equal rights
because black people

constitutionally,
intellectually, morally,

are not the equals of whites--
period.

(Khalil Muhammad)
We have to recognize that
in these awful ghastly tales

of the brutalization of
black people in this country,

the motivation for that
was profit,

from small landowners
to major corporations.

And so at the end of the day,

that part of this country's
legacy is still with us.

(Tonya Groomes)
When I think
about Green Cottenham

and what he went through,

I think about a quote
that comes to mind.

It says something like,
"The arc of history is long,

but it bends towards justice."

And even though Green Cottenham

didn't get justice in his day,

and that so many thousands of
people who were just like Green

didn't get their justice,
maybe now,

through the telling of
this reality and this history,

these individuals can receive
some measure of justice.

[orchestra plays softly]

♪